How NIL is Failing College Sports

Editor’s Note (September 2025): This article was first published in May 2025. Since then, NIL controversies have only grown—lawsuits over transfers, new collective rules, and court rulings are fueling even more debate. The problems outlined below remain at the heart of the chaos.

When the NCAA implemented its interim policy on Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) in July 2021, it was heralded as a long-overdue victory for student-athletes. Finally, college athletes could monetize their personal brands while maintaining eligibility. But three years in, the reality of NIL has exposed deep, structural problems that threaten the very foundation of college sports.

Far from the fair, equitable system its proponents envisioned, NIL has morphed into a thinly veiled pay-for-play scheme dominated by wealthy donors, corporate interests, and an increasingly professionalized amateur sports landscape that’s leaving many athletes and institutions behind.

NIL Is Bad in Its Current Form, But the Concept Isn’t

Let’s be clear: this is not to say NIL is all bad. The core principle—that athletes deserve compensation for the use of their name, image, and likeness—remains valid and important. Student-athletes absolutely deserve to get paid. But this implementation ain’t it.

The problem is the execution. NIL went from zero to 200 MPH overnight with no guardrails. It’s like giving someone a supercar capable of high speeds and letting them drive it through downtown at rush hour. Just because a car can go that fast doesn’t mean it should outside of a sanctioned and governed NASCAR race. Similarly, NIL needed careful implementation with proper rules and oversight—not the free-for-all we’re currently witnessing.

NIL Is Bad for Creating the Collective Problem: Pay-for-Play in Disguise

The most troubling development in the NIL era has been the rise of “collectives” – donor-organized groups that pool money to facilitate NIL deals for athletes at specific schools. These collectives have quickly evolved from their original purpose into recruitment vehicles that effectively function as booster-funded payrolls.

College football’s biggest donors have orchestrated business ventures distributing five-, six- and seven-figure payments to athletes under the guise of endorsement opportunities and appearance fees. While technically legal within vague NCAA guidelines, these arrangements clearly violate the spirit of what NIL was supposed to be.

Consider the case of quarterback Nico Iamaleava, whose story perfectly illustrates the chaos. After signing with Tennessee on a lucrative NIL deal, he later tried to renegotiate his contract during the 2025 offseason. When Tennessee refused both because his performance didn’t warrant the increase and the amount was too high, Iamaleava explored other options. After other schools balked at his demands, he eventually landed at UCLA for significantly less money than he was seeking. Meanwhile, Texas will spend an astounding $40 million on its football roster in 2025-26. But that’s not the issue—why wouldn’t they if they can? The problem is that if another team wants to compete, there’s only one way forward: pay up.

This isn’t about athletes receiving fair compensation for actual marketing value – it’s about wealthy boosters creating slush funds to buy talent. And as long as deals include some nominal “deliverable” from the athlete and are signed after their national letter of intent, there’s little the NCAA can do to stop it. (SportsEpreneur Update as of September 2025: read more about the NIL Clearinghouse and the first NIL deal report.)

NIL Is Bad for Boosting Egos Instead of Programs

A particularly troubling aspect that’s emerged is how NIL has become an ego-driven playground for wealthy boosters. For many donors, it’s no longer about supporting their alma mater—it’s about directly influencing outcomes and claiming credit for wins.

These boosters are essentially treating college teams like fantasy sports with real money. They get a dopamine hit from watching “their” players succeed, knowing their financial contribution made it possible. It’s an addiction—the thrill of buying talent and then basking in reflected glory when that talent performs well.

This creates a dangerous dynamic where the interests of boosters, rather than educational or developmental goals, drive decisions. Coaches find themselves answering not just to athletic directors, but to the whims of deep-pocketed collectives who can control the talent pipeline.

[ed. ...and much more:]

NIL Is Bad for Widening the Gap: Competitive Balance Destroyed

NIL Is Bad for Creating Transfer Portal Chaos: The Free Agency Problem

NIL Is Bad for Athletes Making Short-Term Decisions

NIL Is Bad for the Athlete-Fan Relationship

NIL Is Bad for Corruption and Exploitation: The Dark Side

NIL Is Bad for College Sports’ Identity Crisis

NIL Is Bad for International Student-Athletes

NIL Is Bad, But Reform Is Possible

by SportsEMedia |  Read more:

Image: Tyler Kaufman/Getty
[ed. Money is killing sports (and most everything else), and nobody pays even lip service to educational opportunities anymore. See also: Limbo Field (HCB); and,  The college football spending cap is brand new, and here’s how schools already are ignoring it (The Athletic).]

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WA: Tax the Rich!

[ed. ...and large hedge funds and corporations, too. Please?]

Gov. Bob Ferguson’s revelation this past week that he backs a tax on millionaires was a game-changer in local politics. It virtually guarantees that a state income tax will be the issue of 2026.

Within hours, it also escalated the main practical argument against it — which is that people making north of a million dollars a year won’t actually pay it. Because they won’t be here anymore.

On social media, multimillionaire hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, of Redmond, posted a photo of a U-Haul leaving Washington state.

Taxing the rich is an “old worn out rope-a-dope to convince voters to stick it to the wealthy, those dirty bastards,” he wrote. “Who then promptly move out of the state with the now duped voter holding the check.”

Are the rich about to flee? And do they really drive away in U-Hauls like the rest of us schlubs? (I thought they favored private jets.)

