To Beard or Not To Beard

That was the question...

“The first guy in America to wear a beard was so hated for it that he used to get into street fights with people trying to forcibly shave him.” (h/t @SatanWatch):

The wearing of beards in America did not become popular until the middle of the 19th century, and one man who took to whiskers earlier, Joseph Palmer, became one of the most hated eccentrics of his day. As such, he was subjected to persecution so incredible that it boggles the mind. Palmer may well have been the first man in the nation to wear a beard...

I would never have guessed that beards were almost completely absent from Britain and America from the 1730s until the 1850s, even though in theory I should have been able to realize that none of the Founding Fathers or any other American I’d seen pictures of before that time had one.

Also, you would think that a social consensus that strong would have left enough imprint in the historical record that I would learn about it from somewhere other than a Twitter account called “SatanWatch”, but it happened completely silently!

This puts the “Lincoln grew a beard on the advice of a young girl who wrote him a letter” story in a different light. 1860 was just at the beginning of beard acceptability; this would be the equivalent of a candidate dying his hair pink on a young girl’s advice today!

by Scott Alexander, ACX |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Notes on Acquired Taste. Why Do We Make an Effort To Like Things?

• In Susan Sontag’s Notes on '“Camp” (1964) she writes (with, I think, a hint of camp):

“…these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences [or] attractions…But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronise the faculty of taste is to patronise oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive.” (My emphasis). 

• Sontag has an expansive concept of ‘taste’. She talks of taste in people, pictures, emotion, actions, morality. Even intelligence, she says, is “a kind of taste - taste in ideas”. I’m not certain how useful it is to stretch the concept this far - so far that it colonises intelligence and judgement and wisdom - but Sontag’s high regard for taste, her declaration of its central importance, feels very timely in 2026.

• It has become almost a cliché to name “taste” as one of the last human advantages over the machines. AI is acquiring the skills to make slickly produced pictures and songs and books. But it isn’t yet very good at distinguishing the brilliant from the mediocre; the just right from the just OK.

• It models what we like, which makes it hard to see how taste might change. Ask it to generate twenty songs or twenty jokes and pick the best, and it will pick the one that most closely resembles what the median person would deem good. It won’t pick the surprising, odd one - the one that is ‘wrong’ in a suggestive way. But that’s where the good ideas come from. Innovative culture emerges, like new species, from mutation; from interesting accidents that open up new possibilities.

• It’s not as if humans don’t ‘model’ what came before them, often quite algorithmically. We have traditions, genres, chains of influence. We have plenty of human-made mediocrity - more than ever, thanks to our new assistants. But we also have an ability to adapt or reinvent the model; to put it to our own purposes.

• Individual artists do this intuitively and almost randomly in the process of making. Writers learn to write (painters learn to paint etc) by imitating their predecessors. They learn to be original by getting the imitation wrong and noticing that they like the error. This is an act of taste; the free human response.

• When he was stuck on a painting, Francis Bacon would throw a glob of paint at his canvas then work out how to incorporate the result. Artists make decisions and then try to understand why they might have made them. It’s the dialogue between gut and head that produces the work.

• Taste is similarly post-rationalised, or back-propagated. You notice what you like or dislike and extract a rule from your response. Do this enough times and you build a powerful discrimination engine.

• You also get good at knowing what goes with what. You learn to recognise the clichés of the category, which means you know how to subvert or overturn them. That’s why great artists are such voracious consumers of work from within and beyond their own field. Martin Scorsese has watched at least one film every night for most of his adult life. He watches and records and re-watches obsessively. When he donated his collection of VHS tapes to a university it consisted of 4,400 films, documentaries and TV shows.

• It’s more than pattern recognition. The machines are pretty good at that, after all. Taste is connected to that other human moat - to our sense of purpose, of why we’re doing this in the first place. We’re still the ones who write the prompt - who decide what to create and what is beautiful, important, and valuable. The machine merely knows how to execute on our preferences.

• It can model what we already like with astonishing facility but it can’t give us the next Shakespeare, or the next romanticism or modernism or punk or hip-hop. These new forms aren’t just statistical recombinations. They are born from anxiety, rage, envy, pain, ambition. How do you respond to the unprecedented mass violence and human waste of the Great War? Not by following pre-war cultural conventions.

• New movements are also born from scenes - from humans in proximity to each other, everyone desiring this man’s art and that woman’s scope; ideas, emotions and bodies colliding.

• These movements create the taste by which they’re consumed. “Impressionism” was a derisive nickname for paintings that most art lovers considered weird and sketchy. But the art was good enough to bend popular taste around it. Even more obviously difficult art, like Rothko or Pollock, now has an audience of millions. Some of those people like it immediately; others have acquired a taste for it.

• I’m fascinated by the notion of acquired taste. Strictly speaking, it’s a redundancy. Nearly all tastes are acquired. Nobody is born with particular tastes in design or architecture. We gain a sense of what we like, or what we consider to be good, from our peers and predecessors.

• But acquired taste does refer to a distinct phenomenon: the act of willing a preference into being. You didn’t like whisky the first time you drank it, but perhaps because your father liked it or because you were aware of its cultural prestige, you tried it again and again, striving to appreciate it. Then one day you didn’t have to try anymore. You just liked it.

• This writer likens it to a magic eye picture: you stare at it for ages without seeing what you’re told is there, and then suddenly - there it is.

• This is very different to stumbling upon something we immediately like, which is sometimes referred to as ‘discovered taste’. (Edmund Burke called it ‘natural relish’.) That kind of liking involves no work, no friction, no overcoming of resistance.

• Some cultural objects lend themselves to discovered taste, others don’t. I can’t imagine anyone needing to acquire a taste for Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, but there are other great vocalists whose voices you must learn to like. The most frequently cited reason for not liking Bob Dylan is antipathy to his voice. But if you learn to appreciate the many incredible things he does with it, you will end up in a more intense relationship with it than with the voice of a more obviously palatable singer. Once you’re in on an acquired taste, you’re all in.

• The same is true of whole genres. There are many pieces of classical music that are easy to like. You don’t have to listen to Mozart’s clarinet concerto more than once to be seduced by it. But as a whole and on average, it’s a genre that requires more effort to appreciate than pop. Once you find the key to its heavy oak door a vast and fabulous kingdom awaits. Your memory of the effort it took you to get there, and your awareness of all the people still outside the city walls enhance your appreciation. (That doesn’t mean you want people to remain outside - quite the opposite).

• Difficulty doesn’t make the cultural object concerned better or worse than one that’s immediately likeable. But it does usually mean it’s more complex, and complexity is correlated, loosely and unreliably, with quality. Acquired taste involves the appreciation of subtle properties that don’t make themselves known on first listen or view or read.

• Without appreciating what lies on the other side of the door, why do we ever make the effort to unlock it? Partly because we want what other people want. We might trust the taste of our father or girlfriend or teacher. Perhaps we want to please them, impress them, or feel closer to them. Perhaps we want the social cachet that goes along with this particular taste. To my mind, all of these reasons are perfectly good ones. If a taste is truly worth acquiring, any motivation will do.

• It’s often seen as slightly embarrassing or shameful to acquire a taste through conscious effort. It’s for the try-hards and the social climbers. Liberal societies value spontaneity in taste. “Like what you like, love what you love!” Your gut response is meant to be the authentic one, the one that represents “the real you”. To be swayed by social pressure or by experts and reading is regarded as a sign of insecurity or pretentiousness. But let yourself believe that and your tastes will be less likely to evolve and expand and you’ll miss out on a lot of great stuff. Many of the greatest, most compelling and satisfying cultural objects are complex, occluded, spiky, difficult to like. (Some of the best people too).

by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Susan Sontag by Edward Hausner / New York Times Co./Getty Images

[ed. See also: here and here.]

