Last week a group of centrists came together, once again, to deliver a document describing the ways in which their absence of action is actually very powerful. It has already been largely forgotten, not by design but by essence, for this is the main gist of the reaction to the rise of American socialism: forget. Over and over politicians running on nothing deliver the same ideas they have always delivered, and expect their voters to forget, to not notice, to ignore where these ideas have taken us. It is now undeniable that this no longer works, and in fact that it worked for far too long, and whether or not the latest scramble to contain this truth meant to accidentally name themselves after the Parent Teacher Association, to literally emulate the work of adults dealing with unruly children, is unknown to me, but their efforts will of course fail. They have already failed.

One of the more annoying tenets in these documents, whether they be on a campaign website of someone about to lose an election or on a consultant’s website offering services to help lose elections, is the idea that “government should work.” Promise to America takes it even further, as bold as they can possibly be: “Government matters, but it must work.” This doesn’t mean anything, and it doesn’t sound like it means anything either, but it makes perfect sense to them, because they are idiots. And they believe that we are idiots too, in the traditional sense, which is to say, incredibly simple folks. They believe that as long as “government works,” there is no need to explain how. This is worse than solid faith in a higher being you can’t speak to or work with, but can at least question, at least try to understand. This is not the 10am mass of Good Government. This is Sunday School. They preach not to the choir, but to very stupid children who can’t even read music.

It is good that we have rejected, finally, this god of government, that we have demanded true works and deeds instead of reliance on a higher power. It is also baffling. It has baffled everyone. Opposition forces in America have mostly been successful when driving people further into fascism, and thus the natural response of many precious morons paid to explain America is to assume that socialism, and its desire to make life easier for everyday people, is somehow in service of a twisted form of rightward thinking. On the other side, progressives who truly believe that this victory is the result of decades of hard work - unseen until now - believe that in fact these messages of affordability are the one easy trick that’s finally been tried. They point to the fact that the winning candidates of late largely seek to alleviate the constraints of the unaffordable world we live in now. That every single candidate running for every single office in the history of America has run on the idea that they will make the world more affordable registers just as little to this crowd as it loudly rings out to the other.

In both cases, we are looking only within, as we always do. But this is the question we must ask and answer in order to understand what it means that socialists are winning: is it really as simple as about making our own lives better? If so it is an American movement, birthed here, a way truly to make America better, maybe even great. But if it is not - and I do not believe it is - then this is a movement of Americans without nationalism. This is, in fact, an adult movement, a recognition of the world as it is and our place in it. It is a national response to an international understanding. And that dropping of nationalism, of America, has allowed us to find not the concept of New York, Colorado, Wisconsin, Missouri, Florida but the reality of them, the stuff of these places, the people underneath that which has ruled them. It cannot be made great or good or kind or bad; it can only be made, again and again, to move how we move. In other words, it is the people, not the nation, that have begun to lead.

What we do in our own country to stop imperialism has so far depended entirely on how successful those we are actually subjecting to our will are able to fight back. Had they been able to defeat those fighting them in Vietnam, the soldiers who came home from that war would have been treated historically as heroes instead of harbingers of our own hubris. There are very few movies about a Vietnam veteran who does not end up in some form of disarray, but the soldiers who went to Afghanistan and Iraq and everywhere else we’ve been in my lifetime have been quite literally turned into superheroes - Captain America and his America-backed crew. Those of us who oppose these wars have always been on the outside of American thinking because we did not believe in the virtues not just of the wars, but in the virtues of winning these wars. That is, we did not align with the mainstream ideal of a righteous nation who must prioritize its own victory above all. For this was the liberal drum beat of these wars: sad, but necessary.

It was only when these wars stopped seeming so necessary that this ideal changed. There is, to me, a great sadness in the way this understanding has changed over the last decade, in the fact that American thinking of these wars did not change by violence enacted by them but in fact a boredom with that violence, by the futility of their endlessness, instead of the outrage of their beginning. This is because I want to believe that public opinion can be changed by public morality instead of raw power. It is also because I want to believe that America can start something revolutionary, in this case an end to our own imperialism. But what I have to see clearly in order to understand what it means to be here, in America, is that as the oppressors we can only be reactionary to true revolution, that we are an asset, not a home, to it. Thus I have to accept that these movements, which seek to end our imperial reign, are in fact the success of so-called political violence - just not ours. And then I must decide if I truly am on this side that I have always believed myself to be on, that which seeks to end the dominance that makes my life as simple as it is, the result of victory over all others.

The answer came very quickly to many of us: yes, of course, that’s exactly the side we’re on. It was in fact a question we had already answered long ago, with no real use. What was different in the wake of October 7 was that assistance of true revolution from within our imperial core was now available to us. That is, we were not only morally on the side of the Palestinians, but able to connect ourselves to their revolution in the most widespread way yet seen. The years spent protesting, the courageous work of the students and their encampments, the clarity to lose a job in order to side with the revolution was not childish, silly, wishful thinking, nor was it a stand-in for some bolder, greater thing. These actions were the understanding that it is possible to stand with people across the globe, that it is possible to elevate a message they have sacrificed everything to send, that it is necessary to see yourself as a continuation of your values instead of just your place in the world. And of course the word for this is solidarity.

Imperialism builds walls. It locks in its own victors just as much as it locks out its enemies. We know that we are good, and we know that we are right. But we owe our ability to finally win to the destruction of these walls, these borders, these fences. It is this ability, to see clearly across the world, that has shown us where to stand.

Consider what it means to ignore this, to stay loyal to a higher power, refusing to touch down and learn from what’s growing beneath you. Too far above to understand that you’re being uprooted. Too high up to feel the ground shaking.

I have adjusted dates and tenses when necessary, buy beyond that left it untouched.

The Astoria Pool was reopening. It had been closed for several years - a combination of Covid and construction - and this, the 2024 return, was meant to be a special occasion. The reopening was also then-Mayor Eric Adams’s first official visit to any of the city’s pools during his tenure, and though he declined to join the Parks Commissioner for the ceremonial first splash into the water, it seemed likely that it was his decision to bring along a high school band to play “Empire State of Mind” on horns while it happened.

Adams did not seem at home by the water, and his message during a brief speech - “Pools are the economic driver of New York City” - made little to no sense. But the rest of the delegation sent to reopen the pool was jubilant. This was, after all, a concrete victory, an actual restoration that finished, which is more and more rare in New York’s scaffolded landscape.

Following the ceremony, the official hours of the city’s pools commenced - 11am to 7pm - and the line to take the first dip of summer stretched blocks and blocks. Those of us unwilling to wait climbed instead to the deck across the top of the lido, looking out over everything our city, it turned out, could do.

“18 million dollar restoration,” I heard an elderly man wearing compression socks say to a young couple he didn’t seem to know, “I never seen anything like it. Just beautiful.”

In truth it was. Built as a Works Progress Administration initiative in the 1930s, the pool flows out through Astoria Park, a spectacular view of the RFK Bridge making Manhattan look small. Everything about the 12 WPA pools across New York City is gigantic, and the great span you feel, whether deckside or floating within them, has an almost loving feeling of situating you. It’s clear that you’re still in New York City, no matter how far away you let yourself drift in the water. Even on the deck, I felt that drift, until a voice from below summoned me back. Debra, an Astoria Pool devotee I’d met several months earlier, was calling my name from the water.

“Everyone’s here!” she yelled up, gesturing towards the water, and she meant the Astoria Water Walkers - a group of mostly seniors who spend each summer walking enough laps in the pool to celebrate with a big party at the end of the year. “We get to use the senior entrance,” she explained, “so we cut the lines.”

Debra’s joy shot up to the deck, and probably to the top of the giant trees above us in the park as well. The Walkers had been worried that the pool wouldn’t reopen, and the last-minute announcement that it would was a great relief. In fact I had met Debra back in the winter, when she seemed to be looking for other options, should the worst happen to the pool where she’s been swimming for most of her life. We had both just sat through a presentation about the history of New York City pools sponsored by Plus Pool, a nonprofit that has spent the last 14 years raising money and awareness for the fact that they want to build a pool in the East River, using East River water. That last part is crucial, since it makes absolutely no sense - until they explain it, which, when they do, also makes no sense.

Perhaps for this reason, Plus Pool has pivoted to becoming sort of an all-around swimming enthusiast group, situating themselves as the de facto pool and water experts of the city. Hence the lecture, which was less of a lecture than a series of facts gathered from Wikipedia pages on the subject of swimming, but did cost $24, which would be donated to the organization. For the audience’s part, most people did not seem to know that New York City had pools at all. In the mingling portion after, during which we were encouraged to buy drinks to further support Plus Pool’s efforts, I felt a rap of my shoulder, and there suddenly was Debra. “Excuse me, do you swim?” And I said, yes, I do, and she sighed in relief. “I’m just trying to figure it out – —who here actually swims?”

*

This is the grand scheme of Plus Pool: it’s a floating pool, in the shape of a plus sign. The reason for the shape is “design,” and this is made clear at every Plus Pool fundraiser. The plus sign, whoever speaking for Plus Pool - usually Kara Meyer - will note, is positive. “Particularly now, when there’s all this hate going around,” Meyer had told a crowd of potential donors back in January 2025, “design matters.”

For designers of a certain Obama-era mindset, this idea - that what they do really matters, perhaps more than anything else - is central to their operation. It is often also wildly blind to anything outside of the design being inflicted on whatever field they’ve chosen. An inaccessible pool floating in unsafe water has no need to exist, but if you were to build such a pool, you’d think you’d notice from almost every other pool in the city, and the world, that four straight lines separated from each other is not the ideal shape for swimming.

But the shape of the pool is central to the organization, presumably because it’s all there really is to the pool at all. In fact, back in 2010, when the legendary four designers of Plus Pool first conceived of the idea, they did so by drawing a plus-sign and calling it a design for a pool. That was about it, in terms of creation. But the myth holds crucial, despite the departure of one original founder who felt the nonprofit was getting too white and too rich to achieve an equitable plus-sign. But he isn’t really discussed anymore, probably because that sort of thinking is sort of a downer. And Plus Pool has no intention if not sheer positivity. One is meant to see the floating plus sign from, say, an office building in Kips Bay, and be brought joy, even inspiration. There are so many things one can add, with the existence of a plus sign, that is doesn’t really matter what sort of things one wants to add, or is capable of adding. The more, of whatever, the merrier.

“What we’re getting rid of is just this overall ‘umbrella of No,’” Meyer told me back in 2024, speaking directly to the idea of changing protocols for measuring whether or not water was safe to swim in. “Like, ‘Nope! This doesn’t work!’”

It doesn’t, but that’s beside the point. For Meyer, it was about “moving the needle of change” so that, even if Plus Pool fails, due to not working, another organization might be able to use the lowered standards to build something that succeeds. Accessing the water by swimming, she said, was “the first step” in many that will ultimately lead to better conservation. When I pointed out that it seems like the first step was the Clean Water Act, which hasn’t actually allowed us to swim in the rivers yet, she still maintained that “awareness” of the possibility of swimming in the river is the most important thing Plus Pool does, now. (Forget about the pool for a minute, or forever.) In fact, she says, “the most discernible environmental benefit” of Plus Pool “is making that connection to New Yorkers.”

“This is the greatest city in the world with so many things,” she said, “and the only thing we really can’t do here is jump in the river safely.”

*

There are actually a lot of things New Yorkers can’t do, but swimming on a whole does rank as one. Not in the river, just at all. As of 2017, over a fourth of students in New York City did not know how to swim. In a passionate 2022 op-ed for the New York Times, Mara Gray noted that within these statistics, non-white students were most at risk, with one in three Black or Asian students unable to swim. For their part, Friends of Plus Pool has taken this problem to heart, offering free swimming lessons year-round, mostly in public indoor pools. The Department of Education does this too, and the Let’s Swim initiative promise to build two new pools in public schools and renovate seven existing school pools back in 2024 nodded towards the city’s understanding of this crucial lack.

Teaching children to swim is essential. Of the annual 1.7 million visitors of the city’s outdoor pools— - which are only open for nine weeks out of the year—the majority of patrons are children. According to the Parks Department, this makes sense: children are free during the day all throughout summer, having no school or job to go to.

But these statistics are not new. The history of pools in New York, and in fact in America, is the history of children being in pools, generally while adults decide in the background whether or not that’s a good thing. In Jeff Wiltse’s excellent Contested Waters (2007), which tracks the history of swimming pools in the Northeast, the battle between scoundrel youth and working men and women trying to relax begins in the original bathing pools of urban America and never ends. Today, swimmers of every age above teenage still speak of youthful swimmers as if they might simply overtake them. “Have you heard of this game, Marco Polo?” one of the Astoria Water Walkers asked when I brought up kids at the Astoria Pool. “It is a menace. They are everywhere.”

Anyone who’s spent time in them can tell you that New York’s pools really do belong to children. They open the day school ends, and efforts to keep them open longer into the fall, particularly as September and October days get hotter and hotter, have mostly failed due to collapse of interest once classes start up again. The public pool steps in for school, in practice as much as theory: the DOE provides free lunches at pools every day, and lifeguards in place mean that parents can feasibly let children of a certain age spend time there alone, giving much needed structure and activity to summer days.

In fact, it’s the pool as municipal childcare that keeps the idea of funding the pools at all afloat for many lawmakers. Pools play a near-mythical role in keeping city teenagers “out of trouble.” Every official I spoke to for this article mentioned some idea of pools as that which keeps the perennial troubled youth out of all that city trouble. As one Parks employee put it, “It doesn’t matter how tough they are, you watch them get in the water and just become a kid again.”

It’s a precious concept, but hear it enough times and the unspoken truth unsettles. The insistence that jumping into a pool can turn a city kid into a bundle of soggy joy relies on the belief that there’s something threatening about that kid to begin with. A shocking number of New Yorkers in charge of youth, from Parks to Education, seem to begin their plans for their departments with the idea that the majority of young people’s existence has the capacity to turn into something impossible for them to manage. Where these plans often end up, after countless budget cuts and rearrangement of fundamental priorities, is that the management must begin before anything impossible even happens. That is, the world for many New York City children begins with discipline, rather than encouragement.

This decision affects everyone, whether they realize it or not. Entering a public pool in New York takes so long not only because of lack of staff, but because the admission involves a strenuous investigation into each person entering the pool. Your bag may not contain food, or any pool toys or flotation devices of any kind. Cell phones are not allowed on deck, and neither are most anything else besides water, a towel, and books. If a person is wearing a t-shirt, that t-shirt must be white, for fear of “gang-related” colors. And no person may enter the pool without wearing a swimsuit. This last rule is perhaps the most outrageously enforced. Visit a pool often enough and you’ll notice the force with which Parks Department employees, many of whom got their start in law enforcement, check to make sure New Yorkers aren’t trying to sneak in in underwear or street clothes. Most often, it is teenage boys of color who are most invasively checked, made to show the lining of their swimming trunks to a stranger in front of their whole neighborhood.

