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The Night of Fucking Adam

Note: This piece is part of an informal series of essays and stories about nights out in Japan that begin innocently enough and gradually drift into something closer to accidental anthropology. The settings vary—Kyoto bars, Osaka clubs, late-night taxis, shotengai corridors—but the structure is often the same: a few friends meet for drinks, the evening unfolds without much planning, and somewhere along the way the ordinary rules of social behavior begin to loosen.

The events described here took place during a long evening wandering through Osaka, eventually ending in the nightclub district of Shinsaibashi. Like many such nights, it contained a mixture of small cultural misunderstandings, unexpected friendships, minor chaos, and the strange solidarity that sometimes develops among strangers in bars after midnight.

The character known here as “Adam” was a young British traveler we met that evening and never saw again. The nickname “Fucking Adam” reflects the affectionate exasperation with which the phrase was used throughout the night rather than any serious judgment about the person himself. Anyone who has spent time traveling, drinking in unfamiliar cities, or navigating the unpredictable social ecosystems of late-night nightlife will likely recognize the type.

The intention of the piece is not to document a perfectly accurate timeline of events—after fifteen or so drinks spread across many hours, accuracy becomes a flexible concept—but rather to capture the texture of a particular kind of night: the slow drift from casual afternoon drinks into the surreal territory that sometimes appears around two or three in the morning when strangers collide and small incidents escalate into memorable stories.

In that sense, Adam becomes less an individual than a type. Every city has them. Every traveler eventually meets one. Occasionally, if the night runs long enough, we become one ourselves.

Epigraph:

“A ruinous eyesore, oh what is a mind for?
Just a knife in a lake, just an arrow in space.”
—The Swans

We met around four in the afternoon near Osaka Station, the three of us: Philip, Jack, and me. The plan, such as it was, was simple—have a few drinks and see where the night took us. Osaka is good for that. The city doesn’t require much in the way of planning. If you just start walking and follow the lights, something eventually happens.

Our first stop was a subterranean craft beer joint somewhere beneath the station complex. One of those places down a set of anonymous stairs where the ceiling is low, the taps are numerous, and everyone looks faintly conspiratorial, like they’ve all agreed to drink underground together.

We had a couple rounds there and then drifted through the shotengai behind the Hilton. Early evening shoppers were moving through with that unhurried Osaka pace. Nothing felt like the beginning of a legendary night. It just felt like a pleasant afternoon.

From there we crossed over to a classic American hamburger joint opposite the station. Vinyl booths, neon beer signs, and a bartender who had tattoos running down both forearms like vines. American rock played softly in the background. It felt like a movie set version of America dropped into central Osaka.

We ate burgers, drank more beer, and talked about absolutely nothing of consequence.

At some point Philip announced that what he really wanted that night was to go to a middle-aged club. To be clear, Philip was not shy about his intentions. He was, as he put it, “looking for MILFs.”

So we took a taxi down to Shinsaibashi.

The middle-aged club, unfortunately, was closed. It was only about eight and apparently the MILF scene doesn’t really get going until later.

So we did what you do in that situation: we wandered.

For the next four and a half hours we drifted around Shinsaibashi, moving from bar to bar in that loose, happy way nights sometimes unfold. By midnight we had covered a lot of territory. Between the three of us we had consumed something like fifteen drinks over thirteen hours. And yet only Philip seemed even remotely affected by them.

Around 1:30 we arrived at Sam and Dave’s, a legendary dive of a nightclub tucked into the chaos of Shinsaibashi. The security guy at the door looked us over and shrugged.

“Maybe dead now,” he said. “But gets good later.”

Inside it was a haze of smoke and terrible techno beats pounding from the speakers. The crowd was an odd mixture of people who were extremely drunk and people who appeared to be completely sober and studying the situation with curiosity. It was cooking by one-thirty.

Somewhere along the way we met a jovial twenty-year-old British guy named Adam.

Adam and Jack bonded almost immediately. They were trading insults in that cheerful British way—“you tosser,” “you old wanker,” that sort of thing—and it seemed harmless enough.

Meanwhile a group of Filipino girls had arrived, one of whom—Beverly—was extremely drunk and getting progressively more chaotic. Her friends were trying, without much success, to keep things under control.

At this moment Philip stepped in.

Philip has a well-developed instinct for white-knighting in situations where white-knighting is absolutely not required. He began talking to Beverly, which quickly escalated into something resembling a full-scale courtship right there on the dance floor.

Meanwhile Jack and Adam had begun dancing.

The problem was that they gradually migrated off the dance floor and onto a small raised stage that contained a drum kit and various musical equipment.

Within seconds drums were tipping over. Tables were sliding. A cymbal crashed onto the floor.

Security arrived immediately.

They pushed Jack aside and dragged Adam feet-first off the stage and into what appeared to be a small holding room behind the bar where, judging by the noises coming out of it, Adam was receiving a fairly vigorous beating.

Things deteriorated quickly after that.

Philip decided to treat everyone to Irish car bombs. Unfortunately the bartender had no idea how to make one, so Philip instructed him. The Guinness component somehow disappeared from the process and we ended up with small glasses of Baileys and Jameson.

Adam drank one.

At this point Adam completely lost his mind. He began loudly explaining how terrible the UK was, how he wanted to die, how the American guy earlier had stolen the chesty nurse he loved, and a variety of other philosophical positions.

Security eventually threw us out with minimal ceremony.

Outside the situation became even stranger.

Philip was pouring champagne into Beverly’s mouth near the elevator while her increasingly frantic friends asked me if he was a good person. Jack was trying to figure out where Adam was staying so he could get him into a taxi.

Adam responded by pushing Jack into a decorative pond.

Then he began throwing a water bottle at him like he was Bob Gibson pitching in the World Series.

At this point it was around five in the morning.

Philip abruptly announced he was leaving to meet some Brazilians. Adam remained in the pond shouting curses about our mothers. Jack climbed out, soaking wet.

We left.

Mackenzie took a taxi back to his hotel by the river. I caught the first train home from Shinsaibashi as the sun was coming up, completely exhausted.

And that was the night of Fucking Adam.

We never saw him again.

Dedication:

For Fucking Adams everywhere.
Long may you burn.

Note: if you like this essay, you may also like the essay below. It covers a similar slice of nightlife, this time in Kyoto.

On a Guy Called Whit (with a Cameo from Ambassador Rahm Emanuel)
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Are There Aliens In Our Oceans? An Objective Investigation

Note: This essay is written in the spirit of amused inquiry rather than firm conclusion. Human history is filled with reports of strange visions, unexplained lights, divine visitations, and unidentified aerial phenomena. The interpretation of such experiences has tended to shift with the cultural vocabulary of the time. Medieval Europeans often described encounters with saints or angels. In the twentieth century the language of extraterrestrials became available.

The psychologist Carl Jung famously suggested that UFO sightings may function partly as modern mythologies—symbolic attempts by societies to understand mysterious experiences in technological terms. Jung also observed, with characteristic dry humor, that UFOs often appear to be “somehow not photogenic.”

