1. In the summer of 2011, I worked an extra part time job to put money away for the ring. You know, the ring, the one I was going to give to my gal when I asked her to be my wife. It wasn’t a particularly glitzy or big diamond, but it set me back $775 nonetheless. It was a tall order for a twenty-four year old in seminary, but a worthwhile expense to help arrange that life-changing “yes” I was gunning for.
Nowadays, I can find a similarly designed diamond ring for less than $100 thanks to the innovations of lab grown diamonds. Long touted as the great disrupter of an industry defined by unethical business practices, diamonds can now be produced without intensive ecological disruption or the exploitation of third world labor. Lab grown diamonds were supposed to increase supply and lower the price of all diamond jewelry, pricing mined diamonds out of the market. But as Amanda Mull writes in the Atlantic, such hopes have turned out to be naïve about the influence that status has on our purchases.
The expense itself has always been what makes the ring meaningful.
Why anyone would long to spend extra money when far more affordable, identically useful options abound can be a maddening question — but only when asked about products you’re not personally interested in. You may not feel that way about diamonds, but maybe sports cars or designer handbags or rare whiskeys do it for you. These are all known as “Veblen goods,” so named after the American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first described the phenomenon in 1899. Veblen goods are products for which demand increases as their price goes up, even though improvements in practical utility are marginal at best. People come up with all kinds of arguments for why any particular Veblen good is totally worth the money in rational terms — fine craftsmanship, superior materials, that sort of thing. Sometimes, those assertions are true enough, but they’re not complete. A Veblen good’s primary utility is for social signaling; it derives value from its price, instead of the other way around. It’s desirable because people with less money can’t have it.
All of this puts lab-grown diamond purveyors in an awkward position. Sellers are cratering prices and rapidly expanding supply for a product that needs to be expensive and rare-seeming in order to remain desirable. If a Veblen good suddenly declines in price, demand increases in the short term, as people rush to access status signifiers that would have previously been out of reach for them. But in the long term, these dynamics can spell the end of a Veblen good’s power. As its effect as a status symbol becomes too diluted to be useful for people with actual status, those people eventually move on to other things, and the good begins to lose its aspirational appeal. If lab-grown diamonds become too cheap, in other words, they pose an existential threat to themselves by ruining the demand for diamonds altogether.
In other words, says Mull, it was wrong to think that the status conferred to mined diamonds would be shared with cheaper lab-grown counterparts. The status is not in the jewel, but in the money used to pay for it. See Mull’s opening anecdote about a woman returning her lab grown engagement ring to a jeweler because it was “too perfect” and exchanging it for a smaller mined stone. It’s an economic lesson in low anthropology, an admission that the distortions of the human condition involve the desire to be visibly recognized as better than other people.
2. Keeping with the romance theme in light of next week’s holiday, Danyel Smith writes in the New York Times Magazine that “The World Needs Love. Hallmark is Cashing In.” Working to replicate its success as the Queen of Christmas Movies, Hallmark is expanding its investments into Valentine’s Day with “Loveuary” programming throughout the month of February. Smith wonders what it says about us that our cultural tastes may be shifting away from prestige TV to visual comfort food.
Brands respond to holes in the marketplace, though, and to the zeitgeist. And what the world craves now is love, sweet love. Part of it is the current nostalgia for all things 1990s related, from classic hip-hop culture to beloved romantic films like “Groundhog Day,” “As Good As It Gets,” “Sliding Doors,” “The Wedding Singer,” “Notting Hill” and “The Best Man.” Then came the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Economic recession. A presidential election that bent a nation. Learning how to date and love during the pandemic. In this moment of interpersonal isolation, amid all kinds of division — between the rich and the poor, between men and women, between red states and blue — the “meet cute,” that old rom-com staple, is more appealing than ever. And Loveuary has one after another lined up.
Loveuary — cushiony, bingeable and mesmerizing — is a space of fantasy, like a land in one of Disney’s parks. Life there is spotless and sugary and relentlessly fun. Cookies are warm, and nostalgia reigns. We are running, in the glow of our screens, away from shows that lionize serial killers, away from procedurals that cold-open with yet another young woman being garroted from behind, away from specious news-channel chyrons. Away from the complexities of our own relationships, and the problems that can’t be fixed with bouquets of roses.
Disdain for Loveuary, and Hallmark programming in general, is tinged with nervousness. It’s edged in a fear of how deeply timeworn tropes appeal to realists, idealists and cynics. We’re all afraid. We’re all tired. So we are susceptible to living vicariously through yet another couple sealing their love at a Valentine’s Day ball. Will we suffocate in this cozy secondhand joy? Will we do the work of loving one another? Of being our own cavalry ? Because if not, that’s a horror show right there. Those are the real walking-dead numbers.
Speaking of brands responding to the zeitgeist, stay tuned for next week’s Super Bowl Psychology article, a favorite commercial roundup that yours truly enjoys writing every year. If Hallmark’s slate of Jane Austen inspired Loveuary films are scratching an emotional itch for easier and simpler love, perhaps we’ll see the same reflected during the big game’s potty breaks.
