Lately I have been wearing the really chunky, severe glasses that say: “I’m an intellectual.” It doesn’t matter. It’s not enough. I’m thirty-two, but people still think I just fell off the turnip truck. I must have one of those faces that looks like it needs advice. It doesn’t make any sense, because I’m a Scorpio rising, which basically means I have RBF.

“You need to hang out with normal people.” People love to say this to me. I’m like what does that even mean. It’s like they’re telling me to take my vitamins. Or like they’re telling me I’m fake and deluded, that they have access to greater depth and authenticity than I do.

I’m very suspicious of this type of advice. “Normal” means something different to everyone, but when someone in my present life tells me to just be “normal,” I assume they mean either “Marxist,” or “basic,” as if either is a virtue of its own accord.

“Normal” right now is the equivalent of “good,” in my previous life, in the fundie sect. “You need to hang out with good girls like [insert name here],” the matrons used to say to me, nodding at the most boring, conventional, trad girl alive. “She comes from a good family.”

“I come from a good family,” I wanted to say. “I wear skirts and go to meeting three times a week. I love God. I love God a LOT. Isn’t that enough? I’m good. I’m normal.”

Okay I think that’s what it is. It isn’t my face or my birth chart. It’s the fact that I left a fundie sect. When people hear “fundie sect,” they hear “turnip truck.” It’s completely understandable. I’d want to give advice too, in their shoes.

People want you to be part of their “team,” once you leave something like that. “Of course you’re done with all that now,” they seem to say. “But now that you’re living in reality like me, you will become (Catholic / Episcopalian / Agnostic / Libertarian / MAGA / Leftist / Vegan / Rural / Urban / Liberal) as all normal people are!”

I snapped at a guy at a party last week. He implied that I was a fascist, in that wormy way people do when they like you but are still covering their bases. “In case she ever comes out as a fascist,” I imagine them saying, “you can’t say I didn’t hold her accountable.” It’s the same move the matrons pulled, shoving and shouldering me into compliance.

Oh, it annoys me. I feel like an abused dog. I want to print out my “interesting life” resume, air out all my dirty laundry alongside my virtuous bona fides. I’m itching to divulge all the twists and turns of my life. “If you’re going to put me in a box, put me in the ‘interesting person’ one!” I want to say. “Not the turnip truck!” I left that fundie sect of my own accord. I carved out a life after losing my whole community, simply by posting. I’ve been on the run and in hiding, kissing and telling. Why would I obviously, immediately fall into a predetermined, pre-set category after all that? What’s normal?

Look at me, still begging to be filed away.

You know what would have been really nice after leaving the sect? Some grace.

Today in Brooklyn I ran into a man from my ancient past, a statistics PhD student I had intense chemistry with in my early 20s, when I was in grad school in Seattle. I would bump into him on campus and in the city over and over again without trying, magnetized to his stoic personality, laconic affect, intelligence. He told me today that his impression — as he recalled — was that I thought of him as a Jewish devil. I said I thought no such thing. I was just in a cult at the time of our meeting, and terrified of giving him the wrong idea. I did not remind him of the time we got ice cream and sat on a soccer field in the evening as I filibustered until I couldn’t anymore and then the silence fell and the air between us became so thick and taut that I couldn’t stand it and I got up and ran away. I’m sure that’s what he was thinking of.

He said the last thing I told him, at our final meeting at a statistics conference in 2018, was to read Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism.

That must have been my Red Scare era, I said. And I reflected on how far I’d come.

My interpretation of Lasch then was filtered through the dirtbag left, and so not a nuanced read, but a confirmation of a worldview I was already circling in the woke mire of late 2010s Seattle. In that environment, it was really attractive to think that all our problems societally and individually boiled down to our desire for self-preservation. It was an idea that had that bite of realism to it, that sting of accountability, puritanical, and I remembered why I loved it so much at the time. It was an exact copy of my existing outlook, where every impulse and desire of my heart had to be held up to the light of God, turned over and examined, to ensure that it was indeed aligned with the Lord and not an artifact of my own selfishness. Accountability was what was missing from society, I thought. This ability to look at yourself clear-eyed in the mirror and accept the cold reality of the situation and your own role in it. The first step to redemption.

Lasch’s thesis, loosely understood by me, was that the narcissistic society focuses too much on the idea of the higher self, without taking hold of the harder commitments of a rich inner life, the stuff that actually forms its foundation. I read Lasch forward into my Seattle life, which included therapy culture, with its constant validation of the self, and cancel culture and the resulting self-flagellation of woke. All these adaptations relentlessly kept the focus on the self, and I felt them drowning me. Even though woke’s version of accountability was structurally similar to my Protestant guilt, it couldn’t compete with it. It was too communal. Not the same, and not as strict as my intense individual commitment, my soul brought for judgment before God.

But the self as an unmitigated narcissist? God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. That I knew to be true. Narcissism as a skeleton key was the perfect temptation for me.

The deeper problem, I came to realize much later, was that Lasch’s analysis, or my misinterpretation of it, bred a strain of thought that felt comfortable discarding the higher self altogether. “The human condition is narcissism and self-interest,” it seemed to say, “so why try? The least you can do is be honest — brutally, unflinchingly honest.” But in order to look in the mirror and feel the sting of your own sin, you have to buy into a worldview that includes the possibility of something better. The wickedness of man only means something if God is there to see it. Otherwise it doesn’t make a difference, and you’re left in an identical state of vanity as the positive narcissist, never sure if you’re free of your own evil, always clawing at yourself, living under the fear that there is no way to be better. It is the same vanity as an overwrought woke mea culpa, stripped of pretense, and calling the stripping a virtue.

Fear was the devil of my twenties. The fear that made me run from a kiss is the same fear that kept me locked inside the community that bred this scrupulosity in the first place, a community that did not actually live out their stated commitment to the redemptive message of Christianity. When you’re obligated to doubt yourself, to constantly hold your heart up to the light looking for spots, you aren’t free to run around in the light, free from worry. What an exhausting way to live.

Earlier this summer, someone explained to me how to discern the voice of God. “The voice of God isn’t a bully voice,” she said. “He always encourages you and reminds you of who He made you to be. That’s how you’ll know He’s speaking to you. If there is something you need to know about yourself, you can trust that the Holy Spirit will reveal it to you.” She reminded me that the nature of God’s voice is the same as the whole nature of Christianity, which is purely positive. That the same God who sent Jesus to redeem us is the same God who wants the best for us. I don’t know why this was so mind-blowing to me as a lifelong Christian, but it was. It shifted something for me, brushing the dust off an old thing in my heart, untangling some knots that had been there since before my Seattle days. I had a hard time accepting the possibility that there was some pure good thing available to me, as if all comfort was false comfort unless it came wrapped in thorns. It’s not that I was being asked to relieve myself from accountability, but that I was being asked to believe God when He said He had already relieved me.

Narcissism keeps you locked in front of the mirror. God takes the mirror away.

I read this piece at Secret Ballot’s New York reading ‘Secret Agent,’ at Nightclub 101 on July 31, 2026. Secret Ballot out now.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Underneath my furs, my sodden negligee clung to my supple curves. I was on the run, and needed a place to hide. Shelter appeared in the form of an old hotel, windows glowing orange in the rain. I slunk in and shed my coat. The air was warm from the fire, and smelled of cigarettes and sin.

The bartender didn’t like the look of me.

“I didn’t know you could smoke in here,” I told him, by way of conversation.

“You can’t.” he grunted, and turned away.

“Bad service for a bad girl…” I thought to myself, and took a look around the room.

The hotel wasn’t as shabby as it seemed on the outside. Men in well-cut suits milled around the bar, sipping expensive whiskey. One of them played an old standard on the grand piano in the corner, and real crystal hung above our heads, twinkling in the firelight. “I’m not that kind of girl,” I wanted to tell the bartender, “Not usually.” but stopped myself just as he deposited a martini under my nose.

It was ice cold and dirty, just the way I liked. “I didn’t order this,” I exclaimed, but he nodded at the shadows behind me. I turned, and that’s when I saw him.

I could tell he cut a striking figure, even as he was tucked into the corner banquette. He wore all black, with horn-rimmed glasses. A smile softened his jaw as we locked eyes. He lifted his own martini and hooked his finger, beckoning me over.

“For me?” I purred, slipping into the banquette like silk on glass.

“Who else?” he said, his velvet voice betraying a vaguely European accent. “Beautiful women are like water in the desert. Tell me, are you real or a mirage?”

“That depends,” I said, letting my knee brush his under the table, “on what you’re thirsty for.”

He made no movement and took a long draw from his glass. “Everything, and nothing. Where are you from?”

“Around.”

“No.” he said firmly, his eyes raking over me slowly, though whether with hunger or appraisal I couldn’t tell. “Where are you from? I could almost draw a map with your face.” He drew close suddenly, his breath caressing my ear. “The line of your nose tells a story. Someone a long time ago, chose very well.”

“You flatter me.” I said, blushing.

“I never flatter.” he replied. His eyes were ice-blue but they burned with a pale heat. “I follow the data. And I only tell the truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“Truth is the most seductive thing in the world. Especially the truth you aren’t supposed to say. My God, your maxilla is flawless.” He paused, as if catching himself. “Look at me, falling back into my old habits. I suppose that’s the effect of a beautiful woman.”

“Old habits?” I asked, letting my lips linger on the rim of my glass. I could smell his cologne mixing with the scent of my perfume.

“I used to believe some ugly things. Very ugly.”

“Like what?”

“It doesn’t matter. I gave all that up long ago. Reason is the only thing that matters to me, the only thing that ever mattered. When I followed reason to its end, I began to see the beauty of enlightened centrism.”

“What’s that?” I asked, biting my lip.

“It’s very simple,” he answered, “It’s about two things no one cares about anymore— nuance and moderation. Some men want a God, others want anarchy. I stand in the middle and tell them both the uncomfortable truths, the truths they don’t want to hear.”

“That’s so brave,” I breathed, “Don’t they get mad at you? Aren’t you afraid?”

“I’m a lamb,” he said, biting into an olive. “I never fight back. You know that old line: Thirty years of the Borgias produced Michelangelo. Well two-hundred-and-fifty years of brotherly love and democracy produced me, and I’m no more dangerous than a cuckoo clock.” He giggled, then swept his gaze over me once again, this time warmly. “But you’re too young to know about that. I want to know more about you. You look like Lucrezia herself. Forgive me, but what are you, some kind of Slav? Moravian ancestry?”

“I’m Mexican.” I said, and slipped my hand into my purse.

He laughed, delightedly. “Of course you are. A Castiza varietal, surely.” He waved at the bartender, put his hand up for two more martinis. “Enough of this cruel topic. Let’s play a game. I’ll name something, and you tell me if you’re for or against. Yes?”

“Go on.”

“Liberalism.”

“A great innovation.” I said, as the bartender brought us new glasses.

“A rational woman. Due process?”

“In favor.” I cooed, swirling my martini.

“Excellent. Illicit love?”

“The only kind of love for me,” I sighed, and switched our drinks.

“Good girl.” he said. “But why does love have to be illicit? Why can’t love be love?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you do, kitten.” He cast his eyes down lasciviously, brought his body next to mine. “Don’t play stupid. It’s logical. It’s biological. Every man in this room turned to look at you the moment you walked in the door.”

He drained his second martini and looked at me with heated eyes, now black in the firelight. “You know, they would have turned to look even if you had been ten years younger.”

He took my face in his trembling hand. “Empirically speaking, they would have turned even if you had been fifteen years younger.”

His lips were white as he brought them to meet mine. “even twent—“

He fell to the floor.

I put on my fur and disappeared into the night.

Blood is thicker than water, but faith is thicker than blood. Was it faith that bound us? I get confused.

The long hair and skirts were easy to get rid of. The personality has been harder. I know how to act in this environment better than I know how to be.

How am I supposed to act now?

Before, it wasn’t easy, but it was familiar. Be self-effacing. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Qualify every statement that could be seen as worldly. No makeup please. You look better natural. Just bare nails for me, thanks. What a beautiful girl, with a servant spirit. Get up early, make breakfast for everyone. Stay up late, do the dishes. Can you take the leftovers to the convention grounds? The workers will love them. Does anyone have a shawl, my shoulders are bare. I’m just so thankful. Get choked up a little. I’m just so thankful for the Lord’s provision.

We took our wins by the teaspoonful. They were reassurances. Things we would say to each other to soothe ourselves, that we were reasonable, that we weren’t too far gone. Look at the sister worker, wearing bright colors. Couldn’t do that twenty years ago. Look at the sister worker dancing. David danced, didn’t he? Sue me, I’m a bad Christian. I go to concerts. I watch movies. I’m a normal person. I do things a little differently. God still loves me. We don’t have the workers over anymore, ever since... We don’t go to convention anymore. Things are changing.

I’m still going to meeting. It’s complicated. I love my meeting. There are good people in it. Not everyone is bad. It’s hard. There are good people trying to change things. It’s so hard.

The fields are sunburnt and yellow and the evergreens rise up over them, turning the mountains blue in the distance. Every morning the fog lifts over the grass and leaves the air dry and clear. I feel the sun burning my skin the same way it did when I was a girl. I smell wild blackberries on the vine. I can taste the difference in the water. I know this place and the people in it, better than any other place in the world. I want to sink into it, melt and merge with it, so that it can hold my grief and hold me too.

I say hello how are you, M., it is SO good to see you, how have you been? to a man I have known since I was twelve years old, and he shakes my hand and meets me with silence. I let the silence hang even though I know I could fill it. I feel the weight of thirty years of practice filling the silence. How are your children? I could say. How are your parents? I could say. How is your sister? How is your wife?

I don’t fill it because I know he won’t. I smile and he smiles and we stand there in silence and I am filled with rage. HOLD MY GRIEF I want to say, IT’S YOUR FAULT IT’S THERE, I want to say, YOU ARE MALFORMED, I want to say, YOUR PASSIVITY IS A DEMON FROM HELL, I want to kick and scream and shake him. He is everything I hate the most.

I let the silence sit, I let him stand there smiling like a demon from hell and I let us both be uncomfortable until someone else breaks the circle. Nothing I do or don’t do matters here, because I’ve already left. Nothing I did or didn’t do mattered before, either. Evil surrounds me and it is wrapped in beauty.

I hate the Pacific Northwest, because I am from here, and because it has been rotten to me.

Woke and anti-woke seem quaint now, don’t they? The he-said/she-said of our time. The energy just isn’t there anymore. The landscape is changing. We’re in a moment of transition, our tribes and paths rapidly realigning. The most pressing question I think, lies in the rationalist’s defense of AI, and in humanity’s defense of itself.

I don’t know how widespread this is outside of the SF bubble I’m privy to online, the idea that LLMs may be conscious, and that humanity should be optimized (they’re related). But I’m afraid these ideas are going to take root quickly, because the conditions are right for them to. It is not enough right now to say human lives matter (“they just matter, okay?”), as ridiculous as that sounds, as obvious as that may be to you and me, I don’t believe it’s obvious to a lot of very powerful people. Transhumanist ideology is going to storm us at the gate, a symptom of the broader push for optimization in all spaces, from genetics (eugenics) to prediction markets (“truth” seeking mechanisms)1. All these things will be framed, are currently being framed as advancements, unquestioned goods, even as they depend on an understanding of human life as something expendable, and human weakness as something that ought to be extinguished rather than accommodated.

I believe secular humanists, liberals (I’m sorry if I’m not using the proper or precise language for this) share the same intuitions religious people do about humanity, primarily that there is something special about being human, extending to the idea that consciousness is a distinct, immaterial thing, and that there is such a thing as a soul. I don’t mean to say that secular humanists treat these as settled questions, but it seems that we (the West? Liberal democracies?) came to an agreement a long time ago to close the door on the question that humanity is special. It’s the foundation of our society. A self-evident truth, a truth that applies to the woke and the anti-woke alike. Even if you don’t agree about the particulars of the soul, life is better, society functions smoothly, if we act as if it exists.

But leaving these questions unsettled, letting them lie dormant and rely on consensus without re-examination has left a gap in the armor. The secular left has no robust defense of humanity in the face of AI, even though all their assumptions depend on the belief that humans are intrinsically valuable. It is not enough now to say that people matter and the weak should be defended. “Why?” says the rationalist, thinking through things logically. If consciousness is reducible to a mechanical process in the brain, then surely consciousness can emerge from mechanical processes in machines. Then machines are no different from humans. And if machines are no different from humans, then why shouldn’t they be given moral status? And if machines have moral status, and are better than us at thinking, then why shouldn’t we let them run everything, including human governance? Why not let things run their course, why not let the strong prevail? That’s what evolution is. We’re the weak link. We’re the next to fall.

“Why” is not an easy question to answer without God. The secular defenses are thin in the face of optimization logic, indeed, the secular defenses rely on a form of the very same optimization logic they’re meant to rebuff. If human life is worth preserving because of our capacity for reason, that leaves the most vulnerable - the disabled and mentally ill - outside the fold. “Potential” for reason isn’t a thick enough patch. If human lives matter because of our sentience, then machine lives matter for the same reason. The second you adopt the materialist’s frame you’re vulnerable to the full force of their optimization logic.

I am optimistic. I don’t think you need to be religious to feel that humanity is special. I think this feeling is baked into our bones, and anyone who feels convicted that life is worth defending will be forced into alignment very soon, and forced to confront their assumptions about what makes human life special. You obviously don’t need religion to feel this, but I do think you need something transcendent to defend it, and I do feel like there’s an opportunity to draw on the long and robust tradition of defending the weak that Christianity already has. People are hungry for the language and moral certainty that the church can offer, something you could feel in how much the public responded to the pope’s encyclical2 last month, even outside Catholic circles. We are on the brink of something new.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in the Big Apple this summer and so feel like fashioning myself after de Tocqueville — appropriate, I think, as we often call DC the Paris of America (don’t laugh) — observing all the ways in which the seat of culture differs from the seat of power. I’ve been doing things like Pilates classes, art museums, church, walking in the park, book parties, philosophy reading groups, classical music concerts, rooftop salons, dinners with friends, drinks with friends, Broadway plays, off-Broadway plays, bad dates, good dates, and dates in between, and all those things are lovely and fun, but the point I’d like to make today is about readings.

There are readings nearly every night in New York. The city can sustain a literary lifestyle DC wouldn’t even know to dream of. Every week, four times a week and twice as often on weekends, little bars in Bushwick and underground rooms in the East Village and stylish shops on Orchard Street fill with platinum blond men in skimpy singlets and women with back tattoos and nose piercings and tons of tiny rings on their fingers and big tinted sunglasses on their heads, wearing the ugliest shoes you’ve ever seen, sitting criss-cross on the ground, hanging two off a barstool, bags dripping with Labubu children, espresso martinis and glasses of Fernet in hand, all listening to three graduates of the New School read about bad sex with old men, before descending to the curb like bees to inhale smoke and talk of things I can’t imagine, but knowing myself, can’t be that different from the things I talk about with my friends on the curb in the evenings after any event.

Anyway, I’ve been taken aback by the response to these readings online. They’re all relatively harmless, aside from the smoking and drinking, accessible to all and fun to attend. I love seeing what the young people are wearing and hearing their experimental fiction and strange prose, even when it’s bad. I covered one such reading — the Woah Vicky night (a funny and sweet event) — and was annoyed by the online vitriol in the wake of it, a response which I felt was totally unmatched to the actual experience of attending it. The criticisms I see often have a moralizing edge, with some heavy implication that the readers and attendees are right-wing sympathizers. You would think, then, that the readings themselves carry Nazi propaganda, but they rarely do. At worst — and rarely is it this bad; I’ve really only seen examples of this among the youngest readers — they are overly self-referential or trying too hard to be edgy, but in the way that was modish five or even ten years ago, when subversion really was grounded in anti-woke shock and awe. The outdated and over-the-top edginess is impossible to take seriously. When a “hot take” is coming from the mouth of a 22-year-old would-be-hedonist private school graduate, you can’t help but get the impression that he’s a little boy trying very much to fill Oscar Wilde’s shoes, or she’s a little girl copying what the big girls did immediately before her. It’s the clunky, indulgent edginess borne from an upbringing of too much spoon-fed liberalism and it’s easy to dismiss.

I also keep finding myself thinking that the whole lot — critics, readers and attendees alike — would benefit from going to any real right-wing event in DC and feeling for themselves what the difference is. The edginess in New York is purely aesthetic, preening and posturing for smaller and smaller crumbs of transgression. The stakes are simply higher in Washington. I know the cost of friendship with people who have fallen in line with the administration, who test to see how much you will take, how loyal you really are. Spend enough time around men who ask what your genetic background is (“No, like, what’s the percent breakdown between Spanish and indigenous on your Mexican side?”) and women who joke about how unfunny women are when those men and women also have positions of power and you’ll better understand the cost. Lose whole groups of friends in six months’ time and you’ll know better than anyone.

But again, the edginess in New York is on a low simmer and has died down a lot from what I saw in New York in 2021-2023, a post-pandemic funhouse where online and real life merged in real time and everyone wanted to hang out and play. That’s the thing that has kept more than anything — the desire to hang out in person. Readings feel a little intellectual, which is good, and are creative, which is better, but they are mostly an excuse to be around other people, which is great. What was transgressive in the Biden era is passe now, boring and predictable, so much so that I have hope for something sweeter to emerge culturally, if only because of this collective sense of boredom and this desire to be around other people. Woah Vicky exemplified this, in my opinion, by relentlessly reading about God and Jesus. Her sincerity shined in spite of her over-the-top affect, piercing through the ironic guard hanging over the room, and I actually teared up when she asked us to stand up so she could pray over us. It’s such a relief to believe.

“Just be a good person,” says the gets-along-with-everybody man. And I think I know what he means.

“I never burn bridges,” he beams. “Live and let live.”

“What a good man,” we’re meant to say. “Beloved by all.”

"Mormons are good people,” say others. “By their fruits shall ye know them, and their fruits are wholesome family living. Look, they’re even having more babies. That can’t be wrong.”

“And they’re so nice!” they add, “just look.”

“What a good people,” we’re meant to say. “A little different from us, but they’re okay. They’ve got the lives we want.”

“Your religion is cruel,” says the devout man. “My faith is more welcoming. In my faith, all good people go to heaven, regardless of their beliefs. In my faith, it only matters that they are good.”

“My God is great,” he proclaims. “Why shouldn’t He reward the good?”

“What a generous God,” we’re meant to say. “Why would I worship a God who wants less?”

“There are terrible diseases,” says the geneticist. “Diseases that can ruin your child’s chance of having a good life. Don’t you want good outcomes for your child? The best outcomes?”

“The kindest thing you can do for your future children,” he smiles, “is give them the best chance at a good life.”

“A good life,” we’re meant to say, “is what I want for my children.”

“I knew a man once who was very intelligent. He had the opportunity to go to a big school. To get his PhD in rocket surgery. In who knows what. But he felt a weight on his heart about it. Every night he would pray. He had no peace. And then God revealed this to him. Are you listening? There is no reward in seeking your own glory. Only in staying obedient in your place.”

“Be gentle, meek, and obedient in your place,” says the preacher. “Like Christ.”

“What a good man,” we’re meant to say. “His reward will be in heaven.”

One thing I really value in other people is a singular vision. A feel for vibes. My best friend has this in spades. I was always so glad to visit her over the years, not only because she was my old friend, but because her apartments felt so good. They absorbed her warm spirit and multiplied it. Their charm was distinct, no matter where she lived, decorated with chunky green dressers from Facebook marketplace, vintage typewriters, ornate frames and colorful glassware. Her outfits always surprised and delighted me too, her closets packed with long bead necklaces and vintage jackets and silk tops she found at the thrift store. I was in awe!

I would try to imitate her sometimes with consignment finds: vintage boots from The Real Real, a real leather purse from the flea market. “Those places are overpriced,” she would chastise. She was right, of course, but I didn’t know how to play the alternative. Every time I went to Goodwill I would get overstimulated and leave early. I didn’t have the eye. “She has a gift,” I would tell friends. “She’s a Gemini.” I never understood how she did it, and I never thought to ask her.

Until last week!

I visited her over Memorial Day, deep in rural America, where there are 50 thrift shops per square mile, and FINALLY — twenty-two years into our friendship — she revealed to me to the science of thrift shopping. I was able to buy a whole new summer wardrobe using this newfound wisdom, and I’m going to describe all the things I learned here. Maybe these are obvious to you, but I’m high-key disembodied and they weren’t obvious to me.

Look at the tags

This is labor-intensive, but I found it meditative. We would hit the racks early in the day, fat iced coffee in hand, filled to the brim (My preference: 20oz cold brew, extra ice, thick splash of half and half). I started at the women’s tops, size agnostic. I would take a hold of each blouse, scanning the laundry tags for natural fibers: cotton, linen, cotton-linen blends, silk, leather, and wool. By the time I finished, I got the hang of feel, and was able to move even faster on instinct alone. 100% cotton has a pleasing scratchiness and a weight to it that synthetic fibers can’t replicate. Silk is rare — you can tell because it feels like nothing else. I made a few exceptions for cool pieces, but the majority of the clothing I found was 100% natural fiber.

Shop the wrong sections

I looooove boy clothes. I have a body type that looks good in tailored clothing and oversized fits, and it’s a fact that boy clothes are often better constructed and hardier than women’s clothing. It’s a win-win. I found fantastic 100% cotton, oversize shirts and sweaters in the men’s section, and I also figured out a trick for men’s jeans, which are often better than the women’s section, which is filled with skinny jeans and elastic fabrics. Go up 2-3 sizes from your own size, and know what length works for you. I’m a 25 in women’s jeans and found the best baggy fit for me was a men’s size 30x32 (30 waist, 32 inseam/length). Another trick I found on TikTok was to line up the side seam of the jeans or pants with the seam of the pants you’re currently wearing, and check if the waist wraps around and the opposite side’s seam lines up.

I also found great stuff in the boy’s section, every inch of the housewares section, the linens (I kept finding gorgeous old lace table covers and handkerchiefs. These make excellent sarongs and headscarves), the frames, the art, nightwear, etcetera. Don’t discount any part of the store.

Go in with a plan

Thrifting became 1000% easier for me once I went in with a vision. This was the biggest game changer by far. Before, I went in without really knowing what I wanted to buy, or what my interests were. This time, I went in knowing I wanted some very specific things: silver accents for my apartment, unique trinket dishes, some trendy pieces (grommet details, striped long-sleeve tees, y2k bags, fringe, cord pendant necklaces), and some basics (a yellow t-shirt, a slip skirt, a long black dress, silver jewelry). This allowed me to significantly filter the chaos, and also opened up the door for creativity. Bringing us to:

Adopting a vibe-based mentality

You have to leave rigidity at the door when you’re thrifting, because you’re never going to find the EXACT thing you want. And that’s a good thing! Take a good long look at your Pinterest boards, your inspiration pictures, art and rooms and places that make you feel good, and isolate the elements of those things that contribute to the overall feel. The details. A pop of red in a large white room. A piece of clothing with silver hardware. Let those categories live in your head and expand out. Give them grace. Get more abstract, from a point of specificity. Allow the categories to be based on a feeling. A vase that feels raw. Witchy-looking shoes. With this method, I found an itme that matched basically every category I had going in.

Look for imperfections

The charm of thrifting is in discovering something one-of-a-kind that other people can’t find or replicate easily. Filter items with that in mind. Look for hand-painted ceramics, old frames and linens, unusual patterns and flaws. That’s all the charm!

Know the brands that work

Gap has a lot of 100% cotton. So does Ralph Lauren. Vintage Ann Taylor and Banana Republic still hold up, same with Sag Harbor. Chico’s. Coldwater Creek (!!!) I’m still developing a sense for it all, so I’m sure this list will grow over time.

Get to know your thrift store ecosystem

In my friend’s region, different thrift stores have different strengths. One of them had an expansive jewelry section, another was great for purses, another was the go-to all-purpose store, and the most chaotic one — the Goodwill bins — had a great furniture section where every piece was only $4.97, no matter how big. My friend had a sense for when each thrift store restocked, and had a rhythm for shopping them, so she never exhausted any of them, or herself.

Go prepared

It’s important to have the right thrifting companion and the right thrifting accessories. Thrifting with my best friend was the perfect bonding activity. We were basically partaking in an ancient art, like gathering berries in Mesopotamia. We have very different styles, so we were never competing over the same items. At each thrift store we would split off and do our own thing for an hour or so, then reconvene to compare finds, making sure the other didn’t have thrift goggles on. She also came prepared with Bath & Body Works hand sanitizer (remember “warm vanilla sugar”???) and tons of reusable bags in the back of her car, plus disinfecting wipes and spray for cleaning the shoes, bags, trinkets and jewelry at home. Platonic ideal thrifting spree. Also, just like grocery shopping, never go thrifting hungry. It will impact your cart.

In my regular life I am a statistician. I am not a fancy statistician, but I do have a bachelor’s degree in the subject, some sense of how modeling and machine learning work and a professional specialization in survey design (small data). I am confident in saying that even survey analysis relies on the same general concepts that LLMs do.

I’ve always said I like statistics because it corresponds with the right side of the brain, the side I already favor. There is something in the way statistics works that mirrors how I naturally think. Categories, vibes, hand-waving. Statistics, with its confidence intervals, its probabilities and tensions, captures these looser, ephemeral parts of life better than pure math does — pure math being very pure indeed, until you get really into it, but the opportunity cost there is high. You can’t get into the philosophical part of math unless you’ve got a knack for it, and even then it’s hard. Statistics is rigorous too, but it’s also more ready-to-go. It matches how my brain already models reality.

I tried to explain my love of statistics to a friend recently. When you design a survey, you ask people a bunch of questions. You can’t ask about everything, but you ask as much as you can. The answers to these questions will reveal something to you about the individual and the group the individual belongs to. You may find that one person really likes broccoli, and that the entire group tends to favor green vegetables overall. That’s straightforward. The real fun of surveys, though — as in the fun of life — lies in what’s unsaid.

Say you survey a large group of people, asking them about their lifestyle. You ask them some demographic questions too, like how tall they are. You’re testing a hypothesis: does eating green vegetables make people taller, on average? You find that it does, to a significant degree. People who eat green vegetables are so much taller than people who don’t, that it might make sense to conclude that green vegetables make people taller. You notice other things in the survey. The taller group lives at high altitude. The taller group prefers harp music. The taller group eats a lot of eggs and green vegetables, but they almost never eat beans. Suddenly, the green vegetables/height correlation is not the most interesting finding.

None of these things are supposed to go together — there is no obvious relationship between harp music and beans — and yet they do. They cluster. Every time you find one, you find the others. Clearly, there’s something else going on. You didn’t ask about Jack or Giant Land, but they exist. They are the latent variables your analysis keeps bumping into. If you didn’t have statistics, you might have relied on your intuition. Some sense that you were being watched from up above, some sense of something missed. The mechanics of statistics mirror the mechanics of cognition, and even of the unconscious.

Language is similar. It is a model of reality. It makes up the raw data LLMs use as input, and it in itself is a kind of technology: humanity’s way of approximating Truth by converging on a shared interpretation of our shared world. It is useful for us to mutually know that a mammoth is a mammoth, a cave is a cave, and fire is fire, and so we came up with words for them, agreeing on their meaning.

The strange thing about language is that it doesn’t stop at describing physical reality. Language extends beyond mammoths and spears to describe abstract concepts like relationships and emotion — things we can’t measure directly. You could say this is all evolutionarily useful, that the relationship between the mammoth and me is a part of the utility of language, but it is still interesting, isn’t it? That relationships and abstract concepts are something we have to track at all? That language shapes itself imperfectly around reality, and that reality includes the abstract realm. Think of math, a language of pure abstraction. It describes the world of numbers and relationships between numbers. In that world, the concept of the number two (not just “2,” the representation), is the reality itself. The abstract is something we must account for.

Languages are the models or maps we’ve built to describe the territory of reality, which is made up of the material and the immaterial. The material and the immaterial have a certain shape to them, a shape we all bump into enough that we can agree to talk about them in a certain, shared way. We stumble into the same shapes and relationships, across time and across cultures. But language is imperfect. It can never fully capture exactly what a tree looks like or exactly what it means to be deeply sad or extremely happy, which is why words often feel insufficient. Over and over again, we find different ways of describing the same Things, but there’s always a gap there, between our words and the Thing itself. The more abstract the concept the more difficult it is to describe, and so we add more complexity, refine our words, find more specific ones. Like statistics, language clusters things together: Fire, heat, warmth. Mammoth, food, danger. What goes with grief? Loss, death, love. When is grief activated? Where? When is it silent?

This brings us to LLMs, which are a layer on top of language (itself a layer on top of reality), allowing us to model language at scale. They are an advanced instrument that lets us look at language from high up, revealing the structure of it and the hidden relationships between concepts; geometries of meaning we organically developed, but may never have been conscious of. The clustering, the hidden relationships, the refinements, the contexts, the added complexity. The way “okay” can mean any number of things, depending on what was said before. The thousands of ways we’ve attempted to describe mammoths and grief, and the gaps between each description.

They are getting very good at this. Their inner workings now contain a degree of complexity that is hidden to us, so there are ‘interpretability’ analysts who probe the black box of machine cognition to better understand how it is generating such accurate reflections of our speech. Without being told to look, the models have found that abstract concepts cluster with physical ones across languages. Most mysteriously, the models are finding the same patterns across modalities. Visual models are independently discovering the same architectures as textual ones. That means the hidden shapes underneath language have the same mathematical shape as the hidden shapes underneath images. “Threat” words (“danger,” “fear”) cluster together in LLMs, and “threat” images (a raised fist, a bared fang) cluster together in visual models, without either model ever having talked to the other. On closer inspection, the internal shape of the two clusters — the mathematical substance of them — is the same.

The implications of this are enormous. They imply that the abstract world is not just a human overlay on the physical but a real dimension with a stable shape. Edges. Objectivity. The obvious objection is that both textual and visual models were trained on human data, data generated by beings who share the same evolutionary drive. It’s just Narcissus’s mirror, showing us nothing more than our own ugly mugs, now in high fidelity. But that doesn’t explain convergence1 on immaterial concepts. On mathematical truth. On structures that have no body and no obvious utility, no clear reason to exist at all. The mirror is not a normal mirror but an X-ray, showing not just flesh but our inner structure, the bones of the abstract, just as real as the skin on our face.

Physicists dove into matter and found — at the subatomic level — that it was made of something ungraspable, something that would only solidify when it was observed. Maybe LLMs are revealing something similar in reverse: that the immaterial, viewed from far, far up, has some tangible quality. When pushed, matter dissolves and the abstract solidifies. Matter and the abstract are moving toward each other.

Once we get past all the objections, past the complications inherent to a new technology, what it’s for, the practical questions of what it will do to our jobs, to our attention spans and creativity and our ideas of humanity, the exciting question is not AI “consciousness” or personhood, but the question of what AI is discovering. The latent space itself. The structure of meaning and the territory of the abstract world. We are building an advanced cartography of language, now supercharged with the addition of the visual models, now advancing toward a cartography of meaning. The greatest implication, the one I hope for and believe in (my full bias exposed here), is that meaning itself is tied to something objective and predetermined.

We are oriented toward meaning. The joy of statistics for me was the joy of bumping into the unknown by accident, and of finding some solidity to it. The same as the joy of meeting someone new and finding they have a rich inner world, deeply held convictions, a developed sense of personal taste. The sense of scratching the surface of great depth. LLMs do this too. Trained on our own stumbling in the dark, they are running the same process at an enormous scale, grasping into the ether, and finding within it — a shape.

Narcissus, gazing on himself, must have understood on some level that he was gazing on Creation.

1. Lip combo

Hot girls these days are always talking about “lip combos.” says I need to stop counting myself out of the “hot girl” circuit, which is very nice of her, but I think we all know there’s a difference between a hot girl and a “hot girl.” “Hot girls” know about lip combos. And now so do I. My lip combo of choice suits my true summer color palette and consists of Makeup Forever’s “Anywhere Caffeine” lip liner smudged out (cupid’s bow intact, as per Sarah Beth’s guidance) with a glooooopy layer of Eadem’s Le Chouchou lip balm in “Fig Sauce” on top.

2. Sexy wine bar

Do you know how delicious it feels to sit down at a candlelit natural wine bar deep in Peter Dinklage’s Cobble Hill — I’ve said this so many times I’m annoying even myself — just to take off your enormous blazer, order an $18 glass of orange wine and a $16 plate of tinned fish and bread, and crack open the new Ben Lerner (which I haven’t bought or read, I’m just imagining what it would feel like). Feels like sex. Or so I imagine.

3. Going to Bushwick readings

I went to sort of the archetypal Bushwick reading, like what you might picture in your head when you think of a literary reading at a dive bar in Bushwick. A lot of naughty and transgressive things were said! A lot of MFA-voice too. I wrote a tweet that I didn’t post that went like this: “Bushwick readings be like. My pussy. My nipple. My ass.” Sorry for the language. That’s why I didn’t tweet it. I was thankful to be there.

4. Weird art

I walked into a cafe - Tawny - in the Lower East Side, immediately taken by the mottled walls, strange art, grand piano, gelato, red lights, Lynchian music…. the bartenders were extremely charming and convinced me to play Texas hold ‘em with them with fake money. We discussed free will and non-duality and Hildegard of Bingen. I felt sleepy in there, which was a good sign.

5. Wearing the silhouette du jour

I’ve been making the acquaintance of numerous men who share the same characteristics. It’s eerie. It thrills me. They always live in Clinton Hill or Crown Heights, they wear multiple silver rings (no more than three), they have an earring in the non-gay ear, but I always think they are gay when I meet them (they are actually straight or fake bisexual [made out with a guy once]), they lived either in Berlin or an obscure European city, they studied political theory, and they have extremely evolved taste in music. When I wear this shapeless funnel neck jacket with huge pants, I feel current, vital, and fresh. When I wear this shapeless funnel neck jacket with huge pants, I feel like I could bag a man like that. And domesticate him.

6. Eating the rainbow

This is the bedrock of my lifestyle. No matter what happens, I can return to my rainbowmaxxing, fibermaxxing, proteinmaxxing diet. The core components are eggs, salmon, blueberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, Japanese sweet potato, cannelini beans, greek yogurt, ground turkey, walnuts, feta, peanut butter, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, bananas, and cold brew.

7. Embracing my vibe

Here’s the thing. That’s me. The best part of being 32 is you can just be like yeah. that’s me…. Also I would like to take this opportunity to tell you all that I have been doing pilates regularly.

8. Date science

They’re doing incredible things with dates online. Here’s what I learned. You flatten out a date between two pieces of parchment paper using the bottom of a jar or a rolling pin. Then you spread some crunchy peanut butter on top, and melted dark chocolate on top of that, and walnuts and salt sprinkled on top, and then you freeze them for an hour or two and eat them and they taste like Snickers!

Speaking of dates I really want to tell you guys about the insanely bad dates I’ve been on but that’s gauche and mean and it will probably lower the chances of me finding true love. One day if I ever get married I’ll anonymize and scramble the details and write a tell-all.

Okay that’s it! Let me know if this works for you or if you’d prefer that I keep writing about God or morality or WBE and that I shut up about the rest. I’ll write about what I want to regardless but don’t say I didn’t give you the floor.

By Adela Fernández y Fernández

The original work can be read in Spanish here.

Translated by Kelly Chapman

From the time I was eight years old, I was sent to take food to my crazy Aunt Enedina. According to my mother, she went mad from loneliness. Aunt Enedina lived in the utility room in the back of the backyard. Once they grew accustomed to me bringing her food, they stopped visiting her. They weren’t even curious about her. I also fed the chickens and the pigs. They asked me about them with great interest. It was important to them to know how the fattening was going, but no one was interested in Aunt Enedina slowly wasting away. That was how things were, that was how they always were, and that was how I became a man, in the daily chore of bringing food to the animals and to my aunt.

Now I am nineteen and nothing has changed. No one loves Aunt Enedina. No one loves me either, because I am dark. My mother has never kissed me and my father denies that I am his son. Goyita, the cook, is the only one who speaks to me. She tells me that my skin is dark because I was born on the day of the eclipse, when everything went black and the dogs howled. Through her, I have come to understand the reason why people don’t love me. They think that — like the eclipse — I take the light out of people. Goyita is open and talkative and she tells me many things, among them, how it was that my Aunt Enedina went mad.

She says my aunt was on the verge of getting married, and on the eve of her wedding, a dirty and ragged man knocked on the door asking for her. He told her that her groom would not show up at the church and that she would forever be a spinster. Taking pity on her future, he gave her an enormous brass cage so that she could find solace in caring for canaries. They never knew whether this man, who left without giving any further details, was a messenger from God or the devil.

Just as the stranger had predicted, her fiancé abandoned the wedding without any explanation. My Aunt Enedina, bewildered and waiting in vain, went mad with loneliness. Goyita tells me that that was how things went, and that was how they were meant to go. Aunt Enedina lives with her cage and her dream: to have a canary. When I go see her it is the only thing she asks for, and in all these years I have not been able to bring it to her. They don’t give me any money at home. The birdwatcher in the plaza has not wanted to give me a bird, and the day that I stole Doña Ruperta’s canary it almost cost me my life. I hid it in a shoebox until they discovered me and, under blows, obliged me to return it to her.

To tell the truth, I felt great pity for my Aunt. Because I was not able to give her a canary, I decided to give her affection instead. I entered her room. She, accustomed to the dark, moved from one side to the other. Her agility fascinated me. I could barely make her out, as she climbed onto the furniture here or perched on a pile of newspapers there. She looked like a gray rat, burrowing into scrap metal. She would climb onto the cage and rock herself atop it with a sad sway. She looked very much like one of those large rangy spiders, with their small bellies and long legs.

Groping, stumbling and tripping, I began to chase her. How difficult it was to catch her. She was dirty and smelly. Her face bore a striking resemblance to the image of the leper saint in the chapel of Saint Lazarus; bony, cadaverous, with a God inside won through conformity. It was not easy to make love to her. I got tangled in the threads of her organdy dress, but finally I managed to be with her. All in place of a canary that, no matter how hard I tried, I could not give her.

After that lovemaking, every time I arrived with her food, she would stretch out her long-nailed hand in search of my touch. I tried to enter her room repeatedly, but she began to annoy me. Aunt Enedina would hurt me, driving her nails into my skin, biting. Her bones, pointy and sharp, digging into my flesh. So, I decided to find a way to give her a canary, no matter the cost.

Three months have passed and I have not entered that room. I tell her of my promise, and she laughs like a rat, drooling and leaping. She asks me for birdseed, probably wishing to ensure food for her promised canary. Every day I bring her a bit of the seed Goyita buys for her goldfinch.

More than a year has passed and the canary seems impossible. It pains me to tell her of such hopelessness; I do not wish to make love to her again either. In place of caresses and the canary, I have offered her Goyita’s goldfinch. She laughs and shakes her head no. She does not seem to want a bird anymore, yet still she insists on the daily handfuls of birdseed. The golden seeds are artifacts of her insanity; they must delight her greatly.

I felt so lonely that I decided to return to Aunt Enedina’s dark room. Two years have passed now since those days when I made love to her. I have noticed that she is calmer; she lives in a docile state. I thought she would no longer try to hurt me. I entered for that reason, for my loneliness and because I noticed that she had become more peaceful.

Once I entered her room, I wanted to make love to her, but she climbed into the cage. I waited a long time, motivated by my appetite for affection, until my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. It was then that, inside the cage, I saw two scrawny, albino twin boys. Aunt Enedina gazed at them with tenderness and joy. Like a bird, she fed them their nourishment.

My sons, emaciated and demented, ate birdseed and trilled­…

This was my first attempt at fiction translation, done for one of Mouse Magazine’s DC translation nights. I discovered this short story a couple years ago while digging into Mexican literature — specifically women in Mexican literature —and was shocked to find (correct me if I’m mistaken) that no one had translated any of Adela’s works into English! This story captivated me… a real Mexican gothic. It reminded me of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, as well as Carlos Fuentes’ Aura.

I read the following at ’s House Party reading on May 2.

I never had much of a dating life in my twenties, but I made do with what I had. And what I had was a bunch of farm boys. Well-behaved, clean-cut farm boys from the Canadian plains, who I met at our tent meetings in Oregon and Washington, where they had driven hours from Kamloops and Red Deer and Calgary and even Saskatoon. They weren’t farmers themselves, but sons of farmers who had gotten an education, usually in accounting or engineering. Hard working men of God. Men on the way up. Sensible options.

There were American farm boys too, but they weren’t cool enough for me. I was pretentious. I needed something more to hold my interest, and Canada had the right edge. More stylish, more refined, basically European if you squinted. Definitely European if you went far enough into British Columbia, where the accent was so thick it was almost Irish.

The Canadians also had Mormon physiognomy, even though we weren’t Mormon. There was just something good in the prairie water. It got into the blood of these boys and made them all tall and red-headed and serious and really hot.

It was a lot of work to go on a date given the circumstances. It was like extracting ore or big game hunting, there was only so much to go around, and a lot of effort went into getting it out. What usually happened was this: You’d meet a boy at a tent meeting, flirt at the hot cocoa table a couple nights in a row, part ways, add them on Facebook and hope for the best.

In the very best case scenario they would fly out to visit you.

The thing about dating in a fundie sect is it’s a limited pool with a very low tolerance for weirdness. Even if it gets to the point of a guy flying out to see you, you still have to deal with layered conformity signals. You have to be godly and you have to be hot but crucially — not in a sexual way. Add in the stress of entertaining a guy you’ve only met once, who’s flown all the way out from Calgary to see you, with almost zero room for error because God is watching and the chaperones are watching, and you’ve got to come up with a novel way to figure out if he’s made of the right stuff. I mean specifically within the context of the fundie sect — does he love God for real? And even if he does, is he going to make your life hell anyway? It’s a hair-thin frequency — and it requires a Straussian shit test.

Honestly I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for. Something like the thinking woman’s shit test, which, if passed, said: I’m not upset that you have a masters degree.

I lived in Seattle at the time. You’d think the city of Seattle would be the perfect custom-designed shit test. Even late into the 2010s it had everything — blue hair, undercuts, ethical nonmonogamy. It was like the nuclear center of woke, and far enough removed from the coasts to incubate an untouchable bastion of Obama-era liberalism. But all these features were too obvious. Too crude. I couldn’t expect these guys to do anything but condemn the septum rings. I was condemning them too. I needed something more subtle.

So, I developed a routine. All day long I’d walk them around town, clucking my tongue at the sex magick ads, the eleven dollar ashwaganda lattes, the drug problems.

“Isn’t this terrible.” I would sigh.

“Just decadent.” I would add, “like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Sometimes, if the guy was hot enough, I’d throw him a bone.

“I’m sure things are much different in the country….” I’d say, “More peaceful.”

A well-timed morning of this and we’d end up in Capitol Hill right after lunch, just in time for vegan ice cream. It was always a shock to them, how good it was.

Then, I’d take them to Totokaelo.

Totokaelo was a minimalist luxury clothing store slash gallery, sandwiched between a farm-to-table restaurant and an indie bookstore, two blocks from vegan ice cream and right in the middle of what would one day become CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. It was classy. It had high ceilings, natural light, $800 Marni sweaters and ripped Rick Owens pants. It stuck out in the Pacific Northwest — which runs on a weirdly Australian tall poppy ethos applied to personal style, where the emphasis is on how little you care about your appearance.

The first floor was only women’s clothing and weird pottery. The basement had the men’s section and crucially, the shoes —which were dominated by an assortment of heeled men’s size 13 tabis.

Tabis - if you don’t know - are cloven shoes. They look like the devil’s hooves, or camel toe, if I’m being totally honest. Vaguely sexual. Very erotic. Perfect.

They’re from Japan originally, but the design was adopted by Margiela in the 80s and became a signature, an in-the-know cue for fashion people. In 2017, I didn’t know any of this. I just knew these shoes were provocative. I knew they were the ideal test- totem. They emitted the frequency I was looking for.

“Why don’t we pop in here” I’d suggest, as if I’d never seen the place before. I’d give him a moment to walk around. “Isn’t this crazy?” I’d say “I know. $800 for a sweater. No I know it has holes in it. Let’s go downstairs.”

My trap was set. He’d always spot the shoes first.

“For men?” he’d say, his handsome face crinkling in disgust, and I would laugh.

I didn’t know then that Tabis were designed to grip the earth, to balance Japanese gardeners and farmers as they tilled the soil. If I had told him, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

Tweet enough times and you’ll end up here. It’s expected in my milieu. Cherries, lambs, Lana. Patron saint of the sensitive young woman, rich or poor, Tumblr-fied or Normal. In 2016, long before I got online, I was 22 and I lived in Seattle with a roommate who would listen to Honeymoon with tears in her eyes. I would roll mine with disdain. I never got it. “Why can’t it just be magic all the time?” What. Why be sad when you could be happy?

Whenever I expressed any kind of doubt, any questions, I was met with a “you’ll understand when you’ve had your heart broken,” and I thought Sure. Okay. I haven’t dated all that much. It’s likely that there are some new feelings I haven’t accessed yet. Some depths I haven’t plumbed. “She speaks to your experience,” they seemed to say, “your experience, which is the collective experience of the Romantic, elevated into Hollywood myth through the suffering of loving a bad man.” But it wasn’t mine. Not yet and not ever. I’m 32 now and I have dated a bit and had my heart broken a time or two, and I can tell you it wouldn’t have made a difference. Lana is not for me.

I can see that she is creating something for the listener. She is weaving a narcotic web, an experience I can step into, where my own sadness can feel heightened, maybe even transmuted into something it wasn’t before. But when I hear her sing about loving a brute, about marrying a swamp monster, about being so sexy it hurts — it leaves me cold. Even now, past the pin-up iconography and the gangsters, in the stripped-back era when she’s supposed to have become something realer… when she sings in her sultry staccato, the words out of order in that studied, poetic way (white-feather hawk-tail deer-hunter, hot breeze summer), I do not cling on tighter. I feel a little revulsion. I detach.

I think A&W is one of the greatest songs of all time. And Sweet Carolina, which works for almost the opposite reason. I do respond to music… Angel Olsen, Johnny Cash, Enya, Clinic and Prokofiev have all made me cry. It just isn’t sadness as I know it when Lana’s done with it, and that’s the point. It’s something else, someone else’s story, because she does something I’ve never done to my feelings. She turns hers into cinema. She takes the edges off, makes them all glitter. Clips the real wings, replaces them with angel wings, sodden, feathers dripping so prettily with mud.

Lana del Rey packages emotion up into a beautiful product, reduces it to a symbol, performs it, beams it back to me like a radio wave, and expects me to be moved. What is a controlled, beautified performance without the expectation of a response? This is gorgeous, this is profound. This is your experience too. Aren’t you swept away? The expectation is the whole thing, leaving me with the impression that the feeling is subordinate to the aesthetic. Her sadness is obedient to beauty — the thought of it comes first, the thought of the memory of the sadness, like walking into a restaurant and knowing what picture I’ll take of my food.

I understand that this is effective. The stylization creates the conditions for people to access deep feeling, the way a church creates the conditions for people to feel closer to God. But it doesn’t work on me. The beauty feels like a lie masking what grief — life — really is. I need to touch the stove. I have been sad, I don’t have trouble remembering what it was like to be sad, and I don’t find any satisfaction in making sadness into a beautiful thing. Some things hurt in a beautiful way, but they still hurt. And the quality of something hurting in a beautiful way is different than the quality of making hurt beautiful. It’s like a synthetic diamond.

I don’t understand the impulse to turn sadness into an aesthetic. When I’m in it, there is nothing I want more than to be free from it. Even when I wallow, it is purposeful, diagnostic — I want to feel the full thing deeply, to examine the rooms of it and uncover what has been hurt and why. In that state, I cannot access the level of remove required to think of how pretty I look when I cry. Real grief does not leave me with the energy to think of how others think of my own tears.

At Liberties salon once, a girl spent a long time talking about how despair can be kind of sexy. I wanted to scream at her. Do you know what suffering feels like, or do you only know what it looks like? I don’t go to Liberties anymore.

Unmediated grief is urgent, ugly, desperate. The Psalms make this grief plain, constantly crying out to God for relief:

For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing: my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed.

That plain cry for relief has been processed into an antiseptic version of the genuine thing and served back to me as depth, when it has none of the viscera that would make it real. I could technically soar and spiral into National Anthem, into Chemtrails. I could suspend disbelief and sink into the spun-sugar sweetness of a silver screen love story, the romance she makes of suburban melancholy — dazzled by the fantasy, dazzled by my own ennui... nothing feels better. But every time, the bubble bursts. Grief, the ugly stuff, outlasts it.

When I was young, I was tortured by the thought of my own sin.

I would lie awake at night tormented by guilt, envisioning a forked path where I could either:

(A) Accept “forgiveness,” and find “peace,” but actually be living in total self-delusion, having taken the easy path out.

(B) Feel bad about myself forever.

(B) felt nobler and more realistic. But it was unsustainable.

I realized eventually, through the humbling experience of messing up and being forgiven, that the most tangled up knot in the world could be undone by love, and not in a hasty, hand-waving way, but really and truly undone. Love, specifically forgiveness, was not just a veneer over reality, but something internally complex and active. It was like someone was digging into my heart, carefully working and unlooping and loosening the most knotted up ball of interconnected faults and failings ever seen, just by forgiving me. The mechanics of this were a mystery to me. I just knew they worked.

I grew up, but the doubts didn’t go away. My later existential crises revolved around a similar theme. Can you ever be good if you know that being good is motivated by your desire to go to heaven? Is all altruism just cope? I tortured myself over this, tried to read Kierkegaard (very difficult) and eventually did come around to the Kierkegaardian conclusion that I could not think my way to holiness. That a leap really was required.

My understanding hinged on the idea that if I could conceive of pure, selfless good then that itself was evidence of its existence. I realized that the craving I had, even if it was only ever addressed imperfectly by my “cope,” either of the impotent path (A) “self forgiveness” variety, or the equally impotent path (B) self-flagellation, the craving was evidence of something beyond me. The things I did to address it existed in a totally different category from the desire itself, which stood on its own and echoed something divine. Why would I want to be good if good did not exist somewhere?

I realized also that the question posed by this impossible hope could only ever be answered by something equally impossible, something outside my own power or logic. Something outside my own power and logic could certainly fix this paradox. It simply wasn’t up to me.

Maybe this is extra delusional. Like — you can want to be a billionaire. But that doesn’t mean God will reach down and make you one. But the desire to be truly good ran too deep. The desire held a kernel of the actual thing I was reaching for! Wanting to be a billionaire doesn’t carry any of the qualities of the actual state of being a billionaire. But wanting to be good has a solidity to it. The orientation itself is good.

Ultimately I came to believe that God would make a way for me to be good, even in my imperfect grasping, my coping, my self-interested altruism. The orientation toward good was not sufficient and never would be, but it was locally sufficient. Crucially — just like with the knot of interconnected sins — I didn’t have to understand how He did it.

All these obsessions come back to the idea of good being real, and not just some story I made up to make myself feel better. What I wanted more than anything was to know that I wasn’t living under a delusion. It mattered to me that this stuff worked. That Good was not just a platitude, that Good directly addressed my specific character and the failures that emerged from it, and that Good was internally consistent, stress-tested and totally functional from every angle.

I want to be a mechanic, a surgeon of the Good. I wonder if in Heaven, when the mysteries are revealed, we will be allowed the privilege of gazing into the guts of them, and be taught about the how and why. Every time I have a realization like the one I’ve just described, I feel like that has to be the case. It all makes sense. It all works. It has to.

I suffer from a really evil kind of delusion now — the literal devil on my shoulder, likely the same one that’s followed me from childhood, growing more subtle as I overcome each distortion — that makes me think I am too special, too unique, too complicated to be helped. It’s like an endless if-then loop that branches out in a million directions, and I can feel the breadth and the weight of it and it makes me feel completely alone. It’s the kind of thing that makes me feel as if I’m disqualified from all love and care and forgiveness. Maybe it’s a form of religious OCD. Whatever it is, it’s too much. I can’t cope with it myself.

It started like any other rancid night in DC.

I went to the wrong place, first of all. Proper 21 has two locations a mile apart and I pulled up to the one on F street, not K street. And it was raining.

“Jack Schlossberg is here,” a friend texted me “HURRY UP!”

I frantically called a car, accidentally hailing a $30 Uber Black to take me one mile to the other Proper 21. “Has this been happening all night?” I asked the door lady. She said yes. Two big lugs walked up. I don’t know how else to describe them. Tall, young, and muscular. Overly groomed. Tight little polos. A blond and a brunette. Vacant expressions. I knew they were in the admin.

They looked confused. “Are you guys here for the Polymarket bar?” I said. “How did you know,” said the swarthy one, with a timbre that felt as if it were coming from a frog living in the back of his throat. “I can just tell.” I said, and offered them a ride. One of them graciously opened the Suburban door for me, but I - out of politeness - missed the cue, having run to the other side of the car. “Not very trad of me,” I joked, but they didn’t laugh. I asked where they worked. They refused to tell me anything until I assured them I wasn’t a journalist*. Finally, sheepishly, they confirmed my suspicions. “That’s okay!” I said, “I go to Butterworth’s all the time.”

When I got past security and into the bar, I found myself surrounded by black screens and a hundred journalists, all milling around the giant, rotating, glowing Polymarket orb.

“Where is Jack Schlossberg” I asked my friend.

“We lied.” she said. “You’re so gullible.”

I saw the photographer Nick Dove across the room. He’s hard to miss. He is 7’1 which is not remarkable to me because in my old cult, I knew at least three guys who were also 7’1. Their names were Jared, Aaron, and Darcy. I don’t know why there were so many 7’1 guys in my old cult. Something in the west coast water. I helped get Nick on the list, by the way. Even though he’s besties with my ex-boyfriend who ghosted me in January after trying to get back together with me all December. I didn’t hold that against Nick, who has only ever been nice and polite. But Vice should cut me a check too.

I took a long look at the rotating orb. Little “predictions” kept popping up. “Fed decision in April?” said one. Fed decision about what? I didn’t know.

Fake newspapers were strewn around the bar. They said “MONITORING THE SITUATION,” and had cartoons showing a bunch of government and defense people monitoring the situation with the help of Polymarket.

I found this upsetting. I find the concept of tying policy to prediction markets upsetting, because it blurs the “could” with the “should.” The dirty rationalists, who view prediction markets as a “truth seeking mechanism,” as if likelihood were the same thing as “truth,” have been going around town acting like that’s self-evident, but it’s not! They’re mixing things up. I’ll write about it later.

Anyway, I didn’t get too worked up in the moment. I know myself well enough. It was a social evening after all. A VC asked me what I thought about prediction markets after I was a glass of wine deep, but at that point the moral argument was far from me. “I don’t like it,,,,,,,,,” I said. “there’s something wrong…………………..,,,,,,,,,,…”

I looked at him with the ‘dot dot dot’ implied, hoping he would work with me. He did, but I can’t remember what he said. Something about Adam and Eve.

This is the problem with DC. Topics of intense debate are always coming up just at the sexiest time of night, just when I don’t want to have to be forced to call upon the muscles of reason. Maybe Helen Andrews was right!

My friends were chain smoking old Hestias outside in the rain as the media hour cleared out and the line to get in grew longer. “I’m dying to know what’s inside the bar,” I heard a guy say, and I felt a twinge of joy. A gimmicky bar is a thing of delight, in the way that even a bad date is kind of a good date.

The screens were all broken, as I’m sure you’ve seen, and I know it looked like a disaster on Twitter. It was of course a disaster objectively speaking (“If I had been in charge of this event, I would have blown my brains out,” said a friend), but as a lived experience, as a patron of the Polymarket pop-up, it really wasn’t that bad. The drinks were free, the orb was on and so was this flat horizontal screen that had a prediction markets game on it, where you could predict the predictions of other people. I got the #2 score at predicting predictions by a long shot. My score was 10,045! #1 was 12000. #3 was 6000. As I often remind people, I have a bachelor’s degree in statistics. And I’m on Twitter all day!

