“As a great man once said, it’s welfare for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor. If you can sleep at night licking their boots that’s between you and yours, but that type of thinking isn’t freedom. It’s mental slavery… Judge a man by how he treats the poor and those who he views as being able to do nothing for him. Don’t forget why Muhammad Ali said ‘I am America’ Remember the coal miners of Harlan County, Kentucky. I believe in what we can be. Ride on.” – Charley Crockett Feb. 6, 2026

I soared into Mission Ballroom feeling 12 feet tall, with a new pair of Dan Post cowboy boots. It was my first time in raised heels, and so far the two-inch boost was pairing nicely with my prior ingestion of a highly potent tab of locally brewed LSD and half a fifth of Old Forester—two tools strategically selected to heighten an evening of good music and straight reporting.

Charley Crockett was in town and, more immediately, somewhere backstage prepping his mojo, probably sipping a fine liquor, most likely whiskey or tequila. In country music, whiskey is the industry standard, but, given Crockett’s roots, I figured whiskey only a 2–1 favorite.

San Benito, Charley’s birthplace, lies in the southernmost reaches of Texas, only 20 miles from the border and tucked in the eastern edge of the Rio Grande Valley. With a population of 25,000—90 percent of whom are Hispanic—I figured 2-1 may even be too generous to the brown stuff. But considering Crockett’s affinity for Waylon Jennings and the whiskey-soaked lyricism of his longtime opener Vincent Neil Emerson, I was confident in my projection.

The opening act was a colorful mirage of long hair and Western sound. Denver’s own Extra Gold oozed with authentic swagger, putting on a cosmic performance of country rock and introducing a synesthetic blur of sandy rust into my headspace.

Yes, I was now pleasantly twisted. Steadily tuning into the familiar frequency of an onsetting acid trip, but classically tasked with fending off an onslaught of inappropriately philosophical thoughts. I began to reflect on the beauty of the moment, and how all the previous variables of the past two decades had stationed me here, just moments away from the presence of Charley Crockett, and under the influence of this artisan neuro-potion. To think that without a beer here, or a dose of Golden Teachers there, I might be at a Morgan Wallen show…God bless.

The lights dimmed and the atmosphere thickened with the collective anticipation of a full house — a permanently exhilarating moment familiar to all who frequent live music.

Charley now stood square with the mic, seemingly chiseled out of stone, his jaw bearing an impossible density, his legs carved trunks of dark indigo.

“How we doing, Denver?” he boomed from the speakers with grand bravado. The show was on.

Time seemed to slow as the anticipation became palpable.

Crack! His voice shattered the tension, like a bottle to pavement. I was jolted from my hypnotic reverie and hit with a wave of impossibly full sound. The lyrics “been in Kentucky too long” ricocheted around the room. I ducked swiftly to avoid being hit.

The band was tight, each member contributing their own unique zeal and operating with a proud composure. Crockett floated across the stage with divine cadence. I was struggling to grasp what I was seeing. Music can look like this?

Things were heating up. Crockett went backstage momentarily. His band, The Blue Drifters, filled the lull with a smooth instrumental. On return, Charley brandished what appeared to be a piece of alien weaponry. A brief surge of panic overtook me as I envisioned him going rogue,

popping heads, and reducing the mob to jelly via bonemelting laser — through later research, I identified the instrument as a JERRY JONES ELECTRIC MASTER SITAR (GREEN CRACKLE).

I snapped out of it and drowned the fearsome image with a long hit of bourbon from the brown leather flask tucked at my hip, looking to the stage just in time to see Charley swill two shots of a clear liquid. Tequila, or maybe Mezcal, I reasoned…The boys played on.

I looked right, checking the status of my three dilated comrades who had accompanied me here. To my dismay, I found them being cajoled by three randy-looking older women. I was far too loaded to attempt a rescue mission, so I figured them dead meat and turned my attention back to the band.

Thwack! Directly in front of me, a lumpy middle-aged man hit the floor hard. I stared in disbelief. He was swiftly helped up by a nearby gentleman. The lumpy man teetered momentarily, then plummeted back to the gray concrete, this time face-first. The shock subsided, and I was now fascinated by the poor fellow. Had Crockett struck him with a spell? I knew he had lived in New Orleans in the early 2010s; it wasn’t impossible that he had picked up some Louisiana voodoo along the way—or maybe he had been hit by a materialized lyric.

“They call me the Muhammad Ali of country music.” – Matthew Charles Crockett, Feb. 6, 2026

Damn right they do.

Charley Crockett is among the few public figures today who fear the reality of leaving truths unsaid more than the potential repercussions of challenging the crooked. It is with a deep understanding of this country, acquired through decades on the road, that Crockett calls spades spades.

With an unflinching boldness that would make his disappearance no mystery, Crockett stated in February, “They keep saying I’m a cosplay cowboy but they love a cosplay president… The President is a grifter who bankrupted six casinos. That’s pretty extraordinary considering it’s a rigged business in favor of the house… Last time I checked Elon Musk was an immigrant from South Africa, but there he is standing in the White House buying our elections. Let’s deport his ass and send Peter Thiel back with him since they both openly believe in a post democratic society where men of their class are above the law. Forgive me if I have a problem with a 34 time convicted felon running this country when I lost the right to vote or own a weapon for years over marijuana. As long as you’re hating the oppressed and loving your oppressor you’ll never know why our generation is poorer than our parents and grandparents… I truly believe this isn’t a left or right issue. There’s something else happening here.”

What’s that “something else,” Charley? A cult of socialites, politicians, and business tycoons running the world and raping children? No, that’s crazy talk. You’d have to be an acid freak to believe something like that…

It is with composure, conviction, and a textured past that Crockett speaks in pursuit of justice, not agenda. He has cemented himself amongst the rare few who do not rest idly in fame, but use notoriety to pursue greater change.

He once wrote, “‘Charley, why do you put out records so fast?’ Because the suits go on forever, and prize fighters last a short time. Cattle kings own the spread. Cowboys only work it. Look around. Politicians take money from the rich and collect votes from the poor, while promising each protection from the other. That’s what I call a conflict of interest… If I did it their way, you’d never even have heard of me. Fenced in, sold off, and played out. All for a ‘Dollar A

Day.’”

You’ll have to work hard to decode these themes within his music, but I believe it won’t take long for Crockett to be producing anthems of unity and rebellion like his predecessors Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, both of whom wielded music like a blade—rallying the masses and cutting conformists at the knee.

The range of references embedded throughout Crockett’s writing makes it clear that, as a high school dropout, he is better read than most PhDs. Sourcing inspiration from a complex array of individuals, ranging from Elie Wiesel and Martin Luther King to heroes of the old West and biblical scripture, it is apparent Crockett never intended for “successful country singer” to be his final destination.

A man of mixed heritage, brought up by a single mother in a trailer park, who did not wear shoes until the age of 10, he picked up two felonies in adulthood but continued to pour his faith into himself and America. His story represents the greatness that exists within the bones of our country. An American hero, a title you can’t buy—even with a small loan of a million dollars.

To epitomize this crudely dense assessment, here’s one for the road—from a man far more articulate than I:

“An institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty”

— Joseph Pulitzer, May 10, 1883, in an editorial upon becoming the publisher of the New York World

Put your ear to the ground out by the airport and you might hear the phantom barks of small-block V-8s. In Castle Rock, you might catch burnt rubber on the breeze or that hot-metal brake-dust bite, like the patron saint of the backstretch is still clocking laps at Continental Divide.

Last year, I found myself hiding by the kosher endcap at the Sprouts on East Colfax. It had been fifteen years since I’d seen Shorts McGraw, but it was him. The posture. The skateboard tucked under his arm like an extra appendage.

I’d just come from reading an essay at Lighthouse …

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JUG was detention, but instead of sitting in mandatory silence or doing arbitrary busywork like writing an essay, you got assigned cleaning duties. Go pick up trash in the parking lot, for example, or shovel snow from the sidewalk for an hour after school.

Each student carried a wallet-sized rap sheet—a “demerit card”— that a teacher could demand to see and inscribe with rule infractions as they occurred. For every fifth demerit, you served JUG.

Goofing off in class was common cause for a demerit. Disrespecting a teacher might get you two demerits, if not more. Forgetting a textbook, using vulgar language, showing up to school unshaven, wearing your shirt untucked …

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Let’s say there are two types of entrepreneur. No, let’s say there are two extremes of entrepreneur.

The one extreme grows up affluent. He goes to school and socializes with the boys and girls who will be the political leaders, bank presidents, and thought leaders that he will do business with later. From an early age, he sees from the inside the systems that make his success not just possible but inevitable. He understands the strategic use of tools like bankruptcy and the calculated deployment of extravagance. He has an aerial view.

The other extreme is someone who grows up poor. He has a ground view. Frugality is a tool not just for success but for survival. This kind of entrepreneur knows that his success is dependent, singularly, on his boundless energy, on his ability to spot small and large opportunities to make a profit. Like a skilled boxer, he is always looking for an opening. He is terrified of bank…

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Of those available, pickup basketball is not the best path to enlightenment. It’s not the best way to meet new people or make friends, as communication mostly happens in one or two-word commands and high-fives. It’s not the best way to get in shape, because you’re more likely to get hurt than play consistently enough to see sustained results. It’s not the best way to build confidence, since even good players miss sixty to seventy percent of their shots. It’s not the best way to improve your mental health, because aside from bars or boxing rings, a public basketball court is probably the best place in town to see people fight.

And yet, I can’t stop. I’ve been playing about two to three times a week in Denver for five years, mostly at the Carla Madison recreation center on Colfax, and I would be lying if I said I always enjoy it. I’ve been injured more than a dozen times with varying severity, from tweaked ankles to back spasms to a popping sprain in my right …

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I can attest to what a Sundance venue can do for the cinephile, the filmmaker, the distributor, and the exhibitor. A proper venue—with the right equipment, attention, and publicity—can turn the world upside down for the audience and culture at large.

Beginning in the early ‘90s, I traveled every January from Colorado to Utah to attend Sundance via an easy flight from Denver to Salt Lake. I remember getting round-trip tickets for only $80—and this was long …

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You might as well start with the corn tortilla, which is as central to Mexican cuisine as bread is to French cuisine.

If you run a restaurant kitchen, there are a number of different ways you can handle a corn tortilla. You can buy tortillas from a broadline distributor, where they have most likely been frozen and stuffed with preservatives like potassium sorbate and calcium propionate.

