[UPDATE: I done did the deed! I bought a 2023 Nissan Ariya Engage e-4orce EV with 3,700 miles on it (not a typo) for $20,995 (also not a typo) on August 1st, 2025, ten years to the day after I closed on the sale of my house in Wisconsin to move here. Super smooth, fast, comfortable car with lots of luxury touches. "Like New" in used camera terms.
Nissan (manufacturer) Ariya (model) Engage (trim tier) e-4orce(AWD). It was the sixth of the original eight trim levels in 2023, third from the bottom, one of only two trims with the smaller battery. The original price was approx. $48,190 two+ years ago. That's about a 56–57% depreciation in two years, which is...a lot for a near-luxury-level SUV with only 3,700 miles on it.
Three main reasons it was so cheap AFAIK:
Nissan is limping globally in terms of business health
Smaller battery + dual motors and AWD with tons of e-horsepower and torque = low range
Slow charging, both at home (7.2 kW) and at DC Fast Chargers (130 kW)
All three of those are bad for sales, especially since charging speed and driving range are the chief concerns of new EV adopters. (That was Musk's big innovation with Tesla: give the cars great big heavy batteries to quiet consumers' range concerns.)
I bought it mainly because it was within reach for me, which almost nothing is, but there's a lot I like about it. Mainly, it has an opulent and very tasteful interior, but without the increasingly trifling overcomplications in the interiors of the highest models (I don't need a motor to open the secondary glove box, for instance). Main thing I'll touch on: it's possibly the most comfortable car I, now a sedentary overweight 6'1" 68-year-old*, have ever clambered into. The exceptionally good seats slide back automatically when you open the door to make egress and entry easier, the height and the lack of a stepover are very comfortable, and I love the elaborate "coffee table" which is what Nissan calls the center armrest. Importantly (I might even say crucially) for me, there's no center stack. The sharp side of a center stack digging into the side of my knee in a painful way is a surprisingly prevalent problem for me, disqualifying my second choice, the new Civic Hybrid.
Two pet-peevish things I love: you can cover up the cup holders, which are an eyesore in most vehicle cockpits IMO. And you lower the tailgate with your arm, which I remain convinced is something I am capable of doing all by myself like a big boy. No offense if your taste is for the opposite.
Anyway, brave new world. I'm as excited as a kid with a new toy. However, this news means you will stop hearing about EVs very shortly now, as I'll be "stopping shopping" soon. (And, as always [cheap pens?!? Really Mike?], thank you for your patience with me.) My late brother Scott's rule amongst the brothers was "new sheet metal requires pictures," but I haven't taken delivery yet. Pictures to come.
I beg your pardon for the off-topic post, but I'm just immersed in learning about EVs and everything associated with them (great fun, by the way) and I can't help but have the subject on the brain. (I have this problem: it's by far easiest to write about whatever I'm enthusiastic about at the moment. A few of you might possibly have noticed.)
Here's the thought: it's that one big problem with EVs resides, collectively, in our own heads. We need to re-train ourselves to think differently about fueling.
For years—forever—we have learned, practiced, and internalized the liquid-fueling protocol, namely, drive till empty and then fuel completely all at once, while on the move—that is, as a stop in the midst of driving around or driving toward a destination. So far, everybody except EV adopters still wants to mentally shoehorn electric cars into the liquid-fueling model—drive till almost empty then fuel all at once en route, while out driving. Well, not to sound like a second-grader, but that's not fair. At some point we'll have to change that thinking. Electric refueling goes like this: top off if needed when the vehicle is at rest, meaning mostly at home. It's a new way of thinking about fueling, with a new set of plusses and minuses. So by assuming or insisting that electric cars must replicate the paradigm of liquid refueling above all else, people are naturally allowing their thinking about EVs to be distorted. They have mental blinders on, so to speak. Mental blinders of their own making. Because, obviously, electric refueling is not going to be equally good at the one thing that liquid refueling is best at.
That's what creates "range anxiety"—because we're thinking about driving till empty. And we're assuming we'll need to charge on the road. And all of us (or maybe I should speak for myself) are familiar with that panicky feeling of suddenly realizing the gas gauge is low. Or of actually running out of gas and becoming stranded. But from most of the EV owners I've heard from, they don't drive till empty. That's not how the new model works. They let the charge go down as it will or as it must and then charge it back up more or less right away, the next time the car is at rest and not being used.
I first encountered this idea about fueling and peoples' thinking about it in an article written by Adrian Salinas at an Australian site called ArenaWire.
For most non-city-dwelling drivers (I didn't say all, and yes, I know the exceptions are out there), the car sits idle for most of most days, and even more of the nights. That's certainly true of what I would call "commuter" driving, meaning [home —> work or errands —> home]. Put it this way—imagine you had your own gas pump right next to your garage and the gas in it was nearly free. How many times would you come home at night running on fumes? If you said anything but "never," you're an edge case (maybe you work as a rural mailman. Maybe you have a 170-mile commute each way). If [home —> distant destination] driving is electric fueling's worst thing, then its best thing is that suddenly you do have a gas station in your own garage, with fuel that costs 1/3rd to 1/5th of what liquid fuel costs. Commuter driving is electric's best end-user attribute. Gas/petrol can't touch it.
To figure out if it's for you, all you have to figure out is, how much of your driving leaves the car resting at home, and what's your longest possible daily commuter trip? For me it's a drive to Rochester + maybe 35 extra miles at most doing other things along the way or afterward. That's 150 miles round trip give or take. That's my outlier. Well within the range of all but one or two of the worst EVs still on the market. And 98% if not 99% of my driving is commuter driving, starting and ending at home. For that last 2% or 1%, I could either deal with charging along the way, or rent a car.
The new 2026 Nissan Leaf, coming this Fall
A funny little aside: I have a friend here who bemoans range anxiety with great drama. At which point I remind him that he's got four cars. What, can't he just snag the keys to the ICE SUV on the way out the door for that road trip? Having a liquid-fuel vehicle as well as an EV is the crude way to quiet range anxiety. Any given person might not want this, and it makes no sense to prescribe it, but then, it's also true that a lot of people have it. Hedges & Company estimates that approximately 37% of US households own two cars, and an additional 22% own three or more cars (via AI overview). I've got a friend who has one "good" (expensive, shiny, new) and one "beater" (worn, working, older) pickup truck, as well as a motley of several lesser cars...and a 4-wheeler, and an enormous motor-scooter he bought for a departed girlfriend, and two real motorcycles, and so on. I don't know his opinion about electric cars, but I'll try to remember to tread gently and not blast him a new one if has the temerity to bring up range anxiety as the "deal killer" with Yr. Hmbl. Ed.
Finally, not meaning to be incendiary, but...Eisenhower built the entire Interstate highway system. Surely our flattened, infiltrated version of the once-mighty Federal government, meek, meagre and withered as it has become, could eventually shift itself to install EV chargers all along those highways. That would take care of a whole lot of those long-range trips. We even have convenient places already reserved to put them...they're called rest stops.
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
I've been ill. Spent the whole night on Monday in the ER. Not serious, not chronic, and not important, but it was an ordeal. I'm recuperating.
Life happens....
Meanwhile, Oren and Carl (old friends, of each other and, later, of me—Oren can be seen here and Carl here) have discovered the Chris Killip Foundation website. There's a beautiful brief selection of photographs from each of several of his projects. Go to the site and then to "Images" and have a look. I think this work deserves extended viewing, even meditation if that's not too much to say. His great 1988 book In Flagrante is hard to obtain, and I've never actually seen a copy. It would be nice to have more of the work online if the presentation were as good as it is on the website. (Why can't whole books be presented online? I guess it's not done because then no one has to pay, and photographers need money too. But when the books aren't available and the photographer is no longer with us....)
I never quite had a handle on Chris Killip while he was alive, I'm sorry to say. So I've been reading bits and pieces of biography from here and there. The Wikipedia article on him is a good place to start.
Back soon.
Mike
P.S. I'll be working on catching up with comments today and tomorrow.
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
["Open Mike" is the often meandering, summery, sylvan, and serene Editorial Page of TOP, because otherwise you might never hear what Yr. Hmbl. Ed. thinks about stuff. I'm kidding.]
This could be the one
More followups from recent topics:
The Great Pentax Passalong (if you haven't heard, I'm sharing a loaner K3 III Monochrome so interested readers can try it out): I'm all set to ship on Monday. All five participants are all in the Midwest and Northeast, which is handy. It also looks like I played favorites, because I have met three of the recipients in person, but I didn't: I just took the first four people who asked. The fifth, Steve Rosenblum, is a friend—the passalong was essentially his suggestion in the first place, during an unrelated phone call. I bought a hard case for shipping, but it's a little larger than I expected, quite heavy, and it seems to me that apart from increasing shipping cost, it might also draw undue attention to the package en route, so I decided just to ship in a plain cardboard box. As discussed, each participant will ship it to the next on the second Monday they have it—doing so ensures that each person will have it for two weekends and one whole week in between, which should be a generous amount of time for a trial.
One unexpected headache is insurance. I wanted to add it as a rider on my homeowner's policy for the duration, but the insurance agent is playing it's-not-that-simple / we-need-to-know-more. I'm sure they're rubbing their hands together, twirling their figurative mustachios, and calculating how many gazillions of hundreds of dollars they can hit me up for*. I'm going to go ahead and ship anyway, because, you know, the world is turning, and we're all getting older, and "time and tide wait for no man" (Geoffrey Chaucer, A.D. 1395, Prologue to The Clerk's Tale). At least it will be insured while it's being shipped; for the interim periods it looks like I'll be taking my chances.
To a tea: Life tip of extremely limited usefulness, except to a few: I accidentally steeped my white tea for an hour and fifteen minutes because I got distracted while the electrician was here. It tasted fine. (It was the second steeping.) So, another experiment done: you can steep white tea indefinitely without ruining it. My suspicion/supposition—IANAE—is that the darker the tea, the more careful you have to be about steeping times. I could be wrong.
'Lectric avenue: I'm going ahead and getting my garage wired for an electric car charger. Mind you, I've pretty much decided not to buy an electric car right now**; nor have I yet decided what charger to get. What I'm getting installed is a 240-volt NEMA 14-50 outlet that can be used for lots of different car chargers. That way, when and if I get an EV, I'll be ready. If I never do, then it can be listed as a feature of the house for potential home buyers.
The charger I'm considering is a Lenz Level 2 40-amp with a standard J1772 socket, unless somebody wants to talk me out of that. It supports 9.6-kW charging, which is plenty (7.2 kW is actually enough for most people).
By the way, the electrician pointed out that if you buy a car charger, you can take it with you when you sell the house. Connecting via an outlet rather than hard-wiring makes that simpler.
The Most Desirable Camera on the Planet: Do you remember that we used to do a feature under this heading every so often? It's gone moribund in recent years. However I think there's a candidate out there right now: the Leica Q3.
