Words of the Day 2026-05-04

Patient readers: I have been accumulating links since July 2025, so expect to see some of them here. Anyhow, just because something wasn’t published today or yesterday doesn’t mean it’s not dulce et utile!

On this day: Grease fire ignites half ton of dynamite at Cripple Creek, Colorado [musical interlude].

“Blockade, by Robert Gore” [Straight Line Logic]. “The world is threatened by a blockade more deadly than Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. That blockade is the refusal among the West’s ruling class to allow entry of any thoughts not conforming to their prejudices, slogans, and unattainable objectives.” Correct at a high level, but then we get the very next paragraph: “If President Trump’s Iran adventure represents what now passes for his and his administration’s mental processes, the U.S. and the world are in grave danger. This fiasco in progress has bypassed every marker of intellectual proficiency.” • Indeed, one longs for the day when a senile genocidaire aided and abetted millions of illnesses and deaths with his “let ‘er rip” policy on Covid. The empire was far more competently run, back when the good people were in charge.

“Third Of Americans Are Having An Existential Crisis Right Now” [Study Finds]. “The numbers paint a picture of a country seemingly buckling under the weight of financial pressure and a creeping sense that no one is steering the ship. And for a significant share of Americans, that weight has become existential…. Across age groups, the through line is clear: a loss of agency. When people feel unable to influence the things that matter most, their career, their finances, the broader sense of where the country is headed, the psychological fallout is predictable. Anxiety, helplessness, and that disquieting sense of watching your own life happen to you rather than being authored by you.” And: “Despite the anxiety running through these numbers, the same survey captured something else: a stubborn current of optimism. Nearly a third of respondents (32%) said 2026 has actually gone better than expected so far. More than a quarter (27%) described the year as “hopeful.’” Of course, the methodology: “Talker Research surveyed 2,000 general population Americans with internet access. The survey was conducted online between March 5 and March 8, 2026. Results are self-reported and reflect respondents’ perceptions at the time of the survey.” • IOW, the study group is biased toward doomscrolling. That said, I’d focus on the material (financial pressure) rather than “psychological fallout”…. And how on earth do you poll for “existential crisis”?

“Texting makes us stupid” [Language Log]. “This article by Niall Ferguson, “Texting Makes U Stupid” skipped my notice when it first appeared in Daily Beast (9/11/11). I would have missed it again this time around had it not been called to my attention by Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Anyway, it’s still a hot button issue, so better late than never.

Take a group of teenagers to see the seven wonders of the world. They’ll be texting all the way. Show a teenager Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi. You might get a cursory glance before a buzz signals the arrival of the latest SMS. Seconds before the earth is hit by a gigantic asteroid or engulfed by a super tsunami, millions of lithe young fingers will be typing the human race’s last inane words to itself:

C u later NOT :(

Now, before I am accused of throwing stones in a glass house, let me confess. I probably send about 50 emails a day, and I receive what seem like 200. But there’s a difference. I also read books. It’s a quaint old habit I picked up as a kid, in the days before cellphones began nesting, cuckoolike, in the palms of the young.

Half of today’s teenagers don’t read books—except when they’re made to.

“It’s not just texting, folks, and it’s getting worse and worse by the day. Without book reading, will we evolve into a different kind of (un)knowing?” • And speaking of texting—

“A Strange Pattern in the Middle” [n+1]. “In a 250-word takedown sent to me over text, the brain trust of my father and Anthropic LLM Claude (which was, incidentally, trained not only on my father’s critical tendencies but also on my stolen work_{MR SUBLIMINAL What are you going to do about it?}) described my first column as ‘name-droppy and insecure,’ ‘passive-aggressive about academia,’ and ‘somewhat pretentious despite the anti-pretension pose.’ ‘For someone claiming to be unpretentious,’ Claude/my father declared (and where did I claim to be unpretentious?), ‘she casually drops terms like ‘metafictional dimension,’ ‘political imaginary,’ and ‘autofiction’ without explanation. The folksy tone masks what’s still pretty insider-y literary discourse.’ Got my ass, Claude-father. Mask off. Thank you for doing your part in advancing humanity.” • Ouch!

Dad Joke of the Day: What is purple and commutes? A boolean grape.

“Beyond Body-Con: In the the Met’s Spectacular New Exhibition, “Costume Art,” the Human Form Connects Fashion and Art” [Vogue]. “It’s next to impossible to walk through ‘Costume Art,’ the Met’s blockbuster fashion exhibition, as an impassive observer. Active looking is more than encouraged, it’s required because one’s own visage appears in the flat, reflective surface of the faceless mannequin heads created by sculptor Samar Hejazi. The idea, curator Andrew Bolton said, is ‘to reflect on your own lived experience, hopefully to create a connection, empathy, compassion towards each other.’” Given Jeremiah 17:9The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?, I’m dubious about the “lived experience” shibboleth. I’m all for empathy, but how about we start from material reality, which is by definition shared? Anyhow, from the captions: “Looks by Glenn Martens for Y/Project and Jean Paul Gaultier among classcial sculpture in the Naked & Nude Body,” and “The exhibition teaser, a display case that projects into the Great Hall with looks illustrating the idea of the Naked & Nude Body,” and from the text: “Countering the draped pieces that caress the natural lines of the body on display here are armature looks that impose the perfect physique upon a body.” • Did the work “look” migrate downward from high art down to teen fashion magazines, or upward? And speaking of looks—