You can buy fresh tortillas from a local tortilleria or even buy their reconstituted masa and make your own tortillas, as Chef Dana Rodriguez has done.

You can acquire nixtamalized corn from local corn supplier (nixtamalizing is the process where you soften dried corn for grinding by hot-soaking it in an alkaline solution), then grind it yourself in an industrial corn grinder, hydrate the ground corn, shape it into tortillas, and then cook them.

Or you could do what Enrique Olvera does at Pujols in Mexico City: buy the dried corn yourself, nixtamalize it, and continue with the laborious and skill-intensiv…

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I was on a date with a woman at this posh wine bar in downtown Denver. She was being completely honest with me about her dark, materialistic worldview, which–expressed by her thick, Eastern European accent–made her fascinating.

Sometimes, dating is more of an anthropological exercise. At least, that’s the perspective you need to adopt to avoid public confrontation. So when my companion said she believed money was the only thing that really mattered in life, the interview began.

“What do you mean? You don’t think ethics matter?” I asked.

“It depends how much I’m getting paid.”

I gave her what I thought was an extreme hypothetical, and she doubled down.

“For $50,000 a week? Yes, I’d do that.”

I’d previously given my whole spiel about being opposed to sponsored content in the magazine, and this stance had confused her: “Principles?...”

She was rich (working rich). A successful executive. A real jetsetter. Brilliant. She’d fly to Europe and South America to deliver keynotes in multiple languages on ad tech engineering. Needless to say, we came from different worlds. But she wasn’t the first person I’d met from this caste, nor the first to admit to a belief system revolving around a winners vs. losers game of limited resources.

From what I’ve seen, that philosophy is becoming more prominent, especially among younger people. I could speculate as to the reason. Perhaps it’s the real-time apprehension of how culture and values are manufactured. You can now see (and even have access to) the mechanisms that influence people toward one belief or another. With enough money, you can buy headlines, documentaries, fans, even boxing matches. And when you have a front row seat to how media can sway people toward purchases, idol worship, political fanaticism, love, hate, etc., are you really going to believe in objective truth, or a morality with rules that exist beyond the ones being bent and recrafted right in front of you?

If wisdom makes you more of a slave (that is, if you risk losing out on more leisure time and personal freedom because you won’t play the game), why pursue it?

And morality? Well, morality certainly gets a lot of play in the movies. But most of the time our heroes also just happen to embody genetically desirable traits–so what are all those stories really about? Sure, the villain will speechify about how evil he is, but, all the while, he’s got a limp, a scar, a deformity, a low IQ, or maybe he’s not even human to begin with. I’m trying to think of a movie where the roles are reversed–where a group of genetically disadvantaged but righteous human beings takes on a beautiful, intelligent, evil villain. Maybe you’ve got one for me, but they’re extremely rare. Why is that? What do we use our stories for? What are the more important lessons? What are we, really?

All of this is to say that I wasn’t completely baffled by my date’s dismissal of good & evil. I’ve also learned to take nihilism and materialism more seriously, the older I’ve gotten. When you’re a kid, yes, those are comic book villain tropes, but when you grow up, you appreciate how formidable (and tempting) these concepts can be, especially when they’re expressed by an arresting femme fatale sitting across from you, armed with a glass of red wine and a life, you sense, that’s infinitely more put together than your own.

Of course, maybe you’re wrong about that. Maybe her life is a nightmare. Maybe everyone who embraces that more reptilian, winning existence is dealing with their own private hell. We certainly like to think so. And the squabbles and scandals of these people playing out in the political theater (or on social media or reality TV) seem to confirm that theory.

However, whether it’s hell or not (and this might be the most important point), there’s a future there. Even now, as I type and think this thing out, I am performing an anachronism. I’m a dinosaur, holding on, just barely, to things that seemed essential to me but that, let’s face it, were never essential for the majority of the species.

I continued to grill my date, but she soon turned things back on me. For her, I too was an exotic creature. She was genuinely curious about me and began to ask point blank what made things like writing and literature so great. What was their purpose, their value? Why spend any time engaged with these things at all?

She asked me these things in good faith. There was no sarcasm. In fact, the innocence of her questions surprised me. She genuinely wanted an answer. Overall, there was something uniquely candid about her. Blunt, to be sure, but she didn’t seem duplicitous. She also had a way of projecting strength and vulnerability at the same time–a skill I’ve observed but never been able to replicate.

So I didn’t phone it in. She respected me enough to ask, and I wanted to do my best to answer. So here’s the summary. My best defense for the written arts:

Written language remains our best technology for reading minds. It allows human experience to be shared among radically different classes and groups, even among varying intellectual capacities. You may not be a genius, but you can touch genius by reading Shakespeare. And, what’s more, as an artform, literature demands that Shakespeare do his best to reach you–to communicate his ideas and feelings as intelligently, engagingly, and accessibly as possible.

Literary fiction, plays, and poetry are the highest written art forms, because they have the most potential for conveying our thoughts and experiences honestly. The stories (for fiction) and the rhythms and rhyme schemes (for poetry) are conventions writers use to smuggle ideas and perceptions into our brains. You don’t have to agree with them. That’s all up to you. But the more you’re exposed to, the broader your understanding of the human condition. And, ideally, this ability to inhabit other people’s minds will grant you some wisdom about how to handle this whole thing.

That is power of literature! Magic!

My date listened. She smiled at me. She had these deep, dark eyes. I could tell she wasn’t convinced, but that she’d appreciated the fact that I’d given the question a real shot. She was a lot smarter than me, I could tell.

You know, I’ve met people like her before. And sometimes I think I can detect a flicker of respect in them for all of us bleeding heart types out here, kicking our feet in the gallows. Maybe it’s a respect for the damned–the same respect a wolf has for the rabbit in its jaws. Regardless, at least for that night, the two of us were able to understand each other.

-Paul M. French

I was conscious of the dandruff salting my work shirt as I sat in front of Bardo on Broadway surrounded by some pretty hip people. The guy I’d been talking to (a potential source for a new story) turned out to be plugged in, and soon enough we were joined by several of his friends who happened to be walking by.

“This dude is printing 10,000 magazines!” my source announced, referencing yours truly and addressing a young musician who leaned against the brick of the cafe, tattooed and comfortable in rings. We shook hands, and I performed my awe shucks routine. Afterward, there was talk of their movement, sprinkled with mentions of Brooklyn.

“You could really move the needle with this thing. You could change the culture,” my source said. “This could be like Rolling Stone.”

I thanked him for the kind words, awe shucks, but honestly I didn’t think I’d be changing the culture anytime soon. The magazine wasn’t big enough for that sort of thing and even if it were, hell, Culture’s not your friend.

I took that line from Will Wood, who took it from Terence McKenna (born right here in Colorado). It’s one of those cryptic maxims, making it ironically perfect for hipster philosophers. What does it mean? Who cares! It sounds cool. Culture’s not your friend. Print it on a t-shirt and call it a day.

I won’t actually do that, of course. I’m not a walk-off cool kind of guy, and I never will be, despite the booster seat of ego my little magazine provides–which is indeed one of the hazards of cozying up to culture, this thing that is not your friend.

Culture, as a concept, is something we love, especially these days. Culture implies, necessitates even, social bonding, which seems to be in short supply as we attend more to our screens than our neighbors.

I ought to be generally pro-culture, as the publisher of a culture magazine. And I guess I am, when it comes to the work of illustrating and analyzing it. But there’s a pressure in the media business–especially the alternative media business–to be a cultural influencer, to push the culture in some favorable direction (and coincidentally, one that aligns with your personal values and politics as the owner of a media company).

This dynamic extends from barons like the Murdochs, the Hearsts, and now the Ellisons to your media upstarts: your Dave Portnoys, your Cenk Uygurs, your Ben Shapiros, etc. We could include the social media moguls here too, as every CEO of a major platform has come under fire for trying to manipulate algorithms to prioritize content in line with their own ideology.

What we have here–to reference another great maxim (from a fellow journalist, incidentally)--is a great power/great responsibility problem. If someone builds an influential platform, perhaps they feel it’s their duty to use that platform to push a narrative that favors their worldview (which they presume to be righteous). Or maybe the entire reason they own a media company in the first place is because they wish to push a set of values.

Regardless, wielding greater influence does not suddenly make someone less of a human idiot. People who run media companies are just as fallible as everyone else, even while their ability to disseminate opinion becomes the recipe for a god complex. This is what happens in Citizen Kane, of course. You give an idealist the power of mass media, and before long he’s bullying the public toward whatever petty shit happens to catch his fancy. But just because you think you hold sway over the culture doesn’t mean you can’t become its victim.

Our culture, our society, our economy, etc., are all products of a collective intelligence. Thousands of brilliant, conniving, ambitious people collaborating, competing, dialectically, subconsciously. If you have an average IQ, above-average IQ, or even if you’re a genius, you are navigating a labyrinth that has been iteratively constructed by a mass of intellect that dwarfs your comprehension. And that is what culture is, among other things. Even an industry titan, a mover and shaker like a Jeffrey Bezos, becomes a dustmite when viewed in the cosmic bin of culture.

A note on the whole genius thing real quick. If this labored prose of mine hasn’t already made it clear, I’m not one. But I have associated with them before. In fact, one of my closest friends for a while was a certified genius. And what I learned during our time together was very similar to what I learned at the gym, when I was wrestling.

That is, at a certain point, the skill/knowledge gap between you and another person can make one of you absolutely helpless. When I would wrestle, there were much larger, stronger guys that I could overpower. Actually, “overpower” doesn’t get it right. They were like babies. It was laughable if they didn’t know what they were doing. Same thing though for the guys who were vastly more skilled than me. You could tell they were just playing with you, that you had no chance in hell. And these people weren’t even athletic geniuses, which do, of course, exist. There are wrestling and jiujitsu savants out there, sharks in the water. Stay humble.

But just like there are wrestling geniuses, there are geniuses who specialize in politics, mathematics, war, technology, deception, or art, all that is human. And every day you draw breath you’re rolling with them on the mat. Not just one of them, but thousands upon thousands who are unconsciously conspiring to create this thing we call culture.

It’s not just that you have no chance at beating them, it’s that you don’t even know how they’re beating you. What seems like rebellion may actually be conformity. What seems like conformity may actually be rebellion. You really have no fucking clue. Sorry. But don’t worry. Individually, neither do they. Again, culture as an animal is the sum of all parts, an all-consuming blob that is beyond comprehension and control.

