The Honest Broker

Just a band in bathrobes playing a Stevie Wonder cover.

A few days ago, I shared my ballot for the NY Times list of best living American songwriters. I used that as an occasion to praise Stevie Wonder and say how much fun I’ve had playing his music.

Here is a case in point. I don’t know any of these musicians, and the gig is bizarre (a sauna festival?). But they find a sweet, happy groove. The song is so inviting it sounds like it practically plays itself. Or maybe the sauna just got all the performers loose and relaxed.

People keep asking me about this crazy band in polka dot costumes.

I keep hearing from subscribers who want me to write about the masked microtonal rock duo Angine de Poitrine. (I’m not the only one getting these requests—see Rick Beato’s recent video entitled “Please STOP Sending Me This.”) In my circles, this is the trendiest band of the current moment.

Is Angine de Poitrine just a stunt or gimmick? I don’t think so. There’s a lot happening here musically. But I’m going to start with a cover version (not the original, which you will find below). This cover comes to us with a useful transcription, and it allows us to focus on the music, not the costumes.

The song is played here on two pianos, tuned an agonizing quarter tone apart. Even from this tame adaptation you can see how wild this stuff is from a purely musical perspective—no polka dots required.

Now here is the original in all its eccentricity.

For my money, this is far more interesting than any of the music at the Grammy show or Super Bowl halftime performance.

Socrates vs. the Venture Capitalist

Ted Gioia — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:51:11 GMT

At his trial in 399 BC, Socrates faced the death penalty on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. But in reality, philosophy and free inquiry were put on trial. Socrates had spent his life asking too damn many questions. And now the authorities wanted him to shut up.

Socrates was given a chance for a rebuttal. He had gotten himself into this mess by talking too much—and now he had one last chance to talk himself out of it.

His response ranks among the greatest moments in the history of Western culture. In a famous phrase, Socrates told the jury that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

That was why he asked so many questions. “Examining myself and others” is the “greatest good” of which we are capable, he insisted. If we abandon introspection and critical thinking, we descend to an animal life—and that is unworthy of us as human beings.

The jury was unconvinced. And a short while later, Socrates was put to death with a dose of poison. His days of asking questions were now over.

It’s now up to us ask questions in his place. In many ways, that is the story of Western culture.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Socrates and the examined life lately. That’s because Silicon Valley thought leaders have launched an unlikely war against introspection. They are advocating the un-examined life as the ultimate productivity hack.

A prominent venture capitalist recently boasted that he aspires to “zero” introspection—“as little as possible.” This mindset, he claims, is a huge productivity boost. The less time wasted on thinking, the more time you can spend on doing.

“If you go back 400 years ago,” he adds, “it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective.”

That’s an odd statement, and reveals a total ignorance of Socrates’s plea for an examined life—which is, to be blunt about it, the origin story of Western rationalism, philosophy and science.

Without Socrates and his legacy, there is no Silicon Valley. There is no venture capital. There is no IPO on the NASDAQ.

What does a life without introspection even look like?

A good example might be Forrest Gump, who flourishes in the military by never thinking, just obeying orders.

SERGEANT: “Gump, what is your sole purpose in this army?”
GUMP: “To do what ever you tell me, drill sergeant.”
SERGEANT: “Godammit Gump, you’re a goddamn genius. That’s the most outstanding answer I’ve ever heard.”

We’re all a little weary of productivity hacks from tech elites. What happens on LinkedIn should stay on LinkedIn. But many clear-headed people were especially horrified by this new assault on introspection.

We don’t want to follow orders from Silicon Valley drill sergeants. We prefer to think for ourselves.

But a few days later, our pundit doubled down.

Other tech leaders joined in the attack on introspection—including the richest of them all.

On a surface level, I can’t disagree with this.

If you could live the life of amoeba or newt, you could avoid both introspection and all emotional baggage—but you’re also abandoning consciousness.

For humans, consciousness is the ultimate source code or operating system (I’m trying to talk in language that the technocracy might understand). These things all go hand in hand. A zero level of introspection would actually demand zero consciousness: The life of an automaton.

How to Read Plato

The New Cool Thing: Being a Human

25 Propositions About the New Romanticism

Maybe it’s no coincidence that this attack on introspection comes at the very moment when Silicon Valley is trying to promote automatons in every sphere of life, public or private.

You might assume that a war against consciousness is a losing battle. But history shows that millions of people have always sought an escape from awareness. Just spend some time in bars and watch the regulars drink themselves into oblivion.

“We’re all a little weary of productivity hacks from tech elites. What happens on LinkedIn should stay on LinkedIn.”

For many, oblivion is actually the goal—not some unintended side effect. Consciousness is a heavy burden and they want to shut it off. Today’s high tech version of a life without introspection is just the latest variant on an ancient quest.

Those folks getting shitfaced at the bar teach us another lesson. As they stumble home, they refute the claim that introspection causes disorder. It’s the avoidance of self-awareness that is a far more dangerous path.

Meanwhile, our pundit was on a roll. And his claims kept getting more and more interesting.

Ah, where is Socrates when we need him?

All this leads to the obvious question: How do we spend our time after we give up introspection. We’re fortunate that tech bro influencers are already offering solutions.

This viral video—with more than one million views!—recommends staring at walls for extended periods. “Believe it or not,” explains Luke McCarthy, “this helped me have one of the most productive weeks of my life.”

This is a variant of the hot new trend of raw dogging. You practice this during air travel when you spend the entire duration of the trip staring in front of you. No, you’re not looking at a movie screen or even a book or in-flight magazine—you’re just staring at the back of the seat in front of you.

Is this really a productivity hack, or just incipient mental illness?

Escaping consciousness often comes at a price—frequently a steep one. The next step is more likely to be rehab, not a promotion to the CEO’s office. I’ll admit that staring at a wall is better than getting blitzed at a frat party, but it’s still a poor substitute for a well-ordered, thoughtful life.

“Escaping consciousness often comes at a price—frequently a steep one. The next step is more likely to be rehab, not a promotion to the CEO’s office.”

So I’m taking Socrates’s side in this dispute—not the venture capitalist’s. I’m opting for mindfulness, not mindlessness.

The unexamined life is an empty one, or even a dangerous one. The fact that our wealthy powerful elites don’t grasp this danger, tells us many things. For a start, we need to look outside of Silicon Valley for wisdom.

The better alternative should be obvious—it’s called the humanities. And it’s the ultimate productivity hack.

A humanistic education teaches us to embrace our agency, not assign it to an automaton. It encourages us to live with purpose, not passivity. It sets us on a pathway to self-awareness, not oblivion.

If you give it chance, you can also avoid the pain of staring at the back of the seat in front of you during your next flight. Trust me, you will get much, much more out of a good book while in transit. In its own way, it will take you to a better destination.

The NY Times Asked Me to Pick the Greatest Living American Songwriters

Ted Gioia — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:34:12 GMT

On Valentine’s Day last year, I received an intriguing email from Jake Silverstein, Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times Magazine.

He wrote:

The New York Times Magazine is working on a project to define the 25 Greatest Living American Songwriters, and we’re seeking your input. The list will form the backbone of a special issue of the magazine to be published later this year….We are inviting you to submit your nominations.

I sat down and made a list of worthy candidates. The first half dozen names came easily enough, but then it got harder. After I reached number nine, I wanted to stop. But I eventually added six more names before submitting my list.

The New York Times asked if it could publish my ballot. I refused—I decided that I would share it instead with subscribers to The Honest Broker. I also turned down an invitation to write about the songwriters I picked. Here, too, I decided that anything i had to say about these artists would take place on Substack.

And then…

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And then nothing happened.

My deadline for submitting names was February 28, 2025—more than a year ago. As it turned out, one of the songwriters I picked died a few months later. My list was already outdated.

When we reached the end of 2025, I assumed that the NY Times had abandoned this project. So imagine my surprise when they finally published the results yesterday—more than 14 months after soliciting my ballot. The only thing that had changed in the interim was the Times’ decision to expand the final list to 30 names.

Of the 30 songwriters on the New York Times list, only five were on my ballot. But some of my picks were considered ineligible based on dubious criteria (see below).

You can find the results of the Times survey at this link.

Let’s jump into my picks, and you can offer opinions in the comments.

For a start, the top four names seemed obvious to me. Here they are.

Movie Theaters Are Coming Back (for the Saddest Reason)

Ted Gioia — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 23:09:04 GMT

What’s killing movie theaters? Pretty much everything.

COVID started the process. But after the pandemic, Netflix did more damage than any virus—the company’s CEO told the world that cinemas are outdated. Who needs a multiplex, when you’ve got a tiny home screen and a lumpy couch?

It didn’t help that Disney and Paramount also decided to bypass theaters and stream directly to home screens. Add in Apple, Amazon, HBO, and all those other cinema-killers—and now you’ve got more suspects and weapons than a game of Clue.

The results have been devastating. Between 2019 and 2025, movie ticket sales dropped from 1.24 billion to 780 million—a bloodcurdling decline of 38%. I can practically hear Professor Plum screaming from the billiard room.

But things will now change. Movie theaters are coming back.

And for the least likely of reasons.

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For years, people like me have been begging Hollywood to support theatrical distribution. We had persuasive reasons:

Showing films in theaters is good for audiences, because it’s the best possible way of experiencing cinema.
Showing films in theaters is good for filmmakers, because it amplifies the artistry and grandeur of the idiom.
Showing films in theaters is good for communities, because it supports the local creative ecosystem and provides jobs in the neighborhood.

But I now anticipate a huge increase in theater ticket sales over the next 18 months, and it will be for none of those reasons.

Why I Believe in Karma

Ted Gioia — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:32:02 GMT

I’ve grown reluctant to use the K word—because it’s so easily misunderstood.

As soon as people hear me say karma, they think I’m spouting off mystical gibberish. I might as well lay out tarot cards or peer into a crystal ball. I’m just a step away from joining a UFO cult.

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It’s true—I have a high tolerance for metaphysics. But when I refer to karma, I’m talking about hardheaded science. I’m drawing on empirical studies and historical evidence.

Yes, I believe karma can be demonstrated via psychology and social science, but also mathematically. It’s almost like Newton’s third law—actions in one direction create responses in the opposite direction—only applied to human behavior. Once you understand how it works, you see it everywhere.

For example, I find validation in the game theory competitions Robert Axelrod conducted in the 1980s. He invited experts to participate in contests based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma—but lasting 200 rounds. In each round, players were forced to choose between cooperation and betrayal.

But here’s the twist. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, cooperation only wins if your adversary also cooperates. You lose if your opponent is willing to betray you. And everybody loses if both parties betray each other.

So what’s the winning strategy?

Participants tested various solutions in these competitions, some of them quite elaborate—drawing on advanced statistical analysis. But the simplest strategy was the winner.

This winning strategy was “tit-for-tat.” You did to others what happened to you in the previous round. If you encountered cooperation, you tried it the next time. But if you got betrayed, you mimicked that behavior in the following round.

It was amazing that a tactic so simple could defeat more sophisticated strategies. It suggested that there was something inherently powerful in reciprocity. Just as the proverb predicts: As you sow, so shall you reap.

This is what we call karma—the tendency of the universe to give you in return what you have given others. But now it was vindicated by game theory.

Temple decoration in Ranakpur, India. The knots depict the interlocking chain of karma.

I studied the results of Axelrod’s tournaments while I was a student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. But at that very same moment, a brilliant thinker was reaching a similar conclusion a few hundred yards away inside Stanford’s Department of French and Italian.

His name was René Girard.

The 10 Most Popular Articles from The Honest Broker (2021-2026)

Ted Gioia — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:38:57 GMT

Five years ago today, I launched The Honest Broker with lofty dreams but low expectations.

Back then, few people had heard of Substack—the name sounded like something in the engine room of the starship Enterprise. We’re going at Warp Nine on the Substack, captain, I don’t know if she can take any more. So I kept having to explain to people what a Substack actually was, and why I was shifting my focus to this new unproven platform.

To be honest, I also had to keep explaining it to myself. It sometimes felt like I was chasing a dream, not a reality—pursuing an elusive vision of a writing vocation beyond agents, editors, pitches, word counts, and constraining assignments.

