Saturday, December 27, 2025
Lost Vegas
At a bar downstairs at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, I recently found myself next to a 67-year-old man who had come to town to get a tattoo on his shoulder. The tattoo in question was of Yosemite Falls, in California. As best I could understand it, he was getting branded with the landmark because he was enmeshed in a situationship that wasn’t working out. He and this woman had apparently taken a memorable trip to Yosemite earlier this year, and he hoped that—after he showed her the tattoo—a tarnished spark would be rekindled. I wished him all the luck in the world as he took his leave of me, and for a few minutes, I was alone among the chirping slot machines, nursing a gin and soda and pondering how no place on Earth can make you believe the impossible quite like Las Vegas.
I know more people who hate Las Vegas than love it, and I’ve never been able to construct a convincing argument for why they’re wrong. We are granted only so many vacations in this life, and it might seem ill-considered to spend one of them watching the Blue Man Group in an Egyptian-themed hotel in the Nevadan desert. But here I was, at the Luxor, on a quest to renew my love affair with this city.
The hotel, located at the tip of the Las Vegas Strip, remains a crown jewel of the city’s famed themed-resort district. The building is a matte-black pyramid, fitted with 4,407 rooms and 65,000 square feet of gaming space, all flourished with pop-Egyptian pastiche. Incoherent hieroglyphs plate the walls, plastic pharaohs stand guard in the check-in lane, and taxis idle under the haunches of a gargantuan Sphinx. I had arrived at the hotel on a balmy afternoon in early autumn and took the elevator to a third-floor suite on the southern face of the pyramid, desert sun pouring through the slanted floor-to-ceiling windows. The resort has long been known as one of the more budget-friendly options in Las Vegas, but it has never been cheaper than it is today. That’s because the Luxor, like so many other hotels in the city, is currently half off.
In September, the Luxor participated in the “Fabulous Five-Day Sale,” a massive weeklong initiative launched by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, offering cut-rate deals on restaurants, resorts, and shows across the city. The goal was to coax lapsed vacationers back to America’s sanctum of indulgence, greasing the wheels of a hospitality sector that’s struggled all year long. More to the point, it was a tacit admission that something in Las Vegas had gone awry. Significantly fewer visitors have come to the city in 2025 than they did in 2024, when Vegas hosted more than 41 million travelers, and it’s now facing the worst dip in traffic since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Agitators in the city have attempted to document the deterioration by posting ominous images of barren casinos, conjuring the perception of a place hollowed out by economic armageddon. The reality is more nuanced, but it is true that practically every conceivable indicator tracking tourism to Las Vegas is flashing warning signs. Hotel occupancy has cratered. Rooms were only 66.7 percent full in July, down by 16.8 percent from the previous year. The number of travelers passing through Harry Reid International Airport also declined by 4.5 percent in 2025 during an ongoing ebb of foreign tourists, for familiar reasons. Canadians, historically one of the city’s most reliable sources of degenerates, have effectively vanished. Ticket sales for Air Canada jets flying to Las Vegas have slipped by 33 percent, while the Edmonton-based low-cost carrier Flair has reported a 62 percent drop-off. Those last data points have provoked the city’s mayor, Shelley Berkley, to engage in some emergency diplomacy. In September, she implored our neighbors from the north to make their prodigal return to the Strip.
“I’m telling everyone in Canada, please come,” she said. “We love you, we miss you, we need you.”
Where did everyone go? Nobody seems to know for sure. It’s clear that the city is in the midst of a rough season. What is more vexing is diagnosing what the issue actually is. Are there some obvious, observable problems to explain the swoon? To a certain extent, yes. Vegas has grown more expensive in recent years—hotels and restaurants have gotten pricier, gambling more extractive. But complaints about the cost of leisure have also hampered every other city in America. Tourism is down nationwide, even if destinations like New York City and Los Angeles haven’t suffered as much as Vegas. The terminal plunge of Canadian visitation, meanwhile, is almost certainly related to Donald Trump’s goading the nation at every opportunity. This trend is set to continue into 2026, with experts forecasting as much as a 6 percent drop in foreign visitation to the United States, curtailing tourism sectors all across the country.
But what’s ailing Vegas might be harder to quantify than any material factor—closer to spiritual rot than pure economic tumult. Multiple generations of Americans have been socialized to believe that a mecca of cheap, dirty pleasures awaits in the wastelands of southern Nevada. And for a long time, that was basically true. The mythology of Las Vegas is all-day buffet counters as big as football fields, of David Copperfield tickets that cost the same as a cup of coffee, of indoor cigarettes and comped drinks and the irresponsible ideas those forces can summon in tandem. Las Vegas took your money with gracious respect for your degeneracy, gouging you sweetly and slowly. The magnitude of excess saturated time itself. Somehow, no matter how much you lost at the casino—and you will lose at the casino—it always felt as if you got your money’s worth.