To enter the pool in the city of New York is to find instant relief, and the first dive into the water after a long line almost always feels worth it; the frustrations of the wait float away on first contact. But it is not right to make people go through this humiliation and frustration to find so much relief. It is no wonder that the city fails to provide funding and care to what many officials seem to see as a place to store unwanted people during the summer months. It is only after they prove themselves worthy of joy - by splashing into a pool in just the right way - that the city decides to let them relax.

*

Were it possible to build on the waterfront of New York without the involvement of the city itself, wild projects like Plus Pool, and the $260 million failure of Little Island, which three years into pained existence is still desperate, according to a recent Times article on the Island’s slew of disjointed summer programming, to figure out how to get people to visit it, might simply annoy. But the waterfront exists in a complicated legal mix of public and private, and in some way, we the taxpayers are always paying for it. The reasoning for this is almost poetic: much of the waterfront as we know it wasn’t supposed to exist. As Kurt Schlicting tracks in Manhattan Waterfront (2018), most of the extension of Manhattan was built by selling water-lots, or swaths of water to be turned into land, to private entities, who then held control of these areas and essentially leased them back to city; the idea was that construction of anything at all was essentially impossible without private money, but necessary nonetheless. It’s the same mentality with which Robert Moses took such control of our private-riddled city, and the idea that a person can do whatever they want with something they built, even though they built it on a massive, public entity, is in many ways the resounding narrative of three centuries of New York real estate.

Maybe that’s why the influx of things that no one in the city wants, can reasonably get to, or ever asked for being built along our shores infuriates so much. What’s more, as Schlichting notes, these particular public-private partnerships almost always end up being a publicly-funded space exclusively for the rich, with prominent examples like Battery Park City and the High Line leading the way.

The High Line, which effectively belongs solely to tourists, was built by another nonprofit with a wild dream, and its founders have been active in backing Plus Pool, appearing at numerous events and encouraging people to give as much as they can. 2025’s $16 million from city and state, it seems, will not be enough. This is hard to grasp when the details of the deal emerges: Governor Hochul, in compromise, has also allotted $60 million to build ten new public pools, here on land, and help pay for repairs in existing pools. The Plus Pool claims that if it’s ever built, it can hold 300 people at most—the same as existing Cool Pools, and intermediate pools in general. That’s at least $10 million less per real pool than imaginary pool. With less than half of Plus Pool’s funds given to build known structures, which hold the same number of people, in places that people can and go to, it’s hard to not agree that a disproportionate number of funds is going toward a demographic of the city that’s already captured enough of our money. If the city is so rightfully concerned about creating a city of adults that doesn’t have to be catered to with expensive gimmicks, the logical fix is to give to all youth what only a select few already have. The funding, that is, is terribly misplaced.

One of the most baffling parts of Plus Pool’s pivot’s desire to “raise awareness” among New Yorkers that we’re surrounded by water is the fact that we basically all already know this. New Yorkers already care deeply about their environment for the obvious reason that if we did not, we couldn’t live here anymore. Efforts to clean up the rivers have existed for decades, like the Billion Oyster Project. Advocacy for environmental equity like more trees in poorer neighborhoods, historically lacking in shade and fresh air, has taken off in recent years, just as much as the city-wide interest in our public pools. In what is perhaps the most lasting effort of the pandemic era, the average New Yorker understands that the public, outside world must benefit us all, or else. The pools are there for children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly - and we all want each other there, I think, no matter what our strictest rules put us through. This is a city where a person should be able to be born and live and die, after all. And a city where millions of people already do.

A few summers ago, I was taking a break between laps in the Sunset Park pool when a little boy swam up to me. Unable to reach the five- foot deep floor, he bobbed his head while treading water, determinedly swimming still in a place he was far too little to be in. “How many laps have you done?” he asked, and I was taken aback, because no one had ever spoken to me in the pool before. I told him - fifteen so far - and his little eyes went wide. “Wow,” he said, treading as casually as he could manage. It was exciting to be heroic to him, so I said I still had more to do, and he nodded sagely, but the nod put his head further in the water. A lifeguard blew his whistle, the boy and I looked up at him. “He’s calling to you,” I said, “He wants you to go back where you can stand.” Defiantly the boy attempted to stand in the deep water. The lifeguard blew his whistle again and I shook my head. “You should go back,” I said. “He’s worried about you.” “Ah,” the boy said, and swam dutifully back to his shallow water. I watched the lifeguard watch him, watched him settle back into his chair. When we were both satisfied I joined the other adults in our illegal lap swimming, dodging kids here and there who came over to what it so rightfully theirs, always watching for them, always, in one way or the other, worrying about where they would go.

As of June 2026, Plus Pool still does not exist, though they have built a prototype to continue testing - in the shape of a rectangle.

On Wednesday we’d been in Fort Greene, outside of Greenlight, watching a projector above the outdoor space at Habana Outpost. It was a close game, and I hadn’t had any idea what would happen, because I don’t know anything about basketball at all. Still, all night I’d been out and about, going from place to place before landing at the bookstore. We’d settled accidentally next to a makeshift headquarters for the block’s nutcrackers; a man who knew what he was doing selling them with two other people, still learning, whom he’d left in charge of the drinks’ wagon. “If it were me,” he said to his lackluster companions half way through the game, “I’d have these out, so you could see them,” and then he poured all the nutcrackers out of the plastic bags they’d been concealed in, and the other two nodded, not really taking it in - they were really just watching the game.

At some point a woman on our block tried and failed to lead the crowd in a version of the Kalshi chant that made no sense - “my mayor’s muslim, my bagel’s chive” - and while people wanted to help her, it wasn’t catching on, and I was annoyed, because there’s no such thing as a chive bagel. But then the game took a serious turn, and the bad chant was abandoned, and we all watched - even those of us who had pieced together whatever orange and blue we could from our wardrobes, having only become fans last week - as our team called us up. There was silence and gripping and oohs and ahhs, and I had no idea what to feel until, at 32 seconds, the nutcracker man sprung into action. “That’s it, they got it, they got it,” he said, to no one at all, and dutifully - as if it was his real, true calling, as if it was simply what had to be done - started a chant I had only heard from commercials and videos: Go New York go New York go, Go New York go New York go. And this took off immediately, much better than the Kalshi chant, and then when he’d had enough he switched us to Let’s Go Knicks, without even thinking, he was gathering up nutcrackers to hit the crowd while he did it, he said “they got this” one more time, and then he was gone, and I knew they had this, because I knew that this man knew what he was talking about. When they won we all hugged, all of us on the corner, strangers and friends and everyone, except the nutcracker man, because he was off, selling drinks in the victory.

There was a time, long ago, when I locked in everything I ever heard under someone’s breath, whispered to me discreetly, said so only I could hear. Now I’m so old, now I know everything, but when I was still learning to live here, wasn’t that the only way I did it? A man telling me where to stand to order a bagel, someone holding the subway gate open when I didn’t know how, a woman walking by in the middle of the night, when my sister and I were trying to push the square in Astor Place, who said you have to each have one corner without stopping, and then we did, we pushed it and it turned and we went back to the my dorm and I thought, now I’ve hosted my sister, now I’ve had a visitor. And that was another thing I had learned how to do.

Everything about youth has the capacity to make me sad now, but last year I noticed that on the internet young people kept calling the subway “the MTA subway,” and it struck me as so tragic, because this could only have happened, I realized, from seeking out how the subway works on your own. Were they not asking for directions, were they not complaining about their commutes, were they not speaking at all or being spoken to? Like the dropping of the the from the Lower East Side, it felt like a new wave of language that signaled a loss instead of a new peak. But it is true that trying to learn New York on your own is like a child trying to learn to read alone; the child must be read to, after all, by a real person, the child must hear the waves of the voice as the story progresses, feel the way emotion feels when it’s attached to a series of words. It is not enough to look blankly on, it is a process of engagement, and it is one that serves the ones teaching it just as much, because no one is as cold as an old person who hasn’t engaged with a young person in a very long time. Nothing keeps you young, but a lot of things keep you alive.

When the Knicks won on Saturday I was at Lafayette Grocery and Dairy, standing in a crowd of a hundred or so, among thousands of crowds of thousands of people, and everyone by now had settled into what we were doing. We all had warm beers and no one bothered to conceal them, and even those of us who had only just become fans knew all the players by name by now, and we were familiar with their dynamics, and we all hated Wemby, a petulant child who should go back to Texas and then from there back to France. It became obvious by the end that our projection was a few seconds behind, maybe even as much as twenty, and it became affirmative that we did not care. We would not be checking ahead, we would not even be affected by the woos happening a block away, well before ours. Anyone who pulled out a phone was ignored, only the weakest among us would have checked the score outside of our screen. We could tell, silently, that they’d won before they’d won, we’d heard the fireworks starting, the screaming. But we stayed rapt until the clock on our wall hit zero. And only then did we, on our corner, scream and wave and jump and hug, only then did we know truly what had happened. We waited, together, until we could tell each other.

9. Meaning

8. Personality

7. Places

6. Force

5. Worry

4. Excess

3. Ability

2. Order

1. Aim

Previously: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

Two years ago I was honored to write about The Last Waltz for Geoffrey Lapid’s Movie Diary, America’s most important movie blog. For obvious reasons, I did not actually realize until yesterday that so many people associated the movie with Thanksgiving, but since I was asked, here is the piece, reposted with permission from Movie Diary Inc.

To begin with we should define beauty, which is not so impossible if we try. It’s what strikes you, maybe, what draws you in. It is of course subjective, but we do know that it exists, so whether or not it can exist at the same time in one person without existing for a different person is not that important; either way, it’s real. It’s helpful to have a clue, so here’s one I will say: beauty inherently has an air of surprise. It hits you because it doesn’t look like everything else. The shock is the thing that feels good.

This isn’t relevant to our beginnings, which start, ironically, with After Hours, but to set the scene I’ll say that I watched the movie with my husband, Zac, who is in fact very beautiful. So I know what it looks like.

When the movie ended we looked up where it fell in Scorsese’s timeline, and this is how I found out something I’d never known, which is that Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz is not, as I had always assumed, a tragic romance between two downtown artists which happens to have the same name as the movie about The Band, but actually is that movie, he’s the one who directed it. Obviously the next realization was that I had never actually seen it, and Zac said, well, let’s just watch that scene where Van Morrison is so drunk, that’s so good, and I said okay sure but what are you talking about, why is Van Morrison there, and he said what, do you really not know this, this is all really weird, considering how you grew up, and I said okay well let’s put it on, and we did.

The scene was Van Morrison singing “Caravan.” I knew this from the first note. I have heard this version of Caravan my entire life, along with several other versions of the song, but this one in particular, I have heard all my days. It is hard to explain, truly, what it means for me to say I grew up with this music. Its presence in my life is physical; there was not a time without it. It is rare for me to take a drive with my father in which he does not say “turn on, your rah-dio.” I have seen Van Morrison, also, at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, when he was much older.

I had never seen this version performed though. I had never seen this video. I knew which person, immediately, was Van Morrison; as I said, I had seen him in person, and the cover of Astral Weeks, and the cover of Veedon Fleece, a favorite album cover of mine. What I did not recognize was anything else I was seeing. I understood, because I now knew what movie this was from, that The Band should be present. But this was not The Band’s song, so maybe, I thought, they weren’t there. So I asked Zac, I said, “who are these guys,” and here he just looked at me and said, what, and I said, who are these great guys, these crazy guys, and he said, Lily, that’s The Band, and I said, “what - are you talking about.”

Imagine that from the time you were here there was a song. This song was made before you were born, that was obvious, but whether or not the song was made for you specifically or not was never clear. It seemed to know you were going to arrive, it seemed to have been waiting for you, it seemed to integrate itself perfectly into all of your days, from your very first breath to the step you took away from home, eighteen years after the first time you heard it. When you hear this song you can time travel, you can be five or eight or twelve or 23 or ten, and you are positive that you are not alone, you can bring others with you, and they can take you to their time too, as long as you both were there. You know that this is because you and this song are not separate at all, you are pretty sure actually that you never were. It is your belief, the longer you live, that you were not built and then sat alongside the song, but built by the song itself, built with the song weaving its way through your bones, layering itself into every part of you that can move. Whether or not you would be able to move at all without the song, actually, is unclear. Either way, the song is inescapable. It lives inside of you, yes, but it lives in your air too. It has never, ever, ever been anything that you did not love wholly. There has never been strife. You have never tried to get it out of your bones. You have tried to get every single other thing, actually, out of your bones, at various times in your life. But you have never tried to remove the song. You are, no matter what, no matter how bad things get, always, always only comforted by the song.

What would you do if one day, when you were almost 33, you found out, after a whole life, that one of the people in charge of this song, this part of you - that person, it turns out, that person you thought you knew better than anyone - what would you do if you found out that person was actually extremely, mind-blowingly, singularly hot?

“Robbie Robertson is one of the most beautiful men ever made,” my mother texted me, unhelpfully, at least 32 years too late, when I alerted my family to the fact that I had just seen The Band for the first time in my entire life.

What did I think The Band looked like? It isn’t that strange to me now that I never looked it up. I have heard The Last Waltz my whole life; it makes sense to me that I just assumed I had seen the recording too. It wasn’t just them, either. What’s in my bones is so much music I am overwhelmed. To say that it was never quiet in my house is not an exaggeration, but it’s also true that it was simply never quiet anywhere I went. I didn’t grow up in a commune but my home might have resembled one. How could I have never seen Levon Helm? If you had been around my family at any point in time without knowing who Levon Helm was you would have to assume he was at least my uncle, if not a beloved family friend, someone who had smushed up my hair at holidays. In fact it’s hard for me to truly conceptualize that I have never actually met Levon Helm.

Anyway, in general I thought they looked like the cast of Duck Dynasty. This disparity, between what I assumed were just a bunch of old guys, and the most beautiful man in the world and his equally young friends, was an experience I cannot describe as anything but “insane.” It is one of the craziest things that has ever happened to me in my entire life.

My family thought it was very funny, very sweet. As it happens, I had already spent much of the year reflecting on my family’s music. Back in the spring I watched Summer of Soul in sync with my mom, who was watching in Alabama. On the phone with her right after it finished I blurted out “I’ll never be able to watch this after you die.” But she understood - that movie, like The Last Waltz, was my mom walking around, sitting in a chair, driving me anywhere in the world, our whole family singing along to “Higher” like it was being performed right there with us in the kitchen.

What does that sort of house look like from the outside? I have no idea, I’ve never been out there. Last summer we were all sitting around in the dining room and my dad was playing the guitar and we were singing along and my nearly-2 nephew was dancing in that stumbling toddler way and I thought, I bet this is what people think our family is doing at basically all times, but it’s sort of true, it really was like that, at basically all times.

