Is That All There Is? — A Letter From the Editor
I am obsessed with David Lynch. Maybe unhealthily so. Few directors feel as fluent in the art of the somnambulistic; I know of no other director who could so deftly craft phantasmagorical operas of the manifold dream-nightmare that is the human experience.
Desperate for Lynchian vibes at 3 a.m. one recent night, I sifted through Spotify playlists until I stumbled upon Peggy Lee—specifically one of her most popular songs, first performed in 1969. The song is based on Thomas Mann’s 1896 short story “Disillusionment.” In both works, the central character recalls memory after memory—their house burning down, a circus billed “the greatest show on Earth,” falling in love—before repeatedly posing the same haunting question, translated by Lee as: Is that all there is?
Life, especially now, can feel like a Lynchian nightmare. The grotesque becomes routine. The bizarre becomes expected. We become spectators in a world that keeps showing us more and more absurdity—until even the most shocking images begin to lose their power. We ask, “Is that all there is?”—not with curiosity or wonder, but with a kind of weary resignation.
This is no trivial danger: the numbness that creeps in when we’re bombarded with spectacle after spectacle. The existential fatigue that Lee’s song captures so well—a voice that flattens calamity into a casual shrug—becomes the soundtrack to our lives. We disengage, becoming passive observers of a never-ending performance. The song’s cyclical structure—memory after memory, always returning to that same question—mirrors our own political and social cycles: crisis, outrage, exhaustion, and finally, normalization.
Peggy Lee’s question is more than a philosophical musing. It’s a warning. When each new crisis, each fresh absurdity, is met with a numb “Is that all there is?”—we lose the will to resist. We risk becoming complicit in the transformation of the surreal into the everyday, of the grotesque into the new normal. And so, the chorus of Lee’s song becomes a political refrain as well as an existential one, urging us to recognize, and to resist, the lure of disengagement.
To that end, I am immensely grateful to be your new editor, and I appreciate you taking the time out of your assuredly busy Caltech day to read this. Journalism is the art of engagement, and it warms my heart to see it thrive in this community. May we keep resisting the siren song of disillusionment—together.
Sincerely,
Damian R. Wilson
Editor-in-Chief