Ezra Klein watched Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) and pronounced the trickster dead.
Not dead exactly — retired, pensioned off, walked back into the fold by Nolan's borrowed Judeo-Christian ethics. The age of cunning is over, he says. What we need now is moral order.
I say: wrong diagnosis. The trickster isn't dying. He's aging badly, in the wrong hands, and nobody has bothered to give him new clothes.
"Not evil, not good. In between, with style."
Worth a cross-check here: Nolan's own read on Odysseus doesn't actually back Klein's ending-of-an-age framing. Asked by NPR what word gets attached to Odysseus most, Nolan said it himself — "wily." Not "redeemed." Not "reformed." Wily, still, after three thousand years of retellings. That's Nolan naming the trickster function directly, without reaching for a moral off-ramp.
Who gets to laugh first?
Klein's mistake is treating the trickster as a single figure who either behaves or doesn't. Strength without reciprocity, cruelty without a code — that's not the trickster grown old. What Klein watches in Musk, in Miller, in the iron-laws crowd, isn't trickster energy gone bad. It's the Tyrant and the Pretender, miming trickster energy without a clue what it actually costs — the applause without the appetite, the mischief-face without the crossroads underneath it.
The real trickster never needed rescuing by ethics from outside. He carried his own logic — take without apology, tell the truth in a shape no one recognises in time, show your limitation instead of your power, because the limitation is sharper. None of that requires Klein's golden rule bolted on afterward. It requires the crossroads to stay a crossroads — plural, contested, alive — instead of flattening into one strongman's straight road.
"He is not one. He is whatever the moment requires. That is not confusion. That is precision."
The room that forgot how to blink.
That's the trickster I'm defending: not a force to be tamed, but a discipline of staying at the crossroads on purpose — holding contradiction instead of resolving it too fast, taking yourself lightly enough to see the trap before you're standing in it.
Which is exactly what a boardroom refuses to do. Self-irony is the one move leadership won't practice — the willingness to laugh at your own certainty before someone else does it for you, in public, at your expense. Dada is trained self-irony, institutionalised: it keeps the room a crossroads instead of hardening into one voice too soon.
Still hungry, still at the door.
So here's the rejuvenation. Not a costume change. Not a reboot with better special effects. The trickster earns his youth back by standing exactly where the world is actually confusing now — the algorithm that decides who gets seen, the identities that won't hold still, the failure that keeps clocking back in anyway, the boardroom that mistakes force for clarity. Old gods knew this terrain by other names. Ours needs the same appetite, aimed at the actual new thresholds, not at a movie screen borrowing the Bible to make itself feel resolved.
"My Dada is ready, shifting from foot to foot."
Klein wants an ending. Nolan, in his own words, kept the word "wily." I want a second wind.
A Dispute Among the Like-Minded
This isn't a takedown. It's friction between people who take the same material seriously.
Ezra Klein doesn't show up to shout. He shows up the way he always does — a solo essay, delivered quietly, on his own show, taking fifteen minutes to sit with Homer and a summer blockbuster instead of the next headline. His episode carries the title "Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk's Soul" — itself a small trickster move, using a piece of mythology to read the room we're actually standing in.
That's rare enough to earn respect. He's one of the few political commentators willing to let literature and myth do real diagnostic work instead of quoting them for decoration, willing to sit in ambiguity a beat longer than his format usually allows. Where we part ways isn't the seriousness of the attempt — it's where he lands. He needed an ending for the trickster to make his ethics land. I don't think the trickster was ever the one who needed fixing.
(And for what it's worth — a small European hello across the Atlantic. Even Odysseus needed a crossroads that wasn't Ithaca to find out who he was.)