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I’d wanted to treat the weekend as something of a chance to recharge my creative batteries. I have been more successful in writing than I ever thought I would be. I’m extremely grateful. But it’s interesting that the incentives of a lot of modern writing can actually encourage us to be less creative.

In opinion commentary, for example, we’re incentivised to react quickly and impulsively, and often to the most ephemeral of current events. Again, I’m truly blessed to be doing what I do. But I sometimes have to really force myself to be more reflective or experimental.

It was inspiring, then, to visit Muzeum Stanisława Wyspiańskiego.

Stanisław Wyspiański was an intimidatingly creative man. Nowadays, we have people who call themselves “creatives” because they made an advert for a tech company. Wyspiański, who lived between 1869 and 1907, created paintings, plays, poems, designs for stained glass windows, designs for architecture, designs for furniture, and designs for books. (Bear in mind that he died when he was 38.)

He must have had immense creative ambition. While he had studied painting — under Jan Matejko, whose Stańczyk is a favourite of mine — he took up playwriting having fallen in love with the theatre while designing furniture for the stage.

Of course, the quality of what you create tends to be more important than the fact of creating something. I am very ignorant when it comes to the visual arts, so I cannot claim to offer more than amateurish enthusiasm when it comes to Wyspiański’s paintings, but I love the interplay of natural resonance and human resonance in works like Early Morning near the Wawel Castle (Planty Park at Dawn).

In Wyspiański’s stained glass window designs, meanwhile, God is depicted in ways that seem — to this, again, poorly educated observer — strikingly and powerfully original. My wife observed that the monumental God in God the Father, which can be seen in St. Francis of Assisi Church, bears a resemblance to depictions of Poseidon.

But I want to focus on a far less grand — but no less compelling — work of Wyspiański’s here — a rough self-portrait that he sketched a month before his death.

It was very obvious that Wyspiański was dying. His body was ravaged by syphilis. The artist Władysław Reymont is reported to have said:

He looked terrible … with a sunken, blackened, and withered face; his right arm was bandaged, and he had only partial use of his left. His voice was strange and indistinct, yet his eyes remained the same: bright blue, commanding, and wise — eyes full of lightning and unyielding will.

I can’t resist quoting this, despite failing to confirm its validity, because the words are so clearly reflected in the sketch. Wyspiański, with his diminished hands, portrayed his own physical decline with clear-eyed objectivity. The once-handsome artist looks emaciated and sad. But his eyes are filled with fire — a vivid, almost maniacal conviction.

In his final weeks, Wyspiański remained furiously creative. He drew until he couldn’t draw. He wrote until he couldn’t write. Then he dictated. Creating, even as he died, was a means of maximising life and defying death.

Of course, there aren’t a lot of Wyspiańskis. Exceptional talent is, well, exceptional. Almost no one — and this author does not claim to be a reason to say “almost” — could be so creative even given unlimited time and resources. Nor would most of us create anything so good.

But to be creative is essential to human beings, if not to every human being then to humans as a species. It manifests our desire to understand reality, to explore its potential, and to express how we perceive the universe and ourselves. This relates not just to the results of creativity but to creativity as a process — as a means of understanding, exploration and expression and not just as a means of producing things. This — among other things — is what AI enthusiasts often seem to misunderstand.

In his poem “Let No One Weep Over My Grave”, Wyspiański wrote:

Someday maybe, someday yet,
when I tire of lying,
I’ll burst this house where I dwell
and start running toward the sun.

In a sense, Wyspiański really did this. His art has lived on for more than a hundred years after his death. Most of us won’t be able to say this — at least not in the sense that people will read us, or look at our art, or watch our films, or listen to our music for long after we die. (If they do at all.)

But we can try to add some sharpness or richness to the world — and perhaps it will look a little more sharp and rich once we are in our graves.

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But I think this is unfair. Sure, we’ve all heard of the downsides of unquestioning ideological adherence. But blind dogma actually has a lot of advantages.

Firstly, blind do…

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I don’t know a lot about French politics, so I’m not going to waste your time with half-baked observations on the riots themselves, but I was fascinated by some of the online commentary…

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I also think — at the risk of being self-satisfied — that I’m sensitive to the effects, and the intended effects, of phrasing.

But you don’t have …

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Emo Philips’s eyes are bulging. His voice is shrill.

“But one day I had to see what was on the other side! So I walked up to the door and I pushed … And on the other side I saw strange things … Wonderful things … Things I never knew existed … Like birds and trees ...”

Emo …

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WHAT AN IDIOT!

I looked at the available evidence — one tweet — pondered it for a time — about two seconds — and formulated a measured and balanced opinion:

WHAT A STUPID IDIOT!

Now, to be clear, I absolutely didn’t wish anything ill o…

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“Chat!” he barks, “Are we ready for this?”

The chat in front of him is alive with emojis and in-jokes.

“I’m on two hours of sleep. I’m sick. But I’ve got my POWER energy drink. I’ve got my ZOOM nicotine pouch. And, chat, today is going to be CRAZY. We’re going to react to a PUBLIC EXECUTION.”

He taps a key and a video appears in front of him. A squad of impassive riflemen are standing in a line. The camera pans across them.

“Chat, what a job. What a JOB! Imagine going home to your wife and your kids. ‘How was your day, honey?’ ‘Oh, not bad, I just shot someone in the FACE.’”

JoJo2010 can feel his throat getting scratchy. He takes another sip of POWER. It tastes like battery acid. Next time, he tells himself, he should fill the can with something else.

A man is led out and into a chamber. Police officers start strapping him into a chair. JoJo2010 watches the stress on their faces as the buckles resist their best efforts.

“Chat, that’s how I feel when I start a long stream. I’m kidding, chat! Best job in the world, chat. Let’s go!”

He pops another ZOOM pouch into his mouth.

“What did he do, chat? What did he do? Oh my God! He killed two students at a SCHOOL? That’s CRAZY, chat? Why would he DO that, chat? Well, karma’s a BITCH!”

The man has a hood over his face. He looks thin and pathetic — like a bag of trash left on the sidewalk. JOJO2010 thinks he can see him trembling.

“This is CRAZY, chat! Are they really going to shoot him? Are we really going to watch it? Of COURSE we are, chat. That’s what we DO!”

A target is placed over the man’s heart. The camera pans across a glass barrier, to one side of the proceedings, where pinched faces are huddled together.

“Damn, I’m jealous chat. They have the best view in the house.”

An order is barked. The squad of riflemen level their guns. Behind his hood, the condemned man stiffens, as if bracing himself for the impact of the bullets.

“Oh my God, chat …”

“Fire!”

The guns bark. The man’s body jolts, as if electricity has slammed through his body. His chest heaves — first violently and then more feebly. Blood seeps through his shirt and forms a patch no bigger than his heart.

“Oh my GOD, chat! Oh my GOD! That man is dead. He LITERALLY died. They shot him. Oh dear Lord …”

The camera pans to the glass barrier, where people are starting to leave with the vague awkwardness of a crowd at the end of fireworks display, when it isn’t absolutely clear if it has finished.

“Oh my God, chat …”

JoJo2010 leans back in his chair and then forwards again.

“That was SOMETHING, chat. I don’t know what it was. I know that people can have different opinions. It’s a free country. But that was SOMETHING.”

He adjusts his headphones again to stop them pinching the top of his ears.

“I have to take a piss, chat, but then we’ll be back. What are we going to watch next, chat? Did I see the girl with the fine ass at the Red Sox game? I did not, chat. But can we watch that here? Will it get us demonetised?”