Is Netflix Washed Now?

Today’s headline poses a question you’ve probably never thought to ask, so I’ll start with my answer: yes, Netflix is washed now. The content on the platform has never been great, but it’s never been worse. I open the app these days and I’m amazed. What used to be a source of fun, buzzy, compulsively watchable, and occasionally excellent TV and movies is now an endless river of reheated IP, true crime documentaries, and filler dressed as prestige. Millions of people watch this stuff, and everyone instantly forgets it.

I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix content reaches a staggering 85% of American viewers and has 325 million subscribers globally. Growth is slowing, but that’s the law of large numbers. If practically everyone in America and much of the world is already subscribed to some version of Netflix, and churn rates are still low, then any concern is relative. Going forward: cable is still dying, and even if the biggest premium distribution platform in the world can’t make great content of its own, it can still license movies, TV and sports rights. Netflix can then spread those costs across hundreds of millions of subscribers and a steadily growing ads business, seeing more engagement in a week than Apple TV sees in a year.

So no, the company’s not doomed today or destined for collapse tomorrow. Instead, I think what’s interesting to consider is that Netflix has almost certainly peaked. As a cultural force, as a business success story, and as an entertainment death star destined to swallow Hollywood whole, the arrows are all pointing the wrong direction.

Here was Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg two weeks ago, writing about one of several problems the company has encountered over the past 12 months:

Netflix is struggling to get viewers to stick with its shows for more than a season.

One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season and another 35% for its third season. These figures are all through the first four weeks of a show’s release and come straight from Netflix.

Adding insult to injury, the latest season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of Netflix’s most-watched titles in 2024, suffered a drop of more than 60% over week one. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the month.

That report went viral, prompting a week of commentary on Netflix’s binge model and elongated release schedules, with lots of Twitter users observing that viewers consume eight episodes across a few days and then often have to wait as long as two or three years for the next season. By that point, memories of plot or characters are faint at best. The emotional connection to the story doesn’t exist. No one should be surprised that the audience for a show like One Piece is cut in half in 2026, three years after the first season aired.

While that explanation certainly feels true, Shaw followed up this week to note that data is mixed as to whether extended breaks between seasons do in fact correlate to audience drop-off. Severance, on Apple, gained a ton of new audience after its nearly three-year break. Stranger Things and Bridgerton have been multi-season powerhouses at Netflix despite their long breaks between seasons. Conversely, Tina Fey’s Four Seasons debuted on Netflix in May last year, was met with pretty good reviews, and returned 13 months later with half its audience.

I think the Netflix problem is more fundamental than production schedules. What if these shows just aren’t very good or differentiated? Consider the original productions Netflix has surfaced in the past few months:

• A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
• Running Point
• Lord of the Flies
• Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen
• Unchosen
• XO, Kitty
• Big Mistakes
• Beef
• Man on Fire
• Little House on the Prairie
• His & Hers
• Nemesis
• The Boroughs

That list is culled from a post by the Entertainment Strategy Guy charting Netflix originals that have under-performed in the second quarter of 2026, and one common thread between those titles is that I haven’t heard of almost any of them. Netflix is the one streaming service everyone subscribes to and is theoretically well positioned to be setting the cultural agenda, but that hasn’t happened for quite some time. Did you know that Avatar: The Last Airbender was a thing? Apparently that show lost 60% of its season one audience when its second season aired in late June.

Content and the Year of Discontent

I mentioned the anxiety surrounding Netflix these days, so let me take a step back here. Amazingly, it’s only been eight months since Netflix won the bidding war to buy Warner Bros. Discovery and looked poised to become an entire generation’s one-stop shop for high-end entertainment. The implications of that news produced lots of anxiety, including one of my first articles on this website—Netflix and the Flattening of Everything—and a memorably ominous Variety cover that captured Hollywood’s mood at the time:

The Warner Brothers deal was abandoned at the end of February, when Netflix walked away from the table in the face of regulatory pressure from Washington and an increased bid from Paramount. Even so, the market hated the initial play, as investors wondered en masse why the world’s most (only?) successful streaming platform was suddenly ready to take on a mountain of new debt to acquire a company that had already been the subject of several expensive, failed acquisitions over the past 25 years.

Now, even as the deal is off, the questions remain. Are we sure a Netflix world takeover is a forgone conclusion? Is Netflix sure? The stock is down 18% this year and over 40% across the past 12 months. Investors who did a double take last December seem to have noticed that YouTube has twice the overall engagement that Netflix does, and more time watched on televisions, while free, ad-supported TV services like Tubi and the Roku Channel are becoming meaningful engagement competitors themselves.

Meanwhile, alongside all the original programming that’s failed to launch (or re-launch?), Netflix is adding videos from BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst and Penske Media (as Shaw notes: “Get ready for lots of Bon Appétit cooking videos on Netflix.”) Last fall the platform also added a variety of high-end podcasts in a bid for relatively cheap, recurring content that may be seeing underwhelming results. Then again, they continue to buy more, so who knows? Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reports that Netflix executives have “recently discussed adding live channels that would continuously stream certain programs, or shows and films from a certain genre.” Can Netflix become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix? Can Netflix become Tubi before Tubi destroys Netflix’s long-term pricing power?

All of those moves might have once been seen as the savvy power plays of a world-conquering behemoth intent on taking the next step to expand its footprint. Today, in the shadow of a Warner Brothers bid that accidentally punctured the company’s air of inevitability, this year’s moves look more like spaghetti being thrown at a wall by a company that’s searching for something—anything!—that might hold people’s attention and scale more effectively than an expensive library of content that’s consumed, discarded, and then effectively worthless.

Looking back at the deal to acquire Warner Brothers, HBO and all that IP, I think it’s clear Ben Thompson was right when he wrote that concerns over competition from YouTube specifically and the internet generally were likely key drivers of Netflix’s decision-making. Those concerns seem to be animating all the other options the company is considering, and understandably so. The same way that the rise of social media has throttled the growth of the gaming market, it stands to reason it could do the same to demand for scripted content. With respect to the specific Netflix logic for buying WBD, that context is important: the biggest companies, with the deepest, most diverse libraries, will have the best chance at defending themselves in this new environment. [...]

I like to leave all Aggregator analysis to Ben, but I don’t think investors are crazy to have some questions about where this leads and what the upside looks like. For all the advantages its massive customer base affords (leverage over costs, advertising upside), an obvious difference between Netflix and businesses like Meta, YouTube, or Google—the other demand aggregators—is that Netflix has to spend far more money to deliver on its value proposition to customers and has fewer network effects to defend its long-term centrality to people’s lives.

by Ben Thompson and Andrew Sharp, Sharp Text |  Read more:

Images: Al Bello/Getty Images for Netflix; Variety

[ed. See also: Predictions on the Future of Netflix (and Other Huge Platforms) (Honest Broker).]

Line People

It’s a Sunday afternoon late in June, and as is the case pretty much every day of the week, there is a line at Caffè Panna, an ice-cream shop in Greenpoint that sells perfectly Instagrammable scoops of artisanal scrumdiddlyumptiousness. Though the store doesn’t open for another five minutes, there are more than 50 people, two stroller babies, one Italian greyhound, and one Maltipoo waiting in an orderly line on the sidewalk outside. For every customer who eventually claims their order — “For Hannah! For Harry! For Anna!” — and walks off devouring it, another two seem to appear, creating a never-ending human centipede that stretches from the window, down the block, past an advertisement for the new Olivia Rodrigo album, and around the corner onto another block. The line is inching along slowly, and the clouds are threatening rain, but no one seems bothered. Everyone is beaming. Passersby — bicyclists, drivers, and pedestrians alike — slow down when they encounter the thing, occasionally letting out a squeal of wonder (“What is this line?”) or judgment (“What is this line?”).