3. Thank God that Mockingbird got its roots established some 16+ years ago. Word on the street is that to get a break these days in the new social media landscape, one has to sell out and relentlessly self promote through the algorithms of social media gatekeepers. Over at Vox, Rebecca Jennings reports on the sorry state of the creative arts as publishing opportunities are funneled toward those with social media reach, and voices with good ideas but no “personal brand” are left behind. For those of us from a certain era, this trend is totally opposite to the aloof authenticity that drove the pop culture of our youth. There was no line between self promotion and selling out.
The August/September 1997 cover story of Fast Company was “The Brand Called You,” its headline design a clever take on the orange Tide logo. The gist: If you’re not building your “personal brand,” a term coined by the author, you’re already being left behind by the new economy, one where career success isn’t defined by moving up the corporate ladder but by individual growth and self-promotion. “There is no one right way to create the brand called You,” writes Tom Peters in the kicker. “Except this: Start today. Or else.”
The sentiment was a rather unfashionable one at the time, if not for the white-collar workers reading Fast Company, then certainly for the young people who would eventually enter their world. If there was a decade defined by its obsession with authenticity and artistic purity, it’s the 90s, an era where trying too hard or caring too much about anything was embarrassing, where “selling out” was the ultimate sin.
In his essay collection The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman defines the term “sellout” not as someone who sells something in order to get rich, but someone who compromises their values to do so. “This action was particularly bad if the compromised person was still doing the same work they’d done before,” he writes, “except now packaging that work in an attempt to make it palatable to a less discriminating audience.” Even at the time, there was pushback against the idea of criticizing artists for “selling out,” that it was a naive and hypocritical concept that punished ambition and innovation. “It was a loser’s game and everyone knew it,” he writes. “But it was a loser’s game you still had to play.”
Truthfully, it makes us grateful that our NYC conference in April will mark 16 years since the Mockingbird party started, and for all those years, our supporters have kept the bird flying without us having to sell our souls to tech platforms, clickbait fluff, or advertising partners. Jennings writes in her article that creatives who can escape the self-promotion treadmill are “very, very lucky.” We might have used the word blessed instead, but the sentiment is the same.
4. Before getting to humor this week, I’d like to comment on the delightfully vapid dust-up that is “Golden Retriever Man.” At first glance, the Golden Retriever Man meme is nothing but a bored internet editor flipping through Tiktok desperate to report on a trend. On a deeper level, this trend seems so perfectly tailored for our moment that could be manufactured. We see the planets align in the New York Post’s headline: “What is a ‘Golden Retriever Man’? Gen Z goes wild over new breed of bachelor.” Dogs, generational warfare, relationships, the battle of the sexes, a question without an answer, a potential animal-based personality test … it’s all there to lure you in for a click. The innards of the article include conversations about which celebrity men are Golden Retrievers, while others are sloughed off as needy, energetic Jack Russel Terrier men or strong but work obsessed Belgian Malinois men. (My wife says I’m a St. Bernard — big, hairy, a bit of a mess, but good at helping.) Over at the Huffington Post, there are comparisons to other dating slang words like “himbo,” commentary from people with zeitgeisty jobs like dating coach and content creator, and an acknowledgement that if the trend was reversed and men started talking about chihuahua women, it would be problematic, but it’s all just light fun so get over it. Again, a perfectly designed story to pique everyone’s internet interest.
The true tragedy of this meme, however, is how clear it is that nobody who wants a golden retriever man has actually welcomed a golden retriever into their family. My golden retriever Ginger is goofy, great with people and kids, wicked smart, easy to please, and to top it off, a beautiful shade of amber gold — everything a person could ask for in a dog. And yet … she also bolts out the door if it’s cracked, eats the trash, has a potential allergy to chicken, snags food off of the tray of my one year old’s high chair, groans and snorts when she doesn’t get what she wants, barks ferociously at every sound she hears outside, and refuses to wear cute sweaters for Christmas card photos.
One day, you will go to the park and your golden retriever man will (metaphorically) poop. It’ll only be after you put your hand into the bag and reach down to pick up the metaphorical poo that you realize there is a giant hole in the bag, and now it’s all over your hands. You’ll gag and vomit on the ground as you try to wipe off the metaphorical excrement in the grass, and you’ll begin to jog home desperate to wash your hands. Your golden retriever man won’t want to go with you. Instead, he’ll pull the opposite way insisting that you let him metaphorically eat your vomit. I simply want everyone to know what they’re signing up for when they get any breed of man, because it applies to golden retriever men too.
Elsewhere in humor this week: the Babylon Bee published, “Report: ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ Flags Not Working.” And Reductress offers, “Nice! This Woman Just Journaled so She Should Be Set for Next Ten Months.”
5. In entertainment news this week, folk icon Tracy Chapman crashed the Grammys for a performance of “Fast Car.” Her hit song from 1988 was revived in 2023 in a country music cover by Luke Combs, a cover so popular it won the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year. Chapman’s Grammy duet with Combs harmonized a universal desire for freedom, a desire to break free from life’s hardships and find love and affection and worth. It’s a desire that transcends boundaries of race, gender, economic station, and music genre, as Peter Wehner explains:
The response was instantaneous and overwhelming, and not just in the arena. The song went viral; people took to social media to say they were crying, but not knowing quite why. I couldn’t stop watching the performance yesterday, and I found myself on the verge of tears at times. And for at least one moment, red and blue America reacted the same way to the same event — to a song at once despairing and beautiful and empathetic, about poverty and caring for wounded family members, about a life of failed relationships and shattered dreams, about the desire to escape and the desire for dignity.