These days, though, that dream is in tatters. Millions of people seem to have determined that Las Vegas has become corroded—its joys less accessible, its humiliations too dire. And that is precisely why I, a longtime devotee of the city, found myself at the Luxor for a three-day stint in October. If Las Vegas was truly in decline, I wanted to see for myself what had gone so wrong. And boy did I.
I know more people who hate Las Vegas than love it, and I’ve never been able to construct a convincing argument for why they’re wrong. We are granted only so many vacations in this life, and it might seem ill-considered to spend one of them watching the Blue Man Group in an Egyptian-themed hotel in the Nevadan desert. But here I was, at the Luxor, on a quest to renew my love affair with this city.
In September, the Luxor participated in the “Fabulous Five-Day Sale,” a massive weeklong initiative launched by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, offering cut-rate deals on restaurants, resorts, and shows across the city. The goal was to coax lapsed vacationers back to America’s sanctum of indulgence, greasing the wheels of a hospitality sector that’s struggled all year long. More to the point, it was a tacit admission that something in Las Vegas had gone awry. Significantly fewer visitors have come to the city in 2025 than they did in 2024, when Vegas hosted more than 41 million travelers, and it’s now facing the worst dip in traffic since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Agitators in the city have attempted to document the deterioration by posting ominous images of barren casinos, conjuring the perception of a place hollowed out by economic armageddon. The reality is more nuanced, but it is true that practically every conceivable indicator tracking tourism to Las Vegas is flashing warning signs. Hotel occupancy has cratered. Rooms were only 66.7 percent full in July, down by 16.8 percent from the previous year. The number of travelers passing through Harry Reid International Airport also declined by 4.5 percent in 2025 during an ongoing ebb of foreign tourists, for familiar reasons. Canadians, historically one of the city’s most reliable sources of degenerates, have effectively vanished. Ticket sales for Air Canada jets flying to Las Vegas have slipped by 33 percent, while the Edmonton-based low-cost carrier Flair has reported a 62 percent drop-off. Those last data points have provoked the city’s mayor, Shelley Berkley, to engage in some emergency diplomacy. In September, she implored our neighbors from the north to make their prodigal return to the Strip.
“I’m telling everyone in Canada, please come,” she said. “We love you, we miss you, we need you.”
Where did everyone go? Nobody seems to know for sure. It’s clear that the city is in the midst of a rough season. What is more vexing is diagnosing what the issue actually is. Are there some obvious, observable problems to explain the swoon? To a certain extent, yes. Vegas has grown more expensive in recent years—hotels and restaurants have gotten pricier, gambling more extractive. But complaints about the cost of leisure have also hampered every other city in America. Tourism is down nationwide, even if destinations like New York City and Los Angeles haven’t suffered as much as Vegas. The terminal plunge of Canadian visitation, meanwhile, is almost certainly related to Donald Trump’s goading the nation at every opportunity. This trend is set to continue into 2026, with experts forecasting as much as a 6 percent drop in foreign visitation to the United States, curtailing tourism sectors all across the country.
But what’s ailing Vegas might be harder to quantify than any material factor—closer to spiritual rot than pure economic tumult. Multiple generations of Americans have been socialized to believe that a mecca of cheap, dirty pleasures awaits in the wastelands of southern Nevada. And for a long time, that was basically true. The mythology of Las Vegas is all-day buffet counters as big as football fields, of David Copperfield tickets that cost the same as a cup of coffee, of indoor cigarettes and comped drinks and the irresponsible ideas those forces can summon in tandem. Las Vegas took your money with gracious respect for your degeneracy, gouging you sweetly and slowly. The magnitude of excess saturated time itself. Somehow, no matter how much you lost at the casino—and you will lose at the casino—it always felt as if you got your money’s worth.
These days, though, that dream is in tatters. Millions of people seem to have determined that Las Vegas has become corroded—its joys less accessible, its humiliations too dire. And that is precisely why I, a longtime devotee of the city, found myself at the Luxor for a three-day stint in October. If Las Vegas was truly in decline, I wanted to see for myself what had gone so wrong. And boy did I.
John and Kristina Mehaffey, the husband-and-wife duo who run the gambling news website Vegas Advantage, asked to meet me at Harrah’s, one of the chintzier casinos on the Strip, located just up the road from Madame Tussauds. Vegas Advantage is famous for its obsessively updated database, which tracks the city’s gambling landscape. If a game room has just installed a fresh band of blackjack felt, the Mehaffeys are the first to know. I reached out to them because I wanted a tour of the infamous triple-zero roulette wheels, which have become a symbol for latter-day Las Vegas hubris. These tables were unheard of in the city until 2016, when two of them made landfall in the bowels of the luxe Venetian. The game has since proliferated across the Strip, for one reason: Every time a player sits down for a few spins of triple zero, they’re getting ripped off.