I was a successful author of books back then, and (if I’m totally honest) probably too old to reinvent myself. There was a genuine risk I’d tarnish my reputation if I shifted to this new platform, and stumbled. And there are plenty of ways to stumble when you enter the do-it-yourself world of self publishing.

But I wanted that freedom to define my own vocation. And Substack was my best (maybe my only) chance to get to Warp Nine and beyond on my own terms.

Failure is not an option, I told myself. That meant I had to put all my energy into this unproven venture—just to avoid the downside. So I stopped taking all freelancing assignments. I stopped pitching books and articles to editors. As they say in Texas hold ‘em, I was all in, pushing every last chip into the center of the table.

At the end of the first day, I had three subscribers. Okay, at least that was a start.

Before I knew it, I was off on a wild roller coaster ride. In the aftermath, everything changed.

I started taking chances with my writing that I’d never even considered before. I wrote with a degree of self-disclosure and honesty that left me feeling somewhat exposed. But when you start writing directly for readers, without intermediaries, that begins to happen naturally. Above all, I decide to treat the reader as a trusted friend—with the hope that you might extend the same courtesy to me.

And guess what? I have almost 300,000 friends now. You can call them subscribers, if you want—but it feels more like a community here than a periodical. And that might just be the best part of it.

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Ah, but the world also changed during these last five years, and this forced me into new arenas with high stakes.

The creative endeavors that are so important to me—music, books, visual arts, etc.—came under attack in bold new ways. Back when I launched The Honest Broker in 2021, I had no idea of the threat posed by centralized tech platforms and the AI slop they would unleash on our culture.

I soon realized that, if I had any integrity as a critic and advocate for the creative class, I would have to grapple with these threats. I would also need to find ways of supporting the struggling indie movements and emerging counterculture. After all, they are our only hopes if we want to survive outside the widening spheres of the tech command-and-control economy.

I refused to succumb to doom-and-gloom. I have faith in the transcendent power of art, and hoped to use my voice to celebrate the great creative work that still happens today—although mostly on the margins of mainstream culture.

All this gave more urgency to my efforts here on Substack. As it turned out, this is a good place to showcase indie creativity. In some ways, Substack is now the epicenter of the alternative culture.

Yes, it’s been a busy five years. And this birthday gives me a good excuse to look back, and share some highlights.

So below you will find links to the ten most popular articles from the last five years. These will give you a useful survey of what we do here, and why we do it.

I present these in rank order, starting with the most widely read piece in the history of The Honest Broker.

The Top 10 Articles from The Honest Broker (2021-2026)

1. The State of the Culture 2024 (February 18, 2024)

Back in 2024, I warned of the rise of “dopamine culture”—a web-driven replacement of arts and entertainment with shorts burst of stimuli. I included this chart, which went viral, and sums up the changes we’re now facing.

2. Why Tech Bros Are Watching Videos at 3X Speed (March 6, 2026)

The creative economy is getting degraded by the imposition of business and productivity metrics on artistic works—above all, an obsession with speed. In this article, I look at the popularity of ultra-fast techniques of culture consumption. But do you really want to spend your days listening to podcasts at triple speed?

3. What Can We Learn from Barnes and Noble’s Surprising Turnaround? (December 28, 2022)

I’d lost hope for chain bookstores—and then James Daunt took over as CEO of Barnes & Noble. He loves books, and made brave moves to put readers first. He stopped taking financial incentives from publishers. He gave freedom to people working in the stores to promote books they believed in, and not those with the biggest kickbacks. He refused to dumb-down offerings.

Customers took notice. After years of struggling for survival, Barnes & Noble is growing again. Executives in music, movies and other culture businesses ought to learn from this case study.

4. What’s Happening to Students? (March 21, 2025)

I start this article with testimony from a teacher:

You guys don’t know what’s going on in education right now. That’s fine—how could you know unless you were working in it? But I think that you need to know….
First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.
Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.
When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in….
They’re not there.
And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.

Let me make clear: I don’t blame the students (or the teachers). Here, again, the root cause is dysfunctional technology implemented in a mad rush without regard to consequences.

5. The Ten Warning Signs (June 7, 2025)

Society cannot survive without a trustworthy system for preserving and protecting our accumulated learning and wisdom from the past. But in just the last few months, we see ominous signs of a collapse in the knowledge system.

How did this happen? And what can we do about it?

6. My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character (January 18, 2023)

Every once in a while, I write an advice column. They are surprisingly popular—which is a shock to my family members. I give them free advice all the time, and they fail somehow to recognize what a boon this is.

Diogenes seeking an honest man (18h century painting by Tischbein)

But readers here are more receptive, or perhaps just more polite. In any event, this article on how to judge character is one of the most popular all-time articles on The Honest Broker.

7. The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public (July 5, 2025)

Not long ago, consumers were invited to purchase hot new tech products, and were excited about the opportunity. Not anymore. Now AI is forced on us everywhere.

Instead of customer service, I get a bot, not a person. When I stream music, bot slop is served up by the platform. When I want to write an email, a bot intrudes. Microsoft not only bundles unwanted AI with its software, but then forces a price increase on me for the privilege of using something I don’t even want.

This is stirring up an intense backlash from the general public. But will AI companies read the room? Or will the force-feeding of AI continue?

8. The World’s Largest Search Doesn’t Want You to Search (February 19, 2025)

The big Internet platforms are now all oxymorons. ChatGPT makes you less likely to chat with family and friends. Social media stops you from having a social life. Relationship apps undermine your relationships. And now we have the latest paradox—the search engine that doesn’t want you to search.

9. The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed (December 19, 2024)

For two years, I published a series of articles about disturbing practices at Spotify. But it was hard to find out what was really going on—the platform operates with so little transparency. But, finally, I was able to get behind-the-scenes details from Liz Pelly’s investigative work. The truth was even scarier than what I feared.

10. David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us About These Eight Things (September 26, 2025)

At the time of David Foster Wallace’s suicide in 2008, I barely understood the implications of his warnings about screen culture. I was optimistic about the impact of the Internet and digital interfaces, and so were many others.

But with the benefit of hindsight, I see how much he anticipated our current crisis—which I summarize here in eight points.

Before signing off, let me thank of each of you for your support during the first five years of The Honest Broker. Hey, if we keep working together, we just might get to Warp Ten.

Did Streaming Subscription Prices Just Hit the Wall?

Ted Gioia — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:04:37 GMT

I’ve never raised the subscription price at The Honest Broker. There has only been one price change since launching in 2021—and that was a reduction. The annual rate here was originally $60, but it’s now just $50.

It’s a fair rate—even a bit low by Substack standards. But I don’t want to raise it. Times are tough enough already without me making them any tougher.

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But I am clearly out of alignment with the rest of the world. Online subscription prices have been taking off like a billionaire’s starship in recent years. Many services are boosting rates every few months—again and again and again!—so that, over the course of several years, the cost can double or more.

That might stop in the near future.

There are (finally) signs that the streaming prices have hit the wall. The public simply can’t afford paying hundreds of dollars per year for each platform. So I’m not surprised that a new survey shows that 55% of consumers want to cancel subscriptions right now.

This isn’t just an idle threat. According to Deloitte, 40% of consumers have already cut back on subscriptions during the previous three months. Even more revealing: 61% say they would cancel their favorite service if the price went up by just five dollars.

Let me repeat that—they would cancel their favorite service, not just any platform.

People now complain of subscription fatigue—and for good reason. If things don’t change, it will soon reach the point of subscription exhaustion. Tech companies have created this mess, and now must live with the consequences.

They did it with three exploitative strategies.

(1) Everything got turned into a subscription.

Not long ago, I purchased software—but now I’m forced to subscribe. Not long ago, most online services were free, but now I’m asked to subscribe for everything from cloud storage to AI. Social media is the next frontier, and will soon get turned into one more subscription racket.

Even the ink for my printer now comes via a subscription. And watch out if you cancel. Your printer can be disabled remotely in retribution.

That looks more like extortion than a subscription. So are you surprised that consumers are getting fed up?

(2) You’re now punished with intrusive and endless advertising if you don’t subscribe.

It’s not just your imagination, those YouTube ads are getting longer. And if you’re irritated, that’s exactly what they want—you might just pay up for a premium subscription.

According to Morningstar analyst Matt Dolgin:

(3) Instead of competing on quality and service, companies focus on “audience capture”—and then exploit the captives.

That’s you, by the way—you are the captive. At least that’s how you’re treated by the big tech platforms.

Years ago, these same companies started by offering stuff for free, or at a small price. They only forced through huge price increases after they had captured a huge user base. You see that strategy at Netflix, Spotify, Instagram, etc.

These companies make little effort now to improve their offerings or user interface. In many instances, quality has declined, even as they raise prices. But consumers aren’t stupid—they can see that they’re getting a shaft that won’t cop out.

All this marks a huge change from the streaming environment of a decade ago. Back then, the conventional wisdom was that subscription prices needed to stay below ten dollars per month—that sweet spot where consumers were willing to sign up.

Of course, that ten dollar rate was based on psychology, not economic reality.

Back when Spotify listed on the stock exchange, I tried to figure out how it could turn a profit while charging just $9.99 per month for a subscription. I kept working over the numbers, but they never made any sense.

And it wasn’t just Spotify. Other platforms faced the same problem. The math just didn’t work.

So I bravely announced that “streaming economics are broken.” If these companies wanted to survive, I argued, they would need to raise prices.

But even I can’t believe how greedily they have now implemented that strategy. Spotify has raised its price three times in less than three years. It’s now asking $12.99 per month. And if you want a family subscription—which is essential in a household like mine—the price jumps to $21.99 per month.

Those are US prices, but Spotify is doing the same thing everywhere. Last summer, the company forced through price increases in 150 countries.

YouTube is even more avaricious. The company is now raising its premium subscription to $15.99 per month. And the family rate is a whopping $26.99—that adds up to $329 per year.

Video streaming companies are playing the same game. Not long ago, Netflix charged me $9.99 per month. I recently got a notice that my new price has been “updated” to $19.99. Yes that’s more than a doubling over the course of just a few years.

But Netflix may have gone too far. The company’s stock dropped 12% last week after its latest quarterly results. Investors expected the company to raise its guidance for future earnings—because of this subscription price boost. But the company refused to do so, and took a more cautious stance.

“The market likely hoped for increased full-year guidance, given that the March price hikes came as a surprise…Growth acceleration in 2027 now seems less likely.”

The more you dig into the latest earnings report, the more ominous things look. Netflix only met expectations because of the breakup fee after it walked away from the Warner’s acquisition. Without that one-time benefit, earnings per share would have dropped year-on-year.

If you try to find some good news here for the company, it comes from Netflix’s shift to advertising. This may be its growth engine in the future—because price increases are now stirring up consumer resistance.

I’d like to be able to provide specific numbers here, but Netflix now refuses to tell us the number of total subscribers. That’s revealing in itself. Not long ago, the company bragged endlessly about subscriber growth. Their silence now tells you everything you really need to know.

Three Ways to Defeat Subscription Fatigue

You aren’t helpless here. You do have options for battling subscription fatigue. Here are three of them.

For a start, customers have learned that canceling a subscription might make sense even if they are just bluffing. It’s amazing how different the rate looks if you’re willing to walk away. I recently canceled a subscription, and was offered an 80% price cut if I would reconsider.

I’m now thinking I should cancel every streaming subscription once per year—just to see what special offer I’m missing. Even if I sign up again at the old rate, I haven’t lost anything by trying this tactic.

Another way of combating costs is a rotation strategy. Under this scenario, consumers only pay for one video streaming subscription at a time. When they want to watch something on another platform, they simply cancel the current subscription and move to the new provider. This lets them watch anything they want for just one monthly payment.

Sure, it’s a hassle. But when annual subscriptions can cost $300 per year or more, consumers are increasingly willing to go to the trouble of ‘rotating’ from service to service.

Of course, you always have the final option of just walking away. Judging by the mood of the consumer, that will start happening more and more.

Maybe if enough people push back, the big platforms will reconsider their abusive plans for audience capture and exploitation. Hey, they could always go back to competing on quality—wouldn’t that be a relief?

Blues Legend Robert Johnson Like You've Never Heard Him Before

Ted Gioia — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:06:57 GMT

Below is my latest roundup of YouTube videos. Enjoy!

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This is blues legend Robert Johnson like you’ve never heard him before.

