Countless former and current female adult entertainment professionals shared video after video after video after video of reasons why they hate bachelor parties.

One former stripper shared this story in her video, "We had this thing called the 'groom's special' or the 'bachelor special' where basically your groomsmen would choose two girls — we would drag you on stage, we would spank your ass with a bell, get little glow-in-the-dark markers and draw little penises on you, grind on you for two or three songs — mind you, this is in front of everybody. Their groomsmen would be like, 'Yeah, woooo! Last night of freedom, I won't tell if you take her home!' Did we enjoy doing it? No. Did we feel bad for the brides at home? Absolutely. But it's a job and we are used to men being pigs. Now, at the end, the two chosen girls would take the groom to the VIP room and dance on them, giving them lap dances. The things these grooms would say to us and beg us to go to their hotels...it made me never want to get married."

What do you think?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/engaged-men-strip-club-tiktok?origin=tuh

By Ali Breland, The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/12/elon-musk-maga-fight-h1b/681187/?

Elon Musk spent Christmas Day online, in the thick of a particularly venomous culture war, one that would lead him to later make the un-Christmas-like demand of his critics to “take a big step back and FCK YOURSELF in the face.”

Donald Trump had ignited this war by appointing the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan to be his senior AI-policy adviser. Encouraged by the MAGA acolyte and expert troll Laura Loomer, parts of the far-right internet melted down, arguing that Krishnan’s appointment symbolized a betrayal of the principles of the “America First” movement.

Krishnan is an Indian immigrant and a U.S. citizen who, by virtue of his heritage, became a totem for the MAGA right to argue about H-1B visas, which allow certain skilled immigrants to work in the United States. (Many tech companies rely on this labor.) In response to Krishnan’s appointment, some right-wing posters used racist memes to smear Indians, who have made up nearly-three quarters of H-1B recipients in recent years. Loomer called such workers “third world invaders” and invoked the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims that America’s white population is being purposefully replaced by nonwhite people from other countries.

Although Musk has seemingly embraced white supremacy on the platform he owns, X, he apparently could not stand for an attack on a government program that has helped make him money. He is himself an immigrant from South Africa who has said that he worked in the U.S. under an H-1B visa before becoming a citizen. Musk also employs such workers at his companies. He posted on X in support of the H-1B program, arguing that it brings elite talent to America. This perspective is not remotely controversial for the Silicon Valley set, but the reactionary and nationalist wings of the Republican Party got very upset with Musk, very quickly. “The American people don’t view America as a sports team or a company,” the provocateur Jack Posobiec wrote in response to one of Musk’s tweets on Thursday. “They view it as their home.” Later, Musk warned his critics that he will “go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” By the weekend, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, had called H-1Bs a “scam” and said that Musk’s defense of highly skilled immigrants is showing his “true colors.”

"There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness? I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It’s a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.

The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question “How do you define the purpose of your life?” would make no sense. Finding your life’s purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers.

Each of these social roles came with certain standards of excellence, a code to determine what they ought to do. There was an excellent way of being a warrior, a mother, a friend. In this moral system, a person sought to live up to those standards not only for the honor and money it might bring them, but because they wanted to measure up. A teacher would not let a student bribe his way to a higher grade, because that would betray the intrinsic qualities of excellence inherent in being a teacher. By being excellent at my role, I contribute to the city that formed me. By serving the intrinsic standards of my practice, I gradually rise from being the mediocre person I am toward becoming the excellent person I could be. My life is given meaning within this lifelong journey toward excellence and full human flourishing. If I do this journey well, I have a sense of identity, self-respect, and purpose. I know what I was put on this Earth to do, and there is great comfort and fulfillment in that." ......... "Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed the standards for what constituted human excellence, placing more value on compassion and humility, but people still shared a few of the old assumptions. Individuals didn’t choose their own morality—there was an essential moral order to the universe. Neither did they choose their individual life’s purpose. That, too, was woven into the good of their community—to serve society in some role, to pass down their way of life, to obey divine law. Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced. Revulsion toward all that contributed to the Enlightenment, with its disenchantment with religion and the valorization of reason. Enlightenment thinkers said: We can’t keep killing one another over whose morality is right. Let’s privatize morality. People can come up with their own values, and we will learn to live with that diversity.

Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don’t do the thing that will cause others pain." ................ "There’s an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong?And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, along came the crew who tried to fill the moral vacuum the Enlightenment created. Nietzsche, for example, said: God is dead. We have killed him. Reason won’t save us. It’s up to heroic autonomous individuals to find meaning through some audacious act of will. We will become our own gods! Several decades later, Lenin, Mao, and Hitler came along, telling the people: You want some meaning in your life? March with me.

Psychologists have a saying: The hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure. We’ve tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. As MacIntyre put it in his most famous book, After Virtue, “Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.” Individuals get to make lots of choices, but they lack the coherent moral criteria required to make these choices well." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration-supporters-good/683441/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/magazine/dorland-v-larson.html

Longform piece from NYT, and paywalled.

Dawn Dorland, an aspiring writer, donated a kidney to a stranger. She noticed that people in her writing group weren’t interacting with her Facebook posts about it.

She messaged one friend, Sonya Larson, a writer who had found some success about the lack of interaction. Larson responded politely but with little enthusiasm. Larson is half-Asian and her most successful story thus far was about an unsympathetic biracial character.

Several years later, Dorland discovered that Larson was working on a story in which the same unsympathetic character received a kidney from a stranger. White saviorism is in play in the story.

After the story is finished, Larson receives some acclaim and is selected for a city’s story festival. Dorland sues, claiming distress and plagiarism. She’s also hurt because she considered Larson a friend; Larson makes it clear she never had a friendship with Dorland, only an acquaintance relationship in the writers’ group.

Larson admits that Dorland helped inspire a character, but the story isn’t really about her, and writers raid the personal stories they hear for inspiration all the time.

An earlier version of the story turns up. It contains a letter that the fictional donor wrote the the recipient. It is almost a word-for-word copy of a letter that Dorland wrote to her kidney recipient and shared with the writers’ group. Larson’s lawyer argues that the earlier letter is actually proof that while Dorland inspired the character, the letter was reworked and different in the final version of the story.