The Mehaffeys escorted me past the blinking slot machines and into the pit, where we sidled up alongside a gaggle of players peering over the wheel—watching the silver ball zip along the rim. John explained the math: A standard roulette table has 36 numbers—half red, half black. Hit your number, and you’re paid 35 to 1; bet on a color, and you double your money. Quantitatively speaking, a roulette wheel fashioned this way would be totally fair. “Theoretically, over a million spins, you’d get 100 percent of your money back,” said John.
A green felt table with numbers and alternating orange and black squares. There are three zeros at the beginning, making the odds worse for the player.A green felt table with numbers and alternating orange and black squares. There are three zeros at the beginning, making the odds worse for the player.
A triple-zero roulette table. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images Plus.
Where the house maintains its edge is in the two additional numbers foisted upon the roulette wheel, a single zero and a double zero, both painted green. With those digits in place, betting on red or black is no longer a 50/50 proposition, and if a player is lucky enough to score a win on a 7, or a 12, or a 28, they’re still making what they bet back by a multiplication of just 35—despite the fact that those green spaces allow for 38 potential outcomes. All this is to say that each zero added to a roulette table increases the revenue it scrapes from players by 2.7 percentage points. So, in a moment of incredible audacity, the power brokers of Las Vegas decided to sharpen their advantage, festooning a gauche and unsightly triple zero to their wheels, plundering our wallets more efficiently than ever before.
Why would anyone put up with those bad odds? That’s not quite the right question to ask. Later on in the day, I watched a bachelor party descend upon a triple-zero wheel, despite that, right next to them, bathed in fluorescent light, a double-zero table—encircled by empty seats—waited for customers. The serene, vodka-buzzed tourists either didn’t know or didn’t care that they were inches away from a much better deal. Vegas happily feasted upon that ambivalence all night long.
Vegas seems to have exported its triple-zero philosophy across the Strip. Another casualty is blackjack, which remains the most popular casino attraction in the city. Historically, the game has followed a golden rule. If you are dealt 21—an ace and a 10—you’ve hit blackjack, and your wager is paid out on a 3-to-2 ratio. (A $100 bet nets $150, and so on.) But Vegas has since altered the rules. Now, on most tables, blackjack is rewarded with a 6-to-5 equation; that same $100 kicks back only $120, significantly curtailing just how lucky someone is allowed to get. Again, it’s not hard to see why Vegas casinos made the change. “They’re tripling the house edge,” John told me. “It went up from about 0.66 percent to 2 percent.”
Even if a gambler is willing to tolerate these perversions of tradition, the price of admission in Vegas has skyrocketed. According to John’s research, in 2020, 38 casinos in the greater Las Vegas gambling market featured tables dealing 3-to-2 blackjack capped at a $5 minimum bet. (As in, to play, you need to risk at least $5 per hand.) These days, that group has dropped to six casinos. Prowl through the Strip after dark, sift through the pits, and you’ll feel the difference. Most table games in 2025 force patrons to sacrifice painful amounts of cash to its maw—$25 minimums are basically standard. Fifty-dollar minimums aren’t uncommon either. Even more deviously, some Vegas properties force customers to pay a premium to access friendlier rules. I came across exactly one ultra-rare single-zero roulette wheel on the Strip, which felt a little bit like uncovering the hutch of the last surviving dodo. Naturally, it was stowed away in a high-limit room. (...)
It might seem wise to make room for smaller bankrolls in the city—the soul of Las Vegas is contingent on budget travelers—but those appeals are invariably ignored. Like so many other pleasures of modern life, Las Vegas is increasingly becoming a city financed by private equity. Harrah’s Entertainment, the gambling company that owned the casino where I met the Mehaffeys, was sold to a pair of equity sponsors in 2008 for $27.8 billion. One of those firms was Apollo Global Management, a New York–based real-estate holdings group that in 2022 made a play for the iconic Venetian hotel. That pattern has continued across the Strip. Blackstone, the commercial real-estate giant, entered sale-leaseback agreements for the Bellagio in 2019 and picked up the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay in the years afterward. Blackstone would later sell some of those investments to Vici Properties, a real-estate investment fund founded in 2017, which owns a total of 54 casinos. The mom-and-pops have been bought off, the copper wiring is stripped, and as so often is the case with Wall Street, that tends to be the plan all along.
“The casinos on the Strip are no longer being driven by personalities at leadership. They’re being driven by corporate politics. So they have a different attitude about how you treat your consumers,” said Andrew Woods, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Why wouldn’t the resort industry find a way to maximize shareholder value by nickel-and-diming their consumers? Especially when, until very recently, those consumers haven’t pushed back.”