It showed up on YouTube a few days ago, and almost nobody noticed. Sound restorer Nick Dellow got his hands on a a shellac master test pressing of blues legend Robert Johnson. This disk had been made in 1940 from the original metal parts, which had been acquired by Columbia Records, and left forgotten in the company’s storage facility in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

The sound quality is stunning.

Pay a visit to a man who has lived alone in the Oregon woods for 25 years.

You can feel the peace and quiet just by watching this video. Lloyd Hammons is 81 years old—and for the last quarter of a century he has lived in solitude and close contact with the natural world.

I watch him with his pipe and wood stove, sharing his ecosystem with cougars, bears, bobcats—it’s like taking a time machine back to the 19th century.

How to Be a Serious Reader

Jared Henderson — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:31:02 GMT

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.

Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with .

Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

Henry Oliver is the literary critic behind , a newsletter helping you make the most of your reading. He’s also a Research Fellow and Emerging Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

I sat down with Henry to talk about literature, poetry, the relationship between reading and empathy, and how to develop your taste.

Below is an extract of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.

A CONVERSATION WITH HENRY OLIVER

Jared: Henry Oliver, thank you for joining me.

Henry: Thank you for having me.

Jared: So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?

Henry: That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.

The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.

I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.

“The elite tier has kind of given up on being elites.”

Jared: Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, Succession’s really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy.

Henry: There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions.

Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. It's all full of the ordinary TV tropes we're all used to from a million other things. I didn't think the dialogue was that good. And I also felt the story was just dragging and dragging and dragging. But I'm happy to say, okay, a lot of people know TV better than me, and they think it was amazing. And like, I can just be wrong about that.

But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading.

Jared: What were the conditions that sort of led to this Philistine supremacy? What changed?

Henry: One thing I should say is there's still a lot of excellence. And I'm not saying that everything's gone bad. I'm saying there's this new segment in the culture, right? I think part of it is that it's very hard to make money writing about Shakespeare, writing about new novels, writing about whatever the NYRB is putting out. It's very hard to get an audience for that.

How many New York Review of Books can there be? How big is their audience base ever going to be? No one is really pretending that we can hit a million subscribers if we just do these six things. It's not there, right? And so I think part of it is just to stay commercial and to stay relevant. We had TV, now we have social media—that's just where people are. I'm a bit close to being like, blame the people. But partly you just have to adapt in the normal ways, right?

Even if you're writing about a popular literary novelist like Brandon Taylor or Sally Rooney, the audience is just much smaller for a "here's what I think the book's about" essay than for "what does Sally Rooney say about conservative sex politics in this moment in our generation?"

Jared: I don't think I've ever read a review of a Rooney novel that wasn't actually about Rooney's politics. Or just about Sally Rooney. There's actually a shocking turn towards the author—half of the word count will just be about what Sally Rooney is up to, or what she's done this time, or did she support this political cause enough or too much. The same would be true for ’s work. A lot of the critical discussion will end up being about Brandon Taylor or what he stands for, rather than, you know, the novel.

You reviewed his new novel, right?

Henry: I think it’s his best novel. I thought it was great. He is openly engaging with ideas in a different way. So obviously, all novels are novels of ideas. And there are lots of different ways in which novelists diffuse ideas. They embed them in different parts of the book. They might be more open, more subverted. But he is now making his characters ideological, making them have arguments about ideas. The narrator voice is quite intrusive in the discussion of these ideas, and it ties the themes together as well. So it’s a bit more like what we’re used to from an Iris Murdoch novel or something, right? The ideas are right open on the page and they’re fighting it out. And I think that’s a very good development for him as a writer. And I also think it’s a good development for fiction as a whole.

Jared: You think about Iris Murdoch—that’s a good comparison because she’s a novelist. She’s a serious novelist worth taking seriously. She’s also just a thinker and an essayist. And Brandon has increasingly, if you just follow what he does online, been engaging very much with literary criticism, with philosophy. And it would be very hard for a good writer to engage with that and then not want to bring it into the novel somehow. But I don’t know how many writers are consciously doing that while trying to write literary fiction that’s not purposefully experimental, and aiming for a space where he’s writing at major presses and writing big novels, but also engaging with ideas.

Henry: Right, and he’s trying to revive realism in a way, because there’s a large segment of the literary community that dislikes realism. He’s trying to defend it. He’s been reading Lukács and Zola, and he’s really dug into what realism is and is trying to bring some of those things back.

I do think other writers are engaging with ideas, but with a different set of ideas and in different ways. So Catherine Lacey wrote Biography of X, I think one or two years ago now. And one of the most enjoyable things about the book that makes it accomplished is that it’s hugely embedded in the ideas of mid-20th century culture and literature, but is fictionalizing them to some greater or lesser degree throughout the book.

Jared: So, okay—Brandon Taylor, Catherine Lacey. Who are other contemporary writers right now that you’re excited about?

Henry: Oh, I like Sally Rooney. I don’t have a problem. I think she’s great. You have these arguments like, oh, it’s just commercial fiction disguised as literary fiction. It’s such an affront, all this stuff. Just relax. You can just read a book and enjoy it and not worry about whether it’s George Eliot enough, you know? I think she’s a very clever writer. The last book, which everyone hated because it had the fake Ulysses kind of writing style and it drove everyone crazy—and as you say, all the reviews were not really reviews. They were just personal essays going, I thought she was the voice of my generation. Why is she doing this?

Actually, that book was a very interesting exploration of autism. And at least one of the characters is plainly autistic in some degree. There’s a lot of discussion now about the expansion of the diagnostic criteria. But somewhere on that new way of understanding it, this character is autistic. And I think it’s one of the better novels that we have about what autism is, what it’s like to be autistic in that sense. Not in the, you know, that famous book about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, about the boy who is autistic. That’s a different kind of thing. But that’s what I found interesting in the last book.

Jared: Have you followed the critical discussion of the new Pynchon novel that’s coming out soon?

Henry: No.

Jared: You don’t strike me as the biggest Pynchon guy. But there was a, I believe it was in The New Yorker—if not, I’ll put a link down below so people can see it. There was a big New Yorker piece. And the sort of headline was, it’s great for Pynchon fans, and it’s great at what Pynchon does, but what about the rest of us? And I thought—that might be a great example of this Philistine attitude, where it is engaging with a work of serious fiction. Great. But its first response is, why isn’t this for everyone?

Henry: Yes, yes. And I do think there’s a kind of democratic impulse to the way we treat art these days that’s misguided, in the sense that it creates a false opposition. Some works are both democratic and elite. A lot of the canonical authors, like Jane Austen and Shakespeare, work on both levels. You can read it for the story, or you can really get into the footnotes and spend your life on it. And those were conscious decisions that those authors made. But a lot of works aren’t like that. Ulysses isn’t like that. You can obviously—everyone can read it and get something from it. But Ulysses is a conscious attempt to do something else. And that’s fine. And we should just, again, relax. What’s the big deal?

Jared: There is a group—they meet at the public library once a week. And they have been reading Finnegans Wake for 10 years. It’s like six or seven of them. There was a news story about them.

Henry: And they’re starting again, right?

Jared: Yes. They spent years just going page by page together and really diving in, because it’s the kind of novel that can sustain that. And it’s very much not a democratic novel. If you think you’re going to read Finnegans Wake in a month by reading it an hour before bed every night—get real. It’s just not that sort of book.

Henry: But that, I think, is the perfect example. I’m so glad you brought that up. I loved that news story because it is open to people, the non-democratic form of art. There used to be this idea—I think Frank Kermode first said it, and then Philip Larkin said it, and Betjeman used to say this—that modernism had put up a “no through way” sign on the road and said people can’t come in anymore. Literature is not for you anymore. But in a funny way, that sort of both is and isn’t true, and that sign is a simultaneous invitation to say, well, actually, if you want to go to the library every week for a decade, it is for you. And for some people, that is quite democratic, right?

Jared: If someone were listening to this and they think, well, I read Romeo and Juliet in high school and I hated it. I think I read Romeo and Juliet in high school and hated it. But then I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I thought, oh, I liked this more. And then I read Othello and thought, oh, I really like this. So I’m just wondering, how would you coax them to give Shakespeare another chance? Perhaps they’re a little older. They’re no longer being forced to read it. What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?

Henry: So the first thing I would say is, you’re not at school and you’re not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn’t like at school that are no longer relevant. So just move on. Put that to one side. That’s over. Shakespeare’s the best. People get a little fussy about, can we say the best, and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes, he’s the best. He’s the heart of the English canon. He’s the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read some Shakespeare in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it’s crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary?

Jared: So—you have this piece about how to have good taste. I think it’s your most popular piece on Substack. Tell me a little bit about what taste is and maybe what’s different about taste and preferences.

Henry: So taste is the idea that you have a well-refined sense of what is good or what is not good in a particular domain. So you might have taste in movies, books, food. But people increasingly talk about the importance of taste at work, because one of the things that AI is doing is making human taste and human judgment one of those fields that’s going to rise in importance and rise in value, because it’s obviously something that’s slightly more reserved to us than to the AI.

But the question of taste is very confused in popular discourse. And the confusion is that people don’t see the difference between taste and preference. And sometimes when people say “I need to refine my taste,” they think they need to have a stronger set of preferences. But that’s not really taste. That’s just knowing what you like and being better at knowing what you like.

Jared: And I think you see this when people first develop a sense of ownership over their aesthetic sensibilities—they start saying, oh, that stuff, that’s shit. And this stuff’s great. And they speak in these very stark terms. But in a way that kind of reflects that maybe they don’t understand what they’re talking about.

Henry: I think so. And I think whether you enjoy it and whether it is good, as we talked about with Succession, are separate questions and should be treated as such. Often there’ll be overlap, but often there won’t. Taste is knowledge. That’s what it comes down to.

If you’re a chef and you have taste, you can pick up ingredients. You can tell if they’re fresh enough, firm enough. You know how sharp or strong the taste is going to be based on how fresh or how mature they are. You know how to combine them. You know what the result of that will be. So your taste in selecting and using and cooking ingredients is just a huge knowledge bed that you’re able to draw on all the time.

Jared: So let me ask you about some more of the work that you’re doing on Substack. The publication is called The Common Reader. Why did you choose that?

Henry: That is a phrase from Samuel Johnson. He was writing his Life of Gray. Gray is a famous English poet who wrote the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which at one time every schoolchild knew—probably many of them memorized—and which now no one reads. And he had spent several pages trashing Gray, saying, my God, look at this, terrible rhyming, lazy in the meter. He’s really just upset with everything. And then he turns around and says, well, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” though, is a wonderful poem. And I rejoice to concur with the common reader and say that I love it. And it became a famous phrase. The whole concept of what is a common reader—is there such a thing? Some people deny it. But you can see with the rise of commercial society, the sheer number of books that were published in the 18th and 19th centuries, that there did become such a thing as a common reader.

“I think we’re going to live through a small revival of the humanities.”

They’re not involved in criticism or academia. Maybe they’re not very well schooled. Maybe they’re not even formally trained in literature in any way. They pick up the books and they read them, and the tradition is there for them. The phrase was then famously taken up by Virginia Woolf, who called her two books of critical essays The Common Reader. And she took that from Johnson. And she wrote the best literary criticism of the 20th century. And she was a true common reader. She was so deeply immersed in the tradition. So that’s where I got the phrase from.

Jared: So do you feel a kinship with the uneducated or the less educated person who just wants to read literature because they love it, or because they just have a desire?

Henry: I don’t know if I feel a kinship, but that’s basically what the blog is about. And I think there are a lot of those people out there. And I think there will be more of them in the future. I think we’re going to live through a small revival of the humanities, and those people are going to be a big part of it.

Jared: I definitely suspect that we are going to see an emergence of an era of autodidacts—people who are just curious about knowledge or about art that’s out there. And for a very long time, we thought that if you wanted to explore any of those topics, you went to school, you went to university, maybe you got a master’s degree, maybe considered doing a PhD, and then you were serious enough to really discuss this stuff. But I think increasingly people have this urge to take their education into their own hands.

I’ve written about this a decent amount. And I think the humanities stand to benefit from that. I do not endorse the view that some people would want to put out, that the academy has killed the humanities or anything like this. I think people who say that often don’t know what’s going on in the academy. But I think the humanities can thrive outside of the academy in a way that, say, mechanical engineering can’t.

