What exactly were my professors so jealous of? Museum guilds notoriously, among other things, run the docent program. That means they’re in charge of the tour guides. In an ideal world, the professional staff are the ones who provide the content of the tours, their curatorial skills and specialized knowledge providing the foundation of information shared with visitors. In practice, it was mostly moneyed retirees taking on a passion project, sharing wisdom on subjects they loved dearly but were not nearly so educated as the aforementioned curators about.

In the years since my grandparents were guiding people around one of the largest Native American museums in the country, the landscape has changed, at home and abroad. Since 2020, museums have been grappling with the centering of whiteness in their programming and structures, the systemic biases baked into volunteer-based models, and what it means to run an industry built on the procurement and valuation of objects that were perhaps never meant to be owned in the first place.

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Interrogating these topics is important. Vital, even, to a better understanding of ourselves, our society, and the world around us. I’d never suggest otherwise. But treating volunteerism primarily as a problem to be solved takes away from a core truth: people volunteer — imperfectly, sometimes impractically — because they love something and care about their community and that love and care goes hand in hand. Sometimes a museum is a cultural institution. Sometimes it’s a labor of love. In an ideal world, it’s both.

Like I mentioned at the top, I spend a lot of time thinking about museums. Lately, I’ve been thinking about one in particular.

It’s not a museum in the traditional sense. Arguably, one could call it an exhibit. In point of fact, it is a few long, skinny, wall-mounted shadow boxes sprinkled throughout the interior of a Navajo-owned, Arizona Burger King.

History with a side of fries

According to the display, the owner of this particular Burger King franchise didn’t set out to make what may be the only permanent exhibit about Navajo Code Talkers in the world. Technically related to the Navajo Cultural Center (which is housed in the shared parking lot and the Hampton Inn across the way), the “museum” almost exclusively contains personal artifacts from P. King Mike, a Marine who, like many Navajo men, served in the Pacific Theater. His son Richard discovered a postcard depicting Sugar Loaf Hill, Okinawa, annotated with his father’s handwriting in 1990, and when his father responded with sadness and anger, decided to do his own research at Northern Arizona University. After realizing that his father’s personal effects, including many artifacts taken directly from wartime Japan, told an important story of Navajo who served, Richard secured his father’s permission to build the exhibit. It’s stood here ever since.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Navajo Code Talkers before. Perhaps not. Their main depiction in pop culture is Windtalkers, John Woo’s 2002 war film starring Nicolas Cage. When it came out, it was many Americans’ first exposure to the facts of Navajo participation in World War II. This is probably why the exhibit still pays homage to the film, with one whole shadow box taken up by a gigantic poster of Cage in fatigues. Unfortunately, the film flopped — perhaps deservedly, given that it told the story mostly through the lens of Cage’s white protagonist, a Marine assigned to protect a Navajo code talker, and left the actual Code Talkers at the margins of their own movie.

So who and what, exactly, were the Code Talkers then? In short: the Allied Powers were struggling intensely in the Pacific theater as 1941 ground into 1942. While Alan Turing and his team were dealing with Enigma in the European theater, the Americans were on the other side of the equation in the Pacific, and doing incredibly poorly. The Japanese were some of the best code breakers in the world, and their ability to ascertain American battle plans was leading to defeat after defeat. Enter Philip Johnston — a World War I veteran and the son of a missionary, raised in the Navajo Nation and one of the few outsiders who spoke the language. Johnston came to the realization that America had an asset no other nation could match: the Navajo.

The Navajo language is, for code creation purposes, functionally unique. It belongs to the Athabaskan family — Na-Dené. It’s unrelated to any Indo-European or Asian languages, and unintelligible even to speakers of its nearest relatives. Prior to the Second World War it had no formal system of writing; while its phonemes could be transcribed into English, they never had been. Navajo was so unrelated to anything the Japanese might have encountered that its use would present a functionally unbreakable code.

Yet, the U.S. government almost didn’t start the program at all. In early 1942 Johnston brought the idea to the Marines and staged a demonstration for Major General Clayton Vogel at Camp Elliott, near San Diego. Under simulated combat conditions, Navajo speakers encoded, transmitted, and decoded a three-line message in twenty seconds — a job the coding machines of the day needed half an hour or more to do. That May, twenty-nine young Navajo men boarded a bus at Fort Defiance and rode to boot camp in San Diego, where they built the code themselves. Existing Navajo words stood in for military terms: whale for battleship, turtle for tank. The men (enlisted Marines, mostly privates) eventually scattered across all six Marine divisions in the Pacific to utilize their skill, with Johnston reenlisted as staff sergeant. By the end of the war, roughly four hundred Navajo men would serve the U.S. military as code talkers.

Their experience in the service was mixed at best. Commanders who saw the code work under fire prized it highly. (A signal officer at Iwo Jima admitted that the Marines would never have taken the island without the Code Talkers.) But the Navajo men themselves were sometimes mistaken for Japanese soldiers and detained by their own side. Plus the program was classified and remained so after the war. That meant there was no public acknowledgment during the war, and not for many decades thereafter.

Like the Black and Japanese regiments of the American military, Navajo servicemen who made the decision to serve the United States during World War II did so in spite of the relentless discrimination they faced on home soil. While the Navajo Nation was technically sovereign, the U.S. government had tremendous power over them through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a government agency notorious for blatant dehumanization of its constituents, longstanding corruption, financial mismanagement, and the repeated repudiation of treaty terms to which they themselves had agreed. Citizens of the Navajo Nation lived on reservation lands ill equipped to sustain their people, with little opportunity for agriculture or other industry, bare financial support, and mandatory schooling that stripped their children of their cultural heritage and ripped them from their families for years at a time. It took until 2024 for the federal government to formally apologize for the trauma it inflicted through those residential boarding schools. The first such apology from a sitting president was delivered, fittingly, in Arizona. The U.S. government has never formally provided reparations, either for residential boarding schools, treaty breaking, or other crimes against Native peoples.

With all that history in mind, it’s something of a miracle that the U.S. was able to gather enough Navajo to code talk during the war at all. Those residential boarding schools, for years, inflicted violence upon the children under their care who dared speak in their native language, doling out corporal punishment so severe children were physically and mentally traumatized for years thereafter. In addition to the violent punishments, administrators at the Bureau of Indian Affairs intentionally put together children from different tribes and nations, often ensuring that, even if children tried to speak in their native tongue at school, there was no one around with whom they could speak, regardless.

What fortitude, then, to take the very deepest part of you and share it with a country in desperate need, who had not and likely would never thank you the way you deserved. Arguably, that’s the kind of singular, devastating strength that spawns a lot of museum exhibits.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those exhibits — and the appropriate gratitude — never came to be. The code talkers program stayed classified until 1968. The men came home forbidden to speak of what they’d done. There were no ticker-tape parades, no Life magazine write-ups, no place in the schoolbooks their own children were handed at government schools. The federal benefits that built the white postwar middle class mostly skipped the Navajo, and that was no coincidence. GI Bill home loans were nearly unusable on trust land held in common, which meant reservation lands were, in practice, ineligible. Plus the reservation itself, wholly unsupported by the Bureau, offered little of the schooling or work the GI Bill was meant to unlock. Arizona didn’t even let Native citizens vote until a court struck down a ban on their participation in 1948. Formal recognition of Navajo Code Talkers didn’t take place until 2001, when the original twenty-nine Marines received Congressional Gold Medals. Unfortunately, many of the men awarded these medals were no longer alive to hold them.

While we don’t have a lot of museum exhibits about the Navajo in general, or the Code Talkers in specific, we do have this one inside the Kayenta Burger King. This true labor of love. It is not professionally curated. Since most of the artifacts are from a single person’s collection, they skew more towards general war paraphernalia and less toward the experience of the Code Talkers in specific. But tiny glimpses of the Native experience peek through. A Purple Heart ringed painstakingly in turquoise. Individual ration cards from a time when a sovereign nation was asked to participate in the same home-front deprivation as neighbors who had never done the same for them. And all of this is about half a foot away from a collection of paper crowns and a four-foot-tall banner advertising Whoppers-Your-Way.

It would be easy to categorize this little museum as capitalism gone awry. How sad that this is inside of a fast-food restaurant in a tiny town and not a centerpiece of the Smithsonian or the Heard. There is an argument to be made that the Code Talkers, their service and sacrifice, should be more widely and permanently celebrated by American institutions. I agree.

But there is, in some ways, a greater argument for exactly what this community has built for themselves here, inside a representation of an America that has taken and taken and rarely given back. This is a Navajo-owned franchise of an American empire, on Navajo land stolen from them and then given back at the whims of the American government. America has asked much and given almost nothing to its Indigenous population. Why then should American institutions get to decide how their stories are told?

What I really hope is that one day a big-time philanthropist who normally supports mainstream museums decides to do a visit to Monument Valley. I hope they walk through the hogan and read the paper plaques in the parking lot, sun-weathered and printed out on standard printer paper in size 18 font. I hope they get up close to the shadow boxes and read about King Mike and look at that turquoise-ringed Purple Heart. And I hope they realize that as valuable as it is to support capital-M museums, it is just as valuable — perhaps more so — to let a community volunteer to tell their own story. To let history serve as a labor of love. I hope that philanthropist marvels at the landscape of Arizona and the Navajo reservation and realizes what our country has taken and what it has been given and what it can never give back. I hope it inspires them to write a big fat check and hand it over to the Navajo themselves. Once they’ve done that, they should write another check. This time for one of those big museums, so that they’ll tell this story, too.

Museums are repositories of our history. How they tell our stories matters. Where they tell them matters too. Stories and histories matter just as much when they’re told next to the Burger King pick-up counter as when they’re displayed in the hallowed halls of a major museum. What matters is that we tell them, and that we support the people whose stories they are.

I did not order a Whopper-my-way at the Kayenta Burger King. I ordered a chicken sandwich and a side — halfsies, they call it. French Fries and Onion Rings. I didn’t have to choose one or the other. I got to have both. I hope one day the story of the Code Talkers does too.

I have not made it back to somewhere cool, but I have made it back to somewhere happy. Scottsdale, Arizona has been rated a top-3 happiest city in America, according to a mid-level publication Scottsdale probably paid for the privilege. (Number 1 is Fremont, a suburb a few over from where I grew up, best known for years for… existing, now known mostly for the Tesla factory. I find it hard to believe it is the happiest city in America, given those givens.)

Just down the road from Scottsdale, a bare 20-minute drive, Tempe has rated spot 20. Two parts of the Phoenix metro, neither of them Phoenix, in the top twenty best American cities according to someone who may or may not have been paid to say so. I like the desert. I don’t know if it’s the best at anything, other than being incredibly hot.

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When my plane landed, my parents drove to get me. We’re one of those families for whom airport pickups are a love language. A full requirement of expressing care. I once broke up with a boyfriend who did not understand the sacred nature of the airport run. I realize now he was probably just a New Yorker. Oops.

Settled back into America, I laugh at the memory of my discomfort in the European heat wave. 95 degrees who? Here in the Sonoran desert, it is 100 degrees by 7 a.m. When the sun officially rises each morning around 5:30, it is already 99 degrees. I have to walk the dog. I think about buying him little boots like East Coast dogs wear in the snow. This dog would laugh in the face of boots. We walk through the neighborhood sprinklers instead. I wonder why all these Arizonans thought it was a good idea to plant grass.

It hasn’t always been like this, is the thing. When I was a kid, before my parents lived here, we came here all the time. My grandparents lived here — typical retirees, except for how the thought of humidity and the Borscht Belt gone south had them firmly rejecting Florida and choosing Arizona instead. Not uncommon, certainly, but slightly more interesting.

When I was little — pre-9/11 — my parents would put my brother and me together on the plane. They’d walk us up to the gate, from the summer I turned five, and turn us over to the care of flight attendants as unaccompanied minors. In the pre-tablet era, we played gin rummy and travel-sized Battleship and said please and thank you as we, giggling, ordered can after can of ginger ale. Our good manners rated a smuggled first-class cookie or two, on a few occasions. The flight was short — maybe ninety minutes — and by the time we landed, our grandparents were waiting for us on the other side.

In those days, the tail end of the 20th century, it was, of course, still very, very hot. Each day I’d wake up early, around sunrise, and sneak into my grandparents’ room. While my grandmother slept on, my grandfather got out of bed and went through his daily stretching routine. I’d mimic him, crouched on the floor in imperfect downward dog.

We’d leave their room, quiet so my brother didn’t wake, and go directly outside, where it was hot, but not oppressive, and my grandfather would clean the pool. Big sweeps of the pool net, forward and back, plucking out flower petals and desiccated leaves. I’d skip around the edge, giggling and being tested on my times tables. One morning, still in my pajamas, I fell in. I’d known how to swim for years at this point. The water wasn’t too warm. I was scared for a minute, but found my balance, floating on my back and front-crawling myself back out.

Most mornings were not that exciting. After the pool cleaning, we’d go inside and make coffee. I got to push the button on the coffee grinder. I still think of him, now, decades later, each morning when the droning sounds.

After coffee, he’d pour us each a bowl of Raisin Bran. It’s the only cereal I’ve ever really liked, an old woman in a little girl’s body (or maybe just a fan of the sugared raisins, which I’d furtively pluck out like treasures before the sugar crystals dissolved in the milk).

By the time my grandmother and brother woke up, Grandpa and I would be on to making homemade lemonade. It was a nice, refreshing thing to have on hand. Nice enough that each winter, my grandparents painstakingly froze the juice of lemons harvested from their tree in ice cube trays. We’d pop them out and sweeten them, a cube per person, and thin them with water until the sweet-tartness was enough to keep us awake for a few rounds of seven-card stud and Casino and cribbage.

By midday, we had choices: a science experiment or model planes or a trip to Crackerjacks, the local mini-golf-and-arcade. Perhaps we’d go to the movies to escape the worst of the midday sun, the matinee a budget-friendly option for two retirees and two little ones.

When we emerged from whatever air-conditioned place we’d found ourselves in, as the sun went down, it was cool out.

In Scottsdale and Phoenix and Tempe at the end of the 20th century, people lived in a real, true desert. In a desert, the days are so hot the hairs on your arms might burn, but the nights cool precipitously. The cycle goes on, summer after summer. That’s what happens in the desert.

Or that’s what used to happen. Then the orange groves were pulled up to make more housing. And the motley collection of strip-malls and Spanish-style houses spawned more and more, and skyscrapers started dotting the highways, not just the downtown thoroughfares. Eventually the suburbs that rate the happiness list were eclipsed in ever-widening circles by newly incorporated towns, all of them clamoring for the water already depleting, steadily, from the Colorado each year.

These days, there is no relief. The sunrise is hot. I do not clean the pool in the morning. My hands would burn on the pool net pole.

Midday is hot. It feels familiar. I go to the co-work or the café or the gym. I emerge in the evening. It is still hot. And then the heat comes over you like a blanket. Like you’re tangled up after a night of tosses and turns, and it takes too long to get free. You realize the sheets have wrapped around you and you’re not awake enough to untwist them. It’s like that, but you stay trapped. It’s not a heat that burns. It oppresses. It weighs. The sun sets and the heat stays.

You never smell orange blossoms. You don’t feel the siesta-inspiring lethargy of European heat, because you don’t feel anything. You schedule life so that it doesn’t pass you by. Every climate you enter is either fully controlled or so out of control you almost forget what it was like before. You wonder if the children here know what a desert climate technically is. You wonder if that’s even what it is, technically, anymore.

Every day, you make sure you schedule something outside the house. You get in the car and you drive. There is no other option, really. You look up the transit options as if they will change. A drive that would take 20 minutes would take one hour and thirty-two minutes on three forms of public transit, if you tried. In Scottsdale, third happiest town in America, the main form of transit seems to be a novelty trolley. Its stops are not even bus shelters, just signs so thin their poles warp in the sun. You wonder if they exist at all, or if they’re just a desert mirage.

In Tempe, city-of-happiness number twenty, there’s a light rail, and by all accounts it’s not bad — Tempe is a college town, and college towns eventually notice that undergrads will make bad decisions rather than pay $75 for an Uber. They keep extending it, campus to campus, and swear it will reach the airport one day. But it will not run through Scottsdale. The deep red city council would never allow it. How could they guarantee their own happiness, then?

In the sanctuary of the car, the electric motor whirs. Every time you get behind the wheel, you feel like you’re piloting a spaceship. (That is probably, in no small part, because Hans Zimmer composed the car’s noises as if they were a movie score. Thanks for the soundtrack, Hans.) Your commute to anywhere is perfectly pleasant. Anywhere you want to go, regardless of which town it’s in, takes you no more than forty minutes.

About once a week, you see someone waiting at the mirage, by which you mean the bus stop. It’s usually an unhoused man, alone. Occasionally it’s a family — two parents and a few children, waving paper fans at their faces as if that will mitigate the visible waves of heat, so strong and so low to the ground and so unwilling to dissipate or change or leave. You hope they’re okay. You read an article last year about people in crisis getting third-degree burns. They’d take drugs or get very tired and lie down on the sidewalk. The sidewalks here absorb heat like a superpower, except the hero turned villain. You think about the benches in cities like LA and New York. Hostile architecture. Benches with spikes attached and poles bisecting the seats so you can’t lie down. No need for hostile architecture here. The streets you walk burn you right up.

You are, in fact, very happy here. Perhaps not the third happiest you’ve ever been. Perhaps not the twentieth. But you are happy.

You are also very hot.

You remember one summer when you were little. Your parents joined you and your brother and your grandparents after you’d had a few weeks on your own. A summer blockbuster was coming out, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. You went to the movies at night: a novelty. When you came out of the theater, the sky was heavy with rain. It’s monsoon season this time of year, in a true desert.

That summer night, decades ago, the rain didn’t come. Instead honest-to-God tumbleweeds began to roll. It was a dust storm. The first one in years, they said. The power in the theater went out. You had never seen anything like it. The awesome power of nature, in the biblical sense. It stung your eyes. It had a taste. Dry and acrid and dirty and deep. It didn’t rain that night, but when the dust cleared, it did. The heat let up.

Dust storms are de rigueur these days. When it rains, it’s something to exclaim about. It doesn’t last. The dusty ground sucks it right up, desperate for moisture it doesn’t get from the orange groves anymore. I can’t remember what the orange blossoms smelled like, but I can still smell the dust, then and now.

When I get in my car, the roads are busy but clear. I smell rubber, all the time, the tiny filaments on the tires melting as they meet the road. The road burns, if you’re not careful. If you’re struggling. If you’re third or twentieth or fiftieth happy, you’re inside, in the climate-controlled air. Burning doesn’t happen to you, yet. You can untwist yourself from the blankets. I wonder how long that will last.

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By all accounts, I should. I fell hard and deep down the Heated Rivalry rabbit hole, and while I know hockey alone does not a comparison make, I figured ‘mid-tier romance novel turned mini-series’ had to be a genre with some solid enjoyment crossover.

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My intentions were pure. The reality was a slog. Much that I loved ab…

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Depending on your own relationship with sport, this probably sounds either delightfully unremarkable or like the opening move in an ill-advised midlife crisis. My fourteen-year-old self would certainly have voted for the latter. She would have laughed in my face and then, despite herself, asked whether I really thought we could do it.

I do.

The goal itself is somewhat arbitrary. Yesterday I happened to be taking an exercise class where the instructor mentioned that, if we followed the instructions to the letter, we should cover a mile during the eight-minute endurance block. I made it to 0.81 before the timer went off.

I want the mile, I thought.

I can do that.

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There are odds stacked against me.

Despite appearances, I’m quite fit. I run three or four days a week, usually five to ten kilometers at a time. I lift weights regularly. I eat relatively little processed food. None of that changes the fact that I weigh over two hundred pounds.

Whatever my personal feelings on weight as a single data indicator of health (it isn’t, and it’s absurd to think so on an individual level even when acknowledging population-level trends), running is more difficult with higher mass. That’s just physics. My aerobic fitness has helped me finish a marathon, and it will help me chase this goal. Even so, it can’t guarantee the fastest mile of my life. Not by itself. That requires a level of grit and determination and specific training that I’ve never reached for before. I’ve found myself wondering why.

Thinking about eight-minute miles has forced me to think about my relationship with athletics more broadly. Because it’s not that I never had the opportunity to play sports in my youth. I did. I hated them.

Some of that was my own doing. I already had something I loved and happened to be much better at: music. Spending my afternoons comparing the work and reward of my musical pursuits to my spectacular inability to catch a ball felt like poor resource allocation. I was also an awkward child with little natural facility for artifice. That made feigning enthusiasm for things I didn’t like a functionally useless endeavor, and that did not exactly make me a coveted pick for the dodgeball team.

However, the real problem wasn’t my own feelings or failings or the choices of my peers. The problem, like many we discuss here, was structural.

I grew up surrounded by kids who were naturally athletic enough that many of the basics were never taught. Why spend time explaining footwork or throwing mechanics when most of the class seemed to absorb them intuitively? If you were one of the kids who didn’t, you were left with a very different lesson: that everyone else possessed something you lacked.

Looking back, I don’t think that lesson was true.

I think it was taught.

I was, perhaps, set up for failure from the start.

The year daily PE became mandatory was also my first year of middle school. California required physical education every day, but it didn’t make enough room in the schedule for both PE and elective arts programs. So the school found a solution for the little music nerds like me: zero period.

If you wanted to play flute or trumpet or timpani — no matter how well or how badly — you showed up an hour before everyone else.

That meant arriving at school around seven in the morning and beginning every day with PE, surrounded mostly by your fellow band geeks and a handful of genuinely athletic students who took early PE so they could leave campus sooner for actual sports practice.

As one might expect from the joyously illogical world of public-school athletics, sixth grade was also the year PE uniforms became mandatory.

At first glance, that sounds reasonable. Appropriate clothing should make exercise more comfortable.

If you are thinking that, you were almost certainly never an eleven-year-old girl and you were definitely never bullied as a child.

The uniforms were technically unisex. In practice, they were boys’ clothes with a more inclusive label attached. Nylon basketball shorts. Boxy cotton T-shirts.

Imagine being eleven years old, already fully developed, trying to run the required 9:30 mile in boys’ shorts and an oversized cotton shirt.

Imagine chafing badly enough that your inner thighs bleed, and being too embarrassed to tell anyone why running hurts.

Imagine layering cheap Target sports bras because you don’t know any better, hoping they’ll somehow solve the problem, and having no adult you trust enough to ask when they don’t.

Mr. Farro — your one-eyed, former military PE teacher, who “playfully” chases students around the track swatting at them with a clipboard — is not the person you’re bringing your bra problems to at seven in the morning (or, preferably, ever).

You probably could run a 9:30 mile, but you don’t know why you would want to. Your inner thighs are literally bleeding. Your chest hurts. Your clothes are simultaneously too tight and too loose. You have no music or actual running shoes. You have all your stuff in a locker with a padlock and only nine minutes to change and get to homeroom when class is done.

Just when you thought you might survive it — when you managed to run a lap without stopping, ignoring the ache and the chafing and the sweat you would not be allowed to shower off before homeroom — the sport would change. No more mile. Now it’s time for badminton and the athletic kids are picking teams. Still, be self-deprecating enough and you could get through that too. That was usually the time of year when the Presidential Fitness Test arrived.

A test you can’t study for

If you never had the pleasure of this humiliation ritual: congratulations! I’m very jealous. In the great state of California, this was an every-other-year rite of passage. Over the course of a week, you’d have to engage in all manner of calisthenic pursuits: pushups and sit-ups and pull-ups. Timed miles and timed sprints. Measured sit-and-reach stretches. Each grade level had acceptable ranges based on age and sex. And somehow, that sixth-grade year, nerdy, chubby, full-grown me managed to pass them all. Except one.

Years later I learned that there was almost nothing I could have done to pass the shoulder flexibility test.

The test itself was simple. Reach one arm over your shoulder and down your back. Reach the other up from below. Touch your fingertips. Then do it again with the opposite shoulder on top.

You had to pass both directions.

I couldn’t. I still can’t.

As it turns out, shoulder rotation is heavily influenced by anatomy. Some people simply have less of it than others. It’s mostly genetic. But because the flexibility test counted toward the overall assessment, I failed the Presidential Fitness Test.

Not the shoulder section. The whole thing.

I had never failed anything before.

That moment taught me something about fitness that would take years to unlearn: that effort does not matter when the system is fundamentally unfair. The adults administering the test had inherited a system that left no room to recognize that unfairness. Which meant no amount of trying would ever change their assessment of what I was capable of. Why, then, should I bother to try?

For a long time, I thought this was one of those stories adults tell themselves about childhood. That I’d been dramatic, overly sensitive, determined to extract lifelong meaning from a middle-school inconvenience.

It turns out I had considerably more company than I realized.

The Presidential Fitness Test was never actually designed around children, and it was certainly never designed around girls. It was created not because of empirical data driving national fitness, but because of fear. Its origins trace to the Eisenhower administration, when Americans became convinced that their physical strength was inferior to that of Europeans. No surprise, then, that at the height of the Cold War, that fear developed into patriotic urgency. John F. Kennedy, before taking office, published a 1960 essay in Sports Illustrated entitled “The Soft American,” wherein he lamented a generation whose softness could “strip and destroy the vitality of a nation.”

How to fix the softness of a nation? The first draft of the fitness test was born. Because those galvanizing anxieties grew out of Cold War concerns about military readiness, the earliest iteration of the Presidential Fitness Test included a softball throw meant to simulate lobbing a grenade. Alas, that first draft didn’t pan out, and the competitive machinery I got caught up in came later, even as the militaristic inspiration remained. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson formalized both the test and the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, acknowledging children who scored at or above the 85th percentile while publicly shaming the rest. These relative rankings and their attendant humiliations became de rigueur in gym classes nationwide, all the way through my childhood forty years later.

There is, of course, a design flaw at the center of the whole enterprise. It’s the same one that failed me by the shoulder blades. This test, including its later iterations, was modeled on military benchmarks rather than child development or health science. It’s a test that rewards natural athletic ability and body type far more than effort or progress. A marathoner might fail the pull-up bar and still be profoundly fit; an eleven-year-old with a congenital lack of shoulder rotation might do everything right and still fail. This test cannot tell the difference between a child who isn’t trying and a child whose body isn’t built to the template. And because it was scored in front of everyone, the failure was never private. As the kinesiologist Jackie Goodway has put it, bombing a math test is a private humiliation, but coming in last in the mile run while your classmates watch is a very public one.

For girls, the timing was especially cruel. Physical activity declines during adolescence for everyone, but the decline starts earlier and drops more steeply for girls than for boys. The reasons are almost painfully familiar to me now: puberty, body consciousness, menstruation, embarrassment, and, yes, discomfort with the available clothing options. Researchers studying PE uniform policies have found that girls report low self-confidence, poor body image, and discomfort with clothing options as direct barriers to participation. Those boys’ basketball shorts were never a neutral equalizer. They were another obstacle adults failed to see.

A survey of more than a thousand adults found that childhood memories of PE were associated with adult attitudes toward exercise, intentions to move, and actual sedentary behavior. For those of us who had a bad time, the results were not good. (Worth noting: the researchers were careful to call the effect modest, not definitive, though they were also struck by how vivid and emotionally charged the bad memories still were, decades on.)

Layer perceived weight onto that, and the impact compounds: weight-based teasing frequently happens in exactly these PE and sport settings, and adults who were stigmatized for their size as children often respond by quietly excluding themselves: switching to solitary exercise, working out only where no one can see, or avoiding the setting altogether. A shame-based system aimed at heavier, less “naturally athletic” kids was, functionally, teaching them to associate movement with humiliation.

Given that the whole apparatus was justified as a bulwark against a softening nation, it’s worth interrogating how we got here. Over the decades the test was in effect, American adult obesity rose from roughly 13 percent in 1960 to about 34 percent by 2008. Obviously the test itself did not cause that — correlation is not a grenade toss — but it presided over the increase without making a dent, all while plausibly undermining the one thing that actually protects long-term health: a durable, un-humiliated habit of moving your body for the rest of your life. Even by its own crude yardstick, (the bodyweight of a nation, a metric I’d otherwise refuse) the test failed.

The Obama administration finally retired the Presidential Fitness Test after the 2012–2013 school year, replacing it with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program and FitnessGram. These programs measured students against a standard of health rather than arbitrary speed and strength markers. There were also no more public rankings.

That change didn’t last very long.

In the summer of 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to revive the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition. Tucked amongst the executive order’s provisions was a major one: the Presidential Fitness Test was back.

An exercise in change

It wasn’t really until college that my views on fitness changed. My views on effort, too, though that went through many more fits and starts. I did try, throughout high school, to get fitter. From fourteen to eighteen I ran, often, through the back roads behind my house, dragging our golden retriever mix on plodding jaunts through sidewalk-less streets. I hiked the ridge, a state park a few blocks away, and did endless sit-ups on my purple carpeted floor in the hopes that my identity as fat girl might change, though it didn’t. I did it all in my Target bras and basketball shorts and generic running shoes.

Then, in college, I met gym rats.

Not athletes, at least not in the way I’d understood the word growing up. These were people with jobs and majors and hobbies who treated fitness as another craft worth practicing. They cared about getting stronger the way I cared about learning difficult music or making meticulous study guides. Excellence wasn’t reserved for one part of their lives. They pursued it wherever it interested them.

It was these people who presented to me the obvious: if I got myself my favorite notebooks and pens to make my best study guides for lectures; if I could spend hours perfecting the sound of a single eight-second musical bar; why couldn’t I get specialized equipment and learn to excel at fitness, too?

These are the people who showed me, maybe for the first time, that suffering was no virtue if it didn’t result in anything good at the end. That my legs did not have to bleed and chafe and my chest did not have to bounce. That a whole industry made things designed for the sole purpose of optimizing athletics not for the athletes but for the everyday people who kept fit because that is a thing you do to survive, and it shouldn’t be miserable for misery’s sake.

I have thought a lot, this week, about the difference between being set up to fail and being equipped to try. They can look identical from the outside — same track, same clock, same body — but they are opposite experiences of effort. The girl in the boys’ shorts was set up. Everything about her environment was engineered so that trying harder produced only more chafing, more failure, more evidence that the fault was hers. Of course she stopped believing effort mattered. Effort didn’t matter. Not there. Not on those terms.

But that was a fact about the system, not a fact about me. This is the thing it took me until college (and honestly a good while after) to understand. The problem was never that my body couldn’t do hard things. My body has since run a marathon. The problem was that no one ever let the effort be for me. It was always for the percentile, the award, the clipboard, for the nation’s soft underbelly. It was never for the plain, private pleasure of improvement.

The eight-minute mile is the first athletic goal I have ever chosen entirely on my own terms. Nobody assigned it. There’s no uniform. I have real shoes, a bra that actually works, a decade of aerobic base, and, crucially, the knowledge that suffering is not the point and never was. I might not get there this month. I might discover that at my mass, on my genetics, the pure biomechanics make it a longer project than I’d like. That’s fine. That’s just physics, and physics isn’t a moral failing. It isn’t Mr. Farro and his clipboard telling me I don’t belong on the track.

My fourteen-year-old self would laugh at me, and then, unable to help herself, lean in to ask whether I really think we can. This spectacularly effortful thing.

I do. And this time, no one is grading my reach. Thank God.

My damn book (an undertaking I have been laboring over for just shy of a year) is so close to done that I can recite its closing lines to myself in constant daily monologue. And yet the words are stuck. The monologue stays woefully internal. The wiring between the part of me that knows the ending and the part that could say it — fingers, larynx, anything that turns inside-noise into outside-noise — has come loose.

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So I asked myself: if the city couldn’t get me crawling over my own self-imposed finish line, might a country escape do the trick? This was around the time the algorithm, primed by weeks of covetously refreshing the Michelin Guide Berlin and my cherished daily hour of luxury-travel doomscrolling, began screaming silently at me: Bavaria, Bavaria. And who am I to ignore the siren song of Alpine air?

Being in the land of reliable train travel, the answer to how do I get from Berlin to Munich with my humongous suitcase and without having an aneurysm was easy and obvious. Did I need a first-class ticket? Of course not. Did the novelty of paying for a first-class anything, alongside the sheer size of my gargantuan roller bag, persuade me to fork over €85,99 to Deutsche Bahn? Yes, indeed.

It’s strange, in transit, the things you splurge on and the things you won’t. I wanted that first-class ticket and I got it. But god forbid I pay for a car from my hotel to the Hauptbahnhof when my own two feet would do. I don’t pack a luggage scale; my weight-dar is well honed from years of solo excursions — honed enough to know my one rolling suitcase clears sixty pounds. That, and one workhorse Tumi shoulder bag (my first big-girl purchase, still going strong fifteen years after I took her off the shelf and five years after her warranty expired) were enough to drag through the streets of Berlin. Savvy enough for first class, frugal enough to refuse thirty euros for a taxi, sweaty enough to pray I’d snatch a single seat, with apologies to my neighbors and gratitude for advances in the science of antiperspirants. That’s me.

DB was kind enough to inform me, in a multi-paragraph email, that my 08:29 would run seven minutes behind schedule. Lucky me: enough time to grab a pumpkin-seed roll stuffed with lettuce and Brie and a bottle of Apfelschorle, because waiting for a cappuccino made me nervous. A German high-speed train can get back on schedule at any moment. Those seven minutes were no guarantee.

It took me four escalators to reach my platform. Down, down, down. Somehow I ended up beside an American family. Five of them — two parents, three children, all college-aged. The boy, nineteen at least, crouched against a post with a Game Boy: childhood roles reclaimed but not reimagined. The girls flitted like magpies, recycling bin to announcement board to luggage cart and back. The mother looked like Kristin Chenoweth, if Kristin Chenoweth were a CrossFitter and also very annoyed at her husband for not making their grown son turn off his Game Boy. I tucked my luggage tag under my hand so they wouldn’t see it. My suitcase is fifteen years strong too, and I’d forgotten it still wears the tag I scribbled in undergrad, university logo stark and blatant. I did not want to be sorted in with the America brigade.

Every few minutes I looked up at the board. Train number. Platform number. A diagram of the cars, kindly labeled A through H, with matching signs dotting the posts in both directions. Little yellow ones told me first class got E, F, G, and H. No seat numbers. The most polite start to the Amazing Race I may ever see.

I thought about queuing up to outrun my countrymen, but against every habit I own I wanted to board last and spare myself the indignity of hauling sixty pounds down a narrow aisle, apologizing to a whole car as I went.

And standing there, sorting myself, I remembered when the lines here meant everything. When I actually lived in Berlin: over a decade ago, barely out of school.

Back then I had to renew my visa a few months in, which meant a pilgrimage to the Ausländerbehörde — the Foreign Affairs Office. Every immigrant I knew had horror stories about the place, as though German bureaucracy were a special kind of hell. Even then, I knew bureaucracy is hell everywhere. Germany wasn’t so special.

I’d taken my driving test back in California with a man known around town as Scary Larry, for reasons never fully established. He wore Hawaiian shirts, failed most kids on their first and second and third attempts, and demanded forms in triplicate. I had survived him. I had passed. I could not believe his German counterparts could be much worse.

Lucky for me, I had friends who’d been through the Ausländerbehörde wars. The same friends who’d helped me with my Anmeldung, registering my residence, a thing required not just of foreigners but of everyone who moves towns in Germany. The novelty baffled me, but I played along.

And quickly it became clear it really was a game. The closest thing to a rule book was whatever Kafka you could get your hands on. You had to register within six weeks of arrival. You could, supposedly, book a registration appointment by phone or online. Appointments opened three to six months out from your registration deadline, but you couldn’t book an appointment without an address, and you couldn’t lease an address without an appointment. My friends explained the cheat code: sublet somewhere temporary, show up in person without an appointment, dazzle them with well-rehearsed German, and register yourself in the flesh — ich melde mich an. Anmeldung: success. Next stop, the visa.

My friends came through again. The Ausländerbehörde was open Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Sometimes Mondays, but not every Monday, and usually not Wednesdays — except, occasionally, Wednesdays. Best to call out of work on a Tuesday, when the staff were fresh off a pleasant weekend and a Monday spent inside a building that claimed to be open and was, in practice, closed.

The building was in fact a series of buildings, divided by country. With one hundred sixty-eight visa-requiring nations, they grouped us together. How, nobody was sure. Population? Immigrant population? Immigrant population likely to already speak German? That was our best guess, given that the building serving American citizens also served Turkey and no one else.

I would have a leg up, I was told, because: 1) I was white; 2) I was American; 2a) my birthplace was California, prime real estate for have you seen the Hollywood sign? and I left my heart in San Francisco; 3) I already spoke German; 4) I was a girl; and 4a) if my officer was old enough, he might clock from my name alone that I was Jewish, and that might help too. All these privileges left me poised for a triumphant day at the bureau — provided I was willing to start it at three in the morning.

As with the Anmeldung, the dream was to secure an appointment online. But an online appointment meant booking six to nine months out from your home country — which I’d done for my first visa and could not do for the one meant to replace it, the one not yet expired, which is precisely why I was already in Berlin. Give up the appointment dream, my friends said. Get ready for the roller coaster.

Tip one. The Behörde opens at eight. The line starts forming at four. Be in line. Be one of the first ten in said line. Bring snacks. Bring drinks, but not too many. Do not leave the line. Do not step sideways, forward, or back. Do not cede an inch. Do not make eye contact with the employees as they trickle in, and do not succumb to the sympathetic parent with a baby carriage who really, really could use a better spot. You woke at three in the morning for this. Do not give it up — the moment you do, you come back and do it all again, and there are only so many three-a.m. mornings a woman can take.

Tip two. The line is a ritual, and you must perform it. The line is not a line. At eight precisely, the employees unlock the doors. At eight and one second, the orderly line you have so patiently waited in explodes into motion. The employees stand aside, bemused and amused both, and watch as men — mostly men, almost entirely men but me — sprint up one, two, three flights of stairs to line up again inside a windowless hallway with a holding room at its end. Your place in the first line means nothing; your place in the second means everything, so long as you have one. If you don’t make the hallway: better luck next time. For the stampede, wear sensible shoes.

Tip three. Sensible shoes, but not gym shoes: your outfit must scream I know things, and I know them here. Do not wear jeans. Do not wear leggings, shorts, a baseball cap, a dress too long or too short. Wear black. No big jewelry, not too much small jewelry. Do not smile. Do not speak unless spoken to. Be ready to be spoken to. Hold your passport, casually, in your hand. Don’t wave it. Just hold it. You’ll see.

And I saw. Sweaty in a knee-length skirt, a blouse, a cardigan, my makeup setting-sprayed within an inch of its life, my tote strap damp from the multi-flight sprint, I stood halfway down that hallway fiddling with my navy passport, surrounded mostly by Turkish nationals. I made eye contact with no one. I spoke to no one. I did not smile. And eventually the employees came up the stairs and walked the line, end to beginning and back, beginning to end again. Eventually, a man stopped in front of me and said, in German: You. You speak German. Come. And I did.

It was ten by then. I had worn black. The officer never asked to see the meticulous binder I’d spent weeks assembling; my friends had told me that, for a woman with legs up one through four, he likely wouldn’t. We chatted in German for perhaps thirty seconds. He complimented my one small ring. He slid my visa calmly into the fourteenth page of my passport and handed it back. Seven hours. Thirteen minutes. A small measure of my sanity. I belonged in Germany now. It had chosen me out of a crowd.

I thought about all of this as my train to Munich chugged into the station. I watched the platform queue, each person a domino. I wondered whether we would board one by one, in orderly fashion, or whether my fellow Americans would run — whether someone still needed to win the stampede.

There was no stampede. The hardest part was wrestling my monster suitcase into the luggage rack, nudging aside a delicate orange hard-shell carry-on that should have been stored elsewhere. I folded myself into a single seat. I napped. I read. I worked. I napped again. I ate my pumpkin-seed roll and smiled at the taste of Austria colliding with the flavor of France. I napped more.

Munich’s station was even busier than Berlin’s. I walked past stampede after stampede and wondered what hallways these people were lining up for, what their München Hauptbahnhof platform made them run toward. I dropped my things at the hotel beside the station and, unburdened, walked with no map at all. I turned where the trees were greenest. I turned toward laughter. I turned again at a courtyard full of grandparents and the soft clatter of bocce. I sat in the sun. I tipped my face to the sky and remembered, for a minute, what it was to belong. I let the possibility of belonging once more seep into my pores. I did not notice my nose beginning to burn at the tip, or the freckles darkening the tops of my arms.

I wandered back and slept deeply. I woke to go to Klais, and it was raining, raining so well I unsheathed my umbrella for the ninety-second walk from hotel to station and did not regret it. An app gave me my train time and my platform, and I stood sheltered under the roof. No sun to tip my face into. My nose was not sore.

Eventually a woman approached: did I know whether this train went to Mittenwald? She asked in English. I didn’t, I said, but there was an app. Her face fell. “You’re a tourist, too?”

I thought about it. The word, in this country, laid over me. Once, here, I was not a tourist. I had an Anmeldung and a visa in the fourteenth page of my passport and a bureau I had beaten at three in the morning in the correct black clothes. Now I had a very good accent and an app. I nodded. “Yes. But I speak German, if you need help. We can find someone.”

She’d assumed the train idling at 12:16 was our 12:28. But the number was wrong. The app was confusing. I went to find an employee a platform over. Formality wins the day when it can: Entschuldigen Sie, bitte. Does this train go to Mittenwald? Is it also mine? Is the 12:16 the 12:28? Where is it going? I have not opened a map.

Yes, the worker said. This was our train, bound for two different places, but we had to sit in the front. But it doesn’t show our number, I exclaimed. The front half would, he said. I had more questions. How does half a train carry one route and half another? It was 12:23. I did not have time to ask. I thanked him instead. I found my startled tourist — she was from Bangalore — and explained the two-halves train. She looked skeptical and bolted into the first car. Wrong half. I walked to the front, as the worker had told me, and did not run. Too close to departure for a stampede.

I sat in the handicap section, guiltily, because it was where everyone with a huge suitcase had washed up, telling myself I’d move the instant someone arrived with a mobility aid. I propped my elbow on my bags as if that could stop sixty pounds of deadweight from careening at a sudden stop. The man across from me cracked a beer. I was two feet from the bathroom. No turning back. I screenshotted the app, little arrow expanded to the full list: sixteen towns between Munich and Klais. South, I thought. Southeast. I knew things — if the line ended in Innsbruck we were heading east; if a forest got involved we were heading south. I didn’t need Google as badly as I’d feared. My nose itched but did not burn.

The onboard screen didn’t list all the stops my little arrow had. For a moment I feared the worker had betrayed me. But no — the screen showed only the major stops; the conductor announced the rest aloud, town by town, tiny places where schoolchildren flooded the aisles, shaking rain from their hoods, chattering about their days. I liked watching them board in packs, no older than twelve, alone, no adult required. Sorted, confident, certain of their stop.

Soon only a few stops remained. Klais, I realized, was too small to appear on the screen. I hunted for the nearest major stop, eyes flicking between phone and board. And then we reached it, and the announcer came on — in German first, and I thought I’d misheard, but he said it again in English, because it clearly mattered, for tourists most of all: The train splits here. The back half goes west. The front half goes east. We will wait a few minutes, so you can move to the correct half. The trains will not cease for mislocated passengers.

I did not see my compatriot, the one who’d feared the wrong train. I felt absurdly grateful to the worker who had sent me to the front without telling me why. I thought about clean breaks. Splits. A machine so refined it can cleave itself in two, easy, like a butter knife through a Brötchen still warm from a morning bakery trip. I thought about the bureau that had once split me cleanly out of a crowd — you, you speak German, come — on the strength of legs up one through four, and set me down on the side marked belonging, at least temporarily. I thought about all the stampedes, whole swaths of people shuffling from place to place before things pulled apart.

I got to Klais. There’s more story to tell there. I’m finishing the damn book.

But I keep circling the same questions, and they arrive in my old imperative. That voice that once knew the rules cold: be in line by four. Do not cede an inch. Do not make eye contact. Wear black, hold your passport, do not smile. I knew those rules once. I passed the unwritten test.

Most of my friends don’t live in Berlin anymore. But the ones who stayed in Germany told me the Ausländerbehörde isn’t like that any more. A little less Kafka, apparently.

I’m not sure of the new rules. I don’t know which half of the train I’m on. If it’s moving in the right direction. I don’t know if I can go back to the station if I accidentally get on the wrong side. I don’t know if I get to line up and try again. If I do, does my place in line stay with me or will I have to brave the stampede?

The train is still moving. I don’t know which half I’m on. Not yet.

There’s an irony to that, because I love theater. My earliest, happiest artistic memories live there. I began my professional career in classical music, then spent years working in the nonprofit theater industry. I was interviewing for an executive position at a major American theater as recently as two months ago. I couldn’t convince myself to re-enter that space. I can’t.

I’ve done an analysis of America’s nonprofit arts infrastructure before (you can read it here), but the system is simultaneously a mere footnote and the entire story.

The system of nonprofit arts in the United States is deeply, seismically, and perhaps irredeemably broken. In the way that broken systems do, the people it hurts first and most are those who’ve been historically underrepresented: women and nonbinary people of color, men of color, and eventually white women. Somehow, white men escape unscathed over and over and over again.

I have been avoiding publicly discussing this industry because of fear: fear of retaliation, fear that change is impossible, fear that my voice is not the one that should be centered in the conversation. But something happened a few days ago that I can’t overlook. I’ve been sitting with it, stewing on it, and I just can’t let it go.

A few days ago, Hana Sharif announced her resignation as Artistic Director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., effective June 30. The letter went to the board mere hours before the world-premiere opening of CrazySexyCool: The TLC Musical — one of the highest-profile productions of Arena’s season. Pardon my language, but that’s fucked up. We have got to talk about why.

Let’s start with some disclosure: I don’t know Hana Sharif personally. I know that we’ve been in the same rooms a few times. I’ve definitely shaken her hand at least once. While I know her by reputation (first as Artistic Director of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, then Arena Stage), we’ve never had a conversation or a true professional acquaintance. I did engage, briefly, with members of Arena’s staff on a shared production a few years ago, by which I mean we shared some emails about securing tickets for VIP donors on both sides. I am sure we have been on the same four-hundred-person Zoom calls about arts advocacy and equity. We have a lot of mutual acquaintances. That’s the extent of our overlap.

Sharif is one of a tiny handful of Black women positioned in major leadership roles at American arts institutions in the past decade. For the most part, each has been, in the intervening years, forced out in five years or less. And you can read every excuse in the book — followed, reliably, by its exact opposite. She was too authoritarian; she wasn’t tough enough. She overspent the institution into deficit; she wouldn’t pay for the tried-and-true. Her programming was too dogmatic to sell tickets; her programming was too juvenile to sell tickets. She was too focused on outreach; she wasn’t focused on outreach enough. All of it has been said, oftentimes about the same woman. Sometimes by the same person.

It is possible — maybe even probable! — that each of these critiques is true of at least one of these leaders at some point in her tenure. Guess what: I have worked for white men for whom EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of these critiques is true, and who were never reprimanded, talked to, or criticized, let alone fired or forced to resign.

I have worked for men who screamed at people, swore at people, set deadlines based on vibes alone. Men who spent money so badly that deficits tripled in a matter of months. Men who would grab female staff members and rub their shoulders, ‘as friends do.’ Men who would ignore the names people preferred to be called. Men who made major decisions about pieces of art they never watched all the way through. Men who would never say no to the people who needed to hear it and never say yes to the people who needed help.

I have, of course, also worked for men who did only a few of these things, and women who did some of these things too. Wouldn’t you know it: the white men remain in their jobs. The white women had the chance, for the most part, to leave of their own accord. The men of color lasted a little bit longer than Sharif’s three-year tenure. The women of color are gone.

I can’t even call these double standards, because that would assume the industry knows what its standards are. It doesn’t. There was a reckoning post-pandemic — one that in artistic circles revolved around accountability to values (see: the We See You, White American Theater movement) and in administrative circles revolved around financial instability. Problem is, the people who actually need the reckoning most have no incentive to take part. Both issues have only grown, with performative, virtue-signaling “wins” publicized while gaping wounds fester behind the scenes. All the while, no one who needs to will cross the line and admit that these things must be tackled together. There is no rooting out white supremacy in a structure of philanthropy rooted in whiteness. There is no attracting new capital while the structures of white supremacy remain. This is not complicated to understand. It is, apparently, difficult if not impossible to fix with the leaders we have in place across the industry — leadership that remains overwhelmingly white.

An institution I worked for went looking for a new leader and, for once, it seemed to mean what it said about wanting someone who would change the kind of place it had always been. (I suspected, frankly, that the wanting had less to do with genuine institutional introspection than with an equity-and-inclusion reputation that was not great.) Part of why I’d been brought on, specifically, was for my experience co-leading anti-racism and equity work, alongside my core responsibilities, and I held a senior role on the leadership team. Even so, I wasn’t asked to join the search. I was asked, instead, to weigh in during the final round.

When the search firm asked my opinion in closed-door meetings, I told them plainly: this is the candidate I find most qualified. I want desperately for them to be hired. I believe they should be offered the job. Their vision is clear, interesting, and sorely needed by the people we serve. I also believe that this institution, particularly its board, is in no way prepared to support them the way they deserve, and I am very, very nervous that they are being set up for failure.

You see, I had watched how the Oregon Shakespeare Festival treated Nataki Garrett Myers — another powerhouse of the industry whom I know of but do not know personally. I saw what happened to her, and everything about it made me think: that could absolutely happen here. If this place actually wanted to change, I knew it needed to do the work before the new leader arrived. Not during. Not after. Not never. I also knew there was very little chance of that happening, and very little chance the search firm would share my feedback with the leaders in place at the time.

These were leaders to whom I had to report complaints about their own behavior — myself, because the HR function was a part-time afterthought at an organization far too large to treat it that way, and because my own job had nothing to do with HR. These were leaders who got very, very uncomfortable with what they always took to be personal attacks on their character, no matter how often they were told — over and over and over again — that this was not about individuals but about systems of power, oppression, and harm.