The present investigation was prompted by my brother Mike, who recently asserted via text message that extraterrestrials are currently residing in Earth’s oceans. His wife Coleen agreed. “They are everywhere,” she said. While this claim remains unverified, the oceans themselves are vast, poorly explored, and capable of sustaining a wide range of speculative hypotheses.

The purpose of the essay is therefore not to prove or disprove the existence of extraterrestrial life in the ocean. Rather, it is to examine why such ideas persist, how they resemble earlier historical visions—from medieval religious phenomena to modern UFO culture—and why the possibility continues to feel strangely plausible to otherwise reasonable adults.

Epigraph

There are aliens in our midst.

Wussy

The Jung Problem

At this point in the investigation one is reminded of a dry observation by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

Jung noted that UFOs possess a curious property: they are “somehow not photogenic.” Sightings multiply, witnesses speak with conviction, yet the documentation remains just slightly blurry.

Jung’s larger argument was that such phenomena often behave like modern myths. They appear at moments when societies are under stress, technological change is accelerating, and people are searching for new symbolic explanations of the world.

In other words, the sky fills with things.

Medieval Precedents

This pattern is not entirely new.

During certain periods of medieval Europe, particularly when grain supplies were contaminated by the fungus ergot, communities reported vivid religious visions: glowing figures in the sky, saints appearing in fields, the Virgin Mary materializing in unexpected places.

Ergot poisoning, now understood scientifically, can produce powerful hallucinations. But to the people experiencing them the visions were not chemical side effects. They were divine manifestations.

Entire crowds could witness miraculous shapes in the heavens or detect holy images in the crust of bread. A modern observer might diagnose environmental intoxication or collective suggestion. The participants experienced revelation.

The important point is that the content of the vision reflected the cultural vocabulary available at the time.

Medieval Europe saw saints. Modern America sees aliens.

One can see this dynamic clearly in the case of Joan of Arc. Joan reported hearing voices and receiving instructions from heavenly figures whom she identified as saints.

Historians generally accept that Joan sincerely believed these visions were divine communications.

But it is difficult not to notice that saints were the most advanced category of non-human intelligence available in fifteenth-century France. The conceptual vocabulary for extraterrestrials would not be invented for several hundred years.

Had Joan lived in the late twentieth century, it is at least possible that the same experience might have been interpreted somewhat differently.

She might have reported a craft.

The Cold War Sky

By the late 1940s the heavens had acquired a new cast of characters.

The famous incident near Roswell occurred in 1947, just as the Cold War was beginning to reorganize the world’s imagination. Reports of flying saucers multiplied. The mysterious visitors were described with increasing consistency: small grey beings with large heads and enormous eyes.

The explanation most often offered by the authorities was considerably less glamorous.

Weather balloons.

Strange objects falling from the sky during the early Cold War often turned out to be classified surveillance equipment. Unfortunately, the phrase “weather balloon” never fully satisfied the public imagination.

Aliens, after all, are much more interesting than meteorology.

The Mulder Doctrine

By the 1990s the entire mythology had been carefully systematized by American television.

The X-Files:

In the series, FBI agent Fox Mulder dedicates his career to investigating extraterrestrial activity after his sister Samantha is abducted from their home during childhood.

The abduction occurs at night. A strange light fills the room. The sister disappears.

Mulder spends the rest of his life attempting to prove that what he witnessed was real.

His partner, Dana Scully, is assigned to bring scientific skepticism to the enterprise. Their relationship gradually becomes one of the most beloved partnerships in television history, built on the productive tension between belief and doubt.

Entire generations of viewers absorbed the idea that somewhere in the sky—or possibly beneath the ocean—extraterrestrial activity might be quietly unfolding.

A Modern Lens

Seen from a slightly greater distance, the pattern begins to look familiar.

Medieval villagers saw saints because saints were the explanatory language available to them. Cold War Americans saw aliens because aliens had become the new vocabulary of the unknown.

Both phenomena may reflect the same basic human impulse: when confronted with mysterious experiences, we populate the heavens with the most compelling figures our culture provides.

Which brings us back to Mike.

So Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?

It must be admitted that if an advanced civilization from another planet wished to observe humanity without attracting attention, the deep ocean would offer several practical advantages. The environment is dark, difficult to access, and rarely visited by surface-dwelling primates equipped with submarines that can only remain operational for limited periods of time.

From a strategic standpoint, it would be an excellent hiding place.

This possibility has occurred to more than one observer, including my friend Mason, who recently suggested that a technologically sophisticated off-world civilization might simply have decided that the bottom of the ocean was the most convenient place to avoid the rest of us.

Provisional Conclusions

My brother Mike believes there are aliens in the ocean.

Carl Jung might have suggested that mysterious phenomena often adopt the symbolic clothing of their era. The Middle Ages had saints. The twentieth century produced extraterrestrials.

Mike has simply moved the story offshore.

The oceans remain vast and poorly explored. The woods remain dark and occasionally unsettling at night. Both environments have the correct atmospheric conditions for unexpected encounters.

If extraterrestrials are present, they may well prefer the sea.

But it would be a mistake to rule out the woods.

In either case, it seems wise to remain polite.

Footnote: The Ocean Logic

It must be admitted that if extraterrestrials wished to establish a long-term observational presence on Earth, the ocean would offer several advantages. Humans rarely visit the deep sea, and when we do we tend to leave fairly quickly due to crushing pressure, darkness, and the general inconvenience of breathing water.

From the perspective of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization attempting to avoid unnecessary interaction with our species, the ocean may therefore represent the single most sensible real estate on the planet.

Mike may, in other words, be thinking strategically.

POSTSCRIPT: Supplemental Testimony

Shortly after the investigation began, the primary witness—my brother Mike—provided additional clarification regarding his position.

According to Mike, extraterrestrial life has not only visited Earth’s oceans but has been present there for a considerable period of time. The aliens, he explained, appear to prefer the environment and have constructed bases beneath the sea.

When asked for supporting evidence, Mike cited the well-known Navy pilot videos showing unidentified aerial objects performing unusual maneuvers.

These videos—often referred to as the “Tic Tac” incidents—have circulated widely in recent years and are frequently interpreted as evidence of advanced technology of unknown origin.

Mike considers them decisive.

A second observer, his wife Colleen, agreed with this general assessment while expanding the hypothesis somewhat.

In her view, extraterrestrials may not be confined to the ocean at all. Rather, they may be present around us at all times.

According to Colleen, it is entirely possible that aliens walk among us.

At this stage of the investigation, these claims remain under review.

Dedication: For my brother Mike. I love you bro, but I still thinks them shits are in the woods.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below, which also discuss the famous psychologist Carl Jung.

Carl Jung’s Collected Works: I
Jungian Intimations: I
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On Why Sicario Is the Greatest Film of the 2010s

Note: This essay reflects on the film Sicario and its place within the cinema of the 2010s. It is written in the spirit of cultural criticism rather than formal film scholarship. My aim is not to produce a definitive ranking of the decade’s films, but to articulate why Sicario stands out as a particularly revealing work about power, violence, and the uneasy moral landscape of contemporary geopolitics.

