Freedom is a word that turns up with embarrassing frequency in rock-and-roll songs. How we love to free-associate about freedom. On occasion, we’re good for a “Chimes of Freedom” (at least Bob Dylan is), but if we’re honest, the freedom musicians are most interested in is our own.
The reason I am climbing on this slippery soapbox called “freedom” today is that I’m being given a presidential medal by that name—an honor I’m receiving mainly for the work of others, among them my bandmates and our fellow activists—and it’s got me thinking again about the subject. When we rock stars talk about freedom, we more often mean libertinism than liberation, but growing up in the Ireland of the 1960s, the latter had its place too. We were mad for freedoms we didn’t have: political freedom, religious freedom, and (most definitely) sexual freedom.
Rock and roll promised a freedom that could not be contained or silenced, an international language of liberation. The freedom songs of the folk singers went electric, the coded messages of gospel music burst into the full flower of funk and soul. Even disco promised emancipation, as in Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” or Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out.” In U2, we wanted our song “Pride (In the Name of Love)” to sound like the freedom we were campaigning for in our work with Amnesty International. That’s how insufferable we were.
Outside the studio, it felt like freedom was unstoppable. In Europe, the generation before us had paid for our freedom in blood. We promised we would never forget. Yes, freedom was stalled here, suppressed there, but not forever, we thought. Walls were made to tumble. I think my generation believed that consciousness itself was evolving, that humankind was moving inevitably toward being freer and more equal—despite five or six millennia of evidence to the contrary. I believed it, anyway.
At age 18, we in U2 had our first proper go at activism at an anti-apartheid concert at Trinity College Dublin. Later we answered the call of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu to take up the cause of freedom again—in this case, freedom from economic slavery—and help cancel the old Cold War debts of the least developed countries. Statistics don’t rhyme very well, so I couldn’t sing my way through this campaign. I needed what one of our friends, Bill Gates, would later refer to as a software update, which is to say, a bigger brain.
Rather than go back to school, I went to Africa for my education. Africa, a continent confronting yet another colonizing force—a virus. And what was the death sentence of HIV/AIDS if not a negation of freedom, namely the freedom to go on living? Bobby Shriver, Jamie Drummond, Lucy Matthew, and I launched One and (Red) to help lift that death sentence. Our modus operandi was to enlist a wide variety of politicians across the political spectrum and to do the same with the forces of commerce to make sure that lifesaving medicine would reach the people whose lives depended on it, whether or not they could pay for a single pill. We were following the African activists who were leading the resistance to this nasty little virus in the form of groups such as TASO in Uganda and TAC in South Africa, and unsung heroes like Zackie Achmat, who refused to take his own antiretrovirals until they were available for all. He took the South African government to court to prove that he and HIV/AIDS existed.
Most of my life, freedom could hold its head up. Freedom had attitude, freedom was an attitude. Walls really did tumble, not just the one in Berlin: The Iron Curtains of the Soviet Union were drawn back to reveal democracies struggling to be born, gasping for free air; and extreme poverty—a trap as confining and debilitating as any prison—released millions of people from its grip. Thanks to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), that brilliant cross-party achievement of President George W. Bush, 26 million people have been freed to go on living despite an HIV diagnosis. And Jubilee USA reports that in the years since Drop the Debt—another bipartisan triumph, this one led in the U.S. by President Bill Clinton—an extra 54 million children have been able to go to school. That’s freedom right there.
So if freedom swaggered—or even sometimes staggered, carrying a drink and smoking a cheroot—we kind of forgave freedom, because it got results.
But where are we now, as my hero David Bowie sang? Is the Medal of Freedom a nostalgia act? Is freedom itself a nostalgia act? Maybe the idea of freedom as a guarantee is. But not freedom as a mighty, worthy struggle.
In America, the land of the free, we saw in the past election that freedom is universally valued but not universally defined. For some it means the freedom to things, such as access to reproductive care; for others it means freedom from various forms of perceived government intrusion. It’s an old family argument—older than America itself.
While America wrestles with not just with what freedom is, but who gets it, in other parts of the world, people are literally dying for it. In Ukraine, freedom is a brutally direct, existential question, framed by Vladimir Putin’s guns and bombs: Are your lives worth this fight, this struggle? In Sudan, a civil war whose parties are supported by great powers poses the question of what freedom means when famine is not even considered a new tool of war and hardly makes the news.