Isn’t it strange, then, that I almost never listen to anything these days? During Covid I stopped walking around with headphones on outside, so desperate for snippets of conversation and life outside of my apartment that I walked dozens and dozens of blocks listening for anything, a complaint or a piece of gossip or just a person muttering to themselves that they forgot what they left the house for. I found that I never fully returned to the habit after I heard people normally again. I wondered why and came to the same conclusions a lot of people have come to lately: that the hunt for new music makes me incredibly sad, and somehow the act of reaching back made me a little sad too.

Talking to my mom the day I found out Robbie Robertson was hot, I was surprised to hear myself say “these things will never happen again,” and more surprised to hear her say, yes, they will, someone will come along. We were talking about not just The Band, but all bands, all the bands who have holed into our bones and guts and blood and made us who we are. But more than the bands, we were talking about Martin Scorsese, we were talking about the idea that these bands could be preserved and cared for and sent out to all of us in this dignified, loving way. That someone could make a movie about a concert because it was something to be seen, not because it was simply another way to get money out of the fans sworn to follow them wherever they go. That music could exist without those fans at all, curated by artists wise enough to know that they can’t make money if no one believes they’re so holy they have to see them in person, ruthless enough to turn themselves into gods for profit.

For most of my life I believed that she was right. I looked for that music constantly, I became excited when I thought I saw it happening. But whatever glimmers there were are extinguished now. It did not make money to make music like that. And it turns out gods have nothing much more to say to us besides buy, hold, buy, forever, until they die, which they can’t, or they won’t make money anymore. So when it was revealed in The Last Waltz why exactly The Band was quitting - that they were simply retiring - I was stunned. Robbie Roberston was 33 when they filmed it, the same age I am now, and he really just didn’t want to do it anymore. It was exhausting, he had a family, he had more to do than be paid. Can any of us who make art in any way imagine being able to retire while we’re still that gorgeous? Can any of us imagine being able to say that we’re tired and have it matter?

Of course Robertson didn’t stop making music, or working at all. He continued with Scorsese right up until his death this year, ending on the lurking note of the Killers of the Flower Moon score. It’s beautiful and weird and eerie. It’s not something you’d expect someone nearly 80 to write, and 80 isn’t the age you expect anyone to die, it’s still too early. But watching every interview that surfaced after his death, I noticed that his beauty never faded, that his calm never waivered. He was at peace and he was happy. An artist who gets to work on their own terms always is.

At one point in the concert, Neil Young walks out, a harmonica attached. He is grateful to be there, he calls it a pleasure of his life. He tunes his harmonica, he looks out over the crowd. He begins to play and then stops. He turns towards his friend and says “They’ve got it now, Robbie.” And Robbie just smiles. He believes him. He’s done, I think, one job. He has enough hope in the prospect of more than he can move on.

I haven’t watched The Last Waltz again, but I have spent a lot of time listening to it, reacquainting myself with walking around listening to anything, sitting at home and letting someone else in via speakers. Still a few nights ago we were sitting in silence when Zac looked up from his phone and said “what do you think ancient Greek music actually sounded like?” And I said, well, I think it’s an interesting question, which surprised him, because, I continued, with most things from the past I assume they were very bad, like food, but I think probably we’ve always been good at making music, so I assume it was very good. He nodded, and I kept thinking about it, and he played a video of someone playing an ancient lyre, and I said, hm.

It didn’t sound very good, actually, but I still think I’m right. It’s a natural thing for us to do, after all. We make music with our bodies, we dance when we’re just little nephews and can barely stand. What is not natural, of course, is to drive ourselves into the ground to make things that don’t even last, to turn ourselves into impossible caricatures that no one can stand to hear say anything less than a quip set to melody, to let our art be turned into commerce until it makes so very little money that it turns into nothing instead, or really less than nothing, just the eternal dullness of a commercial that sounds very fun but really only exists to lull you into being so comfortable that you never leave. But I don’t think the music that opens us up and crushes us is ever going to go away. And it’s worthwhile to me, I guess, to wait around for the shock of something truly beautiful, maybe for the rest of my life, maybe just for the little while longer we have until all these vultures give up on making money and let us back into our world.

We really were the best, it turned out. The primary proved that we had found the right people to talk to after all. In particular we had moved a generation that is, across the board, downwardly mobile, and for this reason I started seeing more and more about something called “millennial earnestness.” In the same weeks that a then-33-year-old toppled a political dynasty, a video of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes cringing through a Tiny Desk performance was circulating online. What non-millennials might not have known is that there was nothing earnest in this; in fact the two singers had broken up before the song was released, and for those of us who saw them live some unexplained number of times around smaller, still-cheap venues in New York, the discomfort they had in acting out the love scene mid-song was immediately palpable. But this was not remembered, because the embarrassing middle of the song was not memorable. What was memorable about “Home” was the introduction: the whistling, the beat, the words that meant many people at the time thought the song was called “Alabama, Arkansas.”

You’ll almost always find yourself when you go looking for something, and at the time when I started, post-primary, to find what exactly separated millennial music from the generations sandwiching it, what I was was hundreds of introductions, at least three days a week, more by the end. But still it could not be ignored: when I put together a list of the songs that most signaled to me being 19, 21, 25 in New York City, what I noticed was that each one announced itself spectacularly. We dropped singular piano notes, whistles, guitar chords silencing a room with their steadiness. We told you right away what we were: feeling rough and feeling raw, so sentimental, filled up with nothing, in love again, fighting ‘em off, formerly rotten and still loved. We backed our cars into cop cars and then we crashed them into a bridge. We opened with saxophones, we opened with drops, we opened with drums in a hall that sounded like people running from a gun shot that we were, for some reason, singing about. We asked if this is your first time hearing this when we knew it had to be, we told you our new names so you wouldn’t bother with the old ones, we poured up, head shot, sat down, stood up. We said hey, we said what’s up, we said hello.

What were we doing back then, between the moody fade-ins of the nineties and the desperation for a hook streamed over and over again that’s currently defining the 2020s? We were not sitting around in coffee shops and we were not sitting around on apps, for one; we were quite literally walking around with the smallest and easiest to use form of DJing yet invented. We were desperate to be the favorite person to hand the aux cord to, because suddenly we had more music in our hands than ever before, and we wanted to show that we had found, in all of that, the best. With music we followed the same pattern of this era’s explosion of media - blogs, movies, TV shows, Vines - in that we gave it our all to make great use of the sudden ability to have everything, before the next wave of the internet decided it was actually easier if everyone simply had the same thing.

It was this burst of awe in the fact that we really did have more than any generation had ever had before - we knew this because we were told it constantly, either with the same wonder we held for the fact, or in miserable scolds for spending all of that everything on lattes - that gave way to what we’re now calling “millennial earnestness.” And it is true that we were earnest, that we were loud, that we declared as soon as we knew who we were that we were ready to be that person forever. We wanted to take this new everything and use it for something greater. Feed the Animals as a national blueprint.

What happened next is American history. The answer to a question we had not been asking but stating was very clearly no. There was no money for us, there were no jobs for us, there were no homes for us. The crush was slow-moving until it came all at once, and all that earnestness died in the second half of 2016. If there is a funeral anthem for us, it is a cruel one, for did we not spend the last summer before the end was clear dancing to promise of gooooood times, good times?

We could not have known then that our revivalist did not seem to see the end so clearly. Deep within the wreckage of Soundcloud, it turned out, there he was, seemingly confused, somehow unaware that the time for over-produced music videos and jokey rap was over. Through the ashes of millennial earnestness, Mr. Cardamom rapped on.

There was one last breath, right before the pandemic hit. Now clear on the fact that the liberal capitalism we’d been sold was in fact not going to work, a significant number of us had finally, earnestly moved on to some American form of socialism. We did not have one of our own to push this forward, but we did have Bernie, who was very old and very out of touch and pretty clearly racist in several ways, but at the time the idea was to correct the millennial insistence that racism, like sexism, was fundamentally bad. Thus his Zionism and complete lifetime spent safely tucked away in nearly all-white spaces was overlooked, and his videos were good, and our favorite bands loved him. We believed him when he said Not me, us, and without any real proof assumed that that us would be encompassing of all, instead of only some. This was our failure. But still, even after the losses and the years of chaos, he rallied us. He got on stage after stage and taught converts new facts, reminded life-longers of them too, and that cannot be denied. He made people feel like they could build a better world. In order to do this he asked us something so simple, so unintrusive, that we felt the answer was obvious: Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?

It is luck, sheer luck, that so many people were asked this right before a deadly virus spread so quickly that we were forced to shut ourselves off from each other for over a year. I believe that it helped very many truly fight, in countless ways, for people we felt sincerely at the time we might never know again. The desire for the world around us to endure, in spite of all its flaws, moved an untold amount of people towards radical politics. It was there that Bernie abandoned them, first quietly, in the 2020 protests, then loudly, with his belief in Israel and disdain for Palestine.

In these late revelations of Bernie, we found that the answer to his question was in fact no. Why would we fight for this vague, unknown entity, and, perhaps more importantly, why would you want us to? The true failure of Bernie Sanders was not simply not being able to win the primary, but assuming that the politics of alienation that had so moved the right could sustain the left. Because once the world opened back up, we did not want to keep not knowing the people we were fighting not only for, but with. We were disappointed to find that, in the hopes of making everything as simple as the simplest question, there did not seem to be that much to know. The world that reopened was sterile, frigid, empty. We had better ideas of equality but we had no real need to push them, because the result of closing down everything was that we could only stand to reopen a few things. We relived the decision that it was too hard to make use of the whole world over and over again. It was easier, as it had always been, to simply be given a few hard truths. It became obvious that a person of a certain age should be an unchallenged leftist, and it became boring.

It makes brutal, heartbreaking sense that the version of the left that wanted to exist without the knowledge of Palestine would sell the idea that every person should band together without familiarity, for what we saw in our next wave was that the simplest introduction to what Israel had done with our country’s support was enough to sway whole fields of people. If the passing of Covid settled a nation into the cold knowledge of just how little their government cared about survival, the revelation of exactly how much it rejoiced in destruction set us back on fire. The flippant acceptance of being tossed aside by our leaders gave way to its power: we were tossed en masse. We were, in fact, the masses.

We have a lot of words for believing you can change the world, no matter how bad it is, if only you’re brave enough, loud enough, big enough. One very good one, one you might use when a man born in 1991 is inspiring it, is earnest.

If you want people to listen to you, give them a memorable intro. Zohran’s running to freeze the rent in rent-stabilized buildings, deliver universal childcare, and make the buses fast and free. We said it so much we started chanting it back and forth to each other. Over and over and over again, every day for nearly a year, we went through the city and told people who we were. But we were not tracks, and we were not videos, and we were not a man on a stage, because we did not have only that to say. Over and over and over, we asked who they were too.

If you have noticed, like I have, that this city has felt more like itself in the last few months, it is because we have been reminded that being who we are is not a simple, careless thing. Every life is a universe, I started seeing people post, mourning death after death in Gaza. And I saw people begin to believe it. The initial shock of what was being done in places so far away was morphing into the revelation that nothing was ever that far away at all. There had been, in the wake of the 2020 protests, a definite annoyance in the concept of knowing each other. After all the marching, the arrests, the tear gassing, it seemed decided that Black and white America should simply go their separate ways. This did not happen in the world that learned about Palestine. The desire to understand, learn, and fight together was sincere. The situation was not complicated, it was simply unknown, until it wasn’t. This is the movement that brought forth the majority of those volunteering to canvas during the primary, whether from DSA or DRUM or JVP or nothing. More than anything else, when I asked why people were there, I heard Palestine.

Thus we did not feel that the people behind the doors were unknowable. On the contrary, more people were finding out that they had the very common power to listen and learn than had in a very long time. We fought for the city to be a place we could live in because we knew exactly why we wanted to live here. We could no longer accept that it had become so hard. Whether new or old or barely even living here anymore, we saw that our city was dead, cold, sterile. We wanted to see it live again.

And so we made it a place we could recognize, whether again or for the first time. For one year, we sought an education of our neighbors. We stopped imagining who was behind every door, stopped giving them assigned roles only to be disappointed and frustrated when they fail to play their part. We told strangers what our morals are, our standards are, and we asked what theirs were too. This campaign was won by 3.1 million introductions, 3.1 million attempts to learn what sort of universe learns inside each person. It was with this knowledge of each other, not in spite of it, that we learned we could fight.

The last thing I ever told canvassers, on that very last shift on that very last day, was to take this all in. Take in their walks in the cold night air, take in each buzzer, each door talk, each introduction. I told them that I wanted them to remember what it feels like to change the world - block by block, door by door, conversation by conversation. I told them that I wanted them to be ready to do it again.

We sent them off, and I asked a Friend of Scream the question that had worried me all day, with each emotional send-off, each one tailored to each group: Was that too earnest?

Maybe, he said, but it was also very good.

I have watched this shift with the same disdain I watch everything in New York that has lost its roots as the wealthiest people in our city decide that’s the thing that they want. It makes sense to me that the most prominent versions of this new wave of pilates, so different from the original, have set up shop in places like the West Village. There is nothing left of the radical queerness that once defined this neighborhood on those streets; it is perhaps the shining example of the trade-off that many white men decided to make back in the early aughts, essentially to buy their rights and respect. We forget sometimes, due to its ultimate fair result, that the focus of the gay marriage debate for many people hinged on the prospect of two men becoming one legal unit - essentially doubling already large incomes. That the white, cis, male contingent of the LGBTQ crowd made good on that promise makes sense; that they now tend to veer more moderate and conservative than any other demographic in our queer community is simply the result of wealth welcoming people into its clutches. But when you walk the streets where Stonewall was a riot so many years later, you see the real loss in that callous calculation: you can certainly buy your rights, but whoever sold them to you will still feel like their owner. The West Village today is overrun by the most heterosexual people I have ever witnessed. I would assume they have no notion of the neighborhood’s history beyond the scattered rainbow flags.

Even outside of the West Village, you can usually tell if you’re in a more modern version of pilates right away, because in my experience the fundamental difference is that they do not begin the class with something called footwork. These are exercises meant to start up the motions of the body, and is sort of what it sounds like: a series of movements determined by the placement of one’s feet on the machine. The movements tend to be pleasantly easy at first and then become very hard. But the new form of pilates wants everything to feel very hard, all the time and right away, because it has identified itself with class names like Arms, Abs, and Ass, and become the number one way that our city’s roving Hot Girls Stay Fit. For this reason, these classes tend to take the fundamentals of the therapeutic workout and turn it into something that on its own is very difficult, thus leaving the class-goer exhausted and also, it must be said, so toned. I would not call the bizarre movements these studios tend to direct with the machine’s ropes and springs traditional moves, or maybe even pilates at all, simply because they have a totally different goal. These classes are for people who only do pilates; that is, they are classes for people whose bodies are not only receiving their only exercise from pilates - which can be and often is enough exercise for anyone - but also who want to be completely worn out from this, having nothing else that they need their bodies to show up for. There is a difference between the practice of conditioning a body meant to do more, and fatiguing one down when this is the only action you do. Those who choose the latter tend to have bodies that they simply want to be seen and admired: a still thing that looks perfect. Those who choose the former tend to have a body that has something it needs to do.