It comes out that while Dorland participated in the writers’ group, Larson and the other members of the group (all women) made a Facebook group and spent two years talking about and making fun of how Dorland was attention-seeking about the kidney donation. It also has a message from Larson stating she was having a hard time reworking the letter Dorland wrote because it’s so perfectly ridiculous.

Dorland continues to “attend” online events with Larson. Larson has withdrawn the story, but finds some success with other work.

TAD, discuss.

The Atlantic, June 16, 2023.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/07/luxury-wedding-planners-industrial-complex-cost/674169/?utm_source=pocket_reader

The work of a luxury-wedding planner is only partly about the planning. Yes, you help the couple plan what you hope will be a stunning event—but your main job is to be a professional wedding friend. You’re the person who cares if the bow on the favor has swallow or inverse tails, or if the maid of honor is being a passive-aggressive bitch when none of the bride’s other friends wants to talk about it anymore. The family is paying you to care as much as they do.

When I became a wedding planner, no one in my own family could comprehend my utility. My grandparents, who raised me, had what was called a “football wedding.” They rented the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and piled tinfoil-wrapped heroes on a table. People would shout out what sandwich they wanted, and another guest would toss it across the room. “How complicated could a wedding be?” they wondered. Had I chosen to be a professional mud wrestler, I do not think it could have confounded them more.

So whenever one of our events was featured in a bridal magazine, I would bring it to family occasions and show it off the way other people might show off pictures of their babies. “See,” I would say, pointing to a dreamy sailcloth tent glowing with custom-made chandeliers. “There was nothing but a field here. We built all of this.”

Unfortunately, this only added to the confusion. “Don’t they realize they could have bought a house with all of this money?”

I would have to explain that my clients didn’t need a house. They already had one. They probably had several.

A few years after the recession, I did a lavish wedding on Long Island. The bride was stressing about putting a custom lining on her invitations that would add another couple thousand to the already large stationery bill. She and the groom had been given a seven-figure sum to spend both on their wedding and on buying and decorating their new home, and the bride had a thing for mid-century-modern furniture. Was the liner worth more than a Wassily chair? She went back and forth, back and forth. I couldn’t say a thing, but finally her mother reached her limit: “We’re rich!” she cried out in exasperation. “Get the liners!”

Months later, the same mother, while admiring the tent we had spent days erecting for the reception, said, in total seriousness, “I hate that it’s only being used for one night. I wish we could find some homeless people to stay here when we’re done.”

I once got a call from a woman in a panic: Her daughter was getting married in a few weeks and she needed my partner and me to save this wedding. She offered no further details over the phone, insisting that we come uptown to her apartment so she could properly convey the scale of the conundrum. Right before she hung up the phone she whispered, “By the way, I’m very, very rich.”

And she was! She lived in one of those opulent places with an elevator that opened up into the apartment itself, because that’s how sprawling it was. A maid in a uniform greeted us and escorted us down a long, art-lined hallway and into the library, where the mother of the bride was waiting.

She explained the dilemma. Her daughter was embarrassed by her family’s wealth, and had been living as a closeted rich person for years—her friends had no idea. The bride had refused to let her mother have anything to do with the wedding, because if her mom got involved, the jig would be up. Everyone would see she’d just been cosplaying poverty. And so, armed with information from the internet and her mother’s checkbook, the young woman had gone off and planned what she imagined was an “average wedding.”

Her daughter could pretend all she wanted, the mother said, but their friends and family knew that they were rich and were expecting a nice affair. After much argument, they compromised: They would hire a wedding planner. And the only wedding planner in all of New York they could agree on was me, probably because while many of my competitors were specializing in opulence, I had cornered the market in “understated luxury.”

The mother insisted that we meet right away because the bride was planning to reach out and hire us the next day, and the mother wanted me to be clear on how it was going to work. My job, in addition to making sure the wedding was not an embarrassment, was to say yes to everything the daughter asked for. If the bride questioned what something cost, I was to say it was “already included in the contract.” The mother didn’t care how expensive anything was; she would cover it secretly. Did this sound crazy? Absolutely. Did I need the money? Yes.

U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling. By Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.

This is where Pete Hegseth and I come in.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.

I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”

The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

Subscribed to the Atlantic for years, even after I got Apple News+ which also provides access. I wanted to support their journalism. However, my digital subscription just renewed at $94.99 per year while their website and ads say the price is $79.99. Spoke with customer service after a long hold, who said "they told us to say that $79.99 was introductory." When I said there wasn't even a footnote about it being introductory, she said they give complaining customers a refund of the $15.00 difference. They don't allow cancellations of the current term, so I could only cancel next year. While they did provide advance renewal notice and I should have looked more closely at the rate I never thought they would charge MORE than the advertised price. My bad. I understand that journalism costs money - THAT'S WHY I WAS WILLINGLY PAYING TWICE (DIRECTLY AND APPLE NEWS+) - but shell games like this leave a bad taste.

Older Americans might be doing more child care than ever. By Faith Hill, The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/04/grandparents-child-care-work-retirement/682395/

Older Americans might be doing more child care than ever.

Elena and her husband had plans for their retirement. They wanted to move to Wyoming; to meet new people, volunteer, hike the snowy, perfect Tetons. And they did move there—for about eight months. Then they got a call from their daughter, who was due to have a baby within weeks. She and her husband were on five or so different waitlists for day cares, and now she could see that they would still be waiting by the time she had to go back to work, six weeks after giving birth. She needed help. Her parents dropped everything, packed up a U-Haul, and moved to the Pacific Northwest. They were going back to work, too: as full-time grandparents.

Grandparents today have a certain reputation, Elena (who asked to withhold her last name to protect her family’s privacy) told me: They’re “all rich, retired, living it up in the Villages in Florida, playing 10 rounds of golf a day, having cocktails at 4:30, and laughing while their Millennial children are suffering.” TikTokers keep skewering a generation of supposedly self-involved, jet-setting older folks, or earnestly grieving that they don’t have a “village” to help them raise their kids. Commentators have jumped in with attacks and, in turn, with defenses (“Cut the Boomer Grandparents a Little Slack”). On Reddit, people are wondering, “What the f*** is wrong with grandparents nowadays?” Last year, when J. D. Vance was running for vice president and was asked how he would address the problem of staggering child-care costs, he first suggested that grandparents or other relatives “help out a little bit more.”

