There’s an image in it, two people lit up by nothing but the glow of a TV at that hour of night when the truth shows up, and hearing it threw me straight back to a version of life that no longer exists — kids outside until somebody’s mom’s voice echoes through the streets yelling their kid’s full government name. The grass going cold under bare feet while everyone stayed in their shorts from the warm day, a bite finally showing up in the night air that nobody wanted to acknowledge in fear of ruining the moment, so we’d light a fire in the pit instead of going inside. The day dying slowly, everybody actually in the room with each other instead of just near each other. I can smell that yard when this song plays.

It’s a simple picture, 3 chords and a guy singing about a fight, and it shouldn’t have this much power over me, yet here I am, undone, every single time.

Look, I’m not the person who thinks every year before smartphones was some kind of golden age. I remember answering machines, pagers, rotary phones (those things weighed roughly the same as a dumbbell and could’ve easily doubled as one). None of those deserves a eulogy. But there was a window not too long ago when connecting to another human being required you to actually be near them, with your whole undivided self, settling something with someone in a room until it was settled.

Let’s examine everything else we used to have. We used to call a house, not a person, and whoever answered had to actually talk to us before handing off the phone. Imagine, an entire extra human interaction just to find out if your friend could come over. We used to drive around with no destination because the whole point was being in the car together. We used to wait for people, actually wait (oh the horror!) on a porch or at a corner, with no way to text to ask if they’re running late. None of us decided to give up any of this. We just slowly stopped needing each other to be reachable in real life, because everyone became reachable everywhere, all the time.

Go look at what’s actually happening in the comments under this song right now:

Noah Kahan broke down crying performing it live, and within a day there were thousands of separate people, alone in their separate rooms commenting things like “this song is devastating us” and “he just keeps finding new ways to BREAK US,” strangers stacking their grief on top of each other’s until one person summed up the whole phenomenon by calling it “the biggest reminder we’re all human.” Which, sure, it’s a global campfire of shared feeling, except every single person at that campfire is alone, lit by one screen instead of a dozen faces, bonding with strangers over a song about how we used to bond with people who were actually in the room.

It's currently the season of the anniversary of my son's suicide, the season I brace for every year whether I want to or not, and this song walked straight into the middle of it. Because what "Willing and Able" is actually about is the promise that if you stay in the room long enough, if you're both willing, if you're both able, you get to settle it. You get another round. You get to fix it face to face, bony-limbed and red-faced and imperfect, but together.

I don’t get another round. There’s no room left to stay in. Whatever needed settling between my son and me settled itself the day he died, permanently, without my consent, and there is no version of “willing and able” that reaches him now, no fire pit late enough, no yard we can sit in together while the day dies, because the day already did, and he went with it. The hope this song is built on, the idea that presence fixes things if you just show up for it, is exactly the thing I don’t get to have anymore. That’s what’s underneath all my nostalgia for cracked windows and cooling grass. It’s about the version of connection where the person is still alive to connect with.

So when I watch a comment section full of strangers crying together over this song, each of them completely alone with a phone in a dark room, I recognize it immediately, because I’m doing the same thing, reaching for connection through a screen about a loss that a screen can’t touch. But recognizing that is also where the song stops being a eulogy for a decade and starts being a dare. If a whole comment section can fall apart over 3 chords about 2 people staying in a room, that means the impulse never actually left us, it’s still in there, we still want this, we just forgot how heavy it used to feel to actually show up for it.

So here’s a dare back. Be brave enough to put the phones away during dinner. Be brave enough to show up at someone’s door with zero warning and just knock, and be even more unhinged and actually answer when somebody knocks on yours. Be brave enough to let a kid be bored on purpose. Be brave enough to call somebody instead of texting them (and stay on the line through the awkward parts, because the awkward part is where the actual connecting happens). And be brave enough to sit outside your own house, in the open, for no reason, and see who stops.

At its core, it’s all just inconvenient. The friction was the connection, not the obstacle in front of it. We didn’t lose each other because we stopped caring. We lost each other because caring got easier to fake and harder to actually do, one convenience at a time, and the only way back through is the same door it always was.