One of the features that made Leica special way back in the film days was that although it had only a small percentage of the market, it had very strong owner loyalty. Back then, too, a far greater percentage of objectively accomplished photographers shot Leica than its market share would predict. And a surprising number of professionals of various types owned at least one Leica. I always tried to keep my ear to the ground regarding such intangibles.
I've said this before, but my spidey-sense is that serious, dedicated, engaged photographers—whatever term you choose to use, however you want to phrase it; I mean people who are into it—love their Leica Q's. For a camera so expensive, so minimally featured, and so limited in application (fixed lens, which can be either a bug or a feature depending on your point of view), it gets waaaaaay above its expected share of passion, dedication, enthusiasm, and approval. I've never seen or tried a Q3. I should remedy that.
Courtesy of Ricoh
Runner-up: The venerable and venerated Ricoh GR III, which many photographers also like a lot. I've linked to the "x" version with the 40mm-equivalent lens, not because it's my own favorite focal length, which it is, but also because Ricoh said the following last May: "The production and shipment of the RICOH GR III, currently on the market, are scheduled to be discontinued this July, due to difficulty in procuring of parts and components. However, the production and marketing of the RICOH GR IIIx will be continued for the time being." Note also that the GR IV is being planned. It will have a new lens, a new sensor, and a new processing engine. So if you're interested you might want to wait.
An interesting little twist: Ricoh now makes a version of the GR III with a built-in (but defeatable) filter called "HDF," for highlight diffusion filter. It costs only a little more. The general effect can be observed in the picture above. That sounds pretty exciting, until you realize that if you use an ILC with lenses that have filter threads on the end, you can just buy a highlight diffusion filter and get the same effect. But hey, fun is fun. The new GR IV will come in an HDF version as well, according to Ricoh.
Can't resist a doggie comment: The following can now be observed at The Humane Animal Welfare Society of Waukesha County, back in Wisconsin, where I first met a friendly, charming, handsome, but anxiety-prone pitbull/Labrador mix named Butters. (He was wearing a lime-green bandana around his neck. Butters was nothing if not cool.)
This was in return for a donation of only $125, a bargain if you ask me. Consider a humane animal shelter in your annual giving! HAWS Waukesha is a marvelous place that did a great job for us. I will always reserve a warm feeling in my heart for certain kindly members of the staff, c. 2013.
Mike
*Insurance doesn't work. It's a swindle and a scam. I've been paying homeowners insurance for years and years, and finally, a few years ago, needed to make a small claim, for a perfectly valid reason, exactly the kind of thing insurance is supposed to be for. Their reply, boiled down to the essence, was "Oh, you don't understand. We don't pay YOU. You pay US." They decide when and how much I pay them, and they decide when and how much they pay me. That arrangement works out quite well for them but doesn't work so well for me. The variables turn out to be: you pay us a lot, regularly; and, we pay you almost nothing, ever. It makes steam come out of my ears whenever I read the words "insurance" and "billionaire" in the same sentence. Scoundrels. /rant
**Unless I can find a '23 Nissan Leaf SV Plus that actually costs what the internet says it does (I'm not hopeful of that. Want another rant? Get me going on car dealer bait-and-switch chicanery, which as far as I can see is unrestrained and has become the norm now). My idea is to pay cash for an outgoing model (electric) Leaf (it's being replaced this Fall) and keep the (gas/petrol) Acura. I'll use the Leaf as a runabout and retire the old car for limited duty in snow, super-cold weather, and long trips. Anyone in the know have opinions about that plan? I'd love to hear. Oh, yeah—this is unless the insurance cost for a second car makes the idea untenable. (See above....)
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Tom Burke: "I can’t comment on any of the photography stuff in this post—I’m neither a mono photographer nor a fixed-lens lover—but I have had a couple of good experiences with home insurance which I thought I might pass back to you. More than 15 years ago we were burgled, and the burglars got away with lots of tech toys—DSLRs and lenses, laptops, and other bits of electronics. Just a month or so later I received a big box full of ‘new for old’ replacements; about £10,000 worth in total. Then during the pandemic we had a water leak under the kitchen floor, which caused a lot of damage to the flooring and joists. Again, all repaired over a few months by our insurance company’s contractor. No idea of the cost, but there were numerous visits by their people. So our experience has been good. We’re pretty ‘insurance positive’ to be honest."
Mike replies: It salves my soul and soothes my temper to hear it.
Stan B.: "I have the first iteration of both cameras in question, and can't speak higher of either. The GR is my most used camera of all time (and I've been photographing for well over four decades). It literally fits in a pocket, has an incredible lens, and delivers outstanding IQ—no camera that size delivers better. No, it doesn't have a proper viewfinder, but its pluses well outnumber its one lacking feature which would also defeat its most defining feature—its size. As much as I appreciate the anticipated IBIS in the upcoming iteration, I would've rather had a return of its traditional flash, so wonderfully convenient for portrait fill.
"I purchased a used Q for half price, it is a larger, more expensive version of the GR with a proper viewfinder—and although it has stellar IQ, in truth, it's not (as one would think) that much better than the GR, although the overall feel and build is on another level (as expected). Each camera is a joy to use, provided you're comfortable with one lens—and I've never had to dive into menu oblivion after inadvertently pressing something, somewhere on either. The GR is the perfect take-anywhere, any-day camera that can provide a quality print—no questions asked. The Q provides the tactile, quality experience and results when photography rules the day."
Jeff: "That fixed lens on the Q series also includes a macro mode for added flexibility. And the body/lens is IP 52 rated for weather sealing, unusual for camera companies today (the SL series is even better at IP54). I prefer the Q3-43, and would appreciate the Q2 Monochrom if I didn’t already have M Monochrom versions.
"I’ve also had exceptional experiences from my home insurance policies in the few significant instances I’ve needed them in over 45 years of home ownership. This includes a rider collections policy that I’ve used for camera gear, first edition photo books and vintage prints. When a print was damaged during a house move, the company quickly wrote off the loss, paying full listed value, which I determined in advance. Company and individual policy differences matter."
I hate generative AI. I hate how it’s destroying writing pedagogy and giving students even more excuses not to read (because they can just read a “summary”). I hate how whiny and defensive AI users are about the pathetic little ways they’ve integrated it into their lives. If I could push a button and permanently delete it from existence, I would. If I could go back in time and prevent it from being invented, I would.
The reason I hate it is not just that its output is mediocre bullshit. It’s that it is an active attack on everything I value — literacy, analysis, thought. I find the thought that I would use ChatGPT actively degrading and humiliating. I have never touched it, not even as a joke, not even to prove it sucks, not even — as Beatrice has been doing — to see what it’s showing my students. I admit that this is somewhat irresponsible of me, to indulge my revulsion in this way. This technology — which is unimaginably expensive and resource-intensive and which has not developed anything approaching a plausible profit model — is of course inevitable, “here to stay.” Nothing could interrupt the progress of a technology that requires hundreds of billions of dollars to be shovelled into the furnace year after year after year without returning anything. (Can you tell I’m angry? Can you tell I’m sick of hearing these thoughtless clichés?)
But one must eventually face it. One must eventually give it some thought. Beatrice has been helping, in her Substack posts and in our continual chat thread. She also pointed me to the work of Jan Mullen on AI as externalized attention, which takes the kind of insanely overambitious long view of AI that I find appealling as an aficionado of political theology-style genealogies. Mullen compares the rise of AI to the rise of literacy and notes that the latter was, for most of its history, primarily a tool of state control. In a wide-ranging interview, Mullen wonders aloud whether the form of control AI is creating will line up with our idea of “the state” — but is absolutely clear that the purpose of generative AI is to manipulate and control us, to take away our power and agency, the power and agency that humanity somehow managed to wring out of the technologies of literacy.
I was particularly interested in a moment where Mullen postulates that the new model of control “will be distinctly post-literate — and, as a result, post-legal.” This triggered my political theology instincts and I immediately asked: does that mean it will also be post-monotheistic? Long-time readers know I love Jan Assmann’s theory of monotheism. For Assmann, what monotheism does is not primarily or most importantly to reduce the number of gods, but to introduce a new kind of god — an exclusive God, one in relation to whom all other gods are false. A crucial technology for stabilizing the claims of this exclusive God is of course the written scriptural text, which remains a durable deposit even as day-to-day religious practice inevitably drifts away from the strict demands of the original revelation. The monotheistic God, in contrast to previous pantheons with their loosey-goosey translatability and porosity and their ever-shifting body of mythical tales, is a God of the letter because he is a God of law.
So if ChatGPT destroys literacy and law, then ChatGPT is going to kill God. By this I don’t mean that the bearded guy in the sky is going to be found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest, but that monotheistic religion as we have traditionally understood it will not be able to function in a post-literacy regime.
Note that I am not claiming that ChatGPT will take away people’s ability to read in the sense of deciphering letters — obviously its functioning depends on that. But it is killing the notion of a stable, permanent, authoritative text and undercutting the skills needed to engage with that kind of text. Note also that I am well aware that the vast majority of monotheistic believers throughout history were illiterate (in either the “can’t decipher letters” or “can’t make sense of a complex text” sense). But the elite leaders definitely were fully literate, and in fact that was the source of their authority. One cannot say the same of the type of religious leaders who are most thriving in the meme-ified, Trumpified bastard child of Christianity that sets the tone for American religious practice today. Compared to even a generation ago, literal knowledge of what the Bible says at all has been radically set aside. Some combination of personal charisma and “vibes” — above all, opposition to what they imagine progressivism to be — are the source of authority, leading to obvious absurdities like the rejection of compassion as a Christian virtue.
I am a harsh critic of the dumbed down “seeker-sensitive” model of Christianity I was raised in. But in comparison with what passes for Christian teaching today, it is intellectually sophisticated and morally demanding. This is not to say it was simply “better” (after all, it paved the way for what’s happening now) or that the answer is to get back to the Bible. It’s just to mark how far we’ve fallen. What seemed like a vacuous, popified version of Christianity at the time now seems like a robust theological ethos. The haphazard methods of “Bible study” now seem fit for a graduate seminar.
Speaking of the evangelical milieu, I’ve always resisted Luhrmann’s thesis (in When God Talks Back) that evangelicals cultivate an internal voice that they identify with God. When I was growing up, I didn’t know what people meant when they said that Jesus was their best friend or that God was telling them to do something — and I assumed they didn’t know either, that it was just a weird kind of in-group signalling. For my part, Jesus was not my best friend and God didn’t tell me even one single thing. I was all alone up there in my head, always, and I assumed that everyone else was, too. The thought that everyone I grew up around was suffering from a low-grade self-induced psychosis is difficult to cope with.
Now that people are turning to ChatGPT for spiritual insight, though, I wonder if I finally have to admit it. Obviously here again we are dealing with what seems like a quantitative change — people are using the machine to shuffle religious clichés, where previously they just half-consciously did it themselves. But the qualitative difference is that the insights of “Buddy Christ” could always be corrected against the unchanging text of Scripture. When there is no longer an external anchor like that, when the divine revelation is “customized” for each and every reader, something has changed. Again, this is not to say that what happens to be in the Bible is necessarily “better” than any given ChatGPT transcript — presumbly it’s often worse. But a point of leverage has been lost. Counterargument is no longer possible in the same way. And insofar as that point of leverage, that external source of authority, was how “God” functioned in traditional monotheism, that means God is dead.