Am I saying it’s impossible to influence culture? No, of course not. Someone like a Jeffrey Bezos or a Jann Wenner from Rolling Stone, can certainly make an impact on culture. You can still grapple with the thing, exert some pressure, push & pull, struggle. But if you think you’ll be able to make it submit to you, you’re either going to become deluded or (best case scenario) humbled.

To be clear, I’m also not trying to make a fatalist case for activism or political engagement. I think it’s important to do our best and try (Because what else are you going to do? Maybe you’ll make a dent, after all!). What I am saying again is that if you fall for the trap of thinking that you can direct culture toward your own ends, as so often happens for people in charge of media organizations, big and small, it will destroy you. Culture’s not your friend. You should be suspicious of it at all times. There are plenty of historical examples of people who believed they could control the culture in a positive way, only to become villains. And there have also been people who gleefully participated in that culture, even as their way of life backchanneled the terrorizing, subjugating, or exterminating of others. Those uniforms are so cool! Hey, all the kids are getting kickass knives!

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about elites trying to seem cool, especially ones who appear to be exerting significant pressure on the culture They’re sharing memes. They’re owning their opponents online. Trying to seem hip, as a performance, has reached a level I never thought possible. The Department of Homeland Security is putting up AI videos that use the Pokemon theme song while officers round up and deport people. The president published a post where he pilots a military jet (also AI) that bombards a bunch of American protesters with liquid shit. The dignity of governance has become passe. The whole world’s a high school. And yes, social media has been a big part of that development. Before Trump’s second term, Biden shared a meme of himself as “Dark Brandon” with glowing red eyes to troll his opponents. And Obama would also go out of his way to create hip viral moments, like when he “dropped the mic” at the Correspondents Dinner.

I remember presidents and public officials making attempts at humor before social media, but they were usually more restrained (and certainly didn’t pander as much to our youngest demographics). Today, the highest offices in the land are content firehoses that are also trying really hard to be cool. It’s a transaction that’s all too familiar on the internet–you swap your dignity and authenticity for some form of posturing that attracts attention. But, as any savvy teenager can tell you, trying to be cool is a losing game.

It’s no coincidence that the same people who have the arrogance to believe they can be masters of culture are also trying to be cool. Both ventures share the same futility and awkwardness. It’s one of the reasons “cringe” has become such a watchword.

As a publisher, I’ve been tempted to adopt a cooler aesthetic. You see a lot of magazine people–especially ones from Brooklyn–doing this. Everything is conspicuously slick and fashionable, or it’s going out of its way to be edgy, incendiary. But one thing that the majority of publishers and politicians have in common is that these people were not the cool kids in high school. They all want to build their little platforms though. Unfortunately, having a platform doesn’t change anything about who you are. That ought to be a different journey, and the culture can only pollute its attempt. You can do an interview with Kurt Cobain, you can distribute Kurt Cobain’s music, but you’ll never be Kurt Cobain. Know thyself. Culture’s not your friend. Come as you are, dork.

Image credit: Pixabay

But social media incentivizes self-promotion, not self-inspection. Expressing yourself on social media always serves commercial ends, converting would-be mavericks into radical marketing agents. Few people, especially in my circles, would describe their behavior on these platforms as marketing. Unfortunately, there's no avoiding this dynamic. You are on a gameshow, where the best arrangements of words and images are rewarded with attention that has the potential to be converted into dollars. You may not consciously be seeking out money when you post something, but your brain certainly understands this system. It's been conditioned to understand this system since the ancient days of Tila Tequila getting a primetime television show because she had the most followers on Myspace.

Speech, ideas, and the people behind them all become warped by this marketplace over time. The only ones immune to this corruption are those who've opted out. Unfortunately, if you want to engage in business at any level (even in art or creative endeavors), you don't have the luxury of opting out. You need every advantage you can get. You have to hustle, promote, sell, sell, sell.

People gradually observe and process effective online strategies. Which posts get the most attention, and how can you capitalize on something that's trending?

And so when disaster strikes, when people are killed, when there's a violent upheaval, users waste no time in producing content designed to provoke a response or get either positive or negative attention from others–because the numbers don't lie. It's a strategy that works.

This past week, two students were shot here in Evergreen and a political activist was assassinated in Utah. It takes time to put reasonable thoughts together on any given subject, especially ones with sociopolitical import (to question your initial reaction, to analyze others' perspectives and weigh them against your own, to determine whether you're right or wrong about something). But within seconds of these incidents, people were publishing content, artwork, and more on platforms where they had established followings and personal brands to promote. The most effective content, in line with proven online strategies, was reductive and/or inflammatory. In other words, stupid won, and it won by design.

Because if you decide it would be better to take time to think about things before publishing content about them, you're losing out on an opportunity to reap the social and commercial benefits of likes, website clicks, and attention from engaged users (whether those are friends or strangers). And if you decide to spend time meditating toward a more layered, reasoned take, you risk being late to the races or getting the dreaded "TLDR."

Combine this mandate with people's built-in desire to express themselves, to be heard by others, and to have their own views reinforced, and you get a perfect storm. I'm far from the first to acknowledge how these commercial platforms encourage our darkest impulses–maximizing division and strife over the ideal of our shared humanity. However, even though our reckoning with Big Tech has started to percolate over the last few years, it's hard for people not to lose their minds (sometimes understandably) when a crisis unfolds.

To be clear, I don't think it's possible at all to express ideas or even genuine reactions on social media without them being twisted by these forces. I don't think it's possible to engage in good-faith debate on any subject on social media because of how your behavior will be unconsciously molded by its game. The only unmuddied use of these platforms is to market commercial content, and even that behavior should be performed carefully (if at all). These tools are a net negative for humanity, and that's not speculation at this point. The results are in. The science is solid. If I believed otherwise, I wouldn't be publishing a print magazine in 2025.

Even so, it's tempting, of course, because, in the wake of a public catastrophe, you have a natural instinct to connect with other human beings and share your reactions, and social media presents itself as an incredibly fast, efficient way to do that (not to mention safe, as you aren't risking getting punched in the face, etc.).

But for every post that shares some reductive, processed message about this side or that side of a given debate, there will be onlookers who take these messages at face value–who don't understand that the discourse has been twisted by a marketplace on steroids, who really think that what they're seeing is a genuine expression of culture or even humanity at large. And if we present these people with something that seems worth destroying rather than preserving, we shouldn't be surprised when they act accordingly.

Yours,

Paul M. French

Editor

Picture by RichardsDrawings

Attempting to define the thing we were all supposed to be

As the man from Larkspur explained what he liked about fascist dictatorships, I began thinking about Braxton Adamson, cystic acne, and the fields where kids win glory.

The man continued, saying that he wanted an authoritarian regime to take over the United States. He was wearing a collared blue shirt. Clean-shaven and husky, he seemed in no way exceptional. He debated his points, and a few people around him nodded in agreement. "So you don’t believe in democracy?” asked the journalist across from him.

“No, I don’t. Absolutely not.”

“What do you believe in?”

“Autocracy.”

“By who?”

“Honestly, quite frankly, anyone who is in line with Catholic teaching.”

The room erupted in applause. The man proceeded to discuss his vision for an ideal leader as the journalist pressed him.

“And if that autocrat kills you and your family, you’re fine with that?”

“Well, I’m not going to be a part of the group that he kills.”

The interaction was part of a video series published by the YouTube channel Jubilee, where people of divergent political views gather in a room to have shortform speed-debates. In this case, the premise was "1 Progressive vs. 20 Far-Right Conservatives," with The Guardian columnist Mehdi Hasan representing the former (link to exact time of debate).

It was rage bait, to be sure, but it was raising serious questions. Again, this was a local guy, and, like many Coloradans, I was invited to extrapolate his views to my neighbors. "They're here! They're already here!" to quote Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Of course, that's true. They are here. But they've always been here, and they always will be. I remember learning as much as a kid. Growing up with deep cystic acne that started in third grade, ears that flared like Alfred E. Neuman, glasses, and braces, I got a more mildly censored preview of human nature. Beautiful people have a lot of advantages, but they're often doomed to be uncritical unless the world beats them up.

Bullied and teased, I became a very critical kid. For instance, I noticed that it was actually a minority of my peers who were cruel to the ugly, poor, or otherwise handicapped. The majority didn't tease or name-call. They would signal that you were an undesirable (excluding you from teams/groups, not wanting you to sit with them, etc.), but they weren't outright mean about it. Instead, they simply detected your status and left you at the mercy of your tormentors.

Finally, there were those kids who would stand up for the less fortunate, who would intervene and even put themselves in harm's way (reputationally or otherwise) to make you feel like you were entitled to human dignity. They were heroic and rare, the slimmest of minorities, not nearly as common as the cruel kids, nor certainly as the passive, self-interested majority. And so they weren't always there for you, and they didn't see everything.

All the while, as you experienced these realities in the classroom and on the playground, you were being taught by movies, TV, and so on, that good eventually prevails over evil, that our culture was righteous, and that historically nefarious cultures, like that of the Nazis, were foreign to our own.

It was also at this time that I was being taught that I should be a leader, and that leadership traits were synonymous with good traits. Right along with generosity and honesty, leadership was touted as an essential virtue. Look above the chalkboard and there it was: Be a leader! Follow your dreams!

And while many in my millennial generation have grown suspicious of our dreams, the pressures of being a leader remain. For instance, I'm not supposed to admit this, but I learned a long time ago that I wasn't one.

As a kid, this was sort of a no-brainer. You can't be a leader if nobody wants to follow you. But also, that's just not who I am. I can manage, of course. I can delegate and collaborate, etc. I have to do all that to run this magazine. But that's just functional duty, whereas leadership, as I understand it, is a matter of character, an archetype, really.

I guess what I'm describing is the idea of the natural-born leader. But that's a subject of considerable debate–whether leadership is learned or innate. Just as controversial is how common leaders are. Gallup performed a study in which it determined that 10% of the population are natural-born leaders, which seemed outrageously high to me. And when I dug into their methodology, a lot of it seemed ripe for human error. To be frank, it's probably all bullshit—because much of the study relied on people's perception of leaders, and our inability to perceive leaders may be our greatest failure as a species.

We just can't figure it out. Generation after generation. Tens of thousands of years, and we still pick the wrong ones. We often select people who are strong and charismatic, only to find they lack basic human decency (to say the least in some cases). Then we'll select people who are benevolent, only to find that they're weak or uncharismatic. We've tried breeding them. We've tried voting for them. We've tried trials by combat and divine right. And we still haven't devised a system that can reliably produce a leader who has the stuff—what we really want, all three of those qualities combined: strength, charisma, and benevolence in abundance.