So that’s what Willing & Able is actually about underneath the fight and the TV light. The fact that the argument was still possible, that there was still time for it. That window doesn’t stay open forever, for anyone. The only thing any of us actually control is whether we walk through it while it’s still there.

Read more

Of all the things a person could buy in America, he landed on a taxidermy raccoon posed holding an empty liquor bottle (from Wild Bill's Western Store in Dallas, because nothing says "I'm processing culture shock" like a dead animal clutching a fifth of whiskey).

TSA had to issue an actual public statement about flying with taxidermy raccoons.

Anthony Hopkins waited 88 years to do the thing he actually wanted to do

Last week, at 88 years old, Sir Anthony Hopkins signed his first ever record deal as an actual composer, releasing a single called “Bracken Road” that he wrote in 1963 when he was a broke young actor at the Liverpool Playhouse, noodling on a piano before rehearsals.

The lesson is that the thing you actually wanted to do at 20 doesn’t expire just because you got busy being good at something else.

Barry Manilow and his crotch are touring

Back in February, 83-year-old Barry Manilow was recovering from lung cancer surgery, postponing his Vegas residency because his doctors told him to focus on healing instead of performing. By summer, he was back at the International Theater, the same room where he broke Elvis’s own performance record.

A man who just spent springtime finding out how much time he might not have doesn’t come back six months later and play it safe.

An icon goes on tour after beating the odds, and this is what the concertgoers are posting about. Ok.

Adam Sandler officiated a billion dollar wedding then called the cops about basketball

On July 3, Adam Sandler officiated Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding at Madison Square Garden, and 48 hours later he called the Nantucket Police Department's non-emergency line and asked where he could play basketball.

The internet loves this because it's the opposite of clout. He just wanted to hoop, so he called the cops like a normal person and then showed up and played.

Pitbull convinced 22,141 people to become him

Pitbull’s been a bald, suit-wearing legend for a long time. Last week in London, 22,141 of them showed up to Hyde Park in bald caps and set an actual, official Guinness World Record. Pitbull himself, who is already bald, put on a bald cap too because apparently he needed a costume to officially count.

The whole thing started because a fan posted a TikTok joking that Hyde Park’s capacity was “easily enough to break the world record of people cosplaying as Pitbull,” and then it just happened.

Somewhere out there, you made better choices

Every time a quantum particle does literally anything (hits your sunglasses, passes through a wall, etc.), the universe forks, and a slightly different version of you gets shoved off down a separate branch of reality to deal with the consequences. Not metaphorically. Actually.

According to Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral, there’s no single, continuous you experiencing your one life in order. There are infinite yous, splitting off constantly, each one living a slightly different version of today based on photons doing whatever they want.

So basically, you didn’t choose the version of you currently reading this. A photon chose it. Somewhere out there, a version of you who took the job, texted them back, didn’t go on that dream vacay, is living a completely different life.

Somewhere out there is a hotter, richer, better-postured version of you. (Ok that’s not what the physicist actually said. What he actually said is that there was never a single correct path you were supposed to be on. You didn’t miss your destiny. There isn’t a “supposed to be,” there’s just an infinite scatter of yous.)

And finally, proof that commitment to the bit knows no species.

While bombs were literally falling, WWII British soldiers were putting on full drag shows (and honestly good for them). And it’s not like this was a fringe activity. This was official, organized, and encouraged by the …

Read more

She set out to become the first American woman to row solo from California to Hawaii. Also the youngest woman to do it. Also the fastest woman to do it. And then, somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, she blew past “fastest woman” and became the fastest person to ever make that crossing, beating the men’s record by more than a week. You row, Kelsey!

Naturally, the internet did what the internet does and made it about itself immediately.

She gets to Hawaii after over a month completely alone, and standing right there on the dock is a man. Kelsey takes about 2 steps on land an immediately jumps into his arms. This dude never came up once, not one single time, in 44 days of content.

And the disappointment split into two camps.