His point recalled a conversation I had with Jacob Orth, better known by his online moniker JacobslifeinVegas, who has been publishing YouTube videos about Las Vegas for the past 11 years. In earlier eras of his channel, Orth’s videos had a frothy self-help flair; he doled out advice on how to best enjoy some of the more revelrous temptations the city has to offer. (His best-performing upload is titled “5 Ways Las Vegas Prostitutes Scam You.”) Lately, though, Orth’s repertoire has grown increasingly despondent as he chronicles the sense of precipitous decline pervading the Strip. His second-most-popular video was published three months ago. The title: “Why Nobody Wants to Visit Las Vegas Right Now.”
Orth told me a story that he thinks illustrates what has changed. Two years ago, he dumped a couple thousand dollars into a slot machine with the intention of losing his way into a free room. This is a classic Vegas ritual; there is a long history of casino managers giving away free meals, drinks, and lodging to whales willing to risk a tremendous amount of money on their property. The plan worked, and a few weeks later, Orth received a letter in the mail inviting him back to the casino with a complimentary suite. However, rather than the red-carpet treatment he expected—the licentious glamour of earlier epochs in the desert—Orth found the whole process oddly onerous. He ate a conspicuous “resort fee” on his room to the tune of $90. He was told if he made the booking over the phone, he would be charged $15 more. Early check-in, meanwhile, would cost another $60. When Orth finally got into the suite, he found the bathroom covered with questionable splotches. When he asked the front desk for a different room, the attendant inquired about his membership tier.
All told, the experience left Orth with a feeling shared by a lot of people who’ve traveled to Vegas lately. “Can I just get a clean room without having another fee thrown at me?” he said. “It’s like, ‘Do you guys even want me here?’ ”
by Luke Winkie, Slate | Read more:
Image: illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus[ed. Way too expensive. Normally you'd accept the possibility inevitability of losing money as part of the experience. But now it's mostly trying to avoid being ripped off. My friends used to opt for downtown and outlying casinos, but even those are getting more expensive now.]
Liminal Spaces
or... The Dead Mall Society.
Horrible, whispers a woman behind me.
Aryeh, wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a colourful cap with a propeller atop, is here to take us to the mall—or, more accurately, to several malls, most of which are almost completely abandoned. In his spare time, he runs an organization called Liminal Assembly, which shuttles people through a series of decaying suburban shopping malls around the Greater Toronto Area, places that seem stuck in purgatory between eras, at once eerie and beseeching. (...)
Aryeh’s tours have gained a cult following, often attracting people obsessed with “liminal spaces,” a term given to places that represent in-between stages, connecting two different eras or experiences. By this definition, a parking lot or an empty hallway can be considered a liminal space, as can an abandoned structure, paused mid-demolition. Many people report feeling unsettled or haunted in liminal spaces, and some anthropologists believe this is because our bodies innately know we’re not supposed to dwell in them. They are, after all, not a destination, but a portal, a gateway to another world. But despite this disconnect, many people report feeling a strange, forbidden pull towards liminal spaces. There are digital and in-person communities around the world dedicated to sharing these experiences. r/LiminalSpace on Reddit, for example, has one million followers who post daily photos of bridges and doorways and food courts, of highways that stretch into oblivion. “Dude, that’s so liminal,” others will respond.
For the liminal space curious, semi-abandoned suburban shopping malls are a perfect example of this phenomenon: something purpose-built that’s long-since lost that purpose, yet sits in limbo awaiting its next iteration—a nod to the past, an amorphous fumble toward the future.
But I didn’t know any of this as I slipped into the crowd at Cumberland Terrace on that winter day. I was surprised at the diversity of the people who joined the send off: hipsters, tourists, students, even a few senior couples who strolled the fluorescent, mirrored hallways hand-in-hand, perhaps imagining the mall’s glory days, a 1980s meet-cute at the Italian deli stall when the food court was still open. Days later, I called Aryeh to ask what he thought was the appeal of these deserted, liminal spaces, expecting him to say something about nostalgia and ’90s kids who simply can’t get with the times. But the depth and complexity of Aryeh’s answer surprised me. Nostalgia is part of it, he admitted. People want a reminder of simpler times, when they weren’t bombarded with “the technological future and all this short-form content.” But Aryeh told me that standing in the wreckage of these spaces unlocks a sensation people often crave, but can’t name. He called it a “rare emotion,” the same haunted feeling one experiences after a particularly powerful piece of literature or music.
“When you go to these places that have what I like to say is importance built into them, in the detail of the tiles and the polished brass railings and all these elements, they suggest this place is a very important place,” he said. “But when you see it empty, there’s something very uncanny and eerie about that…You feel things and go, ‘huh, that is really unique.’ And I think that is the escape that people feel when they come to these liminal spaces.” He told me this is a feeling that seems to transcend cultures and geographies, that many people report feeling relieved and delighted when they find there are others who experience this pang of emotion in these spaces. “It’s something core in the human experience.”