Across the Middle East, freedom has always been at the beneficence of the great powers passing through rather than the great peoples born of the Levant. In Syria now we see the first, tentative shoots of freedom after Bashar al-Assad and Putin squeezed and choked the life out of this most mythological ground. But caution is the word. Seeds of democracy can be scattered or trampled. Even in the Queen of Sheba’s Yemen, we see Iran trample on more treasured peoples and impose its brand of fundamentalism not just on its neighbors but on its own people, mostly Persian but also Kurdish, like Mahsa Amini. Women and men yearning to breathe free—free of the vice and virtue police. Yes, that’s really their formal title.
And then there’s Gaza. Israel’s prime minister for almost 20 years, Benjamin Netanyahu, has often used the defense of Israel’s freedom and its people as an excuse to systematically deny the same freedom and security to the Palestinians—a self-defeating and deadly contradiction, which has led to an obscene leveling of civilian life that the world can visualize daily on their cellphones. Freedom must come for the Israeli hostages, whose kidnapping by Hamas ignited this latest cataclysm. Freedom must come for the Palestinian people. It does not take a prophet to predict that Israel will never be free until Palestine is free.
Freedom is complex and demanding. It might even be a little dull, the work of freedom. Certainly the work of peacemakers is. I’ve witnessed it, and of course I don’t have the stamina for it. The fluorescent lights, the conference tables with plates of stale sandwiches, the late nights of hard work and of missing your family back home. In Ireland during the late 1990s, I wasn’t in those rooms, but we all held our breath as almost everyone gave up something they believed in for the cause of peace.
This stuff is complicated. I used to love a good rant about it. Shooting your mouth off before you knew anything was part of the attraction of rock and roll. I used to think that being heard was the most useful thing I could do, maybe because it was the only thing I really knew how to do.
But at some point, it began to have diminishing returns. I remember Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, asking with exasperation and a raised eyebrow, “What is it this time, Bono? Rock Against Bad Things?”
I still have a fondness for symbolic or poetic acts—a fist in the air, a shout, an indelible image. I still think they’re important. But for more than two decades, I’ve opted for more activism and less symbolism. A petition for something utterly worthy arrives once a month at our house. But I’m not much of a signer. These days I’m more inclined to be specific than dramatic, to organize than agonize.
On the barricades, this word might sound like a yawn, but now all I want to be is an actualist (I thought I’d made the word up until I found it in the dictionary). I suppose being an actualist means being an idealist crossed with a pragmatist. I want to know what actually works. If I throw a punch, I want it to land. I enjoyed the wild swings of my youth. But now I’m excited by the strategy and tactics that might put injustice on the back foot.
And actually, in the end, it’s not personalities—as dull or luminous as singers can be—that change things. It’s movements like Jubilee 2000 or the One Campaign, which takes to the streets but also to the corridors of Capitol Hill and parliaments and G8 meetings, working with people who disagree on everything but the one thing (see what I did there?), cutting deals where they can to fight the injustice of extreme poverty. It’s also the animating idea of (Red), a gateway drug for AIDS activism, a way to bring the capitalists on board (and that was before I realized I was one).
Yes, it was 25 years ago almost to the month that the developing-world-debt-cancellation campaign brought me to the office of then-Senator Joe Biden. He was friendly—dropping references to County Mayo, even then reciting Seamus Heaney poems. But he was fearsome too—ready to take a punch as well as throw one. That’s the kind of fighter you want on your side.
I left those meetings with a sense that the very ordinariness of the people who wrote the bills, who built the coalitions, whose day job was the grinding unglamorous work of serving freedom, was in fact their extraordinariness.
It’s what the fight for freedom needs today: faithful, stubborn, unselfish effort. For many years I quoted that line of Martin Luther King Jr.’s: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I now know it does not. It has to be bent. And that’s how the walls will finally come down: in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Gaza, across the Middle East, in every part of the world where health and humanity are at risk. Abraham Lincoln spoke of a “new birth of freedom.” I think he meant that freedom must be re-won by each generation. That is a fine call to action for a new year.
It’s tempting to conclude that the answer is yes. The country elected a man who has been indicted four times, essentially wiping away any chance that he might face criminal accountability for his effort to hold on to power after losing reelection in 2020. The Supreme Court, in issuing its shocking immunity ruling this summer, seems newly on board with the idea that the chief executive can more or less do whatever he likes. What do legal restrictions and constitutional processes matter in the face of a politics that has lost any semblance of reason?