Camp 1: Straight women. The straights were mad because they’d built a whole story around this woman. A woman, an ocean, and pure will, answering to nobody. That’s the fantasy women have been starving for, proof that alone gets to be the whole plot instead of the sad part right before someone shows up to save you from it. So the boyfriend didn’t land as good news. He landed as a plot hole.

Camp Two: The Lesbians

The internet’s gaydar did what it always does.

So two completely different groups of women watched the same boat and built two completely different women in their heads. Neither group was watching Kelsey. They were watching a projection, and the guy on the dock is just where both projections collapsed at once.

Yellowstone bison reminds everyone it’s not a golden retriever

An 80-year-old man was out for walk with his grandson at Yellowstone this weekend, snapping photos of a bison. “Videos of the Yellowstone bison incident showed visitors standing only 5 to 10 feet from the animal—far closer than the park's recommended 25-yard wildlife safety distance. Witnesses reported that some people continued filming the bison instead of moving away as it displayed signs of agitation.” After a short chase, the bison chased him around some trees and launched him 8’ into the air.

Nobody wants a bison to launch anybody into the air. But also, when a 2,000 pound animal is visibly losing its mind 10 feet away from you, the correct move is to leave, not to get a better angle.

Madonna Is 67 and just became the first American woman in five decades to land a UK #1 album

Madonna released Confessions II (her follow-up to Confessions on a Dance Floor from back in 2005), and it debuted at #1 in the UK. That makes her the first American female artist to land a #1 album in the UK across five decades. She now has 13 UK number one albums and is tied with Elvis Presley.

Culture spends an enormous amount of energy telling women exactly when they’re supposed to be done. Done being relevant, done being interesting, done being taken seriously as anything other than a legacy act wheeled out for a greatest hits tour. Madonna just set that memo on fire.

I'm not saying this to be inspirational. It's just funny that Madonna has spent 40 years as pop culture's go-to example of a woman aging 'wrong,' and she just set a chart record nobody else has touched in five decades.

Trending: Looksmaxxing

Single women currently make up roughly 1/5 of all homebuyers, more than double the share of single men. Basically, over 20 million single women in America own homes right now, a record high, in a housing market that woke up and chose violence.

Meanwhile, if you check in on what some guys are up to right now, the answer is lookxmaxxing.

Men discovered self improvement, and self improvement discovered a scoreboard. A handful of influencers have built entire platforms around it, running livestreams where strangers pay to have their faces ranked on a tier from Subhuman to Chad, alongside a whole vocabulary of jargon like canthal tilt and mewing.

Softmaxxing is skincare, sleep, posture, the stuff your actual dermatologist would sign off on.

Hardmaxxing is jaw implants, leg lengthening surgery, and a practice called bone smashing (which is exactly what it sounds like).

I'm not saying one caused the other. I'm not a sociologist. All I'm saying is, women are out here closing on houses, and men are getting rated on a scale from Subhuman to Chad by strangers on a livestream.

Starbucks released another bear for people to fight over

Did we not learn our lesson last holiday season?

And now, this July, Starbucks has released the Pink Bearista for people to buy it all over again.

Starbucks sold a cup. We manifested an investment portfolio out of it, the same delusion that once had an entire generation betting on a Beanie Baby named Peanut the Elephant.

I don’t make the rules. I just report on the bears.

In my will (yes I just pivoted to my will and I promise it’s goi…

Read more

Jason Thompson and I sat down for about an hour to talk about his essay, growing up in a generation where nobody asked how you were doing, and what it means to still be here after everything life has handed you. We talked about humor a…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Women-led businesses receive less than 3% of venture capital investment in this country.1 In a country where women make up more than half the population, drive the majority of consumer spending, and st…

Read more

They’ve come to the conclusion that Gen X were stronger and straight-up sturdier. Like some lost race of leotard-clad Amazons doing leg lifts until the VHS tape snapped. Allow me to expand.

Today’s home workout happens on a mat engineered by NASA. Gen X did Jane Fonda on shag carpet. Not over shag carpet. On it. Carpet that had absorbed two decades of cigarette smoke. There was no mat. If you were fancy, you had a folded beach towel, which would bunch up under your tailbone by the 3rd set of pelvic tilts and stay that way, because stopping to fix your towel meant losing the count, and Jane did not wait for you. Jane waited for no one. Jane had been to Hanoi for Christ’s sake!

The modern home exerciser has a 64-oz Stanley Quencher filled with electrolyte hyalauronic acid collagen water. Gen X had one warm flat Tab that had been sitting on the TV console since the previous night, and they drank it after the workout, alongside a cigarette on the front steps in the leotard. This was called recovery and nobody died. Well, people died statistically, but not from that Tab/cigarette combination as far as they knew. And their doctors smoked too, so who was going to tell ‘em?

There wasn’t an electrolyte within 50 miles. The only thing close was Gatorade, and Gatorade was for their brother because he played football, and athletic beverages were gendered then. Women got Crystal Light. Crystal Light contained nothing. That was the appeal. It was flavored absence. They drank gallons of it and called it self care (except they didn’t call it self care, because self care hadn’t been invented).

And before the Tab and the Crystal Light, they drank from the hose outside. Water that tasted like rubber and whatever was living in the hose. It had electrolytes in the sense that it had minerals.

The 1980s home fitness experience was powered by appetite suppressants available for purchase at the K&B next to the pantyhose, washed down with the aforementioned Tab, on a stomach containing half a grapefruit and a Salem Menthol Ultra Light. Of course those women could keep up with Jane. They were on Dexatrim. They were vibrating and the leg lifts were a side effect. To put it more efficiently, they were on speed.

Speed explains everything. The aerobics, yes, but also the productivity, the perms, the divorce rate, the entire genre of jazzercise. A whole generation of American women was operating at 140 beats per minute internally before the music even started. All Jane Fonda was doing was matching the pace, not setting it.

Young people doing this workout now have chosen it as a fun little experiment in retro fitness. But Gen X did Jane Fonda because their mothers were doing Jane Fonda and the living room had only one TV. They were 8 years old doing “the burn” because Jane said feel the burn, and their mother was feeling the burn (and also possibly the Dexatrim).

So yes. Gen X were built different. They were built out of nicotine, aspartame, over-the-counter amphetamines, hose water, and the belief that if they just did enough leg lifts they would look like a woman who, they later learned, was also struggling, because it turns out the leotard was load-bearing for all of them.

The youth have the better mat, the better water, and God willing, the better relationship with food, and a workout they chose instead of one that chose them. But they'll never know the cardiovascular event of doing high-impact aerobics on shag carpet, hopped up on Dexatrim, while their mother counts in eights and the smoke from her "warm-up cigarette" hangs in the air like a fog machine at a concert nobody bought tickets to

That wasn’t fitness. That was the 80s, man.

Leave a comment

Read more

Read more

Microlearning apps “deliver educational content in quick digestible bursts, usually somewhere between 2 and 15 min…

Read more

I opened the door. I turned on the light. Then I started making demands, which would become my primary occupation for the next thirteen hours.

What I know about American emergency rooms in 2026 is that they are full. Structurally, load-bearing, nowhere-left-to-put-anyone full. Small hospitals have been closing for a decade, over 140 rural facilities gone since 2010, and the patients don’t disappear with them because patients are inconveniently committed to continuing to exist. They drive further and wait longer and funnel into whatever regional hub is still standing, which is also full, which has always been full, which will be full tomorrow and the day after that.

None of this is the fault of the people who work there. The nurses I encountered weren’t indifferent. They were outnumbered, which is a different thing entirely, though the distinction becomes harder to appreciate somewhere around hour 10 when your mother is still in pain and you’re doing internal calculations about how loudly you’re willing to be a problem in a professional medical setting.

Loud, it turned out. The answer was loud.

She lives one mile from that hospital. I mention this because when I found her alone in the dark behind a closed door, she hadn’t been brought there from somewhere remote or rural or far from help. She’d been brought from around the corner.

At 2pm she was formally admitted, and she was still on a gurney in an ER bay because the hospital was full and there were no beds. By this point my mother had been in pain since before sunrise and was asking to be transferred anywhere else, and she meant anywhere, distance being considerably less important to her than getting out of that bay and into an actual bed on a floor with a name. When I asked the nurse about a transfer, she said (with a candor I genuinely respected), “Honestly? That approval would take three days.” Honestly is the word people use when they’re about to tell you the true thing underneath the official answer, and the true answer was that the system designed to catch my mother had a 3-day turnaround on catching her somewhere else instead.

The American healthcare system, ladies and gentlemen, please hold your applause.

She got pain relief at 4pm (11 hours after she arrived). We got a room at 6pm (13 hours after she arrived), at which point the ER had held her for longer than a standard American workday (which feels like a metric someone should be tracking but apparently isn’t tracking).

Let me just say I’m not proud of the scene I made at the nurses station. I’m also not sorry, and I’d do it again, and if you have an elderly parent I suggest you practice your own version in the mirror because it turns out this is a skill with practical applications.

Somewhere in those 13 hours I stopped being a person. I hadn’t eaten. I hadn’t had water. I’d been in that building since 8:30am, moving between my mother’s room and the nurses station and the hallway in between, asking questions and pushing back on answers and tracking medications and diagnoses, and at no point did the institution acknowledge that I also existed within it as a biological organism with requirements. No one offered water. No one pointed toward food. I never saw a vending machine. There was nothing visible anywhere in my orbit that might remind a person running entirely on adrenaline and obligation that she was also a body, which is a remarkable oversight for a building whose entire stated purpose is bodies.

The part that doesn’t make it into the healthcare crisis conversation, and the part that sits underneath the visible failures of beds and staffing and wait times is that the person holding the patient together does not exist to the institution she is holding together inside of. I was functionally an unpaid member of the care team for 13 hours. I tried to keep my mother calm during a procedure that required sedation to attempt three times. I flagged the pain that wasn’t being managed. I made the decisions that needed to be made in the moments they needed to be made, and I did all of this without eating or drinking, and without anyone acknowledging that keeping people alive generally requires also keeping alive the people keeping people alive.

Nobody offered me so much as a Dixie cup. In a hospital.

On day four she was cleared for clear liquids, her first food in 4 days, and they brought her a tray with broth and Jell-O and juice. Then, with the comedic timing available only to institutions operating at maximum dysfunction, every nurse on the floor went to lunch at the same time.

She needed to use the bathroom.

I unplugged her from the machines myself, all of them, and a bed alarm went off when I lifted her, a sound specifically engineered to communicate that something has gone terribly wrong, which was one way to look at it. A nurse from the next floor appeared in the doorway, drawn by the alarm, and took in the scene in front of her, an 86-year-old woman being assisted to the bathroom by her daughter amid a tangle of unplugged equipment while an alarm announced the situation to anyone within earshot. She assessed, determined that the most competent person in the room was the one who wasn’t on the clock, and left. I can’t say she was wrong.

But I can’t stop thinking about the people who don’t have someone there. No one who knows which questions to ask or how long to keep asking them or at what point to stop being polite about it and start being the kind of person who uses the word inhumane at a nurses station and means it. I watched what the experience looked like with someone present and advocating and making herself impossible to ignore, and it was still 13 hours on a gurney and 11 hours without pain relief and an entire day without anyone offering water to the only caretaker there. I cannot fathom what it looks like without that, and I’ve tried, and I don’t want to keep trying because that picture isn’t one I know what to do with.

In a functioning system I wouldn’t have been necessary in the way that I was necessary. But alas, Americans don’t have that system. What we have is the one where the most important qualification for surviving a hospitalization is having someone in your corner who won’t leave and won’t quiet down and won’t mistake a closed door for evidence that everything is fine.

God help the ones who go in alone.

Share

Subscribe now

In my defense, I didn’t seek it out. I was i…

Read more

Fast forward eleven years. The song is now #7 in the UK. It’s number one on Shazam wo…

Read more

Lifted.