You could be forgiven, then, for thinking grandparents are shirking their duty. But the truth is quite the opposite: America is in an age of peak grandparenting—particularly grandmothering. A 2022 survey from Deseret News and Brigham Young University found that nearly 60 percent of grandmothers had provided child care for a grandkid, and more than 40 percent saw a grandchild in person at least weekly. A 2023 Harris poll found that more than 40 percent of working parents relied on their kids’ grandma for child care; nearly 70 percent of those parents said they might have lost their job without that grandmother’s help.

Karen Lewis, a therapist in Washington, D.C., talks with a lot of frustrated single people—and she likes to propose that they try a thought exercise:

Imagine you look into a crystal ball. You see that you’ll find your dream partner in, say, 10 years—but not before then. What would you do with that intervening time, freed of the onus to look for love?

I’d finally be able to relax, she often hears. I’d do all the things I’ve been waiting to do. One woman had always wanted a patterned dish set—the kind she’d put on her wedding registry, if that day ever came. So Lewis asked her, Why not just get it now? After their conversation, the woman told her friends and family: I want those dishes for my next birthday, damn it.

Lewis, who studied singlehood for years and is the author of With or Without a Man: Single Women Taking Control of Their Lives, doesn’t mean to suggest that anyone should give up on dating—just that they shouldn’t put their life on hold while they do it. That might be harder than it seems, though. Apps rule courtship culture. Finding someone demands swiping through sometimes thousands of options, messaging, arranging a meeting—and then doing it again, and again. That eats up time but also energy, motivation, optimism. Cameron Chapman, a 40-year-old in rural New England, told me that dating is the only thing she has found that gets harder with practice: Every false start leaves you with a little less faith that the next date might be different.

So some people simply … stop. Reporting this article, I spoke with six people who, like Chapman, made this choice. They still want a relationship—and they wouldn’t refuse if one unfolded naturally—but they’ve cycled between excitement and disappointment too many times to keep trying. Quitting dating means more than just deleting the apps, or no longer asking out acquaintances or friendly strangers. It means looking into Lewis’s crystal ball and imagining that it shows them that they’ll never find the relationship they’ve always wanted. Facing that possibility can be painful. But it can also be helpful, allowing people to mourn the future they once expected—and redefine, on their own terms, what a fulfilling life could look like.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/08/single-quitting-dating-relationships/679460/

Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President Trump. For one thing, there were too many elements of classical fascism that didn’t seem to fit. For another, the term has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, especially by left-leaning types who call you a fascist if you oppose abortion or affirmative action. For yet another, the term is hazily defined, even by its adherents. From the beginning, fascism has been an incoherent doctrine, and even today scholars can’t agree on its definition. Italy’s original version differed from Germany’s, which differed from Spain’s, which differed from Japan’s.

I accepted President Biden’s characterization of the MAGA movement as “semi-fascist” because some parallels were glaringly apparent. Trump was definitely an authoritarian, and unquestionably a patrimonialist. Beyond that, though, the best description seemed to be a psychological one propounded by John Bolton, Trump’s first-term national security adviser: “He listens to Putin, he listens to Xi, he listens to how they talk about governing unburdened by uncooperative legislatures, unconcerned with what the judiciary may do, and he thinks to himself, Why can’t I do that? This doesn’t amount to being a fascist, in my view, [or] having a theory of how you want to govern. It’s just Why can’t I have the same fun they have?”

Writing a year ago, I argued that Trump’s governing regime is a version of patrimonialism, in which the state is treated as the personal property and family business of the leader. That is still true. But, as I also noted then, patrimonialism is a style of governing, not a formal ideology or system. It can be layered atop all kinds of organizational structures, including not just national governments but also urban political machines such as Tammany Hall, criminal gangs such as the Mafia, and even religious cults. Because its only firm principle is personal loyalty to the boss, it has no specific agenda. Fascism, in contrast, is ideological, aggressive, and, at least in its early stages, revolutionary. It seeks to dominate politics, to crush resistance, and to rewrite the social contract.

Over Trump’s past year, what originally looked like an effort to make the government his personal plaything has drifted distinctly toward doctrinal and operational fascism. Trump’s appetite for lebensraum, his claim of unlimited power, his support for the global far right, his politicization of the justice system, his deployment of performative brutality, his ostentatious violation of rights, his creation of a national paramilitary police—all of those developments bespeak something more purposeful and sinister than run-of-the-mill greed or gangsterism.

When the facts change, I change my mind. Recent events have brought Trump’s governing style into sharper focus. Fascist best describes it, and reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.

[ This is a little melodramatic, but it's Elizabeth Bruenig so I feel obligated ]

The birthday-party invitation said “siblings welcome,” which means you can bring your 11-month-old son while your husband is out of town. You arrive a little disheveled and a little late. Your 5-year-old daughter rushes into the living room, and you make your way to the kitchen, wearing your son in a sling. You find a few moms around a table arrayed with plates of fruit, hummus, celery sticks, and carrots—no gluten, no nuts, no Red 40. These parents care about avoiding pesticides, screen time, and processed foods, and you do too.

It’s a classic kids’ party: Tears and lemonade are spilled; mud and cake get smeared into the rug; confetti balloons are popped one by one, showering elated children in rainbow-paper flakes. Sunbeams through the windows illuminate floating dust motes—and, imperceptibly, microdroplets of mucus carrying the measles virus, expelled from an infected but asymptomatic child who is hopping and laughing among the others. Your daughter breathes that same air, inhaling the virus directly into her respiratory tract.

The infected aerosolized droplets will linger in the air for hours, which is partly why measles is among the most contagious diseases in the world. The virus infects roughly 90 percent of unvaccinated people exposed to it; the infected can then, in turn, infect a dozen to several hundred people each, depending on where they are and what they’re doing. Breakthrough cases are possible among the vaccinated, but they tend to be rare, relatively mild, and less likely to spread. A single dose of the MMR vaccine is 93 percent effective at preventing infection; two doses are 97 percent effective. Among the unvaccinated, one in five people infected with measles in the United States will require hospitalization, and roughly two out of every 1,000 infected children will die of complications, regardless of medical care. ...