Seriously, the specter of it suggests Democrats may be about to solve the wealth inequality issue by chasing away the top. Or at least scaring enough of them away to make the tax a bust.

“If they pass an income tax, I will be better off to change my residency to believe it or not, California,” retired Starbucks executive Howard Behar wrote to me after my column last week on how tax-the-rich fever is rising. He also cited Washington’s rather severe inheritance tax.

Heywood, who has been leading various GOP-backed initiative drives, is an interesting case study because he already fled a state due to taxes.

“I’m an economic refugee,” he told an interviewer in 2022.

In 2010, when California dinged its wealthiest residents with an income tax surcharge that pushed rates as high as 13.3%, Heywood moved his hedge company out, to Washington.

He cited his top reasons for leaving California as “taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes.” Puget Sound’s natural beauty was a fifth reason.

“I came here to make money and to be free,” Heywood said.

So it’s true that rich people sometimes do pull up stakes and split when taxes get too dear. Other readers suggested a different framing.

“Maybe we have so many tech companies paying such high wages precisely because we don’t have an income tax?” one said.

The problem with these arguments is that most of the top high-tech hubs, such as California’s, have even higher taxes, and have for years.

In fact since Heywood fled California, that state has become the millionaire and billionaire capital of the world.

“Billionaires flush with ‘new money’ are flocking to the Bay Area,” read a headline earlier this year from SFGate. A study found the number of millionaires in the San Francisco area rose by 98% from 2014 to 2024 — despite California’s tax surcharges on the superrich.

“When millionaires say they’re leaving, they almost never do,” wrote a tax attorney for Forbes magazine about this data.

Wealth advisers Henley & Partners showed that millionaires and billionaires are in fact concentrated in the U.S. cities and states with by far the highest taxes. New York City has the most rich people, followed by San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. All these places have state income taxes, and some, like New York, have surcharges on the superwealthy that send local income tax rates as high as 14.8%.

San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area, routinely blamed for a list of progressive horrors that’s said to be repelling the rich and civilized, in reality has now surpassed New York for the most billionaires in the world, the Henley study showed. The Bay Area has 82 billionaires to go with 342,000 millionaires. This compares to Seattle’s 11 billionaires and 53,100 millionaires, Henley found.

The income tax rate proposed for Washington, by state Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, would be 9.9% on any dollar earned above $1 million in a year.

That rate seems high to me, though it’s only a bit higher than a special millionaire tax passed by voters in Massachusetts in 2022. They imposed a surcharge on dollars earned above $1 million, so that the top rate now is 9%.

Did the superwealthy flee from Massachusetts after that? Some did, and a big exodus was predicted. But the tax, in its first two years in 2024 and 2025, startled even its backers by raising more than twice as much as projected — $5.7 billion instead of $2.3 billion. Somebody paid all that tax.

“People who thought this tax would backfire will have to concede now that it generates a substantial amount of additional revenue,” Evan Horowitz, director of Tufts University’s Center for State Policy Analysis, told Bloomberg News.

Forbes postulated that the flight of the rich is a sort of chestnut that lives on through repeated tellings by influential people.

“For every high-profile departure anecdote splashed across the headlines, there are thousands of high earners doing nothing of the sort,” the magazine summed up.

It’s true the rich can jet off if they wish. In theory they can “offshore” themselves and their families to Texas or Florida or Nevada, like assets being shifted from one bank account to another.

But they’re also people. They have friends, community connections, kids in schools. They like looking at Mount Rainier, too. Money can’t easily re-create that stuff.

by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Heywood/X

[ed. Seems like a no-brainer to me but then very little in politics makes sense. Beats pitchforks (maybe). See also: ‘Tax the rich’ may be reaching a boiling point in WA (ST):]

***

The populist turn in politics is real. Down at the base voter level, there is no party of the rich anymore.

Another takeaway: It may finally be sinking in for a broad cross-section of voters just how much the top of society has made out like bandits in the Big Tech era.

Consider that in 2017, 12,520 Washingtonians made more than $1 million in income, according to IRS filing data. Just five years later, in 2021, that number had soared to 28,930. That’s a 131% increase in millionaires. These aren’t paper millionaires either, but federal tax filers reporting they earned north of a million bucks for a single year.

Constituting less than 0.5% of the state’s population, this group makes 15% to 25% of all the money earned in the state each year, IRS data shows.

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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.

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.]

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Liminal Spaces

or... The Dead Mall Society.

“How’s everybody feeling today?” Aryeh asks the crowd of thirty-odd people gathered at a bus stop on the fringes of downtown Toronto. In response, there’s sparse, nervous laughter. “No, really,” says Aryeh. “What does it feel like to be alive today?”

Horrible, whispers a woman behind me.

Undeterred, Aryeh presses on. “We’re going to feel for real today,” he tells us, before leading the group through a ramshackle guided meditation, encouraging us to pay attention to the sights and smells and sounds that surround us. I take in the pillowy, slate-coloured sky, the wads of gum mixed with concrete at my feet, the faint smell of cooking oil. At that moment, a child screams and a flock of pigeons crashes into the crowd; a few of us duck for cover. “Yes,” says Aryeh, laughing. “Even that.”

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.

by Jess Love, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: Gracia Lamb

A sewing and tailoring book from Dublin, complete with samples (1833).

via:

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.

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. (...)

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. (...)

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. (...)

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.

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.]

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:

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?”

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.

by Samir Varna |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Joni Mitchell

[ed. A Christmas song. Best to everyone.]

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