The new regime appears to be broadly polytheistic. There is of course always the god of the uncriticizable self, who behaves with the same irritable intolerance as the monotheistic God in the face of even the faintest suggestion that one might consider behaving or thinking differently. But there are many other sites of veneration, an overlapping consensus of podcast hosts and memesters and conspiracists that each believer can mix and match to drive themselves insane in the most relevant and appealing way. Joe Rogan belongs to this pantheon, along with Jordan Peterson and any number of other luminaries whose endlessly prattling voices people love more than their own families. Donald Trump is of course a very powerful god in this polytheistic milieu, but as the boos to his vaccine advocacy and the pushback to his Epstein caginess show, he is not all-powerful, his word is not quite law. And the fact that Trump’s words lack all self-consistency means that there are many Trumps as well, that Trump can be whatever his follower imagines him to be.
I cannot see what the believers see when they look at Trump. All I can see is the most degenerate loser ever to live, the most despicable piece of shit imaginable. Maybe this is of a piece with my revulsion at ChatGPT — and indeed, my failure to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I’m too hung up on facts and reality and meaning and consistency. I’m too literal. That’s why I am unsuited to the emerging world, why I reject it more forcefully than it would ever even bother to reject me. I’m just too literal.
[This paper was presented at the European Academy of Religion conference in Vienna on July 11, 2025, in a session entitled “Agamben’s Theological-Political Horizons: Reimaging Judaism, Christianity, and Messianic Potentiality,” organized by Libera Pisano, Federico Dal Bo, and Carlo Salzani. The topic of my paper drifted a bit from my original proposal, which was going to be an overview of Agamben’s approach to Christianity guided by the question of whether he embraced a “fall narrative.” (Spoiler alert: no.) Hence the title doesn’t quite fit what I presented, but here we are.]
Surely one of the strangest moments in Agamben’s career is that captured in the short book The Church and the Kingdom. Here, in contrast to the academic audience presupposed by virtually all of his other works, Agamben is addressing the bishop of Paris and other clerics, in person, in Notre Dame Cathedral in 2009. In this august and presumably somewhat intimidating setting, he lays out a thorough-going critique of the Church’s betrayal of its Pauline legacy. The Church, he claims, has lost sight of the unique experience of time implied by Paul’s concept of messianism and has thereby ceased to be a community of sojourners in this world and instead become but one worldly institution among others.
For most readers of Agamben’s work up to this point, especially The Time That Remains, this diagnosis is predictable. Those who had moved on to The Kingdom and the Glory would find some of the claims he makes about the result of the Church’s loss of its messianic calling similarly familiar—though with the twist that here he proclaims a “theological genealogy” for the structure of law and exception rather than that of economy:
The crises—the states of permanent exception and emergency—that the governments of the world continually proclaim are in reality a secularized parody of the Church’s incessant deferral of the Last Judgment. With the eclipse of the messianic experience of the culmination of the law and of time comes an unprecedented hypertrophy of law—one that, under the guise of legislating everything, betrays its legitimacy through legalistic excess. I say the following with words carefully weighed: nowhere on earth is a legitimate power to be found; even the powerful are convinced of their own illegitimacy. (CK 40)
Perhaps surprisingly, though, this bleak yet strangely envigorating declaration is paired with an invocation of the possibility that the Church could nonetheless come to play a redemptive role in the world. Though the expected answer to his closing rhetorical question—“Will the Church finally grasp the historical occasion and recover its messianic vocation?” (CK 41)—is surely no, the very fact that he asks implies that the Church might regain the Pauline experience of time and thus presumably serve as a positive model for other institutions.
The possible redemptive role of the Church is unexpected not only because it is about the Church, but because it is so concrete. Instead of pointing to the legal studies of a retired warhorse or the possibility of a world full of Pulcinellas, here he has in mind the reform of an institution that actually exists today in the world. A few short years later, in another short work on church affairs—The Mystery of Evil, based on lectures given in 2012 and 2013—Agamben claims that at least one church official, namely Benedict XVI, had embraced the kind of reform he hopes for, paradoxically through abdicating. While he thereby gave up any direct role in shaping church policy, Agamben believes that his abdication “forcefully calls attention to the distinction between two essential principals of our ethico-political tradition, of which our societies seem to have lost all awareness: legitimacy and legality” (ME 2). By acknowledging he was no longer up to the task and stepping aside—even though he was legally entitled to serve as pope for life—Benedict shows a rare awareness of the importance of legitimacy.
This gesture is first of all a rebuke to the worldliness of the Church, but as in The Church and the Kingdom, Agamben claims that both church and world are both facing a fundamentally identical problem: “The hypertrophy of law, which presumes to legislate over everything, on the contrary betrays, through an excess of formal legality, the loss of all substantial legitimacy” (ME 3). And while the example of abdication may initially seem to point toward the familiar invocation of bringing the Western machine to a halt, here Agamben adopts a different tone, declaring that “legitimacy and legality are the two parts of one single political machine, which not only must never be flattened out into one another, but must also remain in some way operative so that the machine can function” (ME 4).
In this paper, I want to talk about what the unexpectedly concrete and even reformist positions Agamben stakes out in his writings on the Church can tell us about the development of his intellectual project. To do this, I will need to make a perhaps counterintuitive case—namely that the extensive engagement with Christianity in the Homo Sacer project was an unexpected development that he even initially resisted. Though he arguably struggled to fully digest the implications of his theological genealogies, I will show that they helped him clarify both what he finds so objectionable about the “Western machine” and what is actually at stakes in his messianic critique. After tracing this development, I will briefly address the question of Agamben’s “consistency” across time and offer an assessment of the mature position that resulted from his fresh engagement with theology in the midst of his research for the Homo Sacer project.
Resisting the Theological
It may seem strage for me to claim that Agamben began engaging with theology at some discrete point. Obviously Agamben has dealt with theological themes and texts and thinkers throughout his career. From that perspective, the greater focus on theology beginning in the 2000s represents a quantitative rather than qualitative shift. Yet only with the beginning of the Homo Sacer project did Agamben feel constrained to account for his approach to theology explicitly. And he did so initially by leaving theology decisively aside. The figure of the homo sacer is never analogized to Christ, nor is Schmitt’s analogy between the sovereign decision-maker and the monotheistic God ever analyzed. Indeed, he bends over backwards to disprove any Christian genealogy for the concepts he is investigating, devoting multiple pages in both Homo Sacer and State of Exception to debunking Kantorowicz’s famous thesis on the Christian roots of medieval power structures in The King’s Two Bodies and asserting that royal death rituals had solely Greco-Roman roots (HS 92-94, SE 83). Shorn of Kantorowicz’s comforting narrative, we are forced to confront “a darker and more uncertain zone … in which the political body of the king seemed to approximate—and even to become indistinguishable from—the body of homo sacer” (HS 94).
This line of inquiry, so strongly emphasized in the early stages of the Homo Sacer project, will be abandoned entirely in the part-volumes that followed. In its place, Agamben would develop another conceptuality—namely, that of the interrelation of auctoritas and potestas, authority and power. In State of Exception, Agamben memorably connects this dynamic to the paradigm of sovereignty when he declares:
As long as [auctoritas and potestas] remain correlated yet conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct (as in republican Rome’s contrast between the Senate and the people, or in medieval Europe’s contrast between spiritual and temporal powers) their dialectic—though founded on a fiction—can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine. (SE 86)
The state of exception, then, is a failure state of the dialectic between power and authority, what happens when that dialectic collapses. Yet aside from this point of contact, the two paradigms represent two parallel tracks in State of Exception, which lends the book its exceptionally disjointed character. Indeed, the reader may well wonder why we spend so much time on power and authority, since Agamben appears to view their collapse into the state of exception as more or less inevitable.
Yet the invocation of “medieval Europe’s contrast between spiritual and temporal powers” calls this fatalism into question, since that situation persisted in some form for centuries. Why pass over that long period of dormancy in a short parenthetical clause? It’s not for lack of knowledge. We know that Agamben is exceptionally well-informed about medieval theology and, through Dante, medieval political theory. We also know that it’s not any kind of prejudice against theology, since Agamben gave the seminar on Paul that became The Time That Remains during the same years that he was writing State of Exception (i.e., during his one significant period in America). Rather, I would propose that Agamben is avoiding the medieval Christian counterexample for the same reason that he wants to discredit Kantorowicz’s theory of the Christological roots of medieval sovereignty—they are difficult to square with his most extreme claims about the ineluctable destructiveness of the Western political machine.
The Theological Turn in the Homo Sacer Project
I have a lot that I could say about Agamben’s engagement with theology in the early 2000s, but for present purposes, the most important thing is the end result: namely, the massive tome The Kingdom and the Glory, which vastly expanded the conceptual scope of the Homo Sacer project and also promised a more complex structure for the series. Where most readers likely expected that the next installment would be the final volume on “form-of-life”—and presumably comparable in length to the existing volumes—The Kingdom and the Glory, though lengthier than the rest of the series combined, was designated as only a subsection of volume 2. The awkwardness of its place in the architectonic, which actually changed as the series was finalized, matches the awkwardness of its relation to the conceptuality that governed the first three books in the series. In the first chapter, he declares that there are actually two paradigms of governance: “political theology, which founds the transcendence of sovereign power on the single God, and economic theology, which replaces this transcendence with the idea of an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent ordering—domestic and not political in a strict sence—of both divine and human life” (1). This distinction never returns in subsequent volumes and arguably is not even maintained consistently in The Kingdom and the Glory. Indeed, by the end of the book, it seems as though “political theology” and “economic theology,” glory and economy, form part of a single paradigm analogous to the duality of auctoritas and potestas.
What are we to make, then, of the initial gesture of separation between political theology—the paradigm that had informed the Homo Sacer series up to this point—and the newly introduced economic theology? I believe that he wants to assert that the two are separate because, to put it bluntly, he finds economic thinking repellant. Indeed, he concludes his analysis of the theological genealogy of economy with the assertion that the only place the divine economy will remain eternally active is in hell—which means that our global paradigm, based on the eternal providential governance by the invisible hand of the market, is a kind of hell on earth. This rejection of economy is surprising on a first read, because the presentation of economic theology as an alternative to political theology, as well as its association with freedom and democracy, might lead the naïve reader to assume Agamben views it positively. What the association with hell helps to clarify is that, for Agamben, the promises of the economy are all false: it never lets us rest, never ceases to manipulate us, never stops undercutting our freedom in service of its providential plan. His analysis of office in Opus Dei reinforces this impression. The ethics of office are depersonalizing, desubjectivizing, turning all of life into a meaningless ritual performed for its own sake.