Within a quick walk, there are plenty more lines in the neighborhood: for pastries (at Radio Bakery), tacos (Taqueria Ramírez), pizza (Chrissy’s), coffee (Rhythm Zero), matcha (Kettl), ceviche (Mariscos El Submarino), katsu sandwiches (Taku Sando), and more katsu (ACRE). Even during the week, in the middle of the day, it’s not a rarity to see a line of phone scrollers dawdling down India Street toward Radio Bakery. “Is that a bread line?” a visiting family member, looking perplexed, asked me completely seriously not long ago when we strolled past. In some ways, I tried to explain to him.

New York has always had lines for the sorts of experiences you can’t get anywhere else: Broadway tickets, skyscraper observation decks, Cronuts. This summer’s lines, though, can seem borderline ludicrous: three to a street, blocks long, often for the types of things you can get almost anywhere in the city, like bagels, pizza, and pastries. They emerged slowly over the past few years and then like a flood, a cumulative effect of TikTok constantly showing all of us what we are missing out on in our very own boroughs. The temptation is almost too strong — why not take the train 15 minutes to figure out if that slice of pizza is as good as everyone on your “For You” page is telling you it is? “It’s herd mentality,” one young woman, nearly rolling her eyes at herself for joining the masses, tells me at Myka, a fro-yo chain that is arguably the site of this summer’s longest lines. Now, across the city, especially along the Brooklyn waterfront and in much of downtown, people are waiting for an ever-diversifying assortment of viral snacks and “sweet treats” (to use the preferred language of Instagram influencers), all the while petting one another’s dogs, gossiping with friends, minding their toddlers, checking Slack, and scrolling away their remaining time in line. As one TikToker captioned a video taken in the West Village on the first nice day of spring in March, “The sun is out and New Yorkers are back with their favorite activity of waiting in line.” A company called Same Ole Line Dudes (tagline: We Wait for Your Wants!) will even wait in line for you, starting at a price of $55.

Naturally, some New Yorkers are getting persnickety about the situation. “I would never stand in a line. It just seems so déclassé,” the podcaster Francesca Root-Dodson tells me. When I run into a Real Housewife I know on my way to wait in line at Caffè Panna’s original location in Gramercy Park, she says, “When I was growing up here, standing in a line was not a cool thing. Now there’s a whole culture around it. The only thing worth waiting in line for is a Balenciaga sample sale.” The Caffè Panna line is monitored by a camera installed by a mysterious website called damnlines.com. (One Wednesday in July at 4:20 p.m., the website estimates a 25-minute wait; near 30 people are in line.) As such haters’ thinking usually goes, waiting in a line is the lemminglike behavior of tourists in Times Square trying to get a deal on last-minute tickets for The Lion King. Standing in a line is what you do pissily at the airport or Disney World. (Also, self-described real New Yorkers like to say you wait on line, not in one. The mere mention of this distinction can send people into long, impassioned debates about the importance of regional dialect.) “These kids today on these stupid lines,” Dorothy Wiggins, a 100-year-old influencer and West Village resident recently complained on Instagram. (Note her use of on.) “It’s crazy! Just crazy!” Her hairdresser, also featured in the video, shared that she would never stand in line because she grew up under communism.

Others have taken to championing the line people. “I don’t like when people make fun of the people who stand around in long lines,” the downtown writer known as Sotce recently wrote on her Substack. “Some people read Substack, some people wait in a line. Some people have vintage denim and read books by dead people. And really we all die.”

“I’m not somebody who would wait in line,” the owner of the Italian greyhound tries to assure me outside the Greenpoint Caffè Panna. Yet she has just done exactly that, waiting 15 minutes for her Nutella Crunch ice cream, which she doesn’t sound at all embarrassed about as she devours the ice cream in less time than it took to order it. “When you see there’s a line, it means the place is good,” her friend, the owner of the Maltipoo, tells me. Just the day before, she went to Caffè Panna’s other location, where she also waited in a line. Nearby, two sisters, tourists from Boston, snap photos of their scoops before digging in. “All the lines have felt worth it,” one tells me; for breakfast, they waited in a line at Apollo Bagels in Williamsburg. They’d seen all this hoopla on social media and couldn’t resist sussing out the hype for themselves. “I would rather stand in this line here than go figure out another place to go,” one says to me.

by Brock Colyar, Curbed |  Read more:

Image: Natan Dvir

***

Early on the first summerlike evening of the year, New York’s Greenwich Village was abuzz. Restaurant patios were packed, with waiters shuttling bottles of crisp white wine to diners. On University Place, the queue for frozen yogurt at Mimi’s stretched half a block, bending around the corner. I considered joining it. A New York University student told me the line quadruples after 7 p.m. His friend chimed in to call it “the hottest club in New York.”

Whether it’s an hourlong wait for a shawarma at TikTok favorite Miya Miya in Los Angeles or a two-hour queue for pastries from the Cedric Grolet Opéra pastry shop in Paris, long lines for viral foods and popular restaurants have become a feature of urban landscapes. And summer is peak season for them.“These long lines circulate via social media,” says Emily Contois, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa. Posts of queues “create and re-create a representation of popularity and virality,” not just for locals, but for anyone online. A recently published study of tourists waiting in food lines in Amsterdam found that 84% of them had seen videos of those lines on TikTok and 54% on Instagram. Lines have become tourist attractions and social experiences in their own right.

Over the past year, I’ve lined up for coffee in Shanghai, for croissants in Edinburgh and for bagels, pizza, cinnamon buns and, most recently, frozen yogurt at home in New York — all with hordes of others joined in the belief that good things come to those who wait.
A recent survey of more than 3,000 US consumers found that 60% of Gen Z respondents reported waiting in line for more than 30 minutes for a specific food. Among all the age groups, 74% of those said the wait was worth it. Experience enough of these lines, and you’ll see they’re more than a byproduct of imbalanced supply and demand. They’re places where complex social, psychological and economic theories play out, one slow-moving step at a time.

Social media posts have made waiting for Mimi’s part of the experience for many customersPhotographer: Yuvraj Khanna for Bloomberg Businessweek
In the queue for Mimi’s, I passed the time people-watching, scrolling on my phone and chatting with line mates. Among them was Athena Yan, from Shenzhen, who’s studying for her master’s in urban planning at NYU. She told me she’d been drawn to Mimi’s by its online cachet, but now she appraised the queue through an urban planner’s lens. Lines like this, she said, offer a social benefit: They “make the street look more energetic, more alive.” Her interest wasn’t strictly academic. After conquering the line and procuring her yogurt, she said, “I’m going to post it to my Stories.”

by Matthey Kronsberg, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Yuvraj Khanna

[ed. Beats sitting on your couch at home watching tv, I guess.]

Seasons of the Eskimo: A Vanishing Way of Life, by Fred Bruemmer, 1978

via:

How Leprosy Was Used as a Weapon Against Hawaii’s Indigenous Population

Father Damien was a dirty man. Everyone agreed on that. Dirt would accumulate under his fingernails; he rarely washed his hands. His clothes—his habitual cassock and wide-brimmed hat—were worn for days on end; he saw no reason to clean his hut in Kalawao, the leprosy colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. His detractors claimed he lacked elegance too: burly with a “piggish” head, they complained, he squinted from behind a pair of wonky wire-framed circular spectacles. He was eager to learn Hawaiian, it was noted sniffily, but otherwise he had little enthusiasm for languages. His Latin came only by official requirement, his English was sparse; a native Flemish speaker, even his French was stilted. The prose of his letters lacked refinement whatever their language: “coarse…headstrong and bigoted” was one particularly vitriolic posthumous assessment.

None of this worried Damien. Hawaiian did him fine. From that messy home, built in sight of Kalawao’s cemetery, Damien wrote to his brother Auguste, also a priest, to say that Molokai was exactly where he wanted to be.

"We eat what Providence sends us. The calabash of poi is always full; there is also meat; water in quantity, coffee and bread sometimes, wine or beer never. As I have had to work all week and cook on Sunday, you will excuse me if my hands are not as clean as yours, which do nothing, I suppose, but turn the pages of books. Sometimes the plates are not well washed either. But what matter. Hunger and habit make us eat just the same. For dessert, we smoke a pipe. That finished, quickly back on the horse."

In the saddle, Damien would cross Molokai’s mountains; his parish over two thousand square kilometers, he rode down the island’s valleys beyond Kalawao itself, across water and through fields to find the most remote of his parishioners. Today it is a national park, wild garlic growing in fragrant profusion, its white flowers poking up between ferns, yellow hibiscus and amid the ki-tree, the roots of which were used to brew a potent beer. Across this paradise the finch-like honeycreeper flits, feeding off the red spindly flowers of the evergreen ‘ōhi‘a lehua tree. Damien would haul building material and basic medical supplies with him, eager to provide practical as much as spiritual comfort (though he never left without an ad hoc altar of four sticks and a plank). Sometimes he had to abandon the horse and mules to scale by hand and foot the sheer cliff faces which routinely stood between him and his flock. For Damien dirtiness brought him closer to godliness, the grime evidence of his graft.

For his colonial masters, those disdainful of his personal habits, the priest’s life was alien at best and an affront to Western order at worst; religion was supposed to be a cleansing antidote to indigenous habits, a washing-away of the idolatry and idleness they projected onto the population, be they sick or healthy. Yet here was Damien, adopting their ways, it would seem, along with their language. His body and the leprous bodies of his parishioners were dangerously entangled even before he himself succumbed to the disease. This was 1872, and the pious (and patronizing) commentators of the time muttered that Damien’s unvarnished personality was due to his simple farm upbringing in rural Belgium. “It is absolutely beyond doubt that he contracted the disease through his careless ministrations and uncleanly personal habits,” a representative of the Hawaiian Board of Health tutted, though not without something approaching admiration, noting the priest “would have leper boys at work in his kitchen so that he could give more time to his ministrations for others, being busy from peep of day until long after dark.” Dirty of body, dirty of mind, would be the eventual assumption: sexual proclivity was whispered. Damien’s brother, reading Latin scripture in a clean cassock 12,000 kilometers away, faced no such danger and no such accusations of moral lapse.

Damien was never supposed to achieve the fame he did, a symbol of global imperial paranoia and catalyst of religious fetish: a bronze statue, in which he wears his wide-brimmed hat, stick in hand, now represents the state of Hawaii in the US Capitol building’s Hall of Columns. He was never supposed to be the subject of culture wars in his lifetime and long after: in 2020, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried the choice of a white man as Washington’s symbol of the Polynesian fiftieth state. Damien was supposed to stay working in his parents’ fields in Tremelo, a dull village in a duller part of Belgium. The fact that celebrity landed upon him, plucking him from the obscurity of his mission to represent the burgeoning discourse on the disease, says more about the world that orbited him than his actions on the island or his own political nous. There were plenty of other missionaries, in plenty of other colonies, with plenty of other health issues, spreading religion and the soft arm of imperialism. Leprosy, however, had become totemic of a moral depravity or sexual freedom that Europeans had long imagined pervaded the South Seas. The leprous, lascivious body was a perversion that Western proselytizing could fix.

***

For indigenous Hawaiians, leprosy arrived as Damien did, an unwanted visitor from across the sea. The disease may have stowed away as early as Captain Cook’s colonial voyage, but it only became regarded as a public health issue eighty years later. “The commander manifested a laudable humanity, in endeavouring to shield the population from the evil effects which so inevitably result from connection between foreign seamen and the native females,” wrote one sympathetic European account of Cook’s trip. The evil effects weren’t just moral turpitude, but disease too. “But his efforts were in vain. If the discipline of his own crew could have been strictly enforced, the eagerness of the women was not to be repressed.” Historically, this genesis, regardless of whether the women were actually consenting, inextricably linked sickness with sex in the minds of Hawaiian and colonialist alike, with the former’s lack of conformity to Western and Christian mores taking the brunt of the responsibility in the minds of the latter.

The haole—the white incomers—dodged blame from among Hawaiians for leprosy too. As cases multiplied, the disease became known as ma‘i pake, the “Chinese sickness,” named after the thousands of Chinese laborers who arrived on the islands at the invitation of American traders endeavoring to create an export market in sandalwood (a precursor to the sugar industry that would dominate the economy in years to come). “There seems but one way to prevent the whole of Oceania from becoming leprous, and that is the exclusion or the rigid control of all Chinese coolies,” a Scottish physician warned. Wherever it came from, contact was devastating for the indigenous Hawaiian population, which plummeted from the healthy 683,000 people Cook first encountered to just under 40,000 Polynesian islanders left after a century of colonial enterprise and disease.

by Oliver Basciano, Literary Hub |  Read more:

Image: Kalaupapa, Molokai

11,700 Free Photos from John Margolies’ Archive of Americana Architecture: Download, Use & Re-Mix

Your children may not be able to visit an orange juice stand shaped like an orange or the Leaning Tower of Pizza, but thanks to the Library of Congress, these locales can be pitstops on any virtual family vacation you might undertake.

In July 2017, the library selected the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive as its “free to use and reuse” collection. So linger as long as you’d like and do with these 11,700+ images as you will–make postcards, t‑shirts, souvenir placemats.

Whatever you decide to do with them, the archive’s homepage has tips for how to best search the 11,710 color slides contained therein. Library staffers have supplemented Margolies’ notes on each image with subject and geographical headings.

Begin your journey through the Library of Congress’ John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive here.

by Ayun Halliday, Open Culture |  Read more:

Images: John Margolies/Library of Congress

Moist Towelette Museum

Moist Towelette Online Museum

Image: OtefukiTe is "hand" Fuki is "wipe." the O is the Japanese honorific, so you could call it "Honorable Hand Wipe" if you like.
[ed. Yep, it's real. Love the "old internet" vibe.]

Grocery Store Tourism

Grocery tourism is the hot trend of 2026 according to Condé Nast Traveler. This is all well and good, but also a bit late to the trolley because I have been practicing this trend since my twenties, although without the benefit of a name or a hashtag.

My two worlds met in the supermarket aisle. Before I was a travel writer and sent to places with hotel beds that appeared to have been prepared for minor royalty or a very clean corpse, I was a checkout chick at supermarket chain Coles. This was when prices were typed in by hand, making me feel like I was conducting a low-level NASA launch procedure.

A tin of pineapple rings would trundle towards me, and I would punch in its code. Behind it would come shampoo, fish fingers, instant pudding, 24 cans of Diet Coke, and a packet of aspirin. From these items, I could deduce entire family systems. Marriage trouble. School excursions. Flu. A birthday party. A woman about to murder everyone in her house unless she got a Mint Slice into herself immediately.

I loved the products. Not necessarily the customers who could turn feral over a five-cent discrepancy in canned tomatoes. The conveyor belt was a pageant of human need. It was anthropology in a polyester apron.

When people now declare that they have discovered grocery store tourism, I feel like saying, “We know. We’ve had those for years.”

My first trip to America should have been my grand supermarket awakening. I was a PR manager for Malaysia Airlines in the late ’90s, and we were launching a very long flight to New York from Sydney via KL and Dubai. I arrived bristling with ambition. I wanted to see the cereal aisle. Long had we heard rumors of American supermarkets. They were great glittering cathedrals of corn syrup with aisles devoted just to cereal and marshmallows in the shapes of everything from the moon and stars to presidents. I wanted to stand before them all in awe, like Moses, if Moses had come down from the mountain carrying Pop-Tarts.

But the group itinerary was against me. We went to Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and Saks. We went to FAO Schwarz. We went to Woodbury Common in New Jersey. But we did not go to a grocery store. We stayed at The Mark, and while it’s a beautiful hotel, it’s a hopeless base for a woman hoping to loiter near canned soup. Five days in New York and not a single trolley. I still consider this one of the great failures of my professional life.

Japan was different because come hell or highwater, I was finding a supermarket, and I did. Japan has KitKats in flavors that sound like haiku composed during a fever. There are soft drinks made of melon and sandwiches so neat they seem to have been assembled by watchmakers.

I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.

Every country gives itself away eventually. This is usually somewhere between the biscuits and the cleaning products. Finland offers Moomins in places no Australian supermarket would dare put a cartoon hippo. Singapore understands the spiritual importance of salted fish skin. Sweden puts things in tubes that should never be in tubes and then offers fermented herring.

And then the Netherlands has licorice. The Dutch have built an entire moral philosophy out of licorice. Sweet, salty, double-salty, hard, soft, shaped like coins, cars, and warnings from your dentist. I’ve always admired the Dutch, but this commitment to black chewy punishment is heroic. Sweden is not to be outdone and has thus flirted with licorice-flavored chips.

Then there are the products that cause the traveler to stop dead and reconsider the whole Enlightenment. In Vietnam, I couldn’t walk past snake wine without dancing an involuntary flamenco of horror. There was a snake in a bottle suspended in alcohol. Sometimes there were scorpions.

South Korea has canned silkworm pupae. Peru has coca tea. Colombia has arequipe. America has cheese in a spray can, which I respect as both a product and a cry for help.

And now, social media has turned all of this into content. Travelers narrate the experience into their phones. A German soccer fan can wander into an American Waffle House at one in the morning and emerge as a folk hero. Erewhon in Los Angeles has become a celebrity shrine where a smoothie can cost more than a small household appliance and one strawberry comes packaged like an engagement ring and with a similar price.

Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. ...

Museums tell you what a country wants to remember. Restaurants tell you what it wants photographed. Supermarkets tell you what it eats at 6:14 PM when everyone is tired and dinner has become a hostage negotiation. They tell you whether a nation believes in breakfast or whether its citizens require 12 flavors of mayonnaise or 87 yogurts. They disclose the private life of a destination complete with its anxieties and emergency snacks. They reveal the daily economic choices of consumers.

by Nicole James, The Freeman |  Read more:

Image: Yufei Yang/Conde Nast

The Hotness Curve

The Hotness Curve (how age changes a woman's appeal). (Aella - Knowingless)

Images: uncredited

[ed. Two and Five.]

The Decline of Deviance 2

In The Decline of Deviance, I argued that:

Many forms of risk-taking and rule-breaking have declined since the 1990s.

This is both good (less crime) and bad (less innovation).

Deviance is declining because prosperity has increased—people have more to lose, and they’re acting like it.

Since I put it out last October, this has become my most-read post of all time. Lots of folks have chimed in with hypotheses, critiques, and good old-fashioned internet dunks, so let’s see if we can take this idea one level deeper, and weave something out of all these loose threads.

That’s right: we’re doing a sequel to the post about how there are too many sequels.

THE KIDS STOPPED SMOKING AND NOBODY CARED

The most common response I got was: “how awful!”

(The trends, not the post itself, although that too sometimes.)

To most folks, the decline of deviance is a turn for the worst. Previous generations got to live through artistic golden ages, while we have to suffer through an era where there are four different movies that are all, technically, Spider-Man 2.[...]

But this response misses half the post, and the most important point.

In 1995, half of high school students drank, 35% smoked, and 40% had at least tried weed. 10% of them had brought a weapon to school at some point. About 6% of girls aged 15-19 were pregnant. Crime rates were about as high as they had been since we started keeping track of them.

Over the next 30 years, all of these problems shrank and some of them nearly disappeared. And not because of anything we did on purpose! We have no idea how to get kids to stop smoking—when we try to persuade them, we sometimes cause them to smoke more. No, these improvements happened basically by magic, for free, and—I think—as a byproduct of our increasing prosperity. This is like waking up one day to find that you’ve been left a large fortune by a long-lost aunt.

How does this great, unearned victory make us feel? Apparently, it doesn’t make us feel anything. We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s—no doubt we were spending considerable sums of money on anti-drug programs and public service announcements, wasting almost all of it—and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.

Now we’re on to worrying about whether the kids are too sad, whether they play outside enough, etc. Which is all reasonable and fine, but also, can we take a win? Can we at least try to reverse-engineer how some of these trendlines ended up going in our preferred directions, so we can make more of them do that?

I, too, would like to see a movie that is not Spider-Man 2. But I also appreciate that I can watch it safely in my home without fear of being attacked by pregnant teenage criminals.

THE INTERNET DIDN’T DO IT

Many people looked at the trends I presented and said, “Oh, the internet did this”. Maybe the internet killed the vibe by enabling mass surveillance—everyone’s afraid to be weird inside the digital panopticon, where all of your behaviors are recorded, uploaded, and permanently preserved. Or maybe the internet flattened culture by subjecting it to algorithmic curation. We can’t have nice things anymore because the computers won’t show them to us.

Both of these hypotheses are probably wrong, because the internet—at least, the internet as we know it today—simply showed up too late to be a plausible suspect. A majority of Americans didn’t get broadband until 2007. Instagram only launched in 2010, which was also the year that iPhones got a front-facing camera. So the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s, where we see many forms of deviance declining, is not really the transition from “pre-internet” to “post-internet”. That transition happened somewhere around 2012 when a majority of people got a smartphone, and long after most of these trends were already in motion.

So I don’t think the internet is the killer, but I do think it’s an accessory after the fact. In particular, I think the internet accelerated three trends that don’t get much attention. I’m going to call them cultural carcinization, de-frictioning, and the flat-Earth problem.

1. CULTURAL CARCINIZATION

In nature, apparently, being a crab is a good way to be. Several independent evolutionary lineages have ended up with crab-like body plans, a process called carcinization.

Culture can carcinize too, not in the sense that we all turn into crabs, but in the sense that we converge on a small set of strategies. If you’ve ever played a “social deduction” or “hidden role” game like Werewolf, Mafia, The Resistance, Avalon, or Secret Hitler, you’ve seen this happen in real time. Things start out wild and unpredictable as people get a feel for the rules. But everyone’s tactics have to evolve because each gambit can only work once (“If you’re the Secret Hitler, raise your hand right now!”). If you play long enough with the same group, eventually you’ll end up with a handful of maneuvers that continue to be viable even after they’re known, often because they’re difficult to pull off. At this point, the game becomes both extremely competitive and extremely repetitive. This is what cultural carcinization looks like.

The faster we can communicate, the faster we culturally carcinize. When information only travels as fast as humans can walk or horses can run, it takes a long time for any given strategy to play itself out. As we acquire steamships, railroads, telephones, and airplanes, the pace of the game picks up, and tactics have to turn over faster and faster. By the time we get the internet, it’s like every human on Earth is playing Secret Hitler a million times a day. (Except some people are not-so-secretly Hitlers.) Strategies appear and go out of date almost instantaneously until we all end up in a Nash equilibrium, where there’s no way for anyone to get the upper hand anymore.

The internet gives every social trend a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, speeding it toward its crablike final form. On Twitter, for instance, memes go from punchy to passé in a matter of days rather than decades. But if we could play culture on 1x speed rather than 10x speed, if we had time to screw around with different strategies before the game reached its cutthroat stage, we might have discovered different paths entirely. Maybe some folks would end up as crabs, while others became lobsters or kangaroos. Instead, in a hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, we end up with the same few memes, all done to death.