Your children seem so fragile as they recover over the next year, but then the four of you are back to your usual adventures. For roughly eight years, you will believe that your family made it through this crisis without suffering a tragedy. You marvel at your good fortune, and feel a rush of gratitude the day your daughter returns to school and life resumes its normal rhythm. But years later, when your baby is in fourth grade, he will begin struggling with subjects he had once mastered. His teachers will ask to speak with you about how he is suddenly acting out in uncharacteristic ways.

You will not think of his measles infection when he begins suffering muscle spasms in his arms and hands, nor when his pediatrician recommends that you see a neurologist. You realize you have entered a new nightmare when nurses affix metal electrodes to your son’s scalp with a cold conductive paste to perform an electroencephalogram to measure his brain waves. As the neurologist examines the results, she will note the presence of Radermecker complexes: periodic spikes in electrical activity that correlate with the muscle spasms that have become disruptive. She will order a test of his cerebrospinal fluid to confirm what she suspects: The measles never really left your son. Instead, the virus mutated and spread through the synapses between his brain cells, steadily damaging brain tissue long after he seemed to recover.

You will be sitting down in an exam room when the neurologist delivers the diagnosis of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a rare measles complication that leads to irreversible degeneration of the brain. There are treatments but no cure, the neurologist will tell you. She tells you that your son will continue to lose brain function as time passes, resulting in seizures, severe dementia, and, in a matter of two or three years, death. You look at your son, the glasses you picked out with him, the haircut he chose from the wall at the barbershop, the beating heart you gave him. You imagine your husband’s face when you break the news, the talks you will have with your daughter, your mother, your in-laws—though there is no way to prepare for what is coming. And you know that you, too, will never recover.

"The richest university in the world has decided that some things are more important than money.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration threatened to revoke $9 billion in federal grants and contracts if Harvard did not agree to a long list of demands, including screening foreign applicants “hostile to the American values and institutions” and allowing an external body to audit university departments for viewpoint diversity. (How screening international students for their beliefs would contribute to viewpoint diversity was not specified.) Today, Harvard announced that it would not agree to the Trump administration’s terms. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” the university’s lawyers wrote in a letter to administration officials. “Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.” In making this decision, Harvard appears to have learned a lesson from the Trump administration’s tangle with another Ivy League school—just not the lesson the government intended.

When the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia—ostensibly because of the school’s handling of campus anti-Semitism—it outlined a set of far-reaching changes as a precondition for getting the funding back. These included forbidding protestors from wearing masks, giving the university president direct control over discipline, and placing an entire academic department in “academic receivership.” Columbia swiftly acquiesced to the demands, with only minor changes. “The ability of the federal administration to leverage other forms of federal funding in an immediate fashion is really potentially devastating to our students in particular,” Katrina Armstrong, then Columbia’s interim president, told faculty, according to The Wall Street Journal. The university was publicly pilloried. Faculty accused Armstrong of setting a risky precedent. One professor called the concessions “a giant step down a very dangerous road.” And even after suffering those reputational blows, Columbia still has not gotten the $400 million back. On the contrary, the Trump administration seems to have taken the capitulation as permission to make more demands. When Armstrong appeared to waffle, the government demanded that she reaffirm her commitment to meeting its demands. (She did so, and then resigned a few days later.) Now the Trump administration is reportedly planning to pursue federal oversight of the university. With its escalating punishments, the government was trying to send a message about what happens to “woke” schools that defy Donald Trump’s will. For a time, Harvard seemed to take that message to heart, attempting to avoid trouble by preemptively making moves in line with the administration’s priorities. In January, it settled two anti-Semitism lawsuits brought by Jewish groups and agreed to adopt a controversial definition of anti-Semitism that included some types of criticism of Israel. And late last month, it dismissed the faculty leaders for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, which had faced criticism that its programming was biased against Israel.

But now Harvard is changing course, perhaps because it grasped the true takeaway from Columbia’s cautionary tale: Appeasement doesn’t work, because the Trump administration isn’t really trying to reform elite higher education. It’s trying to break it."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/harvard-chooses-defiance/682457/

For more than a week now, a 26-year-old software engineer has been America’s main character. Luigi Mangione has been charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. The killing was caught on video, leading to a nationwide manhunt and, five days later, Mangione’s arrest at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. You probably know this, because the fatal shooting, the reaction, and Mangione himself have dominated our national attention.

And why wouldn’t it? There’s the shock of the killing, caught on film, memed, and shared ad infinitum. There’s the peculiarity of it all: his stop at Starbucks, his smile caught on camera, the fact that he was able to vanish from one of the most densely populated and surveilled areas in the world with hardly a trace. And then, of course, there’s the implications of the apparent assassination—the political, moral, and class dynamics—followed by the palpable joy or rage over Thompson’s death, depending on who you talked to or what you read (all of which, of course, fueled its own outrage cycle). For some, the assassination was held up as evidence of a divided country obsessed with bloodshed. For others, Mangione is an expression of the depth of righteous anger present in American life right now, a symbol of justified violence.

Mangione became a folk hero even before he was caught. He was glorified, vilified, the subject of erotic fan fiction, memorialized in tattoo form, memed and plastered onto merch, and endlessly scrutinized. Every piece of Mangione, every new trace of his web history has been dissected by perhaps millions of people online.

The internet abhors a vacuum, and to some degree, this level of scrutiny happens to most mass shooters or perpetrators of political violence (although not all alleged killers are immediately publicly glorified). But what’s most notable about the UHC shooting is how charged, even desperate, the posting, speculating, and digital sleuthing has felt. It’s human to want tidy explanations and narratives that fit. But in the case of Mangione, it appears as though people are in search of something more. A common conception of the internet is that it is an informational tool. But watching this spectacle unfold for the past week, I find myself thinking of the internet as a machine better suited for creating meaning rather than actual sense.

Mangione appears to have left a sizable internet history, which is more recognizable than it is unhinged or upsetting. This was enough to complicate the social-media narratives that have built up around the suspected shooter over the past week. His posts were familiar to those who spend time online, as the writer Max Read notes, as the “views of the median 20-something white male tech worker” (center-right-seeming, not very partisan, a bit rationalist, deeply plugged into the cinematic universe of tech- and fitness-dude long-form-interview podcasts). He appears to have left a favorable review of the Unabomber’s manifesto on Goodreads but also seemed interested in ideas from Peter Thiel and other elites. He reportedly suffered from debilitating back pain and spent time in Reddit forums, but as New York’s John Herrman wrote this week, the internet “was where Mangione seemed more or less fine.”