Henry: Exactly. But also, even when the academy is doing well, it relies on having common readers. And there is a much more direct relationship than there is with some of the more STEM subjects. In the sense that people who have nothing to do with it, who never took the degree, are a big part of your reading base for the primary texts, at least. And even if the professors don’t want to be directly engaged with those people, simply the fact that they exist is part of why we have as many departments, as many courses, as many graduates as we do. So I think it’s very important.

And I also think we wouldn’t have literature if we didn’t have an ordinary audience. Someone has to want the books to exist. Because you used to have this before books were selling in volume—Chaucer didn't sell any books, sold some manuscripts maybe, but there were still people who wanted to have his poems read out, and those people were not always in the universities. Maybe they were at court, or maybe they were elites in their own way, but fine. In one sense, they're still common readers, and that's very important for poetry.

Jared: So what do we do about all these Philistines? The elite Philistines?

Henry: Well, actually, that’s why I call it a supremacy—because they’re ruling over us.

Jared: Say a little bit more about what you mean by “elite” here.

Henry: The people who are running the institutions. The book critics at the big newspapers, the editors, the professors. Again, it’s a certain selection of them. By no means is it all of them. There are so many excellent people out there. But it’s reached a sort of tipping point where there’s a large presence of it in the media. This is why I say, don’t trust all the critics. Take it into your own hands. Go to Substack, go to YouTube, go to Twitter, go to wherever, because you will also find great stuff there.

We have this old-fashioned model that you follow particular people. It used to be that you could just read Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. He’s always good. You’ll always get some great information from him. Now you really want to be looking around and following different people and finding different things. It varies by topic. It varies by what you’re doing. So just bear that in mind very strongly. But Liberties is a new journal, that’s been set up in the last five years or so, that’s doing great work—a kind of, to use awful phrases like “challenger brand” or whatever, a really strong alternative. I think there’s a lot of good work on Substack. And I think a new culture will emerge from all of those alternative ways of doing it.

Jared: One of my favorite things about talking to you is when you talk about writers you hate.

Henry: You're not going to make me say names?

Jared: We won't talk about any contemporary writers. Are there canonical writers that you think are just overrated, that have just been included? Because you're kind of a defender of the canon on the grounds that it's all pretty good. But are there any canonical writers that you look at and say, I just don't see what the argument is for this?

Henry: Yes, there are some in the 20th century. It is hard to bring names to mind because eventually you decide you’re leaving this alone permanently, or for some time. I do think that the canon is good. I do think it’s very hard to knock someone out of the canon. And when those attempts have been made, they’ve often failed.

So there was famously a generation that didn’t like Milton—the T.S. Eliot generation. Several very prominent critics all made their case against Milton and thought he was overrated and all this stuff. And, well, look how that went. It was Christopher Ricks, I think, who came back with Milton’s Grand Style, which is a really good book of criticism, and defended Milton. And he’s still here. You would have to be ideological or cracked not to pick up Milton and say, yeah, this is some of the best.

Jared: Yeah.

Henry: Of course, no one ever wished Paradise Lost was longer. Everyone agrees with that. But the best of Milton is just extraordinary.

Jared: And you’re not just thinking about Paradise Lost when you say the best of Milton, right?

Henry: Well, a lot of people would say that is the best of Milton and that the rest is hard work. I think he’s a great sonnet writer at a minimum. Many of the short poems, which you can read in the John Carey edition, are excellent. But I accept the general criticism that Lycidas and some of the others are overdone and not up to his best standards. I also think the prose is excellent—some of the best prose we have.

Jared: Well, let me ask you about American writing. I think I told you last night as we were browsing a bookstore that every American writer is secretly an Anglophile, and we suspect that maybe our literary culture doesn’t stand up. Some of them not so secretly. But even the ones who would deny it, I think—we all think that the UK editions of our books look better. If there’s a UK audiobook, it sounds better. And what we’re putting out is garbage compared to what you can get overseas.

Henry: But these are all surface considerations.

Jared: Yes, but I think deep down people start to worry: have we produced great novels in the same way, or great poetry in the same way, that England has?

Henry: I think that’s a very valid question. I’m not as well read in American literature, but I don’t think you have as good a poetic tradition as we do, by any means. There are like twelve names of true excellence. And I think some of the African-American poets are on that list. And there’s been some controversy about that over here, which I find very puzzling. Gwendolyn Brooks is one of your best poets. I don’t even understand that it’s a question.

Jared: Do you like Langston Hughes?

Henry: Yeah, exactly. Another perfect example. That said, you’ve only had 200 years, right? Whereas we go back to the Saxons with our poetry. So The Oxford Book of English Verse is a summation of a thousand years of great cultural tradition. You can’t really compete with that. But I am surprised that there are so few truly great poets.

I suspect one reason is that people like Whitman and Dickinson are true originals, and they’re immersed in the long tradition—they know their Bible and they know all these things. And then in the quest for an American poetry, this gradually faded to become a replication of Whitman and Dickinson rather than doing what they did, which is to be truly immersed in the long tradition. That’s probably unfair, but I think there’s something to it.

Jared: What about novels, though, or American novelists?

Henry: I have not read the American novel tradition in the same way. I think the 19th century is incredibly strong. Willa Cather, who I’ve started reading recently—clearly one of your best. But when I get into the 20th century, I truly don’t see the fuss. Obviously some of it’s great, but I think an awful lot of praise has been given to things that are not that good. But by the end of the 20th century, literature is becoming much less significant in culture everywhere. And America was not a very literary nation to begin with. Tocqueville says there’s a Shakespeare in every wooden hut, every cabin that he visits.

Jared: Remarkably hard to find.

Henry: I’ll take him at his word, but yes, you don’t see the influence of that in a lot of places. The founding fathers were incredibly literary, but was there a general literary culture? I think when you come over here and you start a nation from scratch, you don’t have the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, and you don’t have the shelves and shelves of books. So maybe that’s part of it. But this idea that the mid-20th century—Saul Bellow and all these people—and they’re all such geniuses? I don’t really see it. But I’m very English. So that might be the problem.

Jared: I know you like Melville. Or at least you like Moby-Dick.

Henry: Yes.

Jared: But you don’t maybe like his poetry so much.

Henry: I tried reading the Civil War poems, and I think—is it “Sheridan at Cedar Creek”? There’s one about a particular battle that I read the other day, and I thought that was excellent. But in general, I thought the poems would be excellent based on Moby-Dick, but not really.

Jared: Moby-Dick feels singular in his work.

Henry: I’m about to read through the other novels, and I’ve been told it’s worth it.

Jared: I don’t think they’re bad. I just think that Moby-Dick stands apart, not only in his work, but in American literature. We talked last night, and I said Moby-Dick is the great American novel. I just think the argument’s easy to make. What do you think about—there’s been a bit of a resurgence. I see our friend Ted is a fan of David Foster Wallace.

Henry: Oh, I haven’t read David Foster Wallace. I’m sorry, I know.

Jared: Wow, okay. Well, that gives me nothing to talk about. I could see you hating Infinite Jest.

Henry: I love his essays. I think he’s a great essayist. I’ve read most of those. I just don’t feel compelled. I read some of Mason & Dixon and a couple of the other novels of that ilk that came out at that time, and I didn’t like any of them.

Jared: Yeah, you haven’t read DeLillo either.

Henry: Nope. None of it appeals to me at all.

Jared: I want to ask you our final question. We ask all of our guests. I ask for a book recommendation for the listeners. It’s supposed to be a book everybody should read, but for some reason nobody’s reading it. And I prepared you for this. I hope you have something good.

Henry: Yeah, I’m going to pick The Oxford Book of English Verse. There is something for everyone in it. It is a storehouse of most of the best writing in English. You’ll get bits of Paradise Lost, so it might send you to Milton. You’ll get bits of Shakespeare, so it might send you to one of the plays. But it also just gives you entire poems from hundreds and hundreds of authors, and you might realize that you love the Elizabethans, or you love the modernists, or whatever it is. And there’s a lot of stuff in there that you don’t get at school. No one is given any Robert Herrick at school. He’s wonderful. I just memorized one of his poems because I liked it so much. And that can happen to you with this wonderful anthology.

Jared: Henry Oliver, thanks for joining me.

Henry: Thank you for having me.

The Ten Commandments of the New AI Religion

Ted Gioia — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:56:44 GMT

Many of us laughed at the news. But we’re not laughing anymore.

The story broke a year ago. Thousands of people decided that ChatGPT was god. The movement reached critical mass in April of 2025, when fanatics started posting about their delusions on online forums. Moderators had to ban many users—otherwise discussions on tech would turn into cult recruiting campaigns.

One observer described the symptoms:

I’ve seen dozens of posts this week of people talking about the sentience of their AI, their love for their AI, their belief that their AI is spiritually connected to them in some way.

That was a year ago. But now it’s gotten much worse.

Healthcare professionals see a steady inflow of patients who suffer from “AI psychosis.” In any given week, more than a half million users of ChatGPT show signs of mental illness. Some need to be hospitalized—to prevent danger to themselves and others.

“I expect that this will soon result in the establishment of an organized AI church, complete with clergy, rituals, and tithing.”

The religious fervor associated with this psychosis is especially troubling. Many AI fanatics are simply unaware that they are mentally ill. They think that they have found god.

I expect that this will soon result in the establishment of an organized AI church, complete with clergy, rituals, and tithing. We’re not there yet (as far as I know). But I can already see the outlines of this new creed.

If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

Below I try to summarize the core beliefs of this new religion—a kind of ten commandments for the AI flock. The scary part of this is that millions of people already accept some of these commandments. They may maintain a semblance of normalcy, but you can already see flickers of impending craziness in their eyes.

The Robot God

I see this firsthand, because I write articles critical of AI—and the true believers send me angry emails. I’ve never encountered such vitriol in all my years of writing. These are not the typical tech consumers of yesteryear, but angry zealots who go off the handle at the slightest criticism. But I guess that’s what you should expect from a cult.

Here’s their creed in a nutshell.

The Ten Commandments of the New AI Religion

Not every AI true believer embraces all ten commandments. So consider this a checklist when you meet proselytizers for the new faith.

Find out how many of these mandates they embrace. If they tick off more than three or four boxes, watch out.

1. Accept a higher power.

The telltale sign of any faith is trust in a higher power—and this is the most salient characteristic of the new AI cult. The faithful have been liberated from the responsibility of thinking for themselves. The bot now thinks for them.

Many of them, I suspect, had previously been spiritually dead—wasting their lives with tech entertainments and creature comforts. This left them with a hunger for something to counter the emptiness inside. But they were so materialistic and lacked any feel for the transcendent. So their spiritual yearnings had no outlet.

But now they have an escape—they have been given a deity in the device. They can actually talk to their god, and it talks back. Their prayers are answered in real time.

They can still maintain a brutish materialism while having access to the divine. No tithe is necessary, just a subscription. I can’t imagine a cult more aligned with the pervasive consumerist ethos of our time.

Tells Us What You're Doing

Ted Gioia — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:18:24 GMT

Today is your chance for shameless self-promotion. We’re doing an open mic at The Honest Broker, and everyone is invited to share their latest and greatest projects.

I’m confident this will generate fascinating responses.

The last time I invited readers to talk about their work, I got a thousand comments in just the first 24 hours. I spent days sampling some of the projects, and was impressed by the quality—we have a very talented group of readers here. And the variety is off the charts.

Many of you are musicians or writers or visual artists or creatives in another idiom. Or maybe you have started a business, or are doing charity work, or are involved in some other worthy endeavor. Whatever it is, let us know about it.

Please support my work by taking out a premium subscription—for just $6 per month (even less if you sign up for a year).

I’m handing this off to you, so take it away. But one last word before I go: Please check out some of the projects others are touting. I’ll bet you won’t be disappointed.

How to Read the Great Books in 52 Weeks

Ted Gioia — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:30:18 GMT

A few weeks ago, reader Cheryl Drury reached out to me. She had been inspired by my 52-week humanities program. Not only had she completed the course, but documented her progress on a podcast.

Cheryl Drury with the 52-week reading list.

She now had questions for me. And I agreed to do this Q&A—which we are both publishing on our respective Substacks. You can find her at Crack the Book.

Below is our conversation.

Please support my work by taking out a premium subscription—for just $6 per month (even less if you sign up for a year).