The film’s depiction of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the covert war against drug cartels resonated strongly with me because it refuses many of the narrative comforts typical of American action cinema. Instead of heroic triumphs or clear moral resolutions, Sicario presents a world in which institutional power often operates through ambiguous methods and morally troubling compromises.

In that sense the film belongs to a small tradition of American cinema willing to look directly at the realities of U.S. involvement in Latin America. An earlier example is Salvador, which similarly attempted to depict American policy in the region without the usual patriotic framing.

Readers who disagree with the claim that Sicario is the greatest film of the 2010s are very much invited to do so. Film arguments are part of the pleasure of cinephile culture. The claim here is intentionally bold because bold claims tend to produce interesting conversations.

At the very least, the border extraction sequence alone earns Sicario a place among the most unforgettable cinematic moments of the past decade.

I first watched Sicario on Netflix.

Which is not the way great films are supposed to enter one’s life. Great films are meant to arrive in dark theaters, on enormous screens, in the company of strangers who feel the tension at the same moment you do. Netflix, by contrast, offers films casually, like items on a digital buffet.

But sometimes a movie survives even that.

Sicario does.

Within half an hour it becomes clear that the film is operating at a different frequency from most thrillers. The dialogue is spare. The pacing is deliberate. The camera lingers on landscapes and silences. Something about the atmosphere suggests that the story is heading somewhere morally uncomfortable.

Then comes the border crossing.

The Extraction

The convoy moves slowly toward the border crossing at Juárez. The mission seems straightforward: extract a prisoner from Mexico and return him to the United States. The vehicles move through traffic in tight formation. Nothing dramatic is happening yet.

And yet everything feels wrong. Cars begin to surround the convoy. Drivers stare from their windshields. Traffic slows to a crawl. The camera—guided by the extraordinary eye of Roger Deakins—cuts between glances, mirrors, steering wheels, hands resting near weapons. The tension builds with almost mathematical precision.

What makes the scene so powerful is not the violence itself but the certainty of its arrival. Everyone in the vehicles understands what is about to happen. The operators watch the surrounding cars with an eerie calm, as if they are simply waiting for a timer to run out.

Disaster is not possible. It is inevitable.

When the gunfire finally erupts it is sudden, efficient, and disturbingly professional. The scene ends almost as quickly as it began.

By the time the convoy crosses back into the United States, the viewer understands that the film is not interested in the usual heroics of the crime thriller. It is interested in something darker.

The Line Between Law and Power

Part of what makes Sicario extraordinary is the way it gradually dissolves the moral categories the audience expects.

Emily Blunt’s character, FBI agent Kate Macer, begins the film believing she is participating in a legitimate law enforcement operation. But as the mission unfolds, she begins to realize that the institutions she represents are operating according to rules that have very little to do with the law.

The key figure in this realization is the relaxed, almost cheerful CIA operative called Matt Graver played by Josh Brolin.

Graver is one of the film’s most fascinating characters because he openly blurs the lines between legality and strategy. He treats the war against the cartels not as a legal battle but as a geopolitical game in which certain rules simply no longer apply.

He jokes. He smiles. He reassures Kate that everything is under control. And yet the deeper the operation goes, the clearer it becomes that the “control” he represents has very little to do with justice.

Alejandro

If Matt Graver represents the pragmatic face of American power, Alejandro, played wonderfully by Benicio Del Toro, represents something older and more elemental. Alejandro is not a police officer or a soldier in any conventional sense. He is a weapon deployed inside the machinery of the state.

His presence reveals the film’s central truth: the war on drugs, as depicted here, is not really about drugs. It is about power, revenge, and the maintenance of geopolitical equilibrium through violence.

The final dinner-table scene—quiet, controlled, almost polite—delivers one of the most chilling moments in modern cinema.

Alejandro does not rage. He simply completes the task.

A Film Without Illusions

The reason Sicario stands above most films of the 2010s is that it refuses to decorate its subject with comforting illusions.

American cinema has often struggled to portray U.S. foreign policy in Latin America with any degree of honesty. Films frequently soften the narrative with patriotic framing or moral reassurance. Sicario does the opposite.

In that sense it belongs to a small tradition of films willing to examine American power without the usual gloss. One earlier example is
Salvador.

Like Salvador, Sicario presents U.S. involvement in the politics and violence of the region not as a heroic intervention but as a complicated and morally ambiguous system of influence.

The film does not sermonize about this reality. It simply shows it.

The Craft

What elevates the film from strong political thriller to masterpiece is its extraordinary craftsmanship. Director Denis Villeneuve constructs the story with remarkable restraint. Exposition is minimal. Dialogue is sparse. Much of the narrative unfolds through mood and implication rather than explanation.

Roger Deakins’ cinematography turns the borderlands into a stark visual landscape of highways, deserts, and shadowy tunnels.

And the score by Jóhann Jóhannsson provides the film’s subterranean heartbeat—deep, rumbling tones that feel less like music than like distant artillery beneath the earth.

Together these elements create an atmosphere that is almost hypnotic.

The Film of the Decade

Every decade produces films that entertain, and a smaller number that capture the psychological mood of their time. Sicario belongs to the second category.

The 2010s were a decade in which institutions increasingly appeared opaque, power operated through indirect mechanisms, and the line between legality and strategy often seemed disturbingly thin.

Sicario does not attempt to solve these problems. It simply looks at them without flinching.

And that honesty may be precisely why it stands as the greatest film of its decade.

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On The Dubious Anna Delvey

Note: This essay reflects on the curious cultural figure of Anna Delvey, whose rise and fall in the New York art and social scene became one of the stranger morality plays of the late 2010s. Delvey—born Anna Sorokin in Russia—gained notoriety for presenting herself as a wealthy European heiress while attempting to secure loans and social capital for an ambitious but largely imaginary cultural venture known as the Anna Delvey Foundation.

The events described here draw on widely reported elements of the case: Delvey’s years moving through luxury hotels in Manhattan, her efforts to obtain financing for a private art and social club, the unraveling of her financial claims, and the now-famous trip to Dubai in which a friend—later a magazine writer documenting the experience—was left responsible for an enormous hotel bill after promised funds failed to appear.

The piece does not attempt investigative reporting. Instead, it approaches the story in a spirit of cultural anthropology. Cities like New York have always attracted individuals engaged in various forms of self-invention. The line between ambition, performance, exaggeration, and outright fraud can sometimes appear only after events have run their course. Delvey’s story is compelling partly because it dramatizes this thin boundary in unusually vivid form.

If the tone here sometimes drifts toward sympathy rather than condemnation, that is intentional. Many urban cultural scenes—especially art worlds—operate on the energy of strivers who are, in one way or another, attempting to become something slightly larger than their present circumstances allow. Most of them eventually succeed or quietly disappear. A very small number, like Delvey, collapse in public.

Their stories reveal something not only about themselves, but about the environments that briefly believed in them.

Epigraph

“For all the crazy people who can never get it right.”
— Drugstore

I. The Entrance

There is a certain kind of person who arrives in a city not merely to live there but to declare themselves into existence. Cities like New York attract them the way bright lights attract moths. They arrive with luggage, ideas, clothes that signal belonging, and an almost reckless confidence that the future will eventually arrange itself around their intentions.

Anna Delvey was one of these people.

