Ellen Cushing | The Atlantic

The Worst Airport in America

2026-03-26T09:04:13-04:00

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Airports—not sure if you’ve heard—are a mess. This is especially true this week, as a cascade of disasters (both preventable and not) have caused delays, outages, and long lines across the country. But the airport was a mess long before this week, and it will be long after. When I was first assigned to find the worst one in America, I felt for a minute like I’d been asked which Oreo flavor is the best, or which of my teeth is the toothiest: There are so many, and they all are.

But certain airports are more hated than others. Reagan, near D.C., because it has the most delays of any major airport; one in three of its flights was late in 2025, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Dallas, because it is the biggest—flight-missingly, leg-destroyingly big, bigger than the island of Manhattan, with an incredible 1.5-mile distance between security and the farthest gate. Meanwhile, Hartsfield-Jackson, in Atlanta, is the world’s busiest: On any given good day, more people than live in the entire country of Barbados trudge through it; this week, they were doing so very, very slowly, as security wait times crept up past two hours.

[Read: American aviation is near collapse]

The major hubs are bad in all the predictable ways, but America’s smaller airports are each cursed and tragic in their own exquisite style. When someone posed the “worst airport” question on Reddit last year, the most upvoted response was about the one in Charlotte, North Carolina, which was built as a manageably sized regional airport but is now one of the busiest in the world, thanks to demographic and flight-pattern changes. Orlando has the most complaints about lost or mishandled luggage, according to an analysis of TSA data. And an evaluation of Department of Transportation data shows that Lincoln, Nebraska, and Toledo, Ohio, are tied for the longest delays among lower-volume airports. Apparently they have so few flights that any short delay can quickly turn into a long one.

An airport’s ability to fulfill its most basic function—serving as a place where a human being can, ostensibly, get on an airplane—is just one of the factors that might play into whether it’s terrible. Dallas is America’s worst airport, a travel reporter for a major newspaper told me in an email, because despite its gargantuan size, “you cannot find a good meal there to save your life.” (Your best bet, she went on to say, is “Pinkberry in Terminal C, a dark, low-ceilinged abyss with too-few bathrooms.” Bleak!) Hundreds of airports in this otherwise great nation do not have even one single solitary Chili’s Too. At least one has no restaurant at all. Also, someone on Reddit once paid $27 for two protein bars and a cup of grapes at JFK.

All airports are depressing and scary; some go above and beyond. For example, at least seven American airports are named after people who died in plane crashes. Air-travel-related animal death and injury is exceedingly rare, but the government does collect and publish data on it, so I might have bad news for dogs traveling through Seattle. I was unable to confirm that the Denver airport is home to the headquarters of the Illuminati, as many people believe, but I can tell you that it is home to a 32-foot-tall horse that has glowing, Mephistophelian red eyes and that, in a tragic accident, killed its creator when a chunk of it fell off during the sculpting process. (Locals call it Blucifer.) A couple of hundred miles away, Aspen/Pitkin County Airport sits in a narrow valley more than a mile above sea level, in a part of the country known for its sudden snowstorms, amid terrain that limits the use of instrument flying, and, for some reason, they made the runway unusually short. It is so dangerous that you need a special pilot’s license to land there. As it turns out, there’s a good reason to hate—or at least distrust—just about every airport.

[Read: The one place in airports people actually want to be]

Well, again—some more than others. Ultimately, all of this airport research took me to a dark place: Newark, New Jersey, whose airport has been found, variously, to offer the most stress, the worst food, the most travel disruptions, and the second-most delays (behind Reagan). On Yelp, where it has a lower rating than several nearby prisons, 1,100 one-star reviews refer to it with vocabulary such as chaotic, unacceptable, and hell on earth. The more than 30,000 people who took the data-analytics firm JD Power’s annual airport-satisfaction survey last year believe Newark to be the worst airport in North America, as does Charity Moore, an influencer who has been a flight attendant for 11 years.

Last June, my family and I wasted nine miserable hours there as our flight was boarded and then delayed and then deboarded and then canceled. The air rang with random alarms; the soft surfaces were mottled with mystery stains. At one point, I paid for, and then spent 45 minutes waiting on, pad thai at a restaurant that was not, in fact, open. To this day, I am unsure whether there is a working power outlet in the entire place. We ended up deciding to drive to our final destination, in rural Ontario, and as we sped off in our rental car—tired, hungry, hundreds of dollars poorer, staring down the barrel of a 500-mile drive with a screaming toddler—I felt something approaching euphoria, because at least I was finally leaving Newark airport.

This observation is a little embarrassing, only because it’s so obvious—hating Newark airport is like hating Mondays, or splinters, or wet socks, or the inevitability of death’s cold, cruel tap on the shoulder. Or air travel in general. The truth is, all airports are bad. You’ve heard. They are unlovely and unloved, designed to be passed through, and doomed by decades of disinvestment. They are a vortex of everything annoying: confined spaces, limited options, bad Wi-Fi, overpriced food, fluorescent lighting, other people. They are the opposite of vacation, even as they are inextricably linked to it. And they lay bare the fragility of this modern life, how easy it is for everything to go wrong—right now, especially. The worst airport isn’t Atlanta, or Dallas, or Newark. The worst airport is whatever airport you are in.

I’m joking, of course. The worst airport is Newark.

The Forgotten Female Pilots of World War II

2026-03-17T07:00:00-04:00

Recently, I stood in an airfield in Sweetwater, Texas, and looked up. I was wondering what it would have been like to take off from there in a small plane, flying into the dust of West Texas and the chaos of World War II, as my grandmother had. The land around me had the palette of a well-used watercolor set and the topography of a paper towel: gray and brown, flat forever. It is dry all year round, except when it suddenly pours. The wide, featureless landscape makes for big, blustery winds and difficult orientation. Also, it is famous for its rattlesnakes.

During World War II, Sweetwater’s Avenger Field was the primary home of a program that trained women to fly military planes. They were called Women Airforce Service Pilots—WASPs—and they were the solution to a high-stakes problem: The war needed pilots, and men were dying quickly. From 1942 to 1944, these women volunteers engaged in just about every aspect of military flight operations except combat—ferrying aircraft, testing planes, transporting cargo, training new pilots—so that the men would be free to fight in Europe and the Pacific. More than 25,000 women applied to the program, fewer than 2,000 were accepted, and 1,074 completed training.

By the time the program ended, the WASPs had risked—and in some cases given—their lives to save male pilots a cumulative 60 million miles of flying. But during the war, they were classified as civil servants, no different in the eyes of the government from the female federal employees who typed memos or cooked on bases. After the war, they were ineligible for veterans’ benefits, and kept out of both the military and commercial cockpits. For decades, the WASPs lobbied to be recognized as service members. Today, they are still largely unknown. Soon, they will all be gone.

Patricia Perry, my Grandma Pat, was born in 1921, an only child. She grew up in Auburn, a small town in Northern California’s Sierra foothills. This was farm country—stone fruit and grapes—and when she was in high school, Pat learned to fly a friend’s parents’ crop duster. She was high-achieving, sheltered, patriotic, and eager to please—always, according to my mom, “trying to be the son her father never had as well as the daughter her mother insisted on.” In 1941, she moved two hours southwest to study political science at UC Berkeley. Instead of joining a sorority, she lived in the International House, where she was surrounded by students from all over the world, including many who had fled the war in Europe.

After graduation, she’d planned to attend law school at Berkeley, where she would have been one of just a few women, but deferred her admission to join the WASPs. She met the criteria: 5 foot 4 or taller, at least 21 years of age, high-school diploma, extensive flying experience. On July 5, 1943, when Pat was 21, she began her training in Sweetwater. She had never left California before.

With a few exceptions, the women at Avenger Field were white, but they came from a variety of backgrounds and professions—one was a Broadway actor—and from all over the country. Some were still essentially children; others were in their 30s, married with a family, or widowed by a husband who had already been killed in the war. The wealthier among them had learned to fly for fun when aviation became an expensive diversion in the years between the world wars. Hundreds had gone through the Civilian Pilot Training Program, which had been founded a few years earlier to train men to fly and occasionally accepted women. Pat, like many of her fellow WASPs, had felt called to service. A large number just really loved to fly, and looked for any opportunity to do it.