Taken together, as the preface to Opus Dei suggests, economy and office represent a kind of nihilistic mechanism, working for the sheer sake of working, world without end. And just as the paradigm of the economy, extended to all eternity, becomes hellish, so too does the ethics of office ultimately devolve, in Kant and Kelsen, into an open-ended demand for punishment and suffering. In contrast to the early volumes of Homo Sacer, which extrapolated from the most extreme possible situations to make generalizations about the normal operations of power, Agamben’s investigations of economy and office penetrate into the most mundane spheres of everyday life—our need to make a living and our identification with social and professional roles—to ground a diagnosis that is arguably even more bleak for being less easily dismissed.
The Search for Minority Traditions
The association of economy with hell is not the only unexpected reversal in The Kingdom and the Glory. In the second half of the book, the initial association of glory with fascism may seem to indicate that glory is somehow destructive or oppressive. Yet Agamben asserts that glory, if read against the grain, reveals the inoperativity at the root of all power structures. The idle king who reigns but does not govern, the God who basks eternally in his own glorification—both testify to the ultimately pointlessness of our institutional machinery, which Agamben traces back to Aristotle’s speculation that humanity might be “without work,” without some inherent pre-given task. Where the sovereign suspension of the law actually renders the law’s application more brutal and inescapable, the messianic suspension is a revelation of the ultimate groundlessness of all human works.
When can we see this messianic suspension in action, or rather in inaction? Agamben repeatedly asserts that his investigations into the inner workings of Western institutions succeed in rendering them inoperative. This seems to mean that simply understanding and contemplating the machine is already messianic, to the extent that it reveals the nihilism at its heart. For those seeking more concrete and embodied messianism, Agamben holds up the example of Franciscanism, which inducted its members into a status to which the fundamental category of law—that of possession or ownership—was simply inapplicable, freeing them to live the Gospel rather than follow or obey it as some external rule or law. Ultimately the machine found a way to absorb even the radical messianic claim of the Franciscans back into the legal apparatus by establishing the legal fiction that the pope owned their property on their behalf—and Agamben’s detailed readings of the debates that led to that outcome show that the Franciscan theorists were increasingly cornered into adopting the system’s own terms even as they sought to resist it.
We could say something similar for the briefer genealogies that Agamben lays out in The Time That Remains, which seemed to lay so much of the intellectual groundwork for the theological genealogies in the Homo Sacer project. Again and again, the messianic insights of Paul get reabsorbed and redirected by the Western machine. The messianic experience of time collapses into a mythological narrative, the messianic calling of Paul is perverted into the Weber’s idea of professional vocation—essentially every aspect of Paul’s thought has been repurposed to reinforce the machine.
One is tempted to ask whether these messianic interventions ever turn out to be effective, whether they ever establish anything durable. But in Agamben’s terms, these questions repeat the mistake of the Franciscan theorists of thinking on the machine’s terms. Indeed, I would suggest that even the notion that the machine could be permanently abolished—so often invoked by Agamben at crucial moments of his argument—would represent one last triumph of machine logic if taken literally as a prescription for a durable state of affairs. We can never fully abolish the economy in favor of glory, potestas in favor of auctoritas, the law in favor of the messianic. But by the same token, the machine cannot ever fully achieve the collapse in the opposite direction, at least not without destroying the life on which its existence depends. All we can do is keep the tension alive by finding ever-new ways to live in a way that suspends the machine’s claims to ultimacy and self-evidence.
Conclusion and Assessment
In conclusion, I will address two questions. First, is there really any change or development on Agamben’s part here? Second, and more importantly, what are we to make of this view of politics?
To the first question, I can only answer: yes, obviously. The fact that the quotations from The Church and the Kingdom and The Mystery of Evil sound so jarring to the reader more familiar with Homo Sacer and State of Exception is certainly prima facie evidence that a change has taken place. Agamben did not start out his career as a political theorist and his theory of politics did not emerge fully formed on his first try. He took on difficult questions, he remained open to new ideas and new areas of inquiry, and he often struggled to incorporate new materials and problems while remaining faithful to his deepest insights. To me, this more dynamic and open view of Agamben is more productive and interesting than the more typical reading in terms of “consistency”—and that is something I try to prove at greater length in Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, available wherever fine books are sold.
Turning to the second question, I find it more difficult to answer, because Agamben’s prescription seems vague and elusive but also obvious and even boring. Our institutions would work better, he seems to be saying, if everyone would approach them in good faith and follow the spirit of the law rather than weaponizing its letter. That seems hard to disagree with. But especially as an American living under the Trump regime, which has combined ramptant lawlessness with the weaponization of every available law and technicality, the notion that the solution is to hold law somehow more loosely can be hard to accept. But it is precisely fealty to the law for its own sake that allowed Trump to take power—above all by taking literally the rule that allowed him to “win” the 2016 election despite losing by millions of votes. More than that, attachment to the law has made it very difficult for opposition forces to find ways to straightforwardly oppose him, even in rhetorical terms. This is true above all of his claim to be aggressively enforcing immigration laws that previous administrations had ignored—all prominent leaders concede that “the law’s the law” and cannot be set ignored, much less changed. In this context, one version of a messianic intervention might be for an important political leader to say, “I don’t care what the Constitution or the law says—we can’t treat people like this!” It is a telling sign of our predicament that such an obviously necessary gesture on the part of any major political leader seems roughly as likely as the coming of the messianic age.
[UPDATE the following morning: That was interesting—the information in the post below, which I wrote yesterday using information from Sigma's and B&H's websites, is now obsolete and no longer correct. Literally overnight, not only have some of B&H Photo's listings for some of the I-Series Contemporary lenses changed, but Sigma's own web page for those lenses has changed as well. Sigma no longer includes the DG DN lenses on the Contemporary lenses page, but has added them to the "Discontinued" page. (It's also possible my search yesterday turned up an outdated page.) And several of the lenses I said were still available at the old prices at B&H Photo are no longer listed or are now listed as "Discontinued." It looks like the 65mm lens is the only one still available in L-mount at the old price. But I didn't check them all. Several of the older DG DN lenses look to still be available in Sony E mount at the old prices also.
A couple of things I missed: the 45mm ƒ/2.8 DG (new style) (now $619, vs. the old price of $449) does feature a change: it now takes the magnetic lenscap used across the rest of the line, according to DPReview. And the obvious one: these lenses are now available in silver versions, to match the silver BF. —Mike]
I shoot Sigma L-mount now, and the other day I noticed something that outwardly looked weird. Some of the Contemporary series of lenses seemed to have a subtly new designation—the older lenses were "DG DN" and the newer lenses are just "DG." Not just on the sale pages; the change is also printed on the lenses themselves.
(Note: These illustrations show just the lower
part of the lens, not the whole lens)
This is the older and newer Contemporary 35mm ƒ/2. Note the printed lens designations.
Then I noticed something else weird. On the Sigma page for the lenses, both versions are listed and illustrated, but they don't seem to be right next to each other. For example, this 35mm ƒ/2 DG DN is in the middle of one row and plain DG is at the beginning of the next row down. The 24mm ƒ/3.5 has three lenses in between the DG DN and the DG.
In Sigma-speak, DG is a lens for full-frame, and DN signifies (sigmafies?) a lens for mirrorless. So why did the "DN" disappear?
I know, the suspense it killing you, so I'll cut to the chase. The old and new lenses are exactly the same. No changes. The new lenses are every bit as much for mirrorless as the original DN-marked lenses are.
Then...oh, duh. A number of the "new" DG-only lenses are more expensive. So do you suppose they put the lenses on the company web page farther away from each other to make it less likely that you'd compare the prices? Or does that sound like a TOP conspiracy theory?
The ones that have gone up in price are the 17mm ƒ/4, 24mm ƒ/3.5, 24mm ƒ/2, 35mm ƒ/2, and 65mm ƒ/2.
The ones that have stayed at the same price are the 20mm ƒ/2, 45mm ƒ/2.8, 50mm ƒ/2, and 90mm ƒ/2.8.
It appears that none of the Contemporary zoom lenses are yet available in a DG-only version.
Should you be interested in snagging something at the old "DG DN" price, B&H Photo still has a couple of the DG DN marked lenses that look like they're based on the lower price: the 17mm ƒ/4 DG DN, L-mount, $599 (same as Sigma list price) and the 65mm ƒ/2 DG DN, L-mount, $599 ($100 less than the Sigma list price for the old one; the new one is $769). The others are discontinued at the former prices. The 65mm has particularly nice bokeh if you're all right with the only mildly longer angle of view.
All those prices are for L-mount. Sony E-mount lenses might be different prices. Some look to be more, some less.
I really like this lens series. They have all-metal casings and very smooth operation, and metal lens hoods, even, and their performance is beyond reproach, at least the two I've tried. I've been meaning to buy a 90mm. Now is probably the time. [UPDATE: too late.]
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
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Jim Kofron (partial comment): "Sigma did announce a price increase due to the tariffs. I have a 90mm on backorder from B&H; I think it's supposed to come in September. I doubt that they will 'give it' to me for the original backorder price. The new I-series lenses were all getting the makeover (with magnetic caps, etc). I have a new 45mm and an older 17mm (both for my black Sigma BF). As for the Sigma BF, I'm really enjoying that camera. I've never had a Sigma that was so fast and rock-solid on autofocus—it's quite a treat!"
I reckon I've moderated something within shouting distance of 330,000 comments in my nearly 20 years as a blogger online. I'm sure I haven't seen everything, but I've seen most things. Commenters self-select, but they also respond to the culture of a site—if you're consistent about what you want and reward, what you encourage and what you don't, you'll get the commenters you deserve. As you know, the commenters here are one of the best things about the site.
The Commentariat, though, is a subset of the readership, not the whole readership. And people in my position shouldn't confuse the two. People who comment anywhere (discounting the 2% who just love their own poop, as my friend Phil used to say) tend to be those who feel secure discussing the subject at a useful level.
There are two ways I think that claim can be objectively verified. One is that when I bring up a separate and different topic, we will hear from some commenters we never hear from otherwise, who know a lot about that subject. So if I bring up, say, nursing, or mountain biking, people with expertise or experience with those things will join the conversation—they know more about it than I know about it, and they know they do. The other proof is, how do you yourself feel when you drop in on a forum about something you know very little about? I don't know ab0ut you, but if I go to a forum for car mechanics, or one about finance, or one about learning Italian, I tend to shut the heck up. The reason is that I'm pretty certain I have nothing meaningful to contribute.
Telltale A sign that people are insecure about their own standing, in my opinion, is what I call "the kicker." A kicker is when someone has made their point and corrected another person they think is wrong, but then they have to ram their point home with a gratuitous insult at the end. Here's an example from a random year-old reddit thread (kicker in red):
OP: With inexpensive Chinese EV's banned in the US, I wonder if people will buy them in Mexico and bring them into the US?
1st responder: Not gonna happen. You can’t import non-US market cars that are less than 25 years old. The process to make them US market compliant is not someone an individual or even a small company can do successfully.
2nd responder: I live 2 hours from Mexican border and see Mexican license plates everyday.
1st responder: Mexican citizens can temporarily drive their Mexican registered cars in the US for 90 days. That has absolutely nothing to the with the OP’s suggestion of a US resident buying a car in Mexico and bringing it back permanently. How you failed to understand the difference between these two things is completely beyond me.