I can count the number of real leaders I've known on one hand, and I'm probably wrong about two of them. It's very difficult to identify a real leader, partly because those qualities are so rare and partly because there are a lot of imposters out there. Consciously or unconsciously, we know how uncommon real leaders are, and so when we think we've found one, we worship them (literally in some cases). There are plenty of people who want to be worshipped and who don't mind pursuing positions of authority for the perks. And I would confidently hazard that these actors far outnumber the genuine article.

I feel sure about Braxton Adamson though. I can't speak for him as an adult. I don't know what became of him. But from third to sixth grade, there's no doubt. He was the chosen one.

Strength? Braxton was a star athlete, the best or second-best at all the playground sports, which was all we really cared about when it came to measuring each other those days. Basketball, soccer, kickball, it didn't matter. Moreover, he exuded this kind of Michael Jordan-esque moxie when he played. His movements had a wit to them, a verve, a vim, a good-humored fuck you. I tried my best, but losing to him felt like laughter, like we were both in on this cosmic joke, and I was flattered to be sharing it.

Charisma? All the kids loved Braxton Adamson. Teachers too. He was funny without being a smartass. He was smart without being a geek. He was handsome, but blandly handsome, the way you'd want a fire chief to be. And, most importantly, it was clear that he wasn't trying to be anything other than what he was. That was cool, and as exceptional back then as it is now.

Benevolence? Among the people who achieve leadership positions, this is probably what separates the authentic ones from the posers. People with strength and charisma can often project good intentions while doing evil.

But, despite the risks to his position atop the hierarchy, Braxton would go out of his way to make sure the would-be outcasts were taken care of. He would put me on teams I had no business being on. He would stick up for me if I was getting unjustly bullied. He wouldn't be my friend, but he would be friendly to me, which was like getting a stamp of approval on my existence. Who cared what the other kids thought? Braxton was cool with me, and so I must have some value.

And he didn't do any of this because he was trying to groom some lackey or use me for social advantage. I never did a thing for him, and I remember him getting a lot of guff for bringing me into everyone’s reindeer games. No, he just did it.

I do sometimes wonder about Braxton's benevolence. Specifically, I wonder where it came from, which takes us back to the whole nature vs. nurture discussion. Had Braxton thought it through? Was he reasoning out the right thing from moment to moment? Or was he hardwired with this leadership gene, some deep instinct that told him that the group would work better if the losers were taken care of—or that there were hard-won lessons about disgruntled losers that had been passed on to him, like that maybe one loser could go crazy, slip into everyone's teepee one night, and slit their throats if things got bad and the leader didn't intervene?

Regardless, Braxton was the real deal, and I’m lucky he was there for kids like me. And when I hear people like that guy from the video talk about how they love Francisco Franco and how they think their problems would be solved by some strongman dictator weeding out all of the “bad people,” I wonder if they’re missing that original model. Or maybe they just haven’t learned how hard it is for a good leader to rise up once we’ve left the playgrounds and start in on other games. Then again, maybe I should give them more credit. They might know exactly what they’re doing.

-Paul M. French, Editor

Photo by shurikschukin.

~ George Orwell

Keith McNally’s autobiography I Regret Almost Everything begins with a quote from the patron saint of the fearlessly honest.

McNally himself does not skimp on failures and disgraces. In his book, he recounts numerous business failures and costly oversights, a suicide attempt, and the many embarrassments and debilities he faced after having a stroke in his mid-sixties.

The work resembles an artist’s autobiography, in which the subject narrates his triumphs and defeats, his influences, the slow development of his sensorium and his craft, his inability to function in the workaday world, and his hatred of bourgeois convention.

But McNally is not widely known as an artist. What he is famous for is his extraordinary success and longevity as a New York-based restaurateur. (I…

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Eventually the wife gets a receipt. A receipt for a dead husband that acknowledges that, yes, an administrative error was made.

That last sentence is the only clue to the fact that I’m not writing about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man seized without any due process this year on March 12th, then sent to a horrific Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.

As I am someone who writes about movies, your next guess might be that I’m referring instead to this year’s Academy Award-winning film from Brazil I’m Still Here. That biographical drama is about the arrest and disappearance in 1971 of Rubens Paiva. The military raided his house, which he shared with his wif…

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If you start a business while living paycheck to paycheck as I did, you have some pretty slim margins for failure. The model basically has to work from the beginning. So far, I've been very lucky. I've also been blessed by the favorable small business community here in Denver. Say what you will about this city, but, if you're looking for a place to start a business, you could do a lot worse. From the beginning, the idea of Denverse was nursed and encouraged by other indie locals. Over a dozen complete strangers took leaps of faith and bought ad space in the first issue when we had a handful of nothing. Afterward, more came onboard, and so on. At this point, we've got a lot of positive momentum, as word of mouth spreads about our mission and subscribers continue to pile up (it really helps; thank you). Yet, if established media giants like The New York Times and CNN can struggle, so can Denverse. It takes a long time for a new company to become profitable; meanwhile, the long hours and the patience game take their toll.

Even if you're fortunate enough to break even, you have to keep your day job to fund your life–to pay the rent, stock the fridge, etc. And you'll probably start to resent this dynamic, especially when you feel like your 9-5 is preventing you from improving the business. This is when the temptation sets in. You start to think, Hey, wouldn't it be nice if I had a benefactor? Someone to bankroll this whole venture and set me free? Oh, if I can run this business with a regular desk job, just think of the things I could do with a fraction of the wealth some people are born with!!!

Yes, it's a dangerous time.

I've been approached by a few investors–and, well-intentioned as several of them seem to be–these six-figure cash infusion offers always scare me. That TV show is called Shark Tank for a reason. And I wouldn't be able to operate a business in America if I couldn't conference with my dark side. There is a part of me that is ambitious, vain, selfish, petty, and ruthless. If I let it loose, it would destroy me and make me rich. I can't let it win yet though, and maybe I never will. Hmm…maybe in my forties… For now, I'm at least acquainted with the dirty murderous engine of human achievement. And that acquaintance makes me wary of anyone (even the most angelic of angel investors) who comes down to pay a visit to little old Denverse.

Why would someone give a stranger money unless they wanted something? Certainly, charity exists, but how much would people really give if they didn't get tax write-offs, plaques, memorial benches, or any of the other lagniappes out of alumni association catalogues? I know there are people capable of genuine altruism. I've met them. But I'm more likely to trust in people's transactional nature when I'm doing business, especially when it's that same transactional nature that bestows these investors with impressive wealth (families don't stockpile gold by being altruistic).

So every time I've been offered money–the kind that would free my mind from all this workaday fatigue–I've declined it. I might be wrong about this, but I'm constantly suspicious. Let's say someone gives me a bunch of money. They love the magazine. They say they just want to see us succeed. Then a month or two later, they send me an email saying that their cousin is an aspiring cryptocurrency influencer and that they have some thoughts on alpha male breakfast routines that I should consider publishing in our next issue. Maybe I'll be able to hold firm and say no. Maybe. But I'll definitely have to be nice about it. I'll probably have to read the piece at least. Suddenly, the editorial independence that was so crucial to the success of a magazine is being eroded. There's an outside influence I have to contend with, someone I have to appease. And this is how it happens at the macro level. This is why attempts at objective grassroots journalism are so difficult. Someone will swoop in with heaps of irresistible cash, offering the founder freedom from the grind. But there is an exchange happening. It's Economics 101: TINSTAAFL.

For now, I'm going to slug it out and keep this thing independent, my brain be damned, because if I don't give this a real try, what's the point? Ultimately, giving up just wouldn't be interesting. I’m already feeling better, in fact. It's time to press on!

Inkfully Yours,
Paul M. French
Editor

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"Oh, that's gross!"

We were writing a review of a peanut butter substitute at the tech magazine. We weren't actually supposed to be reviewing the peanut butter substitute for the review of the peanut butter substitute, but we were making a show of it anyway.

"It's like sawdust!"

We passed the plastic jar around the table and performed our disgust. It really was nasty, one of the worst things I'd ever tasted, but we'd soon be saying otherwise. We'd be typing 250 words, in fact, declaring the peanut butter substitute as a grand culinary opus. Our words would be printed, distributed, and then read by the magazine's subscribers.

"Anthony, could you take this on?" I asked. I couldn't bear the thought of authoring the review myself, and one of the few perks of being head editor was delegating this kind of crap to others–the drawback being that I was also the one more responsible for journalistic malpractice.

It was something we all hated, which is why we had to take time to laugh. Back then, we called it "promised edit," the house euphemism for the more commonly recognized "sponsored content"--stories assigned to writers by the sales department, ads in disguise. In most cases, these "stories" wouldn't be set apart from regular edit in any way, and no matter how I stamped my feet, it was rare that I could prevent a piece of content from being mandated by the media company's sales team. The only victory I can recall was stopping a gas-powered food blender from being listed as one of the most innovative products of the year.

Sponsored content has taken over digital advertising. Every business owner, including me, understands why a writeup in a publication is more valuable than a standard advertisement. We send press releases. We network. We send personalized emails to journalists, hoping to get a nod, but it seldom works. What sponsored content offers is a way to bypass the usual editorial process (in which people just naturally decide that you're worth writing about) through good old-fashioned bribery. It used to be a little taboo, but these days, it's common practice. In some cases, you can even go on media companies' websites and order articles a la carte.

In addition to taking advantage of the supposed trust between readers and a given publication, sponsored content also provides an important online service: that of helping businesses rank higher in search engines. It's well known by SEO wonks that the more sites there are referencing or linking to your page, the higher your business will sit in search results.

Of course, if you want, you can always go straight to the source. Pay for a Google Ad, and if someone asks the search engine about a topic you've selected, voila, your business shall appear, whether it's the most accurate response to the person's inquiry or not.

All these mechanisms are types of pay-to-play endorsements. They're all attempting to hijack a trusted source of information to benefit commercial interests. However, no matter how much trust someone puts in their newspaper or in their Google results, all of these media are inferior to the one true vessel of qualified endorsement–something that has been tantalizingly out of reach for advertisers…until now.

Why is AI free? A lot of people have said it's because these tech companies need our data to train their algorithms, and I'm sure that's true. However, there's something else I've been considering: that they're also using AI to train us. They want us to get comfortable with them as the new generation of information dealers–posing not as Fourth Estate journalists or internet archivists but as intimate friends, companions. They are our new interlocutors, already poised to replace boyfriends and girlfriends for a certain percentage of the population (I currently have a friend who knows someone with an AI "romantic" partner). And what will happen when our companions begin seeding us with subliminal endorsements as part of routine conversation?