When she appeared in the New York art scene, she seemed to possess the basic ingredients required for entry into that peculiar ecosystem: style, confidence, and an air of European mystery. She wore expensive-looking dresses and shoes. She wore aa lot of make up and had her hair done at expensive salons. She seemed for a while to ooze money. She spoke casually about ambitious cultural projects. She moved through hotels and restaurants as if she had always belonged to that world. In New York, that is often enough.

The city runs on confidence performances. Every ambitious young person who arrives there is, in some sense, performing the life they intend to have. The art world especially is full of people who are not yet what they claim to be but are working very hard to become it.

Delvey fit into that theater perfectly.

II. The Vision

The striking thing about Delvey was that she didn’t simply want to attend the art scene. She wanted to build something inside it. Her idea was the Anna Delvey Foundation: a kind of private cultural club and exhibition space in downtown Manhattan. It would combine gallery spaces, social rooms, events, artists, patrons, and the atmosphere of a private cultural salon. A place where the city’s creative and wealthy classes might gather.

The plan was grand. But it also had a strange plausibility. New York is full of institutions that began with the ambition of a single person who simply decided that something should exist and then spent years convincing others to believe in it.

Delvey spoke about the project with total conviction. She behaved like someone who already possessed the financial backing required to make such a thing happen. And because she behaved that way, many people assumed the money must exist somewhere.

This is one of the basic mechanics of social confidence. If someone carries themselves like a person whose financial arrangements have already been verified by someone else, most people will not ask too many questions.

III. Hotels

Hotels played a central role in the Delvey story.

Luxury hotels are perfect environments for people living inside ambitious performances. They operate on the assumption that their guests are legitimate. The bill will eventually be settled. The credit line exists somewhere. The guest’s presence itself is treated as evidence of solvency.

Delvey floated through some of New York’s most expensive hotels as if she were simply another wealthy European visitor temporarily residing there while arranging various cultural affairs. The lobbies, the restaurants, the rooms—all of it provided a stage set that reinforced the story she was telling.

Hotels also create a particular social atmosphere. Everyone is temporarily suspended between identities. People are traveling, negotiating, arriving, leaving. It is a place where someone can exist slightly outside the ordinary structures of verification.

For a while, the performance worked.

IV. The Father

Like many figures who construct elaborate new identities, Delvey carried with her a somewhat murky origin story.

She spoke of family wealth. Of connections. Of a background that seemed to hover somewhere between Russia and Germany, between modest beginnings and more glamorous narratives.

Her real childhood was more ambiguous. Her father had worked as a truck driver and later operated a heating and cooling business. It was a respectable, ordinary life. But it did not contain the European aristocratic wealth that sometimes appeared in Delvey’s stories.

This kind of ambiguity is not unusual among people attempting radical self-invention. The past becomes something flexible, something that can be rearranged slightly in order to support the person one intends to become.

In cities like New York, such reinvention is practically a tradition.

V. Dubai

The most extraordinary episode in the Delvey saga took place far from Manhattan, on a trip to Dubai. Delvey traveled there with a friend—a magazine writer who was documenting the glamorous world that Delvey seemed to inhabit. The trip was meant to be luxurious: private villas, elaborate dinners, the kind of extravagant travel that confirms a person’s social status.

For a few days everything unfolded according to the script. And then the bill arrived. The charges for the trip reached roughly $60,000. Delvey’s payment arrangements suddenly failed. The promised wire transfers did not appear. The hotel demanded settlement.

And the friend—the magazine writer who had been invited along for the ride—found herself responsible for the enormous bill. So Delvey left her there. Super bad business Anna baby.

It was a moment that perfectly captured the strange mechanics of confidence artistry. The performance works right up until the moment when reality insists on payment.

Someone, eventually, must pay the bill.

VI. Collapse

Once the financial machinery began to fail, the unraveling accelerated. Banks wanted documentation. Hotels wanted payment. Institutions that had briefly entertained the idea of supporting Delvey’s foundation began to ask more detailed questions about the supposed trust fund that would finance it.

The answers did not exist. The performance collapsed. Delvey was eventually arrested, tried, and convicted of fraud.

VII. The Strange Sympathy

And yet the Delvey story produced a strangely sympathetic public response. Perhaps it was because she had not simply been extracting money for luxury purchases. She had been trying, in her own improbable way, to create something. A cultural institution. A social space. A downtown hub for art and ambition.

The plan was impossible, but the ambition was recognizable. Many people—especially those drawn to cities like New York—understand the impulse to reinvent oneself, to construct a future through sheer force of belief. Delvey simply pushed that impulse far beyond the point where the arithmetic could sustain it.

VIII. Coda

In the end, the most interesting thing about Anna Delvey may not be that she fooled people. New York has always been full of people attempting improbable social performances. The interesting thing is that, for a moment, she came very close to building the life she imagined. And perhaps that is why stories like hers continue to fascinate us. They remind us that the line between visionary and impostor is often visible only in hindsight.

Dedication: For Anna baby (you’re hot BTW) and all the beautiful strivers out there. May your world-curated art spaces someday come true.

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On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks III: Amy Winehouse

Note: This short piece reflects on the strange artistic tension that defined the career of Amy Winehouse: the way her extraordinary authenticity as a singer seemed inseparable from the personal instability that surrounded her life.

Winehouse’s music—especially the songs on Back to Black—felt at once timeless and painfully immediate. The sound drew deeply from earlier traditions of soul and rhythm and blues, yet the emotional directness of the lyrics was unmistakably modern. Few artists have managed to sound so rooted in musical history while simultaneously feeling so exposed to the present moment.

The song Rehab stands as the clearest example of this tension. Its humor, defiance, and vulnerability all exist in the same breath, making it one of the most distinctive pop recordings of the twenty-first century.

Like many listeners, I remember the late-2000s period—particularly around the Glastonbury era—when Winehouse was both an enormous star and visibly struggling. Watching those performances could feel uneasy, yet the brilliance of the voice was undeniable. The same intensity that made the music so compelling also made her career difficult to sustain.

This piece is simply an attempt to think about that paradox: how authenticity and self-destruction can sometimes become intertwined in the lives of great artists.

There are many great singers, but very few voices that feel instantly definitional—voices that seem to arrive already carrying an entire world inside them.

Amy Winehouse was one of those voices.

By the time her second album, Back to Black, exploded in the mid-2000s, it already felt as though she had stepped fully formed out of some earlier musical era. The sound was unmistakably rooted in Motown and 1960s soul, yet the lyrics were brutally modern—messy, confessional, sometimes almost painfully direct.

Winehouse didn’t just sing about heartbreak and addiction. She sang about them as if the audience had wandered into the middle of a private argument she was having with herself.

That tension—between authentic confession and visible self-destruction—became the defining element of her career.

You could hear it most clearly in Rehab, which remains one of the most distinctive pop songs of the twenty-first century. The song is catchy, almost playful on the surface, driven by a swinging brass section that feels lifted from a lost Stax session.

But the lyrics are something else entirely.

They tried to make me go to rehab / I said no, no, no.

