by | Jan 6, 2025 | The Atlantic
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Donald Trump wasted little time after the election in claiming an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” and floating a series of extreme proposals with varying degrees of legal dubiousness. The president-elect has already winkingly suggested that he might stay in office for an unconstitutional third term, indicated that he intends to end the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, and said that he plans to deport U.S. citizens. If the mood on the right is triumphant, the atmosphere among those opposed to Trump has been despairing, as though nothing can be done to hold him back from what he has planned. A representative headline in Slate read “Is the Law for Suckers, Now?”
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.”
[Read: No, Trump can’t just ‘dismiss’ the Senate]
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, legal academics 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.
[Read: The potential backlash to Trump unbound]
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.
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by | Jan 6, 2025 | The Atlantic
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?”
[Read: The friendship paradox]
“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.
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by | Jan 6, 2025 | The Atlantic
Fifty years into the project of modeling Earth’s future climate, we still don’t really know what’s coming. Some places are warming with more ferocity than expected. Extreme events are taking scientists by surprise. Right now, as the bald reality of climate change bears down on human life, scientists are seeing more clearly the limits of our ability to predict the exact future we face. The coming decades may be far worse, and far weirder, than the best models anticipated.
This is a problem. The world has warmed enough that city planners, public-health officials, insurance companies, farmers, and everyone else in the global economy want to know what’s coming next for their patch of the planet. And telling them would require geographic precision that even the most advanced climate models don’t yet have, as well as computing power that doesn’t yet exist. Our picture of what is happening and probably will happen on Earth is less hazy than it’s ever been. Still, the exquisitely local scale on which climate change is experienced and the global purview of our best tools to forecast its effects simply do not line up.
Today’s climate models very accurately describe the broad strokes of Earth’s future. But warming has also now progressed enough that scientists are noticing unsettling mismatches between some of their predictions and real outcomes. Kai Kornhuber, a climate scientist at Columbia University, and his colleagues recently found that, on every continent except Antarctica, certain regions showed up as mysterious hot spots, suffering repeated heat waves worse than what any model could predict or explain. Across places where a third of humanity lives, actual daily temperature records are outpacing model predictions, according to forthcoming research from Dartmouth’s Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin. And a global jump in temperature that lasted from mid-2023 to this past June remains largely unexplained, a fact that troubles Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, although it doesn’t entirely surprise him.
“From the 1970s on, people have understood that all models are wrong,” he told me. “But we’ve been working to make them more useful.” In that sense, the project of climate modeling is a scientific process that’s proceeding normally, even excellently. Only now the whole world needs very specific information to make crucial decisions, and they needed it, like, yesterday. That scientists don’t have those answers might look like a failure of modeling, but really, it’s a testament to how bad climate change has been permitted to get, and how quickly.
The Earth is an unfathomably complex place, a nesting doll of systems within systems. Feedback loops among temperature, land, air, and water are made even more complicated by the fact that every place on Earth is a little different. Natural variability and human-driven warming further alter the rules that govern each of those fundamental interactions.
Some of these systems—such as cloud formation—are notoriously poorly understood, despite having a major bearing on climate change. And, like clouds, many parts of the Earth system are just too localized for climate models to pick up on. “We have to approximate cloud formation because we don’t have the small scales necessary to resolve individual water droplets coming together,” Robert Rohde, the chief scientist at the open-source environmental-data nonprofit Berkeley Earth, told me. Similarly, models approximate topography, because the scale at which mountain ranges undulate is smaller than the resolution of global climate models, which tend to represent Earth in, at best, 100-square-kilometer pixels. That resolution is good for understanding phenomena such as Arctic warming over decades. But “you can’t resolve a tornado worth anything,” Rohde said.
Models simply can’t function on the scale at which people live, because assessing the impact of current emissions on the future world requires hundreds of years of simulations. Modeling the Earth at one-square-kilometer pixels would take “like a hundred thousand times more computation than we currently have,” Schmidt, of NASA, told me. Still, global climate models can be of local use if combined with enough regional data and the correct expertise, and more people now want to use them that way, in order to understand risk to their properties and investments, or to make emergency plans and build infrastructure. “We are asking a lot of the models. More than we have in the past,” Rohde said.
For nonscientists, coaxing useful information from climate models requires professional help. Climate scientists have been working for years with New York City to help direct choices such as where to put infrastructure with sea-level rise in mind. But, Schmidt said, “there’s just not enough scientists to be on the advisory board of every locality or every enterprise or every institution or every company,” helping them access the right climate data or pick which models to rely on. (Some are better at simulating certain variables, such as day-to-night temperature variation, than others.) Often governments end up turning to private-sector companies that claim to be able to translate the data; Schmidt would rather see his own field produce work that is more directly useful to the public.
At the same time, now that the models are running up against the reality of dramatic climate change, some of their limits are showing. When this scientific endeavor first started, the models were meant to imagine what global temperatures might look like if greenhouse-gas emissions rose, and they did a remarkable job of that. But models are, even now, less capable of accounting for secondary effects of those emissions that no one saw coming, and that now seem to be driving important change.
Some of those variables are missing from climate models entirely. Trees and land are major sinks for carbon emissions, and that this fact might change is not accounted for in climate models. But it is changing: Trees and land absorbed much less carbon than normal in 2023, according to research published last October. In Finland, forests have stopped absorbing the majority of the carbon they once did, and recently became a net source of emissions, which, as The Guardian has reported, swamped all gains the country has made in cutting emissions from all other sectors since the early 1990s. The interactions of the ice sheets with the oceans are also largely missing from models, Schmidt told me, despite the fact that melting ice could change ocean temperatures, which could have significant knock-on effects. Changing ocean-temperature patterns are currently making climate modelers at NOAA rethink their models of El Niño and La Niña; the agency initially predicted that La Niña’s cooling powers would kick in much sooner than it now appears they will.
Biases in climate models go in both directions: Some overestimate risk from various factors, and others underestimate it. Some models “run hot,” suggesting more warming than what actually plays out. But the recent findings about temperature extremes point in the other direction: The models may be underestimating future climate risks across several regions because of a yet-unclear limitation. And, Rohde said, underestimating risk is far more dangerous than overestimating it.
To Kornhuber, too, that models already appear to be severely underestimating climate risk in several places is a bad sign for what’s ahead and our capacity to see it coming. “It should be worrying that we are now moving into a world where we’ve kind of reached the limit of our physical understanding of the Earth system,” Kornhuber said.
While models struggle to capture the world we live in now, the planet is growing more alien to us, further from our reference ranges, as the climate keeps changing. If given unlimited time, science could probably develop models that more fully captured what we’re watching play out. But by then it would be too late to do anything about it. Science is more than five decades into the modeling endeavor, and still our best tools can only get us so far. “At the end of the day, we are all making estimates of what’s coming,” Rohde said. “And there is no magic crystal ball to tell us the absolute truth.” We’re left instead with a partial picture, gestural in its scope, pointing toward a world we’ve never seen before.
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by | Jan 6, 2025 | The Atlantic
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.
[Read: Taylor Swift is a perfect example of how publishing is changing]
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.
[Read: Taylor Swift is too famous for this]
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?”
[Read: Taylor Swift and the sad dads]
“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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by | Jan 6, 2025 | The Atlantic
A quiet monologue runs through my head at all times. It is this: dinner dinner dinner dinner. The thing about dinner is that you have to deal with it every single night. Figuring out what to eat is a pleasure until it becomes a constant low-grade grind. It’s not just the cooking that wears me down, but the meal planning and the grocery shopping and the soon-to-be-rotting produce sitting in my fridge. It is the time it sucks up during the week. It is the endless mental energy. Huh, I think, at 6 p.m., dicing onions. So we’re still doing this?
I can compromise on breakfast. It is absolutely normal to eat the same breakfast every single day for years, and equally normal to eat nothing. Lunch: Eat it, skip it, have some carrot sticks, who cares. Lunch is a meal of convenience. But dinner is special. Dinner isn’t just the largest meal in the standard American diet; it is the most important, the most nourishing, the most freighted with moral weight. The mythical dream of dinner is that after a hard but wholesome day at school or work, the family unit is reunited over a hot meal, freshly prepared. Even if you’re dining solo, dinner tends to be eaten in a state of relative leisure, signaling a transition into the time of day when you are no longer beholden to your job. “You could eat a full bag of Doritos,” Margot Finn, a food-studies scholar at the University of Michigan, told me, but that doesn’t quite cut it for dinner: “There’s some paucity there. There’s some lack.”