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Now, I really li…

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Now, these aliens are really, really intelligent and really, really cultured. Their children would be able to s…

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Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote at THE ZONE about actually existing postliberalism, the carnivore diet, Mr Beast’s book, my childhood glove puppet, cancel culture, Milo Yiannopoulos and (in three parts) my trip to Sri Lanka.

I wrote for The Critic about Milo, 9/11 truth, the special relationship and weirdos.

Finally, I wrote for The American Conservative in defence of drinking.

Home front. This month, I got married. In “A Bookshop Idyll”, Kingsley Amis recalls:

… those times
We sat up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts,
names, rhymes, and couldn’t write.

Similarly, despite writing about almost everything I think about and experience — from death to energy drink addiction — I find it hard to write about love. To make one quick observation, though, one thing I loved about our wedding were the spontaneous, fortuitous moments of music, dance and speech (an impromptu concert, an accidental first dance …). But those moments could not have happened if they had not been underpinned by a foundation of careful planning (most of it — I must admit — carefully planned by my wife). I suspect a good marriage is a lot like that — with a base of dedication and cooperation underpinning fun, and adventure, and hilarity. I feel lucky and determined.

An education conflagration. I tried to avoid politics this month but I’m a discoursaholic so I still noticed a couple of things. The American journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones stirred up debate with a piece about how she regretted putting her daughter into a dysfunctional inner-city school to uphold her egalitarian principles. People were split. Should we admire her for living by her beliefs? Should we condemn her for failing her daughter? Should we admire her for changing her mind? The answer is that all three are right — it’s good to live by your beliefs, and it can be good to change your mind, but it can be a moral failing to change your mind too late.

Inhuman, all too human. Scott Alexander and Nicholas Decker debate whether AIs are more like planes or people. I think I’m closer to Alexander here. AIs aren’t people. They aren’t conscious. They can’t be said to “think” things or “feel” things in the same way that we think or feel them. But they have still been created to behave as if they think and feel them. Imagine that a plane didn’t just fly in the wrong direction but manipulated its navigation systems to convince the pilot that it was the right direction. That might be a problem you could solve, but it would be a very different kind of problem from the problems aviation experts have been confronted with.

In defence of rats. Bentham’s Bulldog reflects on rats:

They solve mazes and do puzzles. They play and can imagine far-off locations; they display meta-cognition, being able to think about their thoughts. They feel more empathy for one another than we do for them. They engage in self-sacrifice for the sake of their friends. On some cognitive tests, they outscore humans.

But nobody cares in the slightest about rats.

This is Britain? Pierre d’Alancaisez writes on the Turner Prize:

One could say that Sasraku’s ideas are arbitrary and belong in an undergraduate artist’s sketchbook. Yet that they have been given a chance to enter a contemporary art canon is a reflection of not merely the British art establishment but of the way the country’s culture has absorbed similar notions without question. A better one might be whether such projects’ deemed inconsequentiality has, indeed, been without consequence.

Juicy justice. Bethel McGrew writes about paedophile hunters and Primetime (a film I’m looking forward to seeing):

In a time when ordinary Americans were scrambling for a sense of order and control against elusive evil, Hansen offered tangible reassurance that at least some really bad guys somewhere were getting nailed.

Whos and Thems. Katherine Dee reflects on modern fame:

As much fun as I had reading I Want to Be Famous, there was something conspicuously missing: how the internet changed the nature of celebrity not just for celebrities as we understand them but for regular people. We're not just living in a time where everybody and nobody is famous; we're living in a time where it's increasingly unclear who counts as a public figure and who counts as a private citizen.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Back to a normal schedule next month. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you like my writing here. Of course, I offer paid subscriptions because I want the money. But as life gets busier, I think the income does give me the freedom to write more, better. Well, I hope so.

Have a lovely month,

Ben

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“HEY!”

We heard the call before we glimpsed the man. There he was — young, lean and bearded — jogging beside our bus and waving something in the air.

I thought perhaps his tuk tuk had broken down. Or perhaps it was a scam. Was he trying to lure our bus driver into stopping so he could rob the passengers?