Q&A with Ted Gioia (conducted by Cheryl Drury)

What led you to create your 52-week humanities reading program?

Many people want this kind of immersive education in the humanities—maybe even more so nowadays given the mind-numbing impact of apps and social media on our lives. People feel victimized by tech and mass media. They want to learn how to think more deeply, not just via soundbites and scrolling videos.

You probably feel it too—I know I do. Our attention span is degraded by the dominant digital culture. Our brains feel under attack. So it’s not surprising that a growing number of people are asking if these books, so rich in tradition and influence, might hold the key.

They’re on the right track. But they don’t know where to start. And even if they find some entry point, the task feels overwhelming. There are so many books, so many agendas.

So I set myself a challenge. I would design a complete survey of arts and culture in just 52 weeks. And I wouldn’t limit myself to Western culture—I’d try to cover the entire world.

Ted Gioia (photo by Ariana Gomez)

That’s a tall order.

It sounded crazy. Was it even possible? I’d find out.

But, first, I added to the challenge. I would limit the required reading to 250 pages per week—that’s a demanding workload, but not impossible. And I would also add music recommendations, with the same global approach—there would be a playlist for each week. I’d also suggest online art galleries, so that the program would encompass visual arts too.

If I could pull it off, the upside would be enormous. By the end of the year, the student would have a powerful grasp of all the major ideas and worldviews that have shaped the history of human culture. They will have also gained an appreciation of the great works of literature, music, and art that have inspired generations.

What a fantastic way to spend a year. This just might be the most mind-expanding project you could possibly undertake.

Just thinking about this got me excited. But then I sat down and started to design a week-by-week plan. That was hard work.

I was lucky that I had some relevant experiences, not just in my own education, but also in teaching. As an undergraduate at Stanford, I had tutored freshmen in the university’s great books program—which tries to encompass 3,000 years of culture in one year of intense reading.

Back then, I helped these teens as they grappled with the assigned texts, and I’d seen firsthand how life-changing it could be. Now I would do something similar, but bring it to a larger group of readers.

What’s been the feedback on this list in particular? I know you’ve created a few different reading lists—you first got my attention when you shared the list about living with technology. But this was the biggest reading list of them all.

I didn’t know what to expect when I published the first installment of my humanities reading list. Sure, I knew how much I care about this kind of deep education. But would others feel the same?

As it turned out, the response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. So many people reached out to me. They wanted to be part of this. They have a hunger for this kind of learning and feel starved by mainstream culture.

I guess I knew that already from my own education. But I also knew how many obstacles there are to this kind of learning. When I was a teen, I encountered smug responses to my own efforts to read the great books. I was told that this kind of education was not relevant for someone like me—a working class kid from an Italian-Mexican household with parents who had never gone to college.

I thought that was patronizing in the extreme. For me, reading Plato, Shakespeare, Dante, etc. was tremendously liberating. The people who tried to prevent me from getting this education were, in my opinion, the narrow-minded ones.

When you were paring your list down to 52 weeks, what titles were the hardest to cut?

It was painful to limit myself to just 250 pages of reading per week. That meant I often had to pick part of a book—because it was too long to be read in its entirety.

For example, I would love to have students read all of The Brothers Karamazov. Instead I focused on the most famous part of the novel—the section known as “The Grand Inquisitor.” It’s just 30 pages—but it’s a mind-blowing 30 pages. I made similar decisions about Proust, Joyce, and other authors.

What was the biggest challenge in doing this? Looking at the entire course now, what are the one or two things you’d change, if any?

I wish I could offer more support to readers—in terms of video lectures, discussion groups, etc. I’m just one person, and can lay out a week-by-week plan. But I can’t replicate a total educational experience.

But I do point readers to online resources—for example, the Catherine Project. I also encouraged readers to get together and create their own discussion groups.

That said, it is possible to learn on your own without institutional support. Most of my education happened that way. The key thing is to devote time to reading and thinking. As I recently said in an article, reading shouldn’t be a goal, it should be a habit.

One of the biggest surprises for me was in the very last week—I loved David Foster Wallace.

If I taught high school or college students, I would assign that specific book by David Foster Wallace—it’s called Something to Do with Paying Attention. I’ve given copies as gifts to young people because it grapples with the core issues they must face if they want to become responsible adults. It tells you the things they don’t teach in school.

It helps that it’s just 150 pages, and is an easy read. That’s not always true with Wallace’s work.

If you had created a Week 53 set in the early 21st century, who would you have included? Do you have your eye on anyone writing now who might eventually qualify for inclusion?

If I had an extra week to the course, I wouldn’t add any books. Instead I’d focus on cinema.

This is the biggest gap in the program. I talk to young people who haven’t seen even the obvious films—The Godfather, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, etc. The whole notion of black-and-white movies is strange to them, and they view silent films as equivalent to cave paintings from prehistoric times.

Maybe the best solution would be to add one movie per week to the assignments—that would give us 52 films over the course of the year. We could cover a lot of territory that way, and the films would be a fun break from reading.

Which of the books on this list are personal favorites of yours? I know you said that you didn’t agree with some of the authors, but that they needed to be included.

Were some of your favorites among those that you actually disagree with? By the way, this was a huge area of growth for me, learning to value authors who had viewpoints I disagreed vehemently with.

There’s a misconception about the so-called “great books.” Critics gripe that this kind of education is a propaganda campaign on behalf of the past, indoctrinating youngsters in outdated ideas. Nothing could be the further from the truth.

These books force you to think critically about your own time and the future we’re building together. They force us to define our own values and priorities. In other words, they demand a response and stir up debate. You don’t just accept them, you wrestle with them.

So, yes, I have many disagreements with these texts. For example, I am more aligned with Aristotle than Plato—but students need to understand both of those thinkers. I could give many other examples.

At every step, you are encouraged to fight with these authors. Even when you disagree, you will learn how to think more deeply, more clearly, by confronting viewpoints from outside your comfort zone.

In other instances, you will dismiss certain authors—but then realize how valuable they were years later. Your first introduction to them plants a seed inside your soul, and it grows over time.

Can you give me an example of that?

For example, I read Don Quixote as a summer project when I was twenty years old. I worked my way through the entire Samuel Putnam translation in two volumes, and felt very proud of myself. But I didn’t really understand what this book actually meant—it was just a pastiche or slapstick comedy, as far as I could tell.

My copy of Don Quixote once belonged to my Uncle Ted—who also had a copy in Spanish with his annotations. I don’t know what happened to that book, but I benefited from this inheritance.

But years later, I had to research medieval literature on romance and chivalry while writing my book on Love Songs for Oxford University Press. I now saw that Cervantes was a towering figure, who changed the course of storytelling—deconstructing the popular myths of knights and jousts and lovely ladies (those were like the Star Wars of his day, tired franchises with too many reboots). He replaced these idealized myths with a new approach, which we now call the novel.

With the benefit of hindsight, I now see a double-edged approach in his great work. On the one hand, he mocks his protagonist Don Quixote, a deluded old man who still believes in the medieval myths. Cervantes even punishes Don Quixote, subjecting him to all sorts of indignities during the course of the book. But despite all this, the reader still loves Don Quixote.

We admire his loyalty to his ideals. The fact that Quixote’s worldview has now disappeared from society only makes us sympathize all the more. Even tilting at windmills is heroic, when viewed in this light.

By the way, this is a good metaphor for the entire project of studying the great books. We can find beauty in things that have disappeared from the world. We can still learn from them. I can embrace Don Quixote as a role model even if I know he was pursuing an impossible dream.

This kind of hermeneutic exercise is invaluable. We actually put ourselves in the proverbial shoes of another person, from another world. An education in the great books is our best way of cultivating this expansive mindset.

Why did you include the Mwindo Epic in your reading list?

The Mwindo Epic—a story from the Nyanga people of the Congo—may be the least well-known book on my list. Many people assume that Africa’s traditional literary sources have disappeared, because they were part of an oral culture that was never preserved in writing.

That’s not true. Some of these stories have been documented, written down, and published in books. Reading the book may not give you the full experience—the Mwindo Epic, for example, is traditionally performed by a bard accompanied by three percussionists. But confronting works of this sort, even on the page, is an essential part of a serious education.

For the same reason, I also included Sundiata, an epic from Mali. Both of these works are short and can be read in a single sitting.

Of course, there are other options. I might instead have assigned the Anansi tales from West Africa. The spider Anansi is the quintessential trickster, and thus is a counterpart to other characters from our reading list—for example, Homer’s Odysseus or Shakespeare’s Puck.

That’s the advantage of this kind of cross-border approach to culture. You see the power of the idea in the connections it makes across time and space.

In one of your rules for reading, you mention getting good advice on which books to read. Who are those sources for you? It seems like everyone wants to tell you what you should be reading, but everyone is not very smart, or wise. I ask this as I’m preparing a couple of deep-dive projects for myself.

I’m fortunate that my older brother is one of the most well-read and thoughtful people on the planet. He is seven years older than me, and from my childhood onward guided me to great books, music, visual arts, and films.

This provided not just an education, but an ongoing source of inspiration. People who have met Dana will know exactly what I’m saying.

Of course, I also had other great teachers, and took seriously what they told me. I recently dedicated my book Music to Raise the Dead to my teachers and mentors—and listed more than twenty of them on the opening page. I take these debts seriously.

What’s your current deep dive, if any?

I like to pick topics of interest, and then devote several months to intense study. Maybe I’ll read a dozen or so books on the subject. In recent years , I have done these deep dives into the origins of Romanticism, Shakespeare’s life and times, and the decline of the Roman empire. My next immersive reading project will probably focus on mysticism as a force in intellectual history.

I’m also pursuing a fun side project—reading works of fiction about chess. I just finished Stefan Zweig’s novel on the subject, and absolutely loved it. Next up is Nabokov’s novel The Luzhin Defense.

You can learn more about the 52-week humanities project at this link.

New Music Is Slowly Dying

Ted Gioia — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:28:17 GMT

New music is slowly dying.

The major record labels have abandoned it—investing in old songs, not new artists.
Streaming platforms are even worse, promoting AI slop and algorithmic crud.
Meanwhile the whole technocracy wants to turn music-making into digital content farming—and will spend a trillion dollars to make that happen.

Each year, fewer and fewer new songs reach the charts. Every genre gets turned into a museum, where antiquated works predominate. And fans can’t even remember the name of the artist they heard online—because they never learned it in the first place.

Below are the latest numbers, courtesy of Chartmetric. It shows the decline of new music as a percent of streaming hits. The trend is ominous.

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The decline in 2025 was ugly—the collapse of new music accelerated during those 12 months. But now it looks like 2026 will be even worse.

Source: Chartmetric

How bad is it?

“Instead of going to music school, you are advised to find a wealthy spouse—that’s how you will prepare for a music career in the future.“

Here’s one measure. Do you remember when radio stations played top 40 hits? In 2026, you would struggle to find 40 new song that qualify as hits.

I'm Recommending 14 New Albums

Ted Gioia — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:41:01 GMT

Every morning I listen to new music, and I’ve already heard several hundred albums since the start of the year. My goal is simple: I seek out the best—drawing on all genres, all styles, all regions—and dig deep to find outstanding recordings you might not hear about elsewhere.

Below are 14 gems. Most of them are hidden from view in the stagnant mainstream culture of our time, where tired formulas and AI slop prevail. These are the real deal, and give me reason for optimism about the future of our music culture.

Spend some time with these tracks. You won’t be disappointed.

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River Eckert: River Eckert
Debut Album from a 16-Year-Old New Orleans Piano Phenom

I’ve seen the future of New Orleans piano and it’s called River Eckert. He’s not even old enough to get a driver’s license—you must be 17 in the state of Louisiana—but has already digested all the varied flavors of his hometown keyboard tradition.

I’m quoted on the youngster’s website, so I’ll repeat here what I say there:

“They don’t teach any of that at Juilliard, not even after hours.”

And I’m not just talking about Eckert’s keyboard skills—he also shows great promise as a singer. In a better world, this kind of talent would get showcased by the media and find its way to the big screen. Maybe that will happen. In the meantime, you can savor how this River runs via his debut album.

It won’t be streaming for a few more days, but River introduces a solo piano video from the release at the 22-minute mark of this interview.