Another hint that you’re in a traditional studio, even before the work begins, is that your instructor is not American, and this I think Tooze actually touched on nicely. The most interesting thing about pilates is how international it is. It’s much more common, in New York, to have someone teaching in their second language than to have some transplant stereotype from Ohio. We live in an international destination for the arts, famously including ballet, but what so many people find when they make it here is that it is not actually a place where sustaining one’s dream is possible. Thus, teaching pilates has become a second, or back-up, career for vast swarms of dancers, whether they moved here from another part of the country or very far away.

It is a stereotype that is also true that most of New York’s so-called odd jobs are staffed by people who explicitly planned to be doing something else with their lives. By no means is this true of only our immigrant population. The state of pilates, in that sense, is the state of the city. In America, we are constantly asking our young people to make their way to our world-renowned institutions while offering them consistently worse training than they need to need to get there, whether it be with our failing early and high school education, or a complete lack of arts, or other, training at all. Thus they arrive significantly behind the expectations set for them, even if they came from our city’s own schools. At the same time, and with usually a fraction of the social safety net, people from all over the world are striving and succeeding in ways we cannot imagine in order to get here, only to find that they cannot afford to pursue whatever brought them here. In both cases, the prized destination they aimed for is not able to give them what they need. Whether this is a ballet career or simply raising a family, we have let New York fall into such disarray that no matter where you came from, it is likely that you might need to take on a second job in order to stay here. Pilates, with its freelance status and, as Tooze noted, impossible-to-track metrics, is one of the easier ways in which those working under specific documentation concerns might find that second gig. But for those not trained in ballet or something else done in an air-conditioned, easy-going room, that gig is likely to be much harder, and much more exploitative.

Despite all these issues, I do go to pilates as regularly as I can, which has been less than usual lately. Per my last email, I have been spending most of my time volunteering for Zohran Mamdani, which in my case means leading canvasses around the city a few times a week. I am grateful that I have learned how to protect and rest and reset my body in this time especially, because any one of our legions of volunteers will tell you that canvassing in New York City is very physical work. But I have heard less people make the requisite jokes about getting their steps in on this campaign than any other, because from the beginning our volunteers tended to be people who had been very used to walking the streets of New York City for the cause they believe in. This campaign has been a home for thousands of people who have marched relentlessly to voice their support for a free Palestine, for a country without ICE, for a world where Black and brown people are not faced with violence at every turn. This campaign has been a place for people whose bodies move with a purpose, and we have filled the streets with the message that we are not leaving anyone behind, even if they do not yet know how to move with purpose too. I have met hundreds of volunteers just back from climbing six-floor walk-ups, braving rain and cold and wind and such heat, only to tell me that none of that mattered, because someone who had never heard of this man is going to vote for him now. Nothing has made me more certain that we will win than these moments of people discovering their own strength. What we have seen this year is 46,000 people discovering that they have the power to reshape a city so forcefully set in concrete and steel and absolute rot that no one thought it could possibly bend. What we will see tomorrow night is the truth: everything is reshapable. It only needs a clear vision of what it could become.

I was not a believer in this campaign to begin with. I thought it would be a nice try, and a good attempt at building more socialist power. But I do not care about nice tries; I really only care about winning. I knew Zohran Mamdani could and should win when I saw him confront Tom Homan to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil. I watched a man I knew nothing about use his body to stand directly in the way of power, to demand the justice that is necessary not only for a democracy to exist, but for civilization at all. I could not believe what I was seeing, because we do not have politicians who move. Our leaders are still, and they are perfect. They say what they know needs to be heard, and then they stay put. They do not have beliefs that need to be exercised, they do not have reasons to leave a perch where they can be seen and admired. When I saw Zohran move, I knew I should too. And so I have.

I wanted to go to Morningside Heights. I wanted to walk those streets, to knock those doors, to send people out to an area that I knew mattered a lot in terms of voter turnout, but that would be harder to sway to its normally progressive perch in this election. These are older intellectuals who are generally quite settled in life, having gotten into education or the arts or something like that back when you could still do that and end up buying a co-op on Riverside Drive. I assumed it would be difficult to sell them on a young, Muslim, pro-Palestine candidate, and it was. It was frankly very hard, and for the first weeks or so I would come back home to Brooklyn after every canvass filled with anger. I could not believe that these people were so willing to leave our city behind. And so I told my volunteers to tell them that. We asked our doors to stop focusing only on these existential battles that they watched on MSNBC, to come back down to earth with us, to see what their real, actual, living and breathing neighbors needed and were not being given. And then suddenly, almost all at once, they listened. They saw their cloistered neighborhood swarmed with real, actual, living and breathing people, New Yorkers now no matter where they started out, and they started choosing to move with us too.

All day yesterday I kept one turf list in my pocket. It was a wealthy block, flanked by Columbia on one side and the rest of New York City on its other. I wanted to see what it felt like, so in our final shift I walked over from our launch side to walk it myself. We are positioned further from our lists now, on the other side of Morningside Park, so I had to cross down below on 110th. And when I turned the corner onto Amsterdam, I saw a swarm of people, holding Palestinian flags. And I heard people chanting, and I realized that I was walking into a rally, and I read signs I had never seen before, and they said “Welcome home Mahmoud Khalil.” And there on the steps of the Cathedral of Saint John Divine was the man who has represented to so many of us the fact that all of our fights are the same fights, that we can leave no one behind if we truly want to win. And he was free, and he was home, and he was telling us all to keep going, to keep moving, to march straight to Columbia and demand that he not be the only person released from ICE, that he not be the only person allowed to be free. And the crowd went with him, and I walked my turf.

They were chanting, as I walked up, a very clear message: I believe that we will win. I know that they are right - about it all.

I was happier in those calls than I had been in months, so I called Brian Lehrer myself, after sending a few emails, and interviewed him about talking to all these locked up New Yorkers. We talked for the permitted time, and I was beside myself with glee, because this was Brian Lehrer, and he was on the phone with me. He told me about how guests calling in had prompted his team to further investigate stories about hospitals needing supplies or policies being mismanaged, and expressed gratitude that so many people trusted him with their stories. When I asked if he had noticed an uptick in people like me, people using his callers as a substitution for the sounds normally heard next to them in restaurants and grocery stores and movies during the previews and sometimes during the movies too, he laughed and told me he wasn’t sure.

Our call took place right at the end of May, and I never published the piece. Days after we hung up, a new sound emerged in New York, that of chanting, screaming, running, shots that sounded like guns but were actually gas. Suddenly I was very busy and very focused, two things I had not been in months. I was also very tired, because I found out in those weeks that while I was lucky to have a body that could march and run and take a beating, all of these things were very exhausting, and whenever I came home I found that I fell asleep faster than I had ever had before. Once these things were no longer as frequent, I went back to my story, sure that I could transform it into something even better than before, but the publication I had pitched it to had dissolved in those months, and so I just sat with it. Eventually, everyone came back together again, and for this reason I assumed the interview and initial story idea would be obsolete. Now, I could hear voices much closer again. Now, we had even more things to complain about.

What surprised me was that the quality of complaints had fallen. They were less specific. People were menaced by “the train,” but they would barely bother to expand from there. Was it a person breaking some sort of etiquette, or was it a countdown clock showing 7 or 9 minutes until the next train, instead of the accepted 3 or 4? Were there teenagers being rambunctious, and if so were they doing it in a cruel way where you despised them, or an insecure way, so that you felt you should be able to give them a hug? Was the heater on in the C even though it was much too warm, or had every light flickered while you were stuck in a tunnel? I found that no one could really say anymore, or maybe they just weren’t interested. More often than not they seemed bothered to just have to be on the train at all. Freshly cleaned, waiting for us in all of its gleam, the subway was suddenly a place that people who had no business feeling bothered by it felt deeply offended by.

It became clear that the reason they hated the subway was the reason they suddenly hated a lot of New York, which is that they perceived it to be a place for poor people. And this was at the root of almost all of the new, supremely disappointing complaining: poor people had taken over the city. Whether or not this happened because a significant number of New Yorkers who had spent time with only themselves and their families for the last year suddenly realized that other people were less rich than them, or whether something else had happened which has probably been written about at least six hundred times by now - it’s impossible to say. But many people were suddenly convinced that they were surrounded by poor people, and also that they were terrified by this. What began as a phenomenon mostly on Tik Tok and in Soho seemed to spread like wildfire, which did come later, but in this moment the fire was fear, and it reached the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side and Harlem and Park Slope and Bed-Stuy and certainly Clinton Hill, and now suddenly the city was living in very general, very unspecified fear.

Fear is very boring to hear about, because there really isn’t much to say about it. That someone has convinced themselves that everyone had a knife or a disease that they would deploy on anyone walking their way is not something you need to hear about more than a few times. The desire to hear about anything else - a feud with whoever stocks the stone fruit at Key Food, a poet who ruined a dinner party by bringing a banker, the situation happening with that new building down the street which has been building itself for far too long - was palpable. Instead, what we got was acquiescing these fears, affirming them. Specifically, those fears on the subway, for which our mayor and governor raced to find the most wasteful and useless solution. In the end, we got both thousands of cops and the National Guard, two groups which are notoriously useless and unnecessary, and also totally inept in urban environments. Whereas anyone who had listened to a specific, highly detailed complaint about the subway could see that what it needed was more trains which run more frequently and therefore decrease the time spent sitting alone in the station or being on the train itself - neither of which feels particularly perilous but are clearly places where people allow their minds to wander - would work better than whatever it is cops and the National Guard do. But it was the replacement of specific complaints with blanket, stupid fear that pointed Hochul and Adams to these solutions, and considering I don’t think either of them have stepped foot on the subway in years outside of promotional videos, I would assume they believe all that fear very deeply.

I do not think that you can really complain about something well unless you know it well, and it seems obvious that what happened to call this influx of bad complaints into being was that people simply stopped knowing what was actually going on around them. I think they also stopped caring too, and this, again, could be traced by the surprising number of things there turn out to be about only yourself and your own world and the things you yourself have done and thought about, when you have enough time to sit and go through them.

Staying more focused on yourself than the world around you is a terrible way to find out what’s wrong with the world around you. It also backfired in a peculiar way, which is that old people, who had generally lived long and full lives, having had decent incomes and better scenarios, had a lot to sit back and think about, whereas young people did not. Thus young people began to scramble to make memories and other things to think about as quickly as possible, declaring this and that summer and this and that theory and this and that type of girl, or even boy. A bizarre attempt to create nostalgia - or, a perfect and flawless time to look back on with joy and calm - out of no memories at all, to have already lived a life in a span of nothing. It was natural for young people to look to Boomers here1, in terms of trying to be happy. The pandemic made it very clear that anyone without money and a standard, American family would be completely fucked from now until the final collapse, so there was no reason to look at any other generation, all of which are both poor and scattered, family-wise. But it did not necessarily work, or really work at all. These are not real lives that are being churned out on videos, and the people behind them appear to be too scared to do anything not explicitly laid out as the Thing To Do.

For this reason I was not surprised that the biggest break in this sad imitation came from students, those who had probably left their own form of whatever turning into your parents was in their hometown. Having been one myself, I am biased about students in New York, and I trust people who did not go to school here much less than people who did. But it is also true that even in the many cases where these students themselves came from New York, what they were usually signing up to do in school was to defeat this desire for nostalgia, either by studying the past as it actually was, or the present in some form. In other words, they were occupying the traditional role of students in times of fascism, wherein by the very fact of their education they threaten it. America, which is finally coming into its own as a real, grown fascist state, has always hated education, but now that hatred seethes. And with good reason: who in this country has stepped up more, and with so much more to lose, than those students fighting for Palestinian liberation, for true freedom and equality, for a defeat of what this country has turned out to be?

In New York, we are not supposed to be like the rest of America. In fact, we are supposed to be its opposite. Everything that is rotten about it - racism, anti-intellectualism, fear - we are supposed to despise. But lately when I talk this way I realize I’m becoming my own worst enemy, which if it hasn’t been obvious to readers by now I’ll say explicitly: the enemy is nostalgia, that blanking of one’s own mind, the eternal way that the average person who doesn’t consider themselves to be fascist finds themselves complying with it anyway. To lose all handle on what is happening now, on what one should do now, in favor of remembering how one acted then, this is how we end up with leaders who should have retired a decade ago giving in entirely to Trump, without even so much as a fight. When Chuck Schumer says the way he thinks he can fight is to hand over everything to the president and Musk, he is living in a fantasy in which the way he fought at his best, whenever he actually succeeded, which frankly I can barely remember, can work again. He is refusing to see what is happening around him because he is unprepared for it. It is easier, on him, to live this way.

To be clear, this is not a question of youth versus age. Yesterday, while being driven to jail after occupying the lobby in Trump Tower, half of the van was filled with women in their seventies and eighties, all of whom had been arrested countless times, and had only wisdom and encouragement to share. These are people who are old and are still with us, are still able to see clearly what is happening around them. They can see clearly what the fight for a free Palestine means, what happens to this country when Mahmoud Khalil is abducted and our leaders allow it, what those leaders are doing with concepts we thought we understand like free speech and anti-semitism, what it means when things are changed. I know countless people in their twenties and thirties who are far more removed from reality than these women are. I know people who were born when their grandchildren were who are more nostalgic for these women’s youth than they could ever be.

We will not win now unless we can see clearly what is wrong now. We do not have leadership that is willing to look. We have another chance right now, if we love New York, to get it. We can elect a mayor who can really complain, can really see what’s going on, can really get into the face of the Trump administration and fight for us. Because I do love New York, much more than I love America, and probably much more than I should love any place at all, I plan to spend the next few months working to get Zohran Mamdani elected as mayor. I am doing this as a broken promise to myself. After the catastrophe that was the Biden to Harris 2024 campaign, I swore I would never work for a candidate again. In fact, I said, I wouldn’t work on electoral politics at all. But that was six months ago. And this is today.

“For years,” I finally typed, “all I have heard is ‘Don’t be like Robin Williams,’” and now, I exclaimed, everyone was pouring over themselves to praise him. “I remember,” I typed, without functionally real italics but they were clearly felt, “when he showed up one night as Assscat, and no one knew what to do with him.” No one else typed anything back. “Don’t you remember?” I typed to the emptiness. “It was so sad,” I added, and I meant it very seriously. Back then, with technology, you could tell when someone did.