A great deal, in fact. The country has come a long way from the starry-eyed early days of the Russia investigation, when Trump’s opponents purchased votive candles printed with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s face on them and dreamed of a criminal prosecution that might end Trump’s presidency. Sure, the law is not a magic wand to save America—but neither is it entirely useless. Acknowledging the threat that Trump poses to American democracy does not require accepting that he is unbound by law. On the contrary, taking the risk seriously requires taking seriously the legal and political mechanisms available to prevent the worst of Trump’s intended abuses.
Those mechanisms are available partly because of Trump’s own shortcomings. As would-be authoritarians go, Trump is often lazy, prone to whims, easily distracted, and poorly organized, and each of those shortcomings can create legal and political weaknesses for his administration. The New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie argued shortly following Trump’s reelection that “there is a large gap between a stated intention and an accomplished fact. And it is within that space that politics happens.”
The country has already caught a glimpse of how this process can play out, as Trump has begun to assemble his Cabinet. Within weeks of the election, the vision of a victorious, crusading Trump that his allies promoted swiftly crumbled into something a lot more familiar: a chaotic, grinding slog. That may not sound particularly encouraging, but for those who care about democracy, it’s actually welcome news.
The first hint of breakdown emerged out of the constitutional dynamics between the executive and legislative branches. The Republican Party secured a less-than-overwhelming four-seat majority in the Senate, meaning that the new administration can lose only a handful of votes for confirming Trump’s Cabinet nominees. Briefly, it seemed that Trump’s team had dreamed up a solution in order to jam through the president-elect’s more controversial nominees: force the Senate into a recess by inexcusably contorting the Constitution, then use the president’s ability to fill Cabinet slots unilaterally when the Senate is gone.
The idea was disturbing. It recalled the monarchical power to dissolve Parliament—and, in that sense, spoke to an absolutist vision of presidential authority entirely unchecked by the legislature or any competing center of power. But the incoming administration appears to have backed away from the scheme after Ed Whelan, a fixture of the conservative legal movement, raised alarm about the scheme and voiced doubts about its constitutionality. One of Trump’s most controversial and least-supported nominees, former Representative Matt Gaetz, has since withdrawn from consideration rather than hope for a recess appointment.
Even if Trump’s team decides to pull the trigger on the plan at a future date, they will face no end of difficulty in practice. To begin with, the scheme would require the House to recess first, but the GOP’s House majority is extremely tight, and there is no guarantee that Speaker Mike Johnson could secure the votes to send his chamber home in service of such a scheme, even if he wanted to. In the weeks since Whelan first warned against the idea, legalacademics of all political stripes have begun assembling a range of compelling arguments as to why the plan would be unconstitutional—arguments that a Trump administration would have to face down in court. Even if such litigation makes it up to a potentially sympathetic Supreme Court, and even if the Court is sympathetic, Trump will confront the problem that three of the conservative justices previously signed on to an opinion holding that a president may only fill vacancies during a recess that arose during the recess itself, significantly limiting this immense claim of power.
None of this is to say that the House, the Senate, or a majority of the justices are pure and principled actors, or that respect for the text of the Constitution will be enough to stiffen their spines against Trump. But the combination of public outrage, the existence of strong legal arguments against Trump’s actions, and the total lack of strong legal arguments for them is potentially significant. Each element makes going along with him a little more difficult for Congress and the Court—especially because, even if many members of the public have given up on thinking of the Court as anything more than a political body, some of the justices still want to be able to think of themselves as fair and impartial jurists. And the more difficulty that Trump encounters, the more likely that he shrugs his shoulders and moves on to the next whim.
The same is true when it comes to the specific policies that Trump has promised to implement during his second term, many of them arguably or even blatantly illegal. Dara Lind, of the American Immigration Council, has pointed out that anxious rhetoric around Trump’s promised mass deportations often elides the challenging and perhaps insurmountable “logistical realities” of organizing and executing such an incredibly complex operation. Litigation is part of those logistical realities, too. Consider Trump’s promise to end the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, which will reportedly involve an executive order directing the federal government not to issue Social Security numbers to babies born on U.S. soil to parents who are neither citizens nor green-card holders. How is the Social Security Administration meant to ascertain the citizenship of an infant’s parents? What happens when that agency and others are hit with a wave of lawsuits from organizations challenging the order? A signature on an executive order is a very different thing than actually putting a policy into effect.
