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Just Motes: Non-Sharing, More Mummy Brown, Epstein, Orthobros
Jasper Nighthawk
November 27, 2025
Dear Reader,
We’re visiting family in Chicago, and last night we went downtown to do some “Christmas-y” things. First we went to the Christkindlmarkt set up on Daley Plaza: a German-style Christmas market full of Northern European tchotchke huts and hot chocolate stands, which are almost entirely staffed by German youth on H-2B visas. It was fun. It also had that air of unreality that so many attractions today have. That Disneyland feeling: sanitized, served up on a platter, optimized for your credit card.
From there we went to the old Marshall Fields, an iconic old fourteen-floor department store. Today Macy’s leases the first seven floors. We went up to the seventh floor, to the Walnut Room, where there was a big, garish Christmas tree, more ornament than branch. We took pictures in front of it and browsed the candy bars and novelty santas and Christmas ornaments on sale. My favorite of the latter depicted Santa clinging to a sprinkle donut. My father-in-law bought a pack Frango mints, and we each ate one.
From there we walked to Millennium Park to see the 68-foot-tall City of Chicago official Christmas tree. A beautiful tree—a Norway Spruce—and this one more tastefully decorated than the trees at Macy’s. When you got up next to it, you could see through the branches to the trunk, which was festooned with wires and cables to power the tree’s “119,000 LED lights and 39,250 feet of lighting that equals to nearly 8 miles of glimmering lights.” A technological marvel.
No visit to Millennium Park is complete without spending some time with The Bean. We’d never been there at night before. The three-year-old ran up to The Bean, rapturous, and for the next ten minutes he kept yelling “I love you Bean!” and trying to kiss it, as I yelled, “Don’t put your mouth against it.” He had been cautiously interested in the evening’s previous stops—he especially liked his hot chocolate at the Christkindlmarkt—but now, in this public space, by one of the most popular pieces of public art ever created, he experienced a kind of delirium. He entered a space of pure experiencing. And he got us into it, too, as he insisted on holding hands with each of us, one by one, spinning us around, heads up, twirling streaks of light, the skyline reflecting distortedly off the sculpture, filling us with the magic of early nightfall and cold, wintry air and tiny, glimmering lights.
The bean is pretty great during the day, too.
Today’s Lightplay is coming a bit later in Wednesday than usual. I had penciled in today to share the First Annual Lightplay Gift Guide, but between travel and childcare, I haven’t finished that yet. Maybe next week. For today we’ll have to make do with some good (if mostly depressing) motes.
Thanks as always for reading. I hope you’re doing well.
– Jasper
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This time of year always feels hard to me, for a bunch of reasons. But one is that the cold weather is really hard on our unhoused neighbors, people sleeping rough—and it feels so wrong to eat, drink, and be merry when someone nearby is suffering, often terribly suffering.
But do I do much about it?
I felt chastened by the stark moral clarity in the latest essay from Adam Wilson. Wilson runs a farm where he gives everything away. (I found out about him via this beautiful twenty-minute documentary.) His newsletter is like a letter from a saint, or an extreme altruist, or a man from another time. In his latest issue—“The Normalization of Non-Sharing”—he talks about his first visit to a restaurant since the pandemic:
I haven’t been to a restaurant in years. But I decided to push myself this time, given the shortness of the visit and the family’s wishes. I wasn’t going to order food, but at least I could join in the conversation and try not to be too much of a grump for a couple of hours—two aims at which I didn’t succeed. But grumpy isn’t really an accurate word for the sorrow that washes over me when I try to find a comfortable seat at a table founded upon the polite normalization of non-sharing.
In order to build and maintain the specific form of household we call a market economy, all of its residents must internalize the notion that they are only worthy of eating and staying warm if they contribute to the household maintenance in one most fundamental way: making money. Failure to do that is a punishable offense.
Thus, on the cold, damp day that I decided to break my no-restaurant rule, all of the local people without money kindly kept up their end of the bargain and stayed away. Those with money looked at menus, used the toilet, washed their hands, and warmed themselves by the fireplace. In order to continue functioning, the market economy requires everyone to play their parts. A flood of snow-soaked street people would have made quite a stir in the polite atmosphere of the restaurant. Likely, the police would have eventually been called. In this household, overt or stubborn insistence upon neighborly sharing can become a punishable offense.