That is not what I thought you were going to say, one friend finally replied. And this I remember because it wasn’t what I thought I was going to say either. I had no ties to Williams, he had never been a hero of mine, outside of Dead Poets Society, I had no favorite movies starring him. No one had ever had to tell me not to behave like Williams in an improv class because I never would have; I did not like his style. When he did arrive at the famed weekly showcase of the best teachers, it was a surprise that I felt just as uneasy as everyone else about. At that period, the idea was that everyone in an established improv group was a genius and doing things with their minds that it took years - specifically enough years to pay for at least five rounds of classes, if not more - to learn. His brash, loud, fast takes were simply not what we were about. In fact, he was going against everything we were paying to be taught to do. And on stage that Sunday night, our teachers confirmed it, flailing at Williams’s flails, jumping at his jumps, screaming at his screams.

I remember only one person on that stage who did well with him. At one point another actor was being a person, and Williams came in, hands fluttering together towards the actor’s shoulder, to be a bird. It was abrupt, and it made no sense, and it was clear that the actor being a person had no idea what to do with Williams the bird. The silence of a Choice the Improviser Hates seeped in, until, suddenly, Zach Woods - or someone else who was tall and gentle, but in my memory it’s Woods - appeared from the wall. He, now an absurdly secondary bird, glided to the shoulder of Williams’s bird. Suddenly, we could all see it: one bird, on one shoulder, that was chaos. But a second bird, on a first bird, on one shoulder - that was actually very funny.

*

Sometimes I run into comedians I used to know in my neighborhood, where people in their thirties and forties who haven’t made a lot of money still live comfortably. On occasion, I see them in commercials, in bit roles of TV shows and streaming service movies, in the credits of an awards ceremony that went on too long. Mostly, though, I see them walking down the street, standing on a train platform, in line at the merch table of a small concert, or, once, at the DMV. In that last case, we spoke, not because I wanted to, but because a small man jerked at my arm, and when I looked down he said “I know you. Why do I know you?” The answer is that I used to serve drinks at a monthly show that he and so many others frequented, and also that we’d done some other gig job together, but all I said then was, “My number is being called.”

The truth is that it really isn’t any use to tell a comedian where they know you from. His grasp of my arm, wholly unwanted, came from the fervor he felt when he thought I might be someone. Trapped with him inside the Department of Motor Vehicles, I could have been the very someone he needed. But I was really just a bartender, just someone’s friend, just a girl who hung around for no real reason other than what else was she doing. Had I told him this, he would have released me, but whoever I could have been will never be safe. If he does meet her one day in a federal building where no one’s allowed to leave, he will not ungrasp her arm. He would sooner break it off and carry it home with him, I think, than let that someone - that someone he believes in far more than himself - get away.

I did try, once, to become a someone like that. I wrote out a set about what was happening in my life at the moment - no real job, crashing with friends, not eating meat, very typical stuff. I had been miserable in improv, absolutely torturous to pull off the back wall. When I began improv classes, I’d had a grand idea that comedy would make me a better writer, but I had not realized how much I would hate performing. Telling jokes at an open mic was easier, but as soon as I left the stage I felt hot and I shook and I knew right away that I would die. I went home and threw up for 24 hours. In every moment I saw myself back on stage, I felt it completely, I was there again, it was hell. I had done the mic at the urging of a friend, and I remember that when I was okay again and met him at a bar, having texted him constantly throughout every moment of vomiting, he acted like I’d been through war. “Never again,” he said, and he meant it sincerely. “I’ll never make you do that again.” He hadn’t made me do anything, of course, but I was grateful anyway. I did not want to do it again, ever, ever again. It was nice to hear out loud that I wouldn’t have to.

Had my friend not been so concerned that this perfectly normal experience was literally going to kill me, I wonder if I would have tried to go back. I wonder how long it would have taken me to stop vomiting. Because what I know now is that what I felt in those 24 hours of vomiting was intense, thrashing memory. I wonder when I would have realized that the thing I needed to kill to carry on wasn’t fear of the unknown, like I’d always assumed in my improv days, but the deep imprint of what I had already been through.

Still I think that in that moment I began finally to recognize how much memory killed comedy, because after that I didn’t think comedy was going to help me write anymore. My entire life, actually, was about memory, had always been about memory, in many ways revolved around sitting and thinking not only about things that had already come to pass, but how exactly it had felt to be passed by them. I did not understand how detrimental this was to the nature of performance until it was far too late. Once, in high school, when I was still supposed to become an opera singer, my voice teacher had spent an entire lesson teaching me how to act. It was not enough to sing, I was to walk into a character like I was her entirely, like I had never been me at all. Why not, I asked, just sort of put her on like a glove, and then I’ll act the way I would have in these situations, underneath.

I saw her eyes glare, I felt her loss of words. You’re not there, she finally heaved, utterly unable to deal with how much I did not understand this. She isn’t you.

*

Were I not me, I could be you. You could hear my jokes and you could think you’d said the same thing. If I had nothing, behind everything I said to you just now - you could take it easily. When I put my life behind it, we stop being able to share. Good comedy doesn’t come from one person standing on the back wall watching their life flash before their eyes. It comes from people who are able to share everything, and in return take everything too. That emptying out, beginning over and over and over each time, that’s how you clear the room, so everyone who walks in can fill it back up. When I was younger I called this bravery, and I still believe there’s bravery within it. But it’s a little pathetic too, isn’t it? And it’s a little callous. And more than anything, it’s false. And if my 21-year-old self were to hear me, yearning only for truth, I think she would have thought I was so full of shit. But she would have agreed with me too, late at night, after the shows, in the bar. We all did, back then. It was our greatest, stupidest secret.

Before Me Too, I was the only person officially banned from UCB. On the wall in the box office of the basement of Gristedes, there were two photographs. One of the original UCB 4, and one of my older sister and me, printed off my Facebook, presumably by the then-intern who told me about this a few years after it was hung. Underneath the photo was an arrow pointing to my sister, and here it read “She can come in.” The arrow pointing to mine: “She cannot.”

They had printed the photo off when it was discovered that I was using my sister’s expired ID to order drinks even though I wasn’t yet 21. I was getting very drunk off these drinks, like basically everyone around me, but I was underage, and it was upsetting. More upsetting, now that I’m a much older person who has seen a lot of young women like me, was the way it was handled, but back then the main devastation in my life was the end of my career in comedy, which I hadn’t really wanted, but also had wanted, stupidly, secretly, late at night, always in bars.

Like everyone else, I wanted to write, but I wanted to write something better than whatever was available. A dramatic but clever film, or a really excellent miniseries - nothing so gauche as a sitcom or sketch show. My friend Lana Schwartz wrote, accurately, that in this period of television everything was better than SNL, and everything felt like it would be that way forever. We would be stunned, now, to realize that SNL is celebrating its 50th anniversary mostly alone. The other shows, the places you went when you were much better, deeper, more indie, frankly funnier, those aren’t being watched, those barely exist. The websites where everyone made money that was still good then but presumably much less than what they’d make on TV are gone. I know of a few male comedians who essentially pivoted to becoming on-demand role models for hopeless losers on YouTube, and while you’re grateful that they’re at least keeping a few school shooters from finding their calling, it isn’t the landscape you’d expect to find yourself in so soon after such a boom.

Still no one is able to say exactly how it all happened. Was it Covid, was it Trump, was is the systematic breakdown of the arts that we’re all experiencing in one way or the other. Yes, of course, it’s all of these things, but you’d never know it if you tuned into SNL this weekend, or last weekend, or next weekend. How painful to watch a show attempt to relive fifty years of glory when to even remember last year, for Lorne Michaels and co., is impossible. They can look to the past, of course, but they can’t see anything. Michaels is obsessed with nostalgia, which is not so much the opposite of memory as its murderer. To see whatever you want most from the past, instead of what was - this is how you end up with a sketch tracing the history of New York City over the last fifty years whose soul concept is: crime. Crime outside, forcing you inside, where you yearn to be coddled by the joyful renderings of Lorne Michaels, a brilliant young man who in no way is very old and out of touch now.

The result of such selective remembering is obvious to anyone who’s tuned into not only SNL, but the creations of those churning things out with its blessing on their own time now too. This is a show that adapts to the moment in such a way that most sketches about current events consist of simply reading verbatim whatever a politician said that week. If you saw something on the internet, I hope you enjoyed it, because SNL has decided that it would actually be better on television. There is nothing they can’t reduce into something that Michaels is sure will appeal to the most faceless man in the world. In no way does this dull headache persist more than the show’s attempt to fix its own problems. Rather than meaningfully reckon with decades of lack of diversity, Michaels looks head on at each sketch with whatever minority he’s finally given a spot to and says “what if the joke here is that you aren’t white.” And then, every week, there’s the joke, brand new, faceless, never-before-seen, still shiny in its packaging. If you’ve never seen a person who isn’t white before, if you’re brand, brand, brand new, you’re in for a real treat.

Nothing has let me down in the last decade of our national ruin more than comedy, and this is not because I have been requesting anything of it. On the contrary, following my ban and subsequent vomiting episode, I vowed to never ask anything of comedy ever again. But still I am stunned at the cowardice of it. No group has been more silent on every pressing issue than those still hoping for a job on whatever the worst show on television is today. Now when I see a comedian, more than anything else, they are groveling. They are begging for someone, anyone, to let them in. In order to be let through, they’ll forget any beliefs they once had and and absolutely everything wrong in the world. If you can see it being right, so can they. If you can get the joke, they can make it. When you’re willing to become whatever’s standing in front of you, it doesn’t matter what sort of crowd you’re trying to make laugh. If you don’t believe in anything, nothing ever matters at all.

That’s kind of like the big line, right? From that one show?

What’s that guy like these days? What was he like back then?

9. Fiction

8. Movement

7. Sound

6. Models

5. Care

4. Scrutiny

3. Footing

2. Quiet

1. Power

Previously: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

My nephew has another book called The Story of Ferdinand. It’s about a little bull whose greatest joy is the meadow near his home. When the other bulls are practicing bullfighting, he is sitting underneath a tree, smelling flowers. When we read the page about the young bulls fighting my nephew says “where’s Ferdinand?” and when we get to the page where he is, at the tree, he says “there’s Ferdinand.” It is drama, he is riveted. Ferdinand is stung by a bee and goes wild with the pain; men in bolo ties think he’s the best fighter they’ve ever seen and take him to the city to fight. My nephew squirms closer. Ferdinand does not fight. He doesn’t see the point, he doesn’t want to do it. They still try to make him, but he’s too big and strong to be forced to do anything. He is allowed to go home to his tree, where he remains to this day. The book finishes there. My nephew says “Again.”

Ferdinand is a classic story, beloved by many nearly a century now, and when I choose books for the children in my life I try to be unbiased, to not just drift towards the ones I loved as a child, but it is true that children’s literature has gotten increasingly simplistic in my lifetime. Manifestos without stories are far more prominent than they should be, and books that have even a trace of unclear conflict are rare; instead most stories are black and white in their narratives. Those stories, about one person being good and right and brave, and another person being less so, and eventually the good winning out, whether in actual defeat or, far more likely, bringing the bad over to their side with gentle care, are very boring. What’s more, they fail to do what children’s books should actually do - teach a child to read, and, moreover, to love reading. Opting instead to assume easy words and ideas are enough and skip straight to morals is not only cowardly but frankly never going to work. When a child is learning to read with you, you can feel it. Your voice is a pattern that they respond to, the waves of the story flow into them - now there is intrigue, now there is mystery, now there is surprise - and what they are learning to do is not only phonetically grasp what you’re saying but understand that the figures on the page can create full landscapes, characters, agonies, joy; in other words, life. To teach a child that words only exist to tell them what the right and wrong paths to go down is to rob them of entire places to go within themselves. Instead, what they come to learn is that stories are there to make them better people; a transaction above all.

Literacy rates in this country continue to worry, as public education continues to be defunded and mismanaged, and we know in this moment that this will only get worse. Statistics on children reading for fun suggests that the majority simply don’t do it. It’s unclear if adults do either. But I have worked in some capacity of the media for the last decade, and the connection between what adults are craving for themselves and what they’re giving to children seems obvious. As resources for both local newsrooms and publications of criticism, essays, and general writing have been hacked away, the actually moneyed media uses its booming sole voice to paint the starkest, most morally saccharine portraits of any story it bothers to get its hands on. In other words, what you are getting in this naked media landscape is not so much the truth or the lie of any given story but versions of both which line up with the anchor’s moral vision. This has always been true of rightwing media, but the failure of so-called leftwing media, in the capacity that it is funded, is that it has chosen to take the same route, an effort to silence by shouting louder instead of shutting down the right.

But we have known this about the rightwing media for decades, and it is their voices that have won now. Even so, the most baffled pundits on earth continue to declare that what we need is simply more of the same. A leftist Joe Rogan, a leftist podcast empire - both of which exist already in multiple forms, but in this case the desire is for the same sounding thing but telling you what is good and what is bad, from our perspective. Once we have the better, wholesome, morally correct media, we’ll win, eventually. 

On Tuesday night I watched the expected numbers roll into red areas. The expected blue numbers never came. I look back on my texts, I look at the revelation happening that the Democrat votes needed to stop the Republican votes were not going to come. If there is a media to blame for this, it is MSNBC. They have spent the last eight years not reporting the news but reporting their own warped concept of morality. They have had no trouble swaying right, cheering on vows from Harris to create “the most lethal force” out of the military, to make our borders even more deadly, to do nothing to stop climate change because Silicon Valley does not want that - all tenets of a right-wing order that not only the majority of voters detested but in fact what the majority of their main viewership had supposedly spent a lifetime fighting too. They refused to see Palestine, refused to see genocide, refused to see the countless polls showing exactly what this self-imposed ignorance was doing to their chances of defeating the greatest evil not that they could know but that they could bring themselves to look at. They will have, undoubtedly, another grand four years, a grand eternity as far as we know. In the view of the world they’ve carved out of the desecration of their children’s futures, they are more important now than ever before. 

The main beacon of MSNBC is Rachel Maddow. Though she’s now most regularly seen either smirking or weeping at whatever headlines she’s delivering on screen, she got her start in radio, with Air America. This was meant to be the antidote to talk radio, the Rush Limbaugh force that had so driven this country red. It premiered when I was in high school, after I spent a childhood listening to snippets of talk radio quite often, in order to know what they were saying. My mother wanted me to know the enemy, and since I was growing up surrounded by it in the Deep South, I think this was a good decision. 

But since I knew it so well, right away what I noticed about Air America was that it sounded exactly like the thing it was meant to cure. Round tables, people just saying the same things over and over to people who agreed with them. There was never any serious reporting, and now it makes sense, because the people in charge of these mediums today so regularly steal other reporters’ hard work and meld it into their own narrative that one has no reason to tune in on any night if one has merely read the newspaper before primetime; clearly they don’t have the ability to report at all. I couldn’t understand this, because that wasn’t what I thought the news should be. 