Really? Completely beyond him? Funny, because I can easily understand how the 2nd responder thought his observation might be relevant. And actually, 1st responder is wrong: Mexicans can drive a Mexican-registered and -plated car here for up to one year, as long as they have a valid Mexican driver's license and insurance that comes up to U.S. standards. But note that kicker. In effect, "How can you be so ignorant as to argue with me?"
So watch for kickers—your own or other peoples'. It could be a sign that an overly positive writer is actually unsure of him- or herself. Why add the kicker if your argument is strong enough alone?
Bogus links Anyone can fall for a bogus link*. I'm not playing holier-than-thou here, nor am I suggesting that any specific individual is to blame for "falling" for wrong information—actually, back in '22, when I wrote a couple of articles for a national magazine, the fact checker did so. She challenged something I wrote on a subject I'm so thoroughly versed in that I knew right away where she had gotten her information—she had fallen for a tendentious website that was spreading a false narrative, and she got there by just Googling the question. I knew all about the person who wrote the site she found, a known fraud. (And she wasn't wrong to ask me to defend myself.)
But most things aren't so easy. When people include links in comments here, it's generally a big headache. If I'm being conscientious, I have to check out the link before publishing it. Sometimes, I don't know enough to evaluate the veracity of the link without doing more research. And I have limited time for such things. For that reason, sometimes I'll just remove links from comments.
And sometimes, I learn later that I should have removed a link. The other day, I published a commenter's link to a site that claimed that the "electromagnetic fields" associated with electric vehicles can have deleterious health effects on people, especially people with heart disease or pacemakers. Turns out that's not true, and the author of the site that was linked is a known fraud. But I had to hear from someone with deep knowledge of the issue before taking down the link.
I'm sure I've made mistakes like this...well, let's just be kind to me and say "not infrequently." But with 330,000 comments to vet, even over 20 years, we can't get everything right. Not everything I say is correct, either. My biggest advantage there is that I'm always willing to be corrected. If I make a mistake, I don't have such a big ego that I won't admit it. Of course, I'm also secure enough to argue the point if I still think I'm right.
One of the huge benefits of writing a site like this one is that almost no matter what I write about, I'm surely just about to learn a lot more about it...from you.
Mike
*Although I'm always surprised when I do. I fell for this when it was broadcast—I went around for three days afterwards telling people about the astonishing thing Demi Moore did despite being pregnant. Why that one? I honestly don't know. I try to remember those instances where I fell for things that are obviously tricks, though—it keeps me humble.
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Terrible disaster: This Instagram post stunned me. Our friend John Paul Caponigro lost 80% of his beautiful, carefully made archive of prints to a "mold bloom" in the building where the work was stored. A tree rubbing up against the roof in the wind opened three holes that let the moisture in. The building is insured, but the contents aren't. I have to say I was shocked at those photos, knowing how much work the wastage represents. Sincere and heartfelt condolences to John Paul, and I'm sure we all wish him well in his restoration and renewal efforts. Ned B. alerted me.
Pierce is 90: Now here's a bunch of true hotshots, or should I say hot shooters. Left to right, Eddie Adams, Arthur Grace, Bill Pierce, and Dirck Halstead. (Bill goes by "Pierce" to his friends.) These guys were some of the top names in World photojournalism when this portrait was taken. You can see some of Pierce's work, including some of his famous Northern Ireland photos, at the "Bill Pierce is 90" Facebook page. Happy Birthday Pierce! (Thanks to Carl for this.)
Nicolas the Vampire: For some reason this struck me as hilarious at the time. Back in 2011, an old CDV (carte de visite) was found of a man that resembled actor Nicolas Cage (real name: Nicolas Kim Coppola; he's the nephew of Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola). The logical conclusion arrived at was that Nicolas Cage must be a vampire, one of the undead. Various people then went to great lengths to analyze the photo to prove that it either was or wasn't a photo of Nic Cage, which is what I found amusing. It was proven not to be...based on comparisons of the structure of the ears.
Looking back, this had to be a spoof—most probably the original jokester didn't actually believe it was a photo of Nic Cage. He was just trying to sell the old CDV, for $1 million. Which of course makes it less funny. That and the fact that the historical personage in the photo doesn't look that much like Nicolas Cage.
Anyway, the original photo is back up on eBay—again for $1 million. And, presumably because I looked at it, the seller has offered me $50,000 off through eBay's channels! As a counteroffer, I'm thinking of offering him $214.56. Think that will be enough to nab it?
If I worked at a call center in Mumbai, I'd agree to give him a million dollars but only if he sent me the $50,000 first.
Jim Kasson's creativity: I guess you have to be a literary junkie to appreciate this, but Jim Kasson has collected a remarkable set of reviews of the Fuji GF 110mm ƒ/2 (87mm-e) from a series of eminent authors and poets. I hope it is within the bounds of Fair Use to quote, as one example, this review from Ogden Nash:
The Fujifilm One-Ten F-Two Will do what other lenses rue. It grabs the light with subtle force And keeps your subject sharp, of course. The background turns to silky slush, A creamy, dreamy, whisper-hush. It weighs a bit, but do not pout, Its portraits leave no room for doubt. It’s fast, it’s crisp, it’s smooth as jazz, A lens that makes you shout, “Alas! How did I live before this glass?”
I don't know how he even got in touch with Mr. Nash, never mind getting him to agree to participate. It's hard enough getting in touch with someone who's alive. Not only that, but William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Parker, James Joyce, ee cummings, Geoffrey Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, and Ovid all contributed reviews as well. Who knew that Ovid, of all people, was a GFX shooter? But we now possess the evidence, cf. the Nicolas Cage vampire thing. All are in agreement that the GF 110mm is a great lens, but then, I've always said that short teles are the easiest lenses to design well. (Hat tip to Oren Grad, and kudos to Jim.)
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
It's official: this is an era. The era of what I've snarkily dubbed the great big honkin' normal (BHN) lens. It's a distinct fad or craze that will probably be dated one day.
Here's DPReview's article about the forthcoming SongRaw Moonlit (15 elements in 10 groups, four ED [extra-low dispersion] elements, seven HR [high refractive index] elements, two aspherical elements). It's alleged to be the first full-frame ƒ/1.2 autofocus lens from a Chinese maker. No specs, prices, or availability in my country yet, that I know of. It appears to be Shenzhen SongRaw's only product so far.
These things don't appeal to me, but there might be a reason for that. In the early 1970s (I was 14 in 1971), Olympus made the first of its popular miniaturized 35mm bodies. Then-mighty Pentax followed suit—ever held an ME Super? Even Nikon, king of pro cameras back then, responded with a few small and svelte models: not just the FM and its similar-bodied stablemates; a few diehard iconoclasts will remember the EM and the Series-E lenses. The Contax 139Q that I went through photography school with was reasonably within the boundaries of the small and light body styles of the day. (I later got the larger, heavier Contax RTS II, and, to my surprise, didn't like it as well. It was promptly stolen from me, which I accepted as a sign from the Universe.) Leica rangefinders had always been small, at least as defined at the time—the Leica CL that my high school buddy Art Elkon had was even smaller. The Leica M lenses and the wonderful OM Zuiko line were mostly very light, small, and compact. The Leica C (for "compact") lenses for the CL even more so. That was the fashion at that time. It would be interesting to put the Olympus OM-Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.2 next to the Songraw Moonlit. It might look like an original Austin Mini next to a Hummer*.
Small and light was the fad that I grew up with, is all. It was what was cool at the time. That's probably mostly why I like it. I got a little endorphin charge when I saw the Pentax 70mm ƒ/2.4 again, that I will be sending out with the Pentax Monochrome body—130g (4.6 oz.) with its built-in hood. That's it in the top illustration—and it's bigger than the 21mm that will also be in the box.
I suspect that today's younger photography and camera enthusiasts are growing up with a different fashion holding sway—and that when they're my age now, they'll be looking back with rosy nostalgia on the great big lenses of now as "the way things are supposed to be." They'll get that little charge when they see a great big oversized lens...like an old SongRaw Moonlit.
Nothing new under the sun....
Here's the manufacturer page for the SongRaw Moonlit. Pretty images. And a slick and well-made page, complete with MTF curves for ƒ/1.2 and ƒ/1.4.
Mike
CORRECTION: The first version of this article said the Moonlit is the first ƒ/1.2 lens from a Chinese lensmaker. It is the first full-frame autofocus lens of that speed. Management regrets the error, and will fire the writer as soon as a replacement is found.
*Actually the smallest car I ever saw (and sat in!) was the original Honda Civic. A dealer had one on display. It was a little larger than, say, a suit of armor.
That's an early Doug video, by the way. He's now a YouTube multimillionaire.
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
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Sroyon: "I was born after the Olympus OM/Pentax ME era, but like you I'm a fan of small lenses. Nevertheless I was thinking perhaps we should differentiate between fast BHN (with a max aperture of ƒ/1.2 or wider) like the SongRaw, versus not-so-fast BHN (ƒ/1.4 and smaller). The way I see it, a full-frame autofocus ƒ/1.2 lens is bound to be big, unless they make dramatic compromises in optical quality. Whereas the not-so-fast BHN are generally big because the manufacturers wanted to make a lens which is extraordinarily well-corrected, at the expense of compactness and weight. Thus the motivations of people who buy fast versus not-so-fast BHN are probably somewhat different. Also I feel there are lots of new lenses being produced in general, especially with all the Chinese manufacturers joining the party. Including some very small lenses like the new Fuji 23mm ƒ/2.8, and 7Artisans' new 10mm ƒ/3.5. So there's a market for that too!"
Tom Burke: "Partaking as I do in a (different) forum dedicated for users of the Canon mirrorless camera that I use, I can report that a number of people buy a BHN (or the APS-C equivalent) because they’ve been told that the wider the maximum aperture, the greater the lens is. Having bought the lens, they then use it at that maximum aperture for most of their shots. Until they appeal for advice to the forum, at which point someone advises them to use a smaller aperture. But there’s a definite belief out there that an ƒ/1.4 or wider lens must be better than an ƒ/2 or even ƒ/2.8 lens, at all apertures."
BG: "Big honkin' cameras and big honkin' lenses were popular back in the SLR era, too. It's the macho I'm-a-serious he-man photographer thing. Look at the size of my cameras; it proves I am serious. Nothing changes over time...."
Maggie Osterberg: "When I was a teenager, I wanted everyone to know that I was a PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER dammit! So, I had a big Nikon SLR, with a big potato-masher flash, and a big lens. Which looked pretty ridiculous on my then 5'2" frame! But by golly, folks knew I was serious. By the time I got to my forties, I figured out that unless you're shooting sports, big ≠ good. Best thing I ever did was to get a Leica, with nice small lenses, and then an X100. As E.F. Schumacher wrote, 'Small Is Beautiful.'"
James: "You could, instead of complaining, herald the Sigma Contemporary DG DN series. The 45mm is, in particular, a standout."