I appreciate being reminded of the choice we collectively make to keep running things the way we do. As Ursula K. Le Guin said, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
Elias submits a truly delightful (and by turns stomach-turning) expansion on last week’s mote about the artistic use of mummies: an entire scholarly article on the subject, titled “The Life and Death of Mummy Brown.” This article has it all, including the etymology of “mummy,” the history of “mummy unrollings,” and even a surprise appearance from Rudyard Kipling at an impromptu pre-Raphaelite burial of a tube of mummy brown:
This bizarre but rather touching episode must have had quite an impact on those present, including a teenaged Rudyard Kipling, who was Georgina’s nephew. Kipling used to spend every December with the Burne-Jones’ at their London home. Here is how he described the mummy episode some decades later: “He [Burne-Jones] descended in broad daylight with a tube of ‘Mummy Brown’ in his hand, saying that he had discovered it was made of dead Pharaohs and we must bury it accordingly. So we all went out and helped – according to the rites of Mizraim and Memphis, I hope – and to this day I could drive a spade within a foot of where that tube lies.”
It’s darkly funny to me that the “Epstein Files” stunt from this spring was such a nothing-burger, but the actual Epstein emails released last week are, in fact, jam-packed with scandal and the dirty laundry of power. I’ve looked on with horror as we’ve learned of subplots like the unbearable creepiness of Larry Summers and figuring out who is Bubba? (It’s pretty clear…) But I think there’s both so much here, and our newspapers are so depleted, that it’s hard to find good explanations of the bigger picture. So I appreciated this episode of the Time of Monsters podcast, “Jeffrey Epstein and the American Empire.” Here’s guest Van Jackson laying out how he sees Epstein fitting into the broader American political scene:
Epstein is the embodiment of power politics in neoliberal globalization. And that happens to be very corrupt at its core. So this thing that we called “the International Global Order”—in Washington there’s a romantic gloss on what that was—but what that really was was agents like Epstein profiteering from world affairs and helping consolidate state control of societies. So American hegemony imposed a kind of imperialist peace on the world, especially in Asia. And that imperialist peace was basically peace for rulers but imperialism for the ruled. American hegemony secured ruling class solidarity, basically, but against working class interests.
Fascinating article on an upswing in interest in Orthodox Christianity in the New York Times: “Orthodox Church Pews Are Overflowing With Converts.” And also—as with so many pieces in the Times—it’s really rather strangely edited.
As someone who has been drawn to the more mystical edges of this faith tradition (icon worship, the Jesus Prayer), I wanted to be excited about this. I mean, come on, give me more about the iconostasis! So it first struck me as weird how the article keeps bringing up how Orthodoxy is more “masculine” than Catholicism or Protestantism. Under a photograph of a 20-year-old convert with a pretty face, braces, and perfect eyebrows there is the caption, “’Protestant and Catholic churches have a very feminine atmosphere,’ said Josh Elkins, center.” Then, a little later, this graf:
Some converts report approvingly that Orthodoxy has a more masculine feel than other traditions. Priests, who must be male and can marry, often have large beards and big families. Orthodoxy asks practitioners to make sacrifices like fasting, rather than offering them emotional contemporary music and therapeutic sermons, which critics describe as the typical evangelical megachurch experience.
Ah yes, fasting, something Catholicism never thought of. And what is this term, “emotional contemporary music”? The writer must mean Christian rock music? If the author’s sources stopped and thought for a second, they’d realize that the idea that Orthodox choral music is free of emotion—or even particularly straight-coded—is risible. Just check out this recording from a St. Petersburg church that I randomly ran into last week.
The praise for a “masculine” religion and the dissing of other faiths as not being hard enough is all hedged through this language of “some converts report approvingly...” and “which critics describe as…” It’s only in the final third of the article when the reporter finally gets to give up the act and tell us who these critics are: gleefully fascist, openly antisemitic, hyper-patriarchal YouTube influencers! (“Orthobros”)
Here’s the first stab at defining these guys, 1800 words in:
The online influencers that many young men credit with introducing them to Orthodoxy speak directly about politics and culture in a way that parish priests more often avoid. They tend to share an unbending social conservatism, with a particular interest in the “traditional family” and what they describe as the threats of feminism, homosexuality and transgender identities. They are also generally opposed to the state of Israel.
Then, 246 words later, they come further into focus:
In the South, there is a strain of neoconfederate Orthodoxy that marries white supremacy and Orthodox practice. Matthew Heimbach, who organized the notorious Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, had been excommunicated from the Antiochian Orthodox church but joined another branch.
And finally, at the very end of the article, we get a portrait of a couple who are currently converting:
But the couple agreed that too many mainstream Protestant churches offered only shallow theology and “far-left” ideology. Ms. Fuentes’s former church had a female pastor, which she said she didn’t approve of, and she said she once saw a transgender woman, whom she described as a man, in the women’s bathroom there during a Christmas service.
“There’s just more validity in a church that can trace its lineage all the way back to the apostles,” Mr. Nolan said.
The couple said they were looking forward to raising an Orthodox family, one oriented around duty, truth and “objective beauty standards,” Mr. Nolan said. In their future home, they are planning a prayer area facing east.
Well, at least we got there. What a bummer.
Related: a skit titled “We’re the New York Times!”
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