“Peptides, Supplements, and the Pentastack: The Unholy Guide to Looksmaxxing” [Vanity Fair]. “Countless stories have been written about the quest for an elixir that would grant its drinker immortality. In 2026, this sought-after ambrosia got a new name: peptides. And L-Glutathione. And NAD+, oxandrolone, and good old-fashioned testosterone. Braden Peters, the 20-year-old livestreamer known as Clavicular, is the main representative of this movement: an emergent wave of children looking to accentuate their attractiveness and youth by looksmaxxing. Armed with TikTok-sourced techniques, looksmaxxers reshape their faces and bodies, moving toward a supposedly mathematically defined ideal. Put simply, looksmaxxing is a way of using your own body as a science experiment. This sort of biohacking has a long history in Western medicine, but it’s one many have backed away from because the survival rates weren’t great.” Oh. More: “Yet for Peters, the extremity is the point. “Here’s what makes my system different: I’m not afraid to go where others won’t,” he says in an advertisement for his online course, The Clavicular System. (For $39 a month, you too can learn Peters’s secrets.) “These aren’t small changes: these are life-altering transformations. The kind that make women stop in their tracks. The kind that make other women respect you and give you the kind of halo effect you’ve been missing in life.” So, how has Peters achieved his ‘high dimorphism and ‘strong mandible’? In 2025, he told podcaster Jack Neel that he first started taking testosterone at age 14. ‘I just wanted to get to my goals as efficiently as possible,’ he said. ‘I think everyone should be on testosterone.’ Peters explained that he was actually pubertymaxxing, using supplements and hormones to maximize height and muscle growth before the body’s window closes. The problem with natural puberty, see, is that it’s inefficient. Surgery and bonesmashing—that is, hitting your face with a hammer—are also important tools in the looksmaxxer’s arsenal.” • At which point I stopped reading. If you want to clean the blood off your clothes when you’re done with the hammer—

If Derek Guy1 were on TikTok, I’d have no reason to go on Twitter at all:

Which is not completely fair; a tenacious Covid community still persists there.

Fortune: “The more things change, the more they stay insane.”

“Individual traits and experiences predict the content of dreams” [404 (original)]. “The results revealed possible links between personality traits and dream experiences, and suggested that dreams are influenced by external events such as the pandemic.” Didn’t Freud cover this? More: “ ‘During lockdown, dreams showed increased references to limitations and heightened emotional intensity, effects that gradually normalized over the following years,’ said researchers led by Valentina Elce of IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. ‘These findings demonstrate that stable individual traits and incidental experiences jointly shape dream semantics.’” • Here is more coverage of the same original—

“Your dreams aren’t random. Here’s what’s really happening” [Science Daily]. “By comparing how participants described their daily experiences and their dreams, the researchers found that the brain does not simply replay waking life during sleep. Instead, it reshapes those experiences. Familiar settings like workplaces, hospitals, or schools are not reproduced exactly. They are reimagined into vivid and immersive scenes that often combine different elements and shift perspectives in unexpected ways. This process suggests that dreams actively reconstruct reality rather than passively reflect it. The brain blends memories with imagined or anticipated events, creating new and sometimes surreal scenarios.” • So dreams are a lot like waking life, then?

“The Mind-Altering Power of Lucid Dreaming” [New York Times]. “In a lucid dream, the dreamer can often determine how things play out. Only about half of people will have even one lucid dream in their lifetimes. Roughly one in 10 has a lucid dream once a month or more. As I grew older, I noticed I had lucid dreams less and less frequently to the point that several years ago they stopped altogether. Over the past year, I’ve sought to get them back.” [Musical interlude]. More: “One way of training yourself to lucid dream is to consistently perform reality checks throughout the day. Ask yourself if you’re dreaming and test whether you are: Try passing your hands through each other or see if text scrambles itself when you look away from it. Be mindful of a fundamental question: Which reality am I currently in?” • Uh, ok…. Do we have any lucid dreamers in the readership?

“n+1 Seeks Audience Manager” [n+1] “n+1 is seeking a full-time Audience Manager to work in our Brooklyn office. Compensation will range from $60,000 to $64,000 and includes health and dental insurance. n+1 is a print magazine of literature, culture, and politics published three times a year. Founded in 2004 with a mission to revive the tradition of little magazines, it has since published over fifty issues, launched two book imprints, maintained an online companion to the print magazine (nplusonemag.com), and hosted programs and events across New York City and beyond. n+1 is recognized as one of the most influential literary publications in the US; in 2023 it won a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, which recognized the magazine as a “distinctive, erudite editorial project overflowing with rigor and generosity … both magnet and catapult for intellectually fearless writers.’” • For obvious reasons, I identify with this, and hope the glass is half full (“let’s expand readership aggressively”) and not half empty (“readership is crashing”). Maybe this is your dream job!

Word of the Day: Scrupulous describes someone who is very careful about doing something correctly, or something marked by such carefulness. Scrupulous can also describe someone who is careful about doing what is honest and morally right. “People described as scrupulous might feel discomfort if their work is not executed with a sharp attention to detail. Such discomfort might present itself as a nagging feeling, much as a sharp pebble in a shoe might nag a walker intent on getting somewhere. And we are getting somewhere. The origin of scrupulous is founded in just such a pebble. Scrupulous and its close relative scruple (‘a feeling that prevents you from doing something that you think is wrong’) both come from the Latin noun scrupulus, ‘a small sharp stone,’ the diminutive of scrupus, ‘a sharp stone.’” • Now I’m seeing objects everywhere. Like I had an item of value in my shoe.

NOTE

1. IIRC, Guy suddenly was all over my feed immediately after Musk took over Twitter. I have no idea why that happened, since Musk clearly knows nothing about men’s clothing, and Guy knows everything there is to know.