I've been rather consumed by car shopping the last few days. I just wanted to comment on "range anxiety" with EVs. To add my comment to the other comments.
I've simply noticed that most of the anxiety about charging infrastructure comes from people who don't own EVs. Most people who own EVs don't consider it much of a problem. That seems fair to say from the comments here, or would you not agree?
How far do you need to drive? Some EVs have a range of 300 miles. That's the distance from Chicago to Detroit. It's also the distance from Chicago to St. Louis. Do people really think they're going to be stranded in the wilderness with a dead car because they can't manage to find a charging station between Chicago and Detroit, or between Chicago and St. Louis?
Second point; everybody who talks about range anxiety doesn't seem to mention the flip side of the coin, which is having a private gas station in your garage. Put a Level 2 charger in the garage and you can "gas up" whenever you want to. Similarly, the FUD spreaders online constantly talk about waiting for the car to charge. I don't have time to wait all day, etc. When, actually, if you charge at home, it's a lot quicker than filling up at a gas station. You plug in the car when you get home at night and unplug it in the morning. It can't take as much as two minutes. You only have to wait on long road trips. In everyday life (well, if your situation resembles mine) there's no waiting involved.
Now, of course, "your mileage may vary." As they say. Everyone's circumstances are different. But it's been more than two years since I did a long road trip. My driving goes from my house, to one or two or three or four other places, back to my house. Mostly, I drive to town and back, 15 miles round trip. Maximum mileage in a day is probably a trip to Rochester, 116 miles round trip. I drive to Rochester maybe once every two months, and it's probably less than that. Add some toodling around in Rochester, an errand or three on the way home, a meeting that evening, and I might be at a maximum of what, 160 miles for a day? That's well within the 10–80% range of every car I've looked at so far (I drove a Chevy Equinox EV yesterday). That's worst case.
I'm bitterly disappointed that I probably can't get an Ioniq 5. I love driving that thing. So pleasing. Love everything about it—how it fits me, the ride, the controls, the punchy power, the regen paddles. But I don't think I'm willing to risk the ICCU issue. So now I'm thinking of leasing a 2025 Ford Mach-e for a few years. Sort of just for the experience: I'd like to experience an electric car. Even if it's only temporary. I'm mainly simply curious. I want to find out firsthand what it's like to live with. (This is the impulse that made me into a reviewer: I want to try things for myself and decide for myself.) And I'd like to write about it. Then, 2–3 years from now, I'll regroup and figure out what to do going forward.
It would make the most sense economically to keep my current car longer, so I might. And I must say I think I'd miss it. It's been trouble-free and I'm very comfortable with it. On the other hand, YOLO. And I ain't getting any younger.
Switching to the passive voice, as people often do when talking about commitments: the decision has not yet been made.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Bob G.: "These battery or gas issues sound like the battery-dependent/manual issues back when the then 'new' all-battery cameras were starting to come in…"
Mike replies: Yes, wasn't that odd? For some reason that's something we've never really discussed. In the days of film SLRs, people so strongly desired "battery independence" that some manufacturers, including Leica and Olympus (which was briefly a leading cameramaker in the early 1980s) made specific models that were completely manual and could operate with a completely dead battery or no battery at all. And those cameras usually cost more, and were more rare, than the regular versions (the OM-3T remained scarce and prized for years). I can't recall the name of the Leica equivalent but it was an R SLR. People prized the M6 because the only thing that wouldn't work if the battery died was the meter. And many SLRs had a single shutter speed that would work manually, so that you couldn't be "caught" with a dead battery. You'd be limping, but you could still take pictures.
And those were for button batteries that lasted A YEAR OR MORE in normal use! Remember the admonition to change your camera's batteries every year on your birthday whether your camera needed it or not? The whole situation always seemed borderline crazy to me—especially because we were talking about button batteries that were tiny and weighed about as much as, what, a nickel? How hard was it to stash a backup battery (or two, if you camera required two) in your camera bag in those days? And that would be all you need to cover you in case of the apparently much-dreaded battery failure problem. I mean, even if you were going into the wilderness for a year, take a spare. You'd never feel the weight in your backpack, especially not compared to your backup body and your birding lens.
Then, after a few years of transition, everybody's like, oh, yes, these digital cameras require rechargeable batteries that have to charged virtually EVERY DAY, but we're all fine with that, no problem, we can handle it.
Huh? That was one of those "does not compute" situations. What happened to all that battery anxiety from the SLR days? Where did it go? Maybe all the people who bought all-manual 35mm cameras just switched to view cameras and a Sunny-16 chart, beats me.
Steve Rosenblum: "I appear to be a couple of days late to this discussion, but here are my two cents. I owned a 2020 Tesla Model Y for five years, and last month traded it for a 2025 Mustang Mach-E Premium with the extended range battery. Observations about EVs in general:
They are lots of fun to drive due to the instant torque and lack of transmission.
In five years nothing needed to be repaired on my Model Y after dealing with the initial problems they had with fit and finish issues. No maintenance costs beyond rotating the tires, changing the cabin filter and wiper blades, and they suggest you have the brake calipers cleaned each year if you drive in snowy places that use salt on roads.
Despite being an all-wheel-drive vehicle I found it did much better in the Michigan winter with snow tires compared to all weather tires, so I had those put on each winter.
The estimated 'range' for these cars is optimistic and I suspect they are based upon driving 65 in the summer with the wind at your back with a light foot on the pedal and the AC either off or set at 80 degrees. In the winter you lose around 30% of your range and, if very cold, more.
If you go on a long road trip you do need to plan your route considering charging options. The Tesla supercharger network is the best in terms of convenience and speed of charging and now you can charge non-Tesla cars at them using an adapter. It takes around 20 minutes to charge from 20% to 80% full at a Tesla supercharger. Going on long trips off the interstate system is more problematic.
The vast majority of the time I drive within 10 miles of home, or at most 50 miles of home and a home Level 2 charger is just the ticket.
The best compromise for those with serious range anxiety is a PHEV, or plug in hybrid. My wife has a RAV4 PHEV that can run for around 45 miles on EV mode before shifting to hybrid mode. Ninety-five percent of the time she doesn't drive more than that each day and can recharge at night. She rarely visits a gas station. If we go on a long road trip we take her car so as not to worry about charging.
My brother in law did the ultimate climate-friendly EV hack—he installed solar on the roof of his garage and powers his Tesla completely from the sun. Of course, he lives in California and the ROI on solar panels takes quite a while to catch up (soon to be worse due to recent 'Big Beautiful Bill' changes) but still, pretty cool.
"I love my new Mach-E which I have on a three-year lease. It is in all ways a better car than the Model Y. Just as fun to drive, but much nicer interior, smoother ride, excellent fit and finish, nice B&O audio system. The only defect I have detected since delivery is the exterior temperature sensor reads a bit high, so they swapped that out. Otherwise, perfect quality control. Three of my friends also have Mach-E's and they love them as well."
hugh crawford (partial comment): "On another site there’s a conversation about range anxiety, and I remembered that my father had a little Datsun 720 diesel pickup with an 80 gallon auxiliary tank for fueling farm equipment. In theory it could go over 2,500 miles but we never got it more than 30 miles away from home, and Chevron would deliver 500 gallons of gasoline and diesel to our house. I used to drive 2,800 miles nonstop a couple times a year, but that was 20 something year old me."
Dan B.: "In case you haven’t seen it, the VW ID.4 is supposedly available for as low as $99/month for a two-year lease, that’s a true giveaway and might be a good way to experience an EV at minimal cost...."
Mike replies: My experience so far is that those "offers" are just the "bait" in bait-and-switch come-ons. In every case so far where I've brought a supposed lease offer in to a dealer (four), the actual lease offer made to me has been much higher. Example: on Ford's "Payment Calculator" online I could get a result for a Mach-E Select (the lowest trim) of $330 a month with a $4,069 down payment, 36 months and 15,000 miles per year, whereas the actual lease offer at the dealer was $425 per month with a $5,000 down payment for 36 months and 12,000 miles per year.
Mileage restrictions on a lease kind of defeat the purpose of an electric car for me, because the cheaper fuel would partially be so I could feel more free to drive around photographing.
At Honda, the supposed Prologue lease of $209 per month for two years was contingent on my current car qualifying for "Loyalty or Conquest," meaning, it had to be a Honda (thus proving I was loyal) or it had to be a car from a list of Honda's competitors (meaning they want to conquer those brands). Anyway, my car is an Acura, which is a division of Honda, and it was made at the Honda Manufacturing of Indiana plant in Greenburg, Indiana. But did that qualify as loyal? No. Because Honda and Acura's financial divisions are separate and that's who has to approve the lease. My offer was $289 per month and a much heftier down payment.
That $99 figure you mention comes from Electrek, which merely said one dealer in California was offering it. Also in some cases the specific cars available with those low lease numbers are very limited. So, for instance, by the time I got around to asking about a specific advertised lease at Hyundai, the numbers of cars offered with that lease price came up for different models as "0, 0, and 0." So it seems that the makers will offer just a very few cars at one specific dealer somewhere at very low lease prices just to get those "as low as" reports on the internet. Then you toddle to the dealerships with your naive hopefulness and they get a chance to pitch you on a car.
I just took the first five people who asked to be included. I've gotten lots of private emails from people asking to be considered; please forgive me for not answering you personally. It would kill an hour that I don't have to spare today.
The first five people getting the Pentax Monochrome are: Steve Rosenblum, MikeR, Rob Spring, Todd Scholten, and William Lewis. Like I say, they were just the first five to ask, no special treatment. I'll be emailing them later tonight, or tomorrow. John Camp had a nice suggestion about the timing of shipments: each person should ship it to the next on the second Monday after they receive it. That insures that each person will get the camera for two full weekends and a solid week in between. That's for people who work a nine-to-five and are free on weekends. Nice thought. We'll adopt that.
I'll include two small primes (to keep the package light), the charger, one battery, and of course the camera body with a strap. I'll also include a list of the five people and their addresses, a timetable, and a checklist of the box contents. I'm also going to suggest that the six of us open a text chat so we can talk amongst ourselves.
If this all goes smoothly, we'll do it again in the Fall with five more readers.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
[UPDATE: All five slots are already filled. If all goes smoothly, we can do it again.]
The Online Photographer now owns a loaner Pentax Monochrome camera, brand new, that I can send to TOP readers who might be interested in trying it. v
Does that sound like fun?
You don't need to own or shoot Pentax—a complete set of all you need will be included. Except you'll have to provide your own card.
To play, you need only be an established commenter. I can instantly call up commenting history for any reader: how long you've been commenting, how many comments you've made, and all the comments themselves. There won't be any minimum number of comments or cutoff line for how long you've been commenting or anything like that. All I ask is that I be able to see that you're someone who's been around and engaged with TOP for a while, so that I know you're a "friendly" and that you know our culture. If that's the case, I'll trust you with no questions asked.
This is not sponsored by Pentax USA or any other corporate or retail entity.
