Welcome to Always Boorish: The Inaugural. Cigarettes, sonnets, and profligate ennui - for the modern philistine.

Let’s start things off with a Music Monday roundup. The other night I started things off with this set from Noise Complaints and it just hit the spot. I then went down the R&B rabbit hole.

Some favorites from this set:

• Boo’d Up - Ella Mai

• Aston Martin Music - Rick Ross, Drake, Chrisette Michele

• Broken Clocks - SZA

• Luther - Kendrick Lamar, SZA

• Blessed - Daniel Caesar

Bonus: Charles Yang with an incredible cover of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come:

topvoice

6M followers

View more on Instagram

The Wolves We Make

A few weeks ago, the return of the Dire wolf made headlines. Not metaphorically, but physically - three living, breathing animals, born of surrogate dogs in a VC-backed lab.

The company at the center of the news is Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based startup whose mission is, literally, de-extinction. Their first real test case: bringing back the Dire wolf, which has been extinct for around 10,000 years. Through a mixture of DNA analysis, CRISPR gene editing, and a lot of investor-friendly storytelling, Colossal has produced three pups - Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi - gray wolves edited to appear a bit more “Dire.”

But whether they are actually Dire wolves in any meaningful sense remains deeply contested. The animals share 99.5% of their DNA with modern gray wolves. Only 20 edits were made to 14 genes - mostly for external traits like coat color and skull shape. No genes for behavior were altered. No Dire wolf DNA was inserted. Even Colossal’s own scientists admit the results are, at best, “proxies.”

The initial press coverage didn’t question this. Through a carefully managed media rollout, Colossal handed the story to a few major publications under embargo, locking in splashy, uncritical headlines before any peer-reviewed data was released.

But questions followed. Paleoecologists and geneticists pointed out the shaky claims, the PR-first approach, and the lack of transparency. Some pointed out that Dire wolves likely went extinct from starvation, not just natural selection, and that no habitat exists today to support a viable rewilding. The three pups will live out their lives in isolation. Others may follow, but they too will be confined. There is no plan - nor ecosystem - for them to return to.

So what’s the point of this exercise?

Colossal says it’s about conservation through innovation. That the tools they develop - artificial wombs, genomic reconstruction, even “exo-development” - will eventually help real endangered species. And maybe they will. But what’s troubling is the message: that we can fix what we’ve broken, that extinction isn’t forever.

This is a comforting story, but not an entirely honest one.

Spectacle often overtakes substance, and while the resurrection of the Dire wolf makes for a great headline, it may actually do more to obscure the hard, slow work of real conservation than to help it. Worse, it invites the belief that technological genius absolves ecological responsibility. That we can consume the world and rebuild it later, in our own image.

Romulus and Remus are, in many ways, a marvel. But they are also a mirror. What we see in them says far more about our ambitions, our anxieties, and our need for redemption than it does about anything else.

And maybe that’s the most human thing of all.

Get the cream sauce.

Toward the end of last year I went on an Amor Towles / Sally Rooney bender.

From Towles, I read A Gentleman in Moscow, Rules of Civility, and The Lincoln Highway (in that order).

Then I read each of Sally Rooney’s books (these in release-order). Conversations with Friends, Normal People, Beautiful World, Where Are You, and finally Intermezzo.

I really enjoyed each of these books but recently thought of Intermezzo again, and I was reminded of this quote from The NY Times review by Dwight Garner:

Rooney’s work, like Bourdain’s philosophy, invites us into the marvelous messiness of being alive.

Where Bourdain urged us to “get the cream sauce,” Rooney offers narratives rich with the butter of human connection - both recognize that life’s most profound moments aren’t found in abstinence or neat conclusions.

Rooney’s novels, deliberately unfinished, echo Bourdain’s understanding that the feast of existence isn’t about reaching some (illusory) perfect destination, but rather about savoring every complicated bite along the way.

Both remind us, sometimes subtly, sometimes through brute force, but ever-eloquently that the reward lies not in solving life’s complexities but in experiencing them completely, in the importance of embracing connection over isolation.

In this sense, and I think importantly, the ellipses at the end of Rooney’s chapters are really invitations: to keep living, but also to recognize that meaning persists in the spaces between the definitive moments.

That’s it for now.

For a glimpse into some of the other music I’ve been listening to lately, here’s the always_boorish_v1 Spotify playlist: