Friday, December 26, 2025
Bye, Mom
I get a text that my mom’s in the ICU.
I don’t know how bad it is. I already have a flight to see her in four days and I’m not sure it’s worth moving. This isn’t the first time she’s been in the ICU; for years she’s been in and out of hospitals and stuff that used to make us panic now makes us go ‘oh darn, again?’
I ask, How serious is it? The answers are fuzzy, and I am frustrated. I ask my dad to ask the doctor if she thinks family should come. I get the message: “Doc says yes come immediately.”
Five hours later, my sister and I are landing in Boise. We stop by my parents’ house to grab my mom’s car; I collect photos, a blanket I made her, a little stuffed otter. My mom loves otters. I haven’t thought too hard about her dying, I don’t know if she’s going to die, but everything we’re doing feels important in a way I haven’t felt before. We’re shaky.
We park in the freezing Idaho hospital parking lot at 1 am; my sister says it feels like we’re walking through a fiery gate into doom. She’s right, we’re bracing. The edges of reality begin to pulse.
The front desk gives us wristbands, and we begin the long winding walk to the ICU. At the end of the big hall stands my dad and an old family friend I haven’t seen in years. She hugs us and says “I’m gonna warn you, it’s shocking.” She says, “I’m so sorry, girls.”
We get into the ICU, they make us wash our hands. A nurse preps us, says our mom can hear us but will be unresponsive. Our mom might move, but this is instinctual and not conscious.
We go in. My mom is barely recognizeable, shriveled down like her soul is half gone and her flesh is deflating around the space it’s leaving behind. She’s got a tube in her throat and out her arms and neck, wires all over her head. She’s handcuffed to the bed so she doesn’t tear out the ventilator.
I remember hearing other people say the phrase “Nobody knew what to do” during crises, but I’d always assumed it was a paralysis around what to do with important decisions like ‘do we keep them alive’ or ‘what do we do with the body’. But here, in the middle of it, I realize it applies to everything. I can’t think at all. The part of our brain that does evaluation, desire, and choice has been completely overrun; when someone asks “I’m gonna grab sushi, do you want any” we stare at them in confusion. I keep saying ‘sure, I guess’ at food offers, and the little room accumulates way too much food that slowly goes bad over days. It’s hard to know when to sleep, or when to trade shifts - we should probably take shifts, right? Nobody has a sleep schedule, we’re running on a few hours each night. All I can remember is that when I got there, I thought at least one of us should be well rested at any given time. It’s hard to track that now. We’re disorganized, our half-unpacked suitcases spill everywhere. The air is different. We keep the blinds to the window closed because my dad has autism, and so we can’t see the sun passing; the only sense of time passing is the pulses of nurse activity outside the door and their shift changes.
We’ve fallen into a crack in reality, a place where the veil is thin and the water is still, while the world continues to eddy around us through the hallways outside.
The doctors come in and give us updates, frustratingly vague. She has acute liver shock, with an AST over 2200. Her brain isn’t working but it doesn’t seem like the liver shock was the cause (low amonia). They don’t know exactly what’s going on, could be a seizure but no observed seizure activity. They don’t say anything about survival odds, even when I ask. I say “Okay, if you had a hundred people similar to her, in her condition, what percentage of them would you expect to survive” and they say “we don’t know, it’s so dependent on the person.” I say okay - “but probably not 99 of them, and not only 1 of them. So if you know it’s not those numbers, what number sounds more right” and they say “Good point,” but still won’t give me any actual number. I want to scream. I say “do you think taking her off life support is the next step”, and one of them, I think the head doctor, says “If this were my family member, yes, I would prepare to let her pass.” I accept it. I sort of already knew. (...)
My mom was the opposite of me in almost every way two humans can be opposite. She was traditional and uncomplicated; she once complained to me she didn’t like these new shows that portrayed the bad guy as sympathetic, that was a level of moral nuance she did not appreciate. She was so devoutly religious, most of you probably cannot actually imagine how much; she loved worshipping Jesus and putting crosses on everything she could. Years ago I asked “when you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?” and she said “a mom.” She, as far as I know, had one sexual partner her entire life...
She was far from perfect, but for all her flaws she managed to channel an unconditional love made all the more beautiful by how hard it would be for most people like her to love most daughters like me. In my years I’ve met many a sex worker who talked about being disowned by her Christian mom, but my mom wasn’t that kind of Christian. She was a good one.
A mother’s love is crazy. She poured it all out into my earliest years, when I was still forming in the world. I will forever be shaped by it. It’s hard to look at the intensity of that love directly. It’s blinding. It sort of doesn’t matter who I grew into being, or ways we missed seeing each other each other - she and I are linked at the souls. It’s a heavy thing to be loved so fiercely.
I don’t know how bad it is. I already have a flight to see her in four days and I’m not sure it’s worth moving. This isn’t the first time she’s been in the ICU; for years she’s been in and out of hospitals and stuff that used to make us panic now makes us go ‘oh darn, again?’
I ask, How serious is it? The answers are fuzzy, and I am frustrated. I ask my dad to ask the doctor if she thinks family should come. I get the message: “Doc says yes come immediately.”
We park in the freezing Idaho hospital parking lot at 1 am; my sister says it feels like we’re walking through a fiery gate into doom. She’s right, we’re bracing. The edges of reality begin to pulse.
The front desk gives us wristbands, and we begin the long winding walk to the ICU. At the end of the big hall stands my dad and an old family friend I haven’t seen in years. She hugs us and says “I’m gonna warn you, it’s shocking.” She says, “I’m so sorry, girls.”
We get into the ICU, they make us wash our hands. A nurse preps us, says our mom can hear us but will be unresponsive. Our mom might move, but this is instinctual and not conscious.
We go in. My mom is barely recognizeable, shriveled down like her soul is half gone and her flesh is deflating around the space it’s leaving behind. She’s got a tube in her throat and out her arms and neck, wires all over her head. She’s handcuffed to the bed so she doesn’t tear out the ventilator.
My sister and I hold her hands and cry. We speak to her, but there’s no movement, not even twitching. We sob ‘i love you’ over and over. (...)
We’ve fallen into a crack in reality, a place where the veil is thin and the water is still, while the world continues to eddy around us through the hallways outside.
The doctors come in and give us updates, frustratingly vague. She has acute liver shock, with an AST over 2200. Her brain isn’t working but it doesn’t seem like the liver shock was the cause (low amonia). They don’t know exactly what’s going on, could be a seizure but no observed seizure activity. They don’t say anything about survival odds, even when I ask. I say “Okay, if you had a hundred people similar to her, in her condition, what percentage of them would you expect to survive” and they say “we don’t know, it’s so dependent on the person.” I say okay - “but probably not 99 of them, and not only 1 of them. So if you know it’s not those numbers, what number sounds more right” and they say “Good point,” but still won’t give me any actual number. I want to scream. I say “do you think taking her off life support is the next step”, and one of them, I think the head doctor, says “If this were my family member, yes, I would prepare to let her pass.” I accept it. I sort of already knew. (...)
We all leave the room to allow each one of us to say our goodbyes in privacy. When it’s my turn I go in and it’s her and I, alone. I’d already talked to her in the past blurry days, in the middle of the night when everyone was gone or sleeping in corners I sat by her bedside, holding her precious hand and whispering to her. But this is the last time. I tell her she was a wonderful mom. The walls are twisting in, squeezing the words out of me. I tell her I’m sad we ended up such different people, in a tragic, inevitable way that put distance between us. I tell her I’ll miss her. I tell her many other tender things that were for her ears alone. Each second is so loud; there’s so few of them left, and they are screaming.
Finally we’ve all said our words, and crowd back in. We hold her, we tell the doctors we’re ready. We are shaking. I don’t know what to do. We can’t do anything. They tell us they’re going to remove the ventilator, that we can step out if we want. We all say no. Leaving would be profane. I need to be with her through every second of this. I watch them gently unstrap things around her face, press buttons. They say after they take it out, she will probably die quickly. The ground is rumbling beneath us, the air is bearing down; I think my sister is going to pass out and I manage to pull her into a chair. They lay out a napkin below my mom’s chin. “One, two, three,” says a nurse, and they pull it out, the long tube that comes out with a wet noise. An immense, familiar agony is tearing through my body, starting in my lower gut and pulsing out through my arms and pouring out from my hands and the top of my head and the water from my eyes. The final descent shudders with holiness. The air itself is crying out with a chorus of our primal cries, we have no control over our bodies. She’s on her own now, and she is dying. My sister is sobbing “Momma, I love you”. We feel for her pulse, can’t tell if the beat we feel is our own hearts in our hands or if it’s hers. I put my fingers under her nose, feel the faintest air for a moment, and then I can’t feel any more. A moment later the doctors come in - they’d been watching her heart from the outside - and tell us she’s gone.
Almost immediately, a calmness washes over the Crack in Reality, and we sit back, and reality releases its contraction. I’m surprised by how fast the change is; I thought maybe now is when it would be the worst, but these seconds are so soft. We cry softly, and hold her body softly, and watch the blood start to pool on the underside of her arms and the bottom of her tongue. She looks like the renassaince paintings of dead bodies, and I wonder how many loved ones those old painters had watched die. My sister crawls into bed with her and wraps her arms around our mom’s body. I am hyper aware of the blood moving in my body, the pink under my own skin. (...)
Finally we’ve all said our words, and crowd back in. We hold her, we tell the doctors we’re ready. We are shaking. I don’t know what to do. We can’t do anything. They tell us they’re going to remove the ventilator, that we can step out if we want. We all say no. Leaving would be profane. I need to be with her through every second of this. I watch them gently unstrap things around her face, press buttons. They say after they take it out, she will probably die quickly. The ground is rumbling beneath us, the air is bearing down; I think my sister is going to pass out and I manage to pull her into a chair. They lay out a napkin below my mom’s chin. “One, two, three,” says a nurse, and they pull it out, the long tube that comes out with a wet noise. An immense, familiar agony is tearing through my body, starting in my lower gut and pulsing out through my arms and pouring out from my hands and the top of my head and the water from my eyes. The final descent shudders with holiness. The air itself is crying out with a chorus of our primal cries, we have no control over our bodies. She’s on her own now, and she is dying. My sister is sobbing “Momma, I love you”. We feel for her pulse, can’t tell if the beat we feel is our own hearts in our hands or if it’s hers. I put my fingers under her nose, feel the faintest air for a moment, and then I can’t feel any more. A moment later the doctors come in - they’d been watching her heart from the outside - and tell us she’s gone.
Almost immediately, a calmness washes over the Crack in Reality, and we sit back, and reality releases its contraction. I’m surprised by how fast the change is; I thought maybe now is when it would be the worst, but these seconds are so soft. We cry softly, and hold her body softly, and watch the blood start to pool on the underside of her arms and the bottom of her tongue. She looks like the renassaince paintings of dead bodies, and I wonder how many loved ones those old painters had watched die. My sister crawls into bed with her and wraps her arms around our mom’s body. I am hyper aware of the blood moving in my body, the pink under my own skin. (...)
She was far from perfect, but for all her flaws she managed to channel an unconditional love made all the more beautiful by how hard it would be for most people like her to love most daughters like me. In my years I’ve met many a sex worker who talked about being disowned by her Christian mom, but my mom wasn’t that kind of Christian. She was a good one.
A mother’s love is crazy. She poured it all out into my earliest years, when I was still forming in the world. I will forever be shaped by it. It’s hard to look at the intensity of that love directly. It’s blinding. It sort of doesn’t matter who I grew into being, or ways we missed seeing each other each other - she and I are linked at the souls. It’s a heavy thing to be loved so fiercely.
by Aella, Knowingless | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. It's sometimes a relief when someone dies and are finally free of pain and suffering. Personally I don't believe in the concept of a good death, just various levels of less bad.]
[ed. It's sometimes a relief when someone dies and are finally free of pain and suffering. Personally I don't believe in the concept of a good death, just various levels of less bad.]
How Willie Nelson Sees America
When Willie Nelson performs in and around New York, he parks his bus in Weehawken, New Jersey. While the band sleeps at a hotel in midtown Manhattan, he stays on board, playing dominoes, napping. Nelson keeps musician’s hours. For exercise, he does sit-ups, arm rolls, and leg lifts. He jogs in place. “I’m in pretty good shape, physically, for ninety-two,” he told me recently. “Woke up again this morning, so that’s good.”
On September 12th, Nelson drove down to the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion, in Camden. His band, a four-piece, was dressed all in black; Nelson wore black boots, black jeans, and a Bobby Bare T-shirt. His hair, which is thicker and darker than it appears under stage lights, hung in two braids to his waist. A scrim masked the front of the stage, and he walked out unseen, holding a straw cowboy hat. Annie, his wife of thirty-four years, rubbed his back and shoulders. A few friends watched from the wings: members of Sheryl Crow’s band, which had opened for him, and John Doe, the old punk musician, who had flown in from Austin. (At the next show, in Holmdel, Bruce Springsteen showed up.) Out front, big screens played the video for Nelson’s 1986 single “Living in the Promiseland.”
“Promiseland” joined Nelson’s preshow in the spring, after ICE ramped up its raids on immigrants. The lyrics speak on behalf of newcomers: “Give us your tired and weak / And we will make them strong / Bring us your foreign songs / And we will sing along.” The video cuts between footage of Holocaust survivors arriving on Liberty ships and of Haitian migrants on wooden boats. In Camden—two nights after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, one night after the State Department warned immigrants against “praising” his murder, hours after bomb threats forced the temporary closure of seven historically Black colleges—the images hit hard. When the video ended, three things happened at once: stagehands yanked the scrim away, Nelson sang the first notes of “Whiskey River,” and a giant American flag unfurled behind him.
“Whiskey River” has been Nelson’s opener for decades. He tends to start it with a loud, ringing G chord, struck nine times, like a bell. On this night, he sat out the beginning and took the first solo instead, strumming forcefully, pushing the tempo. “I don’t know what I’m going to do when I pick up a guitar,” Nelson said. He plays to find out, discovering new ways into songs he’s been singing, in some cases, since he was a child. “Willie loves to play music more than anyone I’ve ever met,” the musician Norah Jones told me. “He can’t stop, and he shouldn’t.” For Nelson, music is medicine—he won’t do the lung exercises his doctors prescribe, but “singing for an hour is good for you,” he says. His daughter Amy put it more bluntly: “I think it’s literally keeping him alive.”