2. DE-FRICTIONING

We’ve forgotten how much time people in the past spent consuming content that they didn’t actually want to consume: the unskippable clunker of a song that came in the middle of an album, the late-night infomercial that you sat through because there was nothing else on, the magazine you read cover-to-cover in the waiting room because your doctor was 45 minutes late.

Each new media technology reduces this friction. CDs, TiVo, satellite radio, streaming—they all allow us to spend more time with the content that we supposedly desire. And what happens when this friction goes away? Well, in the mid-1990s, a pair of Russian artists named Komar and Melamid surveyed people around the world about their artistic preferences, and then they painted the “most wanted” scene from each country. The results looked like this:

The lesson here is that when people can articulate exactly what they want, and when the marketplace can give it to them, most folks end up sucking down slop. But I don’t think this is because humans yearn for crap and kitsch. I think it’s because no one knows actually what they like until they’re confronted by it. If you cater to people’s raw, undeveloped preferences, sure, you’re going to take them to Sloptown. But people are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes, if you give them the chance. This is the work art does for us—it stretches our desires, rather than merely satisfying them. [...]

This is Komar and Melamid’s second lesson: if you want to see something interesting, you have to see things that you might dislike. And I don’t mean things that merely bore you, like an AI-written Netflix series that’s only meant to be half-watched while you also shop for shoes on your phone. I mean things that grab your attention, only to slap it around. Acquiring new tastes means, from time to time, spitting things out.

In a frictionless environment, however, this never has to happen. The internet excels at identifying what people already seem to want, and giving it to them good and hard. Oh, you liked that video where a monkey eats a piece of cantaloupe? How about 30 million more of those? How about an anteater licking a watermelon? Will that keep your attention for another three seconds? Wait, don’t go yet!! We’ve got a baby hedgehog nibbling on a pineapple!!

3. THE FLAT-EARTH PROBLEM

People once theorized that globalization would cause niche culture to thrive because small-timers could make their living by selling to a tiny proportion of the populace spread all over the globe—the so-called “long tail”. That did become possible, but it didn’t become desirable. Everybody came to the same realization: once you can reach anyone, why not try to reach everyone? Why sell to one thousand people in every single country, when you could sell to every single person in every single country?

Here’s the rub: the more customers you want, the more you have to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you want your film to play in every theater on earth, then it has to appeal to eight billion different sensibilities, which also means it’s going to suck. This is the flat-Earth problem.

It’s easy to see these effects if you know where to look. Because Hollywood wants to sell movies in every market, they’re willing to do everything from editing out laundry clotheslines that make a country look “too backward” to pretending that Freddie Mercury wasn’t gay. [...] 

AM I JUST UNCOOL?

While some folks blamed the internet for the decline of deviance, other people denied the decline entirely.

One common retort to my argument was that I’m just an old fuddy-duddy. For example, a blogger named Jenn claims that I am too uncool and out of touch to understand the cultural innovation happening in new forms of media like YouTube and Roblox. “Before I take a ‘culture is stagnating’ take seriously,” Jenn writes, “I want to see proof of work by the critics.” She concludes: “The culture is fine. Go play Return of the Obra Dinn.” (Return of the Obra Dinn is a video game.) [...]

Pettiness aside, I think Jenn’s claim is plausible: the older you get, the less access you have to the most interesting parts of culture. If you think things are stagnating, you’re just admitting that you aren’t getting invited to the cool parties anymore. Plus, old folks can’t stop themselves from seeing the past through rose-colored glasses—in survey after survey, people think pretty much everything in culture just happened to peak when they were between four and twelve years old:

(source: YouGov via The Washington Post)

But things get a little more complicated when you separate people’s responses by age. When you first glance at this YouGov survey, it seems like every generation strongly prefers the music from their own childhood:

But look a little closer. The responses from Gen X, Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation all have a clear peak flanked by much smaller hills. Millennials’ preferences, on the other hand, are more spread out. And Gen Z’s preferences are basically a plateau—they’re almost equally likely to nominate the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.

We can’t know whether this is an age effect that they’ll grow out of—maybe every generation was culturally omnivorous when they were younger, and their tastes only calcified when they got older. But I doubt it. For all you Gen X’ers out there, did you spend your teenage years spinning your parents’ Perry Como records until you suddenly switched to Led Zeppelin in adulthood?

Besides, Jenn’s age argument cuts both ways. Old folks are biased by nostalgia, but young folks are biased by inexperience. When you’re young, everything seems new because it’s new to you. You don’t know that your favorite anime is a rehash of a movie from the 1980s, because you weren’t alive in the 1980s. You’re not tired of the tropes yet because you’ve only seem them a few dozen times. You can’t pine for what you lost because you never had it in the first place.

It’s reasonable to be skeptical of any narrative of decline—I did my PhD on why people perceive declines that haven’t actually happened. But (a), unlike most of those spurious nostalgic fantasies, the decline of deviance has both pros and cons. And (b), there are so many weird phenomena here and they need explaining, not just waving away.

For instance— [...]

NO MORE STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

Another theory that readers put forward: the deviance got scarce because life got hard. Nobody can do cool art anymore because everything is too expensive: housing, college, supplies, etc.

I think this is probably wrong. I suspect that it’s always been hard to be an artist, and previous generations were simply more willing to starve for it—not because they were braver, but because the difference between starving and not-starving used to be much smaller. [...]

You don’t have to go that far into the past to find a kind of poverty that feels foreign today. I read an article a while back about punk musicians living in New York in the 1970s, and they’re sleeping in roach-infested flophouses, they’re making music in abandoned buildings, they’re getting evicted and mugged and addicted to drugs.They’re truly broke, not “I can’t contribute to my retirement fund this month” broke, but “I might have to spend the night on this bench because I can’t afford a bus ticket back home” broke. I know plenty of aspiring musicians are out there slumming it right now, but this is a level of deprivation that most folks in developed countries would find unacceptable, if not downright dangerous. Once you’re sleeping rough, it’s time to hawk the guitar and call the temp agency.

That’s not because dire poverty became less glamorous—it was never glamorous!—but because it became uncommon. When five musicians spend the night in a bus station, that’s called being punk. When one musician spends the night in a bus station, that’s called being homeless.

The richer the world gets, the higher the opportunity cost that starving artists have to pay. If you’ve got the chops to write a great novel, then you might also have the chops to make $95k working as a product manager for some mid-sized fintech firm. If your alternative was tilling turnips or spending six months at sea hunting sperm whales, you might say, screw it, I’d rather go hungry for my art than go somewhat less hungry for anything else. But that manuscript in your desk drawer is less enticing when you can have PTO and dental and an annual international vacation where you get to sleep in a bed that doesn’t have any strangers in it. [...]

As William James wrote 100 years ago:

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. [...] We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly,—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.

The difference is that today we don’t despise people who elect to be poor, I think, because we don’t know any of them.

THE DECLINE OF DEVIANCE, THE RISE OF TOLERANCE

Many people asked some version of, “Is the decline of deviance actually an increase in tolerance?” After all, even if you wanted to be deviant today, how would you do it? [...]

So no doubt part of the decline of deviance is an increase in tolerance. But I think it, too, can be explained by the rise of mass prosperity.

The economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that nations get rich when they build inclusive economic and political institutions. Oligarchs and aristocrats fear any growth or reform that they can’t control, which in practice means basically all growth and reform. (“We do not desire at all that the great masses shall become well off and independent,” once remarked Frederick Gantz, an imperial flunky of Francis I of Austria. “How could we otherwise rule over them?”) If the plebs and the serfs can get a bit of money and power, however, it kicks off a virtuous cycle. Once people have some cash and influence, it becomes bad business and bad politics to shut them out—if you won’t engage with them, someone else will, and your more open-minded rivals will eventually out-compete you.