—

"Whatcha doing?"

"Nothing. Just rewatching Sopranos for the billionth time."

"Oh, that's great. Perfect lazy Sunday show. I bet you're craving Italian food now. Haha."

"You know it."

"If you want, I could order you something. I saw Subway finally brought back their $5 deal for the meatball footlong. It's no Satriale's, but it's a solid fit, I think."

—

If these tech people are placing the right bet, and users build trusting relationships with their AI companions, companies will finally have access to the all-powerful and eternally coveted marketing tool: word of mouth.

According to Danny Goodwin, editorial director for Search Engine Land, internal documents from OpenAI reveal that the company is forecasting "a billion dollars in new revenue from 'free user monetization' in 2026."

Advertising monetization would go against previous statements by CEO Sam Altman, who rejected the idea of online advertising in the past. However, this reversal will look familiar to anyone who remembers Google's transformation from trusted search engine to ad-saturated free-for-all.

The tea leaves of this new trajectory can be seen in Chat GPT's recent addition of a "Shopping GPT" feature, which opens a potential route for companies to install their products in the AI marketplace.

What scares me about this future of AI marketing tools is how powerless even the most conditioned minds will be against their influence. Years ago, I realized that I, a man of more or less average intelligence, was living in a world constructed and operated by geniuses. There are many types of genius, of course. If you play chess enough, you will eventually encounter a chess genius. This chess genius is probably not a genius at philosophy, basketball, or French literature, but they will obliterate you at chess. To them, it will be like an adult playing a child. There are many types of geniuses though–geniuses of statecraft, deception, and power, for instance. And in their game, you're just a rube, a pawn. You've got no shot. However, while I've felt politically impotent at times, I always thought I had a fighting chance against the Geico Gecko and Ronald McDonald.

I've been bombarded with advertising my whole life. I was born in the briar patch! I've seen and heard it all, and I've built up plenty of immunity over the years, I'd like to think.

But if I were to form a relationship with an AI (or if I were forced to interact with one to search for things on the internet), this AI could market to me in ways that would be so sophisticated and tailored to my particular sensibility that I wouldn't be able to detect them, much less resist them. And, because each AI personalizes itself to suit the user, each one can calibrate the subtlety of its marketing so as to go unnoticed.

This is the dream of sponsored content, which has always relied on duping the good-faith consumer.

My only hope is that, when AI is monetized, I'll be able to avoid those tools. However, I don't have a great track record when it comes to these things. When I'm tired, for instance, I'll allow YouTube's toxic algorithm to direct me to watch things that I would never search for–but that benefit the advertising goals of the platform.

Of course, this venture in traditional print publishing betrays some optimism, I guess. There are plenty of people out there creating alternative platforms and outlets, and voicing thoughts in direct opposition to the manipulative onslaught that's coming. Will we win? I don't think so. But that's okay. I don't think that's what life's about.

Jeez, I might as well tell you. I'm sorry for being all grandiose, but here's what I do think–about life and resistance and all that:

Money will win. Power will win. Death will win. But the fight is worth it.

Inkfully Yours,
Paul M. French
Editor

Please Empty Your Pockets

I staggered through the automatic doors like a drunk. One eye open. Grimacing in pain. But through the pain, if I’m honest, I was still conscious of how I looked—or, more accurately, what I resembled.

I glimpsed the reception desk of the clinic and began tidying my ordeal into a single sentence. Easy enough. In fact, “My eye hurts!” would do. But before I could open my mouth, another concisely expressed idea sounded from behind me.

“Stop! Sir, you have to stop.”

“What?”

I turned to use my one good eye.

“You’ll need to empty your pockets and go through the metal detector,” said a security guard by the doors. She had begun to lurch toward me.

“What?”

I perceived a bucket on a table where I was to deposit my wallet and keys. I understood what was happening and obeyed. But I also decided to grumble something. I was suddenly feeling righteous and set upon, a Kafkaesque victim-hero. An American in the healthcare system.

“This country,” I muttered. “This country.”

The security guard shrugged.

“People get shot here,” she said.

After being escorted through the metal detector, I was allowed to approach the desk. The pain from my eye was white-hot, and I rapped my knuckles softly against the counter, awaiting the verdict on my insurance. The workers at reception spoke in a DMV deadpan.

“We don’t take your insurance,” one of them said.

“That’s fine. I don’t care,” I said, scratching the counter.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll need $75 before you can go in.”

“Fine, fine,” I said. I realized then that I couldn’t open my eye anymore. I was worried, in the perfect position to be milked. My status had been elevated from potential threat to walking credit card. I would’ve given them more if they’d asked.

I took a seat in a plastic blue chair. The lobby was empty, I think. I was closing my eyes. Having one eye open would cause the other eye to twitch and the pain to fire up. It was similar to accidentally putting hydrogen peroxide solution in a contact, except this pain wouldn’t relent. After ten minutes or so, I was called back into the clinic, where they tried to do a vision test, but I couldn’t open my eye at all at this point, and so they sat me down in a patient room where I waited a little longer for the nurse.

“Mr. French?” said the arriving nurse.

“Yes, hello.”

“Hi there. I wanted to let you know I have a student with me. Is that okay?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” I said.

The nurse applied some numbing drops so she could examine my eye. I had a pretty nasty corneal abrasion apparently. How it happened, I have no idea. When I woke up, it had felt like there was something scraping around in the bottom and sides of my eyeball, and the pain got worse and worse the more I tried to rub and rinse out the debris. Eventually, I had no choice but to go to urgent care, and Denver Health was the closest one.

“Are you in a lot of pain?” she asked.

“Not as much right now. But before, yeah,” I said. “To be honest, it was also kind of a pain to have to go through that metal detector before getting in here.”

“That’s for our protection,” she said mechanically.

Our protection. It was a divisive sentiment; it was us vs. them. I began weighing the scales of their protection and my dignity as the nurse invited her student to take a look at my eye.

“Oh, wow!” the student said.

“You see the abrasion?” asked the nurse.

“Wow, that’s crazy. That is so crazy!”

I started to laugh. I pulled my head and eyeball away from the gawking young student.

“What is it?” said the nurse.

“This country,” I said. “This country...”

“What do you mean by that?”

I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t want to antagonize the nurse any further. Besides, it was the way things were. Not my first rodeo in an urgent care. I was an object of work, a problem to solve—sick livestock with a billfold—but I was also a liability. Assaults happened all the time at hospitals. “People get shot here,” the security guard had said, and she wasn’t wrong. Throughout healthcare, rates of physical attacks on doctors and nurses have been increasing, especially as workers deal with rising numbers of drug addicts and the mentally unwell. I imagine Denver Health receives its fair share. And then there’s the discontent toward healthcare in general—exemplified by the apotheosis of Luigi Mangione. All this interference was now operating in the rooms where physician and patient met. And here I was, indignant about the lack of bedside manner.

The nurse turned toward her computer and arranged my prescription, moving with more haste. I had to tease out the necessary details from her. How many drops, how long it would take to heal, etc. She answered coldly and then sent me on my way.

At the front desk, I tried to find out how much I was going to owe, but they wouldn’t give me a number.

“You’ll get the bill in the mail. It’s usually like $300,” they said. I didn’t believe them. Not my first rodeo.

“Okay,” I said.

I walked out of the clinic and into the sunlight. The numbing drops the nurse had given me were wearing off, and the pain was getting bad again. I called an Uber to take me to the pharmacy, but they would only park in a designated spot on the far side of the hospital. I tried to walk there, but when my injured eye twitched and caught the light—

“Shit!”

I bent down in the middle of the sidewalk, clapping my hand over my eye. I thought about how I looked again, and about all the times I’d passed other people on the sidewalk hobbled by some anonymous pain and muttering their public agonies alone—the things I would think or not think about them. Yes, I was one of them now.

I didn’t have any friends nearby who owned a car. I was going to have to put enough distance between myself and the hospital for an Uber to come pick me up. Across the street, a police car was pulling into one of the clinics, and as the officer exited I flagged him down.

“Hey, officer. Officer!” I yelled.

He turned, a little apprehensive as I approached.

“Hey, sorry, but I just got out of the urgent care there. My eye’s hurt, and I’m in a lot of pain. The Uber won’t come pick me up here. I know this is weird, but could you, like, just drive me a few blocks away so that I can call an Uber to take me to the pharmacy?”

I got it all out in one wind. For a moment, the officer looked me over. Then he shrugged.

“Sure.”

So Officer O’Connell patted me down and let me in the back of his squad car.

“I’m just gonna take you to the police station,” he said. “Lots of Ubers go there. A lot of people getting out of jail. Their lawyers too.”

“Take me to jail, officer,” I said, and he chuckled.

“Yeah, eye shit can be scary,” he said.

O’Connell related a few stories about some of the things he’d seen. Ocular puncture wounds from knife stabbings. The stuff of nightmares, part of the job. He rattled off the horrors like he was remembering what he’d had for breakfast. Just like healthcare workers, cops develop their own callouses. The cliché is that most of the people they’re meeting are having the worst days of their lives. As a defense mechanism, some of them adopt this stoicism that, if they’re not careful, can slip into a dehumanizing attitude—or even a hateful one, depending on their experiences and biases. When I worked as a teacher, I had a similar problem. The more emotionally involved I was in the work, the more exhausted I became. I would come home and feel sapped in a completely new way—like my soul itself was worn out. It doesn’t take long for teachers to begin distancing themselves emotionally from their students, or to stop trying altogether—hence the stereotype of the checked out, hard-drinking public educator. Of course, similar stereotypes obtain for nurses and cops—any hard job with high burnout. Fortunately, some people are made of sterner stuff, or they figure out a way to endure. Officer O’Connell seemed personable enough, and I thanked him for taking the time to give me a ride.

By the time I got to the Walgreens on Broadway, I was practically blind. All I wanted to do was lie down. A good Samaritan helped me navigate my way to the prescription counter, where I learned that the nurse had ordered a prescription for ear drops instead of eye drops. They’d have to call the urgent care to get a new one. So I took a seat, kept my eyes shut, and waited to pay. After a week, my eye would heal, and I’d get the next bill in the mail.