Last year, Nelson didn’t make it to every performance. On those nights, his older son, Lukas, filled in. At the end of the tour, no one knew if Nelson would go out again; five months later, he did. I started following him in February, in Florida. In Key West, Lukas and Annie flanked Nelson as he sat and rested before going on. Annie had her hand on the small of his back and Lukas on his shoulder; they looked like two cornermen coaxing a boxer back into the ring. Nelson suffers from emphysema. He barely survived COVID-19. (He got so sick he wanted to die; Annie told him if he did she would kill him.) His voice is still inky, he struggles for air, but he stays in charge, or lets go, as the moment requires.
“I’m definitely following Willie,” Nelson’s harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, told me. “He sets the tempo. He picks the songs.” Raphael is tall, with dark, curly hair and the easy swagger of a man who has spent his life onstage. When he started with Nelson, in 1973, there was no set list. Every night was “stream of consciousness,” catch-as-catch-can. Now, even with set lists taped to the carpet, Nelson might switch songs or skip ahead, lose his way, or drop verses—things he did as a younger man, too. At the end of a number that’s really careened, he’ll look over his shoulder and cross his arms in an umpire’s safe sign. “We made it,” he’s telling Raphael on these occasions. “We’re home.” (...)
“Willie means more to me than the Liberty Bell,” Jeff Tweedy told me. Tweedy and his band, Wilco, played a few dates with Nelson this year, as part of the annual Outlaw Music Festival, which Nelson headlined along with Bob Dylan. (Other performers included Billy Strings and Lucinda Williams.) Tweedy said he admires Nelson’s vision of America—“a big tent, and it should be”—and the way Nelson says what he thinks without rancor, always punching up. “He doesn’t aim at his fellow-citizens. He aims at corporations. He aims at injustice.”
Nelson has a knack for leaning left without losing the room. He stumped for Jimmy Carter, who was a friend, and for the former congressman and Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich; he co-chairs the advisory board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws; he has pushed for the use of biofuels, running his tour buses on vegetable oil and soybeans; he opposed the war in Iraq. In 2006, he recorded a Ned Sublette song called “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other.” “I’ve known straight and gay people all my life,” he told Texas Monthly. “I can’t tell the difference. People are people where I came from.” (“Beer for My Horses,” a hang-’em-high duet with Toby Keith, has aged less well.)
In 2018, when the government began separating families at the southern border, Nelson said, “Christians everywhere should be up in arms.” That fall, he played a new song, “Vote ’Em Out,” at a rally for Beto O’Rourke, who was running for Senate. O’Rourke told me the point wasn’t only the stand Nelson took; it was the idea of Texas he represented. There was a temptation, O’Rourke said, to accept the caricature of Texas as “extreme, conservative, macho, tough-guy,” though for people like him, who’d lived there all their lives, “true Texas is kindness, hospitality, open hearts.” Nelson, he said, embodied “the best of Texas: you can be a freak, a weirdo, a cowboy, a rancher, a cello player, whatever. He’s the patron saint of that—growing his hair, rejecting corporate music, and just being a good fucking human being.”
At Nelson’s concerts, all of those types gather. They always have. In the seventies, when Nelson was still playing dance halls, ranch hands and refinery workers shared the floor with hippies who’d heard his songs on FM radio. It was a volatile mix. At the Half-Dollar, outside Houston, groups of long-haired kids sat in front of the stage as cowboys two-stepped behind them. The cowboys “would start dancing, do a little spin, and kick somebody in the back,” Steve Earle recalled. “Willie caught it out of the corner of his eye.” Nelson stopped the band in the middle of a song. “There’s room for some to sit and for some to dance,” he said, and, as soon as he did so, there was.
“People out there get to clap their hands and sing for a couple hours, and then they go home feeling better,” Nelson said. “I get the same enjoyment that they do—it’s an equal exchange of energy.” As a young man in Texas, Nelson taught Sunday school and considered the ministry. On the bus in Weehawken, I asked if he saw his work as akin to a preacher’s. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Nelson said. “I don’t try to preach to nobody.” Annie disagreed: “I think he’s a shaman.” Musicians like him draw strangers together, she said. “Let’s face it, we’re being divided intentionally. That’s part of the playbook—divide and conquer. It’s been around a long time. When somebody’s saying hello to somebody without knowing their political ideology, and they’re just enjoying music together, that’s church. That’s healing. That’s really important right now. Really, really important.” (...)
Nelson doesn’t mind doing two or three takes of a number. He bristles at four. Don Was, who produced Nelson’s album “Across the Borderline,” in 1992, told me about recording the title track in Dublin, where Nelson had a night off from touring. They spent an hour working out the arrangement—talking, not playing—then went for the first take. Halfway through the second verse, Was thought, Oh, man, this is unbelievable. Please, nobody fuck up. “He plays this incredible solo in the middle. Third verse, I’m really freaking out—please, nobody. And nobody did.” Kris Kristofferson added harmonies; that was the only overdub. Then Nelson rolled a joint and marked it with a Sharpie, about three-quarters of the way down. He told the house engineer, “I’m going to smoke this joint. When it gets burned down to the blue dot, your mix is done.” Forty-five minutes later, it was. “That’s the mix on the album,” Was said.
These days, Cannon cuts backing tracks with musicians who “get Willie and don’t look at the clock.” Nelson comes in later, as he was doing now, to play and sing. “He has no pitch issues,” Cannon says. “He’s allergic to out-of-tune-ness.” But Nelson plays odd tricks with rhythm—phrasing behind the beat while his guitar rushes forward. “Willie’s timing is so weird,” Raphael told me. “It’s like a snake slithering across the ground.” Nelson is one of the most imitated guitarists in the world, Cannon says, but, without his feel, imitators “sound silly.” When Nelson plays, “even the crazy shit sounds beautiful.” Cannon tries not to sand down the edges: “I love his music too much to screw it up.” (...)
“You never know exactly what he’s going to do,” Micah Nelson told me, describing the concerts he’s played with his dad. He went on, “You’re always present. Nobody’s phoning it in, because you never know where the spirit’s going to take him.” Nelson may sing a verse way ahead of everyone, when they’re “still on the first chord,” and the instinct is to speed up, to catch him, Micah said. “It’s, like, No, no, he’s waiting for us over there, three blocks away.” Nelson lets the band close the gap, then keep going. “He’s singing so outside of the pocket, there is no pocket. He’s obliterating any sort of timing,” Micah continued. Somehow, it works. Any number of times, Micah has thought, Oh, shit, he’s lost the plot. He always finds it again. Playing with Nelson is like performing with the Flying Wallendas, Micah said, or with Neil Young’s band. It’s the opposite of perfectly choreographed shows with backing tracks that all but play themselves. There’s never a safety net. “Obviously, it helps to have great songs,” he added. “Now that I say it, the songs are the safety net. You really can’t go wrong when you have good songs.” (...)
Amy recalled a time when she and her sister were trampled by fans trying to get to their father: “My mom said, ‘He’s not going to really know what that’s like, because they stop when they get to him. They will plow through you to get to him.’ ” Any hard feelings fell away when she thought about the alternative—years her father had spent going nowhere, the life he might have led had he not broken through. “Whatever resentment I had for his fans disappeared when I started looking at it from that perspective.”
by Alex Abramovich, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Danny Clinch
[ed. What more is there to say about Willie at this point? Well, this profile of a recent tour, is one example. Then there's this, by Bob Dylan:]
I asked Dylan about Nelson, and he wrote back with a warning: “It’s hard to talk about Willie without saying something stupid or irrelevant, he is so much of everything.” He went on:
On September 12th, Nelson drove down to the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion, in Camden. His band, a four-piece, was dressed all in black; Nelson wore black boots, black jeans, and a Bobby Bare T-shirt. His hair, which is thicker and darker than it appears under stage lights, hung in two braids to his waist. A scrim masked the front of the stage, and he walked out unseen, holding a straw cowboy hat. Annie, his wife of thirty-four years, rubbed his back and shoulders. A few friends watched from the wings: members of Sheryl Crow’s band, which had opened for him, and John Doe, the old punk musician, who had flown in from Austin. (At the next show, in Holmdel, Bruce Springsteen showed up.) Out front, big screens played the video for Nelson’s 1986 single “Living in the Promiseland.”
“Whiskey River” has been Nelson’s opener for decades. He tends to start it with a loud, ringing G chord, struck nine times, like a bell. On this night, he sat out the beginning and took the first solo instead, strumming forcefully, pushing the tempo. “I don’t know what I’m going to do when I pick up a guitar,” Nelson said. He plays to find out, discovering new ways into songs he’s been singing, in some cases, since he was a child. “Willie loves to play music more than anyone I’ve ever met,” the musician Norah Jones told me. “He can’t stop, and he shouldn’t.” For Nelson, music is medicine—he won’t do the lung exercises his doctors prescribe, but “singing for an hour is good for you,” he says. His daughter Amy put it more bluntly: “I think it’s literally keeping him alive.”
Last year, Nelson didn’t make it to every performance. On those nights, his older son, Lukas, filled in. At the end of the tour, no one knew if Nelson would go out again; five months later, he did. I started following him in February, in Florida. In Key West, Lukas and Annie flanked Nelson as he sat and rested before going on. Annie had her hand on the small of his back and Lukas on his shoulder; they looked like two cornermen coaxing a boxer back into the ring. Nelson suffers from emphysema. He barely survived COVID-19. (He got so sick he wanted to die; Annie told him if he did she would kill him.) His voice is still inky, he struggles for air, but he stays in charge, or lets go, as the moment requires.
“I’m definitely following Willie,” Nelson’s harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, told me. “He sets the tempo. He picks the songs.” Raphael is tall, with dark, curly hair and the easy swagger of a man who has spent his life onstage. When he started with Nelson, in 1973, there was no set list. Every night was “stream of consciousness,” catch-as-catch-can. Now, even with set lists taped to the carpet, Nelson might switch songs or skip ahead, lose his way, or drop verses—things he did as a younger man, too. At the end of a number that’s really careened, he’ll look over his shoulder and cross his arms in an umpire’s safe sign. “We made it,” he’s telling Raphael on these occasions. “We’re home.” (...)
“Willie means more to me than the Liberty Bell,” Jeff Tweedy told me. Tweedy and his band, Wilco, played a few dates with Nelson this year, as part of the annual Outlaw Music Festival, which Nelson headlined along with Bob Dylan. (Other performers included Billy Strings and Lucinda Williams.) Tweedy said he admires Nelson’s vision of America—“a big tent, and it should be”—and the way Nelson says what he thinks without rancor, always punching up. “He doesn’t aim at his fellow-citizens. He aims at corporations. He aims at injustice.”
Nelson has a knack for leaning left without losing the room. He stumped for Jimmy Carter, who was a friend, and for the former congressman and Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich; he co-chairs the advisory board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws; he has pushed for the use of biofuels, running his tour buses on vegetable oil and soybeans; he opposed the war in Iraq. In 2006, he recorded a Ned Sublette song called “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other.” “I’ve known straight and gay people all my life,” he told Texas Monthly. “I can’t tell the difference. People are people where I came from.” (“Beer for My Horses,” a hang-’em-high duet with Toby Keith, has aged less well.)
In 2018, when the government began separating families at the southern border, Nelson said, “Christians everywhere should be up in arms.” That fall, he played a new song, “Vote ’Em Out,” at a rally for Beto O’Rourke, who was running for Senate. O’Rourke told me the point wasn’t only the stand Nelson took; it was the idea of Texas he represented. There was a temptation, O’Rourke said, to accept the caricature of Texas as “extreme, conservative, macho, tough-guy,” though for people like him, who’d lived there all their lives, “true Texas is kindness, hospitality, open hearts.” Nelson, he said, embodied “the best of Texas: you can be a freak, a weirdo, a cowboy, a rancher, a cello player, whatever. He’s the patron saint of that—growing his hair, rejecting corporate music, and just being a good fucking human being.”
At Nelson’s concerts, all of those types gather. They always have. In the seventies, when Nelson was still playing dance halls, ranch hands and refinery workers shared the floor with hippies who’d heard his songs on FM radio. It was a volatile mix. At the Half-Dollar, outside Houston, groups of long-haired kids sat in front of the stage as cowboys two-stepped behind them. The cowboys “would start dancing, do a little spin, and kick somebody in the back,” Steve Earle recalled. “Willie caught it out of the corner of his eye.” Nelson stopped the band in the middle of a song. “There’s room for some to sit and for some to dance,” he said, and, as soon as he did so, there was.
“People out there get to clap their hands and sing for a couple hours, and then they go home feeling better,” Nelson said. “I get the same enjoyment that they do—it’s an equal exchange of energy.” As a young man in Texas, Nelson taught Sunday school and considered the ministry. On the bus in Weehawken, I asked if he saw his work as akin to a preacher’s. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Nelson said. “I don’t try to preach to nobody.” Annie disagreed: “I think he’s a shaman.” Musicians like him draw strangers together, she said. “Let’s face it, we’re being divided intentionally. That’s part of the playbook—divide and conquer. It’s been around a long time. When somebody’s saying hello to somebody without knowing their political ideology, and they’re just enjoying music together, that’s church. That’s healing. That’s really important right now. Really, really important.” (...)
Nelson doesn’t mind doing two or three takes of a number. He bristles at four. Don Was, who produced Nelson’s album “Across the Borderline,” in 1992, told me about recording the title track in Dublin, where Nelson had a night off from touring. They spent an hour working out the arrangement—talking, not playing—then went for the first take. Halfway through the second verse, Was thought, Oh, man, this is unbelievable. Please, nobody fuck up. “He plays this incredible solo in the middle. Third verse, I’m really freaking out—please, nobody. And nobody did.” Kris Kristofferson added harmonies; that was the only overdub. Then Nelson rolled a joint and marked it with a Sharpie, about three-quarters of the way down. He told the house engineer, “I’m going to smoke this joint. When it gets burned down to the blue dot, your mix is done.” Forty-five minutes later, it was. “That’s the mix on the album,” Was said.