Here’s the thing: they hired the person I was so impressed by. To work with them was a genuine privilege. It was also heartbreaking, exhausting, and one of the most burnout-inducing, miserable periods of my life. I had stress hives. I barely slept. I was expected to be available at all times, by every channel that exists. And yet I was still a white lady. I lasted until I took things a step too far: I carried forward a complaint that had been reported to me, and I would not let it go. I asked leadership to stand with me. What I was told, in essence, was that real authority did not sit where the org chart said it did — and that my job was to support that, no matter what. Do what I wanted in my own corner, and let the rest go. I refused.

And yet: I am still a white woman. I was sent off with a measure of compensation and mouths shut about the ill will on all sides. Katy Clark resigned as president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music a few months after meeting a five-year commitment period, and walked away having kept an apartment toward which the institution had put nearly a million dollars. Somehow, I doubt Hana Sharif or Nataki Garrett Myers were offered the same courtesy.

The person I used to work with is still in their job. I don’t know for how much longer. When they leave, will they have been forced out? Technically, maybe not. Materially? We’ll see.

Working within this structure is working within a structure of violence. If Hana Sharif wasn’t the leader Arena wanted, then what support, if any, did they actually offer her to make the situation better? Who got to decide what effective leadership looked like? If the financial model wasn’t working, what concrete steps was the board taking to solve it? Did they ever acknowledge the economic and cultural forces surrounding their theater? The roughly three hundred thousand Black women pushed out of the American workforce over the past year (many of them federal employees in a city that runs on federal employment) who no longer have the disposable income they may once have dedicated to theater? The influx of conservatives into Washington, for whom contemporary theater was unlikely to be a usual pastime? The hostile remaking of the Kennedy Center, one of Arena’s peer institutions, that surely spooked boards across the city away from risk? Did they ask these questions? Or did they decide, like Oregon Shakespeare Festival before them, that the Black woman they brought in was the problem?

Per herself (with full article here):

…there is no version of respectability that is ever safe. Which is why neither Hana nor I believed that shit ourselves. There is no “good one” on this cesspool of white supremacy. There is only us standing in solidarity.

I don’t have the answers on how to fix this industry. Not today. Probably not tomorrow. But I do know literally hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people in the field, all around the country, who are just as angry as I am. In group chats and Instagram comments and Reddit threads, we are all asking the same thing: how can this keep happening, again and again and again? Why do white men get chance after chance after chance? And why are the rest of us trying to seize power from the system by remaking it in its own image, when that image is such a farce?

My biggest frustration with this industry was never that the system was broken. It was that we kept trying to fix it by handing new people the controls of the same broken machine. It doesn’t matter how new the ball is that you drop into the top of a Rube Goldberg machine — different weight, different composition, it doesn’t matter. If the gears aren’t aligned, it is never making it to the end of the track. We know the machine was set up incorrectly and yet we still hear people blaming the ball.

The show cannot keep going on like this. We all deserve better: starting, most importantly, with Black women. I don’t know the details of what happened at Arena. I likely never will; I am not owed them. But I do know that Hana Sharif and Nataki Garrett Myers and the umpteenth Black woman making art and stewarding artists and audiences all over this country deserve a hell of a lot better than to be strapped to the top of a machine built to fail and then blamed when it does.

This summer is a strange one. The temperatures soar but the days are peaceful. Breezy. The thermometer ticks up and up but the days tick by and by, normal as anything. I am sweaty, but that’s nothing new. I walk a lot. I rent a bicycle. I get on the unrenovated U-Bahn train. Summer is summer. Heat is heat. There is more AC than there used to be. I order lemonades and iced lattes I don’t need, to avoid the indignity of asking for my waters with ice.

Sunday morning. I’d like to say it was early. That, America-style, I hopped out of bed at 7am, was jogging by 7:15am and home after a pastry stop by 9am.

That’s a lie. I woke up at 7am and went right back to sleep. No hopping out of bed occurred. I rolled out around 11am. It is just me, myself, and I. No roommates, family, friends, significant others, dogs, or even houseplants. I do not feel lonely. My room has been recently outfitted with a thermostat. I have set it to 20 degrees Celsius without doing the conversion. Whatever it is, it feels great when my default state is warm. Somewhere, I fear a German environmental scientist is screaming without knowing why.

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Now it is 11:15am. I read. I dither. Now it is 12pm. I am dressed. I’ve put makeup on with a white shirt, with the vague idea that I’ll film some content today. I put on a skirt. It is short, because that’s the only kind of skirt I’ve packed and outside it is definitely not 20 degrees C. I don’t put on sandals because, knowing that I will sweat no matter if I am standing still, I am not a monster. My moisture-wicking socks have a lot of work to do.

I think about walking all the way to the cafe I want to write at. They have the first iced matcha I’ve ever liked and the kind of waitstaff who look Berlin-cool on the surface, but by virtue of working at the dumbest, most globalized cafe in a 3-kilometer radius will never actually be accepted by the truly Berlin-cool. I feel a kinship with them, except that I am even less cool than they are. The walk would be 4.8 kilometers. This is less than the jog I plan to go on later, but more than I should subject a cafe worker to. No matter how slow I walk I will be dripping by the time I get to my destination. I decide to take the subway. It looks like it is going to rain.

Instead of transferring, I get off at a major station. Now a 1.5-kilometer walk: compromise.

I put my headphones on. Nothing is playing except the dulcet tones of Google Maps. Verbal walking directions are the true MVP of my solo travels. I realize, 400 meters in, that the voice is telling me to walk straight until I literally run into the building. I take my headphones off. My ears are sweating for no reason. Maybe I should have made espresso at home after all.

By the time I reach the cafe, they have been open for an hour (acceptable), I am definitely shiny but not dripping (also acceptable) and the rain clouds have disappeared (very acceptable). I have not packed an umbrella, which I surely should have, as my blouse is white.

My credit card, as usual, betrays me. No, it’s not denied. The terminal, no matter that all my conversations are in German, automatically transitions to English as soon as I tap my card. Rude, Visa. The barista looks confused. I leave before he can ask questions to try and angle for a tip from a clueless American. He probably wouldn’t, except his colleague did last week. He’s never getting a job at a cafe not owned by a global conglomerate.

I sit down. The booths are velvet. The texture of velvet makes the hair on my arms stand up, but it certainly improves my posture, which is vital when I plan on sitting here for at least 3 hours. An iced matcha appears in front of me. There is no internet, thank God. There is no AC and the sun is shining hot through the windows. I am sweating but not dripping. I write and write and write.

When I am done writing I gather my things and step outside. I have decided I will walk all the way home and as soon as I do, it starts to rain. Fat little drops but only a scant few. I smell petrichor. There are not many people on the street. I revise my plan. Subway it is.

As I start walking to the subway the rain picks up. I realize I am hungry and my shirt is white and there is a smear of makeup inside the collar that I am unsure if people can see from the outside. This calls for a snack.

I wander along whatever sidewalks are shielded by awnings until I see a lunch spot, populated but with tables free. It is tacos. In Berlin. Sure.

I order chips and guacamole and three tacos. A freshly fried tortilla chip is one of the few things I’d put on the shortlist for a last meal and the chips here are perfect. The guacamole tastes like it came out of a single-serving container from Costco, which I find interesting as there is no Costco in Berlin and no naturally occurring avocado in Germany. I wish I’d just ordered chips. The tacos are fine: actual tacos, not Taco Bell tacos: corn tortillas, cilantro, onion. The meat is there. Spicy is something the Germans are still working on. Sour they have down. I savor each tangy, greasy bite.

There is a subway station just across the street. I read the signs on the stairwell which inform me this subway line is not running this weekend. The raindrops continue to drip. Wonderful. I make my way towards the tram. No Google Maps magic required — there are signs everywhere.

By the time I make it to the tram stop I am dripping. The sky is dripping. I feel too sweaty to be on what is sure to be a crowded tram and too damp to face the walk home in an intermittently translucent blouse. Only the scientific advancements in cosmetics prevent me from a face full of mascara drips, so that is something, at least.

I have 4 minutes to wait. I think about taking out my book, but I don’t want it to get damp. I think about taking out my phone, but I’ve already spent too much time on screens. I stand underneath the bus shelter, me and approximately 15 strangers. I try not to creep on people in my ennui. I wave at a baby in a stroller. There is chocolate smeared all around their mouth. They are wearing no shirt nor shoes. I wish more American babies had the chance to be strolled onto tram cars in swim shorts when it is 90 degrees outside.

The tram arrives. It is, as I suspected, very full. A girl in a full Y2K fit presses the flashing green button to open the doors. Few people spill out, and we all make our way inside. I hear a voice. German. They make eye contact with me.

‘Excuse me. Will you help her? She has to get off at Rosenthaler Platz. Last time she missed her stop.’

She is middle-aged. She is holding the arm of an elderly woman in a bright green safety vest who is leaning on a walker. I can’t tell how they know each other. The elderly woman makes her way towards the train, alone.

‘Will you help her?’

My response feels like it’s on a three-second delay. I nod. Y2K moves towards me, and we nod a little at each other. She’s wearing a crop top and a Britney Spears-coded plaid mini skirt, both of which show off her belly button ring. She grabs the front of the walker to pull it over the threshold as I hold open the door.

‘Of course. We will help. Rosenthaler Platz.’

A man in a fetish harness clears out the handicap area so the woman with the walker can get settled. People offer their seats, but she shakes her head a little. It is only a few stops, Y2K explains.

I think about making small talk, but it’s not really the done thing.

I think about a phrase that came to my mind all the time when I lived in Los Angeles, because I constantly found and felt it to be true. “People in Los Angeles are nice, but not kind. People in New York are kind, but not nice.” People in Berlin move through the world like they are connected to one another.

Connection is not good or bad. It just is. There is an elderly woman with a walker who needs to get off the tram at the right stop. No one is helping her. We are helping her. Me and Y2K and fetish harness. I like their Mohawk. I don’t offer the compliment. I don’t think it’s really the done thing.

We approach the stop. None of us have said anything to each other beyond ‘here is good?’ and ‘just a few stops more’. We stand in silence, three different hands steadying a walker I don’t think has brakes, and the woman’s hands grasping the handles in a way that looks learned.

We arrive. I press the button and hold the door. Y2K grabs the front of the walker. Harness follows behind. I think about if I need to wave down the driver, explain the delay. Then I realize: there is no significant delay. The woman is walking away, one laborious step after another, walker moving smoothly through a scant puddle as the raindrops hit, each one precise and distinct.

The three of us get back on the tram. We find better spots to stand. We do not say one more thing to each other.

I find myself smiling all the way to my station. I try and stop myself: I don’t really think it’s the done thing. I can’t actually remember the last time I saw someone in America out in public with a walker alone, in a big city, walking around independently. I can’t stop thinking about how no one here sighed or yelled or rolled their eyes. I keep thinking about how none of us were nice but all of us were kind and there was no fanfare about it at all.

I think about the anger I sometimes run into back home, the way the smallest criticism of the country gets met like a betrayal. This year the nation turns 250. In the scheme of how long people have been learning to live alongside one another, Americans inhabit a baby. Babies need information to grow, I hear.

No one is claiming Europe is utopia. No one is claiming everyone here is happy, or that all of us, back home, are sad. Only that something eases when kindness is the baseline rather than the exception. Something lets go when you can be elderly and tired and using a walker and walk around your neighborhood and know strangers will help you off at your stop and none of them will speak to you with pity or judgment or really speak to you at all.

Family is great and friends are great, but when we talk about it taking a village I think we forget that a village is a town is a city. The village needs roads that go somewhere and doctor’s offices that are open all hours and little taverns where you can go to be alone with other people. A village needs villagers, and you won’t know them all, but if the village has good infrastructure you can know that when you run into them you can help and they can help, and there is no extraordinary fanfare required in that helping, because it is not extraordinary. It is wholly, humbly, ordinary. The village is built perfectly for almost nobody and pretty well for mostly everybody.

Other nations are not utopia. Other cultures are not better or worse. People are people. People are, in my view, inherently kind. That kindness bears out when the kindness is an expectation.

Someone will help you on the tram. They won’t talk about it. You won’t talk about it. You will get off at the right stop.

I have never, before or since, met wind of the speed and relentlessness I did in middle-of-nowhere Kansas. There were stretches where I genuinely believed I would lose control of the car, gusts buffeting us upward of sixty miles an hour and refusing to let up.

Now, I can admit that I’m normally a somewhat obnoxious road-trip driver. The way I stay engaged, primarily, is by singing at the absolute top of my lungs. (My deepest apologies, in perpetuity, to the former roommate who endured years of me shrieking Hadestown and Waitress on New England back roads.) But singing into a sixty-mile-an-hour crosswind did not seem advisable, so I surrendered to the algorithm. Subsequently, the algorithm very quickly surrendered to Olivia Rodrigo.

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I wasn’t expecting my sixty-something father to be the one to react first. “I like her,” he said, somewhere around the second chorus. “She has a good sense of nostalgia.”

‘A good sense of nostalgia.’ My dad was right. I’d add a few thoughts as well. The first is that Rodrigo can actually sing. This is no small thing in the current pop landscape, where “can she sing?” and “is she a star?” are not often the same question. I admire Taylor Swift enormously, both as a builder of worlds and as a top-tier business woman, but I have never once listened to her for her singing voice. Rodrigo lives in a different part of my brain: the one she shares with Ariana Grande, Sabrina Carpenter, Reneé Rapp, and all the pop singers who can genuinely wail. No, she’s not at Beyoncé or post-voice-teacher Adele levels. But she has a real instrument, and, like the best of her cohort, she’s escaped Disney containment with that instrument intact.

The second thing is both obvious and not considered as much as I’d argue it should be: Rodrigo is twenty-three. That’s young by any measure, but it’s especially young for a singer. Somehow, we almost never talk about pop stars this way. Pop culture loves a barely-post-pubescent prodigy. What we don’t talk about is that, physically, a woman’s voice isn’t really finished growing at twenty-three. In the vocal pedagogy I was taught within, we know that the instrument keeps settling, deepening, and stabilizing until women are about 35. That means that, technically speaking, Rodrigo is a lot closer to the high schooler recording herself on YouTube or the undergrad nervously dropping a dorm-room EP than she is to Beyoncé or Swift releasing another platinum monolith.

Honestly, you can hear Rodrigo’s development in real time. The difference in vocal quality across Sour (2021), Guts (2023), and you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love (2026) is significant and audible. She’s gained pitch, power, and stability. The strain you sometimes used to feel in her upper register has mostly disappeared. Breathiness now reads as a choice rather than an accident. Happily, the complexity of her lyrics is starting to be matched by the complexity of her musicianship.

Listening to this album for the first time, a thought struck me about three tracks in. “Wow, Olivia would really kill a madrigal.” If you’re lost, don’t worry: I’ll explain.

There’s a reason high-school and college treble choirs tend to be handed madrigals in their repertoire so early and so relentlessly. If you’re unfamiliar, madrigals are secular, Renaissance-era music, typically written for two to six voices. They can be mixed for men and women, but for students usually it’s all treble or all bass voices. Madrigals have, for centuries, been music whipped out to demonstrate expertise. If you can handle polyphonic, unaccompanied vocal music, you’re on a good track as an artist.

That’s why madrigals are often the first music young singers are given without the guardrails: no accompaniment to hide inside, no orchestration to lean on. Just a few exposed lines that require holding rock-solid pitch, internalizing the rhythm, and balancing against one another in real time. It is brutally hard the first time you do it, especially if your technique is still spotty or developing. But once it’s in the body — once a singer can actually handle it — a whole world of musicality opens up that simply was not available before. Three songs into my first listen of this record, the thought I could not shake was: oh good, she’s gotten there.

Olivia Rodrigo is, I think, exactly where her age indicates she should be. Past the technique. Not yet past the self-consciousness. Standing in the doorway of the larger thing. What’s remarkable about this album is that she’s letting us watch her tiptoe out of the door in real time.

Make no mistake, this is a real album. A concept record in the vintage sense, formally split into two halves, Girl So in Love and You Seem Pretty Sad. By Rodrigo’s own account it began as a document of her first grown-up relationship and had to be rebuilt mid-process when that relationship soured. As a listener, you can feel the seam. The architecture is, in some ways, the achievement here. There are few songs that stand cleanly alone as singles, but listening from start to finish, tracing the narrative from gooily in love to settled but disillusioned, is genuinely satisfying in a way pop albums rarely bother to be anymore.

What I can’t quite say is that the music tracks the emotional turn as well as the sequencing does. The record is a solid mix of post-punk and new-wave throwbacks alongside folkier ballads. Guitar abounds, but real riffs are scarce. There’s a great deal of reliable 4/4 time, standard chord progressions, and dependable drum work. On track after track I found myself wishing for a heightened sense of drama: a key change, a minor mode, an orchestration that escalated alongside the lyric instead of politely accompanying it. The architecture promises a descent. The music mostly stays on a flat path. And yet, the combination of music and lyrics works. You understand, viscerally, what she was living through as she made this. That counts for a lot.

Take these lines from the album’s fourth track, “maggots for brains”:

Somehow, it’s the weekend, I’m still bored out of my skull / And I went to a party but only on principle

An atypical rhyme scheme, in a pop song? Be still my heart. It’s wry, a little self-deprecating, a touch obvious, and instantly, almost embarrassingly relatable. This is the sound of someone who has a great deal to say and is still, charmingly, working out how to say it. The lyrics that follow don’t all clear that bar; we get some fruit metaphors and a couple of tired rhymes and one or two cliché too many. But we also get enormous promise.

Promise is the operative word, because the thing standing most often between Rodrigo and the larger work is a habit she’s nearly outgrown. Call it recitative, call it Sprechstimme, call it speak-singing or pseudo-rap. Whatever you call it, I’m referring to her reflexive retreat into half-spoken lyric breaks. When she was younger and less settled in her instrument, leaning on these made sense; they were a graceful way of working around the parts of her voice that weren’t there yet. She doesn’t need them anymore. She’s matured past them, and every time one surfaces here it feels like a draft she forgot to revise. I hope we hear far fewer of them next time.

“the cure” is where all of this comes to a head. The track touches greatness without quite closing its hand around it. The vocal layering is the real event, a call-and-response that turns almost devotional, with loops stacking and building toward the refrain:

But I’m unraveled (I’m unraveled) / I’m unraveled (I’m unraveled)

This is the line, not incidentally, that she liked enough to hang an entire tour on. Her instinct is right. Her execution is backwards. She builds up to the harmonic crunch, when the more devastating move (the one a more settled artist reaches for instinctively) is to start dense and harmonically crowded and then strip away, pulling the layers back until the listener is left exposed. That knowledge comes with age and with experimenting in a way she doesn’t seem quite ready to do here. She’ll get there.

There is one irony I can’t resist, because it is the whole album in miniature: there is a song on this record called “the cure,” and the actual Robert Smith of The Cure doesn’t appear on it. He turns up two doors down, duetting on “what’s wrong with me.” The record is full of these near-misses, this small constant gap between what’s reached for and what lands. That gap isn’t a flaw to apologize for. I’d argue it’s the whole story.

I’ll even be a little contrarian about the album’s brashest swing. The critical consensus is filing “my way” as her most pop-punk moment, and the retro-synth, jealous-rocker bones are certainly there. But to my ear she’s reaching past pop-punk toward Chappell Roan — the jumping-around-the-club vibes of “HOT TO GO!” — but not quite getting there. It’s giving us the rhythms without the wink. Which is, like I’ve said, the story. Rodrigo’s ambition is legible; she just needs a little more work before she reliably sticks the landing.

Let me be clear, because the structure of this review might have you doubting it: I really do like you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. Not despite the fact that it’s unfinished, but because of it.

This album isn’t timeless. But it is emphatically of our time, and, more unusually, it’s legible across generations. A twenty-three-year-old hears their right-now reflected back. A millennial hears their recent past. A Boomer like my father listens and says, simply, “I get that.” Music that can land the same emotional truth on a Boomer and a Gen Z-er in a single breath is genuinely rare, and it is the opposite of disposable. It’s the kind of thing that signals staying power.

This is not mood music. It won’t be what I reach for to set a tone or think my way through something. It’s something better and stranger than that: the document of a singer caught exactly at the threshold: technique in place, future visible just out of view. In 2026, Olivia Rodrigo is good. The complexity is in her body now. What I’m actually waiting for is what she sings once she trusts it. For a third outing, I’m a fan of you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. Mostly, it has me anticipating what comes after. Don’t worry about being in love, Olivia. Keep growing and the rest will come.

I made a terrible purchase this week.

I was strolling down Kurfürstendamm, window shopping. I love window shopping, 1) because I consider fashion art and I truly love looking at art, and 2) because functionally none of the brands that I covet make clothing or shoes or rings or bracelets in my size, so it is very easy to resist the siren song of luxury goods I should not be regularly budgeting for.

Ku’damm is basically Berlin’s equivalent of 5th Avenue. My assumption was that I would not have to resist temptation, because none of the 5th Avenue–type stores have anything with which to tempt me. They don’t manufacture anything that could. Of course, the minute I had that thought is exactly when I stumbled upon it. An actual luxury store that makes actual clothes in my size. On purpose. I’d heard of the brand. I’d even browsed their clothes occasionally at high-end department stores. But in spite of being known for creating and stocking larger sizes, I’d never actually been able to touch anything bigger than a size 12 in their American stores. And the one time I’d stumbled into their storefront in Italy, their collection had skewed exclusively towards 65-year-old-diplomat-or-diplomat’s-wife, and as I was in my mid-20s at the time, it was easy enough to resist.

This time, though, I was in my 30s. Still not in my leisure-suit era, but old enough (and running my own business enough) that, with a discerning eye, one of their timeless trousers or classic dresses could actually work for me. So I walked in. Still, I told myself, just window shopping.

Ninety minutes later, I walked out with three things. Three things that ran me…way more money than I’m going to admit to here. On paper, this choice was a fine one. More than the luxury goods, the experience of going to a major metropolitan high street and buying luxury goods in my size, after trying them on in the store, is one of the most luxurious experiences of my life.

Too bad I hate them. Well, that’s not true. One item I like fine. It’s a structured linen trouser. I love a structured linen trouser. The one I already own I hunted down like prey from Staud, calling three different phone lines until I secured one of only four size 16 pairs available in the United States. I have designed a whole capsule wardrobe around those trousers alone. They are structured. Precisely tailored. Made solely of natural fibers, and my phone fits in the back pocket. I have not once regretted their purchase.

These trousers are not those trousers. The back waistband is elastic. I pointed out to the saleswoman that I hate that. Clothes, to me, do not need to be comfortable. I spent the first twenty years of my life wearing clothes that pinched, rubbed, chafed, constricted, restricted, and, at one point, scarred. Clothing is armor, carefully applied and situationally deployed. I do not care if I can sit down in something if I look fierce in it standing up. Eating? That’s a later problem. I have never, not once, sought out a clothing item solely or particularly because it offered me comfort.

This saleswoman thought comfort was a selling point. I thought the pants were too big (a genuine novelty). She assured me that, this way, I could sit in them. I didn’t want to sit. I hemmed and hawed at her. She did not speak any English. My German is quite fluent, but not “debate the veracity of fashion aesthetics with an expert deploying extremely specialized vocabulary that you do not possess” fluent. I wanted to buy something. Or rather, I wanted the privilege of investing in something luxury, evergreen, that was designed for me. Or at least for a body like mine. For a body like mine in a store that makes specially crafted goods for bodies like mine that I was unable to try on in the flesh in my own country, for reasons no one seemed able to clarify.

The saleswoman was about the age of my mother. She was kind and chatty and brought me more things than I asked to try on. She sold me on the other two pieces. A matching set that can be mixed and matched in myriad ways. It is made of luxury polyester. I have spent the past five years avoiding buying literally anything made of polyester, and especially anything expensive, because why on earth would I pay silk prices for polyester construction in clothes that barely fit me anyway. I brought up that I don’t wear polyester because I’m on stage a lot, under lights, and polyester smells. She assured me repeatedly, in word and gesture, that this polyester doesn’t. I nodded. I smiled. She gave me a big discount and I bought the clothes. From the minute I left the store I wanted to bring them back.

It is highly unlikely I will be able to. By offering me the discount, my friendly shop clerk likely made the items unreturnable. Good on her, I guess (or at least good on her commission). I know that I am responsible for the consequences of my own actions, and that they likely have no take-backs (once I conquer my own social anxiety, today or next week, I am going to beg leniency from the shop; I am deeply unoptimistic). I have been in Berlin for two weeks and I have purchased exactly zero cool, street-style, Berlin-aesthetic items. Even with oversized being in, I’m not sure where, if anywhere, I could access them in my size. Instead I have purchased a glorified leisure suit and a pair of linen pants that would be really great if I gained thirty years or lost thirty pounds overnight. Assuming my prediction is correct and they can’t be returned, I will figure out how to wear them anyway. If I cry a little, by myself, about the fact that I blew basically my entire fun budget on clothes I don’t even like, mostly for the experience of having been able to wear them, well, that’s between me and myself and now all of you.

People who know me well know that impulse purchases (of things, at least) are not in my usual wheelhouse. I am an e-commerce programmer’s worst nightmare, in that when I see something I like I put it in my virtual cart approximately 5–20 times before determining whether I really want to buy it in the first place. If I don’t revisit the website six times at least, my desire for the garment is clearly not significant enough to pull the trigger, and the virtual cart goes dormant once more. Relatedly, I’ve been renting six clothing items a month for roughly the past decade. I have never, not once, purchased a rental item, in spite of the fact that the service offers a hefty discount for buying. My relationship to clothes as a fashion-forward plus-size woman who spent most of her career in strongly event-centered industries with a ratio, at the executive levels, skewed heavily toward men, is deeply complicated, emotionally fraught, and was built painstakingly over years of tearing up in dressing rooms, frantically taping things closed backstage, and pretending everything was fine.