It’s difficult to gauge what the litigation might look like in advance. But the first Trump administration offers instructive examples. Consider the case of the travel ban during the first Trump administration: Shortly after taking office in 2017, Trump released an executive order barring citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. A flood of litigation ensued as lawyers rushed to airports around the country to represent panicked travelers. Courts blocked the order. And though Trump whined, the administration complied—at least that time around. After the Supreme Court finally issued a ruling upholding the constitutionality of the proclamation, more than a year later, the version of the ban that ultimately went into place was significantly watered-down and incorporated a number of exceptions.
The final ban was, to be clear, stupid, pointless, and cruel, and the Court’s decision was studiously obtuse as to the hateful intentions behind the policy. But the litigation made a difference in allowing people to enter the country who otherwise would have been stranded—not all of them, and not enough of them, but some. For those people, that difference mattered.
This is not a stirring tale of the majesty of law above all. It is, however, a story about the usefulness of the legal process as a means of throwing sand in the gears of the machinery of cruelty. And the travel ban was on far firmer legal ground than many of the proposals being floated for Trump’s second term.
Trump has always been defined by his striking lack of curiosity about the government he sought to lead. To the extent that the 47th president is able to convince the country that he has the authority to carry out his political program as a sort of elected dictator, that will be another victory for Trump’s style of empty know-nothingism. In contrast, recognizing why Trump’s power isn’t unlimited requires a deeper understanding of the mechanisms by which the work of government is actually carried out—exactly the understanding to which Trump’s own apathy is ideologically opposed. The more Americans know about their system of government and the laws that shape it, the better they will be equipped to defend their democracy.
This much you already know: Many Americans are alone, friendless, isolated, undersexed, sick of online dating, glued to their couches, and transfixed by their phones, their mouths starting to close over from lack of use. Our national loneliness is an “urgent public health issue,” according to the surgeon general. The time we spend socializing in person has plummeted in the past decade, and anxiety and hopelessness have increased. Roughly one in eight Americans reports having no friends; the rest of us, according to my colleague Olga Khazan, never see our friends, stymied by the logistics of scheduling in a world that has become much more frenetic and much less organized around religion and civic clubs. “You can’t,” she writes, “just show up on a Sunday and find a few hundred of your friends in the same building.”
But what if you could, at least on a smaller scale? What if there were a way to smush all your friends together in one place—maybe one with drinks and snacks and chairs? What if you could see your work friends and your childhood friends and the people you’ve chatted amiably with at school drop-off all at once instead of scheduling several different dates? What if you could introduce your pals and set them loose to flirt with one another, no apps required? What if you could create your own Elks Lodge, even for just a night?
I’m being annoying, obviously—there is a way! It’s parties, and we need more of them.
Simply put, America is in a party deficit. Only 4.1 percent of Americans attended or hosted a social event on an average weekend or holiday in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; this is a 35 percent decrease since 2004. Last month, Party City, the country’s largest retailer of mylar balloons, goofy disposable plates, and other complements to raging, announced that it would close after years of flagging sales and looming debt. Adolescents are engaging in markedly fewer risky behaviors than they used to; Jude Ball, a psychologist who has extensively researched this phenomenon, told me recently that a major cause is just that teenagers are having fewer parties. Six months ago on Reddit, someone asked one of the saddest questions I’ve ever seen on the social platform, which is really saying something: “Did anybody else think there would be more parties?”
“When I was a kid my parents and extended family used to have serious parties on a regular basis,” the post continues. “I remember houses and yards full of people, music all the way up, lots of food and of course free flowing alcohol. Neighbors, family, coworkers, their friends, they all showed up. And likewise my parents went to their parties. I thought that is what my adult years would be like, but they aren’t.” The post got more than 300 responses, many of them sympathetic.
A lot of other people seem to feel the same way, even if they’re not expressing it quite so plainly. Polling from the market-research and public-opinion company YouGov in 2023 showed that although 84 percent of Americans enjoy birthday parties, only 59 percent had attended one in the previous year. In a different YouGov poll from 2022, only 28 percent of respondents said they would “probably” or “definitely” throw a party for their next birthday. This is what a group psychologist would call “diffusion of responsibility,” and what I, Ellen Cushing, would call “a major bummer”: Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them. We just expect them to appear when we need them, like fire trucks.