These days, Cannon cuts backing tracks with musicians who “get Willie and don’t look at the clock.” Nelson comes in later, as he was doing now, to play and sing. “He has no pitch issues,” Cannon says. “He’s allergic to out-of-tune-ness.” But Nelson plays odd tricks with rhythm—phrasing behind the beat while his guitar rushes forward. “Willie’s timing is so weird,” Raphael told me. “It’s like a snake slithering across the ground.” Nelson is one of the most imitated guitarists in the world, Cannon says, but, without his feel, imitators “sound silly.” When Nelson plays, “even the crazy shit sounds beautiful.” Cannon tries not to sand down the edges: “I love his music too much to screw it up.” (...)
“You never know exactly what he’s going to do,” Micah Nelson told me, describing the concerts he’s played with his dad. He went on, “You’re always present. Nobody’s phoning it in, because you never know where the spirit’s going to take him.” Nelson may sing a verse way ahead of everyone, when they’re “still on the first chord,” and the instinct is to speed up, to catch him, Micah said. “It’s, like, No, no, he’s waiting for us over there, three blocks away.” Nelson lets the band close the gap, then keep going. “He’s singing so outside of the pocket, there is no pocket. He’s obliterating any sort of timing,” Micah continued. Somehow, it works. Any number of times, Micah has thought, Oh, shit, he’s lost the plot. He always finds it again. Playing with Nelson is like performing with the Flying Wallendas, Micah said, or with Neil Young’s band. It’s the opposite of perfectly choreographed shows with backing tracks that all but play themselves. There’s never a safety net. “Obviously, it helps to have great songs,” he added. “Now that I say it, the songs are the safety net. You really can’t go wrong when you have good songs.” (...)
Amy recalled a time when she and her sister were trampled by fans trying to get to their father: “My mom said, ‘He’s not going to really know what that’s like, because they stop when they get to him. They will plow through you to get to him.’ ” Any hard feelings fell away when she thought about the alternative—years her father had spent going nowhere, the life he might have led had he not broken through. “Whatever resentment I had for his fans disappeared when I started looking at it from that perspective.”
by Alex Abramovich, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Danny Clinch
[ed. What more is there to say about Willie at this point? Well, this profile of a recent tour, is one example. Then there's this, by Bob Dylan:]
I asked Dylan about Nelson, and he wrote back with a warning: “It’s hard to talk about Willie without saying something stupid or irrelevant, he is so much of everything.” He went on:
How can you make sense of him? How would you define the indefinable or the unfathomable? What is there to say? Ancient Viking Soul? Master Builder of the Impossible? Patron poet of people who never quite fit in and don’t much care to? Moonshine Philosopher? Tumbleweed singer with a PhD? Red Bandana troubadour, braids like twin ropes lassoing eternity? What do you say about a guy who plays an old, battered guitar that he treats like it’s the last loyal dog in the universe? Cowboy apparition, writes songs with holes that you can crawl through to escape from something. Voice like a warm porchlight left on for wanderers who kissed goodbye too soon or stayed too long. I guess you can say all that. But it really doesn’t tell you a lot or explain anything about Willie. Personally speaking I’ve always known him to be kind, generous, tolerant and understanding of human feebleness, a benefactor, a father and a friend. He’s like the invisible air. He’s high and low. He’s in harmony with nature. And that’s what makes him Willie.
Can Cruising Survive Influencers?
It was a balmy July day and Joseph had dick on the brain. The 25-year-old Brooklyn barista had agreed to walk a friend’s dog in Washington Square Park, so he figured that while he was in Manhattan he’d check in on one of his favorite cruising spots: a men’s restroom at Penn Station. Those in the know know this bathroom; Joseph (his middle name) estimates he’d cruised for sex there about eight times before. He likes that among the fresh faces he will often see the same old queens catching up in their de facto third space. Sure, he could open Grindr or Scruff to find a hookup, but then he’ll get picky and end up scrolling endlessly. Cruising feels more authentic, more real. It’s a ritual. A hunt.
In the early hours of the afternoon, he’d expected the restroom to be livelier. (Rush hour can bring too many commuters seeking to use the bathroom for its intended purpose.) But there was one guy standing at a urinal: a handsome Latino man with dark hair and eyes, and big, beefy arms protruding from his orange high-visability safety vest. This man nodded to Joseph as he entered, which he took as a sign to install himself at the adjacent urinal. The construction worker appeared to be rubbing himself and smiling, Joseph recalled. “He was looking at me. He was trying to peek over. He was doing it. He seemed seasoned at this,” Joseph said. “He was giving an Oscar-winning performance.”
That performance ended when Joseph, thinking he’d met a fellow traveler, flashed the guy his penis. “We got one,” the undercover Amtrak police officer immediately said into a radio microphone hidden in his collar. Stunned and embarrassed, Joseph barely had time to put his penis away before he was handcuffed and marched through the station—his fly still unbuttoned—to a holding room, where he spent the next few hours. One other man was already there, looking humiliated and sad. Two more were eventually brought in as part of the same sting operation: one who was adamant he’d just been in the bathroom to pee and another man in his 20s who spoke only Spanish. Joseph then watched as this man, freaking out, was eventually handed over to immigration agents.
Joseph is among almost 200 people who have been arrested since June 1 as part of a crackdown on cruising in the Penn Station restroom, an Amtrak spokesperson told me. At least 20 of these men were immigrants transferred to ICE custody. While other mass public indecency arrests were made in Indiana, Arizona, and Illinois during the same period, the Penn Station operation was unique in its scale and length. Rep. Jerry Nadler and other outraged lawmakers dubbed it a “hostile arrest campaign reminiscent of anti-LGBTQ policing from the Stonewall era.”
There is a major difference, though, between that era and now: the once-secret world of cruising has never been more out in the open. As Amtrak police were arresting men, nearby cinemas were screening Plainclothes, a movie in which Tom Blyth portrays an undercover New York cop who patrols bathrooms and falls for one of his targets, played by Russell Tovey. When thousands gathered in a Clinton Hill warehouse during Pride Month for the “Twinks vs. Dolls” event, they did so amid ample signage and merchandise from co-sponsor, Sniffies, the map-based cruising app. Mainstream media stories about cruising and orgies have outraged some gay men who say that their safe spaces have been exposed.
But cruising’s real “outing” has occurred on social media, where a growing cottage industry of men are vying to become the Rick Steves of cruising. Guys on TikTok or Instagram will now teach you how to cruise at your gym or how to avoid getting caught in the steamroom. You can learn the best ways to pick up guys in a Barnes & Noble (Step One: “Pick a book you’re not actually reading”) or at your Lowes hardware store. (Step One: “Dress like you know your way around wood.”) You can see videos of men following each other among trees in public parks or tapping their feet in bathroom stalls in the manner of Larry Craig. One creator named Connor (who did not respond to requests for comment) has amassed over 375,000 followers over various accounts with a seemingly endless stream of videos in which he boasts graphically about cruising in airport bathrooms, waterparks, or at his local Macy’s. On X, where content guidelines are much freer, adult performers with hundreds of thousands of followers share explicit videos of themselves having sex with blurry-faced strangers in what appear to be department store changing rooms.
“I’m a teacher by nature and so I thought, Hey, cruising has been around forever. It’s part of our history. Why not teach on it?” said Chandler (his last name), a 34-year-old adult creator who posts instructional guides or suggestive stories themed to what he calls “CruiseTok.” He puts his openness on social media down to a desire for authenticity. “I think in today’s world, it’s more acceptable to be who you are. If that means showing your expression or passion, then yeah!”
But amid a resurgent right-wing that has sought to wind back LGBTQ rights, all this openness has left some, including Joseph, uncomfortable or even worried about what they see as unwanted attention. “I think calling attention to it and trying to get your social media clout from it is annoying,” he said. “The whole point—the whole, historical purpose of cruising was to be super low-key and discreet.” While information about cruising has always been available for people who wanted to seek it out, it’s now being entrusted to algorithms that can push it on people who aren’t, including, potentially, the authorities. All this has left some men wondering whether certain things should still be gate-kept.
“A lot of these much younger people that are 22 and excited about this activity, their natural inclination is just supposed to post it online. There’s no way to control that fire,” said Leo Herrera, an artist and author who self-published a guide to cruising last year. He likened cruising to manning a grill: You need some exposure to act as oxygen to get the fire going, but you want to be able to control it. In the past, cruising might have been fueled by scribbles on bathroom doors or gay hotlines or newspapers, but now it’s an algorithm. “It supercharges it to a level where it just kind of blows up in our face,” Herrera said. “How do we celebrate our sexuality while protecting it?”
That performance ended when Joseph, thinking he’d met a fellow traveler, flashed the guy his penis. “We got one,” the undercover Amtrak police officer immediately said into a radio microphone hidden in his collar. Stunned and embarrassed, Joseph barely had time to put his penis away before he was handcuffed and marched through the station—his fly still unbuttoned—to a holding room, where he spent the next few hours. One other man was already there, looking humiliated and sad. Two more were eventually brought in as part of the same sting operation: one who was adamant he’d just been in the bathroom to pee and another man in his 20s who spoke only Spanish. Joseph then watched as this man, freaking out, was eventually handed over to immigration agents.
Joseph is among almost 200 people who have been arrested since June 1 as part of a crackdown on cruising in the Penn Station restroom, an Amtrak spokesperson told me. At least 20 of these men were immigrants transferred to ICE custody. While other mass public indecency arrests were made in Indiana, Arizona, and Illinois during the same period, the Penn Station operation was unique in its scale and length. Rep. Jerry Nadler and other outraged lawmakers dubbed it a “hostile arrest campaign reminiscent of anti-LGBTQ policing from the Stonewall era.”
There is a major difference, though, between that era and now: the once-secret world of cruising has never been more out in the open. As Amtrak police were arresting men, nearby cinemas were screening Plainclothes, a movie in which Tom Blyth portrays an undercover New York cop who patrols bathrooms and falls for one of his targets, played by Russell Tovey. When thousands gathered in a Clinton Hill warehouse during Pride Month for the “Twinks vs. Dolls” event, they did so amid ample signage and merchandise from co-sponsor, Sniffies, the map-based cruising app. Mainstream media stories about cruising and orgies have outraged some gay men who say that their safe spaces have been exposed.
But cruising’s real “outing” has occurred on social media, where a growing cottage industry of men are vying to become the Rick Steves of cruising. Guys on TikTok or Instagram will now teach you how to cruise at your gym or how to avoid getting caught in the steamroom. You can learn the best ways to pick up guys in a Barnes & Noble (Step One: “Pick a book you’re not actually reading”) or at your Lowes hardware store. (Step One: “Dress like you know your way around wood.”) You can see videos of men following each other among trees in public parks or tapping their feet in bathroom stalls in the manner of Larry Craig. One creator named Connor (who did not respond to requests for comment) has amassed over 375,000 followers over various accounts with a seemingly endless stream of videos in which he boasts graphically about cruising in airport bathrooms, waterparks, or at his local Macy’s. On X, where content guidelines are much freer, adult performers with hundreds of thousands of followers share explicit videos of themselves having sex with blurry-faced strangers in what appear to be department store changing rooms.
“I’m a teacher by nature and so I thought, Hey, cruising has been around forever. It’s part of our history. Why not teach on it?” said Chandler (his last name), a 34-year-old adult creator who posts instructional guides or suggestive stories themed to what he calls “CruiseTok.” He puts his openness on social media down to a desire for authenticity. “I think in today’s world, it’s more acceptable to be who you are. If that means showing your expression or passion, then yeah!”
But amid a resurgent right-wing that has sought to wind back LGBTQ rights, all this openness has left some, including Joseph, uncomfortable or even worried about what they see as unwanted attention. “I think calling attention to it and trying to get your social media clout from it is annoying,” he said. “The whole point—the whole, historical purpose of cruising was to be super low-key and discreet.” While information about cruising has always been available for people who wanted to seek it out, it’s now being entrusted to algorithms that can push it on people who aren’t, including, potentially, the authorities. All this has left some men wondering whether certain things should still be gate-kept.
“A lot of these much younger people that are 22 and excited about this activity, their natural inclination is just supposed to post it online. There’s no way to control that fire,” said Leo Herrera, an artist and author who self-published a guide to cruising last year. He likened cruising to manning a grill: You need some exposure to act as oxygen to get the fire going, but you want to be able to control it. In the past, cruising might have been fueled by scribbles on bathroom doors or gay hotlines or newspapers, but now it’s an algorithm. “It supercharges it to a level where it just kind of blows up in our face,” Herrera said. “How do we celebrate our sexuality while protecting it?”
by David Mack, The Cut | Read more:
Image: blissbodywork_, dbchandler_, showoffjonah
The Precipice
May 1991. Mumbai. Night.
While politicians slept, trucks were loading gold—67 tonnes of it—at the Reserve Bank of India’s vaults in South Bombay. Essentially all of India’s gold reserves. The trucks drove 35 kilometers to the airport under armed guard. There, the gold was loaded onto chartered cargo planes.
Commercial airlines had refused the job. Too risky. Too desperate.
Between May 21 and 31, four flights carried India’s treasure out of the country: 20 tonnes to UBS in Switzerland, 47 tonnes to the Bank of England in London. The RBI had to charter something called “Heavy Lift Cargo Airlines” because nobody else would touch this operation.
The gold was collateral. India was pawning its jewelry.
If you want to understand what this meant culturally, consider: In India, gold isn’t just an asset. It’s sacred. The goddess Lakshmi is depicted sitting on gold coins. Indian weddings feature kilograms of gold because “Does she have gold?” is the first question asked about brides. Women remove their gold only at death or divorce.
And here was the nation shipping its treasure to its former colonizer. At night. In secret. Like a family selling heirlooms to pay the landlord.
When the news leaked, there was public outrage: “We have pawned our mother’s jewelry!”
The operation raised $600 million.
It bought India about three weeks.