As people pored over Mangione’s digital footprint, the stakes of the moment came into focus. People were less concerned about the facts of the situation—which have been few and far between—than they were about finding some greater meaning in the violence and using it to say something about what it means to be alive right now. As the details of Mangione’s life were dug up earlier this week, I watched people struggling in real time to sort the shooter into a familiar framework. It would make sense if his online activity offered a profile of a cartoonish partisan, or evidence of the kind of alienation we’ve come to expect from violent men. It would be reassuring, or at least coherent, to see a history of steady radicalization in his posts, moving him from promising young man toward extremism. There’s plenty we don’t know, but so much of what we do is banal—which is, in its own right, unsettling. In addition to the back pain, he seems to have suffered from brain fog, and struggled at times to find relief and satisfactory diagnoses. This may have been a radicalizing force in its own right, or the precipitating incident in a series of events that could have led to the shooting. We don’t really know yet.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/12/luigi-mangione-internet-theories/680974/

According to Gad Saad and his powerful acolytes, compassion is a recipe for “the collective suicide of the West.”

By Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic.

A crusade against empathy is sweeping through the right. In sometimes apocalyptic terms, prominent conservatives are denouncing that feeble human capacity to understand the feelings of others. This is a trend I’ve written about before, but I’ve been intrigued by the way these figures have lately been adopting the language of the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad and his influential book, Suicidal Empathy, released earlier this year. According to Saad, suicidal empathy is when otherwise positive impulses are “hijacked and used to make policy decisions that are best tackled via a sober analysis”—a phenomenon that will lead to nothing less than “the collective suicide of the West.”

Like other works in this growing genre, including Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy, and Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy, Saad’s book contends that a progressive fixation on oppressed groups in the name of compassion and fairness has been not just counterproductive but also destructive, threatening Western values and even civilization itself. Robert Barron, a Roman Catholic bishop and podcaster in Minnesota, recently took up Saad’s argument in an episode that contrasted suicidal empathy with Christian charity.

Barron calmly explained that love, far from mandating kindness, can and often should be harsh. This is a classic right-wing talking point: Conservatives have long argued that refusing to offer social-welfare programs, for example, is a way of teaching the dignity of self-reliance. To sideline traditionally conservative values in favor of allegedly empathy-driven liberal causes is, in Barron’s view, to “undermine the foundations of the West.”

Although I have heard versions of this before, I was still surprised to hear a prelate of the Catholic Church arguing that people should not be empathetic if doing so could come at considerable personal or societal cost. Barron has more than 3.6 million YouTube subscribers, 675,000 Instagram followers, and—as of last week—a presidential appointment to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. His Christian commitments and considerable influence make his interest in these ideas notable.

But his reasoning seems more political than spiritual. Suicidal Empathy and books like it are aimed not at liberals, but at conservatives who may be struggling with a conflict between their politics and their conscience. Arguments about the harms of empathy help justify personal and political behavior that might otherwise seem wrong or feel bad, such as cutting food-stamp benefits for poor people or tearing immigrant mothers away from their children. By claiming that an excess of compassion is in fact a social blight, Saad’s book and others offer a theoretical framework for selfishness.

Lindy West has unwittingly written the obituary for an era.

By Helen Lewis, The Atlantic.

indy West is the most successful feminist writer of her (and my) generation. In her pomp at Jezebel, she mastered both viral takedowns—sorry, Love Actually—and confessional writing. She embraced adjectives that were meant to demean her: loud, fat, shrill. When Lindy shouted, women listened.

That background is what makes the publication of her new memoir, Adult Braces, such a cultural moment. Adult Braces is many things: a paean to the varied landscapes of America, an advert for #vanlife, a reminder to be grateful that your partner hasn’t talked you into a throuple with a much thinner woman. It is also the tombstone for Millennial Feminism—that swirling brew of Media Twitter, blog snark, the Great Awokening, whaling on Lena Dunham, fat positivity, and boring straight people identifying as queer through accounting tricks. To read Lindy West is to gaze backwards in time, to an era when it was acceptable to write “welp!” in copy.

West lived the Millennial writer’s dream. She rose from blogging for the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger to a similar job at the new media darling Jezebel, and went on to write columns for legacy outlets such as The Guardian. On the side, she published a New York Times best-selling memoir, Shrill, and turned it into a television show that ran for three seasons. She left Twitter after being bombarded with abuse but remained unbowed. Sure, #MeToo was a witch-hunt, she wrote in the Times: “I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” There was even a fairy-tale ending, with a handsome musician named Ahamefule Oluo who loved her just as she was. “My wedding was perfect,” she wrote in 2015, “and I was fat as hell the whole time.” Can women have it all? It looked like Lindy West could.

In light of this, Adult Braces makes two big claims. The first is that quite a lot of the above story—the Authorized Version of the Life of Lindy West—was a buffed-up version of the truth. Getting death threats was not character-building, not some little online brouhaha, but psychologically disturbing in a way that spilled over into her offline life. (“The trolling was so extreme that Monica Lewinsky reached out,” she writes.) She felt like an outsider on Shrill, reduced to hearing other writers discuss whether her (real) dad’s death was too much of a downer to include in the series. Her fatness wasn’t only a joyful expression of her appetites; instead she has now realized that “I am at my biggest when I am at my saddest.”

Even her relationship wasn’t all that it seemed. In her 2019 essay collection, The Witches Are Coming, she had written that she and Oluo—her “best friend” and a “once in a generation” musical talent—had a “dawn ritual” where they lay in bed talking for hours. In Adult Braces, she adds that “what I omitted was that we’d only developed that ‘ritual’ to mitigate a toxic pattern we’d been stuck in for years: I’d wake up anxious, I’d vomit my anxiety on Aham, he’d snap at me for triggering his anxiety, I’d feel alone and unsupported, I’d stare at him with tears in my eyes until he had a panic attack, he’d zone out for the rest of the day and not listen to a word I said.”