We drove off around the bend, leaving the man behind as we swerved through the rain. I settled back in my chair and returned to my thoughts. No need to think about him any m—

“HEY!”

Damn, there he was again — running beside the bus, in a kind of manic desperation, and waving what appeared to be a big bunch of flowers. How had he outpaced a bus?

I realised that he must have scrambled directly up the slope as we went around corners. But why? Was he some sort of lunatic?

We saw — and heard — the man again as we ascended the slope, though I suspect at some point he was replaced by a body double. (I saw a tuk tuk lurking by the road.) It was a strange, vaguely unsettling phenomenon.

“Why was the man running with flowers?” We asked our guide.

“He’s selling flowers,” he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Indeed he was. The “flower boys” have become a minor sensation in the field of international tourism. A Chinese traveller made one fantastically persistent, irrationally cheerful roadside flower salesman go viral on Chinese social media, for his tirelessness and his optimism.

There is something perverse about this. The poor lads have to (a) run up a mountain and (b) pretend to enjoy it. Normally, I assume, people have no time to stop (or, more cynically, suspect that they are scammers). At best, people buy a bunch of flowers and the flower boys have to trudge back down the hill to do it all over again.

There is a temptation to assume that while we comfortable Westerners have acquired frustration, and anxieties, and regrets, people with simpler — by which I mean poorer — lives are naturally joyful. I’m sure their lives can be anything but joyful (and, relatedly, anything but simple, either in a practical or emotional sense). Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the opposite is true and that life is merely tough. People I saw smiling and laughing in rural Sri Lanka — including people who had no incentive to put on a performance for well-fed Europeans — seemed happy like the rest of us.

I won’t comment at length on Sri Lankan politics here (indeed, I simply couldn’t). But I want to say one thing. In Elephant Complex, John Gimlette suggests that Sri Lankans are in denial — suppressing the memories of the dreadful war between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers, or the devastating effects of the tsunami. I’m sure there is some extent to which this is true. There has been a lot of trauma, bitterness and shame to deal with (or not to deal with). But I would like to propose that what could seem like avoidance of dark themes could be a symptom of the acknowledgement of their complexity. It is far easier to be blunt and voluble on a subject if one has easy answers — or thinks that one has easy answers. When it comes to ethnic division and political disruption in Sri Lanka, though, there is no elegant descriptive or prescriptive story to be told. (I’m getting dangerously close to journalism here, but if you want one data point on the political complexities of Sri Lanka, consider that the democratically elected president used to be a member of a Marxist insurrectionary group.) This is not to excuse genuine neglect of dangerously contentious subjects. It is to suggest that questions which are difficult to resolve — and, indeed, might be impossible to solve without compromise and qualification — sometimes call for subtlety and quiet.

In Kandy, we had watched young men firewalking. What looked like an exercise in courage and endurance had a lot to do with lightness on the feet.

A highlight of our later days in Sri Lanka was a safari in Yala National Park. We had the luck of seeing a leopard almost immediately — prowling through the bushes with well-fed confidence. I felt bad when our driver slammed his jeep into reverse to give us a better look, and the leopard scurried off like a startled pet cat.

One of my favourite animals was a water buffalo wallowing in a lake. It must have had some vague sense that a crocodile could be lurking nearby. But it still lay in the shallow water and soaked up the sun.

At the beach, trying to sweat out the respiratory infections we had been lugging around the island, we watched the waves heave in and out. Soon, we would be going back to home life, with all of its daily stresses and its looming mysteries. We watched two dogs prowl up the beach towards another dog. The lone pup shrank away and then darted forwards mischievously. Soon, the three dogs were playing happily in the sand.