In short, the experiment of creating the same thing but left failed instantly. Because it’s not the message here, it’s the medium. If you are someone who regularly puts on headphones and listens to hours of people talking to each other, left or right, I don’t really know what hope there is for you. It is a form that destroys nuance, craft, and message. It is drivel, and the difference between a podcast and a radio broadcast is painfully clear. Consider the Columbia radio station that brought us the news of the police violently raiding the student encampments this spring. What they were doing was reporting, from the ground, the world around them. The podcast instead locks itself into the world of its hideous little room and talks about nothing else. 

For my whole childhood, the best part of getting ready for school in the morning was listening to NPR. Almost every day a reporter went out somewhere into the world and spoke to people about the stories they were covering. It was brief, but I could hear markets and malls and farms and legislatures across the world from my kitchen. The distinct voices of the NPR, who my sisters and I could mimic by the time we were in middle school, were not anchors but guides. My mother used to call it “Some Things Considered,” and she was right - the commentary was always very centrist - but that was not what stuck with me. What stuck with me was that everywhere the reporters went, someone had a story to tell them, and everytime I listened, my world grew bigger. 

Decades later, a post-election round table on MSNBC, having spent the last year talking only to each other, wondered why Harris lost when she had everything going for her, including the endorsement of Queen Latifah - who never endorses anyone. 

They could not understand why she had lost because they could not understand that she was not good. Years of building up the clearest, easiest, most baffling unwavering narrative of right and wrong - we are right and they are wrong - has left them with a total inability to see clearly that a person who might be standing in the side that you know to be yours could still be lacking. That Democrats never did anything to actually concretely protect abortion rights during the entirety of their power after Dobbs, instead leaving it up to states and small funds, could not be true to these people because they had said, over and over, that Democrats were good. That Democrats were attacking from the right of Trump on immigration, vowing to make life even harder for people escaping hardships in hopes of entering a gigantic nation where the majority of people still welcome them, could not be true, because Democrats were good. That Democrats were responsible for Israel’s genocide of Palestine, would not stop giving them weapons to murder children and flatten hospitals, would not stop violently punishing all those who demanded who they stop, could not be true, because Democrats were good. 

“An ‘idealist’ was a man who lived for his idea - hence he could not be a businessman - and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody,” Hannah Arendt wrote. “The perfect ‘idealist,’ like everybody else, had of course his personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit them to interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his ‘idea.’”

She was talking about Adolf Eichmann. I remember how much this shocked me, how long it took me to grasp it, how sometimes I still think I’m having trouble with it. Because for so long I assumed that I was an idealist, and maybe I even was. I have always prioritized my beliefs, what I have considered my ideals, have always tried to work towards making them reality. As I’ve gotten older, I have had to accept that I have to look at the failures of those beliefs, of the structures I have relied on to make them real. I have had to abandon the idealism that created my values in order to look at them under a harsh light. And this has been hard, because it’s hard to understand that your side is doing the wrong things when you’ve made your side the good one. It is even harder when the other side is even worse, concretely so. The idealist, we see, focuses solely on that truth: that the other side is worse. We know, in a thousand different ways, where that blindness leads.

Of all the things the progressive movement in this country needs, the very last is more media that flattens our world. The loss of Trump voters should make it as clear as the loss of Democrats the truth about listening solely to people telling you what is right and wrong: it is boring. It does not hold the attention like we think it does. It’s all background noise eventually. What people will always crave is a real story, not a morality lesson; even the lesson that tells them how strong and jacked and fucking sick they are isn’t interesting after a while. More people have left not only Trump but Musk, Thiel, Vance than stayed with them. The reason we still hear them is that they took away most of the platforms we had for anything else. What we do with the ones we have left should not be what they do with theirs. There is no way to align people into right and wrong when you only show them the most narrow path. They will, no matter what, find a way to see outside the picture you show them. They will always find the whole story. They will understand what it means to ignore it. 

When we first started reading Ferdinand my nephew was almost three; now he is three and a half. One of the most exciting parts of this to me is that he is more interested in longer books, with more text and less drawings. Visiting his grandparents’ house last month, we read Scuffy the Tugboat, a book from my parents’ childhoods that I didn’t really remember. Scuffy is a pompous little moron, and he travels through the world discovering danger, and then also discovering that he is unfit for that danger. When he gets home he is no less pompous and still fairly dense, but he is changed in the sense that he is now directing his few talents towards home. It is a long and involved story, and doesn’t exactly have the sort of lesson you’d want to teach your child, or really anyone. It is a great book. It is fun to read out loud, it is fun for my nephew to be read, he loves it, we read it almost every day. What I like most about it is how indignation comes across in Scuffy: he “sniffs his blue smokestack,” he cries “toot toot.” These are not things I or my nephew could ever do, but we recognize them, and what’s hiding underneath them - fear and uncertainty - is clear. This little tugboat is a character, not with any lesson to teach, but a story to tell. His story is not something to take and exchange for being good and kind and brave, nor is it an arrow pointing towards the right way to go. It’s something to share, without currency or trade. I sit with my nephew and I read to him, and together all we do is widen the world, make it fuller, make it grander. Again, and again, and again.

Of course the movie had a lot to say about this pride, and in particular the pride of journalism that captures not just the bravery of people but the cruelty of them too. And it was surreal to watch a movie so clearly conceived during the hometown fascism of recent American history, during which many domestic journalists have made their names, while our peers in Palestine suffered pain and loss and death at the hands of our own weapons, all while sharing the same purpose: to tell the story of what was happening, there on their ground. That is, if the movie asked a question formed a few years ago - what is the point of capturing this - the present screamed back that this was actually a very stupid question. 

The second time I watched it I was in the South, where I grew up, and I joked that this time I would watch it in 4D. And it did turn out to be true that the next day at the beach I saw multiple military planes flying for seemingly no reason, but what struck me more in this environment was how perfectly the movie captured the experience of riding around in the middle of nowhere in a car. This was, in fact, one of two movies about people riding in cars through the end of the world that came out this year, but I think the sequel to Mad Max: Fury Road was not nearly as good as the original. In that first film, the individuality of each driver and their bastardized vehicle is driven home, in particular when the horrible guitarist flings backwards and forwards on some war lord’s lowrider, stacked with speakers. The security Furiosa feels in her war rig is made clear; only she knows this and that about how to work it, only those she trusts can crawl around and fix it. The hideousness of the world around her makes it clear that she is only safe in this moving planet that she alone can steer. It’s possible that this year’s Furiosa, during which she builds the rig, was less enjoyable to me simply because I hate cars now. In the post-Covid world, those who move through the world in cars regularly antagonize and terrify pedestrians, and do so vindictively, with reckless driving rates and their casualties consistently rising. The pandemic separated Americans largely by those who were willing to live communally and those who demanded to live individually, and the drivers seem exclusively to come from the latter side. In New York, at least, I assume every driver is Travis Bickel - another cinematic psychopath who simply loved driving around - until they prove otherwise, which very few do. 

Cars or not, the reason I watched Civil War a second time is because I thought it was very good, and still do. I wasn’t intrigued by the question of journalism within it because I am not really intrigued by that question at all; I know why journalism matters. And I agree with the assessment of journalism and writing in general that suggests the only way to do it is to carry on in a place that trusts and favors no one, to become essentially the antagonist of everyone and everything you’re inspecting. I do not believe,  however, that this requires a removal of oneself from what one is writing about, and in fact feel that that sort of thinking often produces the worst work. Obviously the emotional removal necessary to keep reporting was very interesting to Civil War, and I thought it captured it well enough, but journalism from journalists who feel they move in a different world is hollow. Again, we look to our better versions, and see clearly what it means to understand that the world you’re reporting on is inescapably your world. 

What I thought Civil War did better than assess journalism was to illustrate what it would be to feel against something, to feel literally at war within your own surroundings, if your surroundings are America. And I thought that was very interesting, because being at war here, in America, has been a fantasy of different sects of Americans for most of my life. In Alabama, one thousand miles away from New York, the people I grew up with acted as if 9/11 had happened personally to them, in our own backyard, and, more so, as if another one was just around the corner. It wasn’t just attackers they were waiting for, but anyone at all who felt that they weren’t on the brink of attack as well, meaning most progressives and Democrats and non-white people who didn’t share the same deranged fear. When I left and moved directly to New York, first to a dorm mere steps from where these attacks took place, I wasn’t surprised to find that no one here shared the same fear, because I understood that those people of my childhood were both stupid and bad. 

But I was surprised a few years later, when some Navy SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden, and I happened to be downtown at the time, and decided to go see what was happening by my old dorm. It was instantly clear that what I arrived at was a barbaric scene, with women on men’s shoulders holding American flags, and people chugging beers and chanting U-S-A. I did not think my interest in finding out what was happening in an important place at a historic moment had been worth it, on the contrary I felt useless and unsafe. Above all I could not understand where these people had come from. These could not be the people I walked by every day on the street; these had to be people from New Jersey at least. The lack of fear I saw every day did not line up with this scene. In truth it shouldn’t have lined up with America at all, for this was the monarchist view of history and revenge, the idea that one person could be so singularly responsible for a massive amount of destruction, and that the killing of that person could somehow resolve it. But at least in my lifetime, that thinking - that childish, barbaric idea - has thrived. Of course now we live in the positive form of it, wherein one person can save, and thus who that person says is the enemy is the enemy in every way. In either case, one person makes or breaks the world.

I have always assumed the embarrassing horror I found when I went looking for a story at Ground Zero came from Bridge and Tunnel, because what I remember seeing there was a fantasy of triumph against something that does not exist. More specifically, it did not exist there, at Ground Zero. To create the type of enemy that you can vanquish with American flags and American beers requires living in a landscape in which the wide world is unknown, where real pain and suffering has not actually been met. It requires building a fantastical world in which everyone who is not you is against you. If there is no other point to journalism that documents the worst moments of human history, it might just as well be to show that those who go through it are people you can recognize. The reality of the world, where what is possible and what is cruel know no limits, is much more terrifying than the fantastical villains those who look away from suffering tend to create.

There is one New Yorker who I think did a particularly marvelous job at recognizing people all around the world. Grace Paley started writing about people from her own community, especially those on playgrounds throughout the city, which she visited with her children. She wrote perfect little stories, setting into stone not only her two boys’ lives and personalities but those of the people she knew from a distance or all too closely. Her ability to look clearly at her own world did not give into limits, instead forming a determination in seeking recognition throughout the world. Her solidarity therefore has no borders; she sees a victim as clearly as an oppressor even when all states and propaganda tells her otherwise. Hers was an international clarity born in the smallest of patches of fearless community. Reading her, particularly in the last year, has reassured me that my own fantasies, of history, of progress, of perseverance of justice, are built on steadier ground than many living legends would lately let us have.

You might be wondering what happened the third time I watched Civil War, if some sort of actual civil war broke out in my country of America that might have made me feel quite dumb for thinking this way, but it didn’t. I took some Nyquil, and I went to bed, where I stared at the ceiling for hours because I had reached the limit of Nyquil working. I felt insane, and I wondered if I was going insane, and I thought of all the times before in my life when I wondered the same thing. There was one time, a few years ago, that I can tell you about. I was walking through the park beside my childhood home when I saw a child holding a gun. It was an automatic rifle, the type that kills boys his age in schools regularly in America. I froze and stared before I realized it was a toy, plastic, made to look real. His mother stood behind him, and his mother looked normal. She wore pants and a flowy top, with a shawl draped around her, flats on her feet that you assumed were Tori Burch. Her hair was styled, she was wearing jewelry. She did not look extreme. She was there with her son who was playing with a toy shaped like the deadliest thing in America for children, but she did not look insane. And so I watched them, because this interested me. And when they made for their car I made for mine, and when they drove off I followed them. I wanted to see where this odd couple went, whether they were stopping in from a vacation - typical for the town - or lived nearby. We drove, me trailing, until they reached a small airport on the outskirts of town, and there the boy and mother parked and stood outside the car. No planes were coming in or leaving. The gun wasn’t taken out of the car. They stood to watch a single plane parked, and the runway. This, I assumed, was another one of the boy’s interests. Guns and planes. A real American boy. I sat in my car in the parking lot of a gas station across the street. I realized I was stalking a child and his mother, and I realized I had no real reason to continue. I knew who they were. Despite my best efforts, these were my neighbors. I went home. I could have driven there with my eyes closed.

9. Resignation

8. Surprises

7. Seclusion

6. Moderation

5. Shame

4. Confusion

3. Despair

2. Walls

1. Them

Previously: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

“The Gazan population, half of whom are children, have already suffered many decades of unlawful brutal occupation and lived under the blockade for 16 years,” the experts said. “It is time to immediately cease fire and ensure urgent and unimpeded access to essential humanitarian supplies, including food, water, shelter, medicine, fuel and electricity. The physical safety of the civilian population must be guaranteed,” the experts said.

“The occupation needs to end and there must be reparation, restitution and reconstruction, towards full justice for Palestinians,” they said. (Read the full statement from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner here.)

I happen to have been born directly into a protest, and because of this my belief in putting my body where I stand is as strong as my belief that I can walk and talk at all. I admire people who have learned it. I have felt a noticeable absence of many of these people in the last 13 days, both in protests and in the world around me. When I walk around my neighborhood I do not see them. I see my parts of Brooklyn, the areas where I run errands and grab coffee, continuing. There are no signs in windows, there are no buttons on sweaters. In fact I cannot find buttons at all. It’s such a small phrase, Free Palestine, and it feels so easy to write on a button, and it feels so easy to pin a button to your shirt. I have seen people do it for dozens of other causes we believe in, including the Muslim ban Trump enacted, during which I happened to fly into Terminal 4 and directly into the heart of New York that I cherish. Looking back the message seems unreal - we welcome the displaced, but continue to support their displacement. I do not know how to reckon with people who feel that way, but I do think that many people do not, and for those people who don’t I would like to ask where you are, and what you are doing with your time right now.

The protest I was born into took place in Tennessee, and nearly three decades later I returned to a different one there, a full adult now, to stand up against the murder that had just taken place in Charlottesville. With the crowd’s guidance I used my body to shield families from the white supremacists attempting to scare them away from their homes, and here I learned a new way to use my body, not just to say what I believed in, to be the best proof of the world I wanted to live in, but to protect and stand up for the people whose bodies other people valued so much less than mine. This lesson took me through the Trump years, took me through the 2020 movement. It has taken me now to the rallies in New York, where I scream that Palestine will be free with thousands of people much braver than I am, while millions around us sit by and let our government say that actually it will die. That in fact, we will murder it. That what we Americans will use our bodies, our weapons, our money, and our words for instead of life is the destruction of an entire world. 

