Christine Rosen On Living IRL

Christine is a columnist for Commentary and a co-host of The Commentary Magazine Podcast. She’s also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. The author of many books, her new one is The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.

For two clips of our convo — on algorithms killing serendipity, and smartphones killing quiet moments — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: the optimism of the early Internet; IRL (In Real Life) experience vs. screen experience; Taylor Swift concerts; the online boon for the physically disabled; Taylor Lorenz and Covid; how IRL improves memory; how emojis improve tone; how screens hinder in-person debate; sociologist Erving Goffman; tourists who never experience a place without an audience; Eric Schmidt’s goal of “manufacturing serendipity”; Zuckerberg’s “frictionless” world; dating apps; the decline of IRL flirting; the film Cruising; the pornification of sex; Matthew Crawford and toolmaking; driverless cars; delivery robots in LA; auto-checkouts at stores; the loss of handwriting; reading your phone on the toilet; our increased comfort with surveillance; the Stasi culture of Nextdoor; the mass intimacy of blogging; Oakeshott and “the deadliness of doing”; the film Into Great Silence; Christine’s time at a monastery in Kentucky; Musk’s drive to extend life indefinitely; Jon Haidt and kids’ phones; trans ideology as gnosticism; the popularity of podcasts; music pollution in public; the skatepark at Venice Beach; and the necessity of downtime.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Aaron Zelin on the fall of Assad, Brianna Wu and Kelly Cadigan on trans lives, Mary Matalin on our sick culture, Adam Kirsch on his book On Settler Colonialism, Nick Denton, and John Gray on the state of liberal democracy. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

A reader flags a new documentary that dovetails this week’s pod on mediated living:

JOIN OR DIE could be of interest to you and your readers. The film, which premiered at SXSW last year and is headed to Netflix on October 18th, is an exploration of community in America, the loneliness crisis, and Robert Putnam’s famed “Bowling Alone” research. Here’s the trailer:

Another has a few guest recommendations for the pod:

I’d love if you’d bring on one of the Silicon Valley guys who broke for Trump this year. My vote would be Marc Andreessen. He is perfectly positioned to explain exactly how the Biden administration has been at war with tech and business more broadly. Andreessen is also right in the middle of some truly fascinating things happening around crypto. (Love or hate crypto, you really can’t ignore it anymore.)

If you’re curious, this video will give you a good primer on how guys like Andreessen think things are about change under Trump:

An alternative guest could be Chamath Palihapitiya, whose transformation from huge Dem donor to public Trump cheerleader has been surprising and instructive. My money is that he’ll be running for California governor in 2026. Make California Great Again, etc.

Thanks as ever, and hugs to Truman!

Here’s a listener on her own dog:

I’ve been a Dishcast listener for a while, but I felt moved to write you for the first time after listening to your episode on grief with Anderson Cooper. The conversation was profoundly moving and thought-provoking. I found myself needing to pause it several times to sit with my thoughts as I listened to you and Anderson unpacking grief, detailing the experience of the loss of Patrick and so many others during the AIDS crisis, reflecting on the loss of your parents, and more.

Some of your experiences resonated with me. I’ve known for a long time that you had a beagle, Bowie. What I didn’t know is that last year you watched her have a heart attack right in front of you. I watched my own beagle, Ellie, have a heart attack and die in my arms in 2020. Like you, I wailed like I never have before. She was a survivor of animal testing, born in a massive beagle factory farm and then sent to a laboratory where she lived in a small metal cage until she was eight years old. She was one of the few lucky ones who was released in the end, instead of killed.

Here’s a picture of Ellie, because who doesn’t want cute beagle pictures in their inbox? I hope she is running free next to Bowie.

I’m grateful we could give her four years of a life of love. But seeing how the years inside a cage destroyed her body, with muscles so atrophied she had to ride in a wagon on our walks, was a painful reminder of how she suffered. The grief of reflecting on how tens of thousands of other Ellies are trapped inside laboratories, and then again with her death, moved me to action. Much as you described channeling your grief into fighting for marriage equality so that no other person is robbed of fundamental rights when experiencing the loss of their beloved partner, the grief I experienced with Ellie pushed me into advocating for other animals who are still suffering inside labs.

Gay marriage wasn’t a popular idea when you boldly started fighting for it. But as you poignantly said, “Our humanity demanded it. So you make the demand.” I’m making this a mantra whenever I’m experiencing self-doubt in my own work. I’m deeply grateful for your history lessons on the AIDS crisis and how you created change, the vulnerable and honest conversation about death, and overall inspiration.