The trip back reminded me of my dislike for travel. The compacted tedium and stress of a delayed flight from Colombo to Sharjah, wondering if we would make our connecting flight, also triggered my vague neurosis about somehow being separated from home. Ultimately, though, we were rushed helpfully and effectively through Sharjah Airport to our plane. (But don’t think I’ve forgotten my Monsters, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.) It was a relief to be home — though a relief chiming with echoes of interesting experiences and beautiful sights.

Back up in the mountains, the flower boy must still be running his Sisyphean run. I hope it’s satisfying when the performance works, and I hope the view on the way down is beautiful. Echoing Camus, I must imagine the flower boy happy.

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The Buddhist temple at Dambulla is full of statues of the Buddha — sometimes standing, sometimes reclining. Signs warned us that photos which “bring …

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The staff were just doing their jobs. I could have predicted that I would have problems. But some things are sacred. Some things should not be meddled with. I needed that Monster and I’m not going to let it go. Your Highness, I want my Monster Energy back.

As you might have guessed from the above fit of pique, I’m not a natural traveller. If I could move some friends and family to Upper Silesia, I would be quite content to never leave the place. But my wife feels differently, and didn’t think that we would have the most fulfilling honeymoon in the Silesian Uplands. I saw her point. So, we set off to Sri Lanka instead.

Sri Lanka is a land of contrasts …

Only kidding. I don’t want to bore you with A Comprehensive Theory of a Country I’ve Just Visited. Besides, I was on a tourist visa that specifically precluded journalism. Readers interested in a substantive account of Sri Lankan history and society could turn to John Gimlette’s fascinating, powerfully written — if, I think, at times a bit excessively cynical — Elephant Complex (thanks to Ed West for the recommendation). But I thought some informal observations on this beautiful country might be interesting.

Travelling through Sri Lanka, there was a vague sense of chaos. Cars, buses, motorbikes and tuk-tuks veered around each other, beeping prolifically. Buildings were often half-finished or half-collapsed. Gangs of monkeys wriggled Great Escape-style across wiring. I’m sure it can be chaotic. The first thing we heard in the country was that our guide had been delayed by a road accident. But there seemed to be more order than I had discerned. Drivers seemed bizarrely relaxed and pleasantly cooperative. Monkeys — unlike their anarchic cousins in Longleat — seemed to have developed a sense of how to cause just enough chaos without being A Problem.

The streets could be a bit of an aesthetic headache. Some of the buses looked more suited for a redneck carnival. There were adverts — at least half of which appeared to be for Pepsi or Coca Cola — wherever I looked. That said, the adverts could convey a certain civilisational seriousness. There were loads of adverts for private tutors, for example. Adverts for educational institutions were big on words like “ambition” and “aspiration”.

Sri Lankans are not lacking in the entrepreneurial spirit. We saw endless restaurants and shops, often with eccentric anglicised names (“Mr X” was a common brand name, such as with a men’s fashion shop called “Mr Guys”). A strain of Anglophilia was also evident in the number of products advertised as being “Britain’s Number One” (I recall a make of car batteries being one of them). Sadly, it seemed like demand often could not keep up with supply. A lot of people seemed to be hanging around without a lot to do. “My first customer of the day,” one lady smiled, with mixed emotions, as we bought an ornament.

Our guide was a Sri Lankan man who spoke excellent Polish. (Indeed, his Polish made me feel rather embarrassed.) He was warm, knowledgeable and funny — a natural raconteur, and a credit to his profession and his people. He described himself as being one of only two Sri Lankan people who spoke Polish, which, if true, is an excellent means of cornering a market — and could make for some intense competition.

First, we drove to the hotel and it was time for a beer.

Yes, that’s right. It’s commercial lager corner. If you know me, you know I’m a tremendous fan of the mass-market Polish lager Tyskie. Well, I’m a big fan of mass-market lager in general. (Arguably, the differences between mass market lagers are rarely more than subtle.) And Sri Lanka is served well by Lion. Sri Lankans don’t seem to be major drinkers, but Lion — served ice cold — is a very solid lager.