I want to see the New York that shaped me shape itself into a place that does not allow this. Our leaders are groveling to the president, our governor missed her own father’s death to tell Israeli soldiers that she, a random, uninvited politician from Buffalo, adamantly believes they have a right to “defend themselves,” a right to commit a genocide, a right to do this. She said this in our name. I do not want to live in the part of New York that lets her speak for us like this. I want to live in Astoria, where last night I was surrounded by more babies and toddlers and children - families - than in any rally that I’ve ever marched in. I want my fellow New Yorkers to leave our homes, leave our dinners, leave your fears which I cannot understand, I am sorry but I cannot, of somehow losing something you believe you are owed - a job, a friend, a position in your world - in exchange for staying silent while your government murders in your name.

It is in these spaces that you will find the tools to stop the weapons, the money, and the words that America uses to kill. You need this solidarity as much - far more - than solidarity needs you.

Please come out. Please tell Palestine, as it exists in its land and as it is spread throughout the world, as it lives in the neighborhoods you visit and cherish and use for what they offer you, that you stand with them. Please tell our leaders that they do not act in our name. Please shout Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza with the people who can tell their family and friends that they heard it, they heard this city stand up for a place even our useless mayor is laying claim to ripping apart. Do not let him speak louder than us.

A list of groups to follow for actions in your area, and more to do in solidarity beyond marching, mostly via Lux Magazine and The New Inquiry:

• WOLPalestine IG Page

• Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, endorsed by The Poetry Project and others.

• Palestinian Youth Movement IG Page

• BDS Urgent Action Alert (from October 8th) which includes a tool to find groups to join in your area

• The New Inquiry’s weekly roundup, including a dispatch from the Palestinian Youth Movement

• Decolonize Palestine, a fantastic resource to learn how it’s come to do this, and where to go from here

• Anera

• Action Network's Rally for Gaza, NYPL, Friday, October 20^th

A list of tools to call your representatives, also via Lux Magazine:

• US Campaign for Palestinian Rights

• #NoMoneyforMassacres Campaign from the Democratic Socialists

• "Stop Genocide in Gaza" from Jewish Voice for Peace

What it really is, I think, and why most of us like it the best, is the least holy time of the year. This period, from the moment Jesus leaves the crib to the moment he begins to prepare to die, is the only time in the church’s year where Jesus is only man, and as a man he lives on earth, wandering the world, being just some guy, until he becomes popular, and then he’s that particular guy, and then the rest starts. It’s in this period that he does all the things that modern and cool Christians love to talk about, like being nice to poor people and sex workers and throwing tantrums in public places. But it’s always been very embarrassing to me that they hold these simple things so high in esteem. All they’re describing, actually, is a human, a kind person. It makes sense if you understand anything about religion at all why, in the second, more modern half of most religions there enters an incredible hero whose number one thing is just being nice, and in each of these religions that completely upends things to the point that usually that guy gets killed or exiled or both, or otherwise disappears. But the good attributes to the son of God are really just that simple, and the breathless expositions of the New Testament, when you read them like a normal person, have the air of a friend gushing over a boyfriend who is just so nice and so thoughtful and she can prove it by the way he does the dishes and never yells. Taking out all the obvious lies - bringing back someone from the dead, washing people’s feet and not being weird about it - the saga of the man to bring all salvation back to earth is just a list of ways to not be a psychopath around people you see a lot.

In my experience, this simplicity is impossible for a certain very delicate, very thoughtful sort of believer to understand. All my life I have been forced to read the quiet, gentle prose of Christian intellectuals, by virtue of recognizing pretty early on in Catholic school that this was obviously all bullshit, and then filling in that school-mandated void with becoming smart instead of reckless, which probably would have made me a much cooler person in high school, but has by now left many of my oldest friends dead or very close to it. There is nothing a Christian intellectual loves more than me, and nothing I am more annoyed by than their suffocating love. It’s worse from them even than the evangelical I starred alongside in a community production of Fiddler on the Roof, who, despite our roles as Jewish sisters ultimately forced to flee our town for persecution, spent the entire production attempting to recruit me to the persecution itself, finally leaving me on closing night (she was not allowed to attend the cast party) with a curse I know still stands, will stand for the rest of her days: I’ll pray for you. Years later, with my fake sister in mind, I learned to never give my real name to evangelicals, knowing that forever I would exist in their list of souls to single-handedly save.

But the intellectuals don’t want to save my soul. They want, because they know how real and settled I am, how very smart I am too, to have me save myself. They want to empower me, that is, to serve. They do this mostly by looking to the natural world, I assume because it cannot speak for itself. What is worse, truly, than a man of god who has just taken a walk. Every chirp from a bird, every weed on a stone, every goddamn tree that they learned the name of not to know for themselves but because some monk knew it too, all these things show them God. Not just show, but are. God has been walking with them through the forest, down the meadow’s path, across every glen. You might wonder if it’s the same god who, on the beach in a picture frame above your grandmother’s sink, was then carrying you, and they’ll chuckle at that, but no, it’s actually not the same god - it’s the smart one. 

There’s something deeply sinister in this achingly precious approach. Ultimately, it does the same thing the evangelical and the framed photos of Jesus yearns for: submits entirely to an authority, renders the believer powerless. But it’s the deep belief that the believer can also hold a power, a power different and greater and more authentically correct than they’re more openly praise-crazy counterparts, that ties a ring of creeping cruelty around their actions. Evangelicals love to tell you that they want to be the loudest, most heinously nutso person in the world for Jesus, that this sort of crazed love for God is central to their salvation. The intellectuals carry, instead, solemn respect. It becomes, then, less active than passive, but still just as permissive to all the God above them, which they love deeply, and believe without which the world cannot, will not exist. 

This belief, that one entity is and should be in power, that all others should submit to it - of course it can only end in fascism, totalitarianism, authoritative wholeness of power. It is in fact the history of Christianity, a religion only ever strengthened by defeat of every other form of love, to conquer. This too they reject, dedicated instead to a version of God that can somehow coexist with others.  But that can never be true of any authority one so steadfastly respects. The act of respecting authority, even passively, is the act of giving an entity power over people you might never even meet. And the true failure of understanding in this mindset is the responsibility of all involved in uplifting power. Authority needs soldiers, whether or not you identify with them. To allow those soldiers to roam the earth, to simply respect them, even when you don’t necessarily agree with them, even when you will see humanity leave them, this is to ensure that they have power over anyone they want.

To let any authority exist is to deny another’s power. When we listen and adhere to power we neglect to hear each other. When we walk in the line the authority gives us we do not walk together; we walk, whether we admit it or not, with footprints in the sand instead, an invisible power we believe to be more important than anyone with prints like our own. King cake season, then, is the time when this authority is abandoned, the time when we see each other, celebrate together, sin together. We parade because we do not have to march; there is no power we have to defy.

We are told, by those who love this authority, that this period of freedom must be limited. We are encouraged to think of it as the time of excess, the time when we’re given so much of our own free will that we nearly explode from it, cram it down our throats and have no room left for anything else. We sin, sin, sin. We do this because just around the corner is the time to practice deep, impenetrable adherence. There is no time more ripe for wandering nature and assigning the leaves, dead and then blooming, to authority’s great love of us than Lent. For forty days and forty nights, those powerfully soft, oh so loving Christians who cannot do anything but feel the power of God in each twig on the ground will lean deep into suffering, into lack, into austerity of body and soul in order to assert that this - true devotion to authority and its power - is what brings about salvation. That the salvation they’re talking about is just some guy dying and coming back briefly and then leaving again is not really important. In fact, it’s barely important. That’s actually more of a metaphor, they say. It’s real, but it’s also not, you know, they’re not crazy. They’re not them. They love it, yes, they love that almighty, they submit to it entirely, they let it run amok, but they’re not the same. It’s all very different. That it all leads up to the same conclusion, that it all ends, in the very same text, in flames and misery - this they have written a little op-ed about. Actually, they say, you can get an abortion before these flames come. The people fighting for the same flames might bomb your clinic while you’re doing it. But that’s because they misread the text. 

I worried, once, that I was giving into nihilism. But I think what I really give into, which is a bit scarier but somehow sturdier, is the most hopeful possibility I can find. True freedom, without bonds or boundaries, is unknowable to us; we have never seen it on earth. I have decided not to fear it, because I have noticed that what ties the nature walkers and the evangelicals and the authoritarians of the world together beyond all else is fear, of the unknown, and of the known that they cannot bear. In the human world, we dance together, feast together, cry together. There is friction and hurt and problems to be solved, now, not in a period after all earthly things have left. These problems can only be solved by people who are not scared of each other, people who are excited to be around each other. There is so much joy when no one is afraid.

And so I love this period of true humanity, true realness, the purest era of what devolves into Christianity, before it reaches its natural conclusion: that it is the best while everything else is worth so much less, matters so much less, offers so much less than even a leaf, when it does not come from this god they uphold. But before all that, this is the time when Christians walk amongst the rest of us, taste our wine, eat our food, hear and see what problems people face. It’s a time when they can make a choice too, I think, to stay among the mortals. You don’t have to flip the switch. There is earth, and it feels good. It tastes good. There is pain too, but it is pain you can come to understand. This is the mortal time, between all miracles, and it is clearer than ever what’s around you. The earth has always died during this season, but now it dies more than ever. Notice its pain, notice what happens when you stop attributing its losses to something beyond those of us right here on it. Notice what happens when you work with others, eat and drink together, celebrate your victories, and mourn your losses among people, rather than gods.

9. Intensity 

8. Cause

7. Definition

6. Judgment

5. Flaws

4. Nicknames

3. Listening

2. Barriers

1. Us

Previously: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

I find everything about the bulbs revolting, he told me at dinner one night. I absolutely do not want the bulbs in our home. But still we kept them, and still they grew, or whatever it was they were doing. They spread out wretchedly and lay waste to everything they touched, is really what they did, but according to experts on these bulbs this meant they were thriving. Always a new limb had grown in the night, and the next morning as we made breakfast at the same kitchen table they were bearing down on it became necessary to dart around their very existence. They developed talons and these talons pierced through their green, a dead finger pointing directly at me while I sliced apples and scooped out yogurt. Their stems mangled within each other in the glass vases more every day, the terror of roots strangling each other among pebbles side by side with our garlic chopping and salad mixing. We were living next to beasts pulled from the darkest soil in hell, which isn’t soil at all, but more pebbles forcing all earth out of the ground.

I moved other plants away from them, aware that they were scaring the normal greenery. When we brought home our Christmas tree, the plant we loved more than any other plant, I tried to shield him from the demons across the apartment. When he seemed to keep his perfect scent to himself more than other trees his size, I blamed the bulbs, but still I loved the tree, balked at the bulbs, watched the tree thrive, ducked from the bulbs.

They did not bloom.

One night when we were hiding from the bulbs, as far towards the tree on the sofa as we could get, we started into the eight hour-Beatles documentary about making their final album, and producing their final performance. Like everyone else, we watched the four men we’d known our whole lives in a new light, a light that made me say, by the end of the first section, that John Lennon really kind of sucked.

I’ve known John Lennon sucked for a long time, which was a big deal for me because as a child I idolized him. I was obsessed with the Beatles from a very young age, and I can recall countless hours in a sun-drenched breakfast room, playing “Nowhere Man” in the middle of my home, next to the room where my mother made me cookies and cakes and lunches and ice cream, thinking about how this song was about me. I would change out the CD in the stereo we kept next to platters for meals where our family and friends would come over and laugh and sing and make new music and find new ideas together, and make it through the jaunty “Help!,” about an idiot who needs help, to get to “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” about the way you’re supposed to love. When I got to high school I finally listened to Revolver, and immediately started saying Revolver was my favorite album, mostly because of “She Said, She Said,” a song about you should never say anything unless it’s the right thing to say. It was only natural that “Imagine,” about a world in which things that exist no longer exist, became a sacred place in my brain, a song you only listened to when you were really ready to get into it, spiritually.

I had decided, by this point of getting into it spiritually, that art was just that: becoming very alone, absent of any stuff at all, so that you can feel as much as possible. In a world that had been made just for me, filled with people who wanted to see me and places they wanted to take me, I knew from the start of my decision to write that creating anything at all required a departure from all of this. At first there was just a little hole to dig and slip into, but as I grew older more barriers became necessary, more roots to crawl under, more burying and burrowing. I wove myself under rocks and hard soil and squeezed myself tight with vines and there, in hell, I tried to do the work that starts all work, the base of everything. I went so deep in not because I was ashamed of what I would produce but because of how revolting I found the process of getting to it. The practice, or the pre practice, that eternal rhythm finding, to me that place is hell, a grotesque, cheap part of work. Its easiness disturbs me: that we should be able to throw out whatever’s skimming the surface just to find ourselves back in the rhythm each person who makes loves so deeply about themselves. To dig through my brain every time I want to say something is also the most excruciating vanity; the sheer torture of my own thoughts required solitude for fear of anyone else being sucked in. I worked in nowhere because nowhere was the only safe place to work.

Even after I understood that John Lennon sucked I still assumed we were similar in that way, that he was a nowhere man because nowhere is where he worked best too. The eight-hour documentary I watched amid the first holiday season I spent living with not just a partner but the partner, the one to spend the rest of my life with, the one who I would hide my own jagged roots from just like we hid from our hideous bulbs, rejected this notion entirely. It was not nowhere where John worked best, Peter Jackson showed me over edits and cuts and splicing and playing; on the contrary, the work he’d brought from nowhere was the worst of all he’d done.

That terrible nowhere-made work was cured by someone who before I’d considered simply The Other Guy, the sellout even, the one who seems so happy and what exactly is all of that about. But it’s Paul who comes into the meticulously built studios with the joy and the buoyancy, Paul whose Christmas directly before seemed to be filled with children and love, Paul who finds comfort in the darkest part of creativity, the emptiness of the nothing you accept, that which you promise you can turn into something. John is not alone in his obvious fear of this nothing. George puts on his bravest face – in the form of a series of beautiful coats – and Ringo is protected by his general innocence, but among the whole room there’s an air of fear common among people who haven’t quite felt something to grasp onto yet. Everyone but Paul shies away, and in this Paul becomes a hero. He wanders in and he plays, he moves around, he pokes and strums at nothing and is not embarrassed or miserable at this use of his senses. He feels until he finds something, and when he does he moves into it. He leaves nowhere behind with ease. I saw, curled up in my own home, where chestnuts might as well have been roasting for the all the love that filled the air, that it was possible to do the same. There was a way out besides knifing through the roots. 

It has always been my greatest desire to suffer for my art but it almost never works out. I suffer for my lack of art, I suffer for my time away. I suffer for my doubt, for my need to create something perfect, in the perfect way. But the art itself has never caused me anything but joy. When I’m writing something good I don’t hear or see anything around me, or notice time or hunger or really even thirst. It’s a complete tunnel vision, absorbed focus, the type of place you stay until you’re finished, with absolutely no sense of time. When I think it’s going to take no time it takes all day and all night; when I try to time it out I’m useless. It’s a trance, and it’s a different plane than anywhere else I exist on. It’s the greatest place I can go in my entire life. There is a part of me that really, truly believes it’s the only place I should ever be. For most of my life I have assumed it was a place accessible only to me.