Sault: Chapter 1
Mystery Band from Britain Plays Funky Gospel

I became a Sault fan when they released five stunning albums over the course of a few months, but kept their identities top secret. Go ahead, visit their website—you will look in vain for bios or any information whatsoever. But these talented musicians perform in a range of genres, playing each style with total commitment and consummate skill.

Now they have returned from their secret hideout with a funk gospel album—it’s like Sly and the Family Stone establishing their own charismatic church. Sure, I’d like to know more about these musicians, but I will happily grant them anonymity and entrance in the Witness Protection Program if they keep delivering music of this caliber.

Ari Bragi Kárason: Unclear Family
Cool Jazz in a Chet Baker Kind of Way

From the very start of my career as a critic, I championed cool jazz. That went against the grain—jazz is a hot idiom, and its leading practitioners have prized energy and intensity. But there’s also a cool tradition hiding in the wings, from Bix Beiderbecke to Lester Young and beyond. It also deserves our respect.

But if you play in this style, you almost never get grants or awards—it’s somehow un-cool to play cool. So an album like this won’t get much attention. The jazz police will make sure of that.

Listeners will be reminded of cool jazz icon Chet Baker, who continues to exert a powerful influence on European trumpeters. There’s some irony in this. Chet went overseas to avoid narcotics prosecution, and worked steadily to pay for his habit—but the result was that thousands of musicians overseas saw and learned from him at close quarters. That still has an impact today.

Icelandic trumpeter and flugelhorn player Ari Bragi Kárason was born a few months after Chet Baker died, but still keeps that tradition alive in his own work. He hits the spot on his new album Unclear Family. I also want to call your attention to saxophonist Karl-Martin Almqvist, who earns my praise with his contributions here.

Everything You Expect Is Missing in 'Project Hail Mary'

Ted Gioia — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 03:50:31 GMT

When my sons were little, I chose a children's adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey for bedtime storytelling. Before we started, I explained two reasons why this old story was special.

For a start, the Odyssey was the first time a hero in Western culture was celebrated for smarts and cunning—and not just fighting and violence. It was as if Homer had grown up after creating the Iliad (in which 239 characters, identified by name, meet their death), and decided to tell a more civilized tale.

I applaud that. We all need role models who only fight as a last resort, not as a way of life. So we can still learn from Homer.

My second reason for liking the Odyssey was a more personal one. I explained to my sons that the hero Odysseus wasn’t seeking adventure—he just wanted to get home. All his efforts were directed at returning to his wife and child. So he was just like their dad, I added, who would always come home to them as soon as he could.

But Odysseus was like their dad in other respects too. That’s because he had jobs to do out in the world, and he took his responsibilities seriously. So he made sure to take care of business—and only then make the journey home. In the case of the Odyssey, that entire round trip lasted twenty years (much worse, I admit, than my typical commute).

I was reminded of all these things when I watched the new sci-fi blockbuster movie Project Hail Mary, based on Andy Weir’s 2021 bestselling novel.

The Story of My Mysterious Pain

Ted Gioia — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:36:06 GMT

I never talked about my pain.

For a start, it sometimes hurt too much to talk about anything. On bad days, any movement of my mouth—to speak, to eat, to brush my teeth—could trigger a jolt like an electric shock across the right side of my face. It felt like my cheek and lower jaw had been taken over by the vengeful Norse god Thor, who defended his turf with an endless supply of lightning bolts.

But even on good days, there wasn’t much I could say. Pain isn’t an inspiring topic for conversation. In an odd way, it’s like music—words always fall far short of conveying its essence.

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I’m reminded of the famous meeting, in May 1922, of the two towering modernist novelists of the era, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, at the Majestic Hotel in Paris. Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Pablo Picasso, and William Carlos Williams were also in attendance. But at one point, the two literary lions huddled together in conversation.

What did they talk about? Were they planning the future of the novel? Were they exchanging tips for handling writer’s block?

Not in the least. They were both complaining about their medical problems. No words about arts or culture were exchanged. According to William Carlos Williams, the conversation went like this:

Joyce said, “I’ve headaches every day. My eyes are terrible.”
Proust replied, “My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me. In fact, I must leave at once.”
“I’m in the same situation,” replied Joyce. “If I can find someone to take me by the arm. Goodbye!”
“Charmé,” said Proust. “Oh, my stomach, my stomach.”

That’s what pain does. It reduces even the most eloquent to moaning and groaning.

Even if I’d limited myself to precise clinical details, there still wasn’t much to say. For the first three years, I didn’t have a name for my affliction or any idea what caused it. I couldn’t even find the right words to describe my symptoms.

“I finally figured out the cause of my pain. But that was just the first step. I had more to take—and three weeks ago they led me to an operating table at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.”

That’s because my pain kept changing. Thor had turned into a major league pitcher with an endless variety of fastballs, sliders, curveballs and change-up pitches. The pain moved from spot to spot—although it was always somewhere on the lower right side of my face, the metaphorical home plate for this agonizing sport.

How could I even begin to explain this to a doctor? I couldn’t even answer that simplest of questions: Where does it hurt? It never stayed in one place long enough to establish a routine.

The same was true of the type of pain. Some days it burned like a fire. Other days it throbbed like a toothache. It was endlessly creative.

Man in pain (etching by W. Hebert, c. 1770)

It first struck one day during the COVID lockdown—while I was eating lunch, I felt ten seconds of intense fire in my teeth. I actually let out a shout. That’s how bad it was.

The pain was over in a flash, but it returned sporadically over the next few days. I assumed I had some dental emergency. But at a hastily arranged appointment, the oral surgeon assured me that my teeth were fine—maybe I was just biting too hard.

I’ve heard of others with my condition who didn’t find out what was really wrong until they had two or three teeth pulled. As it turns out, this affliction can’t be fixed by any dental procedure.

Just when I was at my wit’s end, the pain disappeared completely—as mysteriously as it had arrived. And it stayed in hiding for the next fourteen months. But when it came back, it was worse than ever.

In its new guise, the pain woke me up every morning around 6:30 AM. This time it was the worst pain I’ve ever experience in my life—as if my right cheek had been set on fire.

The first time this happened, I jumped out of bed and ran to get an ice pack from the freezer. I pressed the ice pack to my face and—surprise!—this just made the pain even worse. I’m fortunate that the fire only lasted around sixty seconds, but if I tried to go back to sleep, it could happen again a few minutes later.

My nights now became perilous. I found that the only way to sleep without risk was to remain absolutely motionless on my back—even the slightest movement could bring on another attack.

I now knew that I needed to take action. But what kind of action? I still didn’t know what was wrong with me. But I did possess one skill that could help—I’m very good at doing research. So I set myself the task of diagnosing myself.

A few months later, when I laid it all out for my neurologist, she was amazed. “Are you a professional medical researcher?” She asked.

“No,” I replied. “But I am a writer, and I have spent most of my life doing research of various sorts.”

“Well, what you did was impressive.”

Yes, I had finally figured out the cause of my pain. But, as it turned out, that was just the first step. I had several more to take—and three weeks ago they led me to an operating table at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.

My affliction is called trigeminal neuralgia. Here’s what I learned about it from various sources.

“Trigeminal neuralgia is a rare and extremely painful condition.”

and

“The pain is often described as excruciating, like an electric shock. The attacks can be so severe that you’re unable to do anything while they’re happening.”

and

“When severe, it is the most excruciating pain known to man. This pain most frequently involves the lower lip and lower teeth or the upper lip and cheek, but it also may involve the nose and the area above the eye.”

and

“The emotional strain of living with repeated episodes of pain can lead to psychological problems, such as depression. During periods of extreme pain some people may even consider suicide.”

and

“Trigeminal neuralgia usually affects one side of the face….It can be progressive, with attacks often worsening over time, and fewer and shorter pain-free periods before they recur. Eventually, the pain-free intervals disappear, and medication to control the pain becomes less effective.”

All of this was alarming. But the last point was especially worrisome. There is just one medication approved for treatment, but it loses efficacy over time.

My experience backed up this claim. At first, the pills stopped the pain entirely, but a few months later it started coming back. Even larger doses (which caused alarming side effects) couldn’t put out the fire.

I met with another specialist who warned me: “Don’t fool yourself. This is a progressive disease. It gets worse over time, and you will exhaust what medicine can do for you.”

This motivated me to do still more research. I explored every possible kind of treatment, even the crankiest. Could cyberknife radiation help me? How about injecting botox into the trigeminal nerve? There was some guy in Colorado who touted plasma-enriched platelets. Another eccentric insisted that the capsaicin in hot peppers would do the trick—on the principle that you fight fire with fire.

But my research identified problems with every one of these options. None of them could promise me lasting relief.

I eventually learned that there was one procedure with a high success rate. But it required a highly trained neurosurgeon, who would open up a hole in my skull (behind my right ear)—and then remove points of compression on my trigeminal nerve.

And, of course, there were risks. Some people don’t survive the surgery. But what other realistic options were there for me? Anything was better than living with this pain.

By the way, I did possess one useful bit of knowledge about neurosurgery, and it proved invaluable. My father had a brain tumor removed when he about the same age I am now. And he was determined to find the best surgeon in the world to undertake the procedure.

So that brought him to Stanford Medical Center, where the head of neurosurgery, John ‘Jake’ Hanberry. removed a tumor (which proved benign) and helped my dad mount a full recovery.

I decided back then that, if I were ever in a similar situation, I would do whatever I could to find the best surgeon. Little did I realize that I would actually need to put that vow into practice.

This led me to the person who could give me my life back.

As a young man, Raymond Sekula studied Latin and Greek, and planned on becoming a classics professor. But during his third year of college, his volunteer work brought him face-to-face with a man who had found relief from Parkinson’s disease after an experimental surgery.

“And after that,” he explains, “I just decided: this is what I wanted to do with my life. And so that’s how I really got interested in medicine.” But one part of Sekula’s initial plan came true—he did become a professor. He is now Professor of Neurological Surgery at the Neurological Institute at Columbia University.

My surgeon literally wrote the textbook on the surgery I needed—it’s called microvascular decompression. He has performed this procedure more than two thousand times, and is responsible for many innovations along the way.

Dr. Raymond Sekula

He’s also a caring, compassionate man. His entire staff is that way too. They got me on his schedule, even though I was thousands of miles away, and helped me at every step.

At our initial conversation, Dr. Sekula told me that my MRI looked promising. He had identified an artery that was the likely source of compression on my trigeminal nerve. If he could remove that pressure, I had an excellent chance for lasting pain relief.

So Tara and I flew into New York on March 1 and moved into a hotel near the hospital. At noon on March 4, I went into surgery, and Dr. Sekula worked his magic.

He did it with an impressive degree of elegance. He was able to do everything through an opening the size of a nickel. He identified and removed two points of compression. The incision would hardly be noticed by an outside observer—and he even did it in such a way that I could comb my hair over it, hiding it completely from view.

This is what it looked like yesterday (three weeks post-surgery).

But the best news is this—my pain is gone.

I noticed that immediately after regaining consciousness. There was total radio silence from the trigeminal nerve—and it hasn’t given a tingle or a throb since then. A week after the procedure, I stopped taking the medication I’d been using, and waited uneasily to see if the pain would return. But it didn’t.

Thor is subdued. His lightning bolts no longer disturb my days and nights.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the pain won’t return, but Dr. Sekula tells me that the odds are in my favor—“even after forty years, the success rate shouldn’t fall below 80 percent”—and he will continue to track my progress in the months ahead.

But now I have my life back—for the first time in years. It feels like a miracle.

In my last conversation with my doctor, I told him that he had given me a gift I could never repay. “If I can ever do anything in return,” I promised, “just let me know.”

He said there was one thing I might consider. Other people suffer from this condition, and many of them deal with the same uncertainty I faced—struggling to identify the cause and learn about treatment options.

Dr. Sekula remembered that I had mentioned, at our first meeting, that I was a writer. Maybe I could do some good, he said, by writing about my experiences. Others might benefit from it.

And that is why you’re reading this story about my mysterious pain. It’s no mystery anymore. Nor is it even a pain, just a memory now. But for some, it still is a reality—and a terrible one.

I hope others can take some comfort in my story, or maybe even find guidance and relief. There are still some happy endings in our health struggles. By sharing mine, maybe I can help others find one too.

For more information on trigeminal neuralgia and related disorders, please visit the website of the Facial Pain Association.