My point is that we are obligated to create the social world we want. Intimacy, togetherness—the opposite of the crushing loneliness so many people seem to feel—are what parties alchemize. Warm rooms on cold nights, so many people you love thumbtacked down in the same place, the musical clank of bottles in the recycling, someone staying late to help with the dishes—these are things anyone can have, but like everything worth having, they require effort. Fire trucks, after all, don’t come from nowhere—they come because we pay taxes.
This year, pay your taxes: Resolve to throw two parties—two because two feels manageable, and chain-letter math dictates that if every party has at least 10 guests (anything less is not a party!) and everyone observes host-guest reciprocity (anything else is sociopathic!), then everyone gets 20 party invitations a year—possibly many more. Bear in mind that parties can be whatever you want: a 15-person Super Bowl party; a casual picnic in the park with 20 of your pals; an overfull house party, guest count unknown. They do not need to be expensive, or formal, or in your own home. You don’t need a theme, unless you want one. You don’t even need to buy anything, or clean up beforehand, if you’re feeling particularly punk. All you have to do is invite people in.
In the weeks before I took my 11-year-old daughter to Taylor Swift’s Eras concert in Toronto, things started to go wrong, logistically. Our Airbnb host canceled on us, and I scrambled in a sea of expensive options to find a backup. Then, I realized that my daughter’s passport had expired. You need a passport to fly to Canada. Underneath my stress—and my annoyance that something that was supposed to be fun had become stressful—I began to feel shame. I felt ashamed to be participating in a sort of frenzied hysteria. How could I have allowed myself to get swept up in this? I wondered.
The sensation was hauntingly similar to the experience of questioning, after a love affair begins to go south, how you could have allowed yourself to fall for him, for his lines, his improbable good looks. I felt foolish, a feeling I loathe. My enthusiasm left me vulnerable, like leaning in for a kiss and being rebuffed.
Is Swift worth all this: money, fanfare, space in our brain? No, of course not. And also: yes, completely. Swift’s songs—focused as they are on the allure of being wanted; the wild happiness a relationship can offer; the heartbreak of rejection or of failing to be seen or understood by a partner—tell us that it’s okay to be hungry for joy and love. All the effort required to attend a Swift concert is worth it, in the same way that love affairs are worth it, though both may seem silly and irrational, and their joys potentially fleeting. My daughter is peering down into the canyon of teenage life, the toes of her Converse hanging over its cliff. This is what I want her to know as she approaches the period in which longing and romantic ecstasy may feel all-consuming: You are never too clever or conscientious to be swept off your feet by love, or felled by heartbreak. Falling in love doesn’t make you foolish. It makes you human.
I would not have spent the colossal sum required to attend the Eras Tour had I not completed cancer treatment in June. I purchased our tickets while recovering from the second of two grueling surgeries that had followed chemotherapy and radiation. The less said about the cost of the tickets the better—and yet, something must be said. They were absurdly expensive. My husband took to calling it the Heiress Tour. But ending cancer treatment in 2024 felt like the universe was giving me an excuse to do something reckless in pursuit of joy—to participate in what Taffy Brodesser-Akner has called, only slightly tongue in cheek, “the cultural event of my lifetime.” Illness amplifies things: It both sharpens the razor edge of nostalgia and reminds me that the time I have left is certainly unknowable and possibly short. It also yanks discomfort and misery to the fore, and in doing so reminds me of their opposites: pleasure, joy. Love—bodily longing, feeling known, all of it—is one of life’s most acute and complex pleasures. When it comes to my daughter and love, I can guarantee nothing, except that it will matter to her too.
Lola is caught in that middle space between childhood and adolescence. She cares very much about the fit of her pants and the difficulty of growing out her bangs. But when one of her friends comes over and I find reasons to linger outside her door, I hear them playing with her dollhouse.
She and I are bookends of the catalog of romantic love comprising Swift’s work. Lola has not yet entered the world of relationships; I am settled in a long-term one. Assuming my relationship holds, the tumult of heartbreak is behind me for now. But Swift’s songs yank me back into electric uncertainty: the possibility of a new romance that can light up a life, or the deflation of it flickering out into nothing. She pulls me back into agonizing unreciprocated desire and the terror of losing someone. And she describes the familiar-to-me comfort—always miraculous, never guaranteed—of long-term love.