This process takes a long time, it’s uneven, and it’s not close to being completed. However, a few generations of semi-inclusive institutions have created a much wider spectrum of acceptable lifestyles. If you want to live in a polyamorous, genderless vegan witch commune, you can order your nutritional yeast on Amazon, trade memes with your friends on Tumblr, and vote for Democrats who think your choices are a-ok. If you want to live in a neoreactionary monarchist compound where you stockpile weapons and hunt bears, you can buy your guns at Wal-Mart, read posts on TruthSocial, and vote for Republicans who are on board with all of it. As long as you have money to spend and ballots to cast, someone can get ahead by catering to you.

(Case in point: one of the “platinum sponsors” of the New York City Pride Parade is Deutsche Bank.)

This is a good thing. Inclusive institutions make everybody better off, except for the few cleptocrats who used to live in palaces while everyone else lived in shacks.

The downside is that every corner of culture gets commercialized. Reading comic books, listening to death metal, piercing body parts other than your ears—these used to be legitimately countercultural acts that distanced you from polite society and bonded you to an alternative community. Now you can do all these things at the mall. The Hot Topic-ization of culture means that anything new and interesting gets co-opted and mass-produced, thus draining it of everything that made it cool in the first place.

by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History | Read more:
Images: Mr. Mastrioianni; Joanna M. Wolfe; YouGov/WaPo; YouGov

What Does Dressing Up Mean Today?

I understand that we’re all dressing more casually these days, especially so since the pandemic. But there is something special about going to a play or a nice restaurant, and increasingly I’m seeing folks at such places dressed in what they’d wear to the supermarket or to do chores around the house — which kind of makes me sad. Are we losing something? — Janet, New York City

***

Dressing up can be one of the great joys of life. It is a shared human ritual, a mode of self-expression and a sign of respect. It helps mark time and set moments apart. It is an external expression of inner psychological and emotional states. It is a message to those around you.

That’s not me speculating or playing up the importance of clothes because I’m a fashion critic. It’s an actual thing, known as enclothed cognition — and that’s what you’re sensing has been lost.

A term coined in 2012 in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky, enclothed cognition refers to “the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes.” Essentially, the paper posited that the physical experience of wearing clothes, when combined with their symbolic meaning, affects how we think about ourselves and about other people.

That hypothesis was proved through an experiment involving white lab coats. When people, like doctors, wore them, they tended to pay more attention to what they were doing. The act of wearing the coat changed their behavior.

That is why fairy tales almost always invoke the literal magic of getting dressed. Why people used to dress for the theater, for dinner, for travel, for job interviews, for church, for cocktails, for parties. Why, when I am working at home, I put on my shoes to tell myself it’s time to focus.

But as you say, while we still dress for the big rituals of life, it seems increasingly that more everyday events are considered … well, not worth the trouble.

Somewhere between Silicon Valley’s declaration of independence from the suit and the rise of athleisure, dressing up became conflated with dressing expensively, uncomfortably and (even worse) according to outdated social conventions. Doing so was seen as something you were supposed to do, rather than something you might choose to do, and rejecting those conventions was seen as progress.

What is actually happening, though, is that we are scrambling our signals.

That doesn’t mean we should rush back to the safety of old-fashioned dress codes. At this point, those have definitively gone the way of the dodo. But it does mean we have to reconsider what getting “dressed up” really means, and that has less to do with any mass social definition than with a simple state of mind. Or so I found when I started asking around.

“To me, dressing up is about intention,” the designer Joseph Altuzarra said. “It has to do with the act of getting dressed with purpose and thoughtfulness, with a conscious decision to step into a particular version of yourself.”

Ikram Goldman, the owner of the Chicago retail emporium Ikram, had much the same response. Dressing up, she said, is about “looking polished” — though that term is largely in the brain, and eye, of the individual.

Goldman’s definition of polish: “Never wear jeans; no flip-flops; hair, nails and makeup done.” For Altuzarra, you can dress up in “perfectly fitting jeans and a crisp white T-shirt” as long as there is emphasis on the “perfectly fitting” and the “crisp.”

For his part, Law Roach, the “Project Runway” executive producer and Zendaya’s image architect, said he feels dressed up when he’s wearing “jeans held up with an Hermès scarf for a belt” or one of the “vintage Armani suits from the ’80s I get from a little store in Brooklyn.” [ed. image architect. that is a new one.]

The point, he said, “is putting something on that makes you feel special.” Something that implies a certain amount of care and consideration. Something that signals to your brain, as Adam and Galinsky might say, that what is about to happen is worth anticipating — and triggers the dopamine hit that comes when you realize, as Roach said, that “having somewhere to go is more of a luxury than ever before.”

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images

Good Vibrations

Remember the vibe shift? In 2024, first as the election approached and then after Donald Trump’s victory, pundits and political strategists lined up to declare its cultural meaning quite expansive — a shift not just in electoral politics but also in the partisan alignment and cultural life of the whole country. This was the beginning of an era, we were told; his election was perhaps as significant as the one that once heralded the Reagan revolution or what was called the emerging Democratic majority in Barack Obama’s multicultural America.

A new course had been plotted, and the country would be moving MAGA-ward — both in politics and beyond it. The heavy-handed safetyism of the pandemic era was over, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion. The border would be closed and perhaps tens of millions of people deported. Domineering masculinity and throwback gender norms would reign again in Washington and beyond. And unchecked capitalism would be so fully unleashed that bankers were already feeling empowered to throw around slurs again.

It’s been a while since anyone talked in such triumphalist terms about MAGA’s cultural victory — maybe since the time that the people of Minneapolis essentially repelled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement units that had descended on their city. The cruel kids’ table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country.

The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.

But between the July 2024 assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if there had been a significant shift. It seemed Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well.

Liberals, it appeared, had been ejected from the cultural driver’s seat. To almost everyone contemplating Project 2025 and TrumpCoin and the inauguration stacked with Silicon Valley’s richest, it seemed intuitive that the election told us something profound not just about the politics to come but also about the nature of the country — the vibe shift so clear and obvious that elite liberal institutions, from law firms to top universities and media and entertainment companies, raced to accommodate it.

Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals. We haven’t even hit the midterms yet, and the prospect of an enduring MAGA majority doesn’t look like the natural path of the American future. It looks like a projection from the recent past, already fading.

There are any number of ways to mark the shift back: the president’s abysmal approval ratings, including a –50 net approval rating among independents; the fact that Democrats, hated as they may seem, now have a pretty good chance of winning control of the Senate; the hugely unpopular Iran war coming to such a humiliating end.

But the most vivid might be the planned celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday. A year or so ago, we were told that MAGA had won the culture wars, but barely a year later, when organizers with close ties to the White House tried to put together the Great American State Fair, the biggest stars they could attract were Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice and the living half of Milli Vanilli. Most of the performers who were announced quickly pulled out, then got called “libtards” by a cabinet secretary for doing so, and the lineup was repopulated by fillers like the girlfriend of the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel. Motocross bikers did flying tricks on the White House lawn — which called to mind Evel Knievel rather than any less ironic embodiment of American greatness — and the White House staged a high-profile Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn that Americans judged inappropriate by a 3-to-1 ratio. And that was before the fighter Josh Hokit celebrated his victory by declaring that Michelle Obama was a man, as Joe Rogan giggled beside him.

A year ago, the U.F.C. spectacle might have seemed like a mark of right-wing cultural ascendancy, even though fewer Americans watch combat sports or motocross than they do tennis, hockey, soccer or golf; even though Americans have, by and large, hated Mr. Trump’s rash remodeling of the White House property; and even though Mr. Rogan has spent 2026 criticizing the president on deportations, corruption, wars and foreign policy. But by the summer of 2026, it looked like the kind of imperial indulgence that tends to mark the end, not the apogee, of a given reign.