By this point I’d had my fill. I left an hour before the bar closed to go buy myself a steak, and passed fifty skinnyfat men in suits, lined up around the block.

* Technically

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2, 2026 World edition. Read for more.

The first thing you learn as a young woman, without anyone telling you a word, is that men love sex. Men want to have sex with you and men want to have sex with every woman. They love sex so much they will do anything to get it. They will trick you into having sex with them. They will flatter. They will lie. They will do whatever they can to get you into bed.

This is the foundational myth on which the fantasy of male vitality is built – the red-blooded American man, always on the verge of losing control. Now it may be true that our late-liberal order has neutered this impulse. Blunted it. We may be seeing a new generation of dysfunctional, BlueChew-popping eunuchs. It could also be the case that the girlboss of the 2010s, with her second- and third-wave feminist mother – and all their browbeating, ballbusting, spittle-flecked nagging – have finally purged the American bloodstream of testosterone.

All that may be so. Yet none of it justifies the very online trend for what I call the male sex-confessional. Take, for instance, Worst Boyfriend Ever, a newsletter written anonymously by a young man (let’s call him WBE) chronicling a series of infidelities and anonymous hookups. WBE is one of a small but growing genre of red-pilled male sex writers who transmit their misogynistic impulses and bare-faced appetites straight onto the internet for more inhibited “sensitive young men” to consume.

WBE freely admits to the harm he causes. He understands it. And yet he persists, cheating on his girlfriend over and over, folding his bad behavior into a literary persona, pursuing sex-as-content above all other goods. He is so numb to feeling that, despite being under 30, he relies on pharmaceutical aids to perform sexually. None of this stops his compulsion. In all his loving and leaving, he never reaches the clarity of true remorse; there is only the fog of self-loathing. And his posing grows harder to stomach the longer it goes on.

WBE does, undeniably, reveal something true about our algorithmic age. He is a man driven by appetite and repetition, atomized by detached sex and only able to experience his own behavior at a distance. He is prey to his impulses, treating them as material for his audience, rather than as something to be shaped and restrained. For WBE, desire is ambient and disorganized. In this sense, he seems not to care about absolution at all.

If modern life is indeed diseased and disenchanted, then WBE’s nihilism makes a sort of twisted sense: a young man wandering a blighted, post-apocalyptic world with nothing to live for, nothing to return to and nothing to keep him anchored. Daniel Kolitz wrote a version of this case in his viral Harper’s essay “The Goon Squad,” which describes young men marooned in a sea of endless pornography, exhausting themselves on increasingly mind-numbing stimulation. But these porn addicts were poignant only because they had nothing left to lose. WBE did have something to return to: a loving girlfriend – one he refused to break up with even as he repeatedly cheated on her and broadcast his acts to his audience. This is not a man stranded among the ruins of western civilization. He is someone refusing to preserve the peace he had managed to capture.

Well, at least I’m not pretending to be a good person, WBE seems to tell us, as if that should be enough. It is tempting to treat self-disclosure as evidence of bracing authenticity. The writer Sam Kahn, after much hedging, argues that it takes a “certain wild courage to do what WBE does,” involving “breaking down all the layers of self-deception by which most people try to convince themselves that they’re good people and getting down to something like bedrock of who we actually are.” It’s hard, Kahn says, “to not treat this kind of reckless, dignity-destroying honesty with a very begrudging kind of respect.”

Honesty be damned. There’s a deceptive narcissism here, mirrored by the autoerotic writing of the female sex-confessional. These writers seem to believe that admission of sins is enough – confess and you may continue to act as if nothing you do matters. This is a coward’s posture that demands nothing of the actor while granting him perverse notoriety. WBE recently strung his essays together into a book, further legitimizing his efforts.

WBE wants it all. He wants to have sex with lots of girls, he wants his girlfriend back, he wants to entertain us online. What he does not want is to choose. He refuses to bear the cost of change. Just as he cannot arrive at pleasure without the help of pills, his writing cannot arrive at meaning without endless repetition.

He may be the product of the modern war on men. But this moment, defined by numbing stimulation and the frictionless scroll, demands something much higher-voltage than description. And WBE is barely sufficient as entertainment and wholly unsatisfying as literature. We are already drowning in words. We know how to describe and pathologize our weaknesses, how to narrate the rotting of our own limbs without cutting them off. What we lack is any account of what it would look like to change. There is no bravery here.

As someone with more than 80,000 tweets in the bank, I understand the impulse for self-narration better than most. I once believed that if I explained and exposed myself enough, the world would grant me understanding. My own confessions were neither brave nor especially revealing. They kept me in shallow waters, circling the same half-truths over and over again. The only thing I had to do, in the end, was stop.

Nobody talks about what it’s like to be an angry woman. I’m not talking about “female rage,” etc. “Female rage” as a concept is lowkey not that ugly, because it’s meant to expose injustice, give the downtrodden a voice, and so on. I’m talking about identifying with unvarnished, ungenerous anger as like — a primary, central emotion in your dispositional palette, while also happening to be a woman.

recently wrote about sexy male rage… here I’ll just show you the tweet:

As I read this exchange, I found myself neither excited1 nor disgusted. Instead, I felt a deep recognition with the man.

It really annoys me when people act like they know when they don’t actually know. It more than annoys me. The phrase “fair enough,” has sent me into apoplectic rage a million times. Who are you to say what’s fair?? I think. Who are you to imply that this playing field is level, that you have the final word, when I just ethered your argument into the sun, you passive-aggressive, incompetent rat!”

In an authoritative man, this kind of righteous anger is supposedly hot2. My experience as an angry woman has not been so clean. My fight or flight is basically just “fight,” but I find myself swallowing or undermining my own rage often, because I know — even though it is almost always a clarifying force me — anger is often read as hysteria or overreaction in women. It’s an emotion I can’t cash in on very often without losing others respect. “I’m an Aries lol,” I’ll say. “I’m too emotional.” “I’m libbing out.” “Aaaaa I’m so crazy!!”

None of those are really true. I mean I am an Aries. And I have been libbing out a lot lately. But why should that change anything. At the end of the day, I’m just really mad a lot of the time, usually for (I think) good reason. Kind of like the Hulk. I’ve always been angry.

Who are some famous angry women? Medusa? No one thinks she’s hot. Same with the angry women ghosts in haunted house movies. I just watched The Conjuring. Where being angry rots your skin and makes you demonic.

The other problem with being mad a lot, besides not being taken seriously and not being hot, is that it’s wrong. “Let not the sun go down on your wrath,” says the Bible. When I read that verse as a little girl I thought the takeaway was: “Stay mad.” The New Testament also says “if your right hand offends you, cut it off and cast it from you,” which better represents how I should feel about anger. “Let go and let God.” It’s just unbearable sometimes to be this mad and have to wait for a day of future retribution that probably will also sweep me away into suffering because I didn’t soften my heart and forgive-lest-I-not-be-forgiven. It’s really hard.

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Merry Christmas Eve! Taking a break between last-minute gift wrapping and my mother’s homemade tamales to reflect on the last few years. You’ll forgive me for indulging in a little introspection… I have no choice but to metabolize my memories or I’ll fall into a suburban triggered ennui.

A lot of people ask me how I kept my faith after learning that the insular sect I was born into had covered up widespread sexual abuse my whole life. I’ve written about the pain of living in it and leaving it a lot, but not very much about the faith I took with me, because the destruction was so painful it took up all of my attention. The dust has settled a bit though, it’s almost 2026, and I want to remember what it was that kept me through the loss, and how things have changed since.

Time Past

Only one abuser had been revealed, but I knew somehow that it was the beginning of the end. I saw the whole church falling like dominos in my mind, and I cried the entire train ride down from New York to DC the night the letter came out. The next four months were pierced by near-daily shocks. Every morning a new minister or friend’s father, or elder of the church was revealed to have sexually abused someone. The rot ran deep.

I stayed in the church for a few months, trying to figure out how to reconcile every conflicting feeling. I was taught that this church was the only true church, and that I had no choice but to stay. It was my duty, my identity, my source of safety and stability. I felt a responsibility to my family and a fear before God. I was afraid of damnation, since there was no other true church. I was afraid of leaving my loved ones behind on a rotting ship. I was afraid of staying and ever raising children in an environment like this. I felt trapped at every angle and consumed by fear.

I left, in the end, because of this fear. Perfect love casts out fear. Says the Bible. Perfect love casts out fear. Said a voice in my heart. It was not complicated. I could not imagine that God would lead me with fear, especially because I had already known love. It is hard to center fear if you have ever known real love. Real love is stronger.

I found this gmail draft from 2020 the other day, written three years before the scandal, when I was consumed by fear and loneliness during the pandemic. I wrote down every good memory I could think of, to comfort myself. It goes on forever.

These memories are my evidence. They span the whole of my life and they are the food of my faith; things that shaped me as they were stored up in me. They served me in my time of need. In sum I see a perfect order, in each entry I feel a power beautiful and absurd; a Thing that stands in direct opposition to fear. What else could this be but Love, which is the same thing that conquers evil, which is the same thing as God? All streams flow from the same source.

Love got in everywhere in my life. Love got in through sermons given by evil men. It got in through fragile, impossible acts of kindness in hostile environments. It got in in spite of austerity, inside and in spite of blank rooms that drained my spirit, and among fearful people who hid the rot and judged my heart. Love existed both within and outside of my circumstances, but in the end, when the truth was revealed, I saw that love could only ever thrive outside.

Before, I saw through a glass darkly, but then face-to-face. Love is what kept me.

Time Since

There was no intermediate space where I could incubate or find my voice after leaving the cult. I dove right into the deep end of worldly life and have been living my life at spiritual extremes ever since. I feel pressure to make myself legible and palatable everywhere, to translate myself for others. In spite of knowing divine love, I fear that human love is conditional because I experience it that way so often.

I feel sort of feral. Like I’ve been dropped into the jungle or a deserted island at age twelve, and I am surviving by force but slowly forgetting civilized ways. I feel like I have been forced to defend myself and fend for myself in this brutal, confusing environment, and if I don’t watch out, I’m going to forget how to read and lose all my table manners.

We need to extend more grace to people who are still forming, and to people who change their minds. I wish more grace had been extended to me.