I try to be honest and developmentally appropriate with my daughter about most things: death, sex, money, worry, war, climate change, illness, political upheaval. I model making and keeping friends, and I watch my daughter nurture and value her friendships, and grieve the ones that slip away. I point out regularly that the lives of those who are uncoupled are rich and full. I can dig within myself and find that I do not feel strongly about where she lands: coupled, uncoupled, straight, queer.
But I find that I am not sure what to tell her about romantic love. I share little of my romantic adventures and misadventures before I met her father, or even of the roads that he and I traveled together before we landed next to each other on the couch, reading to two children.
When Lola was small, I read her fairy tales. I mentioned that getting engaged after one night of dancing with a prince while wearing unyielding shoes was ill-advised. But I did not add that you might want to, that the sensation of being loved and loving in return is nothing short of transformative. It was as if, in my acceptance of uncertainty, I was pretending that love is immaterial. Romantic longing—feeling it, receiving it—is such a big part of being a person. Swift gets this, obviously. Love is messy, her body of work asserts. And it’s important, worthy of documentation. For children and teenagers, whose education is now so rational, so fixated on measurable outcomes, seeing someone really wallow in the morass of romance and desire is, I imagine, a relief. Instead of being like, “But don’t you want to build a STEM toy? Or do a research project on Greta Thunberg?”
In November, we traveled to Toronto with friends, and we did tourist things. In a dimly lit Italian restaurant and at the top of the CN Tower, we talked about Swift, our relationship to her. My friend Sari and I find Swift appealing as a writer, a sensitive overthinker. Our sixth-grade daughters, articulate on most topics, were strangely unable to explain why they like her. They just do.
The concert itself, in Toronto’s Rogers Centre, was a glorious spectacle of big feelings: hers, ours. The sound of Swift, and of her fans, felt like a solid thing you could touch, and the visuals—Swift herself, in the flesh but dwarfed by the arena, and an enormous livestream of her red-lipped image, plus accompanying video art—were almost distractingly absorbing. But even in this environment, I was my daughter’s mother: I watched Lola.
She and I sang along to “Cruel Summer,” a song about taking a relationship more seriously than you were meant to, an anthem to vulnerability concealed and revealed. The bridge devastates me every time, and because I was beside Lola and we were both singing with all of our hearts, I remembered my own cruel summer, when I was 18. “I’m drunk in the back of the car / And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar / Said ‘I’m fine,’ but it wasn’t true,” Swift sings. Twenty-three years ago, I said I was fine (casual! Low key!), but it absolutely wasn’t true, and when the boy said that we should stop seeing each other before he went off to college, I played it cool. But then I couldn’t get out of bed. This floored me. I was a competent person who had secured admission to a highly selective college and kept my old Buick full of gas bought with the wages from my summer job. How could something like love undo me?
Later in the stadium, we were hot and sweaty and tired, and Swift sang “Champagne Problems,” about a proposal that doesn’t end in an engagement. It is a deeply sad song, and Lola and I sang along, companionably elegiac. I’d felt cut open when I broke up with my first boyfriend at 17. He loved me; I didn’t love him; he was going to college. I “dropped [his] hand while dancing / left [him] out there standing / crestfallen on the landing.” I woke my mother up sobbing in the middle of the night after ending things with him. How could I have known how gutting it would feel to turn away from him? My mother stroked my hair as if I were 6 and feverish, and tucked me into bed.
“It’s one of the worst feelings in the world,” she said, knowingly, sympathetically. She had told me almost nothing of love, but I knew from her voice that she had experienced this feeling. She could not, of course, have protected me from it. But I’d had no idea the price I would pay for wading into romance. The hurt came back again a few years later when I broke up with my college boyfriend, and I remembered her words, used them to slow my racing heart.
I felt so undone by love as I embarked upon it in earnest in my teens and early 20s—in every permutation I was shocked by how consuming it was. But my daughter has Swift, and her big words and catchy hooks, documenting the good, the bad, and the embarrassing. Maybe she’ll be less surprised by it all.
After the concert ended, we stumbled back to our Airbnb. Lola shivered in her eponymous cardigan. She wrapped it around her in the elevator, and we sang the song, part of a triptych from Swift’s 2020 Folklore: “Cardigan,” “August,” and “Betty” are each told from the perspective of the members of a teenage love triangle. Lola was deliriously tired. “She’s so amazing,” she said. “The love triangle … How does she make each of those characters so real?”