Foreign exchange reserves had fallen to $1.2 billion—enough for roughly fifteen days of imports. Fifteen days until the food shipments stopped. Fifteen days until the oil stopped. Fifteen days until a nuclear-armed nation of 900 million people defaulted on its debts.
What happens when a country that size defaults? What happens when the imports stop?
We know what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed. India was heading there—fast.
The Most Important People You’ve Never Heard Of
Three men you’ve probably never heard of—P.V. Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia—may be the three most important people of the late 20th century.
Bold claim. Audacious, even. Let me defend it.
Here are the numbers. In 1991, over 45% of Indians lived below the poverty line—roughly 400 million people. By 2024, extreme poverty in India had fallen to under 3%.
That’s 400 to 500 million people lifted out of poverty.
The largest democratic poverty alleviation in human history. (...)
Nothing else comes close to democratic poverty alleviation at this scale.
And here’s the thing about crises: they don’t automatically produce reform. Crisis alone doesn’t fix anything.
Argentina has had crisis after crisis—and keeps defaulting, keeps returning to the same failed policies. Greece in 2010 accepted bailouts, changed almost nothing structural, and remains economically fragile. Venezuela’s oil crises led not to reform but to doubling down on socialism, and now people eat from garbage trucks.
The Soviet Union faced a crisis and collapsed. It didn’t reform. It disintegrated.
India could have gone any of those directions. What makes these three men remarkable isn’t that they faced a crisis—it’s that they converted crisis into transformation. That almost never happens.
And because it worked—because the catastrophe was prevented—nobody remembers.
You can’t feel gratitude for the plane that didn’t crash. You can’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster you never experienced. The counterfactual isn’t real to anyone.
This is why India forgot them. But that’s for Part 3. First, let’s understand what they were saving us from.
While politicians slept, trucks were loading gold—67 tonnes of it—at the Reserve Bank of India’s vaults in South Bombay. Essentially all of India’s gold reserves. The trucks drove 35 kilometers to the airport under armed guard. There, the gold was loaded onto chartered cargo planes.
Commercial airlines had refused the job. Too risky. Too desperate.
The gold was collateral. India was pawning its jewelry.
If you want to understand what this meant culturally, consider: In India, gold isn’t just an asset. It’s sacred. The goddess Lakshmi is depicted sitting on gold coins. Indian weddings feature kilograms of gold because “Does she have gold?” is the first question asked about brides. Women remove their gold only at death or divorce.
And here was the nation shipping its treasure to its former colonizer. At night. In secret. Like a family selling heirlooms to pay the landlord.
When the news leaked, there was public outrage: “We have pawned our mother’s jewelry!”
The operation raised $600 million.
It bought India about three weeks.
Foreign exchange reserves had fallen to $1.2 billion—enough for roughly fifteen days of imports. Fifteen days until the food shipments stopped. Fifteen days until the oil stopped. Fifteen days until a nuclear-armed nation of 900 million people defaulted on its debts.
What happens when a country that size defaults? What happens when the imports stop?
We know what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed. India was heading there—fast.
The Most Important People You’ve Never Heard Of
Three men you’ve probably never heard of—P.V. Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia—may be the three most important people of the late 20th century.
Bold claim. Audacious, even. Let me defend it.
Here are the numbers. In 1991, over 45% of Indians lived below the poverty line—roughly 400 million people. By 2024, extreme poverty in India had fallen to under 3%.
That’s 400 to 500 million people lifted out of poverty.
The largest democratic poverty alleviation in human history. (...)
Nothing else comes close to democratic poverty alleviation at this scale.
And here’s the thing about crises: they don’t automatically produce reform. Crisis alone doesn’t fix anything.
Argentina has had crisis after crisis—and keeps defaulting, keeps returning to the same failed policies. Greece in 2010 accepted bailouts, changed almost nothing structural, and remains economically fragile. Venezuela’s oil crises led not to reform but to doubling down on socialism, and now people eat from garbage trucks.
The Soviet Union faced a crisis and collapsed. It didn’t reform. It disintegrated.
India could have gone any of those directions. What makes these three men remarkable isn’t that they faced a crisis—it’s that they converted crisis into transformation. That almost never happens.
And because it worked—because the catastrophe was prevented—nobody remembers.
You can’t feel gratitude for the plane that didn’t crash. You can’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster you never experienced. The counterfactual isn’t real to anyone.
This is why India forgot them. But that’s for Part 3. First, let’s understand what they were saving us from.
by Samir Varna | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Playing With Fire At Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce's Steakhouse
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As celebrity restaurant mascots, athletes offer a tidy sense of vertical integration: Why not supply the very calories they need to expend on the field? I’m surprised there are so few successful models. We have all mostly forgotten (or agreed not to talk about) George Brett’s restaurant in Kansas City, Brett Favre’s Wisconsin steakhouse, or those 31 Papa John’s franchises Peyton Manning coincidentally shed two days before the NFL dropped the pizza chain as a sponsor.
Still, tables have been reliably booked at 1587 Prime—a mashup of Patrick Mahomes’s and Travis Kelce’s jersey numbers, along with a word that vaguely connotes “beef”—since it opened in Kansas City in August. I left an eight-year gig as a KC restaurant critic in 2023, but the mania surrounding the opening was enough to summon me out of retirement. Like a washed-up former detective, I couldn’t resist stumbling half-drunk into my old precinct for one last job.
In some respects, a flashy celebrity steakhouse means the same thing everywhere. But it means something else in Kansas City, a cowtown whose economic engine was its stockyards, once the second-largest in the country, and which has struggled for years to cultivate a high-end dining scene. We have some great restaurants, but fundamentally, we’re a city that loathes to dress for dinner. (I felt a swell of civic pride when I learned Travis proposed to Taylor Swift in shorts.) I wondered how Noble 33—the Miami-based fine-dining restaurant group tasked with executing 15 and 87’s vision—would fare here.
In a pure business sense, they seem to be faring just fine. On a recent visit, a server told me that a group of Taylor Swift fans had waited six hours for bar seats, hoping they might catch a glimpse of the singer housing a truffle grilled cheese. Taylor didn’t show. I wish the restaurant had something else to offer them.
If nothing else, 1587 Prime looks nice. The 238-seat, two-story restaurant inside the Loews Kansas City Hotel is riddled with luxury tropes. Everything is bathed in a charmed, golden light. The stairs are marble, the tables are marble, and the servers all wear smart white coats and black ties. The leather-backed menus are enormous—perilous. Manipulating them at a small table covered with expensive glassware made me feel like a horse on roller skates.
Music is ostensibly a theme. Every night, local musicians perform short sets of Motown, jazz, and soul hits, and the performers are universally talented. They’re also chastely miked. The live backing band is never loud enough to compete with diners’ conversation, and while the singers roam around the dining room, they seem trained in the art of extremely brief eye contact that asks nothing of you in return.
The same can’t be said of the patrons. Every time I looked around the room, diners looked back with the defiant stares of people who are used to being watched. The restaurant seems to be drawing in its target clients: people who fly private. On my first visit, our server—a very friendly woman named Debbie—told us she had two tables that had flown in just for dinner.
“There’s this thing I learned about,” she said. “Did you know they have an Uber Jet?”
I did not. I sensed that Debbie and I had both learned this against our will.
To be fair, one of the reasons I kept looking around the room was that everyone’s drinks were on fire. This was, I learned, The Alchemy ($22), a cocktail the restaurant created for Taylor Swift, a woman who has never had to use Uber Jet.
I ordered one, too, and a dedicated server brought out a martini glass with some steel wool tangled around the stem. (Something else to know about 1587 Prime: there are at least two employees whose main job appears to be setting things on fire.)
“How many tables order this every night?” I asked.
“Almost all of them,” she said, with just a hint of resignation.
She lit the drink. The steel wool pulsed with a warm, luxurious shimmer before almost immediately fizzling into a cold pile (yes, this is a metaphor). “The stem might be a little hot,” she warned, pawing the nest away from the glass. The drink tasted like a Cosmo someone had strained through a French Vanilla Yankee Candle.
The Alchemy is in a section of cocktails titled “The Players,” named for the steakhouse’s famous guests. For Mahomes fans, there’s the “Showtime” ($19), a rum and coconut cocktail made with a “Coors Light syrup” that I tragically could not taste. I preferred Kelce’s “Big Yeti” ($24), a nocino-enhanced old fashioned with bitter chocolate notes.
There is a fourth cocktail in the section, named after Brittany Mahomes. I will not be tricked into commenting on it.
The drinks were designed by beverage director Juan Carlos Santana, who’s led menu design at other Noble 33 haunts. This is the only way I can explain why a steakhouse cocktail menu features a “Noble Margarita” ($18), or why the house martini ($23) is laced with fino sherry and fennel-infused Italicus (a sweet, sunny bergamot liqueur). It’s a lovely, nuanced cocktail, and it seems to have been designed in a lab to piss off martini drinkers.
If you’re after a more traditional martini—say, gin and vermouth—you can order the martini “your way” for an extra $10.
“Isn’t this a service most bars offer for free?” my husband asked.
Sure. But most bars don’t come with a “Martini Cart Experience.” The first part of the Experience is using a checklist and a golf pencil to select your ideal spirits, vermouths, and enhancements, whether that’s truffle brine (an additional $5), caviar-stuffed olives (an extra $12) or an accompanying “caviar bump” ($21).
The second part of the Experience is waiting for the cart. The restaurant only has space for one cart per floor, which can create backlogs when multiple tables order martinis. On my first visit, my table waited a modest 12 minutes before the cart became available.
The Experience concluded with a bartender scanning my checklist, building the martini, shaking it (you read that correctly), and straining it into a glass that had been chilled by a light-up contraption resembling a Simon. With the upcharge for the truffle brine, the martini was $38. (...)
Perhaps my mistake was ordering it with a “tableside flambé,” which you can add to any steak here for an extra $27. After conferring with Debbie about whether this was a good idea, she dispatched a second cart with a second fire-oriented employee.
While he worked, I peppered him with questions. Did he man the flambé cart every night? Yes, by choice. “I’ve never worked in a kitchen,” he said. “I just really like fire.” Had he ever singed his shirtsleeves on the cart? “I’m going to tell you guys a little secret,” he replied. He leaned over the table and brushed some hair away from his forehead. Most of his eyebrows were missing.
In some respects, a flashy celebrity steakhouse means the same thing everywhere. But it means something else in Kansas City, a cowtown whose economic engine was its stockyards, once the second-largest in the country, and which has struggled for years to cultivate a high-end dining scene. We have some great restaurants, but fundamentally, we’re a city that loathes to dress for dinner. (I felt a swell of civic pride when I learned Travis proposed to Taylor Swift in shorts.) I wondered how Noble 33—the Miami-based fine-dining restaurant group tasked with executing 15 and 87’s vision—would fare here.
In a pure business sense, they seem to be faring just fine. On a recent visit, a server told me that a group of Taylor Swift fans had waited six hours for bar seats, hoping they might catch a glimpse of the singer housing a truffle grilled cheese. Taylor didn’t show. I wish the restaurant had something else to offer them.
If nothing else, 1587 Prime looks nice. The 238-seat, two-story restaurant inside the Loews Kansas City Hotel is riddled with luxury tropes. Everything is bathed in a charmed, golden light. The stairs are marble, the tables are marble, and the servers all wear smart white coats and black ties. The leather-backed menus are enormous—perilous. Manipulating them at a small table covered with expensive glassware made me feel like a horse on roller skates.
Music is ostensibly a theme. Every night, local musicians perform short sets of Motown, jazz, and soul hits, and the performers are universally talented. They’re also chastely miked. The live backing band is never loud enough to compete with diners’ conversation, and while the singers roam around the dining room, they seem trained in the art of extremely brief eye contact that asks nothing of you in return.
The same can’t be said of the patrons. Every time I looked around the room, diners looked back with the defiant stares of people who are used to being watched. The restaurant seems to be drawing in its target clients: people who fly private. On my first visit, our server—a very friendly woman named Debbie—told us she had two tables that had flown in just for dinner.
“There’s this thing I learned about,” she said. “Did you know they have an Uber Jet?”
I did not. I sensed that Debbie and I had both learned this against our will.
To be fair, one of the reasons I kept looking around the room was that everyone’s drinks were on fire. This was, I learned, The Alchemy ($22), a cocktail the restaurant created for Taylor Swift, a woman who has never had to use Uber Jet.
I ordered one, too, and a dedicated server brought out a martini glass with some steel wool tangled around the stem. (Something else to know about 1587 Prime: there are at least two employees whose main job appears to be setting things on fire.)
“How many tables order this every night?” I asked.
“Almost all of them,” she said, with just a hint of resignation.
The Alchemy is in a section of cocktails titled “The Players,” named for the steakhouse’s famous guests. For Mahomes fans, there’s the “Showtime” ($19), a rum and coconut cocktail made with a “Coors Light syrup” that I tragically could not taste. I preferred Kelce’s “Big Yeti” ($24), a nocino-enhanced old fashioned with bitter chocolate notes.
There is a fourth cocktail in the section, named after Brittany Mahomes. I will not be tricked into commenting on it.
The drinks were designed by beverage director Juan Carlos Santana, who’s led menu design at other Noble 33 haunts. This is the only way I can explain why a steakhouse cocktail menu features a “Noble Margarita” ($18), or why the house martini ($23) is laced with fino sherry and fennel-infused Italicus (a sweet, sunny bergamot liqueur). It’s a lovely, nuanced cocktail, and it seems to have been designed in a lab to piss off martini drinkers.
If you’re after a more traditional martini—say, gin and vermouth—you can order the martini “your way” for an extra $10.
“Isn’t this a service most bars offer for free?” my husband asked.
Sure. But most bars don’t come with a “Martini Cart Experience.” The first part of the Experience is using a checklist and a golf pencil to select your ideal spirits, vermouths, and enhancements, whether that’s truffle brine (an additional $5), caviar-stuffed olives (an extra $12) or an accompanying “caviar bump” ($21).
The second part of the Experience is waiting for the cart. The restaurant only has space for one cart per floor, which can create backlogs when multiple tables order martinis. On my first visit, my table waited a modest 12 minutes before the cart became available.