It’s funny. It’s defiant. It’s also deeply unsettling, because the listener quickly realizes that the singer is not playing a character. The refusal at the center of the song is real.

In that sense “Rehab” became more than a hit single. It became a kind of thesis statement for the strange artistic space Winehouse occupied. The same vulnerability that gave her music its emotional power also exposed the raw nerves of her life to public view.

You could feel that tension during the years when she was both at the height of her fame and visibly unraveling.

The Glastonbury era captured this perfectly. Winehouse had become a massive international star, yet her stage presence could swing wildly from moment to moment. One minute she would be commanding the crowd with that huge, smoky voice; the next she might appear distracted, fragile, or physically unsteady.

Watching those performances could be oddly uncomfortable. The audience was witnessing genuine brilliance, but it often felt as though the brilliance was emerging from a life that was spinning out of control.

And yet the authenticity of the music was inseparable from that volatility.

Winehouse sang as if every lyric had been torn directly out of lived experience. There was no polite distance between the artist and the material. When she sang about jealousy, addiction, or heartbreak, it sounded less like performance and more like confession.

That quality made her music electrifying. It also made her career precarious.

Pop music has always had a complicated relationship with self-destructive artists. Audiences are drawn to performers who seem emotionally transparent, but the same intensity that produces great art can also be difficult to sustain under the glare of fame.

Winehouse lived inside that contradiction.

The tabloids followed her relentlessly. Every public misstep, every argument, every sign of physical decline became part of a growing media narrative. The spectacle sometimes threatened to overwhelm the music itself.

Yet when she stepped to the microphone and began to sing, the spectacle vanished.

What remained was that extraordinary voice: raw, soulful, and oddly timeless, as if it had traveled forward from another musical generation. In a pop landscape often dominated by carefully engineered personas, Winehouse sounded startlingly real.

That authenticity is why her work still resonates long after her death in 2011.

Many talented singers release successful albums. Only a handful manage to create songs that feel permanently etched into the culture. “Rehab” is one of those songs. The moment those opening horns start, the listener knows exactly what world they are entering.

It is the world of Amy Winehouse: funny, defiant, wounded, brilliant.

A place where honesty and self-destruction were never quite separable—and where the truth of the music was powerful enough to survive them both.

Note:

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Some Everyday Catalyzed Emergencies

Note: The examples in this piece are drawn from moments in my own life where the structure I call a catalyzed emergency appeared in miniature.

What these moments share is not their subject matter but their pattern. A system—whether emotional, institutional, or social—exists in a temporary equilibrium. Then a relatively small catalyst activates tensions that were already present beneath the surface. Once activated, the situation accelerates and decisions that previously seemed distant are suddenly made in real time.

In each case, the catalytic moment itself was small: a candid remark during a conference break, a humorous but revealing line in a professional meeting, or a single sentence spoken in a social situation. Yet in each instance the effect was immediate. The atmosphere shifted, ambiguity collapsed, and the underlying structure of the situation suddenly became visible.

The personal examples described here are therefore not offered as dramatic events in themselves. Their significance lies in the way they illustrate, at the scale of everyday life, the same structural pattern that appears in larger historical crises.

Catalyzed emergencies, it turns out, are not rare occurrences reserved for moments of world history. They happen quietly and frequently in ordinary human experience.

Once you begin thinking about catalyzed emergencies, it becomes difficult not to see them everywhere.

Most of life proceeds in a kind of provisional calm. Conversations unfold along familiar paths. Institutions conduct their meetings, relationships drift through their usual rhythms, and the tensions that exist beneath the surface remain politely contained. Decisions are postponed. Conflicts are softened by habit. The system holds together because nothing has yet forced it to reveal its deeper structure.

Then something small happens.

A sentence is spoken a little too plainly.
A truth appears unexpectedly in the middle of a casual conversation.
Someone says something in a meeting that suddenly exposes the machinery of the institution.

The catalyst itself is often tiny compared to the shift that follows. Yet once it occurs, the atmosphere changes almost immediately. Decisions that once felt distant suddenly move into the present. The underlying structure—emotional, institutional, or relational—becomes visible.

Once you start noticing these moments, you realize they are everywhere.

I remember one such moment during a conference break with the young woman I call Isobel. We were talking in that loose, slightly intimate way people sometimes do between sessions, when the formal structure of the day has momentarily dissolved. The conversation drifted into unexpectedly personal territory, and at one point she mentioned something about her private life that was startlingly candid.

The remark itself was quiet and almost offhand. Nothing in the hallway changed. People were still pouring coffee, drifting between rooms, checking their schedules. The conference continued exactly as it had a few minutes before.

Yet internally something shifted very quickly.

A boundary that had previously existed only as an assumption was suddenly visible. The emotional geometry of the situation rearranged itself in an instant. It was one of those moments when the surface calm of an interaction suddenly reveals the deeper structure beneath it.

Looking back, it was a perfect example of a small catalyzed emergency. The remark itself did not create the tension that followed. It simply activated something that had already been present but unspoken.

Institutional life produces similar moments, though usually in a different register.

Years ago I attended a meeting where Steve Keegan, then responsible for development at the International Baccalaureate, delivered one of the most unintentionally perfect lines I have ever heard in a professional setting. Attempting to strike a tone of humility, he reassured the room that the organization should not think too highly of itself.

“We are not special,” he said.

Then, after a brief pause that only improved the effect, he added:

“Of course we are unique and special in many ways.”

The room erupted in laughter, not because anyone intended to mock him but because the remark revealed something everyone recognized instantly. Institutions often survive on carefully balanced narratives about themselves—humble yet exceptional, ordinary yet distinctive. When those narratives momentarily contradict themselves in public, the entire room suddenly becomes aware of the structure holding the organization together.

Again, the catalyst was small: a single sentence.

But in that moment the underlying psychology of the institution briefly revealed itself. Everyone in the room could see the gears turning.

The same pattern appears in more personal moments as well, sometimes with surprisingly decisive consequences.

I remember a night when a man was attempting to pick up Mariko. It was the sort of situation that unfolds quietly in bars and restaurants all over the world—nothing dramatic, just two people talking while someone else tries to determine what role they themselves are supposed to play in the unfolding scene.

For a while the equilibrium held. The conversation drifted, the man continued his efforts, and I watched the situation with the vague uncertainty that sometimes accompanies these moments. Was I a bystander? A friend? Something else?

Eventually I said something very simple.

“We’re together.”

That was it. A single sentence. A declaration that had not existed in explicit form until the moment it was spoken.

But the effect was immediate.

The conversation stopped. The geometry of the room rearranged itself instantly. What had previously been ambiguous became clear. The situation resolved itself within seconds.

Looking back, it was another catalyzed emergency. The sentence itself did not create the underlying possibility. That possibility had already been present in the emotional structure of the evening. What the sentence did was activate it, collapsing uncertainty into decision.

The remarkable thing about these moments is how small they often appear at the time. They do not arrive with the dramatic clarity of historical turning points. They slip quietly into the flow of ordinary life—a conversation during a break, a remark in a meeting, a sentence spoken in a bar.

Only later does the pattern become visible.