“I know,” I said. “She is amazing.” And I know that Lola knows that love and love stories matter. I wonder if someday, once she has sat at a few of the points of the triangle, she will be even more astounded by Swift’s skill, handing us a three-dimensional, three-pronged shape of betrayal, anguish, and remorse in 13 minutes of music. For my child, who has been raised on pat Common Core standards—she is of a generation for whom English-language arts have been reduced to worksheets prompting students to identify a text’s main “argument”—Swift’s love triangle is a revelation: There is no moral. There is no “lesson” beyond the fact that everyone feels things, everyone wants things, everyone is the hero of their own story, everyone makes mistakes, and some people get their heart broken. It isn’t fair. It isn’t logical. It’s love, and it’s an unholy mess.
Packing up my suitcase in Toronto, I found two bracelets that Lola had given me, one spelling “Archer,” one spelling “Prey,” each beaded by her 11-year-old hands. “Who could ever leave me, darling / But who could stay?” Swift asks in “The Archer,” and it is perhaps the most resonant question ever posed: Who among us has not felt incredulous that someone we loved did not love us back, and simultaneously convinced that we are unlovable?
I want Lola to know that art can save her life, that it can be glue when you feel you will fall apart. That someone else’s art about love—vulnerable, honest, transcendent—can, like love itself, be a lifeline. That when the pandemic threatened to loom forever and I felt alone and terrified and exhausted, Folklore shuttled me to and from work, tethering me to a time in my life when I had felt alive with the longing described in “Cardigan”: “And when I felt like I was an old cardigan / Under someone’s bed / You put me on and said I was your favorite.” In Toronto, Swift reminded us all of the transformative power of being seen, chosen, and understood—and that we were not alone in feeling limp and dreary. I want Lola to know that when I wondered whether I would survive my cancer and its brutal treatments, and when audiobooks couldn’t numb me any longer, I would lie in my bed alone and listen to “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” or “Long Story Short” or “The 1”: “I’m doing good; I’m on some new shit,” I would mouth to myself, willing it to be true.
No one could promise me that I would be okay, nor can I promise Lola much of anything. But I can tell her—with Swift’s help—that love is worthy of a pilgrimage to Toronto. Swift and I—and the 39,000 other people singing along in the arena—can tell her to grab at that brass ring. She will risk falling, painfully and hard. And she might be rewarded by the joy of big love: someone seeing the pieces of her that are wonderful, embarrassing, specific, and exquisitely private. But when love shatters in her hands, she will know that she isn’t alone: There is Swift, never too pretty to be rejected, and all the legions of fans singing along, and also me, next to her.
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On New Year’s Day, while looking for something to watch, I came across a channel with a loud, gray-haired British guy in a nice suit and a scarf bellowing about something or other. I assumed that I had turned to CNN and was watching its ebullient, occasionally shouty business and aviation correspondent, Richard Quest. I wasn’t even close: It was Roger Daltrey of the Who, and he was excitedly introducing the new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Peter Frampton in a condensed version of the October ceremony.
Frampton’s music was, for a moment in the 1970s, the soundtrack to my misspent teenage nights; on the broadcast, Keith Urban joined him to perform his megahit “Do You Feel Like We Do,” and I remembered every word. And Frampton seems like a man who is genuinely loved by his peers. It was a nice moment. But when 80-year-old Daltrey—who, at 21, famously sang, “Hope I die before I get old”—is introducing a man whose biggest hits were produced nearly 50 years ago, it’s a reminder that the entire Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concept is utterly wrongheaded.
As the saying goes, good writers borrow, and great writers steal. I was once a professor, however, and professors give attribution, so let me rely on John Strausbaugh, who wrote a wonderful 2001 jeremiad against Boomer music nostalgia, Rock ’Til You Drop, to explain why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame shouldn’t exist: Because it’s “as true to the spirit of rock’n’roll as a Hard Rock Cafe—one in which there are way too many children and you can’t get a drink.”
The Hall of Fame is about old and dead people; rock’n’roll is about the young and living. The Hall of Fame tries to reform rock’n’roll, tame it, reduce it to bland, middle-American family entertainment; it drains all the sexiness and danger and rebelliousness out of it …
Strasbaugh winces especially hard at the Rock Hall tradition of “honoring” classic acts by “dragging their old butts out onto a stage” and then making them “go through the motions one more time” as they pretend to feel the music the same way they did when they were kids. Writing almost 25 years ago, he said that the Rolling Stones were way past their retirement clock, and that Cher in her late-1990s performances “was so stiff in her makeup and outfits, that she looked like a wax effigy of herself.”