WASP Archive / Texas Woman’s University

Members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots program, wearing flight gear and parachutes

Before she joined the program, Marion Schorr Brown was making $90 a month as a schoolteacher and spending $6 an hour for flight time. Nell Stevenson Bright took her first recreational flight at the age of 8, when her father paid a dollar for her to ride in a World War I biplane, and never stopped thinking about being in the air after that. Cornelia Fort was an airplane fanatic and a flight instructor who happened to have been flying with a student over Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when she was 22. She saw the bombs exploding in the sky, and then she emergency-landed her plane as Japanese military aircraft rained bullets down on the tarmac. Ten months later, she became the second woman to sign up for what would become the WASP program.

The women paid their own way to Texas. They were told to pack light, and to buy life insurance. Once they got there, they were given men’s flight suits; in photographs, they look like children playing dress-up, heavy fabric pooled at their feet. They covered lodging costs themselves, $1.65 a day. The windows on their barracks were painted black, for modesty. They trained for four to seven months, learning physics, Morse code, and military law, and accumulating hundreds of flight hours: everything male pilots learned, except gunnery and formation flying. (They also learned how to examine their cockpits for rattlesnakes.) Every morning, they did calisthenics in bobby socks as military planes flew loud and low overhead. In the evenings, they wrote letters home, played Ping-Pong in the rec hall, and produced a newspaper, The Avenger.

In Sweetwater, locals received them with some suspicion, at least until program leaders encouraged them all to go to church, even the Jewish ones. In the country at large, to the extent that the public was aware of the WASPs, the general attitude seems to have been one of amused gratitude. A cover story about the program in Life magazine—headline: “Girl Pilots”—called the women “very serious about their chance to fly for the Army at Avenger Field, even when it means giving up nail polish, beauty parlors, and dates for a regimented 22 ½ weeks.”

WASP Archive / Texas Woman’s University

WASPs doing calisthenics at Avenger Field, in Sweetwater, Texas. Locals received the trainees with some suspicion, at least until program
leaders encouraged them to go to church.

After training, the women received a pair of silver wings and a few days off. Then they scattered to their next assignment: Schorr Brown to Detroit, Stevenson Bright to El Paso, Fort and Pat to different parts of Southern California, the rest to airfields and Army bases around the country. There, they taught male cadets how to fly; moved supplies between factories and bases; flew paperwork, planes, and pilots wherever they needed to go; and generally engaged in what the pilot Jacqueline Cochran, one of the program’s founders, was fond of calling “aerial dishwashing”—the tedious stuff, work no one else wanted.

[Read: Night Witches, the Soviet female fighter pilots of World War II]

Each WASP was typically one of only a handful of women among hundreds or thousands of men on base, and the historical record suggests that they were treated, at best, like zoo animals. An unspoken but widely understood part of the job description, Pat recalled, was to entertain their male counterparts: She packed a ball gown in her luggage along with her flight suit. The women were skipped over for certain flying assignments, evaluated more harshly than the men, and reportedly told by one base commander that both they and the planes could easily be replaced. For a while, many were grounded during their period. Rumors of sabotage by male pilots spread. Cochran was said—but never confirmed—to have found traces of sugar in the engine of a plane that had crashed and killed a WASP.

Even under the best conditions, the flying itself was difficult and dangerous. The planes were tiny, many of the cockpits completely open to the air. (In Sweetwater, I saw four of them, dinky little tin-can-looking things, and I thought about how I require a glass of wine and a Xanax to get on a 737.) They had rudimentary instruments and no radar or GPS—often, the women would navigate by sticking their head out the window. Schorr Brown once accidentally got so close to the Statue of Liberty while flying from Montreal to Newark that it “scared the living daylights out of her.” Not at all infrequently, a WASP’s assignment was to test a plane for airworthiness, or to transport a damaged one to be repaired, or to tow a target over a practice area while not-fully-trained men on the ground did their best to shoot at it with machine guns. Women were allowed to opt out of this last duty, but no one did.

WASP Archive / Texas Woman’s University

WASPs at the Romulus Army Air Base, in Michigan. The women were typically outnumbered on base by hundreds or thousands of men.

On March 21, 1943, Cornelia Fort was ferrying a BT-13 from Long Beach to Dallas when one of the recently trained male pilots she was flying with accidentally clipped her wing. She nose-dived so hard that her plane’s engine was later found buried two feet underground. Fort was the first woman pilot in American history to be killed while on active duty for her country. The military did not pay for her funeral.

Thirty-seven other WASPs died in service, either during training or on assignment. Each time, their remains were sent home at the expense of their families—the women at Avenger got used to passing around a hat, collecting donations. Their caskets were not permitted to be draped with the American flag, but sometimes their families did it anyway.

Almost the entire time the WASP program existed, its leaders fought for it to be made an official part of the military, with all the attendant benefits. Almost the entire time, they were met with resistance from male pilots. In 1944, as an end to the war appeared to be in sight and the pilot shortage eased, the government ordered the cancellation of a flight-instruction program for men. A group of male teachers began petitioning elected officials and writing to the press: Why should women have these jobs when they couldn’t?

[Read: Why women weren’t allowed to be astronauts]

Soon enough, public sentiment toward the WASPs started to shift. “Women: Unnecessary and Undesirable?” a headline in Time magazine asked. A government report found the program to be expensive and wasteful, especially when so many male pilots were available. A bill that would have provided the WASPs with full military status was narrowly defeated in the House of Representatives. By October, it was all over: The program was to be disbanded by the end of the year.

On December 7, 1944, it graduated its final class. “The WASP have completed their mission,” General Henry Arnold said at the ceremony. “If ever there was a doubt in anyone’s mind that women can become skillful pilots, the WASP have dispelled that doubt.” The pilots he was addressing would never get to put their skills to use. The ones currently on base were sent home.

And so the WASPs scattered back to their lives. They finished school, bred Pekingese dogs, won bowling competitions, sold encyclopedias, had babies, devoted themselves to their families. A number of them applied to be commercial pilots and were rejected, though occasionally an airline would suggest that they were perfectly qualified to become stewardesses.

WASP Archive / Texas Woman’s University

Even under the best conditions, flying was difficult and dangerous. The planes were tiny, and many of the cockpits were completely open to the air.

Marion Schorr Brown married a civilian pilot and settled down in Columbus, Ohio, staying home to raise her children. Nell Stevenson Bright began a career in finance, and eventually became one of the first female stockbrokers in Phoenix. And Pat went back to Northern California, only to find that the law school she’d been admitted to before volunteering had dramatically reduced operations, on account of the fact that there weren’t enough men around to fill a class.

She instead enrolled at a different, less prestigious school. After graduation, despite having job offers in Los Angeles, she returned to Auburn at her parents’ insistence and married a local war hero—my grandfather. She joined him in working at his family’s law firm, which didn’t allow Pat to bill clients or appear in court. On the ground as in the sky, it seemed she was expected to use her many talents in order to help the men around her, without being too bothersome or visible about it.

When she had my mom, in 1951, Pat left the firm for good. Twelve years later, she and my grandfather divorced. He quickly remarried, and she moved to Monterey with my mom and my uncle, then 6. She had graduated from an elite college, flown warplanes, and passed the bar, but as a divorcée in 1963, the best job she could find was working the reception desk at a hotel.

By then, the WASP program had been all but erased from public memory. Like so many who had served during the war, the WASPs themselves generally tried their best to move on afterward. Margo Thurman, Nell Stevenson Bright’s daughter, told me that she’d been unaware of her mom’s service until she was in her 20s. Pat did tell her young children about it, but she didn’t say much: She was proud of what she had done, but it was a closemouthed kind of pride. At some point, she threw away her uniform.

Because they’d gone their separate ways after training, and the internet did not exist, and most of the women had changed their name, many of them lost touch. Most WASPs had little to no contact with the only people who had shared in, and could validate, their experience. Records of the program were classified, and the military didn’t publicize it after it ended. What, after all, would be the point? “No one even knows about us,” one WASP told her local paper in the 1970s. “They say I’m nuts when I mention it.”