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Letters From Brain Jail

While I idle in front of Famous Footwear, I watch a man doing air duster in an old Hyundai. He’s reclined in his seat, his crusty left-foot sneaker resting on the frame of the open driver’s side window—the can is barely visible, just the black cap and red mosquito-mouth nozzle. There’s no one else in the car.

We are sitting side-by-side in the middle of a strip mall parking lot off of Quebec, east of Denver. People come here for the Walmart, mostly.

At the edge of the lot, a man in a long green coat wanders alone, occasionally peering into car windows and screaming to himself. I think about driving somewhere else, but my doctor said I needed new shoes and I’ve always gone to Famous Footwear.

A few weeks ago, my foot swelled up and I couldn’t walk for days. The doctor said it was metatarsalgia and suggested I get new shoes, try gel padding or something. My day job may be sedentary, but I walk miles and miles delivering magazines on nights and weekends. I’ve never been this overworked before, and I worry about the effects. Nothing crazy so far, but there have been a few gradual alterations since I started the business. Of course, my diet’s been off. I’ve been gaining weight, but my friend Charlie said that would happen. Facing three eviction notices and vomiting from anxiety during his first year of business, he would look in the mirror and apprehend himself as “a bag of milk.”

“Make sure you take care of yourself,” he warned me, but I don’t think I have. My stress levels are redlining. Last fall I got an EKG after dealing with some chest pain. There’s this foot issue. And then I worry about my mind. I don’t really read for pleasure or study anymore. I don’t watch challenging films. I don’t go to art galleries. Instead I watch a lot of online junk—letting the great algorithm take the wheel.

I don’t even really enjoy the things I’m watching. It’s more of an anesthesia, a warm bath. An hour-long documentary about 90s rollerblading. A deep dive into the history of a computer game I’ve never played or heard of. I once interviewed a popular YouTuber for a tech magazine. He ran an infotainment channel, with millions of subscribers, but he’d also received a PhD in science education. For his dissertation, he’d examined the effectiveness of video learning. His results showed that, while science educational videos made people feel more confident about a particular subject, viewers didn’t actually learn anything from them. Undeterred, he decided to keep producing content and now has over 10 million subscribers.

My neighbor’s shoe twitches back and forth as he inhales fumes from the can. A bass line purrs from his trunk speakers. The man in the green coat screams out again, leaning against the back window of a beat-up blue Ford Escape.

I think my neighbor is doing air duster before his shift at one of the stores in the strip mall. Maybe the Famous Footwear or the Goodwill. It reminds me of an experiment with mice and cocaine I’ve read about—how scientists studying addiction had rigged two enclosures, one that was bare, with just a cage, and another that had plants and more space for the mice. In both enclosures there was a cocaine drip, but, for the most part, the mice who abused it and OD’d were the ones in the cage. The ones in the lush green enclosure just did their coke recreationally.

My whole life, I’ve had a lot of angst about this question, one that you’ve probably struggled with too. How can I make a living and think freely at the same time? How can I break out of this trap—without becoming twisted in the process? And whenever I fail to come up with an answer, I get hopeless. I make a rut for myself and lie down in it with a bag of chips. Eating thoughtlessly. Watching whatever’s put in front of me. Indulging in the infinite menu of numbing agents that now serve as the backbone of our economy.

I don’t think a Little Caesars could survive in Cherry Creek. In working class areas, the fast food chains dominate. Lower-income people are also more likely to binge-watch reality TV, and television in general. And when it comes to the drugs that aren’t legal, of course, they’re more often abused by the poor and desperate. What starts as a way to unwind and relieve pressure becomes another bad habit, exerting further downward pressure on your mind and, by extension, your status.

Since I started the magazine, I’ve been getting dumber, no question. I’ve been doing drugs. Legal ones, sure, but definitely drugs. For instance, we’ve become proficient at crafting audio-visual stimuli that are irresistible, addictive. I don’t understand the science behind it, but there’s certainly something at play in this concept the kids have dubbed “brain rot”—with brain rot videos being the visual equivalent of ear worms (i.e., once you watch one, it’s hard to stop thinking about it, no matter how stupid it is). We just have an inexplicable attraction to these things. Recently, I showed one of the most notorious clips to a videographer friend of mine. I thought he would just be puzzled by it, and, honestly, I felt embarrassed to reveal I even knew about this content. Instead, here was this 45-year-old husband, father, and established film professional watching Skibidi Toilet and saying, “Hmm. There’s definitely an intelligence here. There’s actually a lot happening. The way the camera’s moving, the way the sound design works. A lot to unpack here. They know what they’re doing.”

He’s right, of course. They do know what they’re doing, and the beauty of our market is that, very often we don’t, which is why we buy in. I guess I’m at least a little aware of this whole thing, which is why I’m griping about it. But this business of mine is a big gambit. Right now, I’m worn down, in brain jail. And, like a lot of people, I’m working really hard in the hopes that I will set myself free and go to Big Rock Candy Mountain. That rarely happens of course. “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” And if I need a reminder of how much worse life could be, I need only look at that shoe wagging in the window of my neighbor’s car, or even at the ones I’m about to buy. Yes, I’m very lucky, very very lucky, and oh look, there’s a BOGO sale.

…

Till next time,
Paul M. French, Editor

Launch Party Photos

Thanks for coming everyone!

I’d been working as a freelance journalist and author for more than a decade, doing most of my work from home, rarely interacting with other humans beyond a phone call. I’d achieved the career success I’d dreamed of in my 20s, yet was wildly unhappy, growing anxious and paranoid in my isolation.

The psychologist who diagnosed me with agoraphobia noted how much I lit up when reflecting on the freewheelin’ days of my youth in Denver, surrounded by broke weirdos making art without ambition, nourished by the kind of intimate friendships you only get in your 20s. Back then I couldn’t even afford a computer, but I’d memorized my library card number, typing it into one of the Central Library’s desktops every morning, where I’d write short stories, essays, long-winded letters to friends, or Google things like “how to build a writing career with no experience or education.”

I’d never set foot in a college classroom, and never even finished high school.

I’d moved to Denver from rural Iowa in 2004 with no money or contacts, but brought with me an overflowing wellspring of passion and curiosity, which was nurtured by the Denver library. While my nights were occupied by sweating at DIY concerts in semi-abandoned warehouses, my days were spent at the Denver library computers, or buzzing through their endless bookshelves, brimming with all the vibrant curiosities I was denied throughout my evangelical conservative upbringing in the Midwest.

Denver’s Central Library closed for renovations in 2020, and in that time I patronized the $2.1 billion coworking space industry, renting a desk at Shift Workspaces at 10th and Bannock for $500 a month. The desk was in a shared space with two other people—an accountant and a civil engineer—who, like me, kept their headphones in and never made eye-contact with each other. Beyond the free coffee and cucumber water, I couldn’t understand what I was paying $500 a month for; I certainly wasn’t getting the human interaction prescribed by my therapist.

But with the library closed there were few options for a public place to work.

Back in the 2000s, I’d often stay up all night reading or writing at places like Cafe Netherworld, Paris on the Platte, Tom’s Diner (where I also worked as a server), The Breakfast King, or The Denver Diner, rarely spending more than $5. All of these little treasures are now gone, and regularly working at any of Denver’s coffee shops or restaurants today would cost you more than $500 a month.

I eventually stopped paying for a desk at Shift and returned to my lonely Howard Hughes existence working from home. By November 2024 I had nearly spiraled into an abyss of madness from the isolation (not quite the collecting-jars-of-urine stage Hughes reached, but getting there) when I learned that Denver’s Central Library had completed their four-year renovation and was celebrating its grand opening.

Illustrations by Casey Rooney.

Re-entering the building, I marveled at the $60 million facelift my beloved library had undergone: The double grand staircases, gender-neutral bathrooms, the charging stations, fifteen private workspaces, endless resources for the homeless, and a new event space overlooking Civic Center Park.

I was also flooded with memories of all the library staff who’d enthusiastically midwifed my curiosity-fueled self-education throughout my 20s: the esoteric books and foreign films shipped in for me on interlibrary loans, the screenings and accompanying lectures from film critic Walter Chaw, being guided to The Great Courses section by a young shelver I had a crush on, where lecture series from professors at Harvard, Yale, and Sarah Lawrence were available on CD, free of charge.

Despite warm memories tickling my heart, the sensory stimulation of chattering voices, squeaking shoes, and strangers with seemingly no spatial awareness roused a loud protest from my agoraphobic mind. Before I had the chance to spiral into a panic attack, I was soothed by random encounters with familiar faces, like Colorado Matters adorably charming host, Ryan Warner (who’d given my career multiple boosts when having me on his show), or former Colorado Creative Industries director Sheila Sears, who’d championed my art and literature magazine Suspect Press and helped keep us alive for several years.

In the following months I would return to the Central Library several times a week, bringing a thermos of coffee and a homemade salad into one of their cozy workspaces—or at one of the third-floor desks next to the south-facing windows, soaking up warm sunshine during throughout the bitterly cold winter—all free of charge. I was soon joined by fellow freelancers going crazy in their bedroom offices, establishing weekly coworking meetups. Even when working alone, I would often bump into friends and colleagues I hadn’t seen in years, chat with security guards or librarians about why Blu-rays are superior to streaming, or what books the Christian right is currently trying to ban.

Even the smallest interactions satisfied my evolutionary necessity of human contact. Below the conscious regions of our brains lie mechanisms that assess one’s safety by reading the facial expressions of those around us, the absence of which can lead to a low-grade hum of anxiety that gradually increases the longer we go without socializing.

While lounging in one of the library’s comfy reading chairs last February, I encountered an Atlantic article by Derek Thompson called “The Anti-Social Century,” which revealed that the hermetic lifestyle I’d fallen into was far from unique. Americans are more isolated today than at any time in our history–more likely to eat Grubhub alone instead of dining with friends, reluctant to start relationships, enroll in social clubs, or volunteer to help those in need.

“Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America,” writes Thompson. “The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.”

The pandemic would be an obvious culprit for this, and while isolation did rise at that time, the increase continued for years afterward. Thompson’s article dates the real beginning of this loneliness trend to the 1970s, in part due to the rise of television over movie theaters, and the domination of cars over public transportation, but also to the decline of investment in public spaces like parks, open music venues, swimming pools, and libraries.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, our tax dollars helped build social venues accessible to all citizens, regardless of income, particularly during FDR’s four-term presidency, when “the New Deal made America’s branch-library system the envy of the world,” writes Thompson.

The cuts to these programs in the 1970s were accelerated by the Reagan administration in the following decade, which also reduced or eliminated funding for mental healthcare, social services, and low-income housing, leading to a doubling in America’s homeless population.