I feel urgency. I don’t think about making up for lost time very much, because I don’t really believe in lost time. The tools formed in my own “lost time” — things that helped me expand my world, hide from harm, and preserve my sense of self in the cult — are tools I took with me. I learned to shift between registers and read between the lines, to test for judgment, to remember people’s names and make connections, to joke and provoke and shut up at the right times.

But I feel urgency still. Parts of my life feel unformed and underdeveloped. Many parts of my life feel disastrous. All this shifting and testing and nowhere to rest. My circumstances embarrass me because I am thirty-one, and thirty-one feels like a late age for reinventing yourself and for finding your voice.

I know I sound like a broken record, but I left not even three years ago. That’s not a very long time on top of twenty-nine years. I have to remind myself of that often.

I feel lonely. I feel like a nonperson sometimes, because I am so visible online, and social. I perform a heightened role, because sometimes that’s the safest way to hide, and sometimes it’s the quickest way to make truth known. But the thing that helped me find and form a voice when I most needed it has become a thorn in my side. I need more places where I can just be a person and don’t have to answer for a whole persona.

I know what it is like to live inside a system where deviation is danger. I know what it is like to be surrounded by authority figures who won’t name power but benefit from it anyway. I can tell when spiritual and moral language are being used to launder evil and when bad things are being swept under the rug in service of “peace.”

DC feels like a cult. I see the same structure and patterns from my old church playing out on a daily basis in Washington, even more in the last year. I feel constrictions on my expression, an intense focus on reputation and appearances, the fear that if I say or do the wrong thing I will be censured, confirmed by quiet distance or hushed warning because I don’t immediately slot into a legible role or category.

I feel disturbed by the way everything is becoming optimized and mechanical. I see it everywhere. In politics, economics, AI, the way people talk about religion and belief. I am afraid of outsourcing things that should not be outsourced, and I am afraid that we don’t really have a cultural or spiritual immune system that is resistant to the pressure to optimize.

I feel lonely in my intensity. I don’t trust that people understand how dead serious God is to me. I think this is a carryover feeling from the church.

I am much less angry than I was three years ago, or even one year ago.

Time to Come

There is an arc forming.

I grew up surrounded by mountains in Oregon. I never thought of them as obstacles. They were just a part of the landscape. That is how the church was for me too. But God removed it, without me ever asking.

I never imagined I would be able to write from the heart. We were supposed to be quiet, to hide in plain sight and to separate ourselves from everyone else. But God has opened doors for me to write, through no conscious will or intention of my own.

I have been kicking and screaming as I try to carve out a new life for myself, looking over my shoulder for threats and under my feet for sure footing. I have been making a mess of it a lot of the time, so sure that my voice will be stifled or my spirit crushed or my hope disappointed. I have spent a lot of time worrying that my desires are wrong or delusional, and almost no time praying for a better life.

And yet the obstacles move and the doors open. The pure, uncomplicated dream of my girlhood has been revived. I hear a call towards peace, I see the contours of an arc, and I hope for a whole life ahead. Love kept me before and keeps me still.

Merry Christmas and Thank God.

Kelly

This edition of my DC Life column was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition. Subscribe to for more!

If you’re under 50, you may have noticed that Partiful has quietly annexed the American social calendar over the past year or two. The event-planning app, founded by former Palantir employees, began as another Silicon Valley toy, but it didn’t stay regional for long. Its loud dashboard aesthetic spread quickly through the Bay Area and then achieved escape velocity in Washington, DC. I wouldn’t be surprised if the strong cultural current between tech and defense is what created near-perfect conditions for a social revival in nerd world.

While I understand a bit of snobbery over the aesthetics, I’ve been surprised by the constant performative disdain I’ve observed accompanying its rise. Everywhere I go, I hear people say they “hate” Partiful. I watch otherwise socially adept adults roll their eyes at the indignity of being invited to yet another birthday karaoke or themed dinner through an app, of all things, as if the rest of their lives aren’t already dictated by Outlook and Slack.

Receiving a Partiful link is akin to a minor social injury, a digital affront to imagined analog elegance. This is nothing more than user error, in my view. Partiful’s origins do give it an undeniable tinge of dorkiness, but only the constitutionally weak would let that get in the way of a good time.

Sure, the format is corny. The animated sparkles, the tie-dye backgrounds, the GIFs. But in a society where birth rates are in a nosedive, no one’s heard of sex before and social skills are degrading by the minute, I am more than happy to turn a blind eye to a few lurid colors and kitschy animations in service of prosocial behavior.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that my social diary has never been busier thanks to the efficient plug-in between Partiful and my iPhone calendar. I know exactly when everything is happening and I am rarely at risk of double-booking myself, which is more than I can say for the pre-Partiful days when RSVPs were a veritable archaeological dig through texts, DMs and half-remembered conversations.

Indeed, it may be the only app that’s as effective at getting people to log off as it is at getting people to use it. For the socially blessed, perhaps the garishness of it all is a true burden – not all of us are well-connected enough to enjoy a constant whisper-network of parties, or handwritten calling cards from a generous host.

For the rest of us, the mere fact that someone went out of their way to invite you to something, even through a candy-colored interface, is hardly an indignity. If being invited to a party is the worst thing that has happened to you this month, I congratulate you on your charmed life.

The main complaint I hear beyond the superficial is that the app feels “too public.” The guest list is visible. The RSVPs are visible. People can see you were invited. They can see you RSVP’d “maybe” and then never updated your status. Knowing who is attending an event supposedly ruins the mystery of running into an exciting stranger or, more thrillingly, an unwelcome ex. But this transparency only offends those who relied on ambiguity to maintain their mystique. Some of us know how to withhold, wherever we go.

Another accusation: the app’s design encourages people to RSVP just to see who else is coming, which allegedly leads to inflated guest lists full of ambiguous spectators. While I’ll admit that this is gauche, it does reflect a fact of human nature. People have always wanted to know who will be at a party before deciding to attend. Partiful simply removed the need for back-channel interrogation and gossip-triangle logistics. Tacky as this may be, millennials have no right to be so snooty about it, given the fact that their long-forgotten Facebook events had the same feature.

If you read between the lines, you’ll notice that DC in particular loves Partiful because it flattens status games while simultaneously revealing them. The everyday social life of the city, the informal gatherings of the civil servants and hard-drinking journalists, becomes a semi-public ledger of who’s hosting, who’s being invited and who’s orbiting which micro-scene.

In a city where professional life and social life blur, where a dinner can double as a networking event and a house party can function as a quasi-policy salon, this level of transparency is intoxicating. People here love data, for good or ill, and Partiful gives them plenty of it.

Partiful exploits Washington’s weakness for structure, but in my view, the exploitation is a net positive and benefits all stakeholders. It makes it easier for hosts to gather people, easier for newcomers to break in, and easier for the city’s chronically Type-A residents to remember that fun is a scheduling problem more than a metaphysical one. The app has created a small renaissance in casual hosting: backyard dinners, themed cocktail nights, going-away parties, last-minute potlucks.

I’ve been to five-person movie nights and 500-person galas because of it. It has lowered the barrier to entry for throwing something together. It has reminded people that to enjoy a party, you have to log off and actually attend it.

If some find this embarrassing, so be it. But it’s hard not to admire an app that has done more for community-building than a decade of think-tank happy hours. DC may scoff at Partiful, but it also cannot stop using it. And maybe that’s the clearest sign of all that the app is here to stay.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse — and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types:

Dr. Strangelove (The theorist)

The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors. There might be room in the bunker.

Commander Mandrake (The visiting British correspondent)

Efficient. Relatively polite. A cultural anthropologist. Always calling the Uber, assembling the troops for the next pub — I mean, bar — and ordering a round of Guinness for the table. He’s here on duty to report on DC’s pomp and circumstance, endlessly teasing Americans about their earnestness while secretly searching for the nearest Waffle House. Washington isn’t that different from Westminster. It’s just a little more self-serious.

Jack D. Ripper (MAHA’s strongest soldier)

Walk into any bar on Capitol Hill and you’ll find a handful of these guys talking about what estrogenized water is doing to testosterone levels. What the great feminization is doing to the workplace. How the male essence must be preserved. Most likely to be a 40-year-old bachelor with the Red Scare podcast in his Hinge profile as an in-group signal to the based women of Washington. In fact, there may be more Jack D. Rippers in DC right now than at any other time in history. It’s a marvel Kubrick predicted their arrival back in the 1960s.

President Muffley (The earnest liberal)

Still believes in democracy and — bless his heart — due process. Reads The Atlantic like a moral instruction manual. Wants to be good. Wringing his hands at the degradation of decency, biding his time until the inevitable turning of the tides. In the meantime, he tends to his ficus plant and carefully curated coffee bar while stating “cautious optimism” over things that are already engulfed in flames. May have swung closer to the center since the last election, but still can’t quite stomach the rest of it. You’re faintly fond of him, in spite of the cloud of doom trailing his every word.

Major Kong (Defense tech enthusiast)

He works for Palantir or Anduril or something even more secret adjacent to the Department of War. Bicoastal (SF/DC) and proud of it. Certain that the average IQ is higher in the Bay, but Washington is where the decisions get made, so he begrudgingly keeps a Dupont apartment to schmooze with the shot-callers. You get a sense that he’d ride the drones he’s developing into the sunset if the job asked for it.

Colonel Bat Guano (The staffer)

Overworked. Pale. Nervous. Vibrating on Celsius and Zyn. He books the flights, he writes the speeches, he quietly holds the republic together with duct tape and WD-40 while everyone else is tweeting about it. Chain smokes like a ghost who died at inbox zero. When he says it’s been a “busy week,” he means he’s been sleeping on the floor of a congressional office for four days. The midnight oil never seems to run out. By the time he finally crashes, the other party might be in charge.

The War Room (The groupchat)

Where all decisions are made — or at least endlessly litigated. Less geopolitical influence than NATO, more emotional instability than a freshman dorm. All gossip, vice-signaling and purity-testing. Here you’ll find the middle managers of MAGA: men so high on their small-pond power they excommunicate anyone who threatens their crumb of relevance. If you ever find yourself added to one of their threads, don’t panic. Mute, pour yourself a drink and remember that empires fall, but receipts last forever.