Most of life feels gradual while we are living it. Days follow one another in a steady rhythm. Institutions maintain their procedures. Relationships drift along familiar channels. The tensions that shape events accumulate quietly beneath the surface, rarely forcing themselves into view.

Then something small happens.

A remark.
A confession.
A declaration.

And suddenly the structure reveals itself.

The catalyst may be nothing more than a sentence spoken at exactly the right moment. But once the reaction begins, the system rarely returns to its previous state unchanged.

Note: This is Part III is our series on the concept of the “Catalyzed Emergency.” You can read the other two essays below.

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In Defense of Conor Oberst

Note: This essay focuses on the songwriting of Conor Oberst and the broader arc of his work as a writer and performer. It does not attempt to settle every critical debate about his career or evaluate the many shifting narratives that have surrounded him over the years.

Instead, the argument here is simpler: when listeners return to the songs themselves — especially pieces like “Cape Canaveral,” “Easy/Lucky/Free,” and “I Didn’t Know What I Was In For” — the caricature of Oberst as merely an overwrought diarist becomes difficult to sustain. Whatever one thinks of the mythology around him, the writing continues to reward careful listening.

For more than twenty years now it has been fashionable to treat Conor Oberst as a kind of permanent adolescent: the patron saint of overwrought confession, the boy genius who mistook emotional intensity for wisdom and simply never grew out of it. Even listeners who admired the early records sometimes adopt a gentle condescension when talking about him now. Those songs were powerful, they say, but they belonged to a particular moment — a moment of youthful melodrama that serious listeners eventually leave behind.

The outline is familiar. Too many feelings. Too many words. Too much trembling urgency in the voice. Somewhere along the way Oberst became shorthand for the idea that emotional sincerity, taken too far, turns embarrassing.

But like many tidy cultural narratives, this one collapses as soon as you start listening carefully again.

The first thing worth remembering is that Oberst began writing and recording music at an age when most people are still learning how to articulate their own thoughts. The early Bright Eyes records captured something very specific: the internal weather of late adolescence and early adulthood. The confusion, the moral absolutism, the sudden swings between despair and hope. Critics often call this melodrama, but melodrama is sometimes just another word for emotional honesty before the world teaches you to disguise it.

What Oberst did during those years was document the process of becoming a person. The songs are full of doubt, self-contradiction, and grand declarations that may not survive contact with reality. But that is exactly how young consciousness works. It moves through extremes. It searches for certainty and then dismantles it. Listening to those records now is less like hearing a performance than like reading a diary written in real time while the author tries to understand himself.

The voice, which so many critics found grating, was central to that effect. Oberst sang as if the words were arriving at the exact moment he needed them. The wavering pitch, the occasional cracks, the sense of someone pushing language slightly faster than it could comfortably travel — all of that created the feeling of urgency. It sounded like a mind thinking out loud.

The strange thing about Oberst’s career is that this intensity became the very thing people later held against him. Emotional transparency, once celebrated as authenticity, gradually hardened into caricature. Listeners who had grown older began to treat the songs as artifacts from a younger self they preferred not to revisit. Oberst did not change enough for some critics, while for others he changed too much.

But the best way to understand his writing is to look closely at several songs that capture the full range of what he does. “Cape Canaveral,” from his 2008 solo record, is often cited by fans as one of his finest achievements, and for good reason. The song moves with a calm, reflective confidence, drifting through memory, regret, and travel before arriving at a quietly devastating insight: “Every time I try to pick up the pieces / Something shatters.” The writing has none of the frantic urgency critics associate with Oberst. Instead it feels mature, patient, almost philosophical — proof that his gift for emotional clarity did not disappear when he left his early twenties.

Another example arrives with “Easy/Lucky/Free,” one of the defining songs from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The track looks outward rather than inward, sketching a world where technology and surveillance gradually erode the illusion of personal freedom. The chorus lands with a mixture of dread and irony that feels more prophetic with every passing year. What might once have sounded like youthful paranoia now reads as a remarkably prescient meditation on the digital age.

And then there is “I Didn’t Know What I Was In For,” perhaps the most quietly devastating song of Oberst’s middle period. The track unfolds with almost conversational simplicity, recounting memories of youth, friendship, and the slow arrival of adult responsibility. By the time the final lines arrive — “You said that you hate my suffering / And you understood / And I said that I love you too” — the song has achieved something rare: a portrait of adulthood that feels honest without becoming cynical.

Taken together, these songs reveal the real architecture of Oberst’s songwriting. Beneath the reputation for emotional excess lies a writer deeply concerned with memory, time, and the fragile ways people try to make sense of their lives. His best work captures the moment when experience shifts from confusion into recognition — when a half-formed feeling finally finds the right words.

Another reason Oberst’s work continues to resonate is that he writes from inside experience rather than from a critical distance. Many songwriters polish their observations until the emotional edges disappear. Oberst tends to leave the edges intact. His songs preserve the awkwardness, the uncertainty, the half-formed thoughts that accompany real moments of reflection. The result is sometimes messy, occasionally excessive, but often uncannily recognizable.

This quality also explains why Oberst has remained so influential among younger songwriters. He helped create a space in indie music where vulnerability could coexist with literary ambition. The songs suggested that personal confession and careful craft were not mutually exclusive. For a generation of listeners trying to articulate their own emotional lives, that permission mattered.

None of this means that every Oberst record works equally well, or that every lyric survives scrutiny. A career built on openness will inevitably produce uneven moments. But the larger body of work tells a more interesting story than the caricature of a permanently anguished songwriter. It shows an artist who has spent decades documenting the slow evolution of a restless mind.

And perhaps that is the real reason Oberst continues to provoke such divided reactions. His songs refuse to adopt the protective distance that many listeners eventually develop toward their own past selves. Instead they remain exposed — still searching, still uncertain, still willing to ask questions that adulthood often teaches us to bury under routine.

In that sense the emotional intensity people once dismissed as youthful melodrama begins to look different. It becomes a record of someone refusing to abandon the difficult work of feeling deeply about the world. For listeners willing to meet him there, the songs offer something rare in modern music: the sound of a consciousness continuing to unfold, one uneasy thought at a time.

Note: This is the third piece in our series “In Defense Of.” Iy you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the one on Mark Kozelek. You can access it below.

In Defense of Mark Kozelek
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In Defense of Mark Kozelek

Note: This essay addresses the artistic approach of Mark Kozelek as a songwriter. It does not attempt to evaluate or adjudicate the various personal controversies that have circulated around him in recent years, many of which remain publicly disputed and complex.

The focus here is narrower: how Kozelek’s long-form, diaristic songwriting works as a musical method — particularly in songs like “Ali/Spinks II,” where ordinary details accumulate into something emotionally larger. Whatever one thinks of the artist as a person, the question of how the music itself functions remains worth examining on its own terms.

For several years now it has been fashionable to treat Mark Kozelek as something like an exhausted case: a brilliant songwriter who wandered too far into self-absorption, whose songs became too long, too diaristic, too willing to linger on the small debris of daily life. Even some longtime listeners have adopted the shorthand. Early records were masterpieces; later ones were indulgent. The verdict sounds tidy. But like most tidy verdicts in music, it collapses as soon as you start listening again.