Here's the deal: I'll ship it anywhere in the contiguous 48 United States, along with a Pentax lens or two. You agree to treat it nice and be careful with it, try it for 10 days or fewer, then ship it along to the next person whose address I'll provide. Shipping it forward will be the only cost you'll incur.
In return, you'll agree to write a short post about your experience to share here on the blog.
The post should be standard TOP blog-post specs: 750 words give or take 500; one to three illustrations.
You can write about any aspect of it you like: what you did with it, what your experience was like, your impressions, your opinion, your feeling about the results, technical analysis of some aspect or other, what you compared it to, how you like the files, whether you enjoyed it or were frustrated by it—whatever you want. NOT ALL of those things are required; any one would be enough. Or something else. Actually nothing specific is required. It's open. You can write anything you care to about your trial period. You decide.
Don't worry if you're not an experienced or able writer, or not a native English speaker. We have a good editor (me).
Illustrations can be pictures you took with the camera; pictures of the camera; a film B&W picture of your own for comparison, perhaps; a graph or chart; or anything you think is pertinent to, or that illustrates, whatever you care to share. It's up to you. I'll include the simple specs in the box.
Let's limit this to five people, say, to begin with. If it's popular and everything goes smoothly, we'll continue.
[UPDATE: All five slots are already filled. If all goes smoothly, we can do it again.]
Call it "The Nomad Pentax."
I think that's everything. Interested readers can reply in the Comments Section (won't be published).
Sounds like fun to me.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
I have a chance to buy a new 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 for $29k, which is a.) a lot of money but b.) not bad for a car these days—in general, never mind a full EV. (Local dealer has a few 2024 models left.)
Think I should?
More specifically, do you think you might enjoy reading the adventures of your quirky and Quixotic online friend Mike as he grapples with the NWO (new world order) of a full EV?
Not every day of course. Not every week. But ongoing. You know how I do—certain topics kinda recur. We'd probably check in a handful of times a year, sort of a long-term review kind of thing, plus the odd observation here and there.
The existing Mikemobile is at 11 years and 150k miles, and is beginning to show rust. Median Blue Book on it is $5,900. It's running fine and has new tires, and I could keep it longer. On the other hand, I've kinda had EVs on the brain since I drove that Mustang Mach-E almost a year ago, and it would hardly be an impulsive or irresponsible thing to do to replace the old buggy.
I am this close to pulling the trigger. Please, influence the influencer!
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Curt Gerston: "We’ve had a Hyundai Kona Electric for three years now. Love love love it. We smile as we pass gas stations; never have to change oil. We charge it in our driveway. Range is never an issue. Go ahead…join the future, and feel better about the miles you cover to go take pictures."
Mike replies: I didn't mention it because I was afraid it would sound too much like rationalizing, but that's honestly one of the motivations. If I go out for two hours looking for pictures with the Sigma, the hours seem to melt away but, day upon day, the gasoline bill gets pretty alarming. I'm not saying I'd save money by buying an electric car, but I'd feel more relaxed about staying out.
The way I calculate it, the savings on gas and oil would pay for about one year and two months of car payments over the six year life of the loan. The sale of the old Acura would also cover about one year and two months of payments.
Andre Y: "If you do, make sure you budget for a home level 2 charger, like a Chargepoint Home Flex, along with installation, which can be expensive mainly because of the copper wiring. Make sure the electrician knows how to install EV chargers too, as chargers have different demands than say a clothes dryer outlet: they run continuously at high power for hours at a time compared to 30 minutes or so for a dryer, so they have different requirements for wiring and load capacity. Get the charger hard-wired instead of using a plug because the plug will wear out, and could cause a fire due to intermittent contact and very high electrical loads."
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Antony Shepherd: "Good Dogs! Thanks for that Mike, really got my day off to a good start. And thanks to the contributors and their lovely dogs!"
Vinck: "Seeing this purely as a suite of pictures, before you add any notes, I'm struck by how wonderfully the five first entries work together. They are all strong and beautiful on their own, but as a set they compliment each other so well I wouldn't take or add anything, nor would i want to see them in a different order. Essentially perfect, and quite unusual for this type of potpourri exercise. All my thanks to the authors and the curator."
Sean (partial comment): "I’ve never owned a dog in my adult life; I’m actually a little scared of larger dogs. But this is now my favourite Baker's Dozen."
Dogman: "Two paws up...or whatever. Great photos! But there are no really bad photos if they are photos with dogs."
Mike replies: Given your handle, I had to feature your comment. :-)
Here's the ni:dr (not interested, didn't read) version: biphasic sleep appears to be for me.
A month ago I promised you an update on this today (see the last paragraph of the linked post from June 15th).
If you didn't see that post and don't want to go back and read it, biphasic sleep is sleeping in two shifts with an interval of wakefulness in between. It was most likely the common mode of sleeping in Europe before the Industrial Revolution, and it was probably the ordinary mode of sleeping in colonial America. Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin are said to have slept that way. It was killed by electric lights and by the modern custom of commuting back and forth to a workplace away from home. I'd give you some links, but you know how to use Google if you want to know more.
The results It's been a somewhat rocky month, but the upshot is encouraging and positive. I slept all but three days "biphasically" this past month. I had to experiment with several schedule changes, and I had to suffer several failures. Nothing big; just ordinary self-indulgent failures. One time I took a late afternoon nap that messed everything up. One time I stayed up too late watching tennis matches (it was an eventful Wimbledon). One time I couldn't stop writing on time and got to bed for Phase II way too late. And one time I just couldn't get to sleep for Phase II. Three times I said the heck with it and slept the old way. Or tried to.
However I really like the schedule overall. It solves two relatively large problems in my life: how to get an adequate amount of sleep, and when to find time in the day for uninterrupted long-form writing.
The current schedule Here's where I've ended up so far:
I set (gentle) alarms for 10:00 p.m., 2:00 a.m., 5:00 a.m., and 10 a.m. I try to get in bed after the first alarm between 10:00 and 10:30 p.m. and turn my lights off by 11:00 at the latest. I sleep for 3+ hours; get up at 2:00 a.m. and come downstairs, where I have the office prepared with a yellow light bulb in the table lamp and the yellow "Night Mode" color cast on the computer display turned all the way up; write for three hours; and then go back to bed at 5:00 for another five hours. Then get up at the last alarm at 10:00 a.m.
I don't cope well with alarms, because my worrying brain wakes me up before the alarm goes off—sometimes an absurdly long time before the alarm goes off. But I'm telling myself every night to just sleep till the alarm, trust the alarm, etc., and I'm getting used to doing that. Perhaps counterintuitively, I have had little problem with waking and going to sleep. I get up at 2:00 feeling perfectly refreshed and ready t0 go, and if I'm just patient with myself I can get back to sleep at 5:00 with relatively little trouble. I have various mental tricks that help.
I should add that I've had sleep problems literally my whole life. I only napped till I was barely two (source: Mom, although I have memories of getting up and escaping my crib*), and I was tested in a time-free environment in the 1970s and discovered that my natural circadian cycle was, at that time, 32 hours. That's not outlier territory but it's also not very close to the 24-hour celestial cycle**. One of my best experiences with sleep was when I was on a week-long wilderness camping trip and my entrainment got perfectly in sync with the sun—marvelous.
Last night was almost as good. I got to sleep on time, woke up at the alarm for both awakenings, and got a little more than eight hours total sleep.
To put that in context, back when I was sleeping "normally," that is, trying to sleep all the way through the night all in one go, I probably managed a normal night's sleep of seven or more hours at one stretch maybe three times a month. At best. I never kept records, but I'd bet my car that there were numerous months when I didn't make it to seven hours even once.
As far as the writing time is concerned, it's just marvelous. I love the three-hour "mini-day" (as reader/commenter AN dubbed it) in between sleeps. It's so peaceful and quiet. I can really concentrate. The three hours just melts away every night, and I definitely need the alarm (the alarms are on my iPad, which I bring downstairs with me) to signal me that time's up. At 5:00 a.m. this time of year, the birds are beginning to chirp (serving as an alarm themselves) and dawn is just barely lightening the sky. I'm working on a piece called "Autobiography is Painful" currently, which should end up at about 10,000 words.
The imperative Writing takes discipline. Consider this passage from a recent article about crime novelist Elmore Leonard by a writer I admire, Anthony Lane:
By 1950, [Leonard] had graduated from the University of Detroit, married a woman named Beverly Cline, and found a job at the Campbell-Ewald advertising agency. By 1955, he had three children and a daily routine to match, as [Leonard's biographer C.M.] Kushins reveals:
Up at five o’clock sharp for two hours of uninterrupted writing (still two pages completed before putting the water on for his morning coffee), then showered and suited for the office—ready to wolf down breakfast and help Beverly feed Jane, Peter, and infant Christopher—then receive the Eucharist during eight o’clock Mass. Finally, he arrived at Campbell-Ewald by nine.
The sheer discipline—“the perseverance to just sit there alone and grind it out,” Leonard calls it—is striking. (Forbidding yourself a first cup of coffee or tea until you’ve written a certain amount, despite not being technically awake, is a brutal habit that I’ve stuck to for decades. Turns out I’ve been taking orders from Leonard all along.)
If I'm going to continue with a biphasic sleeping schedule, and use the time constructively in the service of "grinding it out," I'm going to have to be disciplined in three main ways:
Getting upstairs on time
Sticking to writing, and nothing but, during the mini-day
Stopping writing right on time and getting back upstairs to bed
It's been a fun experiment. Will I continue with it going forward? Constancy is not my best thing. Time will tell. Next update? Eleven months from now. That will be one year from when I started this on June 15th, 2025, nine days after Butters died. Feel free to remind me if I forget.
Mike
*I have many detailed memories of very early childhood, including before I could walk, and I was absolutely astonished when I first learned that most people do not.
**"Night owls" are people whose natural circadian cycle is more than 24 hours, "larks" people whose natural cycle is less than 24 hours. The average is about 24.2 hours.
P.S. How you can tell the illustration is AI-generated: look at the brickwork, especially above the mantelpiece, and the back right leg of the nightstand, mainly. There are a few other anomalies, but those are the easiest "tells." Pretty decent for one try, though.
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
ASW wrote, yesterday: "Bill McKibben has a concise (online) article about recent and future growth of renewable energy sources, how China is in the driver's seat to dominate the space, and how our (America's) energy policies are both backwards and self-defeating, in The New Yorker. It's called '4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment.' It's well worth a few minutes of your time if you have access."
I read this last night. If you've been feeling pessimistic or defeated about the state of the World and the weather, you're about to get a significant mood-enhancer. This is the most uplifting, positive, optimistic, encouraging article on any subject I've read in a long while.
The New Yorker allows four free articles a month to non-subscribers, so you should be able to access it if you are not a subscriber and haven't used up all your freebies. And if you have, August is a new month.
It appears that we are at the tipping point—it's just that America is neither leading the way nor really participating any more. But it's happening globally. America is now firmly on the wrong side of history, as well as on the wrong side of economic development and future prosperity. We've gone from world leader to actively obstructing the future.
But that doesn't mean the news is not good.