So here is the part I keep turning over, the part that turned a good/bad afternoon into an essay. The only reason I could walk into that store and hold a garment in my size in my own two hands is that I was in Europe. Back home — in the country with, by a wide margin, the largest population of plus-size women on the planet — I have never once been able to do the same with that brand. This is not a small irony. The average American woman wears a size 16 to 18, just like me. The majority of us wear a size 14 or above. We are not a niche. We are both the median and the mean. North America is the single largest plus-size apparel market in the world, and the United States is the overwhelming majority of it. And yet I had to cross an ocean to try on a pair of pants.

It would be one thing if this were a stable, if maddening, fact of life — the kind of structural indignity you learn to route around. But at the luxury tier that reality was barely ever built, and the little that did get built is being quietly dismantled in real time. Most fashion houses never graded a pattern above a size 12 to begin with. They plead the cost of fitting, the complexity of grading, and the perceived risk of stocking a 2X at couture prices for a customer they have decided in advance would only return it.

For a few years there was living proof that fashion houses and luxury brands could be persuaded otherwise. 11 Honoré (the closest thing plus shoppers ever got to a Net-a-Porter) was founded in 2017. They carried all sorts of brands, including Carolina Herrera, Prabal Gurung, Ganni, Jason Wu, and Zac Posen, among others, in extended sizes. They opened a New York Fashion Week with these designers and more. Then, over the pandemic, the company was absorbed and went dark. When they suddenly resurfaced this spring, I was thrilled. Unfortunately, 11 Honoré returned not as a designer marketplace but as a single in-house capsule collection for the plus size version of Stitch Fix (I’m not linking them here. It is…not good). Arguably, this is because the designers themselves had retreated, telling buyers, more or less, that fitting larger bodies simply couldn’t be done at a profit. As a consumer, I don’t buy it (sadly, literally). 90% of all of the designer pieces in my closet once came from 11 Honoré, and as budgets go, mine is a lot lower than their target demographic. As is often the case, I don’t think the profit is actually the problem.

Even so, department stores are saying the same thing. Saks 5th Avenue and Neiman Marcus technically stock extended sizes online, though the collections are uncampaigned, with no lookbook, no fitting expertise, and none of the ambiance the entire department store format exists to sell — while their merged parent company lurches through bankruptcy. Nordstrom, once the genuine leader in the market, now offers racks that read like ill-fitting repurposed basics. (I refer to their plus-size section, semi-affectionately, as the ‘sadness corner’.) One recent analysis found that fashion houses including Chanel carry nothing at all that would fit the average American woman’s waist. The plus size market, meanwhile, is projected to keep growing. The demand hasn’t left. The clothes sure did.

It’s worth asking who decided that plus size luxury was a lost cause. By almost every measure, fashion is an industry that women build and women buy: we are more than 70 percent of the luxury workforce but hold under a fifth of its senior executive jobs. Women are the majority of design students and make something like 80 percent of all apparel purchasing decisions. And yet, only about 14 percent of major fashion brands are run by a woman; by one 2026 count, 93 percent of the fifty biggest fashion companies answer to a man. The conglomerates that own most of what I covet are governed by men, as are the department-store dynasties. The year Sarah Burton left Alexander McQueen, every creative director across Kering’s stable of houses was, briefly and tellingly, a white man. Even 11 Honoré, the plus-size disruptor I just spent a paragraph mourning, was dreamed up and run for its first five years by a white guy. So when the industry sits down to decide which bodies justify the cost of a pattern grade, it is, overwhelmingly, men doing the deciding. Men adjudicating, through the oldest lens there is, which women get to be looked at with desire and which get quietly routed toward the comfortable, the forgiving, and the elastic waistband you can sit down in. The male gaze, here, is not a seminar abstraction. It is a line on a P&L. It decides what gets made, and so, eventually, what we are able to want.

It doesn’t take high-level deduction skills to infer the other big reason why this is happening now. Roughly 12 percent of American adults have now used a GLP-1, against something closer to 2 percent across the EU and the UK. That means that American thinness — or at least the pursuit of it — is being chemically underwritten at roughly six times the European rate, and the shelves are responding in real time. The buyer’s math is brutally legible, if statistically unsound: why warehouse a size 18 for a woman our culture has decided is mid-transformation? Why ground campaigns in body positivity or body neutrality when the argument is that those bodies are temporary? The empty racks across America are not neutral. They’re an argument, and one we have heard many times before. A larger body, per this philosophy, is not a body you are meant to invest in. It’s a before-photo. A problem in progress. Or perhaps a waiting room you’re expected to have the decency to quickly and quietly leave.

This is where the inconvenience curdles into something colder. Thinness has, in modernity, often served as a class marker. But the Ozempic era has sharpened that marker into a pillar of late-stage capitalism. As designer dupes and accessible cosmetic work flattened old luxury signals, the wealthy have begun to move the goalposts to the body itself. Slimness, on the surface, displays moral superiority (surely billionaires must be ethical if they are hot!). Underneath, what it truly demonstrates is access to a trainer, a chef, and a standing Ozempic prescription. Access to expensive, time-consuming interventions is difficult, if not impossible, to knock off. You can’t dupe your whole body. Nor can you enjoy those interventions without the luxury of time and space and reliable health monitoring. Thinness, supervised, is much more subtle than filler, implants, or Botox injections. The wealth marker is not the display, but the ease of movement through space, strategically narrowed in real time.

Unsurprisingly, runways have read the room. Of the more than 9,000 looks shown across New York, London, Milan, and Paris for Spring/Summer 2026, 97.1 percent were on bodies sized roughly US 0–4. Plus sizes made up 0.9 percent of the total. That is, shockingly, slightly better than in 2025, when that number bottomed out at 0.3 percent. Trade outlets have started using the phrase “the death of body positivity” without irony, as if the habit of not hating oneself is a seasonal commodity.

Even as the data speaks clearly, there’s more to the story. What often gets lost in the numbers is the labor. Dressing a plus body to read as serious, elegant, moneyed, and fashion-forward is a years-long act of scavenging that thinner women are mostly spared. I did not stumble into my Staud trousers; I tracked them across a continent and secured them by relentless phone call. A thin woman of means can walk into a flagship and walk out assembled. I assemble myself from exceptions to the rules.

Perhaps the cruelest part of this labor is what it does to my sense of self. My taste runs timeless, classic, and structured: clean lines, natural fibers, sharp tailoring. I believe that’s genuinely who I am. But I will never get to run the true experiment. That’s because the plus market has, for my entire life, sorted larger bodies into a narrow set of permitted registers: the pinup, the boho, the one who wears loud tropical florals, the one who is relentlessly ‘fun’. Fun, but not sloppy. Approachable, but never aspirational. When I reach, by instinct, for the aesthetically spare, I can never quite tell whether I’m expressing my true preference or simply fleeing the only other options the industry ever offered me.

Which brings me back to the set hanging in my Berlin closet, tags still attached, smelling, the saleswoman swears, of nothing. I did not buy these clothes. Not really. I bought the experience of being a customer: of standing in a beautiful store and being treated, for ninety minutes, as a body worth designing for. I paid silk money for polyester because the thing actually on sale was dignity, and dignity, it turns out, carries a markup steep enough to make a careful woman reckless.

You cannot buy your way into a system that has decided your size is a temporary condition. This begs the question: can we at least style our way in? The honest answer is that styling is the only lever the industry leaves in our hands. It is real craft, and I will go on practicing it. But I’ve come to suspect that our styling is also the system’s alibi. ‘See how well she pulls it together!’ It’s the decoration draped over a structural void. It’s the window dressing.

Luckily for me, I am very good at window shopping. What I unfortunately keep forgetting is that the glass does two things at once: it keeps me out on the sidewalk, and it decides, pane by pane, what I am permitted to stand there and want. The cruelest thing the industry ever sold me wasn’t the polyester leisure suit. It was the suspicion that the taste I am proudest of was chosen for me too, and handed back so smoothly I mistook it for my own.

It’s funny, then, that for growing up in one of the most gorgeous climates in the world, with stunning infrastructure, good public schools, and a population that could generously be called ‘middle-class’ but was absolutely edging up on rich (my family was comparatively, not ‘that’ well-off because we 1) didn’t live in a gated community 2) didn’t have a nanny or housekeeper and 3) didn’t participate in any travel sports that cost the equivalent of a mortgage payment), I rarely got to spend much time in public outside.

I did spend a lot of alone time outside. We had a lovely, huge backyard, because my father astutely chose a lot for our house that was on a very steep hill in the absolute apex of earthquake country. This might seem the opposite of astute, but with a willingness to invest in reinforced concrete and thoughtful soil grading, a hillside abode was not as crazy as you might think and was significantly less expensive than pretty much anything else on offer. That meant that I grew up on about an acre of land. We had blackberry bushes and tomato plants and even a hit-or-miss almond tree. One summer my dad planted grape vines, and another we accidentally cross-pollinated watermelon and cantaloupe and ended up with aesthetically beautiful but absolutely awful tasting ‘cantermelons’.

I spent a lot of time sitting in the yard, reading books and chasing my brother, learning to swim and digging up dense soil that was more red clay than dirt. My parents loved a dinner party, and my dad and grandfather had built our deck by hand, twenty feet in the air, and both those things meant we entertained outside, a lot. I loved those nights and days. I love those memories. But they aren’t memories about community or broader belonging. They’re about my family. Our people. Our friends. For all the rest of our town knew, our backyard oasis did not exist. To us, their oases, whatever they were, didn’t either. Everyone was hidden from each other by carefully painted, HOA-approved fencing and a sense that success was something you curated, and frankly something you hoarded, a little.

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So when I moved to big cities — a fully misanthropic little contrarian, determined to leave the life of the cul-de-sac behind — I was waiting for the kind of outdoor culture that would spawn a thousand Pinterest boards. I wanted to picnic in Central Park. Stroll with friends down Frenchman Street. I wanted to sit on the Seine in Paris sipping cappuccinos. Perch on a rickety chair eating cornetto in a Roman square. Sprawl on a graffitied bench in Berlin, pretending the smell of cigarettes didn’t make me wrinkle my nose (it did and it does and it’s the only thing about living in Europe that I can barely stand).

In reality, there are very few places that lived up to this outdoor expectation. In fact, of all the cities that I’ve spent significant time in, Berlin is probably the best example of what a communal culture actually looks like when there’s space made for it out of doors.

I find this especially interesting because, as major metros go, Berlin is an absolute sprawl. Compared to New York (population density of approximately 27,000/square mile) and Paris (population density of about 54,000/square mile), Berlin abounds with space at about 10,600 people per square mile. And you do feel this, somewhat. Walking through the Tiergarten at dusk, you can genuinely be the only person on a path, which would rarely if ever happen during the summer in Central Park.

On the main thoroughfares and labyrinthine side streets, though, when the sun comes out, it’s people as far as the eye can see. People sitting at picnic tables outside of Thai restaurants and Spätis and 2-for-1-cocktail bistros serving mediocre French cuisine. People on blankets in parks, chain-smoking and chugging yerba mate in preparation for club visits 6 hours away. Families at playgrounds where toddlers climb rope structures unimpeded and tweens play casual pickup games that suburban soccer coaches would be wildly envious of.

All of these places have seats. All of them have snacks. And all of them encourage the kind of lingering that is structurally difficult to find in almost all of the United States.

Isolation by design

Let’s talk about structure for a minute. Lingering is hard to find in America not because Americans are colder, or busier, or more allergic to leisure than Germans (though we may be all three). It’s hard to find because, nationally, most metro areas have made it illegal to build. On purpose. By statute. For about a hundred years.

In 1926, the Supreme Court heard a case called Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty and in doing so confirmed that towns could legally chop themselves into single-use districts. The Court agreed that, assuming zoning laws were not “clearly arbitrary and unreasonable and without substantial relation to public health, safety, morals, or general welfare,” they were not, in principle, unconstitutional.

Justice George A. Sutherland, writing for the majority, has this to say in his opinion:

Very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business…thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities — until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Under these circumstances, apartment houses, which in a different environment would be not only entirely unobjectionable but highly desirable, come very near to being nuisances.

This argument was the primary one used to justify the legitimization of single-use zoning ordinances, what we call Euclidean zoning today. And this concept—that houses belong in one place, apartments another, stores somewhere else, and industry elsewhere too—became the operating system of nearly every city and town across America. No case has been brought to the Court since that would allow for Village of Euclid to be revisited, in spite of the fact that zoning ordinances have often directly supported discriminatory practices, including in ways that allowed for the ongoing practice of segregation throughout the 20th century.

Of these various zoning rules, the single most consequential is probably the one that governs where most Americans actually sleep: roughly 75 percent of the residential land in American cities is zoned exclusively for detached single-family houses. In my home state of California, it’s even worse. Per the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, over 95% of all residential land is zoned as single-family only (82% if you exclude unincorporated rural land). That includes major cities like San Jose, where that rate hovers at 94 percent.

So our lack of patios isn’t just a misplaced desire for cleaner sidewalks. In most American neighborhoods, it is actually against the law for a café to exist in the same space as houses or apartments do. That means that the corner bistro with four wobbly tables on the sidewalk cannot legally open mid-block in the places where most Americans live. It isn’t that we lost the neighborhood café. For a century, we haven’t allowed it to exist in the first place.

Keeping the motors running

Lest we forget, there’s another deeply American motivation that explains how we ended up here. Money. And in this case, money as it relates to transit. Which means cars. Which, of course, means parking.

For most of the last century, American cities required developers to build a fixed number of off-street parking spaces for every new enterprise: this many parking spaces per apartment, this many per restaurant seat, this many per square foot of store, and so on. This results in a landscape that, if you’ve ever been to America outside of New York and Chicago, you’re well familiar with: strip malls, parking lots bigger than stores, and totally gutted Main Streets.

This conceit is not just ugly (in my humble opinion). It’s also incredibly expensive.

A single structured parking spot costs, on average, between $25,000 and $50,000 to build as of 2025. So when the patio competes with the parking lot for the same patch of ground, the patio loses, every time. By some interpretations, that’s the law. Mostly.

There are scraps of good news. In 2017, Buffalo became the first U.S. city to abolish its parking minimums (go Bills?). Per the Journal of the American Planning Association:

First, 47% of major developments [in Buffalo] included fewer parking spaces than previously permissible, suggesting earlier minimum parking requirements may have been excessive. Second, mixed-use developments introduced 53% fewer parking spaces than would have been required by earlier minimum requirements as developers readily took advantage of the newfound possibility to include less off-street parking.

This legislative change was part of a broader economic plan for the city, one supported by New York State and significant investment in the historically diverse East Side of Buffalo. So far, in spite of less parking, the $65 million investment seems to be paying off.

Dozens of cities and states have since followed Buffalo’s example. California banned the mandates near public transit in 2023. Cities in Washington state followed in 2024. The system is reformable. It just hasn’t been reformed in most of the cul-de-sac-heavy cities and suburbs yet.

Neutral zones

When you stack these two types of legislation on top of each other — single-use zoning ordinances and parking requirements — you get the town of my childhood, retroactively explained. Uses separated by miles, because that’s the law. Sidewalks an afterthought, because no one was meant to be walking them. A train line to almost nowhere, stifled by the rich(er) down the road, because the whole point of the arrangement was to keep things (and people) apart. The backyard oasis behind the HOA-approved fence wasn’t a personality. It was the only legal place, barring the rec center and the high school baseball field, left to be outside with anyone. We had been quietly engineered into our own yards.

There’s a name for the thing all of this destroys, and we owe it to a sociologist named Ray Oldenburg, who in 1989 wrote a book called The Great Good Place. It’s this book that gave us the now ubiquitous concept of the “third place.” Your first place is home. Your second is work. The third place is everywhere else you can socially gather: cafés, bars, barbershops, benches, stoops, and squares. Neutral ground where you go to be among people for no particular reason and no significant profit. The places where the regular and the stranger sit together, not purposefully in each other’s company, but also not at odds with one another.

Oldenburg’s argument, still ringing true almost 40 years later, is that these places are not amenities but the “grassroots of democracy.” They are where a society practices being a society. And America has spent a century making them structurally difficult to build, then acting surprised that we don’t have them.

Europe, by contrast, doesn’t treat the patio as a variance to be begged for. It treats it as the default condition of a street. Paris is the clear example: the city has something like 13,000 permanent café terraces, and when the pandemic hit, the mayor let restaurants spill out onto sidewalks and parking spots with “ephemeral” terraces — roughly 4,600 of them. Then, the city, for the most part, kept them. There are, unlike in most of the United States, no nationwide open-container laws in France (or most of Europe, honestly). Thus, a glass of wine on a bench by the Seine is simply Tuesday, not a misdemeanor.

Same thing goes in Berlin. You might be wondering how this works. Are people just outside drunk all the time? Clearly you have never met a German government official: they love a rule. In single-use business zones (which also exist in Europe, just not literally everywhere), patios and terraces can keep serving until 11:00 PM during the week and midnight on weekends. In mixed-use residential areas, the cap is 10:00 PM. If you have ever existed in a Berlin apartment building, you know that neighbors aren’t shy about calling the city when noise ordinances are breached. But these ordinances exist to facilitate social structures, not eliminate them. That means the seats and the snacks and the lingering I keep cataloguing in Berlin aren’t evidence of a charming national temperament. They are established policy, with the rules and guardrails that such policies codify. Europeans haven’t inherited a naturally more social disposition than the people of the United States. They’ve inherited a legal framework that lets a chair exist on a sidewalk. The disposition followed.

In defense of socialization

Here’s the part where I stop being tedious about zoning and start explaining why we should care about any of this. The reason that the topic of patios is worth 2,000 words is that the lack of patios and other third places for us Americans is making us sick. It is also making us mean.

You might be asking yourself how on earth a dearth of summer terrace vibes is compromising America’s well-being. Well, in 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory declaring loneliness a public health epidemic. About half of American adults reported real loneliness even before the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s only escalated since then. The mortality cost of our disconnection is estimated to rival the equivalent of smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. (So while the European cigarette habit drives me up a wall, they are still, on the whole, healthier than we are, even when they’re smoking.) Chronic isolation is associated with a 29 percent higher risk of heart disease, a 32 percent higher risk of stroke, and a 50 percent higher risk of dementia in older adults. And among people aged fifteen to twenty-four, in-person time with friends has cratered: it’s down something like 70 percent over the past two decades. The advisory doesn’t blame this solely on the rise of smartphones or social media. It names the built environment: the design of our neighborhoods, the slow erasure of the places where we used to accidentally be near each other, and our increasingly fractured transit systems. Socializing is hard enough when we spend work, school, and social time on screen. Add in infrastructure that engenders physical separation, and loneliness, it turns out, has an urban plan. It is not, as it turns out, a good one.

There is a finding in social psychology so well-replicated it’s among the most trustworthy research we have. It’s called the contact hypothesis. It’s the idea, going back to Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport in the 1950s, that proximity to people different from you reduces your hostility toward them. In 2006 two researchers, Pettigrew and Tropp, ran a meta-analysis of 515 studies covering more than 250,000 people across 38 countries. The result was unambiguous: contact, broadly, reduces prejudice. And that contact works even when it’s casual and unstructured. You don’t need a facilitated dialogue or a trust-fall retreat or a particularly dogmatic work of theater. You need to be regularly, unremarkably near people who are different from you.

So that loneliness we were talking about? It, perhaps unsurprisingly, makes us mean. The part that I find hopeful, however, is that through the lens of the contact hypothesis, the more we endeavor to combat loneliness, the kinder we are. The more third places we build, the better our chances of increasing that casual, unstructured contact. What we need, more than think pieces or roundtables, is greater access to patios.

An open backyard

What is it that a third place actually does that a backyard can’t? Well, a backyard requires a level of selection. You have to choose who you allow there: your family, your friends, the coworkers you texted or the acquaintances to whom you sent a handwritten invitation in the mail. Even if you’re the most social person alive, your garden parties exclude those you don’t explicitly invite.

Patios don’t sort, other than by what kind of drinks you like and how attached you are to cushioned versus uncushioned seats. Patios put you at small tables eighteen inches apart from strangers who might vote differently, think differently, and will likely order something you never would. Patios do this while asking nothing of either party except that you peaceably coexist in the sun for an hour without harassing the waitstaff. The eighteen inches between you is the whole ballgame.

America didn’t just zone out the café. We zoned out proximity: the low-stakes, daily, accidental nearness to difference that is, per half a century of evidence, the actual mechanism by which a fractured population learns to tolerate itself. We sorted ourselves into single-family lots and single-occupancy cars and single-feed phones, each of them a beautifully engineered machine for never sitting next to anyone we didn’t explicitly pick. And, to be clear, I understand the appeal. There is little like the rose-tinged memories of my own backyard childhood, unspoiled and sunny, with sweet berries, and ripe tomatoes, and close friends. But I was so, so lucky that I grew up with a village. That the people my family invited into our private spaces were quite often different from us. That is by no means a guarantee. And the less we make space for building diverse communities structurally, the more likely people are to self-segregate.

I’m not going to insult you by claiming a sidewalk table fixes a polarized country. The patio is not a cure. But the thing that can cure us — repeated, ordinary, undramatic contact across difference — requires places for that contact to happen. Unfortunately, we have spent a hundred years making those places illegal. The patio is the precondition. It’s the smallest civic unit there is. The least amount of shared public space in which a stranger can become a face, and a face can become a neighbor, and a neighbor can become someone you find it slightly harder to hate.

My hometown taught me that the good life is something you assemble in private and protect with fencing. That success is a backyard nobody else can see, an oasis you curate and hoard a little. The patio proposes the exact opposite, and it has the audacity to do it cheaply: that pleasure conducted publicly in earshot of people you’ll never invite over is not a lesser kind of happiness but a higher one. It’s the only kind that builds anything past your own property line.

This is my defense of the patio. Not the aesthetic of it. The legality of it. We can do it. We can change the zoning. We can kill the parking minimum. We can even let a café open underneath an apartment building that stands near a house and put four wobbly chairs out on the sidewalk. If we do that, we will not have merely improved brunch. We will have rebuilt, one table at a time, a place where a country remembers it is one.

Give me a chair, a snack, and permission to linger next to a stranger. We don’t have to talk. We just have to exist next to one another. That feels like it might be a start.

Opera is not the music that first comes to mind when I ruminate on how music has shaped my life. I think about seeing The Music Man on Broadway around age 5, literally on the edge of my seat as Marian’s voice soared through “‘Til There Was You.” I think about dancing around the kitchen with my dad while we cooked on weekend afternoons, belting out The Eagles and Chicago at the top of my lungs. I think about jamming with classmates in college, crammed together in dusty, windowless practice rooms while we cobbled together a cappella arrangements of Top 40 Hits.

There are two classical music memories that crack my top 5. My first time singing Schubert on stage, for one. It was an art song1 — “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, or “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”. I was 15. This song is not completely atypical for young singers (Schubert himself wrote it when he was 17), but I wouldn’t say it’s part of the standard high school voice student’s repertoire. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the piece was given to me because my teacher knew I had just come back from studying in Germany in addition to having a background in piano, and was hoping I could handle both the pronunciation and the chromatic intervals while delivering for the studio. While I certainly had the musical prowess to handle the piece, I maybe wasn’t quite prepared for the emotional toll. Poor Gretchen, you see, is left by her boyfriend and basically suffers a psychotic break. I was a sheltered suburban kid who’d never even dated, let alone gone through a breakup so rough I hoped for death to take me.

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The song’s text is a Goethe poem, and it’s from Faust (you might recall, the opera world sure does love Faust). It’s a lament, yes, but it’s not dirge-like or droning. It’s percussive, with a constant, bumble-bee rumbling in the piano accompaniment, sixteenth-notes running like water slipping through cupped hands. Gretchen is frantic. She’s angry, scared, so love-sick you know she and Juliet would have been fast friends. She doesn’t know what to do or where to go or how to move on from here, but she also knows she has to finish her spinning at the goddamn wheel and thoughts of the hot guy who abandoned her for the literal devil are taking up a little too much brain space and really messing with her vibe. Being a girl is HARD, okay, and if anyone in the 1800s knew teen angst, Schubert and Goethe were definitely it.

So there I was. Fifteen. Standing on stage in my sensible dress, too much hairspray in my hair and way too much eyeliner on. I had been agonizing over this piece for weeks. I knew the music forwards, backwards, and sideways. I knew the text — but I didn’t know anything about the text. I’ve never been a proponent of method acting, but as a hyperrational teenager who felt herself above such petty considerations as high school romance, “loved him so much I want to die” felt a little bit out of reach.

But something happened on that stage. I walked up in my sensible shoes. I stared straight into the light shining from behind the judges’ heads, and I felt that song somewhere inside of my bones. For approximately three-and-a-half minutes in a dingy corner room at Cal State East Bay, I transcended my own understanding of myself. I didn’t feel self-conscious of my dress. I didn’t worry about hitting the half-step in measure 16. I didn’t catastrophize, as I had in my journal that morning, that a girl who had never even been kissed couldn’t possibly portray a love so deep it destroyed her.