What happened? One explanation is that Mr. Trump simply squandered his advantage. His tariff crusade produced a burst of inflation. DOGE was a dud. His invasion of American cities in the name of immigration enforcement was so violent and aggressive, it seems to have alienated even those voters who wanted more serious action at the border. And his attacks on foreign countries exposed American military vulnerability, drove a big spike in the price of oil and other products and lost him any claim he might have had to being an antiwar president (always a dubious claim but a relatively widely held one nevertheless).

But look at Mr. Trump’s declining approval ratings, and you see a pretty steady line, from about plus-12 net approval on Inauguration Day to almost negative 19 this month. On particular issues, the decline has gone even further. On inflation, for instance, his net approval has fallen by almost 40 points. Same with demographic subgroups, perhaps most conspicuously those said to be central to MAGA’s claim on the country’s future.

His net approval with young voters has fallen by as much as 50 points, depending on the poll. His net approval among Black Americans was –9 on Inauguration Day and has fallen to –50 today, according to Decision Desk. Among Hispanic voters, said to be a new MAGA bulwark, the president is about 20 points underwater. In his first term, he grew steadily more unpopular but held on to the white working-class voters serving as his base. This time, their patience wore thin quickly, and their support for the president collapsed like everybody else’s.

This may seem like normal postinauguration decline, but the fact that Mr. Trump would be following a normal path toward unpopularity is itself a kind of narrative violation.

During his first term, pundits often marveled at the durability of his base: How could it be that someone so noxious and erratic, peddling such punitive and destructive politics, retained the unswerving backing of so many Americans? To some, he looked like such a transformative figure that the old rules no longer applied; others called him Teflon Don.

But in his second term, there isn’t much of a mystery or obvious superpower. Mr. Trump is in the same neighborhood as George W. Bush was at this point in his second term and no more popular than Joe Biden was at the end of his presidency, and the longer Americans live with Mr. Trump, the more they dislike him. Part of this is the result of voters seeing promise in his 2024 campaign that he was never likely to fulfill, rather than the more predictable path — toward punitive and incompetent governance laced through with corruption and self-dealing. But if Trumpism in office has done so much damage to MAGA’s popularity, it means, among other things, that the support wasn’t that robust in the first place.

As it turned out, according to YouGov, the only sustained period in which Mr. Trump’s personal favorability ratings were positive, since they started measuring them in early 2016, was in the one or two months around Election Day 2024. He was elected again by just 1.5 percentage points and did not even win a majority of votes in the midst of a global anti-incumbency wave.

We heard a lot about the red shifts along the Rio Grande and among New York’s working class, but those populations have swung so far back that they helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor in New York City and have helped revive the perennial Democratic dream of a blue Texas. Project 2025 looked on Inauguration Day like a policy Death Star, but Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive actions has been stymied in the courts, and these days it doesn’t seem that he spent the Biden years building a willing army of ideological loyalists. Instead, he can’t manage to find people to hire for very important jobs. Is that supposed to be a mark of populist integrity, that actual staffing proves to be an unsolvable problem?

On the surface, the rightward lurch of tech oligarchs appears perhaps the stickiest shift of the last cycle, with many leading figures in Silicon Valley still talking about tech accelerationism and how much liberals hate progress — and one of them, the most outspoken Trumper, becoming the world’s first trillionaire along the way. Yet even this phenomenon looks, on closer scrutiny, more like the drift of a few tech leaders than the arrival of an entirely new partisan landscape across the industry or region.

In 2024, tech titans donated much more to Republicans than they did in other recent years, then funded and attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration, celebrating it as a return of sanity or perhaps masculinity. But in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where almost 1.5 million votes were cast in 2024, he won only 3,500 more votes than he did in 2020. Does that look like a culture-spanning vibe shift? Or like the strategic alliance of a relatively small number of wealthy executives and the candidate they believed would happily let them write their own ticket, policywise? Mark Zuckerberg isn’t even wearing his chain anymore.

MAGA was never just a political movement. It pulled anti-establishment sentiment into a bundle with hard-line evangelicals and a new breed of gender traditionalists, unapologetic and rapacious entrepreneurs and those who spent the last decade bristling against the cultural reign of what the progressive wonk Matt Stoller recently called — pretty rudely — “HR lady” liberalism.

In the cultural sphere, those shifts are both a bit harder to measure and perhaps more enduring than the ballot-box version of MAGA. Affirmative action looks genuinely dead, and the SAT is once again a requirement for admission at even those elite universities that briefly made it optional in the name of social justice. Big business still stands cocky and empowered.

Artificial intelligence still mostly holds sway in policy, and the immense wealth of its biggest cheerleaders may mean that hands-off consensus will endure, though the backlash against A.I. and data centers has been astonishingly swift, too, with four times as many Americans saying they were concerned about the A.I. future as were unconcerned about it. Presumably the culture of self-dealing and corruption won’t endure unchanged if a Democrat takes the White House. But it’s also hard to believe — given the ambient presence of gambling apps, for instance — that on questions of self-interest and acquisitiveness the country will return to the standards and propriety of the Obama years. [...]

Hollywood has taken a few steps away from peak woke, but we haven’t seen anything like the pivot from 1970s New Hollywood cynicism to 1980s American flag blockbusters. Corporate America has gotten a bit less gung-ho about D.E.I. but still looks to conservatives to be impossibly woke. The temperature of climate alarm has cooled, but American concern about global warming is just a couple of points off its peak. And while the internet has grown a bit more right wing overall, it’s hard to know if any of that is natural drift, given how much more money has been spent on purchasing platforms and recalibrating algorithms.

The most worrying pattern may be around gender and sexuality, which seems significant enough it can make the whole MAGA phenomenon look like an expression of gender backlash. As recently as 2022, fewer than 30 percent of Republican men surveyed said they believed that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” but two years later, that number was 48 percent. Among Republican women, the number jumped 14 points.

Support for same-sex marriage among all Americans has dropped six points since 2023, but the drop is powered by Republicans. In 2022, 56 percent of them told pollsters that same-sex relations were morally acceptable; in 2026, that figure was just 35 percent — lower than when the Supreme Court decided Obergefell in 2015 and lower even than when Mr. Obama belatedly came out in favor of gay marriage in 2012. In 2016 many liberal Americans believed that Mr. Trump was the reactionary product of the country’s ongoing race conflicts. A decade later, gender looks like a much more illuminating skeleton key. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Erika Kirk is a favorite punching bag of the country now.

But nationally, even these declines can be measured in just a few percentage points, and outside MAGA, it’s not clear how much, if any, ground has been lost since the peak woke years. Democratic men have grown perhaps one or two percentage points more reactionary in their views of gender since 2019, and Democratic women haven’t moved much at all. The share of Democrats saying gay sex is morally acceptable is higher than it was in 2019, as is true for independents, though each is down a bit from a Biden-era peak.

Shifts of just a few points matter, of course, for culture as well as for politics. For obvious reasons, the past 10 years can’t really be called anything other than the Trump era, and Americans will be dealing with the fallout for a very long time — in culture and in politics. But in retrospect it seems we might have gotten ahead of ourselves in tabulating all the things, beyond who was in power, that had really changed about the country as a whole.

Perhaps this sounds like liberal cope; probably at least some of it is. But it is also a reminder that partisan outcomes do not offer precise and comprehensive X-rays of the country, that politicians are rarely the avatars of national meaning we want them to be, that even in a time of hyperpolitics most Americans are pretty disengaged from partisan squabbles and that whenever we try to erect a simple new story about the country on the basis of a couple of percentage-points shifts, we should probably expect the foundation to give way pretty quickly beneath our feet.

by David Wallace Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Pretty thorough and thoughtful essay. See also: Trumpland and Inverted Totalitarianism (SheerPost).]