Starting in the early 1960s, WASPs organized various efforts to gain veteran status. They all failed. Then, in 1976, when the Air Force began accepting female recruits for combat, newspapers, working off military press releases, ran articles about the “first women pilots to fly military airplanes.” By this point, the women’s-rights movement had gained momentum, and the nation, having just lost an ethically murky war, was inclined to glorify World War II and its veterans. Many of the WASPs, including Nell Stevenson Bright, began organizing anew, hoping that this time, the conditions were right for them to actually be heard.

WASP Archive / Texas Woman’s University

Nell Stevenson Bright would go on to become one of the first female stockbrokers in Phoenix, Arizona.

Stevenson Bright turned 104 in June. In late fall, she spoke with me over Zoom from her assisted-living facility in Salt Lake City. She wore cherry-red lipstick and a cable-knit sweater; behind her sat a flower arrangement with a small American flag in it. She talked about the fight for recognition the same way she talked about flying an airplane: matter-of-factly, and with little interest in questions about how it felt. While living in Arizona, she had become friendly with Senator Barry Goldwater, she told me, and shortly after she and other WASPs pleaded their case to him, he “got to work” on a bill—simple. In 1977, the women were finally, formally recognized as veterans and made eligible for benefits.

The recognition effort helped many of the remaining WASPs get back in touch with one another. A few had gathered casually for years, but now they began to have larger, more formal reunions. “We’d just sit around and yak,” Stevenson Bright recalled. They began making the rounds at air shows, setting up a booth and trying to talk with as many people as they could—for starters, they wanted everyone to understand that 1976 was not the first time women had flown military planes. They began considering what else they might want to do to make sure they wouldn’t be forgotten.

Elliot Ross for The Atlantic

Stevenson Bright, now 104, befriended Senator Barry Goldwater, who in 1977 sponsored a bill that granted WASPs veteran status and made them eligible for benefits.

In 1992, the WASPs established an archive at Texas Woman’s University, in Denton, about 45 minutes north of Dallas. A few years later, one of the women and her daughter began advocating and raising money for a museum. It opened in 2005 at Avenger Field, 62 years to the day after the first WASP class graduated. As of this spring, 18 WASPs have had their ashes scattered there, with one another instead of their husbands, under the big gray sky. In 2009, after an extended lobbying effort, the women were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for their service. A few years later, the family of a WASP named Elaine Danforth Harmon fought to bury her at Arlington National Cemetery, and won.

[Read: A woman pilot receives the military funeral the Army denied her]

Pat died in 1995, when I was 7. My sense of her is arrested at the second-grade level: All I remember is that she loved golf, had bright-red hair, and gave me age-inappropriate books about the economy for Christmas, because she thought it was important for little girls to understand how money worked.

I wish I could ask her what she thought of it all—the archive, the medal, the long battle for recognition, the question of whether it’s even possible to win a fight you never should have had to wage in the first place. I know that she was interested in justice, on a philosophical and professional level as well as a personal one, but I also know that her feelings about being a WASP were complicated. When Pat’s children asked her about the war, mostly what she told them was how terrifying it was, how cold she was in the cockpit. She did not make enduring friendships in the program. It did not grant her greater opportunities later in life, or a sense that women could accomplish whatever they set out to do. She died angry at the U.S. military, and terrified of snakes. My mom believes that she did not want to think being a WASP was the most exciting thing she had ever done or would do. She also believes, as she told me recently, that Pat’s life was full of disappointments, often because of her gender, and that her experience as a WASP—during, but especially after, the war—“was the first, and the biggest.”

Recently, pop culture has developed an interest in history-makers and hidden figures—in stories about spunky women who clopped around institutions that didn’t respect them in fabulous high heels, doing math or playing chess, glamorously but silently moving humanity forward. Part of the appeal of these narratives is that they flatter the present simply by virtue of its not being the past: You consume them and think, Thank God we’re not like that anymore. They are stories about discrimination and hardship that are designed to make their audience feel good, as though progress is always linear and justice is always served.

[Read: Why are there so few cultural portrayals of women in combat?]

Many of the women I spoke with for this story have wondered why no one has made a big Hollywood movie about the WASPs. I have a theory. I think it’s because their story does not neatly represent the beginning of anything. A thousand American women were flying planes during the biggest and deadliest conflict the world had ever seen, and then they were back on Earth, wives and mothers, their contribution forgotten before the war even ended. They did not integrate the military or significantly alter the general public’s understanding of what women were capable of—women weren’t allowed to fly military planes again for another generation. As of 2024, just 7.3 percent of this country’s licensed pilots were women; the government report I found this figure in is titled “U.S. Civil Airmen Statistics.” Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently declared that the military must be returned “to the highest male standard only,” and ended a 74-year-old committee created to support women in service.

The WASPs hurtled into a hard wall and it didn’t break. If their story offers a lesson for the women of my generation or the girls of the next, it’s not a particularly uplifting one.

In November, my mom and I paid a visit to Texas Woman’s University. Twenty-first-century women crisscrossed campus in tiny shorts or enormous cargo pants, carrying fat textbooks on physics and Eastern philosophy. At an information desk inside the administrative building that houses special collections, a student worker stared at me blankly when I asked about the WASP archive. “Like … wasp?” she said, moving her finger in the air like an insect.

We got there eventually. The archive shares space with the Texas First Ladies Historic Gown Collection, and one of the world’s largest collections of cookbooks—a news crew had recently been there to film a segment on the cookbooks, and the WASP memorabilia had been moved out of the way. We sat on soft chairs and talked with Corynthia Dorgan, the archive’s WASP expert.

In the months before I arrived in Texas, the Trump administration had embarked on a large-scale effort to purge government materials of references to women, people of color, and various other marginalized groups. (Two months after my trip, Texas A&M University would abruptly end its women’s- and gender-studies program.) Simply acknowledging the existence of certain individuals, facts, and concepts had become a political act. The United States seemed to be in the middle of a mass experiment designed to test just how durable the reality of the past really is.

In some ways, the WASPs and their long, halting fight for status are a perfect example of Americans’ perennial willingness to elide entire histories and people for the sake of convenience or ideology. And they have been subject to this great erasing themselves. Shortly after President Trump started his second term, the Air Force Times reported that at least a dozen pages related to the WASPs and other female pilots had been removed from Air Force websites.

[Read: What the female veterans in Congress think about women in combat]

Recently, Dorgan told me, she and her colleagues had pulled as many PDFs of government webpages about the WASPs as they could, as a precaution. They have also subtly reframed the way they talk about the program publicly, emphasizing its role in Texas history more than women’s history. “You do the little things,” Dorgan said, in order to protect the truth. You do your best to tell the story you care about in a way that will make people want to listen, in the moment you are telling it.

This is something that the WASPs became good at. They started the archive where Dorgan now works, she told me, because “they knew what they did was unique, and it was hidden, and they thought it shouldn’t be.” They created a museum because they felt that they should have a museum. It is still there for anyone who wants to visit; on a recent Wednesday, a group of teenagers was being led around on a tour. The WASPs spent their 80s traveling the country talking about their experiences because they thought those experiences mattered. They talked to anyone who would listen. History, they understood, isn’t something that’s ordained impartially or fixed in position—it’s whatever people decide is worth repeating over and over.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “The Women of Avenger Field.” It has been updated to reflect that Patricia Perry moved two hours southwest, not southeast, to study at UC Berkeley, and that July 5, 1943, is when she began training in Sweetwater, Texas, not the date she arrived there. The article has also been updated to clarify that the remarks attributed to a base commander were not a direct quote, and to correct the verb tense in the quote from Pete Hegseth.

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The Highly Exclusive Way That Everybody Shops Now

2026-03-10T11:04:49-04:00

Scarcity is humanity’s great motivator. This has been true forever, since back when we were basically apes: The most important resources—food, shelter, mates—were the ones that were most in demand. Shortage meant value, and being attuned to value meant staying alive. We learned to focus on the rare thing at the expense of what was around it—psychologists call this “tunneling”—and to prioritize avoiding loss over gaining rewards. It was typically smarter to fight for something everyone else wanted than to waste time looking for something else. That animal wisdom is a reason our species survived.

It is also a reason that, in late 2025, you could find a grown adult—a person who lives in the kind of material plenitude our distant ancestors could never dream of—in a Starbucks parking lot before dawn, desperately seeking a coffee cup shaped like a teddy bear. You see, this coffee cup was available only as a drop.

Generally speaking, a drop is just a slightly different way of releasing products. Instead of making goods at the rate of expected demand and releasing them without fanfare, companies are producing in intentionally low quantities and releasing in discrete, highly hyped events. When Starbucks’s cup—the “Bearista”—dropped in the United States in November, many customers reported that their store had only a handful, which people lined up overnight to buy. Warby Parker releases new frames via drop. Figs periodically drops limited-edition colors of its scrubs. Snack-food conglomerates have, in recent years, begun unleashing Marvel-themed Oreos or southwestern-ranch-flavored mayo the same way. Skims, Kim Kardashian’s lingerie brand, got huge operating primarily on a drop model—a never-ending carousel of novel products, available first come, first served.

[Read: What your favorite grocery store says about you]

At this point, the drop is so popular that it has nurtured its own cottage industries and developed its own technology. An entire YouTube genre is devoted to helping viewers game out Labubu drops. In New York, the professional standers of Same Ole Line Dudes will wait outside sample sales or clothing stores for $25 an hour, with additional premiums for overnight waits and inclement weather. Websites such as StockX capitalize on the booming market for resold limited-edition products. The cloud-computing company Queue-it builds software that helps ensure that online retailers’ sites don’t crash during concert-ticket releases and new drops; on a call with me, Malou Toft, the company’s chief revenue officer, compared the product to the Hoover Dam, in that it funnels a torrent of would-be customers into a manageable drip.

Sometimes the drops beget more drops. Last month, the granola brand Purely Elizabeth dropped a limited-edition granola and partnered with the chain Cha Cha Matcha on a menu inspired by that granola; naturally, the menu was also available for only a limited time. Sometimes, the products being dropped aren’t all that different from a brand’s regular offerings. Often, they sell out so quickly that the substance doesn’t matter. What everyone remembers isn’t the exquisite detailing on the Wicked limited-edition Stanley cup—it’s that people went nuts trying to buy them.

[Read: Buy this album. Now buy it in green].

This is, of course, the point. Drops create artificial scarcity and manufacture novelty. They make underwear feel like a new iPhone, a coffee cup feel like a collector’s item. They turn inventory management into a cultural event and shopping into a game, even if it is one in which the prize is the right to spend $80 on a pair of Crocs that look like the Windows XP wallpaper.

When the drop was first adopted, it was by scrappy, small-production streetwear companies that had been forced by necessity to create limited inventory and to mete it out over time—if they made too much, they risked having leftover T-shirts, but if they made fewer products, everything could get bought up immediately, and shelves would sit empty for weeks or months. But if the practice was meant to keep supply and demand in harmony, it really, really didn’t work. Soon enough, “drop days” were convening hundreds of people outside tiny stores. Anything that, say, the cultish brand Supreme stamped its blocky logo on—a brick, a voodoo doll, a functional fire extinguisher—and issued as a drop became an overnight fetish object. In 2019, the company MSCHF was founded to specialize not in any one product but in drops, the more absurd and attention-grabbing, the better: a malware-infected laptop that sold in 2019 for $1.3 million; Nike Air Max 97s injected with holy water. MSCHF claims to be an artistic project skewering consumer culture, but I’m not so sure what the people buying its stuff think is happening.

In essence, all of these companies were adapting a practice that the jewelry and high-fashion industries have long relied on. Diamonds aren’t rare; for decades, De Beers has carefully controlled their supply to drive up demand. Designers such as Burberry have been known, in the past, to burn unsold goods in order to prevent them from being put on sale, which would dilute the brand.

[Read: A $700 kitchen tool that’s meant to be seen, not used]

But as the artificial-scarcity tactic spreads, it becomes less coherent. In my conversation with Toft, talking about drops led to an unlikely place: Abercrombie & Fitch, which in the early 2000s carried limited sizes and cultivated a clubby atmosphere, down to the beefy 18-year-olds standing sentry outside. “People felt as if they were part of an exclusive club,” Toft told me. “I think that’s what all of our companies online are trying to create: that feeling of belonging to a secret club that has early access or has special access to a certain product.”

It sounded to me like a pretty apt comparison to late-stage drop culture. Abercrombie & Fitch is, at the end of the day, a mall store, not particularly selective about whose money it is willing to take. Drops were once reserved for hypebeasts and collectors buying items so meticulously handcrafted that they could be made only in ultra-limited qualities. Now they are for normal people buying factory-produced suitcases or cookware or snack foods. Companies post extensively about upcoming drops, all the better to whip up excitement. Men’s magazines publish lists of “The Biggest and Boldest Fashion Drops of Fall.” And the stuff isn’t special, because it’s the same stuff as all the other stuff—it’s just made slightly less ordinary by virtue of the way you buy it. Within days of selling out at Starbucks, the Bearista cup was available knocked off on Amazon.

The McDonald’s CEO’s Big Burger-Eating Mistake

2026-03-05T16:03:57-05:00

Recently, Chris Kempczinski ate a burger. It didn’t go well.

Kempczinski is the CEO of McDonald’s. The burger was the Big Arch, the company’s newest offering. And the problem was a video. In it, Kempczinski—looking trim and clean in a beige sweater, oxford collar peeping out—picks up the burger and politely appraises it. He calls it a “product.” He describes the bun as “unique.” He takes a dainty bite, declares it “so good,” and then moves on with his life. There’s nothing to suggest that he is lying, but he’s not exactly selling it, either.

People online found this quite troubling. “This man does not eat McDonald’s,” one post on X said. Burger King weighed in with its own response, as did Wendy’s, and Jack in the Box, and A&W. Soon enough, according to the news, Kempczinski was “under fire.” If you logged on between Tuesday morning and yesterday afternoon, you’d have been forgiven for thinking Kempczinski did something much, much worse than bite into a hamburger wrong.

Maybe he did. The Big Arch video was discomfiting because it broke the rules of the internet-based marketing economy that Kempczinski belongs to (whether he wants to or not). The incident is an object lesson in what happens when the logic of food influencerdom collides with the reality of running a giant business.

[Read: The golden age of the fried-chicken sandwich]

Kempczinski is, by all accounts, an old-school guy: Harvard M.B.A., corporate pedigree, dorky affect, immaculate email hygiene, respectable marathon times, seriousness and diligence emanating from him like cartoon stink lines. He became CEO of McDonald’s in 2019, after a career spent in leadership at PepsiCo and Kraft Foods. His aura, as one commenter put it, “screams kale salad,” not sloppy, thousand-calorie burger. His most recent Instagram post before the disastrous Big Arch reel featured him in a long-sleeve polo shirt sharing tips for traveling internationally. They included exercise and avoiding alcohol.

But Kempczinski exists in a decidedly new-school marketing environment, one where CEOs are celebrities and celebrities are CEOs. John Legere posts gym selfies, Kevin O’Leary stars in movies, Elon Musk shares his every passing thought with all who will listen, Donald Trump is the most famous person in the world. Meanwhile, Rihanna, Jessica Alba, Selena Gomez, Ryan Reynolds, and others have turned artistic success into huge consumer-goods businesses, hawking stuff they claim to use themselves. In all of these cases, the line between selling products and selling oneself is more blurred than ever before. Paid media (advertising) and earned media (influencing) are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.

Today’s internet values relatability more than authority. It loves to confuse informality for authenticity. This is why the social-media accounts of multinational corporations all speak like sleepy teenagers (McDonald’s, on February 13, posted that “my crush just dropped 1500 reward points on me what does that make us”), and why the “get ready with me” video format—in which lifestyle influencers apply moisturizer for an audience of millions—is so enduring. It’s also why, presumably, Kempczinski filmed the Big Arch video in the first place. Every person is a brand, and every brand has a personality.

[Read: The brands are very sorry about your trauma]

In Kempczinski’s business, the most effective form of marketing is the rapturous taste test, ideally delivered by someone who seems genuinely enthusiastic, and who can convey that enthusiasm in a way that’s memorable enough to stand out from all the other people online doing taste tests. The ones who have mastered the form—the food world’s most successful salespeople and biggest celebrities—are influencers, such as the women behind the VIP List, who have nearly half a million followers on TikTok and review food in the chatty, hyperbolic way a friend might. On their feed, a good hamburger is “crack,” a bad one is “traumatizing,” and just about the highest praise a dish can receive is that it “fucks.” The reactions are physical, almost carnal—all the more legible on a small screen. The analysis is unsubtle and straightforward. It’s a performance, to be sure, but no one would ever accuse these people of not meaning what they say.