Some people call it flow state. Some people call it dissociation. Whatever it was, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t overthinking. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just present, in that moment, feeling and sharing that feeling with a clarity and strength my adolescent body had never known before. The Eagles, while I loved them, had never given me that.

My other top 5 musical memory in the classical space, was, you’ll be pleased to hear, actually at the opera. I was studying in Vienna. (Opera, if that wasn’t clear.) In addition to classes and rehearsals, my friends and I were attending the opera 3 or 4 or sometimes even 5 times a week. This wasn’t hard. Thanks to the glories of state subsidies, standing room tickets are readily available and very cheap all throughout the city. If you don’t mind obstructed views, many flights of stairs, and fights with old people about how much space the scarf they’ve tied around a railing entitles them to, you can enjoy world-class opera for the low price of €13-18 (and honestly it used to be even cheaper. It was only €3-5 during my student days).

So we went to the opera. A lot. On the night in question, I’d been in the city for about 3 months, and while I’d had a great time at opera houses all over town, it wasn’t the music that was really speaking to me. I’d loved seeing Grace Bumbry get an 8-minute standing ovation for her walk-on role in Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame. I’d loved watching Elly Ameling take the stage for her own walk-on in my favorite of the comic operas, Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment. But I had not yet had another transcendent moment, as a performer or a spectator.

That night, we were skipping out on the Staatsoper and heading up the road to Theater an der Wien. It’s a smaller theater, and while at the big houses, standing room tickets rated you a wide, spacious row just above the balcony, at Theater an der Wien you got a totally ungoverned square of carpet the size of a linen closet behind a very large pole. And while we couldn’t see 3/4 of the stage, we could hear every glorious note that Cecilia Bartoli was putting out in Rossini’s Le comte Ory. We could also see the conductor. And that, that was transcendent.

And that matters. Because a lot of times in opera, as a singer or a spectator, you can’t quite see the conductor. Metaphorically or literally.

Studying opera is really hard. It requires all the physicality of theater — the total body control, the raw, never-ending emotiveness, the power of practiced stillness, vocal projection that fills a hall — alongside hundreds of years of rigid, prescriptive history. Opera means looking a certain way, sounding a certain way, standing a certain way, and never questioning it unless you don’t mind being screamed at, belittled, and berated. I had teachers throw things at me (to help me pay attention!). Shove me (for my ab control!). Yell at me in the public halls of the Palace of Versailles (for…dressing slutty by wearing a skirt that touched but did not cover my knees for a recital performance, I guess?). These same teachers — for all their, what I realize now, was abuse — genuinely created the conditions that, from spite or otherwise, helped me grow into a good person. Also, they gave me impeccable breath control and the ability to comfortably sing an F6, so even monstrous people have range.

That brings me back to that night. Le comte Ory. Cecilia Bartoli. A view straight into the orchestra pit and of absolutely nothing else. Absolute transcendence.

That conductor was having the time of his life. Every downbeat, every note was punchy and joyful and frankly, just fun. There were no furrowed brows here, no angry scowls, no ‘we are just pushing you to be your best’s. There was just joy, plain and simple. Joy to be making music this good, to be coming together with artists and flying through some of the hardest music in the world and having it be easy. Effortless and breezy but so clearly expert. So cleverly rendered. Joy, joy, joy.

By the end of the night I couldn’t stop smiling. I didn’t care that I was sweaty, that I hadn’t seen more of Bartoli than her left eyebrow. I didn’t know the conductor’s name because he was a substitute and a program cost €6 extra that I was absolutely not paying. But I knew that I had experienced something glorious. Something so singular, so special, that I’d never be able to recreate it. But when I went back to the opera, I could try.

So that’s what I want for you. I want you to have an out of body experience at the opera (the good kind!). I know it feels weird. Maybe a little scary? Kind of lame? Probably expensive.

Opera does not have to be any of those things. It can be transcendent. It can also, genuinely, be fun. Here’s my non-exhaustive list of how to give going to the opera a try.

Rule #1: You shall not pay more than $40 for a ticket

I am so serious. I don’t know who put it out there that classical music is a bank breaker (we are probably conflating it with the inflated prices of Broadway tickets, I guess?) but let me tell you something. Opera houses are DESPERATE for you to attend them. Seriously. If you are under the age of 50 — congrats, you are a ‘young professional’ and you are absolutely being offered a discount. This is true in the United States and most of Europe. While the majority of cities aren’t quite as generous as Vienna, there is no opera house you can’t get into for less than $40, age notwithstanding. I just went to the Deutsche Oper this week. This is an opera that is such a big deal it has its own subway station. I paid €24 for my ticket. You can see the view below. Do not pay for center orchestra. You’re going to be just fine.

Rule #2: You shall be on time

Okay, this one is more for my European opera goers, but it somewhat universally applies. In the States, in the theater world, most shows actually start 7 minutes past the official start time. That’s cute. That’s nice. That is not how opera works. Musicians unions are no joke (solidarity forever!) and they are getting their people home on time. That means the show starts at the time stated on your ticket. Please do not arrive late and then be shocked and dismayed that you are shoved into a side room somewhere to watch the show on a TV screen. They are not holding the show for you. That picture above is from a random Thursday. They are booked. They are busy. They are respecting their musicians’ time. Operas start at the time your ticket says they start. Come a little early. Grab a drink at the bar (there is always a nice bar, with cheap drinks. See: below. Also see: THEY ARE DESPERATE FOR YOUR ATTENDANCE). Walk around. The architecture of opera houses are typically extremely cool! There will be approximately 1 million ushers making sure you do not wander somewhere you aren’t supposed to. They will also aggressively usher you to your seat in time for the curtain to go up. You will not have wasted your €24 to sit in a sad TV room. Everyone wins.

Rule #3: You shall study ahead of time

Okay, this one is controversial, I know. But in the same way a music person (me) cannot go to a sports game and then be sulky that I am bored when I didn’t take four seconds to Google the rules, you cannot go to the opera and then be annoyed that you don’t understand the story. Friend: these people are singing to you. In a language they may or may not speak in their daily life, that you may or may not speak in your daily life. There will be captions, yes. That’s not going to help much when you’re trying to listen and read and look at the stage all at the same time. You are going to be much better served, if you are a person who needs to know what’s going on at all times, by just Googling a quick synopsis beforehand. Don’t use the one on the opera house’s website — that’s usually pretty short and often assumes you’re already familiar. Wikipedia’s got you. You’ll thank me when you can lose yourself in the music without looking up at the supertitles every five seconds, wondering what the word ‘fate’ has to do with a lady chugging wine in a corset.

Rule #4: If you are polite, you shall not be self-conscious about not knowing the unspoken rules

There are a lot of unspoken rules in classical music spaces. If you’re American, you are very unlikely to have learned them in school. That’s okay! You don’t know what you don’t know, and as long as you’re not rude about it, please feel free to ignore anyone who tells you otherwise. What am I talking about?

Well before the show even starts, people are going to randomly start clapping. That is because the conductor is walking out from backstage. You probably (if you’re sitting somewhere that cost you €13-24) cannot see them. People are going to keep clapping until the people who CAN see them observe the conductor wave, then turn around to face the musicians and raise the baton. That’s a signal to the audience that the show is going to begin. You don’t have to know the signal. It is okay if you do not clap.

On the flip side, unless you are seeing a show starring a famous person (by which I mean an opera famous person, with whom you are unlikely to be familiar), you’re going to notice that there is no clapping during the actual performance until you get to the end of an act. This, if you are sports fan or a musical theater person or a normal concertgoer, might seem really weird to you. But unless a Big Name performs an aria so stunning that people literally can’t catch their breath, the clapping gets held until the end of the section. If you can’t catch your breath, screw ‘em. Clap away. I won’t tell.

To wit: follow the room. If you get it wrong, so what? Showing your admiration of a performer’s hard work is never the wrong thing to do.

Rule #5: You shall not expect to adore every moment

Have you ever been to a baseball game? A night out at the club? If so, you can be honest with me: you did not enjoy every single second of a multi-hour experience. Nobody did. That is okay!

In all likelihood, you aren’t going to enjoy every moment of your 2.5-4 hours at the opera. Some of the music is going to drag. Some of the comedy is not going to hit. Some of the drama is going to seem overwrought. You are going to be squinting at some weird lighting choices. You might, for a little while, fall asleep.

Listen to me again when I tell you: this is totally and completely fine. Normal. I have an actual degree in Opera Performance and on Thursday I dozed through both Acts I and II of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was not on the edge of my seat. But I didn’t leave. I stayed through intermission, wandering the lovingly curated historical exhibit on the history of the Deutsche Oper. I took my seat again for Act III. Wow. Worth it. Transcendence. Joy, joy, joy.

In the same way you might find yourself buying snacks and beers to encourage yourself to stay at a game that doesn’t pick up until the top of the 6th, sometimes you have to give the opera a minute. But if you stay through Act III, there might be a quartet so glorious your breath hitches, a little. You might lean forward. They might be singing in English. You, a native speaker of English, may or may not understand exactly what they’re saying. You don’t look at the captions. You don’t need to. You’re going to feel it. The same swooping feeling when you see them hit that home run or score that winning goal. When you eat that home cooked meal. That human feeling. There are only so many places it’s easy to access that feeling. The opera is one of them. Wanna bet?

Feelings. Live.

I still don’t know the name of the conductor I watched at Theater an der Wien. I never found out.

What I know is that he was having the best night of his professional life. I know that, possibly, every night was the best night of his professional life. If that’s true, what a gift. And if it isn’t, it was still true to me: a young musician wondering a little what the point of learning a dying art really was.

That conductor’s joy was contagious in the way that only really good music can be. Live. Embodied. Something you feel in your teeth.

You can stream every recording of Cecilia Bartoli ever made. You can’t stream that conductor whose name I don’t know, on that night, with that orchestra, in that pocket-sized standing room square from which I couldn’t see the stage.

That’s what I want for you. Not perfection. Not a performance of good taste. Just one night where you stay through Act III and feel it in your teeth.

You don’t have to love opera. You don’t have to perform for the performers, the audience, or whomever it was that made you feel like you’re doing culture wrong. You just have to give the art a chance. Gretchen’s at the spinning wheel. You’re in the cheap seats. Something’s going to surprise you.

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By the time I ended up in sunny Southern California, I’d been living in deeply pedestrian cities for the better part of a decade. I’d gotten used to a world where I could roll out of bed, put on my shoes and be somewhere. Getting where I was going never felt tedious or frustrating, even when it took a while, because every part of the commute of living felt like a step in a journey. What interesting shop might I see? What friend might I run into? Would there be cool graffiti or interesting music or fresh flowers on the way? Yes, the subway was grimy and stiflingly hot, but I could read a book the whole trip and still get to work on time. I could exit the station and grab breakfast hot and fresh and cheap and not have to budget extra time.

It’s easy to think about walking and what it did for me through the lens of efficiency (how gauche! How especially American!), but walking, for all that it accelerated the rhythm of my days, also slowed me down. When you stroll past a lush green park after work, you sure are tempted to sit in it. When you see posters advertising concerts and exhibits and community forums on the way home, you might just be tempted to stop by.

When I moved to Los Angeles, it felt, suddenly and inextricably, like half of the world went silent. I only knew 2 people when I moved — both friends from college whom I adored but hadn’t kept in fantastic touch with, who had their own relationships and friends and communities already long established, and not communities with which I necessarily had much natural overlap. I wasn’t particularly deterred by this; I’d moved between lots of major cities in my adulthood, nationally and internationally. I had a new place playbook that had always been easy to implement.

First things first: join a club. Usually a running club, because then I’d hit two birds with one stone: I’d meet people, and start to learn my city on foot. But in LA I hit a roadblock right away. Running clubs in LA were not purely social and recreational (I’d later learn this only made sense; when you have to scope out a driving route to everywhere, you’d want the most efficient extracurriculars too). Running clubs in LA were, first and foremost, fast. Even ones boasting that many paces were welcome didn’t have folks running slower than 10 minutes per mile. The running snobs can come for me, but that isn’t realistic run club running in my world, when I’ll happily cruise along at 12-13 minutes on a good day. Even if I trained daily, I wasn’t going to break an 11-minute mile anytime soon, and trying to do so in a group setting wasn’t particularly appealing. A co-worker convinced me to sign up for the marathon, which was an awesome way to see a variety of neighborhoods on foot, but after one disastrous attempt at a group run, I trained pretty much entirely on my own.

And that training was hard. Way harder than training for any previous race. It was hard not just because it was lonely, though it was, but because the pedestrian infrastructure in LA is so horrible that everyone thought I was a lunatic for running through the streets. One of my first weekend long runs, I wanted to run to a destination. This was usual practice for me. I’d scope out a specialty bakery or coffee shop or a bookstore. I’d map my run to my destination, keep a backpack stocked with towels and water, and plan to take public transit home after I got myself a little treat or three.

LA, for all its foibles, is in fact a major metropolitan area, so there is usable public transit, no matter what people tell you, and planning my run was easy. 5.5 miles from my apartment in Central Hollywood to downtown LA and The Last Bookstore, a multi-story book mecca I’d had on my list for ages. A quick Metro ride home. All of this seemed like a regular Saturday to me.

Everyone I talked to — every co-worker, every acquaintance — when I informed them of my weekend plans, talked to me like I had lost my mind. Didn’t I know this was dangerous? This was lunacy! I was a single woman, I couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t do this, would I?

I did it. The run wasn’t hard. It was, for the most part, quite pleasant. I went straight down Sunset Boulevard, discovering the towering fountains and swan boats of Echo Park, where I took a break on a grassy hillside and ate a Tupperware full of farmer’s market strawberries I’d stashed in my pack. This mundane activity garnered stares. I started running again, and for a bare quarter mile, for the very first time in my adult life running alone in broad daylight, I felt, just briefly, unsafe. There was only one way to get from Hollywood to Silver Lake to Echo Park and then Downtown. That one way required running directly through an underpass. It was lined on both sides with folks in crisis, with the particular stale smell of unwashed bodies and a layer of crusted dirt. Car after car after car zipped by me, and I realized, quite suddenly, that if any of these folks in crisis tipped over the edge, not a single driver in those cars would stop. They did not think about people on foot walking on the sidewalk. They didn’t consider sidewalks at all. They did not consider the tents and tarps dotting the underpass, the hungry people in need, struggling. It did not occur to them that someone might want to jog from one neighborhood to another on a sunny Saturday and in doing so encounter neighbors in crisis. They were just trying to get from point A to point B in a city where getting places is hard and staying places is harder still. I realized, in a way I’d never felt in a city before, that I was both surrounded by people and totally separated from them and actually, truly, alone.

I did, of course, make it to the bookstore eventually. I had to check my bag at the door. They have an issue with shoplifting, I guess — or maybe guns? (In the States, it’s hard to know either way.) At any rate, you’re not allowed to have a bag bigger than a 3x5 index card to enter the bookstore, so they offer a bag check for you like a stadium or a museum. It is worth it, for the books. They’re everywhere. New and used, repurposed in decorative arches where they’ve become too worn to read. It’s an amazing place. The journey to get there made the whole thing haunting, though. Sad. I missed the feeling of putting on my shoes and feeling like I was happily going somewhere.

That feeling, or rather its absence, is why I decided to abscond to Berlin for the summer. I left LA last October, and have since been hopping around between family and friends in a variety of American cities and suburbs, but none of them have quite scratched the pedestrian itch (or at least not without costing an amount of money no sane person would want to spend unless they had to).

Why is it that America is so bad at building communities that let you feel like you’re getting somewhere when you walk out the door? As much as we might like to think it’s the personal failing of some faceless entity or a lack of political will from various people in office, that’s not enough to account for America’s car-clogged towns. Nor is it solely a matter of any individual city’s preference or taste. The reality is complicated. It is also the product of seventy-odd years of sustained, federally subsidized policy choices. Once you understand that history, the streets of Europe feel like less of a lifestyle amenity and more of a political statement.

When America Lost Its Ways

It’s hard to pin America’s descent into unwalkability to one particular moment. The creation of an interstate highway system has been a topic of national conversation since FDR’s administration in the 1930s, one that dovetailed somewhat naturally with state and federal cooperation around road creation and the establishment of the National Park Service. Originally intended to improve interstate commerce and provide work opportunities during the Great Depression, the interstate highway project was stymied by World War II. It was only after the Second World War came to an end that the federal government started to seriously consider the rapid creation of an interstate highway network, and that culminated in the passage of the multi-billion-dollar National Interstate and Defense Highway Act under President Eisenhower in 1956. The rapid construction of the interstate highway system suddenly opened access to inexpensive land at the urban periphery, triggering the construction of large-scale subdivisions. That shift was not without controversy — eminent domain policies (disproportionately impacting communities of color), redlining and the segregation of suburban communities, as well as ongoing racist laws and practices deeply embedded into housing policies that meant the economic promise of the interstate system was heavily skewed towards the post-war boom for white, middle class families. It was these families who could afford a lifestyle that necessitated, and indeed revolved around the car, and gave rise to communities increasingly centered not on the town square, but on the parking lot.

While the economic benefits of highways increasingly benefited suburban communities, and tourist economies along the highway routes, urban and rural communities began to feel the strain. Downtowns, drained of investment and population, tried to imitate the very thing that was beating them. The first pedestrian mall in the US was built in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1959, and over 200 permanent pedestrian streets were installed across the country through the 1960s and 1970s, initially met with great fanfare and optimism. The theory was sound enough: remove the cars from Main Street, and you’d get something that felt like a European city center — lively, strollable, and commercially viable. That model could surely compete with the suburban shopping mall, which was becoming a community hub in those comparatively busier, wealthier, non-pedestrian areas.

It didn’t work. Most of these pedestrian-only blocks were created in the 1960s and ’70s, and demolished or reopened to traffic by the 1980s and ‘90s. Of more than 100 malls studied in one Journal of Urbanism analysis, only 43 still exist (and mostly in areas around major universities, not cities in general). With the benefit of hindsight, this isn’t much of a surprise. You can’t bolt a pedestrian zone onto a city that had been structurally reorganized around the assumption that no one would walk anywhere and expect pedestrian-only areas to work out. By the late 1980s, it was clear that most downtown pedestrian malls had failed. Many communities found that ripping them out and restoring car access produced immediate economic improvement. And in the United States, where economic precarity has direct impacts on everything from housing to healthcare, the short-term monetary need had to override the long-term health of the community. The car had won. American cities had rearranged themselves around that fact so completely that there was no going back. No amount of planters, string lights, or concrete barricades could undo over fifty years of car-centric urban planning.

A Different Post-War Reality

The European trajectory diverged much earlier, and for reasons that were not entirely altruistic. Pre-World Wars I and II, most European cities had structures that had held for hundreds of years — central squares anchored primarily by churches, surrounded by streets and alleys that housed storefronts, markets, and parks.

Public parks had been on the rise since the late 1800s, when former aristocratic hunting estates were repurposed for the people, with Berlin’s Tiergarten being one of the most obvious examples. This meant that the advent of the motor vehicle presented a significant challenge for safety and commerce. How could this new machinery work within the narrow, square- and plaza-centered structure of the European city?

Different cities offered various responses. The first pedestrianization of an existing street took place around 1929 in Essen, Germany, on a narrow shopping street that could not accommodate both vehicular and pedestrian traffic. At the same time in Berlin, city planning officials were commissioning housing for the employees of the local Siemens plant, and they needed it to be, frankly, less depressing than existing housing projects. That meant a complex that felt like a neighborhood, with the sense of community and walkability that traditional villages and historic city centers had developed over centuries. Two other German cities followed this model in the early 1930s, but the idea didn’t spread much farther before the onset of the Second World War.

The war destroyed tremendous amounts of urban infrastructure, and the postwar period provided opportunities that no city would have chosen but many used well. Restoring historic buildings, rebuilding housing for displaced populations, and contending with tremendous economic hardship — not to mention the influence of four separate Allied nations in the occupied zones and the exile or murder of some of the nation’s most eminent architects and urban planners by the Nazi Party — meant that rebuilding would require deliberate, long-term planning and the reestablishment of international relationships that had been significantly (and negatively) impacted by the war.

The aesthetic that arose out of the rubble, both literal and figurative, particularly in West Germany and influenced by France, the Netherlands, England, and Scandinavia, was one of organic functionalism, where nature and function combined to create buildings and neighborhoods that were guided by the natural forms surrounding them. That meant being really careful about cars.

By 1955, twenty-one German cities had closed at least one street to automobile traffic. By 2010, Germany had around 3,000 pedestrian zones established in 170 cities. (Given American fascination with the Autobahn, you might be pleased to know this did not seem to negatively impact its historic rise).

Exploring the difference between the American and European models, it’s clear the disconnect isn’t purely physical. In fact, it’s largely institutional. The impetus for pedestrian zones in Germany came from municipal administrators rather than economic institutions, and the decision to pedestrianize was considered an organizational measure to improve urban infrastructure and assist in postwar reconstruction, with the community as a whole as the beneficiary. American municipalities were also seriously considering how to maximize post-war society — they just came at it from a much different direction, one guided predominantly by the dollar.

To wit: in the US, the pedestrian mall was conceived as a retail intervention: a way to compete with the suburban shopping center. In Germany, it was conceived as a civic intervention, designed to rebuild a fractured society. And Berlin, specifically, was its own complicated case.

West Berlin’s postwar planning was, for a time, explicitly car-forward. The “Stadtautobahn” was built with the strong political and ideological intention to demonstrate the superiority of the Western lifestyle during the Cold War, its ambitions far ahead of actual motorization at the time. And yet the city that emerged from that era is still, by American standards, radically walkable. That’s a function of density, transit, the pre-war urban fabric that survived and shaped what got rebuilt around it, and the municipal urgency to rebuild with forethought in addition to reactionary policy. Walkability here was not solely a planning vision, but one combined with a structural inheritance. And while that inheritance is one that planners occasionally tried to bulldoze, culture dictated that cities kept recovering and rebuilding around their historically walkable cores.

70-odd years after America said “money” and Germany said “society”, we are actively seeing who wins.

Spontaneity Tastes So Good

I have been in Berlin for about a week, and I already feel like a little bit of a different person. I haven’t lived here in years, and as in LA, I have only a handful of old friends here.

And yet, everything feels completely different. My shoulders are not up around my ears. I can walk out of my door and immediately be surrounded by people at patio tables sipping cocktails, groups of students picnicking on lawns, and seemingly endless green spaces stretching in nearly every direction. Getting places feels effortless and arriving there feels unplanned. All of the relaxation of a European summer without any of the social media trappings of it. Yes, there are cars — a lot of them — but they feel connected to the streets they’re driving upon and they drive in tandem with trams and street cars and cyclists and pedestrians as far as the eye can see.

There’s probably a version of Euro Girl Summer that is showing up on repeat on your algorithm right now: white linen, aperitivo hour, bikinis on the beach. That is not the one I’m living. That version is essentially a pitch for the cinematic version of summer. A summer that’s designed for the aesthetics more than the experience, and one that can be replicated in any resort town from Mallorca to Montenegro. Not that I’m against a beach, but the long-term benefit of a Walking Girl Summer seems a lot more viable than a debt-inducing Beach Girl one.

What walkabe European cities offer, as a permanent residence or as a getaway, is categorically different from a few weeks on the Riviera. (It’s also something that’s a lot harder to capture in a single frame.) It’s the experience of a city that was designed and redesigned around the assumption that public spaces belong to the people moving through them. That you might turn a corner and find a market, a courtyard, a jazz bar, a Vietnamese spot that’s been there for thirty years because the rent hasn’t killed it yet. That you can cover six miles on foot and have it feel like six discoveries rather than six errands. For us Americans, always hustling to nowhere, that’s a novelty that can reset your whole nervous system if you let it. When you look at it through that lens, you realize that the TikTokers swearing that all their ailments and sensitivities no longer exist when eating pasta in a Roman piazza or scarfing down croissants in Paris haven’t magically cured themselves through the power of gluten: their systems are just way less stressed.

The US never got to a place where existing can be both busy and human. Not for lack of trying, but because the infrastructure bet was placed on the car, and because building so few pedestrian-friendly projects for so long meant that city governments lost the expertise to do it at all. That’s a deficit that compounds itself. You cannot retrofit your way into a walking city if the city has spent half a century assuming no one will walk. You need the street to have been built from the beginning, or rebuilt from the rubble, for the person on foot. When those streets don’t exist, everything requires resources. Resources to plan, to drive, to park, to arrive. There are no spontaneous croissants in that posture. And a planned croissant, in my experience, doesn’t taste quite as good.

I think about my run to The Last Bookstore sometimes. About the strawberries in Echo Park. The underpass. The bag check. Everything about that day was fine, technically. I made it to where I was going. I made it home. I bought some books. But the journey hollowed out the destination. I had gone somewhere, but I hadn’t been anywhere.

That’s the thing about putting on your shoes in a city that was built for you. The going is the point. And when you want your summer to feel a little more like summer, I’d recommend the trip that affords you the spontaneous spritz on your walk home far more than cocktails on a beach you can’t afford. It tastes much sweeter that way.