But this can’t be true, and it was arrogant to think so. There is no such place as nowhere. When I think I’ve buried myself I’m still quite visible. What I believe to be my most wretched self, that which must constantly begin again, constantly sort through another series of thoughts and ideas and sentences, that part can be terrifying but that part can never truly be alone; I can never truly be alone. And there is no story I would have to tell from a place that doesn’t exist. Why not, then, just love this horrible process? Why not just let this all happen no matter who can see it? Why not see what blooms from the wretch that everyone else can see too?

These spaces the Beatles created, these warehouses to rummage around inside themselves in order to find the hits, these are the ideals. Whole buildings dedicated just to your work, where an endless supply of tea and toast and cookies and wine are provided, and your loved ones and friends can stop by but they are stopping by to see you work, not to talk or spend the time together that makes your work so good. Because it is not suffering to create, it is not a burden to be talented. It is not a waste of time to get back to the place you need to be; it is not shameful to have to need to. It is not unworthy of your time to feel your way back into your own rhythm.

Before the documentary when I pictured Paul I saw a man with arms spread wide on a massive stage, beckoning an arena to sing along with him. Now I see him the same way, but I don’t think it’s so bad or empty or even shallow. Instead I see a man whose sole purpose in life is to play the hits, and I wonder why it took me so long to realize that the hits are not the lesser. The hits are the things that take the most patience, the most peace. What do I love, truly, more than playing my own?

Every Christmas I try to inflict some form of misery into the otherwise joyous season, and most times it backfires. Last year I thought maybe the talons would do it, that whatever they were building, supposedly so perfect and beautiful, would really become something as evil as the process they took to get there. But they never did bloom at all, not for me, not for us. Instead they just sat there, wrecking more stones and disfiguring the kitchen, while I made tea and spread jam on toast. Eventually we had to leave them, to head out for our own cheery Christmas, to find more love in another place still.

In an act of confidence we knocked on our neighbors’ door and asked if, against all odds, they might want our little demons, could take them in and see what might become of them in someone else’s hands. These, we said, are as much as we have, and we cannot hold them anymore. They said yes, and we said goodbye, sending our snarls into the world to capture someone else, all we had to give to them buried deep within their roots.

We were in his re-election campaign headquarters, which was wedged into a shopping center and filled with a shocking amount of young people of all sorts of backgrounds, each of whom sighed like they had the world on their shoulders but felt able and proud to carry it. The mayor’s smirk was contagious, as each staffer gave me knowing looks when I asked why exactly they also seemed to be working so hard for this man, like I didn’t realize what it meant to be responsible for bringing a taco bar that was also a bike repair shop to a formerly dying city. “You just have to get him,” a young woman in charge of his schedule told me, eyes glued to her screen, life and death at her fingertips.

As I left an intern at the door waved an election piece into my hand, a foam finger with the candidate’s name blazoned across it. I thanked him but refused, explaining that I didn’t actually live here. But the young man wouldn’t release the hand from mine. He just stared at me, incredulous, as if there was nowhere else to live besides his mayor’s domain.

I have tried, ever since then, to figure out who told this mayor that mayors exist in their own realm. This was just before Pete Buttigieg decided that being mayor of the most insignificant town in America meant he should run the whole thing, and it was then that I started realizing: mayors are insane. Mayors, of all the leaders in the world, are the most likely to think they do more than anyone else, and, bizarrely, the most likely to believe they are loved. It is that belief which fascinates and terrifies me the most. What sort of person in charge, especially now, especially in America, would believe that the people they’re ruling love them?

By now, actually, I don’t know anyone in an American city who does not hate their mayor. And while this has been true of New York since well before I got here, the hate is newly intense. It is no longer a passive issue. Throughout the country, we spend our days bothering them. We tweet, call, write emails to their offices. We explain in perfect detail and beautiful words what we hate about them. And in return we get nothing. They do not ignore our complaints; on the contrary, they seem to hear them and intensify whatever was so bad.

It is not a new phenomenon for our country’s most progressive hubs to elect and subsequently deal with bizarrely moderate to right-leaning mayors, but it feels unfair that the pandemic, which broke everything else, could not break that sacred bargain too. When Bloomberg was still mayor I remember reverent professors and board members on the Upper West Side describing what they considered to be a sort of immaculate balance: our tiny Republican mayor kept the city’s radicals in check, for which the radicals were grateful. Exactly which radicals, you might ask, and these people would wave to the radicals on Riverside Drive, and you would understand they meant the radicals who were now retired and rich, off of their non-radical side jobs.

It is these people who want that famous display of progress that does actually progress anything, essentially a mockup of what progress could look like, a model city that a child could play with after their father left it abandoned in his study to go back to work making sure coal mines still exist. And it is this realm that mayors thrive in, but maybe none more than our new one, who might just be the ultimate mayor, in that he’s a cop.

The quintessential fake protector of a world where he holds all the power, our mayor calls everything in the city his: my kids, my healthcare professionals. Our mayor believes the truth is irrelevant, that anything can mean anything, that whatever he says is the rule. Our mayor sees himself above criticism because all he thinks he is is strength. Our mayor does not believe that strength can be questioned.

But what our mayor seems to love more than anything is to be seen. Against all precedent he demanded to be sworn in on national television, just after the ball dropped in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, a place that almost none of his constituents ever want to go. He has decided his true role as mayor of New York City is to be our spokesperson, talking more to the rest of the country than to us. He wants people in other places to know that we’re fine, we’re back, we’re ready for them to come visit. He does not seem to care that we are not, does not seem to realize that his job is actually to construct rather than declare this grand restoration. And that we don’t really want all these people from across the country to come thrashing through our still delicate city – this is out of his understanding entirely.

Our mayor is not alone. This place where one does not listen or act or function but where one is so fervently seen, it turns out, is the last place of refuge for most of our elected leaders, and it is on display that they’ll go down, righteously. They will show, in fact, that they are powerless, as long as they can show at all. They will do anything to be heard by people other than the people who elected them, and it is still, still, still impossible to tell them that this is not the way to build more power out of the power they already have.

Because if that’s what they want, we could give it to them. We could make a stronger city out of what’s already here rather than ask people who hate us anyway to come trampling through, bringing their own demands that make no sense with our own, that are in fact at odds with ours. We could look at what we have and turn it into what we need.

But this isn’t what a leader like a mayor wants. They want reach over depth, they want more ears and eyes on them, they want a possibility of bringing people they’re convinced could love them if they could just see how much they do for us all – a taco bar, in a bicycle repair shop, in this old town, can you even imagine – without anything that could steady those people who put them in their first grasps of power to begin with. It is numbers over the bodies that they represent that has led to this mindset, those numbers on a TV rating, on a tweet, on a clip where you say you’ll do something that doesn’t, after the numbers are gathered, have to actually be done. They’re empowered by a fortress of people who say whenever they enter a room that this is a room of change, this is a room where it happens, and those people stay so far away from everyone else who could change their mind – most of our cops don’t even live in our city – that their minds are as safe as their insulated leader. 

And when they let us down, again and again and again and again, they’ll be reelected anyway, because the people on the side they’re so desperately crying out to, we know, much more than them, are worse. But that doesn’t matter to them, truly. Even in this stark world of us versus them, our leaders still insist they occupy the third space, the third party, the bizarre neutral that no one on either side wants. They are mayors, and they are ours, against every single wish we yell at them. 

9. Experiences

8. Affirmation

7. Joy

6. Victory

5. Appeal

4. Carelessness

3. Decisions

2. Air

1. Humans

Previously: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016

When I was more depressed than I had ever been before, because I was only 19, I found a video of a puppy who could not turn over. Stranded on his back, the tiny French bulldog, so pure and so wriggly, would roll and roll and roll, but never make it upright. The video went on for over a minute, until finally, out of breath, the baby gives up. He remains upside down, un-right, stuck in exactly the wrong position. Sometimes I watched it dozens of times in a row. Almost always in the middle of the night, alone in my dorm on 12th and 3rd Avenue, I could not take my eyes off of him. I would cry, I would drink, I would send the link, without context, to people who loved me and could not help me but desperately wanted to. When I saw the puppy who could not be correct the word that came to mind was: me.

It’s the same incantation I heard last month when I listened to Drivers License x Soulja Boy (Mashup), the full version of the popular Tik Tok remix, which teens use mostly to convey that they were broken up with one day and then experienced a much more serious tragedy on the next one. And the sound – Tik Tok calls the thing you play over its masterpieces just Sounds – works perfectly for these sequences, but as a whole translates just as well for the new grief of everyday life. There was my deep, longing sadness, and there was the crash – watch me crank it, watch me roll – that brought me back to chaos, energy, something bizarre but something to land on nonetheless. 10, 11 months into the pandemic, struck with new turmoil, the ludicrous combination of sounds did not just make sense to me, they seemed to capture the entire essence of what I was.

This assigning of your own emotions to the totally unrelated is how memes as we know them began, obviously, with the internet seeing something that seemed like nothing – a road sign, a stock image, an animal posed bizarrely – and finding ourselves in it instead. It’s not really new; the history of creativity is essentially doing the same thing: you see a bird in the sky and think it means God apologized, and from there things just sort of escalate. But in the last years it’s become obvious that the art used to sell us things was especially into this shallow concept, turning sitcoms and advertisements and big budget films into so-called internet humor, desperate to flesh out that which worked because it existed without flesh.  

The most obvious example is Marvel, a literal Shiva, which 13 years ago sold us back our endless wars as some sort of underdog fight against the most noble cause on Earth, which, according to the stream of movies that I’ve watched in theaters, on planes, at other people’s houses, in my own bed, on mute at the gym, over gif sets on Tumblr where hundreds of teens were trying to tell me that every single character in the movie is gay, is never really explained. It is good to win, and it is good to be either American or from an imaginary country in Africa, and it is good to protect your friends from death but not really anyone else, that’s basically what I’ve gathered. It is especially good to have armor and toys that can kill but you, holding these or wearing them, are noble enough not to kill more than necessary, but obviously you have to kill a little. Everyone has one weapon that is designed by a genius – the genius is a woman or a minority, which is EVERYTHING – and that is extremely good, that’s really the height of good. What would we be without these geniuses who make this technology which, yes, it’s a weapon, but really it’s science, which you might remember from 2012, when it started saying fuck a lot.

But Marvel’s success across such a wide base, which I have to include myself in based on one movie which is Thor: Ragnarok, doesn’t seem to trace back to the action of these weapons as much as the decision to make the people who carry them feel the same way you feel, talk the same way you talk, dress the same way you do when they’re not in their costumes. And then from there the key: these heroes are making points, emotionally. The gif sets on Tumblr that swarmed for years were never about the coolness of fighting or superpowers, but always an analysis of how DO YOU SEE HOW THIS MAN JUST BROKE DOWN FROM ALL THE PRESSURE HE’S UNDER TO SAVE THE WORLD and DO YOU SEE HOW THEY LOOKED AT EACH WHILE THEY’RE FIGURING OUT WHERE THEY NEED TO GO TO SHOOT THINGS OUT OF THEIR SUITS and THE WAY HE TOUCHES HER BACK HE IS COMFORTING HER AFTER THEY’VE KILLED BUT HE’S GAY (SEE NEXT GIF SET OF GLANCES AT MAN) SO IT’S PLATONIC AND THAT IS BETTER and so on. In other words, these soldiers had a distinct purpose, and they were very overwhelmed by that. What they generally find the strength to carry on in, it turns out, is the weapon itself. 

Sometimes I would have to agree, these scenes really did look emotional, but mostly I wondered what exactly was going on here, why teenagers who should hate this sort of commerce were suddenly eating it up. But we see now that the establishment was just disguised as a nerd, a geek, a hot woman yes but she’s powerful and therefore misunderstood, and that that absurdly simple trick, as simple as a plot where a large, gross man snaps his fingers and kills half the universe, worked pretty much instantly. And people who are much more willing than I am to take in all these terrible movies and TV shows and video games would be able to better trace how, with 500,000 thousand very real people dead, I am told every day on Twitter that this show about a witch whose robot husband died is, breathlessly, radically, fervently, about grief.

I was very drunk when I watched that robot die. It was early April and I, like so many of us, could not remember the month before. Every day I woke up and I felt terror and I did what I needed to do to keep my body alive and then I would drink and stare at things that could take away what every expert was telling us was actual grief but what I did not know would present itself as a manic drive to feel absolutely nothing. I listened exclusively to music made for Tik Tok videos, and I spent nights exclusively on Tik Tok. I would watch these videos of people feeling nothing just like I was, set to the same Sounds over and over and over, filming our collective amputation of the world we had a month ago in 20 second videos of walking outside, pouring more wine, drinking more iced coffee, washing more things, and I would feel nothing too.

When they finally lost the robot I could not understand it. Influenced by the teens on the other app, I filmed myself on Instagram like I had some sort of audience. Why, I screamed, because of course I was alone. Why do they care about this. Why is this sad. If this robot can save the world by dying, unplug him.

I, probably like you, have spent the last year teetering on the edge of art that could make me feel anything, living on the internet and in images and film and Sounds that could help me ignore the world outside of my brain just as much as the one inside it. In rare bursts, I have been able to do the thing that helps most, which is read something made up that explains something real. This has been so hard, and no one really knows why, but last week Patricia Lockwood sent out a book that felt custom-made to carry you from one realm to the next. I read the first half of her novel in despair, her excellent, spot-on descriptions of the internet devastating me because is this just what life is now, is this just as far as we can go, isn’t there anything further, isn’t there a feeling that can still be made just for you. The second half answers astoundingly clearly: of course there’s more life. It hurts more than anything you could ever see on a screen, but it’s there.  

It does not feel conspiratorial or exaggerated for me to assume that our embrace of self assigned to the most shallow thing we can grasp repackaged and sold to us in every form of culture might have led to a nation that is having difficulty processing exactly how much death we’re walking among. This is not to say that memes took away our feelings, it’s that the organic nature of the process was stolen and replaced with something much more sinister. It is, in fact, the strategy of the people failing us again, driving over our goals for equity and peace and renewal with fear and war and ignorance to simply put a fun spin on what is destroying. Of course it isn’t true that this is fine, but the next two panels do get worse. That little dog never leaves.

But the puppy does roll over, actually. I found the video years later, seven seconds cut off for mysterious reasons. And I was so overwhelmed that I could stumble across it, the brave right ending to this video I associated with so much pain, when everything was suddenly going so right, and the whole world looked brighter, and a future felt inevitable instead of potential, and I thought: us.