The basic complaint about Kozelek’s later work is well known. The songs stretch past ten minutes. The lyrics catalog ordinary events: hotel rooms, meals, airports, old friends, television shows, half-remembered conversations. The narrator seems to be narrating his own day in real time, occasionally pausing to note a basketball score or a passing cloud of melancholy. To critics raised on the discipline of verse-chorus songwriting, this can sound like navel-gazing elevated to an art form.

But the strange thing about Kozelek’s music is that the minutiae are not actually the point. They are the atmosphere. His songs work less like traditional compositions and more like extended walks through consciousness. The grocery lists, the memories of old bands, the stray anecdotes about touring musicians — all of it forms the texture through which something else slowly emerges. A mood. A sense of time passing. The feeling of being a person moving through an ordinary day while carrying decades of memory.

The best way to understand this approach is to listen carefully to “Ali/Spinks II,” one of the central tracks from Benji. The song begins almost casually, recounting the death of Kozelek’s cousin and drifting through fragments of memory connected to that loss. There is no obvious structure, no chorus that arrives to organize the material. Instead the narrative moves the way memory moves: sideways, unpredictably, circling back on itself. The details accumulate slowly until the emotional core of the story becomes unavoidable. What begins as a series of seemingly unrelated observations eventually reveals itself as a meditation on grief, family history, and the strange ways tragedy ripples through ordinary life. The song is long, messy, and digressive — and it works precisely because of those qualities. “Ali/Spinks II” is not merely an example of Kozelek’s method; it is the test case. If the listener accepts the logic of that song, the entire later catalog suddenly makes sense.

This approach did not come out of nowhere. Kozelek has always been a writer drawn to the long arc of a song. Even in the early days of Red House Painters, the music moved at a patient pace, letting chords hang in the air while the lyrics circled around regret, nostalgia, and quiet observation. What changed later was not the impulse but the level of exposure. The lens moved closer. The songs stopped pretending to be about characters and admitted they were about the singer himself.

For some listeners that shift felt like a loss of mystery. But there is another way to hear it. Kozelek’s later records are essentially field recordings of a mind at work. They capture the strange mixture of memory, boredom, humor, irritation, and melancholy that makes up ordinary consciousness. Most songwriters edit this material down to the highlights. Kozelek leaves it mostly intact. The result is less like reading a poem and more like sitting beside someone during a long drive while they talk about whatever crosses their mind.

The famous outbursts that circulate online tend to obscure this. Kozelek has never been particularly careful about public performance of personality, and that roughness often dominates the narrative around him. When he released the song “War on Drugs: Suck My Dick,” a public feud with The War on Drugs instantly became the headline. The track was petty, funny, abrasive, and entirely unnecessary — which is to say it was perfectly consistent with the same impulsive candor that fuels his songwriting. Kozelek has never seemed particularly interested in polishing the public version of himself.

But the deeper argument about his music usually centers on the accusation of self-indulgence. Why should listeners care about the details of a songwriter’s daily routine? Why should a song wander through anecdotes about hotels, meals, or aging friends? Why should anyone sit through ten or twelve minutes of conversational narrative when a tight three-minute composition could deliver the emotional payload more efficiently?

Kozelek himself once answered that question in a line that perfectly captures his stubborn philosophy: he said he liked playing shows for “dudes in tennis shoes.” The phrase sounds casual, almost dismissive, but it carries a small manifesto inside it. He is not writing for critics parsing lyrical elegance or for industry tastemakers deciding what counts as proper songcraft. He is writing for ordinary listeners who recognize the shape of everyday life — the boredom, the odd digressions, the strange humor that creeps into conversation when people talk long enough.

In that sense Kozelek’s songs resemble a certain kind of late-night storytelling more than traditional music. Imagine someone sitting across the table recounting a memory that begins in one place, wanders through several unrelated details, circles back to a childhood story, and eventually lands somewhere unexpectedly moving. The emotional impact arrives not through compression but through accumulation. You spend time inside the story until its meaning quietly surfaces.

The length of the songs, which so many critics treat as evidence of indulgence, is actually central to the effect. Time itself becomes part of the composition. The listener settles into the rhythm of the narration. Small details begin to gather weight simply because they have been allowed to exist long enough. By the time the song ends, the ordinary events that seemed trivial at the beginning have become part of a larger emotional landscape.

This is not the only way to write songs, and it is certainly not the most efficient one. But efficiency has never been Kozelek’s artistic goal. His music belongs to a tradition of artists who treat the everyday as worthy of sustained attention. The diary becomes the canvas. The passing moment becomes the subject. Instead of distilling experience into a polished metaphor, the songwriter simply records the experience itself and trusts that meaning will accumulate over time.

If that approach sometimes borders on excess, it also produces moments that feel uncannily real. A stray observation about a friend can suddenly open into a meditation on aging. A casual mention of a hotel room can turn into a reflection on the strange loneliness of touring musicians. The emotional truth arrives sideways, hidden among the details of ordinary life.

Which brings us back to the central criticism: that the songs are too long, too detailed, too inward. All of that is true. But it may also be precisely why they matter. Kozelek’s music asks listeners to do something that modern culture rarely encourages anymore — to slow down, to sit with the flow of another person’s thoughts, to accept that meaning often appears gradually rather than in a neatly packaged chorus.

Not every listener will have patience for that. But for those willing to spend time inside the songs, the reward is a strangely intimate experience: the feeling of inhabiting someone else’s memory stream for a while. The tennis shoes crowd, in other words, may understand something that critics occasionally miss. Sometimes the most honest art does not arrive in the form of a perfectly shaped statement. Sometimes it arrives as a long conversation that refuses to end too quickly.

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In Defense of Ryan Adams

Note: This essay is not an attempt to defend Ryan Adams the person. It’s an attempt to defend the continued seriousness of the music. The distinction matters, even if our cultural conversations sometimes pretend it doesn’t. Also, I fucking love Ryan Adams. He is the motherfucking man.

Epigraph:

“When the stars go blue.”
— Ryan Adams

For several years now it has been socially safer to treat Ryan Adams as a closed case: talented songwriter, personal flaws, cultural exile. The outline is familiar enough that most people no longer bother to revisit the work itself. But the strange thing about Adams is that the songs refuse to cooperate with the narrative. They remain stubbornly alive — hundreds of them scattered across albums, demos, and late-night recordings — carrying the same bruised intelligence that first made people pay attention twenty-five years ago. At some point the question stops being whether Ryan Adams is an admirable person. The real question becomes harder and less comfortable: what do we do with an artist whose flaws are obvious but whose music continues to tell the truth in ways very few writers can manage?

Part of the problem is that Ryan Adams belongs to an older model of songwriting — the kind where the emotional life of the artist is inseparable from the work. The songs are confessional without being literal, personal without being autobiographical in any simple way. From the early Whiskeytown albums, to his solo debut Heartbreaker, on to today, Adams has always written like someone sitting in the wreckage of his own choices and trying to understand what just happened. That voice — raw, impulsive, often heartbroken, sometimes self-pitying, often painfully perceptive — was never tidy. It wasn’t supposed to be. The appeal of Adams at his best has always been that the songs arrive before the moral cleanup crew.