Kempczinski’s sin was this: He tried to act like an influencer, but he isn’t very good at it. He projects the wrong kind of authenticity. He doesn’t look like a man who eats McDonald’s, and he speaks in notably more grammatical sentences than the person running his company’s X account. He doesn’t talk about food in the colloquial, exaggerated way we’ve come to expect from people eating before a front-facing camera. In short, he’s a LinkedIn guy in a TikTok world—a traditional CEO, not a professional charisma machine ostentatiously having his life changed by a beef patty between buns. If you saw him eat a burger this way in a restaurant, you wouldn’t bat an eye, because he ate it like a normal person. Of course it made for bad content.

The Most Manly Drink, Now for the Girls

2026-02-25T10:47:25-05:00

For a while in the 2000s, drinking neon-colored sugar water was just about the most manly thing you could do, at least if the marketing for energy drinks was to be taken literally. These drinks came in flavors such as “Hardcore Apple” and, um, “Assault”; the art on their cans referenced venomous snakes, mythical beasts, the military. The companies that made them tended to forgo traditional advertising in favor of sponsoring athletes famous for getting punched or jumping off things. Their slogans made promises invoking conquest and might: A can of this stuff would give you wings, fuel your fire, unleash the beast.

Recently, though, a new kind of energy drink has emerged. Or rather, the same drinks have emerged in a new package. The active ingredients tend to be pretty much the same—taurine, guarana, and, most saliently, caffeine—but the marketing is gentler, the flavors are fruitier, and the cans are cuter. Beverage companies seem to have realized something that—not to brag—I have understood since I was about 15: There is nothing inherently male, or masculine, about being tired.

As of this year, energy drinks are a roughly $80 billion business. Relatively speaking, however, the category is quite young, about 200 years younger than soda. In the 1980s, an Austrian businessman fell in love with Krating Daeng, a bottled drink adored in Thailand for helping workers stay alert. He partnered with that company’s founder, added carbonation (to appeal to international consumers), and rebranded it with an English name. Thus Red Bull was born, and an entirely new class of beverage was introduced to the world.

[Read: The drinks Americans can’t quit]

These beverages were different from soda, which was already an impossibly crowded market, and they needed to set themselves apart. So Red Bull—along with, most notably, Monster and Rockstar, which arrived in the early 2000s—worked to appeal to a demographic that was supposedly ripe for the taking: adolescent and early-20s men. They did this by positioning themselves as fuel for masculinity’s great pursuits—playing video games, doing sports, getting drunk. In essence, they laundered the feminine connotations of sweetness and fizz into something a real man would drink. Much like many of the people consuming them, these drinks seemed to revel in being a little disgusting: They tasted vaguely of poison and looked like nuclear waste. They dared you to find a problem with this.

Then, as that demographic grew up, energy drinks became a tool of efficiency. Starting sometime in the 2010s, it was really not all that uncommon to see a guy in khakis drinking NOS, which is named after a method that street racers use to make their cars go faster. The energy that had previously been acquired and expended while playing Grand Theft Auto was now being used to format a spreadsheet. Life comes at you fast.

In the past decade and a half, as energy drinks started to go more mainstream, advances in flavor science and packaging technology enabled companies to more easily produce a wider variety of drinks—which a novelty-obsessed consumer base happily guzzled down. At the same time, soda popularity flatlined and wellness culture ascended. These conditions created the perfect environment for energy drinks’ second explosion, when Celsius came along and transformed them from party fuel and productivity juice into something just as improbable: liquid fitness.

Celsius’s formula was sugar-free, and its flavors were much less abstract—fruits and herbs, ingredients you could feel good about if you squinted. Its slogan—“Live Fit”—spoke not to conquering one’s external enemies but achieving domination over one’s physical form. Its cans were slim and neutral, almost elegant, and they promised to boost metabolism and burn body fat. (They also noted, in much smaller print, that the drink is unlikely to lead to weight loss on its own.) From 2020 to 2023, Celsius sales increased tenfold. It now makes up more than 20 percent of the energy-drink market, for which it has also created new customers. People who would never be caught dead swilling neon fizz from a camouflage can were suddenly consuming a drink that was materially the same, but was being sold by exploiting a different set of unattainable aspirations, using a different vocabulary.

Last year alone, convenience-store sales of energy drinks increased by 10 percent. This new interest is largely being driven by female-coded drinks such as Alani Nu, which was created by a fitness influencer and is promoted by Brittany Mahomes and Paris Hilton. (Last year, Celsius bought Alani Nu for $1.8 billion; that same quarter, Celsius’s revenue increased 84 percent.) Bloom, a different brand founded by different fitness influencers, sold $1.3 million in drinks in a single week after introducing its own lilac-canned, “metabolism boosting” energy drinks in 2024. This week, the caffeine-free energy-drink company Update announced that it would be “relaunching” itself with a new partner, Kim Kardashian, already an avid fan of the brand.

And sometime this spring, Monster is set to launch FLRT, an energy drink marketed so squarely at women that it feels a little humiliating. The drink claims to support skin and hair health in addition to doing the normal energy-drink stuff (providing energy); its website showcases gals in going-out tops and vows that “energy should be as vibrant, fearless, and fun as those who drink it.” It comes in flavors that could just as easily be nail-polish shades: “Berry Tempting,” “Guava Lava,” “Sunset Squeeze.” In case the target audience wasn’t obvious enough, the logo is a hand-drawn daisy.

[Read: Why bros love energy drinks]

Just over a decade ago, when energy drinks’ first, male-focused wave was cresting, researchers from the University of Akron, in Ohio, embarked on a small study to try to understand what all this energy—and all this advertising—was doing to the people drinking it. They asked their subjects whether they agreed with a series of statements, including “I think a young man should try to be physically tough, even if he’s not,” and “If I consume energy drinks, I will be more willing to take risks.” They also asked them about their sleep habits and overall health. They found that men who were more invested in masculine ideals—especially young white men—were markedly more likely to drink energy drinks, and also that the ones who drank more energy drinks tended to have worse sleep.

The study, which was published in the journal Health Psychology, was groundbreaking in that it showed that men, too, were being hurt by rigid physical standards, gendered stereotypes, the way ubiquitous advertising turns ideals into expectations. Functionally, energy drinks and their marketing had done to men what so many other products had done to women: manufactured inadequacy, and then sold something that they claimed would fix it. Now women have energy drinks too. Great.

A Very Retro Olympics Opening Ceremony

2026-02-06T20:29:28-05:00

Every Olympics opening ceremony is an advertisement—for the host country, for the Olympics themselves, for the notion of a free-trading global order competing through sport, in the same place and on even ground. This year, the ceremony for the Winter Olympics, held in the Italian cities Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, was also an advertisement for the past.

This focus on the old is, well, new. Although every ceremony is, to some degree, a celebration of the host country’s history, the event has recently tended to feel like a technology-conference keynote, or a music festival. Two years ago, in Paris, organizers turned the seventh arrondissement into a light show and devoted considerable airtime to the Minions. Beijing’s event, in 2022, looked uncannily like a laptop screensaver. The year prior, at the opening for the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games, the mood was painfully contemporary, with a minimalist soundtrack and drones flying overhead. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel, and the Olympics are a chance to show off on the world’s biggest stage. Usually, it seems, this is accomplished via lots and lots of LEDs.

This year’s ceremony, by contrast, opened with a pair of dancers in angel wings reenacting the neoclassical sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, which was created about 100 years before the invention of the lightbulb. The show then ran through a psychedelic tribute to a bygone Italy, a sort of live highlight reel of hundreds of years of civilization, rendered bonkersly but quaintly: Color-saturated Roman centurions marched solemnly in line with people dressed as moka pots; visual gags celebrated pasta, paparazzi, the film La Dolce Vita. At one point, the great composers Verdi, Puccini, and Rossini appeared in bobblehead proportions, like the guys who run the bases at Minor League baseball games: history turned into a cartoon, very literally.

At nearly every moment, the reference point was somewhere from decades to millennia in the past. The violinist Giovanni Andrea Zanon played a 300-year-old Stradivarius; a phalanx of models strutted around in classic suits in the colors of the Italian flag; the actress Sabrina Impacciatore paid tribute to the Olympics’ more recent past via an extended dance sequence set in the 1970s and ’80s. Even Mariah Carey, the show’s major modern performer, was dressed like an Old Hollywood starlet in a sparkly dress and a voluminous ostrich-feather stole; she sang an exceptionally breathy version of “Nel blu, dipinto di blu,” which came out in 1958.

[Read: The man who broke physics]

Maybe all of this is to be expected for a country whose best-known cultural influences lived during the Renaissance. But the production itself was also undeniably retro: The lights were minimal, the music mostly classical, the choreography traditional. With a few exceptions, the entire show could have been produced anytime in the past 40 years.

Before the opening ceremony, people gathered in the streets to protest the governments of various countries competing, as well as the festivities’ very existence amid a major affordability crisis in Milan. During the Games, organizers will be using 3 million cubic yards of artificial snow: In Northern Italy, as in all over the world, the sky can no longer be reliably expected to behave like it used to. The 2028 Summer Games, to be held in Los Angeles, are already beset by concerns about cost overruns. The Olympics are one of our oldest global institutions, which is another way of saying they are a bit archaic—of, and invented in, a different world. The future is uncertain; best to focus on the past.

The Sciencewashing of Everyday Life

2026-01-22T12:57:30-05:00

There’s a double helix in my local Sephora. It’s roughly the size and shape of a soda can, and it is accompanied by a placard referencing patents and peptides, as if in a science fair. It’s trying to sell me a hair mask.

Online, the company responsible for this display describes itself as a “biology-first haircare brand, powered by biotech.” It practices “biomimetic hairscience,” and, thanks to “a decade of complex research into the bioscience of hair,” has patented a peptide that repairs hair “at a molecular level across multiple types of bonds including polypeptide chains and disulfide bonds.” I have no idea what any of this means. The mask costs $75.

In 2026, it is possible to cover your body in science. You can put on probiotic leggings and a patented bra, and then you can apply lipstick containing hyaluronic acids “with differentiated molecular weights” and slather your face in a “triple-lipid peptide cream” developed by self-identified “skintellectuals.” You can also eat your science, by way of “clinically-studied key herbs, adaptogens, and minerals—at amounts informed by research.” If you get thirsty, you can have water that has been chemically manipulated with extra hydrogen atoms, just in case two aren’t enough for you. Even decades-old products have been newly recast as miracles of modern chemistry: After years of selling itself purely impressionistically, via close-up shots of hot athletes dripping sweat and swilling neon liquid, Gatorade has recently begun touting itself as “Lab Tested.” As the wellness movement collides with the supercharged demands of selling products in a crowded market, science-speak seems to have invaded every crevice of the fashion, beauty, and food industries.

[Read: Eat your vegetables like an adult]

Many of the claims these products make are perfectly legitimate, if a bit goofy; others are transparently nonsense. And dubious, science-flecked marketing claims have existed about as long as marketing has. But they used to be comparatively unsophisticated, and quite literal: Cheerios contains a certain amount of fiber, and fiber is good for you, thus Cheerios is good for you and you should buy it. A skin-care product is superior to its competitors because it has more vitamin C, and vitamin C is good for your skin. These ads were informed but plainspoken, employing the simple logic of cause and effect, inputs and outputs, using words most people recognized. They talked, basically, like a family-medicine doctor.

Today’s ads, by contrast, talk like the Ph.D. kind of doctor, using polysyllabic words and alluding to things viewable only under a microscope. They seem designed not to illuminate but to obfuscate, to impart the veneer of science at such a high level that people will never really ask how, or if, it works. Almost no one is looking up a peer-reviewed study, or spelunking through the patent database, to make sure the claims on their package of goo are accurate. “People like buying products that are, quote, research backed,” Neil Lewis Jr., a behavioral scientist at Cornell, told me. “But most people, they’re not equipped to actually evaluate those claims. They don’t have the time or expertise, often, and so they sort of just look for some heuristic cue, and that’s good enough.” What science-washed products promise—more than what they actually promise on the package—is that someone else did the work for you.

For years, the trend in consumption was beautiful but useless trash. Now, Stephen Zagor, who teaches courses in food business at NYU and Columbia, told me, “science is the new it thing.” For companies, nodding to state-of-the-art technology and papering a corporate website in clip art of molecules is an indication that their product is the best, empirically. And for consumers, drinking a soda that went to grad school is a signal too—of savviness and responsibility. It’s cultural capital: If others “see us eating a food item that has been surrounded by scientific discussions, people think automatically we know what we’re talking about, when we don’t have a clue either,” Zagor said. “Science makes ignorance feel smart.”

[Read: The Trump administration’s most paralyzing blow to science]

Many companies do actually employ professionals—cosmetic chemists, food scientists. But science in the private interest doesn’t necessarily work like science in the public interest. It tends to operate on a different timescale, and to use different yardsticks. The scientists who work for corporations need to be sure that their products provide enough short-term benefit to keep people buying, while abiding by consumer regulations. They are employed to ask questions the market wants answered, ideally as quickly as possible.

The irony here, of course, is that this is happening at a time when institutional science, the kind that doesn’t come with next-day shipping, is under considerable threat. The federal government has embarked on a concerted, and largely successful, effort to undermine, discredit, and defund serious scientific research at any opportunity. Influencers and pundits have sought to cast scientists themselves as elitists and liars, in an effort that appears to be working: Nearly one in four Americans has little or no confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest. Thousands of scientific minds have, by brute force or something subtler, left the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and academia. Their absence leaves a vacuum. Some of these people worked on projects that couldn’t be sold; others worked to regulate the ones that could. Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly pessimistic, I worry that we are approaching a world in which scientists are employed not by independent institutions but only by companies—a world in which science itself is marketing copy, and little more.

How Sweetgreen Became Millennial Cringe

2026-01-08T16:04:47-05:00

Last spring, Sweetgreen did something shocking, at least insofar as the menu adjustments of a fast-casual salad chain can be described that way: It added fries. In interviews, the company’s “chief concept officer,” Nicolas Jammet, paid lip service to “reevaluating and redefining fast food,” but I suspect that Sweetgreen was also “reevaluating and redefining” how to make money in a world that appeared poised to move on from buying what the company was trying to sell.

In the first two months of last year, Sweetgreen’s stock price had declined more than 30 percent. The company had already made significant changes, dropping seed oils, adding “protein plates,” and hiring a bunch of robots in an apparent effort to cater to the early 2020s’ three defining dining trends: the MAHA movement, the protein fixation, and the push to cut costs by eliminating human labor. But not even air-fried potatoes could stop Sweetgreen’s free fall. In August, with operational losses reaching $26.4 million, the chain fired workers, and also the fries. As the year ended, Nathaniel Ru, who co-founded the company in 2007, stepped down from his role. Today, a share of Sweetgreen stock costs less than $8. In late 2024, it was more than $43.

This is remarkable because, for a golden decade or so, Sweetgreen was the future of lunch. Americans, especially ones who were youngish and worked on computers, were toting green paper bags around coastal cities (and later, smaller towns and non-coastal cities) en masse. Silicon Valley was injecting capital into a restaurant as though it were a software start-up.

Sweetgreen’s early success was not a fluke. As a restaurant, it truly did do something incredible. The company put high-quality organic produce in interesting combinations, incorporating fresh herbs and global ingredients, and going heavy on crunch and citrus. It sourced from small farms that it listed proudly on chalkboards inside each store, appealing squarely to a cohort who knew they really should be shopping at the farmers’ market, even if they usually got their groceries from Instacart, guiltily. And Sweetgreen was an early adopter of online ordering, allowing its customers to waste less time waiting in line. When a Sweetgreen opened in my city, in 2016, replacing a restaurant that had been serving hamburgers for 65 years, I was excited about it the same way I was excited when fiber internet came to my neighborhood: Finally, a better way to live.

In all this, the chain was achingly of its era, when high functioning in the office (productivity) and on the cellular level (health) became irretrievably intertwined. The widespread adoption of smartphones invented new categories of aspiration, new ways to sell things, new expectations that workers be available and productive, including during lunch hour. The wellness influencer—a figure whose job title did not exist just a few years earlier—suddenly started to seem like one of the more powerful figures in American life. Millennials graduated, grew up, got jobs, and emerged as not just a chronological category but a marketing segment.