Last year, the Rolling Stones went on tour again and were sponsored by—I am serious—the AARP.
And Cher was also just inducted into the Rock Hall in October, at 78 years old. When you’re asking Cher to suit up so that she can be lauded by the young-enough-to-be-her-granddaughter Dua Lipa, you may be trying to honor the artist, but you’re mostly just reminding everyone about the brutal march of time.
I am sometimes blistered on social media for my bad music takes, and I will confess that with some exceptions, I didn’t really develop much of a taste in music beyond the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Top 40 ear candy until I was in college. (My musical soul was saved, or at least improved, by the old WBCN in Boston and by my freshman-dorm neighbor at Boston University, who introduced me to Steely Dan.) But you don’t need a refined taste in music to cringe when a bunch of worthies from the music industry assemble each year to make often nonsensical choices about what constitutes “rock and roll” and who did it well enough to be lionized for the ages. Look, I sort of like some of those old Cher hits from the ’70s—“Train of Thought” is an underrated little pop gem, in my view—but Cher as an inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? If she, and Bobby Darin, and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Woody Guthrie, and Willie Nelson are all “rock,” what isn’t?
This is where I must also admit that I’ve never been to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, or even to Cleveland, for that matter. But I’d argue that seeing it all up close—as Strausbaugh notes in his book, it’s full of this rock artist once wore this shirt and that rock artist once touched this mic stand—isn’t the point. Trying to trap the energy and spirit of youthful greatness behind the ice in some sort of Fortress of Rock Solitude is nothing more than a monument to nostalgia. Worse, it’s an ongoing tribute not to music, but to capitalism. Perhaps the music business was always a business, but most rock and roll was about opposing the establishment, not asking for a nice table at its Chamber of Commerce ceremonies.
Don’t get me wrong: I love both rock music and capitalism. I am also prone to a fair amount of my own nostalgia, and I will pay to see some of my favorite elderly stars get up onstage, wink at the audience, and pull out a few of their famous moves—as long as they do it with the kind of self-awareness that makes it more like a visit with an old friend than a soul-crushing pastiche of days gone by.
But even when a return to the stage is done with taste, age can still take its toll on both the performer and the audience: I’m now in my 60s, and as much as I liked seeing Peter Frampton get a big round of applause, I didn’t feel warm or happy; I just felt old, because he was obviously old. (Frampton has an autoimmune disease that causes muscle weakness, so he had to sit to perform his arena anthem.) And when Keith Urban is playing along as the representative of the younger generation at 56 years old, it makes me feel a certain kind of pity for people who gave me the musical landscape of my youth.
Maybe America doesn’t need to commercialize every Boomer memory. Artists become eligible for the Rock Hall 25 years from the release date of their first commercial recording, but rock can’t be distilled in 25-year batches like some sort of rare whiskey. Rock is more like … well, sex. Each generation has to experience it for themselves; later, each generation thinks they invented it; eventually, we all realize that no generation can fully explain their feelings about it to the next one.
Speaking of sex and rebellion, one of the best arguments against the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is that Warren Zevon isn’t in it. His continuing exclusion is one of the great ongoing controversies of the selection process, but the point is not that Zevon should be in it; rather, the question is whether Zevon would ever want to be honored in such a place. The man who wrote “Play It All Night Long” and “Mr. Bad Example” simply doesn’t belong on a pedestal next to Mary J. Blige and Buffalo Springfield. And that’s reason enough that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should not exist at all.
The FBI said that the attacker who killed 14 people in New Orleans on New Year’s Day appears to have acted alone.
Military officials said that the driver of a Cybertruck that exploded in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas yesterday was an Army master sergeant who was on leave from active duty.
Federal agents searched the home of former NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, who was accused of sexual misconduct last year. Maddrey has denied the allegations.
Dark mode has its touted benefits: Dimmer screens mean less eye strain, some assert; and on certain displays (including most smartphones), showing more black pixels prolongs battery life. Dark mode also has its drawbacks: Reading lots of text is more difficult to do in white-on-black. But even if these tradeoffs might be used to justify the use of inverted-color settings, they offer little insight into those settings’ true appeal. They don’t tell us why so many people suddenly want their screens, which had glowed bright for years, to go dark. And they’re tangential to the story of how, in a fairly short period of time, we all became creatures of the night mode.