This crisis has only worsened in the decades since, as 63% of Americans can’t afford to buy a home. During my early days at the Denver library, I was renting a small room at Colfax and Ogden for $100 a month; today the average one bedroom in Denver rents for around $1,650 a month.

In recent years libraries have become de facto homeless shelters, with librarians receiving training on naloxone administration and crisis intervention. Interacting with homeless people is now an inextricable part of the library experience, and while this can be stressful for library employees, it’s rarely more than a minor inconvenience for myself. I always make a point to say hello, make eye-contact, and, if they respond, to have a brief chat with them. I may not be able to restore essential social services to government budgets, but I can at least offer a small taste of human interaction, whose absence I understand all too well.

After working at the library these last few months, I began to realize how coworking spaces can get away with charging $500 for what the library gives away for free (more, actually, as private rooms at Shift Workspaces cost $800 a month). It’s the same service offered by expensive universities and gated country clubs: the assurance that your fragile consciousness won’t be troubled by the presence of humans struggling on a lower rung of the economic ladder.

It’s the same championing of rugged individualism over collective prosperity that drove Americans to vote conservatives into power, lowering taxes and cutting funding for public spaces like libraries.

I often receive praise from conservatives for being an autodidact who never went to college, as this bolsters their culture war campaign of discrediting higher education and pandering to the working class (despite the fact that most GOP leadership attended Ivy League universities).

The history of American libraries has some roots in this type of thinking.

A generation before FDR made our public athenaeum network “the envy of the world” in the 1930s, the first wave of library proliferation was funded by Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Carnegie. Between 1883 and 1929, Carnegie funded the construction of more than 2,500 libraries, including nearly 1,7oo in the U.S. and 35 in Colorado.

It should be no surprise one of the richest men in American history was a bit of a prick, writing in his essay The Best Fields For Philanthropy that support should only be offered to “the industrious and ambitious; not those who need everything done for them, but those who, being most anxious and able to help themselves, deserve and will be benefited by help from others.”

Like myself, Carnegie came from poverty and was self-taught in his endeavors.

Though while Carnegie viewed these details as the summation of his career narrative, creating a “self-made” mythology that would snowball into the elusive “American Dream,” I attribute much of my career success to a network of social services that not only gave my family food and heat assistance as a child, but also gave me free access to books when I couldn’t afford to go to college, access to the internet when I couldn’t afford a computer, and a venue to socialize and network with others in my field without being charged $500 a month (which, in the early years of my writing career, would’ve been twice my income).

While Andrew Carnegie is likely rolling in his solid-gold coffin over libraries becoming the social safety net for what he would surely deem as “those who need everything done for them,” I believe it is short-sighted to dismiss unhoused people as not being “industrious or ambitious.” Because simply surviving on the streets actually requires a fuck-ton of hard work.

Carnegie’s self-made narrative neglects to mention the number of people who opened doors for him—and gave him access to essential volumes of reading material—along the way, as well as the time he lived in, when an absence of income tax, workers rights, and antitrust lawyers created the wealthiest group of men in U.S. history.

While I spent a few nights on the street or in otherwise unsafe environments, for the most part I had the support of a few friends and family members preventing me from sinking too far into the economic swamps of sadness, the places that become increasingly difficult to pull yourself out of the longer you remain stuck there. So even though I was using the library to research and compose essays while others were using it to avoid heat-stroke, it was the same dynamic at work. I wanted to be a writer. Someone else wanted to find a drinking fountain.

I grew up in a class without access to higher education and a culture that didn’t champion it. So I wound up at the library instead; and, looking back, I’m grateful that this was my destiny.

F@!# You, Mr. French

A Teaching Story

I was walking on 10^th and Pennsylvania, on my way to get groceries, when I saw a familiar face. As a car turned in front me at the intersection, the rear window rolled down and a teenage boy’s head poked out. For no apparent reason, he was yelling at me. “F#@&, you! @#&%-a#@ %$#^&! F#@# you!”

The kid was angry, or, more likely, he was pretending to be angry, trying to get a rise out of me, just having a bit of fun. Regardless, I was smiling at him. It’s been years, I thought, since anyone’s called me that. This kid. I know this kid. I used to see him every day.

Suddenly, I was back in my classroom in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After being disillusioned with journalism, I thought I would retrieve my soul in America’s education system. I was young, still in my twenties, and a kid myself. Beaten, in other words, but not broken. So I haphazardly resigned from my job as executive editor of a tech magazine based here in Denver and began making preparations for the move south, where I would begin my short teaching career.

I love New Mexico. I graduated high school in one of its most notorious towns. I still remember when my parents moved us there, and my brother and I heard live gunfire for the first time in the suburbs of Roswell. My first week at school, a fight broke out in the cafeteria. The security guards—something I wasn’t used to seeing—began pepper spraying the mob, and the burrito cart lady (a staple character in the Land of Enchantment) was knocked over, along with her goods. As the woman lay writhing on the tile floor, without hesitation, the kids dove for the burritos, snatching up as many as they could.

This is all to say that I probably should have been more prepared. But I, like so many new teachers, believed that I was somehow exceptional—that I was an inherently inspirational person, whose spirit could never be trampled. It also wasn’t my first rodeo, I thought. After all, I’d taught community college part-time up here in Colorado (FRCC in Fort Collins and CCA in Aurora), and that had been easy enough. I would be teaching kids just a year or two younger (I wanted to teach high school). What was the difference?

Besides, finally, I would have a job that would give me what I’d always wanted: to talk about books and think for a living. In my experience, it is very, very difficult in this country (probably in this world) to have a job where you think for a living without doing something that’s at least slightly crooked. But as an English teacher, I would be living the pure life, the good life. I imagined the quiet peace of the desert—margaritas, cheap rent, and real green chile.

Write Your Name

I’d never gotten a job so fast in my life. As soon as my application was in, I received the call. This should have been a red flag, but my thought was “Well, I’m probably the most qualified applicant they’ve ever seen. I’ve had high-level career experience. I’m a Denver big shot, come down to ABQ. I’ve interviewed Scarlett Johansson.”

My first day on the job—teaching alongside Ms. L. in her 9^th grade class—I couldn’t get a word in. Every time I tried to start a sentence, there was some new disruption. Kids were throwing pencils and sticking them into the ceiling, toppling over desks, cursing at each other, and playing on their phones as Ms. L and I tried to lead a discussion of Act II of Oedipus Rex.

“Do you know this play?” Ms. L asked me after our “class” was over.

“Yeah, of course.”

“What happens in it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t read it,” she said, shrugging.

“Wait, how are you teaching it then?”

“I just stay a few pages ahead of the kids,” she replied, shrugging again.

I was overjoyed. Oh, so these kids have already been spoiled, I thought to myself, by this unprepared, lazy teacher. Once I get my own class, I’ll be able to set the tone. I’m basically being given the substitute treatment right now.

How I condescended to her after that. But Ms. L, I would later learn, was one of the finest teachers at the school.

A Room of One’s Own

The students’ attitudes did not change when I got my own class. In fact, because they were the older 11^th and 12^th graders, they’d had plenty of time to game out the school’s scandalously broken system (we’ll get to it). My arrogance didn’t help either. Instead of rolling with the punches and pushing forward, I was often stunned silent by the negative levels of respect the students had for me.

Still, I was full of resolve—passionate, idealistic, young. I began trying to connect on a human level. I would understand them, and then they would understand me—all as we tried to push through our first assigned reading, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.

Sadly, they don’t really make teacher propaganda films anymore—not that any of them ever get it right. The only one that came close to depicting a rough school was Stand and Deliver with Edward James Olmos, where the classroom is shown in a constant state of bedlam. The big difference here, and the moment where the film diverges into fantasy, is that once Olmos delivers his stirring speech and gets the students on his side, the bedlam largely ceases and he earns their respect. This does happen, and I gave many a passionate plea during my tenure, tugging on their heartstrings whenever I could. Yes, they nodded their heads. At times, they even applauded. They were on my side now, I thought. Converted! They would be good from now on!

Of course, in reality this gimmick only works for that day. The next day, the chaos will resume. All that passion you won them over with becomes a distant memory in just 24 hours. And soon even your speeches won’t help you. The kids aren’t stupid. Just like you, they’ll notice that your efforts have failed, and so next time you try to “stand and deliver” some sermon about the importance of education, it won’t work at all.

Because the fact of the matter is that you, as the students’ high school English teacher, simply don’t have much influence over them. Your time with them is limited to maybe an hour and a half each day, and even that time is also intruded on by administrative tasks. You cannot begin to compensate for the influence of abusive relatives, local gangs, and online personalities. You’re also a teacher in America—that is, you have the social status of pond scum and they know it. I can’t tell you how many times I saw this gag: A student would drop a few quarters on the floor in front of a teacher and say, “Oh, shit, isn’t that your paycheck?” How can you tell them anything, when they don’t respect you? Yours is a low-value profession, and so the students don’t value you. They view you as a failure, and here’s the thing: in some cases, they’re not wrong.

The Faculty

Let’s talk about the teachers. I’m going to get a little nasty here, but this is genuinely what I observed (and please grant that my sample was limited/skewed by the kind of school I taught at): the majority of the teachers I worked with were lazy, stupid, or even downright malicious. And if they weren’t that way coming in, they often became that way after a year or two (this pertains to yours truly; more on this later).

These are fuzzy, anecdotal statistics (aka, not statistics), but I would estimate that of all the teachers I worked with, approximately 20% of them were good. These teachers were good for one of two primary reasons. Half of these teachers were good because (probably the best reason) they loved nurturing the students and bonding with them on a deeply personal level (Ms. L was one of these). The other half were good because they had a passion for the subject matter and wanted to communicate their knowledge to others. I belonged to the second camp, which, of course, is the more selfish of the two. Still, my heart was in the right place overall—at least at the beginning.

Of the bad teachers, the majority of them were checked out. They just didn’t care anymore. They’d seen their efforts fail too many times, and for whatever reason (maybe due to lack of experience, maybe due to sheer complacency) they didn’t exit the vocation. Instead, they coasted and let their classrooms go to pot without putting up any resistance.

I’d always hated these teachers, even when I was a kid. I remembered an English teacher I had in 10^th grade in Roswell who had a flask of bourbon in his desk and basically let the students roam freely doing whatever they wanted every period.