Newark International Airport

05:32

My flight left last night at 8:00 PM in one time zone and now it’s 5:32 AM in another. I am grateful for the foresight of 2021 me, who in her heyday of pandemic-era plane commuting between Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. (don’t ask) made the most indulgent commitment of her adult life to date: splurging for a travel credit card with a more than $600 annual fee.

Speaking to past me through the void: I know you feel certifiable. I know you feel like the ghost of Dave Ramsey, who you don’t even like, is going to come haunt you in your sleep. Dave Ramsey is full of it.

The unnecessary luxury of your investment seems pretty darn necessary when you have twelve more hours of waiting ahead of you and now get to experience the luxury of a hot shower after hours in an economy seat, no additional travel or hotel required.

Sure, it does feel a little like summer camp, in the sense that you are waiting for a cabin leader to come yell that your shower is taking too long. But it’s 5:32AM and it’s just you and a businessman in a full suit queueing for the showers and you have a whole change of clothes in your carry-on bag and Perricone MD toiletries you did not have to request waiting for you on the wall. True or untrue, this feels like some of the best money you’ve ever spent.

You change your clothes. You do your makeup. You hope that the good plane karma that has resulted in you receiving more free upgrades than your comparatively minuscule annual expenditure dictates will strike again if you look especially put together. You know that’s not how capitalism works. You do it anyway.

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06:13

It is too early for food because your body cannot tell if it is 3AM or 6AM or some other twilight entirely. The lounge has increased in fanciness since your last visit, and there is now an actual human being making lattes instead of the sadness espresso machine. Your $600 feels more and more golden by the minute. A vanilla latte sounds like a compromise your body can get behind. You are in line behind a woman who fights the barista about the definition of cold brew. The barista is not being paid enough to fix her face. You hope the $10 you stuff in the tip jar might help. You know it won’t. It is a very good latte.

06:22

You find a seat in a single-person phone booth with no door catty-cornered to the floor to ceiling windows. The vinyl seats are completely cracked through. You wonder if all the $600 fees went towards barista training and not reupholstery. It doesn’t matter. You are too overstimulated to handle the feeling of your headphones on your head and the place is still pretty empty, so you answer emails while an old man and his wife eat 3.5 plates of plain scrambled eggs and 4 pints of beer in approximately 7 minutes at the table down the row. You wonder where they are going, and how they are going to feel on the trip.

07:01

It feels like a humane time to start time zone adjusting. Breakfast! You leave your ratty leather backpack and your rattier work bag underneath your jacket in the booth as though that will deter nonexistent thieves. The voice of your mother is screaming in your head. You do it anyway (sorry, Mom). You wander aimlessly through the buffet as though you have forgotten what food is. 3 in every 4 items seems to have American cheese (you might be one of 5 Americans worldwide who cannot stand American cheese). You toast a piece of rye bread and eat it with salted butter and cucumbers (nutrition) and two sausage links (protein?). You drink two of the tiny blue plastic water cups and think that meets your daily hydration needs (it does not). You watch two bros in snapbacks chug IPAs after cheersing to their boys’ trip. You do not know where they are going. You do not know what sort of constitution it requires to chug beers at 7AM.

07:59

You have eaten your breakfast concoction. You have read 8 Substack articles, none of which have anything to do with you or your work. You pass out ‘likes’ like candy because the craving for validation, no matter what anyone says, is a universal constant. You realize your breakfast concoction is not as nutritious as usual. You decide you need fruit.

At the fruit trays there is as mother of indeterminate age with a toddler of extremely determinate age. The mother is definitely your age but probably younger and also infinitely older. Your 30s are a mystery. So is parenthood. You nannied for 7 years and you still don’t understand the urge. You also understand it completely. The mother’s hair is twisted up in a messy bun. Her extremely toddlery toddler is not responding to her mother’s calm narration of her fruit choices. You think this mother is an attorney. Maybe a hostage negotiator. Perhaps the head of a crisis PR firm. Whatever her transferable skills, she talks this child off a mango-based ledge (you think $600 gets you mangoes? It gets you institutional pineapple and institutional honeydew and on very special occasions red seedless grapes). I stand behind the tiny tyrant and applaud (internally). Keep knowing what you want, girlie. Get your mangoes. Just not today. Patience is a virtue. The pineapple is the best of the industrially processed fruits. No, your mother does not hate you for putting jam on her own slice of toast. It will not touch your toast. There is jam in the fruit section. What time is it again?

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08:46

You have eaten the pineapple. Attorney/hostage negotiator/PR exec (pick one) and terrible (incredible) toddler have gone to catch their flight. You still have 7 hours to wait. It’s like you’re at work but the work is existing in liminal space without losing your mind and also you’ve paid for the best possible version of liminal space. Late-stage capitalism is an absolute mindfuck every single day. You need a nap. You put your headphones on because you’ve reached the level of overstimulation where pressure on your temples is preferable to noises of any kind that are not controlled by you. You turn on Law & Order for background noise because nothing says “everything is fine” more than a bad crime procedural, in your experience. You leave your laptop open with the brightness turned all the way down so people think you are doing something. In your head people might care what you are or are not doing. They just want to know why the buffet is out of pineapple.

11:27

You fell asleep to the sounds of ADA mumble-mumble of Season Twenty-Million of Law & Order. You are an entirely new person. Another family has colonized the booth across from you. They have a pile of egg whites in a bowl and are challenging each other to see how much hot sauce they can pile on them. You are glad your flight doesn’t leave for five and half hours. You do not want to sit with the hot sauce twins. The occasion of awakening feels like it deserves another snack. You think you should have more nutrients. You get half a sandwich and furtively remove the single-serving Cheez-It packet from your bag. Probably the most American thing about you is your love of Cheez-Its. You savor every salty bite. You probably need more tiny water cups.

12:44

You remember a client still owes you money. You check your bank account. They’ve actual paid. The airport lounge is a miracle place. You don’t make the rules. You just know.

A man comes up to you. You remember the article in The New York Times you read about two men falling in love in the airport lounge. Maybe this is finally your meet-cute.

The man wants to know if an errant toddler is your toddler. It is not your toddler. This man does not think of you as a viable romantic prospect. You are wearing makeup. You have more emails to answer. You are tired of Law & Order.

14:01

Here’s a life hack I shouldn’t share, because sharing it means it will probably be made against the rules. Oh well. If you book one leg of a flight on money and another on airline miles and the reservations aren’t connected, they aren’t going to check your bag all the way through. But bags arrive ahead of their people all of the time. The kindly people at the “Advanced Baggage” office don’t know why your suitcase got to them 7 hours before you did — they just know it’s true. That means you can sit in the airport lounge drinking vanilla latte number two, smelling of free bath products and pineapple juice, while they are none the wiser. Now that your flight is only a few hours away, you can exit the increasingly crowded lounge, go fetch your bag from the sad luggage room, and check it back in for flight number two. You have been an hour away from New York City for 7 hours. You have not gone into the city. You have stretched your $600 and made the baggage people watch your bag for you like it’s a stray cat. Worth it.

14:34

It took approximately half an hour to exit the terminal, fetch your bag, check your bag again, reenter the terminal, and ascend the escalator back up to the lounge. You are getting your money’s worth, damn it.

It is now definitely 5 o’clock somewhere. Your cute outfit did not warrant an upgrade from the powerless bag drop employees. You did get an offer to pay $900 for business class. You are not paying $900 for an 8 hour flight — you’re still mad (grateful) (mad) you agreed to pay $600/year six years ago for unlimited access to the pineapple buffet — you’re not paying for a business class seat. Maybe one day you’ll be the kind of writer who gets invited on trips where someone else pays for business class. That is, if you don’t alienate everyone by talking about your misanthropic fear of paying for business class.

Since you will not be enjoying alcohol in economy class (unless the stars align and you get an upgrade at the gate) you get one (1) glass of Prosecco. There are no seats at the bar. Your booth has been taken over by a couple. The woman is sitting on the man’s lap. They have a dog with a rhinestone collar and a leash that says “Emotional Support Animal”. You think about your former colleague and how much shit she got for her service dog. Her service dog who helped manage actual Type 1 Diabetes. You move far away from your former booth. You hope the dog enjoyed your Cheez-It crumbs. You find a seat at a high top table. You, a business man with an HP laptop, and your glass of Prosecco. Also, a man who probably has Tourette’s. You feel for him. You also put your noise-cancelling headphones back on. You wonder if that makes you a bad person. Your nap feels very far away.

15:22

You are writing this article. You have ideated eight new characters for the novel you’ve been writing for the past six months based on observation alone. Your $600 was worth if for the people watching. You are about to get on a flight to Europe.

Du musst dein Deutsch in deinem eigenen Kopf üben. Du sprichst immer noch fließend Deutsch. Du glaubst, du sprichst immer noch fließend Deutsch, nä?

Tu dois pratiquer ton français, qui est bien pire que ton allemand. Tu as apporté un cahier d’exercices. Tu ne l’as pas ouvert aujourd’hui.

You are too tired to try Italian. You are not very good at Italian. You can’t wait to have to catch the train in Italy. You did not bring a workbook for Italian. You are sure you will be fine.

16:00

You still have half a glass of Prosecco. When you were dropped at the airport yesterday, your Dad said he loved you and also that he hoped you found what you were looking for. Are you looking for something? Maybe not yet.

Lucky for me, I not only have that friend, but that friend is my brother. Luckier for me, he has a loyalty card at the local theater, which means discounted snacks. Luckiest for me, he has the unerring (and slightly inexplicable) ability to choose movies that should be squarely outside my wheelhouse but inevitably end up becoming favorites.

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I should have known, then, what I was in for with The Sheep Detectives.

If you have escaped the marketing, let me loop you in: Man (George, played by Hugh Jackman) shepherds a flock of sheep while also getting them hooked on classic mystery novels through nightly dramatic readings. Sheep (a variety of famous people including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bella Ramsey, and Patrick Stewart) are dismayed when George is murdered, and use the keen(ish) detective skills gained from story time to attempt to solve the mystery. The trusty trio of (literal) black sheep (Bryan Cranston), flock-leading redheaded sheep (Dreyfus), and collective-memory-keeper sheep (Chris O’Dowd) work hard to discover the culprit, crossing paths with and at times assisting bumbling townsfolk including the policeman (Nicholas Braun), the innkeeper (Hong Chau), the butcher (Conleth Hill), and the other shepherd (Tosin Cole). A hot-shot lawyer (Emma Thompson) leads the will reading after kicking out an enterprising young journalist (Nicholas Galitzine) and the soon-to-inherit-but-estranged daughter of the victim (Molly Gordon) becomes the prime suspect. Hijinks ensue! Shenanigans abound! Capers are afoot! And somehow this is a better take on Agatha Christie than Netflix’s actual take on Agatha Christie and the kind of kid’s movie the youth of 2026 actually deserve.

Are movie studios afraid of the dark?

There is a reason children’s stories have always contained darkness, both literal and figurative. Not horror for the sake of it, but the kind of existential weight that, handled correctly, teaches a child that the world is large and complicated and survivable. Experiencing big feelings through media can allow children to confront their fears and anxieties in a safe and controlled environment. The original fairy tale tradition (before Disney laundered it into something more palatable and profitable) was never primarily about comfort. It was about life’s rehearsal. Here is the witch’s house. Here is what happens when you are greedy, or cruel, or foolish. Here is death, and loss, and the unfairness of the world. Now you know. Now you are slightly more prepared. There are, as Sondheim said, moments in the woods.

But something happened to children’s media somewhere in the last decade or so. Fear, as a narrative tool, has been increasingly replaced by spectacle. Monster A elicits scream B. Special effects abound. The threat is vivid and enormous and usually CGI, and then it is defeated, and everyone is fine. The emotional arc is clean because it has to be: studios are risk-averse and parent groups are vocal and the path of least resistance is a villain who is scary-looking but not actually threatening to anything a child might recognize in their own life.

There is a German word for this that is worth knowing: spannend. Literally translated, it means “exciting” or “thrilling,” but the more precise meaning is closer to “tension-creating” — the feeling of being held in suspense, of not knowing how something resolves, of sitting on the edge of your seat in the face of genuine stakes. A well-constructed fairy tale is spannend in the deepest sense of the word. I’d argue what has gone missing from so much children’s media in recent years is not fear exactly, but spannend; that sense that something real is at risk, that the stories we are told operate according to genuine moral logic, and that the outcome of those stories matters.

Research on children’s cognitive development and fear responses has long noted that younger children respond to salient visual images — something that looks frightening — while older children become increasingly responsive to abstract threats, i.e. things communicated through implication and consequence rather than appearance. This tracks with what earlier scholars observed about fairy tales1: the deeper developmental work happens not when a child is scared of the witch’s face, but when they reckon with what the witch represents. Modern children’s films have, by and large, optimized for the younger end of this developmental spectrum — maximum visual threat, minimum existential weight — and in doing so have quietly abandoned the older children who are hungry for something that takes them seriously.

I cannot believe I am saying this, but The Sheep Detectives does not make this mistake.

Sheep taking things seriously

The film’s central conceit is not the murder of the sheep’s shepherd. It is that the sheep have developed, collectively, the ability to choose to forget. Any event that is too painful, too frightening, or too destabilizing can be voted out of the flock’s shared memory. Gone. As if it never happened.

Lily, Louis-Dreyfus’s redheaded flock leader, has used this mechanism to forget her own parents’ death. The flock has collectively agreed, for most of the film, that death does not apply to sheep. That sheep become clouds. That the absence of those who have left is not loss but transformation. It is a beautiful, terrible coping mechanism, rendered in wool.

Mopple, the O’Dowd sheep, cannot forget. He is the flock’s memory-keeper, constitutionally incapable of the collective amnesia that protects the others, which makes him both essential and isolated. When Sebastian (Cranston’s black sheep, the group’s loner for much of the film) sacrifices himself for the sake of the flock after learning that the shepherd they thought would save them actually plans to bring them to the slaughter, an adolescent sheep convinces the group to forget that, too. Even as Lily and Mopple beg them not to and the winter lamb (the baby outcast) watches.

It is only these three — the leader who can’t bear to remember, the keeper who can’t choose to forget, and the child who has never been permitted full membership in the group — who grieve and work to save their flock. And it is only through that grief and effort that the flock, eventually, comes to understand what it has been losing every time it votes to forget. Grief, as the film quietly and devastatingly argues, is not the opposite of joy. It is the proof of it. It is also the act of remembering that eventually helps solve the mystery.

This is not monster-elicits-scream fear. This is the fear that wakes even adults at 3am: what happens to us after we die? What do we owe the people we’ve lost? What does it cost a community to prioritize comfort over truth? What does belonging mean when it is contingent on complicity?

The sheep grapple — through the mechanism of a murder mystery with impeccable comic timing — with sacrifice, with belonging, and with the daunting impact of creating outcasts in a group that often defines itself through consensus alone.

Miss Marple would like a word

Here is something you may not know: Agatha Christie was funny. Not accidentally funny, not funny-despite-herself funny, but actually funny — a writer with a precise comic sensibility who understood that the murder mystery only works when it is fully self-aware. The eccentric suspects, the implausible sleuth, the resolution that is simultaneously surprising and inevitable — these are not incidental features of the form. Christie’s genius was not that she hid the murderer cleverly in her multi-layered plots. It was that she understood the genre as a kind of theater: a performance of order being disrupted and restored, playing out against a backdrop of a specific social system that produced both the murderers and the victims.

That’s why, 50 years after her death, Christie is so often on the collective brain (and a target for our collective wallets). Unfortunately, not many of her adapters are getting Christie right. The recent Netflix Seven Dials adaptation is very pretty and extremely dutiful and entirely too self-serious for its source material. The Kenneth Branagh helmed Poirot films are grandiose in a way that veers towards pomposity, something that I’d wager Christie herself would have found absurd (she was, by all accounts, a total pragmatist who rarely suffered pretension). The Knives Out sequels, which arrived with considerable fanfare as Christie-adjacent entertainment, honored the surface of the genre without trusting its deeper logic: that the murder mystery is not, primarily, a puzzle but a social document.

Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes author Sir Author Conan Doyle (the pair of whom I would argue are two of the most renowned mystery authors to ever live) were both fundamentally satirists. Holmes’s England is a place where the veneer of civilization is perpetually one good shock away from cracking. Poirot’s is populated by people who believe their class position insulates them from consequences (they are wrong). Miss Marple’s is perhaps the most salient of all: a world where a little old lady is consistently underestimated by exactly the people whose crimes she unveils. In all of these worlds, the mystery isn’t the murder — it’s how the conditions for murder came to exist in the first place.

It’s rare that a children’s story can undertake this same analysis with the verve and wit that Christie and Conan Doyle offered. The Sheep Detectives does it by going through the genre, not around it. This is not a parody of the murder mystery. It is a murder mystery — just one that happens to star sheep. The hierarchies of sheep society are real: flock leaders and black sheep and winter lambs occupy recognizable social positions and navigate recognizable societal pressures, and the parallels to their human contemporaries pay off without pandering. Also, and perhaps most importantly, this movie is heart-wrenching and heartwarming and — as Christie might hope — really, truly funny.

I did not expect to spend the drive home from a kid’s movie thinking about collective grief and the social function of forgetting. I did not expect the Bryan Cranston sheep’s death to hit the way it did. I did not expect to feel, in a sheep-adjacent murder mystery, that I was watching something true.

The best children’s stories have always known something that stories made for grownups sometime forget: all of us, for the most part, just want to be taken seriously. And being taken seriously is not reliant solely on dour seriousness. Real stakes don’t always require scale. A question like ‘what happens when we die’ is not made smaller in its asking. Fear is not an obstacle to joy. Neither is darkness. We all experience darkness. The question is how we learn to come back into the light.

My brother was right, as he often tends to be. I will likely be dreaming of CGI sheep.

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More importantly, for the food-as-fuel set, I worry you might not have had the chance to sit down with your people at the table. That you can’t take a bite of food today and have it transport you across time and space to a different table twenty years ago where you’re smiling the same smile you did then.

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What a special thing, to inhabit all the versions of yourself with a nostalgia that is not backward-looking but all-encompassing. What a gift to learn the fullness of people through the foods they make and the foods they share. I have an ever-growing map of the world unique to me that has taken me from kitchen tables to exclusive dining rooms to roadside food stands and back again.

It is food that has remained an outstretched hand as I’ve moved all over the world. From luscious 3am noodles standing up on the side of the road to four-hour, fifteen-course dinners that treat ingredients in ways I have never seen before and will likely never see again. What a privilege it is that I can map out my life with culinary road markers.

Here is when I fell in love with Vienna, eating käsekreiner outside the opera house. There is where I ate my first Michelin-starred meal, marveling at the delicacy of each presentation. Here is where I got my heart broken for the first time over movie theater popcorn smothered in butter. Here’s where I remember my grandmother’s hand teaching me to gently, gently fold the egg whites into my soufflé. Here’s where I learned someone could fall in love with the fullness of me over blue-rare steak and spinach so creamy it was more white than green.

Last night I added a new pin to the map.

Christopher’s at The Wrigley Mansion is not yet Michelin-starred (the guide hasn’t made it to this region, though it’s about to) but it will be, and when it is, nobody will be surprised. Chef Christopher Gross’ cooking is French-French, and something about foie gras while you’re looking at Camelback Mountain is trippy in the best possible way. The usual menu runs eight-courses, but they also offer something else: a three-course classics menu. All Chef’s best-loved dishes, the ones people have been requesting for decades, stripped of fuss and presented as they were always meant to be — generous, confident, and luminous.

The evening began, as these things often do, not with an official course, but with an amuse-bouche. Paper thin smoked-salmon and a pop of herbs atop a terracotta-colored edible spoon (crackers, we hardly knew ye) alongside champagne served in a frosty glass chilled by liquid nitrogen — for the vibes.

And still, before the meal technically began, more gifts: bread. Not bread as an afterthought, but bread as an opening argument: olive loaf, a twenty-five year sourdough, a proper French baguette. Alongside them, two butters stacked one on top of the other in arresting design — cultured crème fraîche, pale and clean, and a layer of compound butter nearly black, made with charcoal and charred onion and finished with flaky salt that caught the candlelight.

Then: the red pepper bisque. Sure, it’s just soup, but a soup that arrives in a preheated bowl, filled to the brim exactly. One milliliter more and that soup would spill over, but a kitchen like this would never. This is the kind of detail that makes you grin without realizing you’re doing it. Have I ever before paid this much attention to the level of my soup? What fun, what joy, what expertise in action to realize that a line cook is spending time measuring exactly the amount of soup that will give you the best possible experience and a waiter is pouring it from a single-serving copper pot into your pre-heated bowl, and suddenly soup is something you can linger over.

Next: steak. Real, unctuous, Australian Wagyu ribeye with haricot verts, slim and bright. A little pot of Béarnaise, classical and unapologetic, and an extra supplement of foie gras on the side. The kind of dish that doesn’t need to explain itself because it has been explaining itself, correctly, for a hundred years, in a portion size that does not say Ralph-Fiennes-is-waiting-for-you-around-the-corner-with-a-cheeseburger but ‘we can be fussy because we have earned it and also you are damn sure not leaving here hungry.’

Dessert, of course, to close. Chocolate mousse in a tempered chocolate shell so delicate it shatters at the crack of a spoon stuffed with blackberries so plump they look fresh of the vine. And more off-the-menu surprise: a cube of passion fruit mousse covered in gold leaf and raspberry powder, so symmetrically assembled it almost hurts to put in the fork. Of course the bright, graceful bite to end the meal is so, so worth it.

There was a wine pairing. There was a view. And at the end, because we asked nicely and were just the right kind of curious, our waiter brought us a small pour of a brandy Chef receives as a personal gift and typically reserves for friends.

I have never had a meal exactly like this one before. I have also had countless meals exactly like this one before. The highest compliment I can offer is that every course was a memory: of roasting vegetables for soup with college roommates. Of eating chocolate mousse at a restaurant in Paris alone at 19, dazzled by the elegance and possibility the world had to offer. Of trying Armagnac for the first time, 13 years old and determined to be sophisticated but coughing from one eye-watering sip. This cuisine is everything I know and love and also like nothing I’ve ever had before. This kind of eating is special.

Building Tables

The meal I just described cost real money and a heck of a lot of it. I am aware of this. I also know that one of the best food experiences I had last year was a lengua street taco I ate alone on an overturned paint bucket in an L.A. gas station parking lot (the taco cost less than the round-trip bus fare it took to get there). Both of these things are true. That’s actually the point.

The map I’m making has no hierarchy. It has the käsekreiner and the Wagyu. It has the soufflé and the movie theater popcorn. It has the twenty-five year sourdough and the tortilla patted flat by a woman who has been doing it for sixty years and does not need to think about it anymore. What unites every pin on the map is not price or prestige or the number of stars someone has assigned to the kitchen. It is presence. It is the seat at somebody’s table.

You cannot be anywhere else when the bisque is perfect. You cannot be distracted when the butter is exactly right. You do not want to move from exactly where you are as the taco melts in your mouth, even if you are sticky and sweating and it is ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit outside. Food insists on the present tense in a way that almost nothing else does, and the present tense is where the people you love actually are.

There is a lot of noise around food right now, and not all of it is wrong. Grocery prices have climbed to levels that make feeding a family feel like a feat of Rube Goldberg engineering. Ultra-processed food has colonized the center aisles of every supermarket in America while the produce section quietly shrinks. Restaurant workers remain among the most poorly compensated in the American economy, and the tipping and service system that was supposed to supplement their income has become a mechanism for shifting the burden of their wages almost entirely onto diners. Food snobbery is real, and the line between genuine connoisseurship and using taste as a class signal is thinner than an expertly cut slice of hamachi. Just ask the tech bros The Wall Street Journal and Casey Lewis just reported on. Per Lewis:

The venture capital firm Slow Ventures has begun hosting “etiquette classes” for young tech founders; at a March session at Maxwell Social, a private members’ club in lower Manhattan, about 50 aspiring Zuckerbergs sniffed cedarwood-scented paper strips, did caviar bumps chased with Belvedere shots, and sat through panels on wine pairings, hosting, and fundraising. The thought, according to Slow, is that AI has commoditized coding, so founders now need to win people over with charisma and “high EQ” — soft skills the technology can’t replicate. (As one attendee, a 23-year-old founder, put it, “We can’t be weird forever.”) The sessions have been free but “oversubscribed,” accepting only 30-50% of applicants; the firm’s “modern etiquette handbook,” released last November, sold 700 copies in its first month.

I hate to break it to the aspiring entrepreneurs, but sophistication measured in vodka shots and caviar slurped off cupped hands tends to have a short shelf life. Just ask Marie Antoinette.

Let Us have Cake

These conversations matter and they deserve the serious treatment they’re getting (largely elsewhere and by writers better positioned than I am to cover them).

But I notice that the discourse, in aggregate, has a tendency to strip food of the thing that makes it irreplaceable: its capacity to be, at the same time, sustenance and ceremony, ordinary and sacred. Food is a marker of where you’ve been and an invitation to be fully where you are and an opportunity to decide exactly where you’re going. When we talk about food only as a policy problem or a status symbol or a health marker, we lose the thread. We forget that the point of the table has never been the food alone.

The map I’m making is not a record of the best meals I’ve eaten. It is a record of the moments when I was most fully myself, most fully with other people, most fully convinced that being alive is, on balance, a remarkable situation to find ourselves in.