The Experience concluded with a bartender scanning my checklist, building the martini, shaking it (you read that correctly), and straining it into a glass that had been chilled by a light-up contraption resembling a Simon. With the upcharge for the truffle brine, the martini was $38. (...)
Perhaps my mistake was ordering it with a “tableside flambé,” which you can add to any steak here for an extra $27. After conferring with Debbie about whether this was a good idea, she dispatched a second cart with a second fire-oriented employee.
While he worked, I peppered him with questions. Did he man the flambé cart every night? Yes, by choice. “I’ve never worked in a kitchen,” he said. “I just really like fire.” Had he ever singed his shirtsleeves on the cart? “I’m going to tell you guys a little secret,” he replied. He leaned over the table and brushed some hair away from his forehead. Most of his eyebrows were missing.
by Liz Cook, Defector | Read more:
Images: uncredited
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Jackson Browne
[ed. Also, These Days (feat. Luz Casal). Don't confront me with my failures. I had not forgotten them (written at 16). Excellent album. More (here).]
"Late For The Sky"
The words had all been spoken
And somehow the feeling still wasn't right
And still we continued on through the night
Tracing our steps from the beginning
Until they vanished into the air
Trying to understand how our lives has led us there
Looking hard into your eyes
There was nobody I'd ever known
Such an empty surprise to feel so alone
Now for me some words come easy
But I know that they don't mean that much
Compared with the things that are said when lovers touch
You never knew what I loved in you
I don't know what you loved in me
Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be
Awake again I can't pretend and I know I'm alone
And close to the end of the feeling we've known
How long have I been sleeping
How long have I been drifting alone through the night
How long have I been dreaming I could make it right
If I closed my eyes and tried with all my might
To be the one you need
Awake again I can't pretend and I know I'm alone
And close to the end of the feeling we've known
How long have I been sleeping
How long have I been drifting alone through the night
How long have I been running for that morning flight
Through the whispered promises and the changing light
Of the bed where we both lie
Late for the sky
...of the bed where we both lie
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI Slop
Lately, everywhere I scroll, I keep seeing the same fish-eyed CCTV view: a grainy wide shot from the corner of a living room, a driveway at night, an empty grocery store. Then something impossible happens. JD Vance shows up at the doorstep in a crazy outfit. A car folds into itself like paper and drives away. A cat comes in and starts hanging out with capybaras and bears, as if in some weird modern fairy tale.
This fake-surveillance look has become one of the signature flavors of what people now call AI slop. For those of us who spend time online watching short videos, slop feels inescapable: a flood of repetitive, often nonsensical AI-generated clips that washes across TikTok, Instagram, and beyond. For that, you can thank new tools like OpenAI’s Sora (which exploded in popularity after launching in app form in September), Google’s Veo series, and AI models built by Runway. Now anyone can make videos, with just a few taps on a screen.
If I were to locate the moment slop broke through into popular consciousness, I’d pick the video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline that went viral this summer. For many savvy internet users, myself included, it was the first time we were fooled by an AI video, and it ended up spawning a wave of almost identical riffs, with people making videos of all kinds of animals and objects bouncing on the same trampoline.
My first reaction was that, broadly speaking, all of this sucked. That’s become a familiar refrain, in think pieces and at dinner parties. Everything online is slop now—the internet “enshittified,” with AI taking much of the blame. Initially, I largely agreed, quickly scrolling past every AI video in a futile attempt to send a message to my algorithm. But then friends started sharing AI clips in group chats that were compellingly weird, or funny. Some even had a grain of brilliance buried in the nonsense. I had to admit I didn’t fully understand what I was rejecting—what I found so objectionable.
To try to get to the bottom of how I felt (and why), I recently spoke to the people making the videos, a company creating bespoke tools for creators, and experts who study how new media becomes culture. What I found convinced me that maybe generative AI will not end up ruining everything. Maybe we have been too quick to dismiss AI slop. Maybe there’s a case for looking beyond the surface and seeing a new kind of creativity—one we’re watching take shape in real time, with many of us actually playing a part.
by Caiwei Chen, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image:@niceaunties (Wenhui lim)
[ed. See also: Let's Hear It for Slop (word of the year) - with bouncing bunnies included; or here.]
North Pole Economics
Or, how the Grinch stole Christmas. Again.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
We have a follow-up conversation about the price of toys. During the summer, a toy industry group warned that the president's Liberation Day tariffs would put Christmas at risk. Well, the holidays are now upon us, so we've called back Jay Foreman, the CEO of Basic Fun! That's the home of Care Bears, Tonka trucks, Lincoln Logs and Lite-Brite. Jay, so it might sound like we are completely obsessed with the price of a classic steel Tonka truck, but I got to ask again - what is it going to cost this year?
MARTÍNEZ: And these price hikes - what does that do to your sales? Are Tonka trucks so classic that people are just going to buy them anyway, or are you seeing a slowdown?
FOREMAN: Well, we're seeing sort of two different effects. The first effect was that we lost about eight weeks of shipping in the middle of the season, as well as this sort of uncertainty about what the tariff level would be sort of stunted the traditional pattern of buying from the retailers. So we got a lot less orders this year than last year. So whether the consumer shows up or not, there are going to be less Tonka trucks in the market. The other aspect, of course, is the consumer sentiment. We are really now starting to feel the consumer is noticing that prices are up and affordability is becoming an issue.
MARTÍNEZ: So I was looking at a report from the market research group Circana, and they say U.S. toy sales have been up by 7% this year. How do we square what they say and what you're reporting?
FOREMAN: So there's really two factors there. One is if you increase the price of toys anywhere from 10% to 30% because you've got a 30% tariff, then your gross sales are going to go up regardless. But the other thing that's skewing the sales data is there's a huge trend right now in the toy business, which is collectible trading cards, which aren't really toys. They're as much as a publishing item as they are toys, but they're sort of tracked by Circana in toys. And things like Pokemon cards, NBA cards, Major League Baseball cards, Magic: The Gathering trading cards - they're on fire right now. And the toy industry might be seeing some increase in sales, but it's in a very narrow band of categories and with a small group of companies. The smaller or medium-sized companies are really hurting pretty bad this year over the tariffs.
MARTÍNEZ: The last time we spoke, too, we talked about maybe considering where you manufacture things. Has enough time passed for you to make some kind of call, or maybe at least be leaning in a certain direction when it comes to where you manufacture your toys?
FOREMAN: Yeah. I mean, we held fast here at Basic Fun! and we kept our production primarily in China. It's just the most reliable supply chain. When you start to move the supply chain and set up new manufacturing, there's a big learning curve, not to mention a huge cost. We also kind of bet on the fact that there will be a recognition by the administration at some point that China is a very important trading partner. Almost, we have a symbiotic relationship with them, and while they can joust with each other, at the end of the day, they've got to play ball. And while we'd love to bring toy manufacturing back to the U.S., it's not really practical. We don't have the type of labor here. We don't have factories set up. We don't have the ability to finance the development of factories. So we're an industry that's generally not really going to be coming back to the United States, like some other industries might have a better opportunity to. So we've stuck it out in China, and so far it's paid off for us.
MARTÍNEZ: We mentioned back in the summer, too, that toymakers were saying that Christmas was at risk. Was that hyperbole, or is that maybe more of a reality now than ever before?
FOREMAN: Well, I mean, it was not hyperbole when, you know, tariffs were 145% and it was a de facto embargo on importations, not just from China but from other markets. You know, remember, India's tariffs are 50% right now. You know, I always say that consumers can always find products to buy. Stores will never be empty. It's all about the stuff you really want, and is that available when you want it, or are you going to get the next best item? So Christmas will come. It always comes. It will be full of a few less of the more desirable types of products, and consumers will have to, you know, be satisfied with sometimes the next or the third best thing on their list.
by A Martínez, NPR | Read more:
Image: Tonka truck/Walmart
[ed. See also: Mark Zandi, Chief Economist/Moody's Analytical (X):]
***
We’ve just updated our spending by income group data for the second quarter of 2025, based on the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts and Survey of Consumer Finance. Looking at the data, it’s not a mystery why most Americans feel like the economy isn’t working for them. For those in the bottom 80% of the income distribution, those making less than approximately $175,000 a year – their spending has simply kept pace with inflation since the pandemic. The 20% of households that make more have done much better, and those in the top 3.3% of the distribution have done much, much, much better. The data also show that the U.S. economy is being largely powered by the well-to-do. As long as they keep spending, the economy should avoid recession, but if they turn more cautious, for whatever reason, the economy has a big problem.
[ed. Solution - just lower your expectations.]
“You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils...Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many, but you always need you always need steel,” Trump said.
“You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls,” he added.
“You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils...Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many, but you always need you always need steel,” Trump said.
“You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls,” he added.
Stop, Shop, and Scroll
Commerce has long been central to social media; as long as ads keep the lights on at Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, we will all be pressured to buy, buy, buy. Instagram was a mall even before #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and Pinterest became an “AI-enabled shopping assistant.” The influencer industry — which Goldman Sachs has predicted will grow to nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027 — has snowballed into a possible side hustle for anyone with access to a phone. There’s a handful of MrBeasts and Alix Earles at the top and an untold number of micro-influencers hawking goods and services at the bottom. For audiences, it means we have spent the better part of a decade living within a 24/7 digital infomercial, with social media — sponsored content and organic posts alike — resembling not much more than a buying guide, a catalog of unabashed and conspicuous consumption. Some audience members find themselves in deep debt or describe their behavior as a full-blown shopping addiction; others have developed careful strategies in an effort to limit their consumption. We have never been so aware of all the things there are to purchase, and the frictionlessness of shopping apps disguised as social media has created an army of voracious buyers. What has this abundance done to us? (...)
The impulse to shop is not exactly a secret — there’s often a resigned self-awareness to it. In a video viewed 1.5 million times, a woman stitches together clips of herself from random moments in her daily life. With a deadpan voice, and Radiohead’s “No Surprises” twinkling in the background, she recites highly specific products like she’s filling out a Mad Libs page: Chan Luu crystal toe ring. Arc’teryx hiking shoes. Vintage hoodie. “This is just the last 48 hours, mind you,” the caption reads.
This kind of video has become a mini-trend, with the idea being that the mere utterance of a temptation might soothe the part of your brain that wants to buy the item. (...)
We see so much marketing material that in certain subcultures online it is not just common but the expectation. In traditional marketing, it was understood that brands had to expose consumers to their message three times before they actually engaged with it, like going physically to a store to buy a product. In the age of social media and algorithmic overload, that number is now seven, says Mara Einstein, a marketing-professional-turned-critic and author of the book Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. For one, the vastness of the internet has allowed for the number of available products to bloat beyond imagination — there are simply too many things. But how we learn about products has changed drastically as well; as media has fragmented to a million sites, feeds, screens, and algorithms, so too has the advertising we see. There is no one TV commercial a quarter of households are seeing, then telling their friends about. Instead we see a digital display ad here, an influencer’s video there.
“You may be finding out information from people and so on, but you’re increasingly spending time in a space where you’re constantly being bombarded by sales messages,” Einstein says. Influencers know how to stay on message, constantly priming viewers to give in and buy something.
Being influenced is nothing new, of course. But the short- and mid-form video format creates a new type of intimacy and allure, especially if you are already looking for something to buy. It’s hard to argue with a sales pitch when you are watching someone in their home actually using the product they are trying to sell you.
The content doesn’t even have to be explicitly promotional: I recall a video I made last year about my reporting being used without credit by content creators. My frustration had hit a breaking point, so I recorded a selfie-style TikTok complaining about the contemporary media ecosystem. Only my head and a portion of my shoulders were in the video, but someone wanted to know where my blouse was from.
TikTok itself has only bolstered the idea that every piece of content is an opportunity to consume. Through TikTok Shop, anyone can become a digital salesperson. In much crueler, more tasteless examples, TikTok has added shopping prompts to videos coming out of Gaza: A woman in a head covering becomes a promotion for similar-looking garments with headscarves. A bespectacled Israeli activist protesting their government’s besiegement is a billboard for a pair of glasses. (...)
It’s easy to blame the influencers for all of this — and many do, regularly, like clockwork. The most recent discourse cycle, in late September, was kicked off by a TikTok video with 390,000 views and arguments that stretched on for weeks.
“These influencers make way too much fucking money,” the video begins. “You’re just getting paid to sell people shit they don’t fucking need. It’s literally just overconsumption … You’re perpetuating this cycle that’s really keeping us trapped.”
Content creators are admittedly a perfect target for the general rage many of us carry around. Many of them seem unencumbered by the endless horrors of the world, with daily routines that include blocks of time for “warm water” and to-do lists with “plan out mocktails for the new year.” Their digital presence exists suspended in time, where there is always something new to recommend, packages of shiny new things waiting for them, and a willing audience that completes the positive feedback loop. Wouldn’t it be nice — as people are in line at food banks, fighting for a precious few job listings, and snatched off streets by masked agents — to sit in your home and talk to yourself for a living?
But the draw of the influencer is powerful; even if you cannot become her, you can own the same things she does. For Antoinette Hocbo, who picked up hobbies via TikTok, the characters she encounters on her For You page seem effortlessly cool. They have an eye for design, they’re interested in the arts, they drink wine. You buy into the person first, and eventually — hopefully — you buy the stuff, too.
“[There’s] the whole idea of parasocial relationships,” Einstein, the marketing expert, says. “If somebody has gotten to the point where they’re spending that much time online with someone, they’re vested in what that person has to say.” The feeling of intimacy is physical: When followers watch their favorite TikToker, they are literally holding them in the palm of their hand. (...)
TikTok made going viral a possibility for a whole new slate of people. Now the hard part is how to keep things rolling when it happens to you. Most of the platforms themselves do not pay much for views, but brands eager to partner with buzzy people do. Creators often talk about their work in terms of self-discovery or self-actualization: This is who I want to be online, and these are the products and tips I truly, honestly want to share.
The tension comes then with the “very real commercial realities of playing to an audience, bowing to commercial sponsorships if you were lucky enough to have them,” Duffy says. “And then the new dimension, which doesn’t have the same precursors in legacy media, which is playing to the algorithm.” A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of adults on TikTok are there to find product reviews and recommendations — especially young women. (...)
Project Pan, as a concept, is both clever and strange. For years, a community of people organized largely on the internet have committed themselves to finishing their beauty and personal care products — the name coming from your promise to hit the bottom of the pan that holds your blush, for example. It’s smart for the way it gamifies something people struggle with. (Who among us doesn’t have half-used bottles of soap or barely touched tubes of lipstick?) It’s also deeply revealing: These products are meant to be used, and we collectively are so bad at finishing them off that we need a little game to make it happen. Off the top of my head I can confidently say that I’ve never once “panned” a compact of blush; I have expensive tubes of red lipstick that didn’t end up being my color, but that I can’t bear to throw out; and I have four bottles of sunscreen that crowd my cabinet, waiting for the summer they’re finally used up. There are many more products that I could — should — Project Pan that I’ve forgotten I even own.
Cassandra Silva, on the other hand, knows exactly what she has. She knows, for example, that she spent $2,857.98 AUD on makeup in 2024 and panned products totaling $1,654.13. She owns eight eyeliners, but her ideal number would be four. In 2023 she panned seven mascaras, 11 colored lip products, and one blush, among many others, all lined up in a photo of the totally empty containers that show her progress. She keeps all this data in a giant spreadsheet that she shares with me after we talk, and as I scroll through it, I realize I have never seen an eyeshadow palette where every color is completely empty.
“Compared to beauty YouTube, it’s not insane insane, but it’s still more than any one human could ever reasonably use,” Silva says of her inventory.
She watches beauty YouTube channels, but needs to be careful about what she consumes: She tries to stay away from content showing off hauls, new releases, or the ever-tempting limited-edition holiday releases.
“I am as conscious as I can be for a makeup addict,” Silva says. “I try, and I am freaking susceptible. It’s so bad.” Recently, a palette of neutral eyeshadows hounded her Instagram feed — she caved and bought it, only to be thoroughly disappointed when it arrived. As a panner, Silva will be stuck with it for years until it’s finished.
Chessie Domrongchai used to make the kind of content that Silva perhaps would steer clear of — she was the one tempting makeup lovers with all of these products. As a beauty YouTuber, Domrongchai shared in-depth product review videos for brands like the once-buzzy direct-to-consumer brand Glossier and tested fistfuls of lip glosses in subtly different shades for her 40,000 subscribers. She shared new releases, compared similar products from different brands, and recommended items for upcoming sales. In a 2019 video, she walks viewers through her pinky-brown nude lipstick collection — 15 shades, not including lip glosses and liquid lipsticks. She followed makeup brands and watched other YouTubers, accumulating more and more products to explore ($10,000, she says, feels like a conservative estimate of the value of her collection at its peak). In makeup, Domrongchai found self-expression, creativity, and community.
Until one day in 2022, when a switch went off in her head.
“I started to view a lot of the overconsumption that I was seeing online as kind of disgusting and wrong, and I recognized a lot of the way that I showed up on the internet was to overconsume,” Domrongchai says. Not only that, but she felt her online presence also influenced viewers to keep buying more and more.
“These are just regular people that are just now stuck with the burden of their overconsumption,” she says. But as a content creator, it was hard to be part of the beauty space without having a constant parade of new products.
In recent months, Domrongchai has developed a new routine for the many products littering her home. One by one, she meticulously peels off stickers and labels: from shampoo and olive oil bottles, from dish soap dispensers and face wash. Using a mix of baking soda, mineral oil, and rubbing alcohol, she goes to town on brand names printed on the packaging of eyeshadow palettes and lipsticks, scrubbing away their origins and the millions of dollars of marketing that went into them — arguably why they are in Domrongchai’s house to begin with. The result is shelves and countertops full of bare bottles and tubes and pumps filled with product but stripped of just about everything else. Watching her videos, I’m slightly horrified at my own ability to recognize the specific products even without all the labeling, the colors and shapes of bottles acting like an afterimage of a CeraVe cleanser.
“Of course I’m going to buy the face cleanser that keeps my skin clear, but I don’t need it to continue to market to me in my own home,” Domrongchai says. “In the past I had three different [lotions] and all of their labels and their marketing on these products … They’re all kind of yelling at you trying to convince you to use it. They’re kind of [in] competition with each other.” In other words, it felt like a social media feed.
For some panners, finishing a product can elicit the same rush that buying something new does — that same dopamine rush of hitting “place order” creeps in when you hit that pan. Then you post it online for other panners to see, adding to the thrill. Finishing products becomes a task to complete, just like shopping is.
“What it can do — which I don’t love to admit to — is you’ll put more blush on than you would,” Silva says. “You just slather it on.” Silva shows me her spreadsheet page from 2024 showing colored lip products she used up: 23. Silva estimates that the average person finishes maybe one lipstick a year. In order to pan that many products, she was reapplying them 15 to 20 times a day, she says. Sometimes Silva wonders if she should ditch panning, too, like she did consumption-focused beauty spaces.
“When you first get into it, it’s so helpful, and you really get that community and you can turn some products over. Then the longer that you’re in the panning community, it’s like, all right, now panning is a problem,” she laughs. “Now I’ve taken all the problems I had with makeup consumption and translated them into late-stage panning. It’s like late-stage capitalism.”
This kind of video has become a mini-trend, with the idea being that the mere utterance of a temptation might soothe the part of your brain that wants to buy the item. (...)
We see so much marketing material that in certain subcultures online it is not just common but the expectation. In traditional marketing, it was understood that brands had to expose consumers to their message three times before they actually engaged with it, like going physically to a store to buy a product. In the age of social media and algorithmic overload, that number is now seven, says Mara Einstein, a marketing-professional-turned-critic and author of the book Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. For one, the vastness of the internet has allowed for the number of available products to bloat beyond imagination — there are simply too many things. But how we learn about products has changed drastically as well; as media has fragmented to a million sites, feeds, screens, and algorithms, so too has the advertising we see. There is no one TV commercial a quarter of households are seeing, then telling their friends about. Instead we see a digital display ad here, an influencer’s video there.
“You may be finding out information from people and so on, but you’re increasingly spending time in a space where you’re constantly being bombarded by sales messages,” Einstein says. Influencers know how to stay on message, constantly priming viewers to give in and buy something.
Being influenced is nothing new, of course. But the short- and mid-form video format creates a new type of intimacy and allure, especially if you are already looking for something to buy. It’s hard to argue with a sales pitch when you are watching someone in their home actually using the product they are trying to sell you.
The content doesn’t even have to be explicitly promotional: I recall a video I made last year about my reporting being used without credit by content creators. My frustration had hit a breaking point, so I recorded a selfie-style TikTok complaining about the contemporary media ecosystem. Only my head and a portion of my shoulders were in the video, but someone wanted to know where my blouse was from.
TikTok itself has only bolstered the idea that every piece of content is an opportunity to consume. Through TikTok Shop, anyone can become a digital salesperson. In much crueler, more tasteless examples, TikTok has added shopping prompts to videos coming out of Gaza: A woman in a head covering becomes a promotion for similar-looking garments with headscarves. A bespectacled Israeli activist protesting their government’s besiegement is a billboard for a pair of glasses. (...)
It’s easy to blame the influencers for all of this — and many do, regularly, like clockwork. The most recent discourse cycle, in late September, was kicked off by a TikTok video with 390,000 views and arguments that stretched on for weeks.
“These influencers make way too much fucking money,” the video begins. “You’re just getting paid to sell people shit they don’t fucking need. It’s literally just overconsumption … You’re perpetuating this cycle that’s really keeping us trapped.”
Content creators are admittedly a perfect target for the general rage many of us carry around. Many of them seem unencumbered by the endless horrors of the world, with daily routines that include blocks of time for “warm water” and to-do lists with “plan out mocktails for the new year.” Their digital presence exists suspended in time, where there is always something new to recommend, packages of shiny new things waiting for them, and a willing audience that completes the positive feedback loop. Wouldn’t it be nice — as people are in line at food banks, fighting for a precious few job listings, and snatched off streets by masked agents — to sit in your home and talk to yourself for a living?
But the draw of the influencer is powerful; even if you cannot become her, you can own the same things she does. For Antoinette Hocbo, who picked up hobbies via TikTok, the characters she encounters on her For You page seem effortlessly cool. They have an eye for design, they’re interested in the arts, they drink wine. You buy into the person first, and eventually — hopefully — you buy the stuff, too.
“[There’s] the whole idea of parasocial relationships,” Einstein, the marketing expert, says. “If somebody has gotten to the point where they’re spending that much time online with someone, they’re vested in what that person has to say.” The feeling of intimacy is physical: When followers watch their favorite TikToker, they are literally holding them in the palm of their hand. (...)
TikTok made going viral a possibility for a whole new slate of people. Now the hard part is how to keep things rolling when it happens to you. Most of the platforms themselves do not pay much for views, but brands eager to partner with buzzy people do. Creators often talk about their work in terms of self-discovery or self-actualization: This is who I want to be online, and these are the products and tips I truly, honestly want to share.
The tension comes then with the “very real commercial realities of playing to an audience, bowing to commercial sponsorships if you were lucky enough to have them,” Duffy says. “And then the new dimension, which doesn’t have the same precursors in legacy media, which is playing to the algorithm.” A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of adults on TikTok are there to find product reviews and recommendations — especially young women. (...)
Project Pan, as a concept, is both clever and strange. For years, a community of people organized largely on the internet have committed themselves to finishing their beauty and personal care products — the name coming from your promise to hit the bottom of the pan that holds your blush, for example. It’s smart for the way it gamifies something people struggle with. (Who among us doesn’t have half-used bottles of soap or barely touched tubes of lipstick?) It’s also deeply revealing: These products are meant to be used, and we collectively are so bad at finishing them off that we need a little game to make it happen. Off the top of my head I can confidently say that I’ve never once “panned” a compact of blush; I have expensive tubes of red lipstick that didn’t end up being my color, but that I can’t bear to throw out; and I have four bottles of sunscreen that crowd my cabinet, waiting for the summer they’re finally used up. There are many more products that I could — should — Project Pan that I’ve forgotten I even own.
Cassandra Silva, on the other hand, knows exactly what she has. She knows, for example, that she spent $2,857.98 AUD on makeup in 2024 and panned products totaling $1,654.13. She owns eight eyeliners, but her ideal number would be four. In 2023 she panned seven mascaras, 11 colored lip products, and one blush, among many others, all lined up in a photo of the totally empty containers that show her progress. She keeps all this data in a giant spreadsheet that she shares with me after we talk, and as I scroll through it, I realize I have never seen an eyeshadow palette where every color is completely empty.
“Compared to beauty YouTube, it’s not insane insane, but it’s still more than any one human could ever reasonably use,” Silva says of her inventory.
She watches beauty YouTube channels, but needs to be careful about what she consumes: She tries to stay away from content showing off hauls, new releases, or the ever-tempting limited-edition holiday releases.
“I am as conscious as I can be for a makeup addict,” Silva says. “I try, and I am freaking susceptible. It’s so bad.” Recently, a palette of neutral eyeshadows hounded her Instagram feed — she caved and bought it, only to be thoroughly disappointed when it arrived. As a panner, Silva will be stuck with it for years until it’s finished.
Chessie Domrongchai used to make the kind of content that Silva perhaps would steer clear of — she was the one tempting makeup lovers with all of these products. As a beauty YouTuber, Domrongchai shared in-depth product review videos for brands like the once-buzzy direct-to-consumer brand Glossier and tested fistfuls of lip glosses in subtly different shades for her 40,000 subscribers. She shared new releases, compared similar products from different brands, and recommended items for upcoming sales. In a 2019 video, she walks viewers through her pinky-brown nude lipstick collection — 15 shades, not including lip glosses and liquid lipsticks. She followed makeup brands and watched other YouTubers, accumulating more and more products to explore ($10,000, she says, feels like a conservative estimate of the value of her collection at its peak). In makeup, Domrongchai found self-expression, creativity, and community.
Until one day in 2022, when a switch went off in her head.
“I started to view a lot of the overconsumption that I was seeing online as kind of disgusting and wrong, and I recognized a lot of the way that I showed up on the internet was to overconsume,” Domrongchai says. Not only that, but she felt her online presence also influenced viewers to keep buying more and more.
“These are just regular people that are just now stuck with the burden of their overconsumption,” she says. But as a content creator, it was hard to be part of the beauty space without having a constant parade of new products.
In recent months, Domrongchai has developed a new routine for the many products littering her home. One by one, she meticulously peels off stickers and labels: from shampoo and olive oil bottles, from dish soap dispensers and face wash. Using a mix of baking soda, mineral oil, and rubbing alcohol, she goes to town on brand names printed on the packaging of eyeshadow palettes and lipsticks, scrubbing away their origins and the millions of dollars of marketing that went into them — arguably why they are in Domrongchai’s house to begin with. The result is shelves and countertops full of bare bottles and tubes and pumps filled with product but stripped of just about everything else. Watching her videos, I’m slightly horrified at my own ability to recognize the specific products even without all the labeling, the colors and shapes of bottles acting like an afterimage of a CeraVe cleanser.
“Of course I’m going to buy the face cleanser that keeps my skin clear, but I don’t need it to continue to market to me in my own home,” Domrongchai says. “In the past I had three different [lotions] and all of their labels and their marketing on these products … They’re all kind of yelling at you trying to convince you to use it. They’re kind of [in] competition with each other.” In other words, it felt like a social media feed.
For some panners, finishing a product can elicit the same rush that buying something new does — that same dopamine rush of hitting “place order” creeps in when you hit that pan. Then you post it online for other panners to see, adding to the thrill. Finishing products becomes a task to complete, just like shopping is.
“What it can do — which I don’t love to admit to — is you’ll put more blush on than you would,” Silva says. “You just slather it on.” Silva shows me her spreadsheet page from 2024 showing colored lip products she used up: 23. Silva estimates that the average person finishes maybe one lipstick a year. In order to pan that many products, she was reapplying them 15 to 20 times a day, she says. Sometimes Silva wonders if she should ditch panning, too, like she did consumption-focused beauty spaces.
