Like many brilliant women, Karly Moran denies that she’s brilliant. If you want to observe the one human reflex more automatic than the jerk of a knee struck by a mallet, just compliment Karly—she will take no longer than a nanosecond to betray flushed cheeks, rolled eyes, and the slurred insistence that she is “literally the dumbest bitch on the entire planet.” Karly is the kind of person who smiles at the barista and asks them how their shift is going and selects the highest tip option when presented with a range of presumptuous percentages, having already observed them misspell her name on the coffee cup as Carly-with-a-C. She is the kind of person whose virtues are obvious to others but invisible to herself. And given that Karly will never cop to this in a gazillion years, I am enumerating these virtues on her behalf. First: she’s brilliant. Second: it’s spelled with a “K,” kapeesh?

Third: you would not be reading this if it weren’t for her. For those who don’t know, Orphan Academy is the duo of Jonathan Jin (that’s me) and Karly Moran. We read books and talk about them. But more precisely, we are lowbrow trash that crack open an IPA just as enthusiastically as we crack open the Nicomachean Ethics. We are fiscal have-nots that rely on a Substack newsletter to enshrine the economic self-immolation of reading books with the entrepreneurial halo of posting online. We are civilizational detritus that pronounce “bruh” as a two-syllable word. Orphan Academy represents the partnership of two people who have identified that the most harrowing deprivation of being born with bad parents and no money is, in their experience, that they find themselves scrambling to catch up on their Virginia Woolf. And I mean that. Run into Karly during her lunch break at the fast food joint and you will find her deploying the provided single-ply napkin to exorcise grease from her fingers, preparing them to turn the hallowed pages of A Room of One’s Own.

The reason why Orphan Academy wouldn’t exist without Karly is that it was basically her idea. Early in our relationship, back when we were still just awkward friends-of-friends who simply knew the same people, Karly surprised me with an unsolicited Christmas present: a well-loved copy of East of Eden, its spine fractured like concrete cracked open by the San Andreas. In the accompanying Christmas card, Karly revealed that this was her most prized possession, explaining that she had purchased the book during sophomore year of high school, that she had read every single page over and over, that she had loved every page, that she had given the book to her first boyfriend, that she had given the book to her cousin, that she had extolled the virtues of Steinbeck’s prose to anyone who was willing to listen, that the book had changed her life for reasons she still can’t quite articulate but ever since becoming a college undergraduate and meeting me and somehow intuiting an “implicit trust that we’d be just bound to each other,” she had known that she could appoint me, Jonathan, as the final descendant in the book’s genealogy. She hoped that we could “walk together for a while” and concluded—in the very postscript that would go on to inspire Orphan Academy—that I was the appropriate muse with whom to share her favorite literature and poetry.

The first of such poems was Invictus, faithfully transcribed on a square of embossed cardstock.