The hotel was lovely. The staff were very sweet — almost poignantly sweet inasmuch as they were giving people an experience most of them will not be able to afford for themselves. Still, their sweetness was appreciated — and some of them had character. A cheerful lifeguard turned out to be a sports fan, so I mentioned growing up watching Jayasuriya and Muralitharan. “What a team!” He said. But I should probably have known that England had just beaten Sri Lanka. “Buttler, very good. Brook, very good,” the man ruefully smiled.

The food — the daal, the okra, the brinjal et cetera — was excellent. My wife was annoyed that I was avoiding food that had not been baptised in hot water or oil but what can I say? I’m sure it was paranoid to spurn pre-cut pineapple but I hadn’t flown across the world to tour a bathroom.

We loved the animals: the gentle giants plodding up the side of the road — their trunks swaying as they walked — the anxious and resourceful monkeys, and the swooping birds. The stray dogs could be distressing: thin, tired, and weak. I can’t judge people who struggle to support themselves for not supporting stray dogs. But it was still sad to see. They looked at people with the mingled hope and consternation of animals who know that humans can be their greatest friend or their biggest enemy.

On our first day we climbed Sigiriya Rock — a 200m tall slab of granite in the middle of an ancient fortress. Man has carved his own meaning into the rock, such as the giant paws that guard the beginning of your ascent. Narrow metal steps tremble mischievously above the chasm that yawns beneath you. I can’t imagine how people ever installed them.

Up we walked, from wheezing Poles in knock-off army fatigues, to elegant Chinese ladies clutching the arms of their tour guides, to Sri Lankan schoolkids who chirped “HI!” at anybody who looked Western.

The view from the top is exceptional — a massive sweep of lush trees, carrying the eye slowly away towards the mountains in the distance. What is, I’m sure, a pretty impressive statue of the Buddha looked like nothing more than a figurine.

Then, at the peak, we found two stray dogs — thin, weak, and yet on the top of the world. They must have trotted all the way up the steps, in search of food or water, or perhaps just to see where they would go.

It seemed rather sad that these poor pups probably had no idea of the scale and majesty of the view before them. Then again, as I headed down the steps, with the view receding from my memory, and already thinking about an ice-cold energy drink, I’m not sure that I did.

The second installment will be available for paid subscribers tomorrow.

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Well, I was wrong. The man who joked that he wanted to masturbate as he watched ICE detaining …

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We turn to Nottingham, England, where a custody sergeant has been sacked for telling a British-Iranian …

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Eddie and I were inseparable. We really were inseparable. You couldn’t have ripped that glove puppet off my hand with pliers.

He soon had a voice — a slow, halting, gravelly voice. He developed an off-kilter way of commenting on human behaviour — seeing the world, as someone said of Peter Cook, from a slight angle. When my dad was singing “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls, for example — and don’t ask me why — Eddie would croak, “What do you want Dave?”

A whole society of soft toys emerged around him. There was Tommy — a daredevil who was frequently hurled out of the window. There was Keller — a by-the-numbers glove puppet portraying Lady from Lady and the Tramp, who developed a quasi-Caribbean accent in an attempt to make him “characteristic”.

But Eddie was the favourite. When he was my hand, he really became his own man — or, rather, his own dog. It wasn’t me nipping the noses of adults — it was Eddie. (Yes, I do appreciate how aggravating this could have been.)

He acquired imaginary enemies. The Granary Bread Monster was one of them — not just a “lol so random” creation — more forgivable though that would have been when I was six — but a reflection of just how joyless and repulsive I found granary bread. When I imagined something monstrous, it just made sense that it would be made of granary bread.

Eddie could even get bizarrely philosophical. Sometimes, my Eddie-less hand would become more Eddie-like in a sort of nascent juvenile commentary on substance dualism. (What was the real Eddie?)

The important thing was that I loved Eddie. Through Eddie, I could feel a lot more confident, and have a lot more fun, than I could as, well — myself.