I’m pretty sure a lot tastes just as good as skinny feels. In fact, many things taste better. Pass me the bread and the good butter and take a seat at the table, okay? There’s a lot of pins to add to the map.

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There is something about a matching set. Maybe it’s my Millennial heart, but there is little that makes me feel as empowered as putting on a matching pair of yoga pants (no flares, please) and a strappy sports bra and going to some sort of boutique fitness class where a stranger can yell at me for forty-five minutes to an hour.

I came up in the age of two-a-day workouts, stretching my ClassPass to its breaking point. For much of 2016, my roommate and I would wake up at 5am and walk to a Flywheel (RIP) where a spin or barre class would kick our asses alongside 35 other cutthroat New York girls. We’d fight for a spot in the showers, bemoaning the ever-changing rotation of complimentary body wash before throwing our hair into buns and high-tailing it to the office, with a stop at Starbucks or Joe and the Juice on the way.

We’d make it through a day at work, at some point stopping for some flavor of $15 salad for a sad desk lunch, and lurch our way out the door at 6pm for a cross-town sprint to a networking happy hour or second workout class, or — less often — a crappy, app-enabled first date. If there is still a Pinterest board demonstrating the girl-boss stereotype, sipping iced-coffees year round between overpriced fitness classes and weekends away from the city, our 2016-selves would fit right in.

Except, of course, unlike my roommate, I came up in nonprofit arts & culture, not corporate America. And also, unlike my roommate or pretty much any of those 35 other girls: I’m fat.

Mum’s the Word

Before we get any further: I am not sad, disillusioned, confused, or self-deprecating when I describe my body. It is the description most apt to describe me: fat. Fat, however, is a very loaded word in 2026 America, and one that is seemingly disappearing from bodies and discourse around them by the day. I am not only not thin; I am demonstrably large. Yes, I am quite muscular, but that muscle is covered everywhere by — you guessed it — fat. I am an American size 16-18, which means that I can occasionally squeeze myself into mainstream clothing but mostly have to scour for extended sizing. I am tall with big feet and large hands. If I lost 100 pounds tomorrow (which is unlikely but happening more and more all the time in the Ozempic age), I would still be large, which is an inconvenience most think pieces have no desire to talk about (body diversity, who?) and also the genuine reality of my genetic makeup. It is possible that I could one day be thin, but even if that day comes, I will always be big. No amount of injectables can change the length of my European size 43 feet or my size 9 ring finger.

I’ve been thinking about this more than usual, lately — and not in the abstract. I walk into a new fitness class and the instructor’s face does something involuntary. A flicker of recalibration. An ‘oh, okay, we have one of those today.’ As soon as things kick off, it is clear that I’m not a beginner, and yet I constantly collect comments about my improbably great form and how “surprisingly strong” I am. Strangers tell me, unprompted, how ‘proud’ they are of me as I mind my own business at the gym.

I understand the impulse. It’s not malicious. It is, however, revealing — because what it shows is an assumption so baked in to people’s perception that they don’t even realize they’re making it. The assumption that my body signals ‘beginner’. That my body signals ‘scared’. That me moving my body is an act of aspiration, not of habit. That my presence in the room is more legible as self-improvement than as expertise. These are not responses to me. They are responses to our collective understanding of what fitness is.

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The Pilates Body is not about Pilates

When men say they want a woman with a Pilates body, they do not mean they want a woman who has achieved the core stability and postural alignment that Joseph Pilates originally designed his method to produce — first for injured dancers and World War I internees, later for the broader population interested in rehabilitation and strength. They mean they want a woman who does not take up space — literally or metaphorically. They mean they want a woman who is thin in a very particular way: smooth, contained, not-too-muscular, and always deferential to their environment. They mean a woman whose body signals docility, compliance, and an ingrained desire to bake sourdough bread.

This is not a niche internet phenomenon. It has colonized enough of the cultural conversation that it warrants a TikTok genre, a counter-TikTok genre, and — inevitably — a counter-counter-TikTok genre. One recent entry that made the rounds: a woman arguing that women who weight 160 pounds or more have “attitude” and should “take that attitude straight to the treadmill” as they “act their weight”. There are plenty of critiques of this video and they aren’t wrong. They correctly identify the woman’s insecurity, her internalizing of a system rooted in proximity to power that she thinks will protect her (it won’t), and the sad circularity of women policing other women’s bodies in the hope that it earns them social capital and cultural cachet. That critique is fair and it’s most likely true. But it stops right before it gets interesting.

As debates-by-TikTok indicate, we are living through a cultural moment with a very low tolerance for complexity. The same forces driving people to use AI as a replacement for thought rather than a supplement to it — the hunger for instant answers, the comfort of flattened binaries, the appeal of a world simple enough to be understood at a glance — are operating on bodies, on gender, and on belonging. A Pilates body is a binary. You have it or you don’t. It has nothing to do with whether or not someone actually does Pilates. It has everything to do with what category of woman someone is, what her relationship to discipline and self-restraint looks like from the outside, whether she is trying or failing or refusing to be what society says is correct. Like most categorization mechanisms deployed against women, it is less interested in health than in legibility. Less interested in what a body can do than in what it signals. Because, as the story goes, when you know the right signals, you gain the right power. You are invited into the right rooms. Get seats at the right tables. And in a world where women are increasingly better educated than men, the instinct to locate power in the body rather than the mind is not accidental — it is both a response and a correction.

Fair or unfair, right or wrong, fear is a powerful motivator. And whether we name it as fear or not, categorization is a coping mechanism. It is a psychological, almost pathological effort to predict action and reaction. If I have a Pilates body, I am a woman who is desired. If I live in this way, my outcome is guaranteed. So what happens, then, when bodies exist outside the norm? What happens when the categorizations aren’t so black and white?

Historically, bodies that live outside of standard categorization, as well as those that live solidly within them, serve as a barometer for what comes next. Bodies are more than just our physical embodiment of self. They are windows to a collective understanding of who we are, who we want to be, and the ways we define the distance between those realities.

Bodies as Culture

Bodies as representations are not new. The body has always been where culture works out what it cannot say directly.

Edgar Degas spent decades painting ballerinas at a moment when French bourgeois culture was deeply anxious about female labor, female visibility, and what kind of woman was permitted to occupy public space. His dancers are exquisite and also surveilled. They are watched by men in top hats in the wings. They are watched by us. They are watched by each other. The gaze is the subject as much as the body is.

Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers — painted in 1875, rejected by the Paris Salon for “vulgarity,” now hanging in the Musée d’Orsay, and one of my personal favorites — gave working-class male bodies the same monumental, almost erotic attention that had previously been reserved for mythological nudes. It was scandalous not because of nudity but because of whose bodies were being looked at and how they were being portrayed. The painting is quietly radical in the way it insists that these bodies matter. That labor is a form of beauty. That what a body does has its own aesthetic weight.

Picasso’s fragmented bodies in the Cubist period — the faces seen simultaneously from multiple angles, the figure that cannot be resolved into a single coherent image — are impossible to divorce from the trauma of the Spanish Civil War and the broader collapse of a stable European world order. When the world fractures, so does the body we use to represent it.

It is not incidental that all three of the artists I’ve highlighted here are men. The canon of bodies-as-culture is largely a canon of men deciding which bodies matter, how they should be seen, and what they mean. Degas’ dancers did not ask to be watched. Caillebotte’s floor scrapers did not commission their own monument. The gaze that makes a body into a text has historically belonged to someone else. Subversions of that are notable and noteworthy. That this remains true — that the Pilates-body discourse is substantially driven by what men say they want, and sustained by women competing for proximity to men’s approval — is not a coincidence.

TikTok is not the Clark, the Museo Nacional, or the Musée d’Orsay. But our impulse to read culture through bodies and to read bodies as culture is somewhat timeless and deeply human. When a significant portion of a young woman’s algorithmic feed is devoted to telling her what body makes her morally legible, sexually valuable, and socially acceptable — and when another significant portion is devoted to fighting that argument — that is a historical document. It tells us something about our era’s anxieties the way Degas’ tells us something about his. These feeds will likely be analyzed, a hundred years from now, by people trying to understand what we were afraid of and why we needed women’s bodies to carry that fear.

Matching Sets and Differing Opinions

Here is what I know: I put on the matching set because I like it. Because the version of myself that walks into a room in a color-coordinated outfit and moves with confidence through a class that challenges her is not making a statement about aspiration or self-improvement or what I intend to look like someday. She is just — here. Competent. Present. In the room.

But that state of being, regardless of conformity or performance, always invites scrutiny, because my body doesn’t fit.

Complete task A, exist in form B.

If I do Pilates, I will be acceptable.

For some of us that is not the case. Arguably, for the majority of us, even if the veneer is better aligned, that is not the case. And when the categorization is so easy to exist outside of, fear compounds. That fear — that life isn’t as predictable as one might think, that women can’t be controlled or dissected in proofs like a mathematic equation — these things contribute to an overarching sense of societal instability. They engender enough precipitousness to inspire an entire content ecosystem that exists to adjudicate which bodies belong in which rooms, performing which kinds of femininity. That ecosystem should serve as a klaxon call that something is very, very wrong.

The Pilates-body discourse is not about fitness. It is about a cultural moment that finds complexity threatening. People are desperate for the definitive. The woman on TikTok telling bigger women to take their attitude to the treadmill is not an anomaly — she is a product, running faithfully on the same operating system that produces AI slop and political binaries and the flattening of everything nuanced into something that can be processed in thirty seconds or less.

In the algorithm age, how do we defy the constant tagging of the content of our lives? Can we take seriously the idea that what we watch, what we consume, what we scroll past — fitness aesthetics and TikTok trends as much as Degas and Picasso — is culture, and if so, do we have the capacity to change it?

Society carries with it weights and counterweights. For every Love is Blind contestant generating outrage and counter-outrage, there is a piece of legislation quietly (and sometimes loudly) changing the vectors of actual lives. For every thin woman in a beige matching set there is a fat woman in a hot pink one and a thin woman exercising at home in her basement in a ratty T-shirt. Only one of these women fits correctly into her box. All three of them exist anyway. I’m going to keep asking — where’s the TikTok argument for that?

I never really thought much about soft-boiled eggs. Other than vague mentions in British kid-lit, they weren’t exactly a staple in a standard American household, and I didn’t eat them with any real frequency until adulthood.

So I’ll never forget the first time I ate them. Myself, alone, in a booth upholstered in red velveteen. A real paper newspaper in my hand with one of those wooden holders for racking it on the wall. Espresso topped with cloud-like foam, seedy bread and steaming rolls, slices of cheese and cold meats: and the eggs. Set in porcelain holders with little cloth hats and presented with Viennese matter-of-factness alongside a tiny stainless steel spoon.

I ate those eggs one delicate spoonful at a time, alternating with sips of strong coffee tempered by milk foam, and crusty, crumbling bread, and creamy European butter, and German-language news one paragraph at a time and, for the first time in my life around age 20, felt solely, singularly myself.

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When I left Vienna for the last time, spent one last lingering morning sipping Wiener Melange and reading the paper much more fluently than when I’d started, I figured that life — the life of lingering Kaffeehaus mornings and custardy egg yolks at sweetly isolated booths was behind me. Back to America and the hustle and the grind and the sinking sensation that leisure was accessible only by time machine.

Then I spent my first summer in New York. I was cranky and tired and had spent 4 weeks in a cast after slipping down a flight of stairs at 6am stone-cold sober. When my ankle was finally freed and I was back to my 8am-8pm nonprofit arts gig, I realized that even without a broken bone I was slightly miserable and the frantic slipperiness of my days never, ever seemed to stop.

I wanted some of the fleeting sunlit feeling of seeing beautiful things without looking for them. Of cracking the fragile shell of an egg and peeling it away and eating it quietly alone while still a part of something, feeling like Lucy in Narnia as she opened the wardrobe door. The easiest way I knew to find a frisson of that feeling was to go look at beautiful things on purpose, and in New York on a budget that usually meant the Met Museum.

At this particular time in my life, I’d already been there many times. Alone: often. With friends, occasionally. But mostly my visits to the Met were on dates, and as the broken ankle had cramped my style and contemplating my singledom among the Baroque masterworks wasn’t especially appealing, I thought maybe I could cure my malaise with art I that loved best and best reflected my own overwrought, slightly existential ennui — even if I had to shell out 25 bucks for it. That meant the Neue Galerie.

The Neue Galerie, in my opinion, is like if the Frick were more intimidating, but also more unapologetically European. If you’re not overly familiar with the NYC museum scene, both museums are in homes-turned-exhibits, every corner embellished with some sort of outlandish crown molding or ironwork rail or filigree — the Neue is just more obviously Viennese in feeling. The paintings almost startle you — up a flight of stairs and there is a Klimt! There is a Beckmann! There is an Otto Dix and suddenly you are overwhelmed with emotions you can’t quite name and looking at the crown molding again.

The collection at the Neue Galerie belongs to Ronald S. Lauder. If the name seems familiar, it probably should — he’s one of the multiple billionaires so minted by the success of Estée Lauder, the cosmetics brand (Estée Lauder was his mother). Ronald Lauder comes up a lot in a lot of discussions that straddle the line between legitimate sociopolitical and cultural analysis and antisemitism, so it’s worth delving into his personal history.

The Lauder family is American and Jewish, of Hungarian and Austro-Germanic Jewish descent. Many people in the U.S. assume that that kind of history, and Ronald’s penchant for 20th century Austro-Germanic art, means that the family emigrated in the 20th century due to the Holocaust: not so. Estée Lauder was born in the United States, in New York City, in the early 1900s, after her mother arrived in the U.S. in 1898. Lauder grew up in Queens, eventually meeting and marrying her husband, Joseph, the son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants, in 1930. While their parents were immigrants, none of the direct branches of their families were still living in Europe during the Second World War.

The family’s brand was entirely self-made. An uncle of Estée’s was a chemist and made face creams. She started selling the creams to friends and fellow customers at her local hair salon. Eventually, she realized that there was much more possibility in the world of cosmetics, and with that in mind she and Jospeh founded Estée Lauder Companies in 1946. Within a few years Saks Fifth Avenue was stocking their products; then department stores all over the country. Eventually they went international, and started buying up a huge portfolio of major brands. Even today, a shocking number of mid to high-end cosmetics are part of the Estée Lauder portfolio: Clinique, Origins, MAC, La Mer, The Ordinary. At pretty much any price point, any makeup or skincare you’ve seen at an American mall likely has a connection to Estée Lauder. It’s no surprise then, that everyone in the family is doing quite well financially.

While of course the subsequent generations of the family — Ronald, who we’re about to discuss, his brother Leonard, who passed away in 2025, their children Aerin, Jane, and William, and their children — are not self-made in the way of their parents, the familial and community expectations of education and success imposed upon them made it so that all of these heirs and heiresses are highly educated and extremely well-connected. Their degrees come from quite the collection of Ivy Leagues and prestige institutions. They are also, to a tee, highly philanthropic, a practice well-established by their parents, who were some of the earliest major proponents of breast cancer research, in addition to funding parks and recreation initiatives, the arts, and a variety of Jewish causes.

It is especially interesting, with all this in mind, to juxtapose Ronald and his brother Leonard. Leonard eventually became CEO of the family business. After a brief stint as a naval officer, Leonard joined the Estée Lauder in the late 1950s and never left. His wife was brought on to help him ideate Clinique.

And, of course, Ronald worked with them at first as well. He headed up international expansion for the company beginning in the early 1960s, but that multi-national interest led him to more political pursuits. By the 1980s Ronald Lauder was well established as a political operative and donor with deep conservative leanings, a strong pro-Israel sentiment, and significant ties to Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.

It was around this time, in the late 1980s, that Ronald Lauder decided to run for mayor of New York City. Roger Ailes (of Fox News infamy) was one of his chief strategists. Netanyahu became even more strongly associated with Lauder during this time as Lauder loudly endorsed Netanyahu’s Likud party in his public remarks. Lauder’s opponent in the Republic primary? Rudy Giuliani, to whom he lost — badly (33% to 67%) — in spite of $14 million in expenditure. Giuliani then went on to lose the general election, not taking over as mayor of New York until 4 years later.

If this all feels really familiar in 2026: you’ve barely seen anything yet.

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According to many reports from the time period, one of the reasons Lauder did so badly in the race was because his political views (at this point he was buddy-buddy with President Reagan, who had appointed him Ambassador to Austria in 1986) were diametrically opposed to the vast majority of New Yorkers in general, and the New York Jewish community in particular. While it was never fully substantiated, that seemed to include many members of his own family, who unlike Ronald were not publicly supporting any political candidates but were quietly giving, and overwhelmingly to Democrats. For someone with Ronald’s political leanings, the family’s — and business’s — support of more liberal causes — the MAC AIDS Fund launched in 1994, with RuPaul joining as spokesperson in 1995 — had to be something of a blow, or at least a hell of a disagreement over Thanksgiving turkey.

In many ways, Ronald Lauder was one of the first wealthy Jewish philanthropists in America who was vocally on the right-wing of the political spectrum. Which makes his deep love of Austro-Germanic art of the early 20th century — deep enough that he founded the Neue Galerie in 2001 — so epically weird.

The Finest Bauble at the Ball

For anyone who has spent time with the art of the Weimar period — the cultural heyday of Germany between World Wars I and II — watching right-leaning people 100 years later feel affinity to works made during this time is, mostly, incredibly strange.

The artists displayed at the Neue Galerie— Kandinsky, Klimt, Dix, Beckmann, and many, many more — were exploring expressionism, spirituality, and the open wounds of national trauma through their work. Pieces from this era are often unsettling and earnestly reflective of the darker parts of the human condition. It is hard to look at works of this period without experiencing a sense of collective responsibility and a raw, open understanding of the cliff-edge feeling of loving as a verb. These artists were boundary-pushing, mostly progressive, and often operating outside of the auspices of societal norms or the establishment. They were not exactly the types that would be keen for a Mar a Lago invitation in 2026.

Of course, the grand hypocrisy of Ronald Lauder and Trump and Netanyahu and those in these circles, is that they can love and champion this work not because of, but in spite of its depth. They can live in this cognitive dissonance because, frankly: the works are stunningly, hauntingly beautiful. Sometimes they are literally shiny — the finest bauble at the ball. Lauder refers to “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I”, colloquially known as “The Woman in Gold”, and perhaps Klimt’s most famous piece, as“[the Neue Galerie’s] Mona Lisa.” It’s notable for its stunning beauty, but also because Lauder acquired it for $135 million from the Bloch-Bauer heirs after a landmark restitution case returned it from the Austrian government (which is genuinely a whole other essay).

What the Yolk Knows

Why the political essay, you might ask? Weren’t we talking about eggs and an art museum?

Well, you may have heard that the Neue Galerie has had quite the week. Ronald Lauder, age 82, has decided to merge the museum with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Provided they can fund a $200 million endowment (an undisclosed but significant amount of which has already been given by Ronald, his daughter, and Met Museum board members Marina Kellen French, Candace K. Beinecke, Daniel Brodsky and Blair Effron), the Neue Galerie will become a satellite of the Met, like the Met Cloisters museum and the now defunct Met Breuer.

Isn’t this good, then? Isn’t it amazing to watch the arts transcend politics? Shouldn’t we be happy that a generous philanthropist like Lauder is giving to the public good, in perpetuity, regardless of his personal views?

Yes. Of course. That’s one answer — or part of it.

But there is also a much more complicated reality, where almost no one who keeps track of the arts in America would ever assume that one of its biggest supporters is the same man who’s given more than $1.6 million to pro-Donald Trump organizations. The same man who spent $1.7 million opposing criminal justice reform in New York. The same man who — and this is true — reportedly pitched the idea for Trump to buy Greenland all the way back in 2019.

The artists that Ronald Lauder so loves were subversive. They were skeptics. They were deeply traumatized by the aftermath of war. And many of them were Jewish, queer, or communist — all communities that Lauder’s political allies have historically targeted.

I think a lot about my time in Vienna. It was one of the happiest periods of my own life. The city is a beautiful time machine — slow but not lazy. Elegant but not stuffy. Utterly composed and astonishingly civilized.

Like the Lauders, my own Austro-Hungarian Jewish family did not, for the most part, experience the horrors of the Second World War. They had long since come to America — a few of them, like Estée Lauder’s mother, from Hungary in 1898.

My family never created a billion-dollar empire. But it did, unceasingly, contribute to the communities it built on American shores. Education. Philanthropy. Compassion. Empathy. An endless striving for more, not for an individual’s success, but for the uplift of community — these were all the values I learned around tables probably less expensive but otherwise quite similar to the Lauder’s.

When I lived in Austria, I always had a background, simmering awareness that while my own family, by some turn of fate, had managed to take those values across a vast ocean and put down roots, the sprawling branches of our family tree did not make it out. All the things I love about Austria — the bone deep sense of rightness, of home that I always felt there — were desperately, systematically stripped away from millions. But it was, in large part, Jewish artists and Jewish communities who made Viennese culture and Viennese art what it was — and is — in ways that still linger, indelibly, today.

Knowing all of these things, I keep thinking about my eggs. When I took myself to the Neue Galerie, looking for the sense of peace and place I’d always loved in my time in Austria, I forgot of course, that the museum has a slice of Viennese cafe-culture all its own: Café Sabarsky.

When you go there, you can sit down in a booth — the seats are not velveteen. Everything costs three times as much. There are no racked newspapers. But there are eggs, white and pristine, with tiny stainless steel spoons. There are strong espressos topped with foam. There are crusty slices of bread and still warm rolls. There are echoes and parallels. There is the space to breathe.

Last I ate at Café Sabarsky, I wasn’t thinking of these things. If I could go today, I’d bring my own newspaper heralding the generosity of Ronald S. Lauder. I would wonder if he has ever sat down and cracked open a soft-boiled egg. I would wonder if he’d ever seen the yolk run and thought about colors. Yellow and white and faintest blue. I would wonder what he thought about time machines.

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I have been lucky enough to know a lot of successful women. To be friends with them, work with them, look up to them, mentor them, be them. And if there’s one thing that they all have in common, it’s confidence. The expression of that confidence is different, of course, with personality and age and type of work and systems of support — the list goes on. I wouldn’t say that the many successful women I’ve met are particularly alike. But they do share the quality of knowing their own worth when the hard work they’ve put in has indisputably paid off.

Particularly in New York, and especially in high-powered corporate settings — which, whether we like it or not, prestige media is — there is no way for a woman to ascend without an innate (and often painstakingly developed) sense of self-worth, a steely determination, and an unshakeable understanding of her own skills.

That’s why I was excited when the opening of The Devil Wears Prada 2 set up Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), twenty years on from the original movie, as the kind of woman I know and have known. As early-twenties Andy hoped for, today’s Andy has blossomed as a successful journalist. She is wearing great clothes. She is winning a major award for a multi-part series focused on the Federal Reserve. Then she’s getting laid off via text. And then, fairly instantaneously, she is being offered a great job, back at Runway magazine again.

As setups go, I was hooked. There are so many ways that opening premise could have led to high stakes. What would it look like for formerly meek Andy, molded in some ways by her early-career experiences with Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), to reenter Priestly’s iron-fisted domain but this time as a peer (or at least, something close to it)?

We will never know. Instead, Anne Hathaway’s Andy is — in spite of her demonstrated accolades, strong friendships, and professional ties — exactly where we left her in 2006 both as a character and as a woman.

For someone who has been trusted to steward serious, consequential information in her reporting (by government employees, no less) Andy has seemingly no idea how to walk into a room and build rapport. Her first time meeting with Miranda and Nigel in twenty years is an awkward miasma of fan-girling and posturing more fitting of an overeager intern than a woman we’re supposed to believe has been gainfully employed with a well-regarded portfolio of writings since her departure from the magazine. And look: certainly many of us regress when we’re thrust into familiar environs after a long time, but there’s a big difference between sleeping in your childhood bedroom over Christmas break and inadvertently performing teen angst and reconnecting with your former boss, especially when she’s a behemoth in a culture-setting industry and you’ve been hired to work directly for her. I’m all for suspending my disbelief, but imagining award-winning journalist Andy Sachs as completely unable to stop herself from running her mouth with the in-universe version of Anna Wintour alongside Stanley Tucci’s Nigel (aka 2011-era Tim Gunn) was something of a step too far.

You might be asking yourself — why does this matter? Is it really a big deal if the leading woman in a low-stakes pseudo-rom-com can’t be believed as a journalistic powerhouse? The short answer is: yes. The longer answer is: well, let’s chat.

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Don’t Girlboss Too Close to the Sun

2020s pop culture may seem far away from the early-2000s fatphobic, manic pixie dreamgirl age, but I’d argue much of what we’re seeing today is the same old story repackaged through the 2010s girlboss era and then gently deflated by the backlash against it. Take, for example, the archetype Andy Sachs is living within: she is successful by every measurable metric — the job, the luxury apartment she quickly secures, the wardrobe, the accolades — but constantly, almost pathologically undermining herself. She trips, literally or figuratively, at the precise moment her competence is most needed. She second-guesses the instincts that got her to the top. She requires, consistently, the external validation of a mentor, a man, or a moment of dramatic crisis to remind her that she was, in fact, capable all along. All of this makes absolutely no sense in the context of her character. We’re supposed to believe that a woman who can charm billionaire art collectors and finesse her way into a Vermont compound somehow doesn’t know how to walk into a room and present herself? Truly, the math is not mathing.

