Welcome to Your American Pope Weekend!
Chicago Dip-Dishes the Vatican. Plus: Natasha Lyonne, Jerry Springer, May Cocktails, Arcade Fire, and More...
Dear Wags,
We pause for a rare moment of almost-unifying national pride. The 267th Pontiff and Prince of Rome is from Chicago. At first blush, he seems like a thoroughly decent chappy, so different from all those other headline-grabbing Americans. Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, might prove to be what the doctor (or Somebody higher up) ordered. Here’s hoping.
Because lately, we’ve been contemplating our national gift for inflicting ourselves on the rest of the world without bothering to learn geography or a second language—two things Pope Leo, it turns out, does rather well. Of all the great and terrible things America does to everybody else, what’s most confounding? We keep circling back to our eternal cult of individuality—the secret sauce that makes us us (or the U.S. the U.S.). We’re charismatic fundamentalists about it. And it gives us this magical, cursed idea that the best way to solve terrible problems is to sign up for Pilates.
This hit us like hailstones the size of golf balls, as America endures a socio-political psychotic break with potentially dire ramifications. To which not a few people we know have responded by referencing a self-help bestseller: The Let Them Theory, by Mel Robbins. Does this popular tome need further introduction? Probably not—it’s hawked on every platform. Let Them refuses to let us alone.
Who are we to thunder on about an innocent book that gives some people relief? Well, the same old prickly sourpusses we’ve always been, fed up with yet another self-actualization grift. There’s the phrase itself—idiotic, clunky, smug, passive-aggressive. But worst of all? It isn’t even clever. Let Them is what you get when you’ve hit the bottom of the barrel of self-deluding aphorisms—a catchphrase so depressingly unimaginative it feels less like advice than a serenity prayer for the crushed. It doesn’t rhyme, it has no snap. It flops off the tongue like a soggy Labrador.
When obnoxious people try your soul, don’t fuss—just Let Them! intones motivational mystic Robbins, who had an epiphany while dealing with unruly teenagers on prom night. (And bully for her, truly, for finding a silver lining in raising adolescents.) Let them do what, exactly? Spit in your eye? Eviscerate Medicare? Invade Poland? What a limp way to wave the white flag. Like all viral mantras, meaning matters less than the moisture-wicking fabric of pop psychology it’s wrapped in—language as false insulation against life panic. Still, it reproduces nicely on an Instagram tile.
There’s a lentil of truth in Let Them—most things in life are beyond our control. You can discover this gem of wisdom threaded through all credible philosophy and religion, in twelve-step programs, and down at your corner bar. Try to shake off the 3:00 a.m. piranhas nibbling at your sanity, and you’ll be momentarily less discontented. America never tires of trying to turn what is both blindingly obvious—and nearly impossible—into another hustle.
Do stop trying to control what others do—blather this infuriatingly dull catchphrase and watch your cares skitter away! This is the stoicism of a Marcus Aurelius who works in Target’s marketing department. The jujitsu of self-improvement culture is that even in badgering you to let go, it’s making it all about You. Are You happy? Is Your navel buffed? Surely if You did your breathwork, life would be peachy.
Still not seeing results after ten days? Well, what’s wrong with You?
Let Them—and all its antecedents and successors—is part of a venerable tradition of therapeutic hucksterism that promises salvation through walking on coals, a squeaky-clean gut, a gratitude journal bound in vegan leather, or one more TED Talk delivered by someone in a hoodie and Allbirds. But if any of it worked, what would happen to the airport bookstore—and why are we still so miserable? Marketing masquerades as empowerment, but it breeds a uniquely American brand of passivity, in which multimillionaires urge the rest of us to loosen up while they franchise serenity at scale.
The American default position is to turn collective crisis into a personal branding moment. The political becomes psychological; the psychological becomes marketable. Instead of reckoning with reality—its chaos, its cruelty, its unavoidable demands—we turn inward. We meditate. We track our habits. We talk about boundaries on podcasts. We ostentatiously unplug to recharge, then log back on to cash in on the journey. We don’t organize, protest, or argue; we self-soothe. And when somebody in yoga pants exhales lobotomizing gibberish like let them, we rarely pause to ask: What the hell are you talking about?
Let Them reveals how blunted we’ve become—down to the language we use to describe human feeling. Everything is now a “tool,” every thought a “hack,” every moment of discomfort a “trauma response.” Every opportunity to delve deeper into a difficult subject is moronified into a “double click.” The real vocabulary of growth—effort, doubt, confrontation, responsibility—has been replaced by a flattened patois of therapeutic non-engagement. This isn’t wisdom. It’s an emotional cloaking device for a burned-out nation that wants to be left alone without guilt.
Pope Leo is part of a much older self-help program. It’s been riddled with corruption, scandal, and human failing—but at least it calls its followers to grace, not a seven-figure deal. At its best, it insists that salvation can’t be achieved through another personal makeover, but in seeking justice for the least among us. Maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll be a corrective to a society that routinely turns bland clichés into bestselling gospel and checks out of the world to take another selfie through the smudged lens of a front-facing camera.
We’ve become a culture so allergic to friction we’d rather gargle nothingness than stir the sediment of gritty reality. We hit the like button, we repost the mantra, and keep searching for the next glib guru to teach us what we already know.
Why on earth do we let them?
Yours ever,
Miles Raymond
The Dark Maestro by Brendan Slocumb
How cool is a planet that still makes room for classical music thrillers? Brendan Slocumb (The Violin Conspiracy) returns with another tale of crime, race, and stringed instruments—this time centering on cello prodigy Curtis Wilson, who rises from D.C.'s Anacostia projects to the New York Philharmonic. When his father Zippy, a drug dealer turned informant, flips on his former crew, Curtis and Larissa—Zippy’s girlfriend and the young musician’s fiercest champion—are swept into witness protection. But the music that saved Curtis also makes him a target. When the feds prove to be less than helpful, the trio takes matters into their own hands.
Drawing inspiration from a comic book character he invented as a kid, Curtis strikes back—no easy feat when you’re lugging a cello case. Slocumb spins a spirited, high-stakes yarn and gives us another unlikely hero to root for.
—Kara Milovy
The Catastrophe Hour by Meghan Daum
Timing really is everything. Late last month,
published an essay collection with a most catastrophic title. A few months earlier, her house burned down in the L.A. wildfires. This is an unhappy coincidence, not marketing. The essays here were completed ahead of that particular disaster, but they contemplate more subtle reversals—the kind that keep people in midlife pacing the floors well past midnight—with characteristic wit.Fans of Daum’s writing know she has a lyrical way of tallying up loss—youth, relationships, real estate, stuff—long before most of her possessions went up in smoke. But she’s eerily clairvoyant here, weighing the cost of being a woman on her own, accumulating baggage and worry lines in a high-priced, youth-worshipping town. And then there are her thoughts on the cheapening of her métier—the personal essay—as influencers (and their bots) spew out “content” at numbing volume, destroying the value of revelation.
The new information economy, she writes, turns us all into overgrown trick-or-treaters, performing for a few bits of candy. That may be true for some, but even in a tsunami of self-disclosure, she is a singular chronicler of a disaffected age.
—Alison Porchnik
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