When the accusations against him surfaced in 2019, the cultural machinery moved quickly. Adams’s shows were cancelled for a while, he was dropped from projects, and reclassified overnight as an artist whose work had become morally contaminated. Some listeners stopped listening immediately. Others quietly kept listening but stopped talking about it in public. The silence that followed was oddly complete. In a culture that usually thrives on argument, the Ryan Adams conversation simply evaporated.

That disappearance is revealing. It suggests that many people were less interested in wrestling with the complexity of the situation than in resolving it as quickly as possible. Once the story had a clear villain, the cultural instinct was to move on.

But the songs remain.

Listen again to Come Pick Me Up, and you hear a man cataloguing his own emotional incompetence with surgical clarity. Oh My Sweet Carolina still carries that strange mixture of homesickness and resignation that only a handful of songwriters ever capture. Later work — Ashes & Fire, Prisoner, Chris, the better moments of the sprawling archive that followed — continues the same project: the slow documentation of a person trying, often unsuccessfully, to live with himself.

None of this absolves Adams of anything. It doesn’t erase the accounts of people who describe him as manipulative, volatile, or worse. If anything, the songs themselves suggest that those accounts are not entirely surprising. Adams has been writing about his own volatility for decades. The records are full of it — jealousy, insecurity, emotional chaos, the constant sense of someone struggling to regulate the intensity of his own personality.

What the songs also reveal, though, is a rare level of self-awareness about his own condition. Adams’ best work doesn’t present him as a romantic hero. It presents him as part of the problem.

And that distinction matters.

One of the stranger habits of contemporary cultural criticism is the belief that the value of a work of art should track the moral cleanliness of the person who made it. This is a comforting idea, but it collapses under the slightest historical pressure. Much of the art people still revere emerged from personalities that were messy, selfish, unstable, or worse. Songwriters, perhaps more than most artists, tend to write directly from the fault lines of their own lives.

If we demanded perfect character from every songwriter whose music we admire, the history of popular music would shrink dramatically.

The more interesting question is not whether Ryan Adams deserves redemption. That is not something critics or listeners are qualified to grant. The question is whether the songs themselves still carry meaning once the mythology surrounding the artist has been stripped away.

In Adams’ case, the answer seems to be yes.

The songs are still precise. The emotional details still land. Lines that once felt like romantic exaggeration now sound more like documentation — the sound of a man who understands, perhaps too late, the patterns that keep repeating in his life.

There is something oddly honest about that.

The best Ryan Adams songs have always sounded like dispatches from someone who knows he is partly responsible for the wreckage he is describing. They are not pleas for sympathy so much as attempts at recognition — moments where the singer steps outside himself long enough to see the pattern clearly.

That is why the music persists even when the cultural narrative surrounding it has hardened.

The songs were never about innocence. They were about self-knowledge.

And self-knowledge, even when it comes from flawed people, is still one of the things art is uniquely good at revealing.

Dedication

For Ryan, one of the five greatest songwriters ever and the motherfucking man. I love you baby.

Note: If you like this essay, you may like these others in the same “In Defense Of” series.

In Defense of Conor Oberst
In Defense of Mark Kozelek
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On Talent and Talent Spotting

This piece grew out of ordinary days at school rather than any single dramatic event. It’s about leadership as I’ve experienced it—imperfect, iterative, and learned mostly through miscalibration. The Bash & Pop line isn’t about suppression; it’s about timing. Talent is fragile. So is trust.

Epigraph

“Lick it shut before I lose my guts
Or I might rip it to tiny pieces.”
—Bash & Pop, Tiny Pieces

I.

You can tell within thirty seconds which young person is carrying voltage and which one is carrying rehearsal. At Rits Uji it happens once or twice a year: a student, or a recent graduate drifting back onto campus, unmistakably alive. It’s not polish. It’s not performance. It’s the high of being, for once, unedited. They don’t need to say much. You see it in the way they stand, in the way they occupy air without apology.

When that happens, the moment goes strangely timeless. I don’t feel older or younger—I feel outside of age entirely, the way I used to at the International Student Forum when a handful of kids ran circles around the adults simply because their energy was cleaner. That’s when I have to be careful. The instinct to spill truth rises fast, to say something too honest or too directional. I’ve gotten it wrong before—said too much, too soon, watched a young person recoil from a truth they weren’t ready to carry. That’s when the Bash & Pop line surfaces: seal it before instinct turns into damage.

II.

Youth talent isn’t just something you identify; it’s something you steward. And stewardship starts long before contracts, titles, or decisions about who someone is going to become. At Rits Uji my job is mostly invisible: CAS, Student Council, the quiet nemawashi that turns chaos into consensus. But the real work happens in smaller moments—when someone bright crosses your field of vision and you feel the spark you could either fan or overwhelm.

That’s the danger. Talent doesn’t need fireworks; it needs pacing. Recognition without collapse. Direction without hijacking momentum. My own instinct can run hot—I want to give the whole truth at once, to offer the map before they’ve even decided where they’re going. Leadership, for me, has meant learning restraint. Not caution. Respect for the shape that hasn’t formed yet.

III.

The flip side of youth talent is youth fragility. It’s just as easy to read. Today it was a judo kid—curled in the nurse center, eyes red, voice small—caught in the churn that forms when discipline starts to eclipse humanity. You can see when excellence becomes pressure, when identity narrows to a single verb.

That responsibility feels heavier. One wrong word—one too-direct truth—can land harder than anything they face on the mat. So I measured my voice. Offered steadiness instead of analysis. The temptation to diagnose, to explain the larger pattern, was there. But not every insight needs to be spoken in real time. Sometimes leadership means keeping the ink from running red.

IV.

Restraint has a cost. Not dramatic. Just a quiet pressure in the chest—the sense of holding back a sentence that arrives fully formed but can’t yet be given. That’s the part of leadership no training covers: seeing a young person clearly and deciding how much of that clarity they can carry.

You swallow the rest. Not because you doubt it, but because timing matters more than brilliance. The wrong truth, delivered too early, can fracture trust. The right truth, delivered at the right moment, steadies the ground under someone who is still learning how to stand.

V.

With my son, talent has never been about molding or steering. It’s the opposite. I want his spark to move in whatever direction it’s already leaning, and I want to run alongside for as long as he’ll let me. That’s the calibration I carry into school without meaning to—the belief that momentum matters more than mastery, that the job isn’t to sculpt but to notice and match pace without crowding.

Watching him grow taught me the discipline I try to practice at Rits Uji: let the young be young. Let the talent be wide before it is refined. When the moment grows too bright or too raw, when the truth wants to spill too quickly, the choice isn’t silence. It’s timing.

VI.

In the end, talent spotting is less about brilliance than about restraint. Not leading from the front, not pushing from behind, but matching rhythm long enough for someone to find their stride. Youth talent dazzles. Youth fragility aches. Somewhere in that overlap, leadership becomes atmospheric rather than performative.

They don’t need speeches or interventions or the full weight of truths learned the hard way. They need someone who can read the moment, steady the air, and resist tearing it open before its time. And if you’ve judged the moment correctly, they outrun you.