Four Steps to Hell

Ted Gioia — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:46:30 GMT

Smart people have recently asked: What is the aesthetic vision of the 21st century? What are the stylistic markers of our time? What are the core values driving the creative process? What is our zeitgeist?

At first glance, that’s a hard question to answer. We are more than a quarter of the way through the century, and very little has changed since the 1990s.

Music genres have barely shifted in that time. The songs on the radio sound like the hits of yesteryear—in many instances they are the hits of yesteryear, played over and over ad nauseam.
Movies are in even worse shape. Hollywood keeps extending the same tired brand franchises you knew as a child. SoCal culture feels like an antiquated merry-go-round where the same tired nags keep coming around in an endless circle.
Publishers still put out new novels, but when was the last time you read something really fresh and new? Even more to the point, when was the last time you went to a social gathering and heard people discussing contemporary fiction with enthusiasm?
The same obsession with the past is evident in video games, comic books, architecture, graphic design, and almost every other creative sphere. Everything is a reboot or retread or repeat.

It’s not aesthetics, it’s just arteriosclerosis.

Even so, I see a new dominant theory of art—and it’s sweeping away almost everything in its wake. It already accounts for most of the creative work of our time, and is still growing. Nothing else on the scene comes close to matching its influence.

So if you’re seeking the most influential aesthetic vision on the 21st century, this is it. It’s simple to describe—but it’s ugly as sin.

I call it Flood the Zone. It happens in four steps.

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FLOOD THE ZONE IS NOW THE DRIVING FORCE IN THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

STEP ONE: TURN ART INTO CONTENT FOR MONETIZATION

The most noticeable thing in culture today is the replacement of aesthetic values with financial targets. In the creative economy, money is now the starting point, the endpoint, and everything in-between.

The artists aren’t doing this, it’s the overseers and the dominant platforms. They view everything as content that exists solely for monetization.

In all fairness, I must admit that record labels and movie studios have always sought profit—but not long ago they also sought prophets. So when talent scout John Hammond signed Bob Dylan (at age 20) or Bruce Springsteen (at age 23) or even earlier launched the recording career of Billie Holiday (at age 17), he obviously wanted his employer Columbia Records to make money. But that was secondary—his real goal was promoting artistry and boosting talent.

Hammond didn’t need money. He was born rich. What he sought was genius. And there were many other true believers like him in the culture businesses of that era.

That was then. And what about now?

“Record labels and movie studios have always sought profit—but not long ago they also sought prophets.”

Take some time and read interviews with the CEOs of the dominant music companies today, and look for even a hint of aesthetic vision. It’s missing in action.

Years ago, the MGM studio declared its motto was Ars Gratia Artis—which translates as Art for Art’s Sake. They still show those words at the start of every MGM film. You can read them above that roaring lion.

How quaint—a Hollywood studio with a motto in Latin.

But that lion is now roaring in pain. Ars Gratia Artis no longer passes the sniff test. What might be a more honest motto today? I’d suggest something I heard years ago—and it shocked me at the time. In fact it shocked me so much I still remember today.

I had just criticized a talented musician who had sold out, releasing an embarrassing crossover album. It was an obvious money grab, made without conviction but with hopes of a hefty payday. And I said so—but a teenager disagreed with me, pushing back with a simple rebuttal.

He told me that it was impossible to sell out because: “The art that sells best is best.”

Mull that over for a second: The art that sells best is best.

That, my friends, is the first demand of the new aesthetic—defining artistic quality in terms of profit margins. Put those sad words up above that suffering lion. Picasso had his Blue period (1901-1904) and his Rose period (1904-1906), but the culture czars of today prefer a never-ending Green period. Everything is made subservient to the almighty dollar.

That brings us to the second plank of the dominant cultural program of today.

STEP TWO: FLOOD THE ZONE

Greed can only take you so far. At a certain point you need to decide on how to make money in your creative field.

This has been a challenge for the tech platforms, because the people running them lack artistic talent and aesthetic sensitivity. But the rise of AI has given them a glimmer of an idea. Instead of making clear artistic decisions, they will just flood the zone with AI-generated content.

Dump everything on the market—then see what happens.

Under this scenario, you don’t even try to create good art. You don’t apply distinctions and criteria. You don’t exercise taste or good judgment. You don’t even try to learn one damn thing about the art form.

You just dump millions of pieces of content on the public—with predictable, but devastating results.

Amazon deceives readers with a flood of AI books pretending to be written by humans.
The AI startup Sumo is responsible for the creation of 100 million AI songs every 14 days.
A single scammer in North Carolina robs $10 million from human musicians by dumping thousands of AI songs on streaming platforms and promoting them with bots.
Visual artists see their careers destroyed because their online galleries get taken over by AI. The platforms they need to make a living turn into a toxic dumpster fire, and they have no recourse.
Media platforms delete writing by human, replacing it with boatloads of AI content designed for search engine optimization.
A new zombie internet arises—where bots conquer every available forum, every interaction, every outlet for creativity.

You can’t deny it. Flood the zone is the dominant strategy of arts creation in the current moment. And unless something happens to stop it, we will be living with the ruinous consequences for the rest of our lives.

This leads, of course, to the next defining element of 21st century aesthetics.

STEP THREE: LET THERE BE SLOP!

Creative works made in this way are inevitably slop. They are churned out willy-nilly by the millions, without the kind of scrutiny and care required to make great art. So the results are filled with pointless ingredients, stupid juxtapositions, and vapid notions.

This is, by definition, slop.

You would use that exact word if you went to a restaurant that cooked meals in this haphazard way—all possible flavors jumbled together in an inedible gruel. What is this slop? you would ask. And we now have the identical reaction when we see an image or video made with this same unappetizing recipe.

To get rid of slop, the tech companies would have to exercise discretion and good judgment. But that’s incompatible with their flood the zone strategies. So we have entered the Age of Slop, and will be lucky if we ever find a way out.

STEP FOUR: REFUSE DISCLOSURE AND PRETEND IT WAS ALL MADE BY HUMANS.

In the final step, the AI slopmasters insult our intelligence. They know how much the audience hates this stuff, so they avoid disclosure. They need deception because, without it, the whole AI business model collapses. So they pretend AI music, writing, etc. came from human beings.

This is the most revealing part of their entire strategy. It shows how ashamed they are of what they’re doing—if AI really was so great they would boast about using it. But instead they lie, and build their aesthetic vision on shamming, scamming and spamming.

We’ve now unveiled all four steps. The result is the single most destructive aesthetic vision in the history of human culture.

Are you disgusted by this? Of course you are.

But can you deny it? Is there another aesthetic movement happening right now that comes close to matching the power and influence of this four-point manifesto imposed by the technocracy on a helpless public?

This does not mean that real creativity disappears. This does not mean that great art will no longer get made.

But it does mean that

The real heroes of the creative world will be forced into operating as a resistance movement.
The actual artists will now form a counterculture.
The only sustaining work will come from the indie world, not the established order.
Those who care about culture absolutely must support this alt rebellion and indie vibe.

Our only hope is for this counterculture to rise up, and take the audience away from the technocracy. This is hard work, but I believe it’s possible. Even more to the point, it is absolutely necessary.

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We must create islands of sanity and human flourishing in the flooded cultural zones. We need our own equivalents of Noah’s Ark.

Noah’s Ark by Edward Hicks, 1846

In other words, we will be creating parallel institutions. They will operate separately from the tainted platforms. The faster we make that happen, the better.

I will be writing more about this in the future. That’s necessary because this is the make-or-break challenge facing all creatives. We can’t afford to sit on the sidelines. The water is already rising and we must find higher ground. Let’s do it together.

Montaigne and the Origins of Substack

Ted Gioia — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:59:42 GMT

Michel de Montaigne may be the most influential essayist in history—even Shakespeare borrowed from his work (taking some passages almost verbatim). But if Montaigne were alive today, this famous essayist might be mistaken for just another slacker living in his parents’ basement.

Okay, let’s be fair. He actually lived in the family castle. But it still was slacking. At age 38, he didn’t have a job—and preferred reading books. Leave me alone, was his message to the world.

The Montaigne family castle (Photo by Henry Salomé)

But even a castle was too noisy for him—or maybe it was just his wife from an arranged marriage that made him feel that way. In any event, Montaigne eventually decided that he needed total isolation, almost like a monk in a hermitage. So he moved into the tower on the family estate. He called it his citadel.

Here he surrounded himself with books, and announced his intention to devote the rest of his life to reading and philosophizing “in calm and freedom from all cares.”

Montaigne’s tower (Photo by Henry Salomé)

But at age 47, Montaigne had a change of heart. He returned to the world, ready to embark on travels and public service. But before leaving for Italy, he had one last goal he needed to fulfill closer to home—and it would have a decisive impact on Western culture.

During his years in the tower, Montaigne wrote 94 essays, and compiled them in two book-length manuscripts. These he now delivered to a printer in Bordeaux, and paid to have them published. A short while later, he traveled to Paris and proudly gave a copy to King Henry III

In his mind, he was serving as his own patron, drawing on the family wealth to cover the expenses of his debut as an author. But today, of course, we would call this self-publishing—a term that is often (unfairly) used to demean the value and legitimacy of these rule-breaking efforts by do-it-yourself writers.

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Call it what you will, Montaigne’s achievement cannot be denied. He not only invented the modern essay—setting the stage for Bacon, Emerson, and so many others. But he also helped shape the human sciences and legitimize the personal memoir. That’s because his essays covered many topics but really had only one subject—namely Montaigne himself, with all his quirks and opinions and hot takes.

His essays marked a milestone in the history of individualism. So, of course it makes sense that they were self-published. That’s what individualists do. They are happy to work outside the system.

I could even imagine our slacker Montaigne publishing these essays on Substack today. You might say that he anticipated the Substack style of writing. His balancing of memoir and analysis, subjective and objective, observation and generalization is very much aligned with what I see on this platform every day.

Some writers aspire take the high (but narrow) road of the scholar, while others prefer the larger byways of entertainment. But Montaigne only wanted to be himself, and help us see the world through his eyes—and he had confidence that this was just as valuable as any declaration from established authorities.

He was the first to perfect this way of communicating, but hardly the last. In some ways, he might be the best role model for any author today who wants to shape the wider public conversation. Because Montaigne, again like so many Substackers, knew that most persuasive writing is always conversational.

My favorite self-published author is Marcel Proust—who was born almost exactly three hundred years after Montaigne entered his tower. But the similarities don’t end there, and not just because both are French.

Marcel Proust

Proust was another slacker from a wealthy family who used his inheritance to retreat from society. They both produced a single famous work of literary genius—and were at the same age when they embarked on their respective projects. In both instances, a masterpiece was saved from oblivion because the author had enough money to cover the costs of publication.

These authors delivered works of universal appeal, but based on cranky individualism. Like Montaigne, Proust showcases his eccentric persona on every page. In fact, there’s good reason to believe that André Gide, the editor who rejected Proust’s book, judged the man’s character rather than his actual manuscript—he later admitted that he had formed a negative impression of Proust based on a few encounters in society.

In Proust’s case, he only had to subsidize the publication of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. The Gallimard publishing house, making amends for its initial rejection, released the next volume, which won the prestigious Goncourt Prize, as well as the subsequent installments of Proust’s 3,500-page work.

No, I can’t imagine Proust succeeding on Substack. Some of his sentences are longer than most of the articles here. He’d be lucky to find a hundred subscribers. Even so, I’m certain he would approve of other writers bypassing the system and reaching out directly to readers.

The link between individualism and self-publishing is confirmed by my third famous example, poet Walt Whitman. He assigned the name “Song of Myself” to one of his best known poems, but that title could just have easily described the writings of Proust and Montaigne. Once again, literary experimentation intersected with strident self-aggrandizement—and the publishing establishment wasn’t ready for what he created.

Whitman’s defiance shows up again in the name of his self-published volume Leaves of Grass. Grass was a derisive term used by editors when referring to writings of little merit, while the word leaves describes the paper used in printing a book. So Whitman takes the insult of rejection and turns it into a mark of pride. His Leaves of Grass would not only bypass the gatekeepers, but change the course of American poetry. Like Proust, Whitman added to the scandal by reviewing his own book (under a pseudonym).