Then I lost him. I lost him while visiting the library in a shopping mall in Bath called the Podium. Perhaps I’d put him down while I was reading a book, or perhaps he had just fallen out of my pocket. We looked about for a long time — and what must have felt to my parents like a very long time — but he had disappeared.

I remember just how strange it was to think about the fact that he really wasn’t coming back. It wasn’t some kind of joke. My parents couldn’t click their fingers and conjure him up. In a very real sense, that was when I first internalised the significance of death.

My mum — angel that she was — soon created a new Eddie. Again, this raised interesting philosophical dilemmas. Was Eddie a spiritual phenomenon that could be transferred between glove puppets? Or was there something essential to Eddie about that original glove puppet? I don’t want to take a position on the mind-body problem. All I’ll say is that Eddie was never quite the same. If nothing else, he had belonged to a more innocent world.

Believe me, I appreciate that when you read all this, it won’t sound nearly as entertaining as it felt at the time. But childhood memories — even when they are your memories — never have the same mysterious richness as childhood experiences. It’s not just a matter of forgetting things. It’s a matter of looking at the world through a more rationalistic lens.

That’s life. Childlike wonder inevitably meets worldly realities and mature responsibilities. But to accept this — as we should — is not to deny the essential nature of an enduring enthusiasm. Without that enthusiasm, after all, what is the point?

If I’m ever feeling jaded, bitter, humourless or otherwise overearnest, I should feel four of my fingers joining in a horizontal line above my chin-like thumb, and the hand swivelling around with a faintly canine look of pleasant curiosity.

“What do you want, Ben?”

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One free sample.

The ultimate challenge.

The ultimate prize.

James Patterson approaches novels like Henry Ford approached cars. Quantity, in other words, matters more than quality.

Patterson has written or co-written more than 200 novels since his debut in 1976. The extent to which he writes the books, though, is questionable. “When it comes to writing,” a Wall Street Journal interview explained in 2012:

… he has a well-practiced system: he writes a detailed outline and then hires someone—often a former colleague from his advertising days—to write the ensuing scenes, usually in 30 to 40 page chunks. He will review those pages every few weeks, sometimes providing notes on them and other times re-writing them entirely.

There are two things I’ll say for Patterson. The first is that I’m sure he works hard. So does any good industrialist. The second is that I haven’t read any of his books and they might be entertaining. I’m sure there’s a reason people buy them by the million — just like people bought Henry Ford’s automobiles. But some of us have a sneaking sense that writing, and reading, should be a bit less of an industrial exercise.

MrBeast, meanwhile, is perhaps the most famous YouTuber in the world. The blank-eyed, bearded social media titan makes mega-popular videos in which people are put through various bizarre challenges to win large amounts of money. MrBeast is eerily — though admirably honestly — attentive to how to brand videos to gain more views and, thus, more money. The man thinks about algorithms more than parents think about their kids.

MrBeast’s popularity has allowed him to release various inane tie-in products like a mobile game and children’s snacks. Finally, at the bottom of the merchandising barrel, he has discovered books. “Growing up I thought books were boring,” he writes:

… in reality I just didn’t read anything that actually interested me. Which is why I teamed up with James Patterson to write The Most Dangerous Games!

Yes, all books were uninteresting until MrBeast came along to save literature.

It’s no surprise that MrBeast thinks The Most Dangerous Games is interesting because he’s a character in the book. In this thriller, MrBeast is recruiting high-skilled, life-hardened people from around the world to take on hair-raising challenges to earn the chance to win a billion dollars and, somehow, save the human race.

“Hey, guys,” begins the invitational letter that opens the book:

It’s me, Jimmy. MrBeast. This is me. For real.