***
But if humans themselves are in a constant search for optimization and self-improvement, so are cities as a whole. And malls, with their single-storey forms, plopped amongst a sea of unused parking spots (what some real estate developers call “lazy land”) are easy targets for the chopping block. Between 2017 and 2022, an average of 1,170 malls closed each year in the United States, nearly twice as many as during the period between 1986 and 2017. In my work as a journalist, which sometimes involves covering the urban planning beat, countless economists and land use planners have told me that the rise of e-commerce, a global recession, and population growth requiring new housing has created a perfect storm for the demise of these spaces. I tried to find data about mall closures or redevelopments in Canada, as we’re clearly not exempt from these same forces, but came up empty. Regardless, malls are now considered so outdated that many North American municipalities—including Toronto, Metro Vancouver and Phoenix, Arizona—have unrolled mall redevelopment strategies. These often guide or incentivize the “intensification” of shopping and strip mall sites, imagining, in their wake, clusters of sleek luxury towers with airy retail units on their ground floors, side streets with artful shrubbery, places for pedestrians to sit and walk and admire the benefits of capitalism.
But as a mass trend, this hasn’t always worked out. Some redevelopment projects—like the mall we just visited with the Liminal Assembly—get stuck amid municipal red tape, while others fall victim to rising costs and construction labour shortages, leaving them in limbo, the gaping maws of excavators still poised in their parking lots. Other malls seem to be resisting this movement altogether, standing sentinel with their faux-brick tiling and plastic ferns, even as vendors abandon ship and their kiosks clank shut for the last time, having sold their final mutton roll or polyester-blend nightgown. Though our cities have always been susceptible to the whims of social, behavioral and economic forces, the truth is, even the most meticulous of plans sometimes go awry, leaving gaps between what we want and what we are given.
***
We make our way through the suburbs, spilling into low-rise malls that threaten to blur together as one: the same brown tiles and shuttered kiosks, the plastic trees and fountains parched of water. The murky glass atriums that soar over the retail corridors, now hushed and sleepy. The way all that’s left in these malls are stores that seem to sell a singular, specific item: Clocks Unlimited, Bikini Warehouse. On the bus between destinations, we talk about millennial childhoods, about the passage of time, about how disconcerting it feels to explain pivotal news events that shaped our youths, like 9/11, to a younger generation who has only the vaguest notion of them.Christa pipes in: “Tell me about it. When students ask me about Y2K it becomes a history lesson.” We laugh, uneasily. The sands of time, and all that.
We pull into our final mall destination of the day, which Aryeh preemptively describes as “a beautiful and tragic space.” Inside, the main floor has been commandeered by a mishmash of cash-only Asian food stalls, which gives it the feel of a makeshift street market. On the mall’s perimeters, vendors sell DVDs, Filipino souvenirs, discount travel agency packages, while the building’s upper levels consist of carpeted banquet halls and space leased by a Chinese Baptist church. One or two of the walls have been painted a shade of bubblegum pink not found in nature. We run up and down the stairs, delighted by the open space, whispering to each other that there’s a payphone bank with real phonebooks from the ’90s. Of all the malls, this one feels like the most functional, as though unplugged from the “global mall system,” as Aryeh calls it. It’s gone back to the earth, becoming what its community really needs: cheap noodles and worship services and bootleg DVDs. Somewhere, a land developer is having a wet dream about turning this place into a utopian master-planned community, but for now it persists, a quiet dignity to its stubbornness.
I once read a comment on r/LiminalSpace likening the feeling of being in a liminal space to the sensation you get as you’re about to rappel off a cliff. Weight balanced between your foot and a rope, your body hovering over the drop, it’s a viscerally unsettling moment as you navigate two different experiences of gravity. But with that comes possibility, said the commenter, so many different futures awaiting as you leap into the chasm.
by Lana Hall, Hazlitt | Read more:
Image: via
The Last Good Thing
On a late-winter Chicago day that was more gray than cold, I retrieved a binder from a neighbor’s front porch. The binder was fat and unexpectedly heavy, and I had the deranged thought that it might be filled with sand, but it wasn’t filled with sand. It was filled with 92 DVDs. DVDs can seem heavy if you haven’t held them in a while.
I had not been on the lookout for DVDs, and until I became aware of this binder, I had no special attachment to DVDs of any sort. There was no box of Criterion Collection masterpieces lugged from apartment to apartment since my college days. I certainly did not long for the color-coded cables that always had to be untangled and reconnected to the DVD player my husband weirdly couldn’t bring himself to throw away, nor did I miss hunting for the special remote that only ever made an appearance when I was looking for the regular one. Society had moved past DVDs, and frankly, so had I.
