From the November issue: Being born within days of Halloween may have determined the course of my artistic fixations. Growing up, I would celebrate my birthday with costume parties. Whatever else it meant, for me Halloween meant fun, gifts, and the satisfaction of growing older. I was always destined to be a writer; Halloween, arguably, ensured I would write horror. This essay is my tribute to the holiday, a tribute which is really a eulogy: For the Halloween celebrated by our forebears—even the one I knew as a kid—is quite dead.

–  Justin Lee
Associate Editor

For further reading: Mary Ellen Kelly remembers a time before Halloween died in “Halloween Memories” (2010): “My earliest Halloween memory dates to the very early 1950s, when my mother took me by the hand to walk through deepening shadows to a field near our house. There, a vast army of weirdly clad older children and teenagers cavorted around a huge bonfire. . . .”

OpenAI, which owns Chat-GPT, recently announced that users will be able to generate pornographic content starting in December. The consequences of entirely customized adult content are going to test moral arguments against porn, stress social cohesion as people slip into their fantasies, and imperil the mental health of users, Samuel James writes today: “The brave new world is no longer new.”

For further reading: Last month, James wrote about the role of internet pornography in Tyler Robinson’s alleged decision to assassinate Charlie Kirk. And First Things writers have been sounding the alarm on pornography for decades: Jason Byassee wrote about the dangers of online porn in “Not Your Father’s Pornography” (January 2008).

Until next time.
 

VIRGINIA AABRAM

Newsletter Editor