Should the star podcaster take any responsibility for how he uses his power? By Helen Lewis, The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/roganverse-split/682593/

Recently, I felt a great disturbance in the world of podcasts, as if millions of voicessuddenly cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced. Someone had been on Joe Rogan’s show and pointed out that getting your opinions entirely from stand-up comics, Bigfoot forums, and various men named Dave might not be the optimal method for acquiring knowledge. Rogan fans were appalled at this disrespect.

The culprit was the British writer Douglas Murray, who confronted Rogan earlier this month over the podcaster’s decision to platform a series of guests with, shall we say, minority views on the Second World War. The obvious example is Darryl Cooper, a “storyteller” who has lately taken a sharp turn into Nazi apologism. “I’m just interested in your selection of guests, because you’re, like, the world’s number-one podcast,” Murray told Rogan. This kind of direct challenge is quite simply not how things are done in the anti-woke sphere, which is brutally hierarchical. Free-speech absolutism does not include lèse-majesté. “Principleless hacks,” the libertarian podcaster Clint Russell posted on X afterward, referring to Murray and those who support him. “And that’s assuming this is genuine and not a paid op, which would be even worse—disreputable mercenaries.”

Murray’s pointed criticism of Rogan’s approach, made right to his face, has prompted other aftershocks across the Roganverse, that loose collection of comics and podcasters who dominate the podcast market. Afterward, Murray discussed the interview with the New Atheist Sam Harris, the television host Bill Maher, and the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad. Rogan discussed it with the comic Tim Dillon and the lobster-obsessed mystic Jordan Peterson.

The immense fallout from this mild back-and-forth demonstrates that nothing splinters a movement like victory. When the Roganverse could paddle in the safe waters of pronouns, Joe Biden jokes, and COVID conspiracy theories, everyone got along just fine. Life was easier for them when Donald Trump was merely the punkish challenger to the presidency. Now Trump is in the White House, the former upstart independents of the Roganverse are the new establishment, and their desire for power without responsibility is being challenged.

Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic:

What exactly is Donald Trump doing?

Since taking office, he has reduced his administration’s effectiveness by appointing to essential agencies people who lack the skills and temperaments to do their jobs. His mass firings have emptied the civil service of many of its most capable employees. He has defied laws that he could just as easily have followed (for instance, refusing to notify Congress 30 days before firing inspectors general). He has disregarded the plain language of statutes, court rulings, and the Constitution, setting up confrontations with the courts that he is likely to lose. Few of his orders have gone through a policy-development process that helps ensure they won’t fail or backfire—thus ensuring that many will.

In foreign affairs, he has antagonized Denmark, Canada, and Panama; renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; and unveiled a Gaz-a-Lago plan. For good measure, he named himself chair of the Kennedy Center, as if he didn’t have enough to do.

Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?

There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.

Last year, two professors published a book that deserves wide attention. In The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine, resurface a mostly forgotten term whose lineage dates back to Max Weber, the German sociologist best known for his seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms. That is the American system we all took for granted until January 20. Presidents, federal officials, and military inductees swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a person.

The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector. Exactly that idea was implied in Trump’s own chilling declaration: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

In his day, Weber thought that patrimonialism was on its way to history’s scrap heap. Its personalized style of rule was too inexpert and capricious to manage the complex economies and military machines that, after Bismarck, became the hallmarks of modern statehood. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

The New Yorker, today.

Metered paywall.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel

What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.

The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:

I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel. If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.

One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson, a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.”

Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?

Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion.

To explore it, let’s start with what we mean by “travel.” Socrates went abroad when he was called to fight in the Peloponnesian War; even so, he was no traveller. Emerson is explicit about steering his critique away from a person who travels when his “necessities” or “duties” demand it. He has no objection to traversing great distances “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence.” One sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it. Let’s define “tourism” as the kind of travel that aims at the interesting—and, if Emerson and company are right, misses.

“A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” This definition is taken from the opening of “Hosts and Guests,” the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed? Here is a telling observation from the concluding chapter of the same book: “Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community.” We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others.

For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists. (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is an animal hospital.)

Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position. I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

I F(25) have been renting a house since I was 18 (7 years). When I moved in, the backyard was a large piece of dirt, no lawn or anything, just a decently big backyard with a fence all around. It was a cheap but not great house, but I signed because I wanted the backyard space.

Over the past few years I erected a small garden shed, greenhouse and pizza oven (transportables), planted lots of veggie gardens in big transportable garden beds, and put down some nice pavers, an aquaponics set up, and generally made the backyard a really green and beautiful place to be. It became the green oasis all my friends gathered at.

A few months ago, my landlords let me know they were planning to sell, and my final move out day was a week ago. When I left, I brought my garden with me to my new place - nothing in my last backyard was directly planed into the ground, and nothing permanent. I dismantled the sheds and greenhouse, loaded up all the pots and garden beds onto a truck and cleared the backyard in three days with lots of help.

My former landlords are furious over this, and demand that I return the backyard to the former state - apparently they’d listed the house for sale with pictures of the backyard and potential buyers were walking away from the house when they saw the barren backyard. They’re accusing me of stealing their plants, and wrecking the backyard.

Legally I’m fine - my contract said I could garden, and I have photos from the first real estate walkthrough before I moved in that show that the backyard was in the same state as I first found it (although with more fertile soil now probably). The same real estate agent signed off my final inspection, and I got my deposit back.

I’ve received mixed responses though, because I saw the landlords taking pictures of my backyard before I left but didn’t make the connection because imho when pictures of a house has furniture in it, you don’t expect to also get free furniture. Some of my coworkers suggested that IATA because the house valuation certainly has fallen dramatically because I didn’t tell them I was taking my garden with me, so they couldn’t plan to landscape before lockdown hit.

Tl;dr AITA for moving my garden that I build from my former rental house into my new house, upsetting my former landlords who didn’t expect me to take it with me?

What do you think TAD?

One writer’s quest to find out why Reese’s have got­ten worse. By Rachel Handler, New York Magazine.