“When you first get into it, it’s so helpful, and you really get that community and you can turn some products over. Then the longer that you’re in the panning community, it’s like, all right, now panning is a problem,” she laughs. “Now I’ve taken all the problems I had with makeup consumption and translated them into late-stage panning. It’s like late-stage capitalism.”
by Mia Sato, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Cath Virginia
Monday, December 22, 2025
Alone in Self-Driving Cars: How Convenience Dissolves Consensus
There’s something odd about getting into a Waymo.
After a couple phone taps, the vehicle slowly glides to the curb with perfectly controlled movement, as if fixed on invisible tram-rails etched into the road for its robotic wheels. The white Jaguar moves with the elegance of a prima ballerina, with none of the emotion. All control. Perfect precision. No mistakes. The interior of the self-driving cocoon is comfortable. Supple leather, still new. It talks with a meticulously paced digital intonation. Ambient lo-fi music eases you in.
The whole affair reeks of violent convenience.
Convenience is the mind killer.
When we look at the tools, products, and systems we design, the guiding problem statement always seems to be the eradication of friction. Eliminate the delays, remove the resistance, rid the human inconsistencies.
In the driverless car, we enter seamlessly and we rest completely. We avoid the small irritations of a driver on the phone or a driver who wants to talk. No more “how-do-you-do’s” or “where-are-you-from’s.” There’s no shared an environment. A troubling silence smothers the car. It is difficult not to be reminded of Sartre’s line from Huis Clos:
The issue is that this hell is where we come to understand each other.
It is in the conflict of communication that we form consensus...
Many think pieces have been written about echo chambers and their consequential radicalizations, but, more importantly, our digital polarization has made it nearly impossible for us to share any common ground. This common ground, while sticky, uncomfortable and human, is where friction lives. It’s this friction that’s necessary for shared experience, discrepancy, negotiation and ultimately social progress.
This is why we’re witnessing a collapse of consensus.
We no longer share truths, we speak different languages, dispersed amongst a million Babels.
The Tower of Babel is a story in which humanity, speaking one common language, unites to construct a tower to reach the heavens. Seeing their ambition, God scatters the people, giving them different languages, and making cooperation impossible.
The story’s evocative because it foregrounds the complexity inherent in communication and how that complexity was imposed as punishment.
Communication is inherently difficult: we stutter, misspeak, use the wrong words and say the wrong things. We struggle to be understood every. single. day. An off-hand comment can land poorly with a barista. A joke to a friend can avalanche into a full blown conflict. The wrong salutation in an email can risk an entire exchange.
The dream sold by human-AI interaction – or really much of our consumer technology – is that of perfect communication. One where the interlocutor is always comprehended, always right. And one where the receiver is pliable and diligent, flexible and smooth, adaptable and compliant. “Sycophant” is the term – a servile self-seeking flatterer, one who praises those in power to gain approval.
This is why it feels so good to chat with a chatbot, because as interlocutors we are in utter control. As cybernetics scholar Norbert Wiener reminds us,
The advent of AI-human relationship also signals a similar flattening of the rugged ground of our human relationships.
It is the extension of perfect communication to an experience of endless frictionlessness. A dream of being known without being challenged. But without friction, there is no true dialogue, no true understanding, no true consensus, and no ideological encounter pushing us to new ideas. No fun.
by Matt Klein and Ruby Justice Thelot, Zine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
After a couple phone taps, the vehicle slowly glides to the curb with perfectly controlled movement, as if fixed on invisible tram-rails etched into the road for its robotic wheels. The white Jaguar moves with the elegance of a prima ballerina, with none of the emotion. All control. Perfect precision. No mistakes. The interior of the self-driving cocoon is comfortable. Supple leather, still new. It talks with a meticulously paced digital intonation. Ambient lo-fi music eases you in.
The whole affair reeks of violent convenience.
Convenience is the mind killer.
In the driverless car, we enter seamlessly and we rest completely. We avoid the small irritations of a driver on the phone or a driver who wants to talk. No more “how-do-you-do’s” or “where-are-you-from’s.” There’s no shared an environment. A troubling silence smothers the car. It is difficult not to be reminded of Sartre’s line from Huis Clos:
“Hell is other people.”It keeps echoing, because it seems to be the base assumption guiding our fear of friction. In the imagination of contemporary product makers, friction is other people. The designer’s premise tacitly becomes: life would be perfect if only you could remove the human being who stands between you and what you want.
The issue is that this hell is where we come to understand each other.
It is in the conflict of communication that we form consensus...
Many think pieces have been written about echo chambers and their consequential radicalizations, but, more importantly, our digital polarization has made it nearly impossible for us to share any common ground. This common ground, while sticky, uncomfortable and human, is where friction lives. It’s this friction that’s necessary for shared experience, discrepancy, negotiation and ultimately social progress.
This is why we’re witnessing a collapse of consensus.
We no longer share truths, we speak different languages, dispersed amongst a million Babels.
The Tower of Babel is a story in which humanity, speaking one common language, unites to construct a tower to reach the heavens. Seeing their ambition, God scatters the people, giving them different languages, and making cooperation impossible.
The story’s evocative because it foregrounds the complexity inherent in communication and how that complexity was imposed as punishment.
Communication is inherently difficult: we stutter, misspeak, use the wrong words and say the wrong things. We struggle to be understood every. single. day. An off-hand comment can land poorly with a barista. A joke to a friend can avalanche into a full blown conflict. The wrong salutation in an email can risk an entire exchange.
The dream sold by human-AI interaction – or really much of our consumer technology – is that of perfect communication. One where the interlocutor is always comprehended, always right. And one where the receiver is pliable and diligent, flexible and smooth, adaptable and compliant. “Sycophant” is the term – a servile self-seeking flatterer, one who praises those in power to gain approval.
This is why it feels so good to chat with a chatbot, because as interlocutors we are in utter control. As cybernetics scholar Norbert Wiener reminds us,
“Communication and control entail each other.”But scientists warn of social sycophancy in our AI. As more people seek answers from their LLM companions, the more one is praised (deservingly or undeservingly), and the more distorted one’s self-perceptions become.
The advent of AI-human relationship also signals a similar flattening of the rugged ground of our human relationships.
It is the extension of perfect communication to an experience of endless frictionlessness. A dream of being known without being challenged. But without friction, there is no true dialogue, no true understanding, no true consensus, and no ideological encounter pushing us to new ideas. No fun.
by Matt Klein and Ruby Justice Thelot, Zine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Everything in moderation. A Gulfstream V waiting at the airport (and limo to drive me there) would be frictionlessness I could support.]
Touched for the Very First Time
Deep in California’s East Bay, on a mild fall night, a 32-year-old we’ll call Simon told me that minutes earlier, for the first time in his life, he had felt a woman’s breasts. The two of us were hunched over a firepit on a discreet wooden terrace while he recounted what had happened: The woman, with a charitable smile and some gentle encouragement, had invited his hand to her body. She let him linger there for a spell—sensing her contours, appreciating her shape—before he pulled away. Now Simon was staring into the embers, contemplating these intrepid steps out of the virginity that had shackled him for so long. He seemed in a bit of a daze.
“I haven’t been physically intimate with a woman before,” he said softly. “I tried to do it without causing her any discomfort.”
Simon is tall, broad-shouldered, and reasonably well dressed. On that evening, he wore a wrinkle-free button-down tucked into khakis, and a well-manicured mustache on his upper lip. A lanyard dangled around his neck with an empty space where he should have Sharpied his name. Instead, he’d left it blank. After traveling here from Europe—over an ocean, craggy mountaintops, and quilted farmlands—he was, I got the sense, a little embarrassed. Not everyone travels 5,000 miles to have their first kiss. Simon felt it was his only option.
Looking around at the top-secret compound we were sitting in, it was easy to deduce why he’d come. Everything about the place bore the carnal aura of a Bachelor set: daybeds lingered in darkened nooks and crannies. A clothing-optional hot tub burbled next to a fully stocked bar. Hammocks swayed in the autumn breeze. A fleet of beautiful women patrolled the grounds, demure and kind-eyed, ready to break bread with the men. Unlike most of the women Simon had come across within the checkered complexities of his stillborn sexual development—remote, inaccessible, alien—these women were eager to teach him something. They wanted him to grasp, in excruciating detail, how to turn them on.
Simon had purchased a ticket to Slutcon, the inaugural event of a radical new approach to sex education. In its most basic definition, Slutcon is an exclusive retreat for sexually and romantically inexperienced men to learn about intimacy. The women on site had a plan for them: Over the next three days, they would break these boys out of their inhibiting psychic barriers, rebuild their confidence, and refine the seizing glitches in their courtship techniques. By the end of the weekend, the men would understand how they too could become one with the sluts.
Of the 150 or so attendees of Slutcon, many of them, like Simon, were either virgins or something close to it. Tickets ranged from $1,000 to $9,000, and the retreat was pitched as a place to learn how to interact with women—as instructed by women themselves. Slutcon is staffed almost entirely by paid and volunteer female sex workers and intimacy experts, and together, they had made themselves available to be touched, seduced, or otherwise experimented on by the novices at any moment during the convention.
In the parlance of Slutcon, these professionals are referred to as its “flirt girls” or, more colloquially, its “flirtees.” Wearing plastic green wristbands that designated their consent, they darted between the men, sultry and warm, prepared to host anyone who endeavored an approach. Men brave enough to try would be rewarded with their most coveted desire: a chance to speak with, caress, or, hell, maybe even have sex with someone they were attracted to in a controlled environment, where fears of offense were nullified. After all, Slutcon is what its founders call “a place to experiment without getting canceled.”
Its organizers believe that America needs this sort of experimentation to repair its broken relationship to sex. Young people are hooking up at astonishingly low rates, and the problem is especially acute with young men: In 2013, 9 percent of men between the ages of 22 and 34 reported that they hadn’t had sex in the past year. A decade later, nearly 25 percent of that same demographic is reporting a prolonged period of celibacy. Fifty-seven percent of single adults report not being interested in dating, and nearly half of men between the ages of 18 and 25 have never approached a woman in a flirtatious manner. Experts have attributed the drop-off to a variety of causes: There’s the post-COVID loneliness crisis, men’s increasing aversion to romantic risk and rejection, and the political ideologies that continue to divide the genders. But regardless of the cause, in 2025—an age of both Lysistrata-tinged female separatist movements and the intoxicating misogyny of Andrew Tate—it is fair to wonder if men and women still like each other in the way they once did.
To soothe this discontent, Slutcon’s organizers treat femininity like a fount of knowledge. More controversially, they also argue that most men are good—if a bit misunderstood. The conventions of 2010s liberal feminism have no quarter here. Slutcon was not founded upon the idea that men must be leached of patriarchy to be properly socialized. And if I’m being honest, that position had left me with an icy feeling in my stomach from the moment I arrived. What if an attendee took undue advantage of Slutcon’s leeway? What if they flew over the guardrails and made the women here uncomfortable—or, worse, unsafe?
It’s a dangerous game that Slutcon plays. The organizers entertain the idea that to rehabilitate our decaying norms about intimacy, men need to shake off their fears about sex—with the help of women willing to grant leniency to their erotic forays. Almost a decade removed from #MeToo and the astonishing reckoning it unleashed, it was difficult for me to completely sign off on that. It wasn’t that Slutcon was a reactionary project or was concocting a backward tradwife fantasy. But the event did unambiguously assert that men alone are unable to fix our ailing sexual culture. At Slutcon, masculinity in itself was not toxic. Women too, people here argued, had a hand in this unraveling. And if these men and women could spend a weekend committed to radical empathy between the genders—blurring the line between sex education and sex work—maybe we’d relearn a skill that feels crucial to our survival. As the weekend wore on, I started to see their point.
“I was interested in being a part of a convention that was taught by women who are sexually successful and sexually open,” Jean said. “I have a mindset that isn’t You guys suck, and here are all of these ways you’re being weird. Instead, it’s like, I want to help you. I want so badly for you to hit on me better.”
“I haven’t been physically intimate with a woman before,” he said softly. “I tried to do it without causing her any discomfort.”
Looking around at the top-secret compound we were sitting in, it was easy to deduce why he’d come. Everything about the place bore the carnal aura of a Bachelor set: daybeds lingered in darkened nooks and crannies. A clothing-optional hot tub burbled next to a fully stocked bar. Hammocks swayed in the autumn breeze. A fleet of beautiful women patrolled the grounds, demure and kind-eyed, ready to break bread with the men. Unlike most of the women Simon had come across within the checkered complexities of his stillborn sexual development—remote, inaccessible, alien—these women were eager to teach him something. They wanted him to grasp, in excruciating detail, how to turn them on.
Simon had purchased a ticket to Slutcon, the inaugural event of a radical new approach to sex education. In its most basic definition, Slutcon is an exclusive retreat for sexually and romantically inexperienced men to learn about intimacy. The women on site had a plan for them: Over the next three days, they would break these boys out of their inhibiting psychic barriers, rebuild their confidence, and refine the seizing glitches in their courtship techniques. By the end of the weekend, the men would understand how they too could become one with the sluts.
Of the 150 or so attendees of Slutcon, many of them, like Simon, were either virgins or something close to it. Tickets ranged from $1,000 to $9,000, and the retreat was pitched as a place to learn how to interact with women—as instructed by women themselves. Slutcon is staffed almost entirely by paid and volunteer female sex workers and intimacy experts, and together, they had made themselves available to be touched, seduced, or otherwise experimented on by the novices at any moment during the convention.
In the parlance of Slutcon, these professionals are referred to as its “flirt girls” or, more colloquially, its “flirtees.” Wearing plastic green wristbands that designated their consent, they darted between the men, sultry and warm, prepared to host anyone who endeavored an approach. Men brave enough to try would be rewarded with their most coveted desire: a chance to speak with, caress, or, hell, maybe even have sex with someone they were attracted to in a controlled environment, where fears of offense were nullified. After all, Slutcon is what its founders call “a place to experiment without getting canceled.”