Really the most hopeful thing I've encountered recently. Thanks to ASW. And for others, coolly recommended (that's a joke. Not "warmly" recommended, yageddit? As Craig Ferguson used to say, "amused myself, and that's half the battle").
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Dean Johnston [no relation to Mike]: "After reading that, and in the context of thinking about the world, I feel better than I have in ages."
The most fascinating portfolio of pictures I've seen recently isn't art. It's called "Photos: The Scale of China’s Solar-Power Projects," and unfortunately it's behind a paywall. [UPDATE: Many readers are reporting that the content isn't walled off for them. So give it a try! —Ed.] Absolutely mind-boggling.
Solar energy is a significant fascination. The best short primer on energy I've ever read (not all I've read on the subject, of course) is the first 98 pages or so of a book called American Theocracy by the late Kevin Phillips. The section, Part I, was called "Oil and American Supremacy." It is in essence a long essay. As with other Phillips books, its connection to the rest of the book is rather loose—some of his volumes are redolent of collections rather than concerted, coherent, through-going argument. So the essay can stand alone. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall too—you'd have to buy the whole book in order to read that one little section. In the late 2000s, ever a Don Quixote, I wrote a letter to Mr. Phillips and Penguin, his publisher, suggesting that "Oil and American Supremacy" really should be issued as a separate small volume at modest cost. Penguin at the time had a series of pamphlet-style semi-miniature books that featured important short-form writing from the past and present. Here's one of them:
I also have the translation of Ecclesiastes from the same series and one or two others, but I can't find them. Frustratingly, the books, which I saw in a bookstore display and which all had similar-but-varied form, format, typography, and cover design, don't seem to have been given a series name, and I can't find a page for them among Penguin's far-flung constellation of imprints, house names, and web pages. (There are only five major publishers in the USA, of which Penguin/Random House is the largest.) It's possible they simply under-performed and were unceremoniously dumped. Doesn't matter. Long and short, I thought "Oil and American Supremacy" would fit perfectly in the series, and it's one of those things—you know how it is with those things—that I urgently felt every citizen ought to read. But by now, Penguin's had 20 years to get back to me, which kinda makes my hope for a reply grow dim. (I'm joking.) And Kevin Phillips died in 2023.
Kevin Phillips was an interesting fellow, by the way. He was one of the founding theorists of Movement Conservatism and post-Goldwater Republican strategy—usually credited with originating the Southern Strategy—who later moved toward independence and became an outspoken critic of the Republican Party. In other words, he actually thought for himself, which would make him stick out like a sore thumb today. I went on a deep dive into politics during the Bush II years—I probably read 150 books, all of them except one now slumbering in boxes in the attic of the barn. Kevin Phillips, the essence of an iconoclast, was the best find. (Well, Thomas Frank too.)
Anyway, one of the points Phillips makes in "Oil and American Supremacy" is that rich and powerful national economies have historically had trouble moving away from the energy sources that made them rich and powerful in the first place. The Netherlands and wind power, Britain and coal. The Dutch windmills peaked in the 1600s and 1700s—yet there were still 9,000(!) windmills in The Netherlands in the nineteenth century! (There are some 1,200 left today—believe it or not, only partially for tourism.)
Assuming the pattern plays out, America is going to have a very hard time moving away from oil. We have long been the global powerhouse. We tend to think of the Middle East when we think of oil production now, but on this very day (and for years now) the United States is the world's largest producer of oil. Our big problem is not that we don't produce huge amounts of oil, it's just that we use even more than we produce—that's what gives Saudi Arabia such pull over us, and it's why we have willingly gone along with the largest transfer of wealth in the history of Planet Earth—American wealth shifted to the countries that make up for our oil shortfall. It's why our military budget is so huge—to protect the shipping lanes for oil coming from the Middle East. (If the military cost of protecting global oil extraction and importation were passed along directly to the pump, a gallon of gasoline in America would cost somewhere roughly between $13 and $18. That's including the offset for supplementary biofuels.) It's why we fought the Gulf War—by historical accident, Iraq has the largest and least exploited oil reserves left on Earth, and, consequently, America now has a dozen huge military bases in Iraq, all of them strategically "protecting" oil fields, oil production facilities, and oil shipping hubs. Of course that it is not their stated purpose, but it is their purpose. Never mind a wholesale switchover—it would make incredibly good sense for us to make it our national purpose to simply gain enough alternative energy production to attain energy independence. It would solve a large number of complications and eliminate vast expenditures of national resources.
Meanwhile, China has no such sentimental, historical, and institutional attachment to the energy sources of the 20th century, and the Chinese are killing us in the race to harness and develop solar. We've allowed them to get way, way out ahead of us. Photographs aren't proof, and photographs aren't argument, but what they certainly are is illustration, and I've never seen a more stunning illustration of China's emerging supremacy in what will surely be the dominant 21st-century energy source. No one sees the future, least of all me, but oil will not be the world's major source of energy in 2100—that much is easy to predict, simply because there's not enough of it left. With its electric cars improving by leaps and bounds (BYD just passed Tesla as the world largest EV producer), its battery research lapping us, and its solar power technology, implementation, and deployment crushing ours, China is setting itself up to rule the future. (Germany and Brazil are also well ahead of us in alternative and renewable energy.) One word describes the U.S.: behind.
I wish I could link to this set of set of pictures. The most symbolic one is captioned "Floating solar panels stretch across an aquatic farm built on land that subsided after extensive coal mining, in Suixi County, Anhui province, China, on April 28, 2025." But oh well. For those of you who subscribe to The Atlantic, be sure not to miss it.
Mike
P.S. I'm watching this morning what are indisputably the two greatest tennis players alive on our planet. Back to the tennis!
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
John Shriver: "Dan Yergin's book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power is also a great treatise on how the whole western world is wrapped around oil. I was half way through the book when my mother died in 2020, and had just gotten to the end of the Second World War. The Allies won that war much because of their control of oil. The Allies starved both Germany and Japan of oil. I took a course from Dan Yergin at the Kennedy School of Government on this topic about 1980, before he wrote the book. (Cross-registered from 'the small trade school down the river.') Very interesting; an enormous amount of reading. There's also a PBS multi-part series based on the book, which is accessible online. Here's the first part."
Mike replies: The Prize is now a trilogy: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (2008); The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2012); and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (2021). The trouble is, their combined 2,336 pages (six and a half pounds of paper in the print versions, according to Amazon) isn't bathroom reading. I put a high value on primers (the word is properly pronounced to rhyme with trimmer) because they might actually be read, which is why I like Kevin Phillips' entertaining backgrounder. However, all you have to do is read the first page or two of the sample of The Prize at Amazon to realize that you're in the hands of a compelling and capable writer in Mr. Yergin. History well written is the only true page-turner. Like you, I read a lot of The Prize when it was more or less new, before ultimately being defeated. (I tend not to like histories as they butt up against the present, because they get less and less authoritative the closer they get to now. I learned that reading histories of photography.)
Jan-Peter Onstwedder: "I think you need to fact-check some of your post. The US imports crude oil, true, despite producing a lot. But it also is a net exporter of refined products. So imports + domestic production is greater than domestic demand, the balance being exported as fuels, plastics and other petrochemical products. It used to be true that OPEC had significant influence over prices and therefore US economics, but that influence is much smaller since US production has gone up so much. And the US now uses far less energy per unit of GDP than 20–30 years ago. All in all, oil is still important but no longer an excuse for meddling in other producing countries’ affairs."
Mike replies: And yet we still do. Oil imports have hardly abated. I admit I'm not up on "the Shale Gale," but the go-to book on it is for those who are interested is probably this one. Bear in mind that fracking in general might well be a sort of financial shell game: it succeeds by attracting huge amounts of speculative investment from the excess amount of capital "sloshing around the world" (a consequence of wealth hoarding) and has yet to prove that it's actually sustainably economically viable. At any rate, I'm not interested, because when the world is burning the last thing we need is more fire.
ASW: "Bill McKibben has a concise (online) article about recent and future growth of renewable energy sources, how China is in the driver's seat to dominate the space, and how our (America's) energy policies are both backwards and self-defeating, in The New Yorker. It's called '4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment.' It's well worth a few minutes of your time if you have access."
Mike adds: Here's a brief clip: "...Even though we’ve got used to seeing solar panels and wind turbines across the landscape in the intervening fifty years, we continue to think of what they produce as 'alternative energy,' a supplement to the fossil-fuelled power that has run Western economies for more than two centuries. In the past two years, however, with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world."
I just read it. It's an incredibly hopeful article. And from Bill McKibben! (Who at times has sounded like the most pessimistic person on the planet.)
"I've shipped the prints to everyone who's paid me. Everyone who has paid should have either received their prints or a tracking number from the USPS. Anyone who hasn't received one or the other should get in touch with me at ctein@pobox.com ."
We've heard from several people who have already received their prints and they were glowing in their praise and satisfaction. Our print sales over the years have been a lot of fun and very gratifying. Thanks again to all.
Large-format printer for sale: Ctein, as you know, is moving to Montana soon; he's gonna be a dental floss tycoon. Er, no, I mean he's moving Ireland soon, and it has nothing to do with dental floss. I lifted this from his most recent newsletter: "I am still looking for someone who is interested in buying my 44-inch Epson P9000 printer. I'd like to keep it until shortly before I leave. It should be someone local (this is not shippable!) and I'm offering it at an extremely good price, like less than half what a new one would cost, with over a grand worth of ink and paper."
[He means it when he says it's not shippable. It weighs in excess of 300 lbs. and it's huge—when Epson ships these to trade shows, the reusable crate they use costs as much as the printer itself. For this reason, the sale would have to be local in the San Francisco area. —Mike the Ed.]
"I've also got a 17-inch Epson P800 printer for sale. Available for immediate pick-up with a decent ink supply, and I think you'll agree the price is right at $500."
Same email address as above.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales thro ugh affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Real quick—just wanted to mention that yesterday, not long after the post about weird stuff you use your phone camera for, I went to the local mechanic's shop, Marbles, to see if I could get an estimate. My car has some rust at either end of the rocker panels, and I wanted to see if it could be fixed, and, if so, how much it would cost. The guy who does the body shop estimates is the owner, Paulie Marbles. I thought he had retired but he assured me he hasn't, although his son now occupies the big office. Anyway we're standing there discussing rust and rocker panels, and Paulie apologized for not being able to get down and look up under the car, saying he isn't as nimble as he used to be, or words to that effect.
So I got the phone out, reversed the camera, and stuck the phone under the car. We were able to see the extent of the rust just fine, with me on one knee and him standing up. I just thought it was funny that this happened right after we were talking about it here.
The verdict, by the way—he doesn't really do rust. He says no matter how good a job you do, it can still keep coming back. Reminds me of my friend Jim, who kept a favorite Subaru station wagon for 11 years through the snowy, salty Vermont winters. He would have kept it for longer but rust got the better of it. That was a while back—cars are much more rustproof now. But still, you know what Neil Young said:
Mike
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales thro ugh affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
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