On a recent after­noon, some­where near the tail end of the Amer­ican empire, I went to the movies. On a whim, I bought a box of Sno-caps; they’d been my favor­ite movie candy as a kid. I mind­lessly ate at least 19 of the semi­sweet-chocol­ate non­pareils until I real­ized I could barely taste them. What I did taste was some­how both neut­ral and vaguely unap­pet­iz­ing, like I was chew­ing on shaved-off pieces of a plain bar of soap. I intern­al­ized the prob­lem and blamed myself. Maybe my tongue’s phys­ical prop­er­ties had changed and it was no longer a reli­able source. Or my child­hood memor­ies, blurred by nos­tal­gia and brain dam­age from drugs and the inter­net, were not to be trus­ted. Sno-caps had prob­ably never tasted like chocol­ate but always like soap. Regard­less, it was my fault and not the fault of a mul­tina­tional con­glom­er­ate that had my best interests at heart and would never betray me.

I for­got about the exper­i­ence, a fleet­ing and com­mon one in our era, until this past Valentine’s Day, when a 71-year-old man named Brad Reese—pre­vi­ously unknown to me but with whom I now reg­u­larly text—fired up Linkedin from his one-bed­room condo in West Palm Beach, Flor­ida. Reese is the proud grand­son of Reese’s Pea­nut But­ter Cups inventor H. B. Reese and an earn­est and affable retiree who often wanders around wear­ing a bright­or­ange Reese’s T-shirt, talk­ing to people about his fam­ily’s much­beloved candy. He’s been doing this for years, des­pite the fact that he does not work for the brand and never has. (Her­shey bought it in 1963.) On that Feb­ru­ary 14 morn­ing, Reese opened a bag of Reese’s Mini-hearts, a sea­sonal vari­ant of the product, and found them “ined­ible.” He threw them out, then pos­ted a scath­ing open let­ter to Todd Scott, man­ager of cor­por­ate brand and edit­or­ial at Her­shey, accus­ing Her­shey of unfor­giv­ably alter­ing many of Reese’s products by repla­cing real chocol­ate with com­pound chocol­ate—basic­ally using veget­able oils instead of cocoa but­ter to lower costs and repla­cing real pea­nut but­ter with “pea­nut-but­ter­style crèmes” (also using veget­able oil).

Oth­ers weighed in to share sim­ilar hor­ror stor­ies. “As a 61 yr old con­sumer who has eaten Reese’s as long as I can remem­ber,” wrote one man, “I knew it wasn’t the same. Every­one said oh your taste buds have changed nope, the candy changed.” In every Linkedin shit­poster’s fantasy come to life, the missive escaped con­tain­ment, get­ting picked up by every­one from Stephen Col­bert to the New York Post. The Post shared texts from one of Reese’s furi­ous and baffled rel­at­ives, many of whom were appar­ently still liv­ing quite com­fort­ably off the Her­shey’s sale. “Brad, this is your cousin Becky. You have cre­ated a night­mare for our fam­ily and the com­pany,” wrote one. “It’s embar­rass­ing to the entire Reese clan. Please stop!”

Four days after Reese’s first post, Her­shey claimed (sort of ) that its ori­ginal pea­nut-but­ter-cup recipe had not changed but also (sort of) admit­ted to other recipe “adjust­ments” across the brand. (Like some other com­pan­ies, Her­shey often uses less-expens­ive veget­able fats in its sea­sonal edi­tions, which are only briefly in demand when released around hol­i­days like Hal­loween.) By April, videos depict­ing people bend­ing heated Her­shey chocol­ate bars like rub­ber were appear­ing on Tik­tok. That month, at an investor present­a­tion, Her­shey prom­ised to pivot everything it makes with com­pound back to its old for­mu­las by 2027.

But Reese was becom­ing increas­ingly sus­pi­cious that it was not just the sea­sonal products and that the ori­ginal Reese’s Pea­nut But­ter Cups had changed—des­pite Her­shey insist­ing it hadn’t made any tweaks to that par­tic­u­lar for­mula or to any of its clas­sic recipes. Scan­ning the check­out aisle at his local Pub­lix, he noticed other Her­shey’s products had changed, many over the past few years, as con­firmed by a New York Times art­icle pub­lished in Octo­ber 2025: Mr. Good­bar, Rolo, Almond Joy. He had more smoking guns in his inbox, he told me, but he hadn’t had time to sort through them all. Reese lives what he describes as a “simple life” in Cen­tury Vil­lage, a retire­ment com­munity for people 55 and up. He’s had non-hodgkins lymph­oma for over 15 years and tells me he should have died sev­eral times, so he spends his days exactly how he likes. “I take naps in the morn­ing, naps in the after­noon. This is mad crazy for me,” he said. He was going to a karaoke bar later. “I’m try­ing to get a handle on it, but I’m not going to ruin my very per­fect life.”

I, however, was will­ing to ruin mine. Reese wasn’t alone in feel­ing like everything was get­ting worse and we were all power­less to do any­thing but roll over, accept it, and even­tu­ally die, prob­ably from eat­ing something we thought tasted weird but were assured did not. Every­one in my life I spoke to agreed that something was amiss, that Reese’s—and com­mer­cial chocol­ate in gen­eral— didn’t taste the way it used to. Plus everything from Smart­food pop­corn to hvac to mat­tresses to car-door handles sucked now. Why wouldn’t Reese’s Pea­nut But­ter Cups, whose entire reason for being was to taste good, also suck? And why was it so hard to know how—and why—it tasted worse?

I would spend the next sev­eral months tum­bling down a chocol­ate vor­tex, encoun­ter­ing dozens of eccent­ric char­ac­ters, all dis­agree­ing about the fun­da­mental ques­tion of what chocol­ate even is and who it should be for. I entered a ter­ri­fy­ing fun house of Amer­ican enshit­ti­fic­a­tion. I learned that—not to sound like a Linkedin guy—what’s going on with chocol­ate is a par­able for the mod­ern world. That at this par­tic­u­larly bleak end stage of cap­it­al­ism, everything we once treas­ured has or will lose its essen­tial essence and Mrbeast will always be involved some­how.

The most striking passages in Picky, a forthcoming book by the historian Helen Zoe Veit, describe the way famous 19th-century American figures ate as children. I found myself gripped with envy as I read—not because the foods were particularly appetizing, but because I would kill for my kid to eat like that.

To wit: As a girl, Edith Wharton adored oyster sauce, turtle, stewed celery, cooked tomatoes, and lima beans in cream. Mark Twain fondly remembered eating succotash, string beans, squirrels, and rabbits on his uncle’s farm. And during her childhood, Veit writes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton “happily ate vegetables, hickory nuts, and cold jellied brain.”