Music has the power to move us, to refine and ennoble our sensibilities, to take us places—sometimes transcendent places—that other things simply can’t. Rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost soul, Plato wrote, imparting grace. But music requires musicians, and on Sunday night, America was witness to two very special ones. They were repairers of the breach, and we briefly shared not just a continent, but a country.
In TV, the long awaited Netflix adaptation of Avatar: the Last Airbender arrives in less than two weeks. Color me excited — once I saw that Paul Sun-Hyung Lee (of Kim’s Convenience fame) was tapped to play Uncle Iroh, I knew that the team behind the adaptation was shooting for the authenticity of the 2005 original TV show. Given that self-promotion was already addressed in news item number three, you’ll forgive me for plugging the seven-part deep dive into the original show I put together back in 2020. If this adaptation is half as good as the original, it’ll be worth the binge.
6. I once read a critique from Bible scholar N.T. Wright that American Christians talk about heaven too much (just as Mitch East outlines in his recent reflection from Mere Orthodoxy). It’s responsible for America’s “lazy Christians” who aren’t discipled enough and aren’t doing enough kingdom work on earth. The conversation needs to change, Wright argued, and Christians need to be challenged with visions of bringing God’s kingdom here on earth.
Putting aside that Wright’s own denomination (the Church of England) has been actively imploding for decades, and challenges to kingdom work aren’t exactly stemming that tide, East is right to argue that any preacher who wants to remain existentially relevant to their parishioners must talk about heaven with them. The power of the eight words “You will go to heaven when you die,” as East outlines, carries with it the weight of the gospel itself.
You have heard it said, “The Gospel is not about going to heaven when you die.” Don’t sing about “flying away” when this life is over. Don’t preach about God’s celestial shore or the mansion for His children in the air. These sermons are “escapist” and Christians who listen to them become apathetic about this life, ignore injustice, or shrug their shoulders about the misery of the poor. If we keep preaching this false gospel, the Church will only care about getting to heaven, not doing God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.
That last phrase, taken from the mouth of Our Lord, reveals the issue with this line of thinking. The Lord’s Prayer seems to imply that God’s will is done in heaven in a way that God’s will is not done here. If the angels and saints in heaven are doing God’s will perfectly, we can see with our eyes that the opposite is true here. That’s why we need to pray that line in particular.
Heaven and earth are different, according to the Lord’s Prayer. So is it wrong for a sinner to want to go to heaven? When, if ever, will a sinner be able to go? Can a sinner exist in the presence of God if “nothing unclean can enter heaven”? If it’s impossible to live with the Lord and keep our attachment to sin, the only other option is to exist apart from Him and stuck with sin. That sounds like a decent definition of hell, and no one is asking to go there.
Imagine a preacher who wants to answer these questions for his parishioners. He is in his office writing this week’s sermon. He’s preaching to a room full of liars, cheats, and narcissists (and he is the worst of them all). They know they’re going to die one day and don’t want to go to hell. What does he tell them? Is there any good news that he has to offer? […]
All of the hand-wringing about “going to heaven when we die” fails to address the existential question that every mortal will face in this life. We’re all on our way to the grave at one speed or another. Is there a life after death or not? What is it like? Who decides? A preacher, priest, or minister who has no answers to these questions is missing a piece of the gospel. […]
“Going to heaven when we die” is a message that has helped Christians for millennia. They remind themselves that this life is “just a few more weary days” and then the “shadows of this life” will be behind them. Instead of the rags of poverty, they will be given a white robe of the faithful. Instead of living under the highway, they will be given a home Christ went to prepare for us. Instead of suffering at the bottom of society, they will put on their crown and rule under Christ in the kingdom of heaven.
While there is genuine comfort in the gospel for the present — the good news of a God who loves us as we are — death nevertheless looms for everyone in a way that qualifies all human endeavors. Without the hope of heaven, we are left with whatever we can make of the here and now and the endless list of imperatives to be more and do more for God. And if there is one thing we do know about heaven, it’s that it is a place of eternal rest, for lazy Christians and busybodies alike.
Strays:
- In the Hedgehog Review, Gerald Early explores the role that the Exodus plays in the formation of black identity in America in a larger conversation about black American identity, and wonders if the story of Joseph is a better example to emulate. Also: thoughts regarding the offense of Uncle Tom’s faith in Harriet Beacher Stowe’s famous novel.
- John Fea penned an unexpected and kind word for 90’s evangelicalism this week in the Atlantic. Reflecting on the ways that the right leaning evangelical ministry “Focus on the Family” transformed his father from an angry and abusive parent to a kind and loving one, Fea wants people to know that the trendy takedowns and deconstructions of the movement are only telling part of the story.
- Why the + Is Everywhere.