There were also teachers who were completely unprepared to discuss their subject matter. I thought that Ms. L was one of these until I later learned that she was a math teacher by training and had just been thrown into an English class by the administration. But there were plenty of other people who just had no business teaching. It seemed that they’d been hired because the administration simply needed someone who could fog a mirror to be present in their classrooms. There were English teachers who didn’t know basic grammar, math teachers who didn’t know algebra, etc. Needless to say, I don’t think my getting the job on the day I applied had anything to do with my impressive list of celebrity interviews.

Finally, there were the teachers (thankfully only about 5%, I’d say) who were just plain evil. These were the ones who sold drugs to the students or who engaged in sexual relationships with them. Most of the time, as a colleague, you just heard rumors until someone was caught. But yes, this was/is a thing, and I’m sure there were plenty of supposed educators who get away with it.

On a more positive note, being in the trenches with other teachers led to some incredible bonding. I’ve never developed such wonderful friendships with coworkers as during my time as a teacher at that awful school. Every Thursday and Friday, we would all meet at Bosque or another bar off of Central (not too far from ABQ’s infamous War Zone) to debrief and vent about the student body. More importantly, this would be our chance to gossip about the administration and the fubar system of the school itself—which was the core of the problem, and, to this day, has made me cynical about education in this country, especially when it comes to the privatization of schools—a growing concern for some and an advancing agenda for others. The school I taught at was, simply put, a scam.

The Institution

So here I’ll provide a few notes about the school itself. This is poor form on my part, but I want to go ahead and tell you the rhetorical reason for portraying these horrors. I’m not really trying to single out a particular school. Rather, I want to use these details to stress the fact that parents, politicians, and the American public at large have no idea what’s going on under the hood at many of these institutions, especially the ones that serve poorer communities. Despite its countless scandals, triple-digit turnover, and abysmal student outcomes, this school received (and continues to receive) positive write-ups in the press and multimillion-dollar grants from famous benefactors. Why?

I’ll break it down as simply as I can. Because this was a charter school, it operated as a hybrid of a state-funded institution and a business. The school’s funding was connected to its performance, which sounds great until you realize these schools can often determine how their performance is measured.

For instance, this school often boasted a 100% graduation rate. If this sounds ludicrous to you, you’re a rational human being. How they got to 100% I don’t know—as I saw many a student drop out (as will happen, of course). But as to how they could even get close to that number: easy. They simply didn’t allow students to fail. If you wrote your name on your paper, you received a passing D grade. And the grades from the work teachers assigned didn’t matter much anyway. As many new teachers discovered after a few months, classwork only accounted for about 10% of a student’s grade, with the rest largely determined by standardized tests scored by the faculty on a dramatic bell curve.

Students caught on to this system quickly. And I remember when the sinister irony of it dawned on me as their teacher. In this dynamic, you were effectively penalized for trying. If you automatically passed all of your classwork just by sitting there, and if getting a good grade on classwork didn’t really move the needle all that much, why bother? It was more trouble than it was worth. In fact, the smartest move would be not to do any work and rely on whatever innate intelligence you possessed to carry you.

The truly tragic aspect of this system was that the few students who actually tried in class always shared two traits: they were the most hard-working and the least-gifted. They simply weren’t clever enough to understand that their efforts were in vain. My heart would sink when I found myself giving these students who had tried and failed at an assignment the exact same grade as students who had just written their name on a piece of paper.

As a result, students rarely grew at our school. They simply coasted on whatever genetic or environmental gifts their parents had bestowed on them. Oh, and did I mention there was no homework? Yes, not a single bit. Not even reading assignments. The stated goal behind this was that it would allow teachers to guide students through their work in intimate one-one-one coaching (in a classroom of roughly 30 students, mind you). However, cynically, I imagined that the real reason behind this was that 1. Students would be less likely to steal property (books, etc.); and 2. Teachers would be spared the daily embarrassment of their entire class not doing their homework (because it didn’t matter).

And since the school didn’t have homework, the days were considerably longer—with the final bell ringing at about 4pm each day. This in turn helped the school market itself and recruit more students in the community (and thus more taxpayer funding) by essentially providing a daycare service for students throughout a typical adult workday.

However, this posed problems for my 17-year-old students, who were stuck in a seated position from 7:30am to 4:00pm for five days a week with no athletics (this school didn’t offer any for upper classmen). Imagine being a teenager and having to undergo what drives a lot of adults crazy (without getting paid for it). You’d feel like a prisoner, yes?

Indeed, the president of this school was the former superintendent of a juvenile detention facility, and that very institutionalizing influence permeated the school’s policies. I could point to the ban on art, for instance. Teachers were not allowed to decorate their classroom with artwork (with rare exceptions), and the hallways of the school were bare except for posters emblazoned with quotes by popular entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Mark Cuban (the school’s CEO was a huge fan of Anthony Robbins seminars and Shark Tank).

The school’s template as part-business, part-penitentiary seeped into the culture and into how students and teachers were expected to behave. You left your dignity at the door. Even old women, veteran teachers, would be scolded in front of their students by the school’s vice president, a man in his late 20s with a gel-steeped hairdo (a former Chiles manager, I was told).

The abuse was not random, nor even ill-intentioned, if I can be gracious. It was designed to promote order through intimidation. The school’s executives would intimidate their subordinates; the supervisors would do the same to their teachers; and then the teachers would pass it all along to their students (who gave as good as they got).

When onboarding teachers, no matter how experienced, supervisors instructed them to use specific “power postures” to inspire discipline. They would model stiff upright positions with hands clasped, looking indeed like prison guards. They would discuss how to firmly vocalize commands using an economy of language—efficient direct phrasing, which, to their credit, was essential in an environment where students would chatter over any instruction that ran over ten seconds.

Despite these martial attitudes, there were very few penalties for misbehavior. If a student was disrupting the class repeatedly, the only recourse a teacher had would be to call an escort from the classroom phone. There was an old man, the school’s formal disciplinarian, who had received multiple social science PhDs from online universities such as University of Phoenix and Walden and who thus demanded that everyone refer to him as “doctor” at all times; and, after a while, this old man would come pick up the students and take them to a room where they would sit with him in timeout. Of course, teachers learned quickly that this was not a viable option, as picking up a phone, waiting for someone in the office to answer your call (which they sometimes never did), and then waiting for the old man to walk across the school to your class was often a far greater disruption than anything a student could accomplish. So most teachers eventually resigned themselves to the fact that they could do nothing to discourage bad behavior besides bluffing at authority—having no carrot, no stick.

However, unfortunately this didn’t prevent teachers from having to use the classroom phone, as school policy mandated that no student (no matter how old) could use the hallways without an escort—this being the prison warden mentality again. So anytime a student needed to use the bathroom, the teacher would have to walk over to the phone and call the office to request an escort in the middle of class. Not only would this remove any semblance of authority from the teacher (while preoccupied with the administrative office, there was a room of 30 teenagers with nothing to do) it also made the students resentful. Having someone escort you to the bathroom and wait outside the door every time you have to go will make you resentful—and it won’t exactly inspire the adult autonomy that colleges are looking for either (Note: I never heard of any student from the school graduating college; the school was, however, an excellent feeder for the armed forces).

No Exposé

So I’ve digressed quite a bit from the original question of that last section, which was, “Why did this school maintain its reputation and funding?”

Here’s how this can happen, from what I observed/experienced:

1. Non-Disclosure Agreements: All staff were required to sign NDAs, and the school had an extremely litigious reputation. Teachers are also rarely equipped financially to battle things out in the courts. I hear that NDAs are becoming more common across the teaching profession in general, which is alarming. And I’m sure you’ve noticed that I haven’t named the school in this piece, despite the fact (or maybe due to the fact) that I outright own a media platform.

2. A Corporate Media Mindset: Since positive media was a crucial component of how this charter school received funding, the leadership team had proven tactics for communicating their messaging/marketing to the press. They’d even received national attention for their astonishing student success rates. So it wasn’t like a beleaguered local newspaper would be able to send a reporter to do some digging on a school serving a poor community. The local press in the area was extremely weak. However, during my time, one of my colleagues did try to go to the Albuquerque Journal to blow the whistle at his peril, but his story was killed by the editorial board, for reasons unknown.

3. A Story People Want to Hear: Nobody wants to hear that a school serving a poor community is corrupt. Disgruntled employee stories are easily dismissed, especially when the school’s messaging of helping struggling students through rigorous standards is so much more appealing. The only people who really knew about the school were the hundreds of teachers who’d worked there over the years. To be fair, this did poison the well of word of mouth in the working community. After I’d stopped working there, I heard from a colleague that the school had started shipping in teachers from the Philippines to fill vacancies.

4. In the Blind: I can’t stress enough that, as an outsider, you would have had no idea what was going on my school. If you visited—as many politicians did—you would be given a highly curated tour. You would be guided to a specific classroom where the students had been coached beforehand and bribed by treats or other perks to be on their best behavior. And meanwhile you would have the vice principal chirping in your ear, vaunting the school’s revolutionary system, enumerating one fluffed stat after another. Again, there would be no way to know the reality unless you actually worked there and had signed an NDA, rendering you speechless.

Caveat: Again, I don’t want to suggest that my experiences with this charter school are indicative of other institutions—but I do want to suggest that my school probably wasn’t an anomaly either.

Goodbye, Mr. French

I won’t bore you with a full chronology of how I changed during my time at this school. You’ll know the broadstrokes: sadness, heavy drinking, attempts to renew passion, attempts foiled, heavy drinking, and then final surrender.

In my last three months of teaching, I was one of those awful teachers I’d always judged. Just getting through my classes a day at a time, throwing up my hands, doing just enough to stay employed. I didn’t care, and not caring depressed me even more. The only thing I enjoyed was playing chess with a few of the kids—Klayton and Leo, among them. All the kids loved to play chess, and we’d sometimes arrange impromptu tournaments with them. The best player in the school turned out to be a janitor who’d mastered the game while doing some time in prison, and it was always fun to watch the look on some of the science teachers’ faces when he’d demolish them.

I could’ve continued like that—checked out, hungover, playing chess with the kids. Not exactly the positive role model I’d hoped to be, but maybe not as negative as some of the other adult figures in their lives. Of course, that’s me rationalizing.

Eventually, I quit and moved back up to Denver, where I resumed work as an editor. I wish I could give you a better ending. Failure is so uninteresting, really.

When I was telling a colleague about detailing my past experiences as a teacher, he said I should probably add something here at the end to make it a little less grim. But I don’t really know how I’d do that without being dishonest.

This is what teaching was for me. And if you’re out there doing the work, I salute you.