[Read: The people who eat the same meal every day ]
The Dinner Problem might be especially acute for working parents like me—children are unrelenting in their demand to eat at regular intervals—but it spares almost no one. Disposable income helps mitigate the issue (disposable income helps mitigate most issues), but short of a paid staff, money does not solve it. I could accept this as the price of being human, if everywhere I looked there was not someone promising a way out. The sheer number of hacks and services and appliances and start-ups suggests that some kind of dinner resolution is forthcoming: How could it not be solvable, with this many options? We are living in what might be the world-historic peak of dinner solutions: A whole canon of cookbooks is devoted to quick-and-easy weeknight dinners for busy families and entire freezer cases dedicated to microwavable meals. There is takeout and prepared food and DoorDash and a staggering number of prep guides outlining how to cook in bulk one day a week. And yet, none of it has managed to solve the problem: Dinner exists, daunting and ominous.
As it stands, dinner is a game of trade-offs: You can labor over beautiful and wholesome meals, but it is so much work. You can heat up a Trader Joe’s frozen burrito or grab McDonald’s—there is a reason that as of 2016, the last time the government counted, one-third of American adults ate fast food on any given day—but you don’t have to be a health fanatic to aspire to a more balanced diet. You could get takeout, but it’s notoriously expensive and frequently soggy, more a novelty than a regular occurrence. Delivery apps, at least, offer the promise of extreme convenience, except that they are even more expensive, and the food is often even soggier.
In spite of all these options, if you cannot free yourself from dinner, you’re not alone. The many attempts to make dinner painless have not lived up to their promise. Remember Soylent? One of the bolder possibilities, for a while, was a shake that pledged to make “things a lot less complicated” by replacing conventional food with a deconstructed slurry of nutrients. I do want things to be less complicated, but I also want variety. I want to chew. A lot of other people seemed to want these things too, which is presumably one reason food-based dinner persists and Soylent has mellowed into a “nutritional supplement lifestyle brand.”
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Given the general enthusiasm for eating, most proposed innovations have focused on easing the labor of making dinner. Grocery stores offer pre-chopped produce; Whole Foods briefly experimented with an on-site “produce butcher” who would slice or dice or julienne your vegetables. Meal kits that ship portioned ingredients to your doorstep ought to be an obvious solution, and for a minute, it seemed like maybe they were. In 2015, Blue Apron was valued at $2 billion and, according to TechCrunch, was poised to reach “99 percent of potential home cooks.” It did not, in fact, reach 99 percent of potential home cooks, nor did any of its competitors. “There are still people who really love meal kits,” Jeff Wells, the lead editor of Grocery Dive, a trade publication, told me. “There just aren’t that many of them relative to the overall food-shopping population.” The problem is the cost, or the menu, or the quality, or the lack of leftovers, or the prep time.
When one dinner solution fizzles, there is always another, and another, which will be superseded by still more. Lately, Wells said, grocery stores have been investing in their prepared to-go options, with in-store pizza counters and plastic clamshells of deli salads and ready-to-heat containers of spaghetti. Everywhere I look, I seem to be inundated with new and somehow improved solutions. On Instagram, I learned about a new delivery service that is in the process of expanding to my area. While streaming a movie, I was introduced, repeatedly, to a company that sells healthy meals I could have ready in two minutes. Every time I turn on a podcast, I am informed about a meal-kit company that, if I use the promo code, will give me free dessert for life. They all promise the same thing: that dinner could be painless, if I let it. I could have it all, my dinner and my sanity.
Of course, all of these options still require divesting from the Norman Rockwell dream of home-cooked dinner. The ideal of dinner has made me resentful and occasionally unpleasant, and at the same time, I viscerally do not want to eat a vat of precooked spaghetti. I can make spaghetti, I thought. But then I was back where I began. Most of us have two basic choices: You can make the necessary compromises and accept something less than optimal, or you can surrender to a wholesome trap of your own making. You can buy the pre-chopped onions, or you can suck it up and chop your own onions. Those are the choices. The notion that there is a permanent way out—a hack, a kit, a service that gives you all the benefits of dinner cooked from scratch without the labor—is an illusion. You cannot have a meal that both is and is not homemade: Schrödinger’s salmon over couscous with broccoli rabe.
Dinner resists optimization. It can be creative, and it can be pleasurable. None of this negates the fact that it is a grind. It will always be a grind. You will always have to think about it, unless you have someone else to think about it for you, and it will always require too much time or too much energy or too much money or some combination of the three. It is unrelenting, in the way that breathing is unrelenting. There is freedom in surrendering to this, that even in this golden age of technological progress, dinner refuses to be solved.
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