I’ve been sitting in my kitchen since last night holding a single saltine cracker, staring at the wall, whispering the word “lifted” over and over until it stopped sounding like…

Read more

Listen. I just needed a medical procedure that required a hospital gown, an IV, and me lying very still while someone did something that was going to make my life better. Simple. In and out.

But you already know this didn’t go that way.

I’m a third generation New Orleanian. And New Orleans does not care what you came for. You came for a medical procedure?…

Read more

The Gulf of Mexico? Coming to get us?? Sir, the Gulf of Mexico is where we vacation.

The study notes that Louisiana loses one football field of land every hundred minutes. Ummm… The Saints haven’t had a football field worth keeping since 2009. This isn’t new information and we are coping just fine thank you very much.

The researchers called for something they’re calling a “managed retreat,” which is a coordinated, planned relocation of residents away from the city before the water arrives. Try walking up to a man in a Who Dat jersey who is currently eating a Lucky Dog while simultaneously yelling at a referee and say, “Excuse me, sir, have you considered a managed retreat?” He’ll offer you a beer and think you said something about a receiver.

The scientists specifically warned that if we DON’T do a managed retreat, people will just “trickle out over time” in an “uncoordinated mess.” And they said this like it’s a bad thing.

Uncoordinated mess is our brand. “Uncoordinated mess” is what we put on our brochures. Have you seen our road construction? Have you seen our drainage system? Have you seen us try to run a red light at the same time as the person across from us who is also running the red light? We’ve been an uncoordinated mess since 1718 and we have a tourism industry built entirely on it.

One of the co-authors said, (and I quote), “It’s like a timebomb.” Well, the city of New Orleans heard the word “timebomb” and started planning a second line for it. The theme is going to be “point of no return.” The krewe already has a name. There will be flambeaux. Someone’s making jambalaya for everyone.

The scientists don’t fully appreciate that New Orleans residents have a deeply sophisticated threat assessment system that’s been refined over three hundred years of hurricanes, floods, occupying armies, plagues, corrupt officials, and the I-10/610 split, and that system’s one setting is Yeah but I ain’t leaving though.

We ran this exact calculation during Betsy. We ran it during Camille. We ran it during Katrina, although some of us recalculated mid-storm and revised our answers. We ran it during COVID when the CDC said New Orleans was the most dangerous city in America and we said okay and then held a jazz funeral for the jazz funerals we couldn’t hold. A peer-reviewed journal for damn sure isn’t gonna be the thing that moves us.

The study also projects that sea levels could rise between three and seven meters, which would push the shoreline 62 miles inland and surround both New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Now THAT I would pay to see. Baton Rouge. The city that has spent its entire existence being smug about being slightly more north also surrounded by ocean? I’m not saying the apocalyptic flooding of coastal Louisiana is a silver lining. I’m saying I’ve driven through Baton Rouge traffic on I-10 and I’m open to all outcomes.

The study says political leaders are only willing to discuss relocation “in private meetings” and not in public forums. That’s because they know us. The second any Louisiana politician says “managed retreat” at a public meeting, they’re going to spend forty-five minutes getting yelled at by a guy named Boudreaux who has six generations buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 and would like to see a scientist come down here and tell his mémère she needs to relocate. (The mémère has been dead for decades, but that’s not the point. The point is you don’t tell a New Orleans family to leave their dead.)

I want to be responsible here, so I’ll say the science is real. The land is sinking. The water is rising. The wetlands are gone. This is not a joke. But the true thing underneath my jokes is that every person who has ever bought a house in this city has done so with a full and complete understanding that they were purchasing property in a bowl, below sea level, in hurricane alley, in a state where the ground itself is actively disappearing, and we bought it anyway.

The scientists want us to have a plan. And our plan is to be here until we aren’t, and to have a very good time in the interim, and to make sure there’s good food. And there’s always good food.

If you’d like to donate to Louisiana coastal restoration efforts, visit the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana or click this link: https://www.crcl.org/donate/.

If you’d like to relocate, Charlotte is apparently very nice.

Share

Subscribe now