From another beagle lover:

Well, that’s twice in four months: the first was Stephen Fry, and now there’s Anderson Cooper. On both occasions I have decided to lurch into ill-advisedly longer hikes than planned with Dougal the beagle, since I didn’t want to pause the pod halfway through, and I didn’t want to have to answer any questions about my emotional state. I got the beautiful late afternoon views over the Pacific, paired with the increasingly anxious descent over loose scree in failing light. I attach a photo of a quite delighted beagle in his element:

I also just read your December 1990 piece properly for the first time, the one that Anderson recited passages from: “Gay Life, Gay Death.” I’m still processing it.

It’s in my collection, Out On a Limb. Yet another dog parent:

I promise to send in a VFYW submission soon, but in the meantime, here’s a reflection on your talk with Anderson — perhaps my favorite one on the Dishcast yet. I didn’t know to be prepared to cry (and choke up several more times), but the rawness and authenticity displayed in this conversation were truly moving. There are three things in particular I’d like to respond to: grief in general, death in society, and gay history.

On grief, I’ve only ever experienced secondhand tragedy. I’m thinking of, most recently, a very close friend of mine whose father just died of a brutal combination of throat and brain cancer. At 31, I have been mercifully spared these kinds of tragedies and traumas. I see it as a blessing to still have my parents, siblings, and close friends and family all alive and well — yet I often think about how, as a result, I am completely ill-prepared for loss. And I have no idea how I will respond.

I had but a taste a couple of months ago, when I had to rush my dog to urgent care after what appeared to be a stroke. He’s an older midsize dog that I’ve had for seven years now, and he’s traveled all over the States and Western Europe with me (23 states and six countries together, but who’s counting!). It’s cliché, but he’s my best bud.

Because I got him when he was already “old”, I didn’t think he’d be around this long, and I’ve long thought his death would come sooner than later. (In fact, a couple of years ago I bookmarked the old Dish reader collection “The Last Lesson We Learn from Our Pets,” which I’ve never read and am saving for when the time comes.) But that stroke threw me into a deep sadness, deeper than any breakup and deeper than I’ve experienced in a long time. And all for a dog that’s still alive!

He hasn’t recovered fully, and we’re now at the phase where “he has good days and bad days.” So I’m dreading having to face his end. But that’s why I’m grateful for this episode; it’s given me a window into how to properly think about these things.

My other two points are on the historical discussions of the AIDS crisis and of death more broadly — about our society’s obsessive and unhealthy avoidance of death. As an historian of early-modern Europe, I regularly make this point about the ubiquity of death in daily life in every time and place before our own today in the advanced West, and how we now hide death as much as possible. For something as natural and universal as death, I often don’t recognize the mundane yet macabre descriptions of it that appear in the archives. So I appreciate that this discussion came up in the episode.

Particularly insightful was Anderson’s observation that death and sex have flipped scripts today in terms of what’s public versus what’s private, all from our modern obsessions with pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. I’m not immune to these obsessions, obviously, but it’s a keen insight worth grappling with.

Lastly, as a millennial card-carrying homosexual, I find it very true just how ignorant my generation of gays is of our very recent history. You are not wrong to complain about it. Yes, it’s obviously wonderful that we are able to live our lives today as freely as we do, but it comes at the cost of often losing all perspective over the real widespread discrimination and trauma suffered by those before us. The activist cosplaying of my peers is often insufferable. In the weeks leading up to the election and in the weeks since, many of my gay friends have been in full freakout mode about all our rights that are supposedly under attack. Come on.

More importantly, though, I deeply appreciate the witness you give to your dear friends and to true friendship — both in this conversation and in Love Undetectable, which I read two years ago. One of my favorite passages:

The resilience of homosexuality itself, its capacity to endure even against the most crippling discrimination, even against the most invasive psychotherapy, is ultimately not about the resilience of alienation, or subversion, or disease. It is about the resilience of love itself.

The essay that follows, “If Love Were All,” is one of my favorites of all time. Absolutely beautiful. Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you. I’m proud of that essay on friendship. Love Undetectable is also in print. (Can you tell it’s Christmas season?)

A reader with a grim cancer diagnosis comments on the news:

Long-time Dishhead here, hoping the time is right to have a discussion about dying, death, and the Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD) laws, such as the one that lawmakers just passed in your home country. We will probably disagree on some parts of the MAiD debate, but I think we have a unique perspective to add based on a shared medical history.

Like me, you were diagnosed with HIV in the 1990s when it was essentially a death sentence. We were lucky and received a reprieve when an effective pharmaceutical cocktail was finally released in 1996. For me, I had already been formally diagnosed with AIDS by that point, so the release of the protease inhibitor Crixivan came just a few months before I likely would have succumbed to yet another opportunistic infection. If a “death with dignity” law had been available in Washington state at that time, I wonder if I might have made the decision to check out before the suffering started in earnest, and before I had access to the new cocktail.

I’m curious if you ever considered this question — for yourself or your friends that may have just barely survived.