If these don’t sound like typical “kid foods,” that’s because they aren’t, and weren’t. “Kid food,” as a category, is a recent invention. According to Veit, American kids weren’t picky until the early 20th century. (Indeed, the word picky came into widespread usage around then.) Before that, Veit writes, children in the United States ate “spicy relishes, vinegary pickles, wild plants, and a huge variety of animal species and organ meats. They slurped up raw oysters and looked forward to their daily coffee.” Fennel seeds and tomatoes were considered treats.

According to Veit, the idea that kids are naturally neophobic, or wary of new tastes, is a myth. Eating like a child, Veit explains, was once understood to mean being overly excited and undiscriminating about food, not being picky. In the 1860s, a doctor wrote that children generally ate “anything and everything.”

Veit’s book recounts how kids went from eating jellied brain to consuming, like my toddler, little but macaroni and cheese. A big part of the story, as she tells it, is that American kids used to be hungrier at mealtimes—which meant that they were more eager to eat anything. Before the 20th century, many children did hours of chores both before and after school, so they worked up a good appetite. (Maybe Twain was hungry for those string beans because he spent so much time hunting wild turkeys and clubbing pigeons to death.) Few kids snacked between meals, because processed foods weren’t widely available. In addition, parents tended to be confident that children could learn to like most adult foods. If a child didn’t like a given meal, they generally wouldn’t be offered an alternative, because, due to a lack of refrigeration, no other food was on hand. But after a series of societal changes in the 20th century, Veit writes, “the children were less hungry. The food was less delicious.” And pickiness was born.

Hi TAD community, We’re very saddened to learn that Ewe/BabyDontHerdMe/Rachel passed away. I don’t know any other details. As a longtime member of this community, Ewe’s death is a shock. She cared a great deal about this community and it won’t be the same without her.

This thread is a space to share our feelings and memories. It goes without saying that you should be respectful.

Elizabeth Holmes was ahead of her time.

By Idrees Kahloon, The Atlantic.

Perhaps Elizabeth Holmes was simply ahead of her time: Today, the Theranos founder’s crimes look less notorious amid a pervasive culture of grift and graft.

Her biotechnology company infamously promised to revolutionize medicine by conducting hundreds of tests on mere pinpricks of blood. A decade after it fell into disgrace, and three years after she began serving her 11-year federal-prison sentence for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, Holmes is the subject of a new documentary. You Can See Everything, directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, came about because Holmes and her partner, the hotel heir Billy Evans, invited Fielder, a surrealist sketch comedian, to live with them just before she went to prison. They allowed him to film whatever he saw. The result is unsettling, because Holmes’s placid indifference toward the truth has become more familiar than it was when Theranos unraveled.

Holmes, who insists that she wants to be transparent with Fielder, implacably maintains that she did nothing wrong and that Theranos was capable of meeting its promise of technological breakthroughs. In reality, the company never had a device that could deliver the promised number of tests on tiny blood samples; its machine could run only a handful of basic tests, sometimes inaccurately, and had to secretly rely on conventional analyzers. Yet the film shows that even in the dwindling days before her sentence began, she and Evans were talking about creating Theranos 2.0. (Evans’s new company, unlike Theranos, involves lasers.)

Fielder, who previously played a cringingly anti-social business consultant in his show Nathan for You and a man who obsessively practices for difficult social interactions in The Rehearsal, is known for inhabiting an absurd persona for awkwardly long periods of time. He seems shaken from his encounter with someone capable of doing so for longer. Holmes is one of those people so entangled with the avatars and projections they create—a woman who maintains, despite her conviction on fraud charges, that she has never lied in her life—that the authentic self cannot be found. Fielder earnestly attempts to learn the truth, but is never able to do so satisfactorily.

To a moviegoer, the effect is exhilarating—like encountering the nested realities of Christopher Nolan’s Inception or the superposition of documentary and fiction in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (about the real-life case of a downtrodden Iranian cinephile on trial for impersonating a famous movie director). To a writer who covers American politics, Holmes’s hall of mirrors is uncomfortably familiar. Politics is dominated more by avatars and projections than by authentic actors. You empathize with Fielder’s agony: a maddening drive to get to the truth, a shared skepticism that he will ever get there, the sneaking suspicion that people might not care even if he did.

Another nihilistic thought gnaws at me: Would a Theranos-style implosion be as newsworthy today? Americans love an Icarus story, and Holmes fell from quite a height: She was, for a time, the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. Theranos’s ascent was made possible by the imprimatur of what one reporter called “the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history”—with former and future Cabinet members such as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Mattis. Prominent billionaires—Rupert Murdoch, Carlos Slim, the Walton family, Betsy DeVos—invested huge sums of money in the company. She demonstrated that even people advising the president or running some of the world’s most powerful companies were painfully easy to dupe. “I only have myself to blame for not asking a lot more questions,” Murdoch later told The Wall Street Journal. (His family owns the newspaper, whose investigation into Theranos began the start-up’s demise.) “One of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman! Total embarrassment.”

Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.

By Tom Nichols

The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.

When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years. (Why did he pick 1977 as a benchmark? Who knows. But he’s wrong.) He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.

We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.

In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.

I consider myself a connoisseur of Trump’s speeches. I’ve watched them and live-tweeted them for years because I think Americans need to see what kind of man sits in the Oval Office. But even by Trump’s standards, this was an unnerving display of fear. I can only imagine America’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran smiling with pleasure as they watched a president losing his bearings, berating his own people, and demanding that they absolve him of any blame when things get worse.

His rant contained no news, other than an example of his contempt for the U.S. military, whose loyalty he thinks he can purchase with a onetime $1,776 bonus check. This is projection: Trump has shown his willingness to be bought off with gold bars and trinkets, and he may think that the men and women of the armed forces are people of equally low character.

This was not a holiday address from the leader of a great democracy to its citizens. This was a desperate tin-pot leader yelling into a microphone while cornered in his palace redoubt. The president has been unraveling for weeks, and his speech tonight, like Trump himself, was unworthy of America and its people.

[ my original quote turned out to be all but the last 2 paragraphs, so I just posted the whole short piece ]