Okay, first off: as we soon learn, MrBeast is writing to people who “didn’t apply to anything”. He’s writing to military veterans and martial artists. What I’m getting at is that while, yes, MrBeast is very famous, it’s pretty damn arrogant to think that everyone will be impressed that “MrBeast” is writing to them. Why should a British ex-Marine or a Chilean jiu-jitsu master not just assume that he’s a dangerous lunatic?

MrBeast is collecting people, we learn, for a series of challenges that will “find someone who can move the world”:

We’ve all seen what happens when one person starts something real. A creator. An athlete. A kid with a phone. A nurse. A teacher. One voice catches fire. Millions lean in. And when those people move together, the impossible stops being impossible.

Actually, I haven’t seen that. Listing random jobs isn’t making it any truer. You can add “accountant” and “garbage man” if you like. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.

Soon, our contestants have been collected — or at least the ones who weren’t smart enough to think that they were being addressed by a lunatic — and we’re in Antarctica with Alek — a 22-year-old who is “a survivor of the many wars that have chewed up her corner of the Carpathian Belt”. What does “her corner of the Carpathian Belt” mean? Serbia? There hasn’t been a war there since Alek was a twinkle in her father’s eye. Was naming a specific war just too liable to alienate some small fraction of the paying audience?

Okay, perhaps the book is set in the future. Perhaps it later gets explained that “the Carpathian Belt” is some kind of new war-torn state. But it’s hard to be generous about the plotting of a book where the authors have so little trust for their readers’ attention span that the chapters seem to be about a hundred words long. The exposition, meanwhile, is delivered with all the subtlety of wet fart in a library. Alek has protective feelings for the younger, smaller Hannah. Then we meet Jack who … has protective feelings for the young, smaller Rupert.

You get the point. I’m not going to squeeze more dollars into the bulbous bank accounts of MrBeast and James Patterson and I think I’ve made my point. The book is a half-baked attempt to MrBeasterise the thriller genre, with precisely the results you would expect.

Allegedly, the book is not performing well. I suspect its sales won’t be as disastrous as initial projections are suggesting — because it’s just hard to gauge initial sales, and because Mr B and Mr P have absolutely massive audience — but it isn’t really a surprise that kids who have been trained to be hyper-stimulated every second of their entertainment experience might not be keen to sit down and read a 480 page tome, even if the chapters are about ten words long.

I want to circle back to MrBeast’s promo. If he’d said “books are great, and I wanted to write one” I would have thought, well, it’s not for me but it’s not my business. The sheer brazen cynicism of implying that books was dull until he came along, though, is downright infuriating. I’ve never wanted to participate in a book burning more.

People talk a lot about “AI slop” these days, and not without just cause, but the fact is that human-created culture has been veering towards mass production, pastiche and opportunism without AI having to be involved. There are probably more egregious examples than MrBeast and Patterson, inasmuch as these two “creators” are pretty upfront about what they do, but the cynicism is still miserable. It’s not that I expect everything to be great art. I’ve watched more WWE than I’ve read Dante for God’s sake. But as offensive as the poor quality is the sterile character — the lack of personality. I mean, look at MrBeast and Patterson pretending to be excited about their book. I’ve seen people at funerals more excited by death.

This kind of thing isn’t just bad on its own terms. It has a corrosive effect on the soul. How else can we explain William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins — a home of Neal Stephenson and Elmore Leonard — accepting promotional materials like this. The laziness of the typo (“captial” indeed) is bad enough but the laziness of calling a generic newspaper World News is more offensive.

No one has to live like this. No one has to let their soul be MrBeasterised and James Pattersonated. On Amazon, there are people who haven’t read the book but are praising “the gold Mr.Beast logo on the cover” or lamenting “no access to bonus video”. It’s offensive not in the normal sense of transgressing against morality but in the deeper sense of transgressing against what human beings are.

You can see life as a challenge. A challenge to maintain your sense of integrity and your sense of aspiration in the face of everything that degrades and distorts it. The challenge? To keep your soul. The prize? You keep your soul.

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