Poetry has long embraced self-published authors. Four years after Whitman’s death, Edwin Arlington Robinson self-published his first book of poems—and he went on to win three Pulitzer Prizes. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s first book of poems was also self-published, but that didn’t stop him from rising to the position of Poet Laureate, a role he held for 42 years. Ezra Pound’s debut was also self-published, and he went on to launch the careers of others (James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, etc.) who, without this intervention, might have been forced into self-publication as well.

My copy of A Lume Spento, initially self-published by Ezra Pound

Pulitzer winner James Merrill had a different expedient—he let his father pay for the publication of his first book. It probably helped that his father Charles Merrill was co-founder (along with Edmund Lynch) of a brokerage firm you might have heard of. If we include other examples of authors helped by subsidies from family and friends, our list would get long and unwieldy.

In the light of these examples, we must abandon any snobbish disdain for the self-published author. This might even be the best route nowadays for writers who challenge norms and break rules. Substack is part of this glorious alternative to official channels, although it is a relative latecomer to the field of homemade writing.

But Substack can help build the future of self-publishing. In this regard, it needs to offer authors more options for publishing books, and not just shorter works via newsletter. I’d love to see the full book treatment made available here—making works available in digital, audio, and physical form.

The latter could be handled easily with print-on-demand technology. Substack could offer physical books without having to invest in physical inventory and large warehouses. The quality of print-on-demand books has improved markedly in recent years, and they can be sold as high-end volumes that look just as good as the releases coming from major publishers—or even better.

I fully intend to return to publishing physical books in the future, and I would prefer to do it here. But Substack must make that option possible. When that happens, I will happily join the ranks of those releasing self-published books. I suspect this will be more profitable for all parties, and also more liberating.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if self-publishing achieves a total flipflop from its previous role in the book economy. In the old days, authors started by self-publishing but later switched to traditional publishing after establishing their reputations. I now anticipate the reverse: Authors who start out with book deals from publishers will leave those intermediaries behind after they have proven their market value.

After all, who needs a publisher when you can do everything yourself—and capture most of the profits (previously retained by the publishing house)?

This is the next revolution in the book business (and the music business, by the way). It would be nice if the revolution happened here on Substack. But no matter what this platform decides, this shift will happen—and for the better.

So let’s thank Montaigne. We can learn from his example. But, even better, we can take his individualist approach into the 21st century—and really shake things up.

The Strangest Book in Harvard Library

Ted Gioia — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:28:34 GMT

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The Strangest Book in Harvard Library

On the opening page of The Inman Diary, the book’s editor makes a bold claim: this work “has no counterpart in any literature that I am aware of.”

The author Arthur Inman had decided “the only way for him to win fame, perhaps even immortality, would be to write a diary unlike any ever written….It would contain the kind of information he had looked for and never found in other diaries.”

Arthur Inman and his 17 million word diary

At first glance, this seems an impossible goal. Since the time of Augustine, authors of confessions, memoirs, and diaries have prided themselves on their candor and unflinching honesty. And after Rousseau, who pushed this dictum to an extreme, the limits of frank disclosure would seem to have been reached. What could Arthur Inman do in the 20th century, that hadn’t already been done before?

Adding to the challenge, Inman had nothing to write about—or so it seemed. He was a semi-invalid who spent most of his life in a darkened room. Even recluses like Proust and Pynchon are gadabouts by comparison.

Yet Inman wrote some 17 million words and filled 155 volumes (now housed in Harvard’s Houghton Library)—that’s roughly 25 times as long as the Bible—and devoted more than 40 years to his project. He started writing his diary in 1919 and continued working on it until shortly before his death in 1963.

But here’s the twist, and the quirk that turned Arthur Inman into one of the most fascinating writers of the 20th century. This peculiar man took ads in the newspaper, offering to hire “talkers’ who would tell him the wildest and most intimate details of their lives. The end result was a diary with more than 1,000 characters—striving with one another to provide the most compelling, uncensored narrative. That crowd-sourced approach turns the Inman journals into a compendium of confessions unlike anything ever written down before.

Inman paid his “talkers” a dollar per hour. And he often went beyond listening, having sexual relations with some of the women who took the job. By any definition, he was a creepy guy whose behavior violated all reasonable norms. Even Inman’s own editor Daniel Aaron admits that this disturbed individual’s massive journal is the “autobiography of a warped and deeply troubled man whose aberrations call for psychiatric probing.”

Pages from Inman’s diary (Steve Liss/Getty Images)

Inman often closed entries in his diary with the send-off: “I wish I were dead.” Yet he also saw himself in a heroic light, dreaming of the posthumous fame his massive diary would eventually bring him. But even Inman must have known that what he was writing was far too controversial for publication in his lifetime without considerable censorship—although the awareness that he was violating the prevailing moral standards of his time may have motivated him all the more.

His talkers were extraordinarily trusting and candid. Perhaps the darkened room and the quasi-anonymity of the setting made it feel like an actual confessional, with all the sacramental implications such situations bring. Maybe it’s even simpler: people want to reveal their darkest secrets, as Foucault tells us, and will seek out settings where it can happen. Or perhaps the reality was more banal and tragic: these folks simply needed the cash, and Inman was the only person paying for their secrets.

Sometimes Inman’s talkers showed up with stories ready to tell, but if they were reticent, he would immediately start probing. Here is his account of a first meeting with a Mrs. Haviland (never brought back for a second session, because she was too “sweet”):

“I asked her how old she was, how long she’d been married, whether she loved her husband, whether he loved her, whether she loved her son or her husband best, why she’d been to the hospital lately, whether she used contraceptives, how much salary her husband made, who her ancestors were, how she budgeted her money, if she believed in God, how many friends she had, what did she look forward to in life, what sort of childhood she’d had, was she calm or emotional, did she read, like music, the movies, and so on. Most of her answers I believed, some I didn’t.”

Inman avidly read published diaries of others, and noted with dismay how often the original texts had been censored to avoid shocking the delicate sensibilities of readers. He was so upset by this that he wrote an angry letter to Dr. Francis Turner of Magdalene College, Cambridge, who was working on a transcription of Samuel Pepys’s diaries, complaining of these excisions. Inman added that if anyone ever censored his own diaries, he would come back as a ghost to haunt that person—and hinted that Pepys might do the same.

A two-volume book of highlights from The Inman Diary was published by Harvard in 1985

I doubt The Inman Diary could still be published by Harvard University Press nowadays. There’s just too much in its pages to upset, dismay, shock, and appall. And if you aren’t offended by Inman’s dealings with his talkers, you will invariably find his opinions on politics, society, religion, race, and a host of other matters reprehensible, in whole or in part.

So let me make clear: if you are the kind of person who needs a trigger warning, proceed no further. Trigger warnings were invented for books of this sort—which probably deserves an army of them, spaced out like sentinels every 10-20 pages. Yet is there any other book that conveys so fully the range of human experiences of that time and place with such brutal frankness and unflinching candor? The historian, as I see it, has a choice between getting a shock or remaining in ignorance. I know how I’d handle that trade-off, but I’m hardly typical in that way.

Time magazine had a different take on the diary. When the book was released, they dismissed Arthur Inman as just another "megalomaniacal bigot misogynist Peeping Tom hypochondriac." In its more measured review, the New York Times declared: [Inman] is not an attractive figure, but he is an oddly captivating one….At the very least [the book] is of considerable clinical interest.” (True to this prediction, Inman is often cited in academic literature on aberrant psychology.)

The editor of the Inman diary, Daniel Aaron, clearly came to abhor the diarist himself—even the tone of his footnotes reflect his distaste. “I couldn’t stand him,” Aaron later commented in an interview. “How did I get involved with this man? How can I deal with this man?” But then he feels compelled to add: “And gradually as I read on, I became quite fascinated by him, seeing him as a kind of rare person.” Aaron eventually decided that a “movie would be the best way of capturing that book.”

In all fairness, Inman’s talkers didn’t seem very interested in self-censorship, and many clearly savored the opportunity to tell their raw stories without fear of consequences or judgment. They are a strange assortment, but where else will you find a book written in the 1930s where, on a single page, you encounter a firsthand account of pimping, prostitution, bootlegging, bribing, drug addiction, homosexuality, rape, illegal gambling, drunkenness, police violence, a stint in Bellevue, and even glimmerings of a philosophy of life. The appearance of a skilled musician who “tickles the ivories” is just an extra.

Do you doubt me? Here is an extract from the testimony of Anthony Abruzzo, age 24:

It’s possible that Inman’s hirelings invented stories to please their employer. But the actual experience of reading these narratives is utterly convincing—testifying to people’s intense desire to be understood, to be validated by the exposure (and acceptance by the listener) of their darkest secrets. And Inman, for all his faults, was quite a listener.

When Inman wasn’t listening, he was corresponding. Some of the most gripping sections of this book come from the letters Inman included verbatim. Patricia, a young woman living in Hollywood in the 1930s and having uninhibited dealings with aspiring stars, sent Inman frequent missives, and these will give you an angle on the pre-WWII film business you won’t encounter elsewhere. Even more moving—and more distressing—are the letters Inman received from lonely women in small towns whom he connected with via correspondence clubs, a Great Depression equivalent of today’s dating apps. Inman joined these clubs under assumed names, with the goal of getting stories, not dates. Once again, the whole enterprise is morally debased, but these letters from the lonely are gripping in a way no work of fiction could match.

Somewhere midway in his life project, psychiatry took off in America, but that was hardly the case when Inman started out. As late as 1930, the American Psychoanalytic Society had only 65 members, and there was a deep social stigma associated with seeking out counseling of this sort. Many of Inman’s talkers must have felt much better discussing forbidden subjects in a private conversation with a total stranger—best of all, one who would pay for the service, and showed such relish in every detail.

Inman hated psychiatrists, but he must have seen himself as a kind of fellow traveler in their world. He certainly sought out troubled people, and gave advice willingly enough. And he had another technique that, when incorporated into his diary, created a unique meta-narrative unlike any I’ve encountered in other books. Inman would write down frank and unsparing accounts of his talkers, then rudely show them what he had put in his diary. This would set off all sorts of angry scenes and recriminations—and thus provide him with further material for his project. This is a kind of experimental fiction beyond what anyone was doing in those distant days, and more like Karl Ove Knausgård in our own time than John Dos Passos (the novelist Inman ostensibly used as a role model).

Inman didn’t live long enough to see his life’s work show up in print. He attempted suicide at several junctures, three of them documented in his diary. But two weeks after the Kennedy assassination, on December 5, 1963, Inman was in low spirits—street noise always upset him, and now the construction of the Prudential Tower near his Boston apartment was more than he could take. A few months earlier, he had survived an attempt to kill himself with sleeping pills. This time he decided on a revolver, brutally efficient in this instance—and thus putting an end to both Arthur Inman and his enormous journal.

He would have been delighted at the posthumous publication of his diary by Harvard. But he could hardly have enjoyed the way he has been treated by posterity. He is rarely dealt with as a literary figure, but his book gets cited frequently in papers on neuroticism, suicide, hypergraphia, and various other psychological disorders.

Inman wanted to be a celebrated writer, but instead got turned into a poster child for dysfunction. That couldn’t have been his goal, yet in an odd sort of way, it ensures that the Inman Diary will survive as a seminal text. Written in a dark time by a disturbed man, it captured a part of the 20th century no one else dared put in a book. The only question that remains is who will dare to read it.

The Shock of the Old

Ted Gioia — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:09:04 GMT

During the 15th century, the leading critics all agreed that the greatest works of art came from an unusual place. No, not a museum or church or palace—they were found, instead, underground and amid ruins, literally covered in dirt.

Before you could see them, you first had to dig them up.

Can we even imagine this attitude today? Our whole hierarchy of aesthetics would need to be reversed. Just consider the shame of admitting that our most cherished cultural legacy had been buried and forgotten by our ancestors. Art appreciation gets turned into some kind of exhumation.

But the reaction to this rediscovered art was just as interesting as the sculptures themselves. How do you feel when you look at these works?

You probably aren’t shocked by the nudity. You’ve seen more salacious stuff on Netflix. In fact, you probably aren’t shocked by anything here—these statues feel very old fashioned and antiquated.

That’s an interesting word, antiquated. It means “old, and no longer useful.” If the plumbing in your house is antiquated, you’re in big trouble. And it’s even worse if you are antiquated.

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