This dichotomy problem likely seems familiar. We all know this character. I’d wager that she’s the protagonist of approximately forty percent of the prestige television produced in the last five years. She is also, increasingly, the butt of a specific kind of joke that masquerades as self-deprecating solidarity.

The “I’m just a girl” meme, which began as a charming acknowledgment of the absurdity of navigating a world not built for women, has since metastasized into something more unsettling — a cultural shorthand that encourages us as women to preemptively disclaim our own competence before anyone else can do it for us.

The meme is funny. It is also, if you look at it long enough, doing something alarming. “I’m just a girl” functions as a permission slip — to fail, to be confused, to be overwhelmed by things that society has decided women shouldn’t have to manage. Which would be fine, even useful, if it existed in a vacuum. It doesn’t. It exists alongside the rise of the tradwife influencer, the mainstreaming of rhetoric that frames female ambition as unfeminine or threatening, and a political moment in which the gains of the last fifty years of feminism are being systematically challenged. In that context, the “I’m just a girl” exemption stops being a joke and starts being a posture, teaching us to reach for incompetence as armor before the world can strip our competence away.

Who Benefits When Women Don’t Trust Themselves?

In a world that feels increasingly destabilizing and complex, the tradwife offers a simple contract: relinquish the exhausting project of self-determination and receive, in exchange, clarity of purpose and the approval of a partner who has agreed to do the determining for you. The appeal is, in some ways, deeply human. What makes it worth examining is the specific cultural work it is doing in alignment with particular political movements that benefit from women who have been taught to distrust their own judgment.

The messaging is rarely explicit. It doesn’t need to be. It lives instead in the texture of the stories we tell — in whether the women depicted are portrayed as whole people or cautionary tales. In whether competence is shown as earned and sustainable or as a precarious performance that will inevitably crack. Andy Sachs, now in her forties, becoming a giggly, juvenile version of herself the moment she enters Miranda’s orbit is not, on its own, a political statement. Andy Sachs’s confidence draining one interrupted clause at a time — in spite of twenty years of demonstrated professional success and the film’s own implicit and explicit insistence that she has arrived — in the exact same ways and for the exact same reasons that she lost sight of herself in 2006 is making an argument, whether it wants to or not. That argument is simple: women like Andy don’t really change. Their accolades are surface. Underneath the bylines and the award speeches and the excellent coats (almost always furnished to her by a man), she is still, fundamentally, waiting to be validated.

The original Devil Wears Prada was, at least, honest about its cruelty. The pleasure of watching Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly was inseparable from the pleasure of watching a woman exercise power with absolute precision and zero apology — and the film held space for the nuance that created. Miranda was not a role model. She was a force of nature. The distance between what she demanded and what anyone could reasonably provide was the engine of the story, and it ran on something close to awe.

The sequel smooths those edges into something more palatable and considerably more insidious. The cruelties here are smaller, more deniable, delivered with the particular fluency of women who have learned to wound each other in ways that leave no visible mark. Miranda to Emily — now a force in her own right — is no longer the blunt instrument of the original but something subtler: the careful, consistent diminishment of a woman whose success has somehow failed to register as truly legitimate. Emily to Andy operates on similar frequencies. The put-downs have been upgraded to the register of professional association, which makes them easier to miss and harder to name.

What’s notable isn’t necessarily what is there but what isn’t. In the real-world environments that this film purports to represent, something has shifted in the last twenty years. The women who have built significant careers and significant platforms in major corporate settings are, by and large, not building them on the architecture of competitive diminishment. The podcast networks, the Substacks, the editorial collectives, the mentorship pipelines that actually exist: they are characterized far more often by a conscious, imperfect, but genuine effort to build differently. To create the rooms they weren’t invited into. To share the bylines and the platforms and the credit.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 does not know these women exist. Or if it does, it has decided they are less interesting than women who have not yet learned to stop punching sideways at each other. And a pivotal detail: the women of color in this film are present almost exclusively as assistants — capable, competent, and decorative in the background of rooms they are not invited to lead. Simone Ashley (as Amari) and Helen J. Shen (as Jin) are given roles that gesture at a future where they might ascend, but the film gives no indication it believes that future is imminent, or interesting, or worth depicting. A film about powerful women in prestige media in 2026 that cannot imagine what that power looks like when it isn’t white is not just a missed opportunity. It’s a choice. It’s the same choice the industry has been making for decades, dressed up in better clothes.

The Verdict

None of this is to say that The Devil Wears Prada 2 is completely unenjoyable. It has the bones of something genuinely fun. The cast is great and the clothes are drool-worthy. Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway and Stanley Tucci doing almost nothing remain much more interesting than most other actors doing anything: period.

But the pleasures are surface. Underneath them, the film is making choices — about who Andy is, about what success looks like on a woman, about how women treat each other when the stakes are high — that are worth naming. Not because the movie is a political treatise. It isn’t. But because culture is always holding up a mirror and forcing us to take a look at ourselves. Even when it’s pop culture. Especially when it’s pop culture. Especially when it insists that we’re all just having a little fun.

The devil is in the details and in 2026 the real moral of a movie like this one is that there are no singular devils here. These women are not ‘just’ girls. They never were. Serious film or fluffy blockbuster, the women of Runway deserved to be seen as the grown women they are and the trendsetters they purport to be. I’d like to see that movie — it’d be a lot more interesting than the one we got.

VERDICT: The Devil Wears Prada 2 — Boring, and a little too comfortable with it.

If you asked me what ‘radicalized’ me by the manosphere definition — by which I mean what made me ever-increasingly skeptical of interactions with conservative men — I couldn’t pick any particular instance. That’s not to say there aren’t specific instances. Rather there are so many that narrowing them down would take far more than the word count Substack makes available to me.

Most of these instances, anyway, are variations on the same theme: it is utterly uninteresting and often somewhat threatening to deal with men who are constantly, immovably convinced that they are the smartest person in the room. It is particularly alarming when you realize that these kinds of men — the sanctimonious, superior ones who nine times out of ten think they can land the plane or kill the bear or beat the professional female athlete in a game of two-on-two — have nothing to back themselves up. They are not well read or well versed in anything much and they are very well practiced in thinking they are entitled to whatever they want anyway.

I say this not to say not ‘all men’, but to get to wondering: what, if anything, are these men engaging with that convinces them so utterly that they know the shape of the world?

Calling out these men as conservative preemptively is perhaps unfair. This is an assumption I can admit is anecdotal more than provable, and also one belied by the fact that I’ve met plenty of left-leaning men who are deeply insufferable in their own ways. Those men, though, usually have some justification — real or perceived — for their sense of superiority. The ones who teeter on the precipice of being red-pilled I’ve struggled to figure out, outside of the usual overwrought hand-wringing around social media, where they are learning what they learn about society and their place in it. And more pressingly — is there anywhere they could be learning something better?

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As a lover of prestige media, then, it probably makes sense that a question rose to the fore: if these men are reading or listening or watching prestige media, what exactly is it they’re reading? The magazines and periodicals that come to mind when I think of cultural criticism: The New Yorker (my GOAT, y’all know by now), Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The Baffler, Salon. All of these are on the center-left-progressive side of the spectrum. Outside of a single and godawful run-in with Evie magazine, an experience so alarming I have not yet been able to bring myself to try again and refuse to hyperlink it here (Margaret Atwood, eat your heart out), I genuinely could not think of a single publication that engages in thoughtful critique of arts and culture and claims to lean right.

So: to the internet!

Quickly I discovered there’s only three obvious options: The National Review (I try to be open minded, but…no). The American Conservative (seriously: no). And the relatively innocuous sounding, by comparison, The New Criterion.

You can imagine which one I decided I could attempt to engage.

The New Criterion was founded in 1982 by Hilton Kramer, who left The New York Times to found the magazine amidst public, bombastic criticism that the paper was too left-leaning. He was a vocal proponent of the culture wars, consistently arguing that federal arts funding was overly focused on political correctness (though his specific arguments rarely survived scrutiny). If he were alive today, based on his prolific body of public writings, I’d wager he’d be a Never-Trump Republican type more than an Andrew Tate apologist.

Given that, cracking open the 2026 version of his publication was both absolutely what I expected and completely baffling.

In many ways, this History of European Art fever dream seems totally on brand for what this magazine is purported to be. On the flip side — if I did not know it was 2026 I would think, based on these visuals, that it was 1987. Even as a lover of museums, fine art, and classical music, exactly none of these offerings looked interesting, relevant, or like they might contain a hot — or even lukewarm — take. Until near the bottom I saw a theater review of Every Brilliant Thing.

As shows go, even for the uninitiated, this is the kind of piece that is pretty much universally beloved. (I’d say no spoilers, but it’s been out for over ten years, so I think we’ll be okay). Duncan MacMillan and Johnny Donahoe’s one-act is a first-person, interactive play about a man who, from childhood, creates a list of “brilliant things” in the hopes of helping his mother overcome her depression.

I haven’t yet caught the Radcliffe revival, but having seen both the HBO recording and a live production, I know the material. I was expecting that even a right-leaning publication would share in the joy of a show that, yes, veers a little after-school-special but mostly reminds us that shared humanity can get us through our darkest times.

Silly me. I should have remembered my well-earned lessons on sanctimony and superiority.

The review, by Kyle Smith — aka “America’s most cantankerous film critic” (he serves as film critic for the Wall Street Journal and theater critic for The New Criterion) — is a useful illustration of what happens when a critic approaches theater as text rather than as a live, participatory experience.

Smith’s main issue with the show, which has been continuously running in some form since 2014 after its 2013 debut, is that it’s too trite. A show that begins in the perspective of a child, that asks us to face the specters of mental illness and mortality and grief uses too many greeting card tropes to be worth of serious consideration? Per Smith:

Every Brilliant Thing, a one-person show (starring Daniel Radcliffe at the Hudson Theatre through May 24, then continuing with Mariska Hargitay), is a manic play about depression. It would have been more aptly titled “I need a lithium prescription.” …Radcliffe, bearded and earnest in sneakers and a sweatshirt, charm-bombs his way through the performance. He has to, given how weak the material is: it’s an undercooked, immature effort that relies heavily on an interactive gimmick.— Kyle Smith

Compare Smith’s interpretation to the review by Helen Shaw, chief theater critic for The New York Times:

The same day that I saw “Every Brilliant Thing,” I read about a Pew survey which found that American’s don’t trust their neighbors…the United States logged the highest proportion of respondents — 53 percent! — who had described their fellow citizens’ “morality and ethics” as bad. By the time I reached the theater, I had managed to get pretty despondent about it, and I was well on my way to a panicky spiral…But as “Every Brilliant Thing” went on, I started thinking about it all over again. Come to this theater, I thought at those 53 percent. I bet I know what might help. - Helen Shaw

Obviously, critics are allowed personal taste. How that taste develops, however, is what Acquired Taste is actually here for. The problem isn’t that Smith is wrong to have standards. The problem is that an entire publication has built its cultural framework around a set of values so narrow that genuine human feeling reads as sentimentality. And while, yes, there are plenty of things that aren’t traditional markers of cultural cache that deserve higher value or prestige — we’re gonna get there, and cars will be involved, promise — these night-and-day critiques reminded me, mostly, that a lot of Americans are living in genuinely parallel realities.

Of all the right-wing hot-takes that have trickled down to me, the one that scares me the most is the perspective of influencer Allie Beth Stuckey (I am not linking her — she truly does not deserve the clicks). Stuckey has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers through the premise that empathy is toxic and inherently opposed to Christianity.

Empathy, the act of understanding the feelings of others, is bad, in this worldview, because it encourages too much sympathy for other people. The act of demonstrating empathy means that you might comprehend that life is not lived identically, that people can suffer due to circumstances beyond their control, that privilege is real. And to acknowledge that is to acknowledge that individualism is not the highest pinnacle to which one can ascend.

I hesitate to reduce culture to binaries this stark. Acquired Taste exists precisely because I spent more than twelve years inside institutions that defined what culture was — and watched, consistently, as the people who most needed access to those spaces were the least likely to ever get it. That’s not a left or right problem. That’s a people problem. But even that perspective can easily tip from enthusiasm to sanctimony if not handled with care.

The same presumptuousness I so revile in those self-proclaimed smartest-men-in-the-room is something I can slip into just as easily — from a seat that has given me a voice in museums, theaters, concert halls, and convenings that most people will never be allowed inside.

I can’t say I’m a convert to The New Criterion. I can’t say I don’t worry — deeply, at a constant background hum — that empathy has become one of our greatest cultural dividers. That theater, one of the oldest forms of human storytelling, one rooted in a tradition of sharing and helping each other walk a mile in each other’s shoes, is potentially considered by over half the country too trite to meet its most fundamental mandate. Those worries won’t go away.

But I’ll keep trying, on the slim chance that the Kyles and Allie Beths of the world might still be persuaded that empathy isn’t the enemy of culture — it’s the whole reason culture exists. We can be hopeful but not naive. Thoughtful but not pedantic. Not sanctimonious, but self-assured, if we keep asking the question: how on earth did culture get here?

When I was 15 years old, my grandmother decided to treat a few friends and me to a day out at the museum. This was exciting for many reasons: we were broke, and this meant Grandma would cover our transit tickets into the nearest big city. Instead of pooling gas money for a ride to the nearest Sonic, we got to go into town: novel! And most importantly, perhaps, this was no ordinary museum exhibit. This was a retrospective entirely about clothes.

For four slightly outside-of-the-box teenage girls desperately trying to escape safe and somewhat Stepford-y suburbia, a whole collection of high-fashion seemed like a dream. Some afternoons we were known to carpool to Borders (RIP!) and browse the magazine section, oohing and aahing over Vogue spreads as if we had any clue what the sartorial differences between Dior and Prada even were. Fashion was proof that different could be celebrated, revered, put on literal pedestals and not disdained or scoffed at. Fashion was expensive in a way that looked at once effortful and effortless. Different from the expense that was tallied in our hometown by car brands and house sizes and the right kind of Ugg boots. Someday affording the clothes we saw on those pages meant the collegiate expectations, the AP test cramming, and the summer job stress had a purpose. Fashion was aspiration come to life.

You can imagine, then, why I’ve long been an enthusiastic observer of the Met Gala. Each year, I’d devour the wrap-ups and gorge myself on analyses even as fashion itself began to disappoint me in ways I hadn't anticipated. Around 15, I became undeniably plus-size. The brands whose silhouettes I’d coveted on that museum visit and in those Vogue pages were, likely, forever out of reach for me. Even when the small number of plus-size guests wore their clothes-as-art at the Gala each year, I knew I’d never be able to wear them, even if I got rich — those clothes were one-of-a-kind, never to be replicated in ready-to-wear collections or knock-off Target collaborations past a size 12.

All this to say, there’s always been things to frustrate about the Met Gala. Is it just a pet project for Anna Wintour? What is the difference between attending as a supporter (actually shelling out for a table as a philanthropist) versus receiving a coveted invitation to see-and-be-seen as a guest (attending on someone else’s dime as an advertisement for one’s personal brand and a model for various fashion houses and luxury brands)? Who and what is this gala even for?

Fashion for a cause — really!

If you’ve been lucky enough to live outside of the bubble of nonprofit galas — congratulations, you’re really not missing out on much. The premise works like this: individuals can buy tickets (usually in pairs or quads) or tables (packages usually for 6 people or more, with full tables seating 10 or 12). Most of the ticket or table purchase is a genuine, tax-deductible donation to whatever organization is throwing the party, minus the fair market value (a.k.a. hard cost) of whatever goods or services the attendees will enjoy throughout the evening. Usually this consists of catering and venue rental cost. For well-resourced (or sometimes poorly-resourced but highly aspirational organizations), this can include the costs of entertainment, party favors, and fancy decor as well.

The idea is that some people aren’t moved just by what an organization offers. Perhaps you are not a regular museum goer, but your client or business associate supports a museum. Conversely, you like to support a children’s aid organization. It’s considered good business for you to support each other. They might buy a table for 10 to their museum’s gala and invite you, for free. Implicitly, it’s understood that you’ll donate to the organization during their live auction or buy a raffle ticket. Your colleague will do the same at your organization’s gala in a few months time. Even for smaller organizations, if they’ve hit the point where they can afford to host a gala, ticket prices will run anywhere from $250 for a single discounted guest (think alumni of a program or affiliate) all the way up to $100,000 for a table (yes, even in small markets). Rinse and repeat.

It might be obvious already, but this model really only works well for a handful of nonprofits. Places that are the big fish in a small pond, or places that are such big fish they can’t be ignored even in an ocean of philanthropy. As you might imagine, lots of smaller organizations get caught up in the hope and glamour these big events provide — if The Metropolitan Museum of Art can raise $40 million in one night, can’t we?

Short answer: no. Longer answer: Hell no. Longest answer: well, you’ll see.

The Devil Decides the Guest Lists

Many things make the Met Gala somewhat singular in the world of nonprofit fundraising, but the only one that matters is not a thing but a person: Anna Wintour.

Given the model as I’ve explained it above, galas don’t tend to be choosy about who attends them. If you’re willing to shell out hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to support a nonprofit, they’re more likely than not to take your money, especially in this moment of economic precarity. In fact, hoping that unconnected guests discover your event and purchase tickets to it is part of the model too. The idea is, you pick great people to honor, their network is made aware that they’re being honored, and out of a sense of that quid-pro-quo spirit referenced above, they’ll pony up to support their friend, colleague, or someone they owe a favor. On paper, this practice is mostly positive. In practice, it means rooms as volatile as a New Jersey wedding with the same table-seating politics and room-temperature canapés. You can imagine that this aesthetic is not acceptable to a culture-maker and tour de force like Anna Wintour.

So, Wintour’s rules are different. Buying a ticket is nice — it’s not enough. If Ms. Wintour does not personally approve your attendance, you are not coming to the Met Gala. If a company buys a table and invites you, that is also not enough. Ms. Wintour must personally approve your attendance. Philanthropy is the side quest, not the purpose. The purpose is to define who we should aspire to. Isn’t it?

What do we mean when we talk about wealth?

Before we get into the Amazon of it all, let’s talk about money. You may remember my explainer on the structure and history of arts nonprofits in the United States.

That model, which came into existence in the 1950s, relies on an economic structure that no longer exists — specifically, on upper-middle-class donors. And in the past 30 years, that class has been quietly hollowed out.

Here's the short version: the net worth of the top 0.1% of American households has increased by a factor of 8 since 1996. The top 10% excluding that 0.1%: a factor of 6. The top 50% excluding the top 10%: a factor of 5. Everyone else: a factor of 4. Net worth has grown at twice the rate for the top POINT ONE PERCENT as it has for the bottom 50%. The professional classes — doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs — have accrued wealth, yes. Just significantly less than the people whose wealth is primarily based on capital, not income.

What this means for fundraisers: the pool of prospective donors has shrunk, but the amount that can be requested from a small, increasingly wealthy group of ultra-high-net-worth individuals has increased by that same factor of 8.

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with the biggest fashion event of the year. Well: a lot.

The Met Gala is not just a splashy party — it’s a fundraiser. Its job is to keep the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art running. For years, one night funded the Institute’s entire year.

But their staffers got savvy. Since 2016, the Institute has been building a quasi-endowment — a reserve fund that functions like an endowment but isn’t permanently restricted — one they hope will make them self-sufficient within five years. If it works, they won’t need the Gala to keep them going. One or two major donations from big spenders, however unpalatable, could set the Institute up for independent success forever. The Gala wouldn’t be a fundraiser. It would be a living exhibition.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: what does it mean to build a permanent public institution on the backs of people known for working against the public good? If the Gala stops being about fundraising because a few bad actors with big checkbooks have made operating goals irrelevant — then what is it actually for? The celebrity? The style? The Anna-Wintour-of-it-all? Or is it about catering to that ever-growing 0.1% whether they’ve rendered themselves morally obsolete or not?

Lauren Sánchez Bezos and Money as Taste

When word got out that pseudo astronaut, former journalist, and newlywed Lauren Sánchez Bezos would serve as honorary co-chair of the Met Gala alongside her husband, the generally reviled Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, many in the world of arts and culture publicly expressed confusion. Neither of the Bezoses inhabits the world of luxury as an arbiter or taste maker. They do not serve on the Met Museum’s nonprofit board. Though they recently gave some money to the CFDA through their Earth Fund, their philanthropic efforts pale in comparison to those of Jeff Bezos's ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott. Scott has given over six times more to charities than the Bezos couple, and shows no signs of slowing down. Somehow, this did not elevate her to honorary chair of the biggest fashion event in the world.

In private though, few expressed confusion about the Sánchez Bezos appointment at all. First, it’s worth noting that, in gala-speak, there is a significant difference between a chair or co-chair and an HONORARY chair or co-chair. The real chairs of this year’s Met Gala were announced months ago: Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour herself. These are the people who represent the event in public, get listed on the invitation, invite their friends and networks. They might even work with nonprofit staff to approve materials, prepare speeches, or serve as ambassadors to the event and organization. Honorary co-chairs on the other hand do one thing and one thing only: give a crap ton of money.

And here, on paper at least, the Bezoses delivered — sort of. Rumor has it they gave a $10 million donation to sponsor the event (though that has yet to be confirmed by either camp). By any measure that would normally be a significant sum of money. That is, until we remember the Bezoses actual net worth.

According to Forbes May 2026 estimates, Jeff Bezos is worth somewhere between $224 and $278 billion. Since I’m nice, I’ll use the lower number for our calculation. That means Bezos’ ‘generous’ donation to the Met Gala was a whopping 0.0045% of his net worth. Let me say that again. Bezos and Sánchez Bezos gave a donation worth not 40% — not 4% — not .4% — but POINT-ZERO-ZERO-FOUR PERCENT of their net worth to one of the most notable nonprofit fundraisers in the world, and we were all asked to applaud.

If not generosity, then, perhaps Sánchez Bezos’ participation could be attributed to interest. This is a woman who has been trying — publicly and desperately — to be taken seriously as a tastemaker for the past few years.

This is not a woman who has ever heard or been interested the concept of ‘quiet luxury’. Sánchez Bezos is not a woman content with the quiet but immediately recognizable indicators of wealth: Birkin bags, Van Cleef bracelets, and Cartier watches that others in her tax bracket (or lack thereof) have been displaying for years. She wants opulence so opulent some call it gauche. The most lace, the most diamonds, the most décolletage.

The issue, of course, is that when one’s aesthetic can be summed up as ‘the most’, the subtleties that signal actual taste disappear entirely. While Bezos may have been inspired by Madame X, it’s clear she doesn’t understand it. The parts of the portrait that make it memorable: the velvety texture of the bodice, the gathered draping of heavy, matte silks in the skirt, the vulnerable line of the neck displayed by the chignon, the natural width of the chest that juxtaposes dainty femininity and masculine breadth — all of these are left behind in favor of modern opulence. The imperfections that define a painting so memorable it is how some define the Met’s collection are thrown away. Imperfections are failures when every perfection can be bought.

Cowardice is Contagious

You may be asking: why does any of this even matter? It’s clear that very few people are aspiring to the aesthetic of Lauren Sánchez Bezos. No one is watching the Met Gala for the donors, right? They’re watching it for the celebrities.

You might think that, but remember — the celebrities are at the mercy of the donors too. And even the most successful celebrity is not part of the Bezos bracket; they’re part of that top 10% we talked about before. That group matters enormously, because they're the group for whom aspiration and ascension historically meet. We need the top 10% because they prove that meritocracy exists — or at least, they’re supposed to. They show through their actions and tastes what the rest of us are supposed to look for to define ourselves. That’s what my friends and I, desperate for a sense of belonging and motivation, were looking for in the pages of Vogue at age 15.

This is where the Met Gala theme — and folks’ adherence to it — shows more than it might intend as well. When celebrities are, as a collective, feeling hopeful, they take risks. When they take risks, social change feels possible. Take, for instance the 2021 Gala (pre-Trump 2.0) versus the Gala yesterday:

The 2021 theme was “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion”. This year’s “Costume Art”, exploring the body as a curated object. The 2021 clothes are striking: risky to the point of breathless, almost exciting discomfort. AOC’s message is so bold the House Ethics Committee tried to make an example of her, forcing her to pay the difference on what they believed to be the fair market value of the dress. Lil Nas X took Americana as royal mandate, with a striking gold cape demanding the viewer’s full attention. The 2026 outfits, while still arresting, feel comparatively soulless. What does it say about progress or lack thereof when, five years later, Amanda Seyfried is wearing what amounts to a typical princess dress, and Connor Storrie — a breakout star of queer-romance fame — is wearing something whose main risk is a whisper of femininity displayed on a masculine body?

If any conclusion can be drawn from the Met Gala this year, it’s this: we should all be a little bit scared. Style reflects society, and the styles on display last night should be sounding some alarms. Predictability. Imitation not derivation. Display not demonstration. When the ultra-wealthy get to make aspirational destinations their playground, everyone loses. The art is less creative. The guests take less risks. The institutions make more money. The ultra-rich don’t notice. And we all end up staring at the pages of Vogue, 15 years old again, wondering if we can ever, ever make it.