Still, the second I saw the binder—containing “practically every major kid’s cartoon movie from the last 20 years on DVD”—appear on my local Free Box Facebook group (where my neighbors give away everything from original artwork to half-empty bottles of shampoo), I wanted it deeply, covetously, like when you see someone wearing a wool sweater that is so entirely your style, you can’t believe it isn’t already yours. Ninety-two disks! Without a moment’s hesitation, I typed, “Interested!” and pressed return. And the next day, I stood awkwardly on my neighbor’s porch to collect my prize.
At this point, I still assumed my excitement about the DVDs had primarily to do with thriftiness, or perhaps a kind of rugged self-reliance. I still assumed their appeal came not from what they could offer me but from what they could free me of, namely going along with the ever-more-expensive whims of Disney+ executives.
In other words, I considered a binder containing 92 DVDs to be the children’s media equivalent of F*** You Money—Take that streaming bill and shove it!—and not, say, something to build my identity as a parent around.
Obviously.
That evening, while my husband sautéed asparagus on the stovetop and my children squabbled over whether to watch Peppa Pig on Amazon Prime or All Engines Go on Netflix, I announced to my family that we were quitting our streaming services and going analog.
“Well, more analog,” I said, suddenly unsure. “Digital analog. Is that a thing?” I sensed that it might not be, but also that this wasn’t particularly important. What was important was that our viewing habits were moving back in time to an era when watching television didn’t require keeping a credit card on file with five different companies.
Then I inhaled sharply, cringing the way one does while uncorking a particularly volatile bottle of champagne. Ditching streaming would be no great struggle for me, someone who watches about as much television as your typical giant Pacific octopus. But the rest of them?
To my surprise, the anticipated shrieks of displeasure never came. My children, whose ears shut down at six p.m. though their bodies keep kicking until eight, wouldn’t even register the change until the end of the month, when our Netflix account finally ran out of gas. At that point they would look at me as though I’d shredded a sacred contract formed between them and the universe. I would, in turn, cheerfully remind them about the DVDs.
“That’s right,” I would say. “They are very shiny. No, stop—you can’t touch them! They scratch.”
Even my husband merely nodded and flipped the asparagus. I could only assume that he was deep in thought, considering the transformative possibilities of spending less time watching television. The two of us have always shared some private dismay about not being altogether more impressive people—Times obit–worthy, ideally, but at the very least, people who exercise more often. Besides, it went without saying that I would not be canceling YouTube Premium, which is where my husband watches sports highlights. In my quest to become a thriftier parent, I had no desire to become a single parent.
An honest account of the binder’s out-of-nowhere appeal should also include observing how neatly DVDs’ technological primacy aligns with my own “reminiscence bump.” This is what psychologists call the increased salience for the autobiographical memories we form between the ages of approximately 10 and 30. For the rest of our lives, although what came before and after will predictably recede, the events of those 20 years will maintain their privileged place in our minds. Researchers aren’t entirely sure why this is. Some suspect novelty: New things are inherently more memorable, and this is a time of new things. Others chalk it up to the sheer number of culturally significant milestones that happen during our teens and 20s, from first kisses and summer jobs and driver’s licenses to weddings and college graduations and—well, more common until recently—first homes. Another theory focuses on storytelling: As we come of age, the places we go and the music we listen to and the people we bond with become the settings and soundtracks and characters for the stories we tell ourselves about the people we are becoming, stories that we’ll carry all our lives.
If these theories sound similar, it’s because they’re all trying to explain the same phenomenon: why our formative years are so very formative. They are all trying to explain why some part of a reasonably well-adjusted, middle-aged woman with a husband and two kids will always be a teenager with spiky hair, trying desperately to convince herself that she likes watching low-budget horror movies.
Low-budget horror movies on DVD, that is. In 1997, when the disks first hit American shelves, I was just 13; by the time revenue from streaming eventually eclipsed that from DVDs (and their higher-definition Blu-Ray cousins), I had already left my 20s behind. Which means that for me, the pinnacle of home entertainment is and will always be synonymous with a fat binder of DVDs.
For a few weeks, quitting our streaming services and embracing DVDs indeed seemed like a sacrifice. Quickly, though, the experiment morphed into something quite different. I found myself proselytizing about the Way of the DVD. They’re so cheap, I’d say to another parent at pre-K pickup. People are literally giving them away. Go to a garage sale of any size and there you go: more DVDs for the collection.
It’s nice to really own a thing, I’d say to a colleague with children of her own. It’s nice not to worry something will go poof in the night.
It’s great for the kids to have choices but not too many choices, I’d say to anyone still listening. It’s great when what they want to watch is in the binder, and it’s great when it isn’t and they have to decide whether they want to purchase How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World with their tooth-fairy money (both of my kids were in highly productive tooth-losing phases) or wait for a free disk to arrive at the library. Because when everything can be yours just like that, is anything even real?