Its organizers believe that America needs this sort of experimentation to repair its broken relationship to sex. Young people are hooking up at astonishingly low rates, and the problem is especially acute with young men: In 2013, 9 percent of men between the ages of 22 and 34 reported that they hadn’t had sex in the past year. A decade later, nearly 25 percent of that same demographic is reporting a prolonged period of celibacy. Fifty-seven percent of single adults report not being interested in dating, and nearly half of men between the ages of 18 and 25 have never approached a woman in a flirtatious manner. Experts have attributed the drop-off to a variety of causes: There’s the post-COVID loneliness crisis, men’s increasing aversion to romantic risk and rejection, and the political ideologies that continue to divide the genders. But regardless of the cause, in 2025—an age of both Lysistrata-tinged female separatist movements and the intoxicating misogyny of Andrew Tate—it is fair to wonder if men and women still like each other in the way they once did.
To soothe this discontent, Slutcon’s organizers treat femininity like a fount of knowledge. More controversially, they also argue that most men are good—if a bit misunderstood. The conventions of 2010s liberal feminism have no quarter here. Slutcon was not founded upon the idea that men must be leached of patriarchy to be properly socialized. And if I’m being honest, that position had left me with an icy feeling in my stomach from the moment I arrived. What if an attendee took undue advantage of Slutcon’s leeway? What if they flew over the guardrails and made the women here uncomfortable—or, worse, unsafe?
It’s a dangerous game that Slutcon plays. The organizers entertain the idea that to rehabilitate our decaying norms about intimacy, men need to shake off their fears about sex—with the help of women willing to grant leniency to their erotic forays. Almost a decade removed from #MeToo and the astonishing reckoning it unleashed, it was difficult for me to completely sign off on that. It wasn’t that Slutcon was a reactionary project or was concocting a backward tradwife fantasy. But the event did unambiguously assert that men alone are unable to fix our ailing sexual culture. At Slutcon, masculinity in itself was not toxic. Women too, people here argued, had a hand in this unraveling. And if these men and women could spend a weekend committed to radical empathy between the genders—blurring the line between sex education and sex work—maybe we’d relearn a skill that feels crucial to our survival. As the weekend wore on, I started to see their point.
***
On the first night of Slutcon, Aella—the pseudonymous blogger, escort, and internet eccentric who is one of the event’s primary organizers—took the stage at the main pavilion for something of a keynote address. “We are pro-men here,” she said, outlining what the audience could expect from the days ahead. The attendees were reminded that the “flirtees” had consensually opted in to the weekend’s affairs and all were adept at interfacing with clueless suitors. Aella implored the crowd to release inhibitions, to breathe freely, to dig deep within their souls and excavate their inner vixen. Yes, she reminded the room, the women would maintain their personal boundaries, which were always to be respected. (“Some of you will find out in brutal detail that you are giving a girl the ick,” Aella said.) But also, she said, the men here shouldn’t fear bumping against those boundaries—and ought to receive the feedback that resulted graciously, with an open heart. As she wrapped up her remarks, she left the men with a homework assignment: At some point in the next three days, they should ask a woman if they could touch her boobs.
That message resonated with Ari Zerner, a 28-year-old attendee dressed—somewhat inexplicably—in a purple cape. “There’s this feeling of safety here. I know that even if there’s pushback, there’s not going to be punishment,” he said of the weekend’s social contract. Zerner told me that his top goal for being at Slutcon was to learn how to “escalate” a conversation with a woman into something more flirtatiously charged.
Earlier in the day, organizers had distributed a schedule to all participants detailing the retreat’s panels, presentations, and workshops. Some of them centered on seduction: One lecture focused on how and when someone should lean in for a kiss; another offered advice on optimizing a dating profile. Elsewhere, experts gave insight on the taxonomy of sex toys and the finer points of cunnilingus. There was a rope-play demonstration, a seminar on how to properly receive blow jobs, and an assessment of what it takes to be a tactful orgy participant. (One pointer: Shower before arriving.) Once the evening rolled around, Slutcon’s educational atmosphere would morph into a bubbly social hour, when the skills honed in the workshops could be tested on the flirtees. On Saturday night, everyone would gather for Slutcon After Dark—the weekend’s marquee party, and something of a final exam.
All of this made Slutcon sound a little bit like a pickup-artist boot camp, reminiscent of the greasy symposiums of the mid-2000s. Led by vamping gurus like The Game’s Neil Strauss, these “men’s workshops” had dispensed questionable wisdom to help guys get laid quickly, efficiently, and transactionally. (Sample advice: Be slyly rude toward the women you want to sleep with and isolate them from their friends as quickly as possible.) Yet while Slutcon featured a much softer methodology than the Tao of Mystery’s, and was expressly led by women who gave far better advice, nobody at the event ran away from that comparison. In fact, some of the enlightened organizers here wondered if, given the total backsliding of our sexual norms—and the fanatical inceldom we’re facing now—there was something worth reclaiming about an earlier age when, at the very least, men were enthusiastic about approaching women.
“I’m pro–the idea of pickup artistry, in the sense that it goes against the dominant resentful male ideology where guys feel like they’re doomed in the romantic market because their jaw is angled incorrectly,” said Noelle Perdue, a self-described porn historian and one of Slutcon’s speakers. “The idea that you can do certain things that make you more appealing to women is not only true, but there is an optimism inherent in it that I think we’re missing right now.”
After Aella’s commencement, like a class adjourning for recess, the men were unleashed. The sun had firmly tucked behind the chaparral hills, and all at once, everything was possible—for better or worse.
Nobody quite knew what to do with themselves. Some men clustered together, white-knuckling Pacificos, hoping to get lubricated enough to make conversation with the flirtees from a chaste distance. (Alcohol, throughout the weekend, was strictly rationed for safety reasons.) Others, revved up by Aella’s pep talk, hit on everyone in sight, with blissful ego death, to varying degrees of success: I watched one gentleman, balding and heavyset, tell each and every woman in the building that he found her pretty. The campus was permeated with the energy of a middle school dance, more anxious than anticipatory. But still, I admired the attendees’ gameness. Here was a legion of dudes, all gawky, stiff, and tragically horny—imprisoned by long-ossified social and fashion blunders, who write code for a living—taking a leap of faith. At last, they were putting real intention behind the hunger that had burned in them for ages. Slutcon had implored them to flirt their way out of the mess they had found themselves in, and they were willing to give it a try.
The women, meanwhile, were already hard at work. Many of them were coiled on patio furniture, maintaining disciplined eye contact with whatever attendee was currently talking to them. Some of them offered feedback on the men’s techniques, and more often than not, the counseling was astoundingly rudimentary: “It’s like, ‘You are a full foot taller than me and you’re kind of looming over me, so maybe don’t loom’ or ‘You’re not smiling, you’re not really having a playful time’ or ‘You’re getting touchy-feely too fast,’ ” said one of the flirtees, perched on a picnic table in a skirt and crop top, chronicling her interactions thus far. “It didn’t feel like teaching so much as both of us exploring the space together.”
Another flirtee, a striking 27-year-old with jet-black hair named Paola Baca, felt the same way. She had taken it upon herself to slowly disarm the layers of neuroticism that might have previously prevented some of these dudes from engaging with her back in reality. And in that sense, Baca felt that she offered a form of exposure therapy. “A lot of young men don’t think women are humans,” she said. “Not as less-than-humans, but more-than-humans. Attractive women are basically gods to them. I want to show them that we are humans too.” (In her civilian life, Baca studied evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.) (...)
That message resonated with Ari Zerner, a 28-year-old attendee dressed—somewhat inexplicably—in a purple cape. “There’s this feeling of safety here. I know that even if there’s pushback, there’s not going to be punishment,” he said of the weekend’s social contract. Zerner told me that his top goal for being at Slutcon was to learn how to “escalate” a conversation with a woman into something more flirtatiously charged.
Earlier in the day, organizers had distributed a schedule to all participants detailing the retreat’s panels, presentations, and workshops. Some of them centered on seduction: One lecture focused on how and when someone should lean in for a kiss; another offered advice on optimizing a dating profile. Elsewhere, experts gave insight on the taxonomy of sex toys and the finer points of cunnilingus. There was a rope-play demonstration, a seminar on how to properly receive blow jobs, and an assessment of what it takes to be a tactful orgy participant. (One pointer: Shower before arriving.) Once the evening rolled around, Slutcon’s educational atmosphere would morph into a bubbly social hour, when the skills honed in the workshops could be tested on the flirtees. On Saturday night, everyone would gather for Slutcon After Dark—the weekend’s marquee party, and something of a final exam.
All of this made Slutcon sound a little bit like a pickup-artist boot camp, reminiscent of the greasy symposiums of the mid-2000s. Led by vamping gurus like The Game’s Neil Strauss, these “men’s workshops” had dispensed questionable wisdom to help guys get laid quickly, efficiently, and transactionally. (Sample advice: Be slyly rude toward the women you want to sleep with and isolate them from their friends as quickly as possible.) Yet while Slutcon featured a much softer methodology than the Tao of Mystery’s, and was expressly led by women who gave far better advice, nobody at the event ran away from that comparison. In fact, some of the enlightened organizers here wondered if, given the total backsliding of our sexual norms—and the fanatical inceldom we’re facing now—there was something worth reclaiming about an earlier age when, at the very least, men were enthusiastic about approaching women.
“I’m pro–the idea of pickup artistry, in the sense that it goes against the dominant resentful male ideology where guys feel like they’re doomed in the romantic market because their jaw is angled incorrectly,” said Noelle Perdue, a self-described porn historian and one of Slutcon’s speakers. “The idea that you can do certain things that make you more appealing to women is not only true, but there is an optimism inherent in it that I think we’re missing right now.”
After Aella’s commencement, like a class adjourning for recess, the men were unleashed. The sun had firmly tucked behind the chaparral hills, and all at once, everything was possible—for better or worse.
Nobody quite knew what to do with themselves. Some men clustered together, white-knuckling Pacificos, hoping to get lubricated enough to make conversation with the flirtees from a chaste distance. (Alcohol, throughout the weekend, was strictly rationed for safety reasons.) Others, revved up by Aella’s pep talk, hit on everyone in sight, with blissful ego death, to varying degrees of success: I watched one gentleman, balding and heavyset, tell each and every woman in the building that he found her pretty. The campus was permeated with the energy of a middle school dance, more anxious than anticipatory. But still, I admired the attendees’ gameness. Here was a legion of dudes, all gawky, stiff, and tragically horny—imprisoned by long-ossified social and fashion blunders, who write code for a living—taking a leap of faith. At last, they were putting real intention behind the hunger that had burned in them for ages. Slutcon had implored them to flirt their way out of the mess they had found themselves in, and they were willing to give it a try.
The women, meanwhile, were already hard at work. Many of them were coiled on patio furniture, maintaining disciplined eye contact with whatever attendee was currently talking to them. Some of them offered feedback on the men’s techniques, and more often than not, the counseling was astoundingly rudimentary: “It’s like, ‘You are a full foot taller than me and you’re kind of looming over me, so maybe don’t loom’ or ‘You’re not smiling, you’re not really having a playful time’ or ‘You’re getting touchy-feely too fast,’ ” said one of the flirtees, perched on a picnic table in a skirt and crop top, chronicling her interactions thus far. “It didn’t feel like teaching so much as both of us exploring the space together.”
Another flirtee, a striking 27-year-old with jet-black hair named Paola Baca, felt the same way. She had taken it upon herself to slowly disarm the layers of neuroticism that might have previously prevented some of these dudes from engaging with her back in reality. And in that sense, Baca felt that she offered a form of exposure therapy. “A lot of young men don’t think women are humans,” she said. “Not as less-than-humans, but more-than-humans. Attractive women are basically gods to them. I want to show them that we are humans too.” (In her civilian life, Baca studied evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.) (...)
***
The boys at Slutcon, it seemed, were at least trying to unwind the multitude of traumas that had brought on their sexual maladjustment. But I remained curious about how all of this was going to turn them into better flirts. The following morning, I filed into a seminar led by Tom, the pseudonymous partner of one of the organizers and one of the few men on staff. He had convened a last-minute flirting training session after witnessing some subpar attempted courtships the night before. “I was like, Oh, gosh, a lot of this is not up to my quality standards, ” he told me. “I had the itch to step in and help.”
So, in a makeshift ballroom filled to the brim with contemplative men—many dutifully scratching down notes with ballpoint pen, eager to learn from the previous evening’s mistakes—Tom tried to adjust course. Spectators were summoned to the stage, one by one, and each of them was thrust into a simulated date with Jean Blue, a sex worker with a flop of auburn hair who had gamely volunteered to serve as a surrogate.
The problems were immediately apparent. The thrills of good flirting can be felt rather than thought—and that is a difficult principle to distill through language. How can anyone articulate the electricity of a good date, especially for those who may have never touched it before? “I basically stopped people when they made me flinch,” said Tom afterward. “And then I tried to name the flinch.”
There was, indeed, a lot of flinching. Some denizens of Slutcon offered Jean canned, dead-on-arrival opening statements (“What Harry Potter character are you like?”). Others attempted to ratchet up the intrigue in hopeless ways (“What’s your sexiest tattoo?”)...
So, in a makeshift ballroom filled to the brim with contemplative men—many dutifully scratching down notes with ballpoint pen, eager to learn from the previous evening’s mistakes—Tom tried to adjust course. Spectators were summoned to the stage, one by one, and each of them was thrust into a simulated date with Jean Blue, a sex worker with a flop of auburn hair who had gamely volunteered to serve as a surrogate.
The problems were immediately apparent. The thrills of good flirting can be felt rather than thought—and that is a difficult principle to distill through language. How can anyone articulate the electricity of a good date, especially for those who may have never touched it before? “I basically stopped people when they made me flinch,” said Tom afterward. “And then I tried to name the flinch.”
There was, indeed, a lot of flinching. Some denizens of Slutcon offered Jean canned, dead-on-arrival opening statements (“What Harry Potter character are you like?”). Others attempted to ratchet up the intrigue in hopeless ways (“What’s your sexiest tattoo?”)...
“I was interested in being a part of a convention that was taught by women who are sexually successful and sexually open,” Jean said. “I have a mindset that isn’t You guys suck, and here are all of these ways you’re being weird. Instead, it’s like, I want to help you. I want so badly for you to hit on me better.”
by Luke Winkie, Slate | Read more:
Image: Hua Ye
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