[Read: The sad ballad of salad]

Around this time, a number of venture-backed start-ups appeared to sell them new versions of stuff they already used. The stuff was legitimately nicer, but only a little; the real innovation was in how it was sold. Largely, this meant minimalist packaging that was purpose-built to look good on a small screen, and marketing copy that made canny nods to responsibility but also fun, using a corporate voice that sounded like a real person’s, even if that person was sort of embarrassing and obsessed with the grind (“you’re going to guac this week. #monday 👊,” read the caption on an Instagram post from Sweetgreen in 2015). In short order, many Americans swapped out their YMCA stationary-bike classes for SoulCycle; their yellow cabs for rideshares; their generic workout gear for color-blocked, cellphone-pocketed leggings made out of, like, recycled water bottles.

And these same Americans abandoned the salad bar—for decades, a depressing fixture of the workday lunch—in favor of Sweetgreen. It was a healthy, efficient meal for healthy, efficient people (at least aspirationally), a power lunch for those who didn’t have assistants or expense accounts but who were nonetheless determined to feel in control, possibly formidable. Especially after 2018—when the company began installing shelves in office lobbies and WeWork cafeterias, from which workers could retrieve a preordered salad without leaving the building—it just became a default, a nearly frictionless calorie-delivery vehicle for people whose bosses were definitely paying attention to whether their little Slack bubble was green or not.

Sweetgreen was what you ate while listening to, if not the Hamilton soundtrack, then a self-improvement podcast at 1.5 speed, ripping through emails or shopping online before dutifully composting your beautifully designed, biodegradable bowl. It was the perfect fuel for the grinning strivers of the long 2010s, when a better world was possible, and in fact something you could buy. When a dear friend of mine got married, what she wanted to eat more than anything else while being poked and prettied in the hotel suite was Sweetgreen. It was the most reliable, most delicious, least risky meal either of us could think to pick up at an exceptionally frenetic moment. But it also made sense, spiritually, on a day that often requires total command over both one’s appearance and a large number of spreadsheets—a day that is a public declaration of hope for the future, and, in some ways, the first day of your adult life.

[Read: The golden age of the fried-chicken sandwich]

Sweetgreen sold salad, which you eat, but it also sold moral superiority, which you build an identity around. (By 2016, BuzzFeed was posting lists about “21 Truths for Everyone Obsessed With Sweetgreen.”) The company capitalized on this to sell not just lunch but a lifestyle brand. It staged an annual music festival; collaborated with cool fashion people on limited-edition housewares and accessories; sold branded Nalgenes and expensive, earth-toned sweatshirts in its capacious webstore; posted its playlists to Spotify. Imagine anyone willingly re-creating the sonic ambience inside their local McDonald’s at home and you will realize how unique Sweetgreen is, or was, among casual-restaurant chains.

Although McDonald’s and its ilk got big by serving as broad an audience as possible, Sweetgreen derived much of its cachet from projecting a level of elitism. This, as it turns out, is not the secret to market dominance. Sweetgreen has always been relatively expensive, and it has gotten more so: In 2014, a kale Caesar with chicken was $8.85; this week, in some locations, it’s more than $14.75, which is almost $2 higher than can be explained by inflation alone. Maybe more important is the impression that it’s expensive. Today’s consumers are highly price-sensitive, Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of the trade publication Restaurant Business, told me, and “Sweetgreen has had a reputation as an expensive place to eat for what you’re getting.”

There’s also the issue that many Americans don’t like salad quite enough to actually want it regularly. In a 2024 YouGov poll, 40 percent of respondents said they ate salad more than once a week, which might seem like a lot until you remember that some of them were surely lying, and you consider how many more people prefer food that isn’t chopped-up raw vegetables: Last year, the nation’s top five quick-service restaurants were, in order, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s. “It’s really difficult to convince a large number of people that salad is something they’re going to eat on a frequent enough basis to support a chain like that,” Maze said. Many years ago, he was driving his then-10-year-old son and a friend home from baseball practice, and the friend was excitedly talking about eating Chipotle for dinner. The memory has, clearly, stuck with him: “Can I realistically imagine my son’s 10-year-old friend bragging about going to Sweetgreen?” He cannot. I can’t either.

[Read: America is done pretending about meat]

Sweetgreen went public in 2021, and it has not been consistently profitable since. No amount of savvy marketing could make the salad-haters change their minds. But then the people who used to like Sweetgreen also started abandoning it. In the third quarter of last year, the average Sweetgreen store’s sales declined almost 10 percent; the drop was most significant in Los Angeles and the Northeast, two of the company’s core markets. (I asked Maze where those customers were going instead, and he said maybe Raising Cane’s, which specializes in chicken fingers.)

Some of this can be explained by prices, but plenty of other restaurants have raised their prices and not seen sales fall off a cliff. I think Sweetgreen didn’t change so much as the world around it did. A $15 salad was never really an investment in one’s health, but it certainly doesn’t feel like that in this economy—and besides, that moment has passed. The optimism of the previous era has given way to something more nihilistic. The people who were once going to guac this week are now quiet quitting and scarfing tallow. The “power” in Millennial power lunch has, largely, been replaced by impotence and apathy. WeWork went bankrupt; Hamilton became cringe; trying so hard to do the right things all the time started to feel pointless and naive. When I told a friend and fellow former Sweetgreen enthusiast about this story, he said, “What’s the point of eating a salad when we’re all going to die?” He was joking, kind of.

The Color of the Year Is an Exercise in Absurdity

2025-12-19T10:30:00-05:00

Earlier this month, many attractive people filled a room in Lower Manhattan. They drank elaborate cocktails and gazed upon Instagram-y art installations and left with a gift bag that contained, among other things, earbuds studded with Swarovski crystals. The vibe was high-end, sophisticated, arty. The guest of honor was a color.

Pantone throws a party like this one annually, in conjunction with the announcement of its “Color of the Year.” For 2026, it’s “Cloud Dancer,” which, the company notes in a press release, “serves as a symbol of calming influence in a frenetic society rediscovering the value of measured consideration and quiet reflection.” The color, the release continues, also helps peel “away layers of outmoded thinking,” “making room for innovation,” and, of course, reminds us that “true strength lies not just in doing, but also in being.” (It’s white.)

The choice was controversial in the banal way that everything is controversial now. Some people noted, pointing to the news, that this was maybe not the year to publish a press release about how awesome whiteness is, and some other people found that argument to be a very serious symptom of the woke mind virus. People took to Instagram to call the choice tone-deaf, or to label it trolling, or, in a few cases, to announce that they were “rejecting” Cloud Dancer, as though the color itself were an unsavory ideology and not a band of light visible to the human eye. Other people reacted to the reaction by suggesting that critics of Cloud Dancer were terminally offended hysterics looking for racism where absolutely none exists. Credulous news stories about the debate filled my feeds. I began to seriously worry that this frenetic society might not, in fact, rediscover the value of measured consideration and quiet reflection.

[Read: Rage bait is a brilliant word of the year]

White—like all colors, but maybe more than most—is loaded with meaning. Throughout history, it has carried with it commanding associations: with elitism, purity, nobility, wealth, moral superiority. (The architect Adolf Loos, in his seminal 1908 essay arguing that ornamentation was “degenerate,” hoped for a world where “the streets of the city will glisten like white walls.”) It is certainly not neutral, as Pantone has suggested in the Cloud Dancer rollout. If you ask a physicist, white isn’t even technically a color, because it does not exist on a single wavelength. The choice is strange by almost any measure. But then again, so is the concept of a color of the year.

As companies go, Pantone is an odd one. It does not sell paint, despite its association with paint swatches. It does not sell any of the machinery needed to make paint or produce fabric, either. It does not invent new colors, because that’s not (generally) possible. What it sells is a standard: For more than 60 years, it has categorized, named, and numbered more than 10,000 different shades, each rendered into format-specific formulas. The idea is that any designer in the world can be sure that the pinky purple in an ad on their computer screen will perfectly match the pinky purple that appears in the ad when it is printed in a magazine, and will perfectly match the pinky purple that appears on the packaging for the product the ad is for, because they are all Pantone 246 C. Much of Pantone’s business is selling color-swatch guides to designers, artists, and marketers to ensure this uniformity, which is hugely important to their jobs. The company is, in other words, in the intellectual-property business, and it has an effective monopoly over its particular field.