It’s good for movies to be real, I’d say. Treat them badly—roll them down the stairs or throw them like frisbees or wear them because it’s fun to pretend to have large, glassy robot eyes—and they will scratch. Natural consequences! It’s good for there to be natural consequences. (...)
Unlike VHS tapes, DVDs encode data digitally, allowing for higher video resolution and superior audio quality. DVDs also store more data, and they store the information more efficiently. This is what frees up space for the bells and whistles: dubbed audio tracks and subtitles, director’s cuts and deleted scenes. DVDs are read by laser; so long as they aren’t used as coasters or hockey pucks, they shouldn’t wear or tear at all. On a commercial DVD, even the most determined fool cannot accidentally tape over a favorite movie. And remember the days before opening menus, when you stood by the television and pressed “REW” on the VCR until the members of your family screamed that you’d gone too far, in which case you’d press “FF” until they screamed again? DVDs have menus, and when they arrived, America let out a collective, “Hell yeah.”
But VHS, the technology that DVDs supplanted, was the truly transformative one. VHS was what let us all own movies in the first place, to watch whenever we wanted to. Or was it color television that transformed home entertainment? The rise of network programming? That very first public broadcast? It hardly matters. By the time DVDs came along, the latest crest among so many waves of progress, it seemed inevitable that they would be good, and that the technology that eventually replaced them would be even better.
A lot of things seemed inevitable then.
I grew up, after all, when the growing up was good. The Berlin Wall was coming down, and the world was opening up. The economy was strong and college attendance was on the rise and Americans were more optimistic that children would live better lives than their parents. There were problems, sure, but they were problems that would resolve themselves in time, as a new, more enlightened generation took the helm. I grew up when time itself seemed on my side.
I watched social media connect us, and then I watched it detonate us into a billion tiny factions. I watched smartphones liberate us, and then I watched them capture us all over again. Now I see artificial intelligence on the horizon, and even as I am awestruck by its potential, I shudder.
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” said the philosopher Paul Virilio. Here’s the thing: I grew up when it still felt possible that we could invent the ship and then put our heads together to avoid the shipwreck. In the world bequeathed to my children, it can seem like there is no avoiding the wreck. And in this world, in this widening gyre of uncertain outcomes and frictionless gratification, DVDs are shiny and real and the same shape as life preservers. DVDs are the last unambiguously good thing: the last technology that arrived and only made things better and would never ever let us down.
I had not been on the lookout for DVDs, and until I became aware of this binder, I had no special attachment to DVDs of any sort. There was no box of Criterion Collection masterpieces lugged from apartment to apartment since my college days. I certainly did not long for the color-coded cables that always had to be untangled and reconnected to the DVD player my husband weirdly couldn’t bring himself to throw away, nor did I miss hunting for the special remote that only ever made an appearance when I was looking for the regular one. Society had moved past DVDs, and frankly, so had I.
At this point, I still assumed my excitement about the DVDs had primarily to do with thriftiness, or perhaps a kind of rugged self-reliance. I still assumed their appeal came not from what they could offer me but from what they could free me of, namely going along with the ever-more-expensive whims of Disney+ executives.
In other words, I considered a binder containing 92 DVDs to be the children’s media equivalent of F*** You Money—Take that streaming bill and shove it!—and not, say, something to build my identity as a parent around.
Obviously.
That evening, while my husband sautéed asparagus on the stovetop and my children squabbled over whether to watch Peppa Pig on Amazon Prime or All Engines Go on Netflix, I announced to my family that we were quitting our streaming services and going analog.
“Well, more analog,” I said, suddenly unsure. “Digital analog. Is that a thing?” I sensed that it might not be, but also that this wasn’t particularly important. What was important was that our viewing habits were moving back in time to an era when watching television didn’t require keeping a credit card on file with five different companies.
Then I inhaled sharply, cringing the way one does while uncorking a particularly volatile bottle of champagne. Ditching streaming would be no great struggle for me, someone who watches about as much television as your typical giant Pacific octopus. But the rest of them?
To my surprise, the anticipated shrieks of displeasure never came. My children, whose ears shut down at six p.m. though their bodies keep kicking until eight, wouldn’t even register the change until the end of the month, when our Netflix account finally ran out of gas. At that point they would look at me as though I’d shredded a sacred contract formed between them and the universe. I would, in turn, cheerfully remind them about the DVDs.
“That’s right,” I would say. “They are very shiny. No, stop—you can’t touch them! They scratch.”
Even my husband merely nodded and flipped the asparagus. I could only assume that he was deep in thought, considering the transformative possibilities of spending less time watching television. The two of us have always shared some private dismay about not being altogether more impressive people—Times obit–worthy, ideally, but at the very least, people who exercise more often. Besides, it went without saying that I would not be canceling YouTube Premium, which is where my husband watches sports highlights. In my quest to become a thriftier parent, I had no desire to become a single parent.
An honest account of the binder’s out-of-nowhere appeal should also include observing how neatly DVDs’ technological primacy aligns with my own “reminiscence bump.” This is what psychologists call the increased salience for the autobiographical memories we form between the ages of approximately 10 and 30. For the rest of our lives, although what came before and after will predictably recede, the events of those 20 years will maintain their privileged place in our minds. Researchers aren’t entirely sure why this is. Some suspect novelty: New things are inherently more memorable, and this is a time of new things. Others chalk it up to the sheer number of culturally significant milestones that happen during our teens and 20s, from first kisses and summer jobs and driver’s licenses to weddings and college graduations and—well, more common until recently—first homes. Another theory focuses on storytelling: As we come of age, the places we go and the music we listen to and the people we bond with become the settings and soundtracks and characters for the stories we tell ourselves about the people we are becoming, stories that we’ll carry all our lives.
If these theories sound similar, it’s because they’re all trying to explain the same phenomenon: why our formative years are so very formative. They are all trying to explain why some part of a reasonably well-adjusted, middle-aged woman with a husband and two kids will always be a teenager with spiky hair, trying desperately to convince herself that she likes watching low-budget horror movies.
Low-budget horror movies on DVD, that is. In 1997, when the disks first hit American shelves, I was just 13; by the time revenue from streaming eventually eclipsed that from DVDs (and their higher-definition Blu-Ray cousins), I had already left my 20s behind. Which means that for me, the pinnacle of home entertainment is and will always be synonymous with a fat binder of DVDs.
For a few weeks, quitting our streaming services and embracing DVDs indeed seemed like a sacrifice. Quickly, though, the experiment morphed into something quite different. I found myself proselytizing about the Way of the DVD. They’re so cheap, I’d say to another parent at pre-K pickup. People are literally giving them away. Go to a garage sale of any size and there you go: more DVDs for the collection.
It’s nice to really own a thing, I’d say to a colleague with children of her own. It’s nice not to worry something will go poof in the night.
It’s great for the kids to have choices but not too many choices, I’d say to anyone still listening. It’s great when what they want to watch is in the binder, and it’s great when it isn’t and they have to decide whether they want to purchase How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World with their tooth-fairy money (both of my kids were in highly productive tooth-losing phases) or wait for a free disk to arrive at the library. Because when everything can be yours just like that, is anything even real?
It’s good for movies to be real, I’d say. Treat them badly—roll them down the stairs or throw them like frisbees or wear them because it’s fun to pretend to have large, glassy robot eyes—and they will scratch. Natural consequences! It’s good for there to be natural consequences. (...)
Unlike VHS tapes, DVDs encode data digitally, allowing for higher video resolution and superior audio quality. DVDs also store more data, and they store the information more efficiently. This is what frees up space for the bells and whistles: dubbed audio tracks and subtitles, director’s cuts and deleted scenes. DVDs are read by laser; so long as they aren’t used as coasters or hockey pucks, they shouldn’t wear or tear at all. On a commercial DVD, even the most determined fool cannot accidentally tape over a favorite movie. And remember the days before opening menus, when you stood by the television and pressed “REW” on the VCR until the members of your family screamed that you’d gone too far, in which case you’d press “FF” until they screamed again? DVDs have menus, and when they arrived, America let out a collective, “Hell yeah.”
But VHS, the technology that DVDs supplanted, was the truly transformative one. VHS was what let us all own movies in the first place, to watch whenever we wanted to. Or was it color television that transformed home entertainment? The rise of network programming? That very first public broadcast? It hardly matters. By the time DVDs came along, the latest crest among so many waves of progress, it seemed inevitable that they would be good, and that the technology that eventually replaced them would be even better.
A lot of things seemed inevitable then.
I grew up, after all, when the growing up was good. The Berlin Wall was coming down, and the world was opening up. The economy was strong and college attendance was on the rise and Americans were more optimistic that children would live better lives than their parents. There were problems, sure, but they were problems that would resolve themselves in time, as a new, more enlightened generation took the helm. I grew up when time itself seemed on my side.
I watched social media connect us, and then I watched it detonate us into a billion tiny factions. I watched smartphones liberate us, and then I watched them capture us all over again. Now I see artificial intelligence on the horizon, and even as I am awestruck by its potential, I shudder.
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” said the philosopher Paul Virilio. Here’s the thing: I grew up when it still felt possible that we could invent the ship and then put our heads together to avoid the shipwreck. In the world bequeathed to my children, it can seem like there is no avoiding the wreck. And in this world, in this widening gyre of uncertain outcomes and frictionless gratification, DVDs are shiny and real and the same shape as life preservers. DVDs are the last unambiguously good thing: the last technology that arrived and only made things better and would never ever let us down.
by Jess Love, The American Scholar | Read more:
Image: Gracia Lamb
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.]
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