Pantone offers a genuine utility in the same way that the dictionary does. But it’s a fairly boring one, with a fairly limited audience. Over the years, the company has expanded its remit, finding new and impressionistic ways to sell color, and itself as the arbiter thereof. (“God created the world in seven days. And on the eighth day, he called Pantone to put color into it,” the company’s founder, Lawrence Herbert, once said.) In 1986, Pantone opened a consulting arm, through which its experts advise companies on how to use color in packaging and logos—a decade ago, it worked with Universal to develop and trademark Minion Yellow (13-0851 TCX). These days, the company also sells trend-forecast reports, and licenses its name and colors to other companies: You can now buy Pantone-branded sneakers, key chains, and mugs in its robust online store, and for a period of time in the 2010s, you could stay in a Pantone-branded hotel in Brussels.

[From the February 2025 issue: What not to wear: The false promise of seasonal-color analysis]

The most absurd invention, however, is the color of the year, which the company started announcing at the turn of the millennium, ostensibly to “draw attention to the relationship between culture and color,” though practically it just drew attention to Pantone. The annual color is apparently meant to reflect humanity’s deep yearnings—for “closeness and connection” (peach, 2024), or “a new narrative” (magenta, 2023)—but also to predict its future tastes. And the color’s very announcement has become a massive cultural and commercial occasion—a global news event created out of thin air, and a coup of publicity and corporate synergy unlike anything else I can think of. (Imagine Oxford University Press licensing its word of the year—incidentally, rage bait—for use in products.) The color of the year takes something available to everyone, in nature, and sells it back to us.

This year, the high-end hotel chain Mandarin Oriental is incorporating Cloud Dancer into its properties. The furniture company Joybird is making sofas in it. For the people who can’t stand to use off-trend Command hooks, 3M has unveiled a Cloud Dancer line, and for the serenity-seeking preschooler, Play-Doh has released a special edition of its signature Doh. The controversy has abated, but the stuff to buy will stick around.

Advent Calendars Are Totally Out of Control

2025-11-18T14:00:00-05:00

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It is believed that in the fourth century, European followers of the still-newish religion called Christianity first formally observed the period in December leading up to the birth of Jesus Christ. They called it “the Advent,” from the Latin word for “approach” or “arrival,” and it was a somber time, one for preparation and contemplation. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory composed many of the texts still associated with the Advent, at least as it is practiced by Catholics. In the 19th, German Protestants turned the waiting into something more like counting, lighting candles to mark the days until Christmas. For millions of people, for more than 2,000 years, the Advent has represented an opportunity to reflect, to anticipate—to make holiness out of the spiritual equivalent of standing in line, to sit in stillness during the year’s darkest time and know the light is coming.

In 2025, the Advent seems, mostly, to represent an opportunity to pluck miniature diversions out of perforated-cardboard compartments. People with even a tenuous relationship to Jesus Christ are nonetheless spending their Decembers counting down the days until his birthday; they are doing this by opening paper doors, behind which they are finding just about anything a person can possibly buy—tea, designer lipstick, wine, weed, chili crisp, cheese, knives, crystals, smoked summer sausage, toys for children, toys for cats, toys for dogs, toys for sex. They are participating (possibly subconsciously) in an ancient, sacred ritual by unboxing their daily thong. They are counting down to Christmas without compromising their gains, as Jesus would have wanted. They’re celebrating the season the way it was meant to be: with Keurig cups.

The Macy’s website currently offers many dozens of advent calendars, ranging in price from just under $20 (chocolate) to $955 (an assortment of goodies from the Swedish luxury brand Byredo). Williams-Sonoma has more than 20, including two cross-branded with the Netflix show Bridgerton. Burger King and Kraft Natural Cheese each do an advent calendar, as does Red Bull, though I gotta say, that one looks suspiciously like a normal 24-pack of cans. Sometimes, advent calendars cost as much as a small boat; sometimes they merely contain two dozen (very) small boats. Bonne Maman, the French jam company, has quadrupled production of its advent calendar since debuting it in 2017, and the calendar still sells out every year, a representative of the company told Modern Retail. Advent calendars have now gone so wide that they’re not just for Christmas anymore—Hanukkah and Valentine’s Day have both received the advent-calendar treatment, in a development that is wholly natural, if you think the point of advent calendars is to invent new categories of acquisition, or a bit goofy, if you think the point of advent calendars is to observe the Advent.

[Read: The luxury makeover of the worst pastry on Earth]

Advent calendars as mass-marketed products have been around since the early 20th century, when European companies began selling simple paper ones, mostly for children. Their slow march toward secular adult indulgence kicked into warp speed about a decade and a half ago, when beauty companies began putting sample-size products into glamorous boxes and marketing them under seasonal names. The idea presented two opportunities at once: Advent calendars were aimed at loyalists but also roped in new customers unwilling to spring for a full-size tube of goo who might be persuaded by what they saw as a good deal on two dozen petite ones. The calendars’ once-a-year nature also allowed companies to create artificial scarcity, drumming up excitement and demand. Most important, they provided nearly a full month of daily exposure to a company and its products—for the people who bought the calendars, and for whomever they were showing them to. Not insignificantly, this was shortly after YouTube was founded: Unboxing videos were one of that platform’s earliest native hits, and the only thing better than a single unboxing is 24 unboxings in a row.

The unboxing videos are now on TikTok, too, and they follow the same format and offer the same thrills: surprises, ribbons, novelties in tiny, adorable packages. Everyone loves a small treat, especially one that feels like a deal. More and more, giving gifts has also become something that people are doing for themselves—I think it’s notable that the very premise of an advent calendar, which one typically starts opening nearly a month before Christmas, means it’s probably not a gift. (“A little moment, just for you,” whispers the copy inside the cover of an advent calendar full of waterproof jewelry.) The season has morphed into a weeks-long festival of consumption, its own liturgical calendar’s worth of shopping holidays: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day. The advent calendar began as a form of religious expression. It still is—it’s just a different religion.

The Matcha Problem

2025-11-17T08:00:00-05:00

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A couple of years ago, Pokémon introduced a new monster: Poltchageist, a “Grass/Ghost type” with special abilities in “hospitality” and being “heatproof.” It is wily and homicidal; it is also matcha.

Sure—why not? Matcha, a special preparation of green tea, is already everywhere else. It’s in candy and restaurant desserts and ultra-firming eye cream and Frappuccinos and a pretty foul-sounding martini. Loacker, the 100-year-old Italian company that makes those Quadratini cookies, has introduced a matcha flavor. Dunkin’ sells a matcha doughnut. Thousands or possibly millions of young people on TikTok seem to have devoted their life to decanting green sludge from one vessel to another. Retail sales of matcha powder in the United States are up by 86 percent from three years ago. Matcha is outselling coffee at some cafés, including my local Blank Street, which isn’t really a coffeeshop at all anymore—earlier this year, the company drenched its interiors in celadon, dropped the word coffee from its name, and began offering an ever-expanding menu of matcha drinks in baroque, hybridized flavors, such as carrot cake and “daydream.”

In 2023, the global matcha market was estimated to be $4.3 billion. That number is expected to nearly double by the end of the decade. Like most trends, this one is a synthesis of several macro-level factors, among them: caffeine anxiety, the wellness boom, rising coffee prices, the proliferation of cheap home milk frothers, and the fact that the color green looks amazing on video. Matcha has appeared, as if out of nowhere, to brute-force its way into the mainstream American palate.

Except—matcha does not come from nowhere. It comes from Japan, where it has, for centuries, been used ceremonially, and where supply challenges are now colliding with world-historic demand. For hundreds of years, matcha has been a specialized product, one that is, by definition, laborious to produce: Camellia sinensis thrives in subtropical, rainy climates. The best, sweetest matcha—the matcha that people who know matcha drink—comes from plants grown in the shade, after which their two youngest leaves are picked (by hand, only at the very beginning of the season) and then steamed, de-stemmed, deveined, dried, and ground between granite. As an agricultural product, it is much more like wine than like, say, corn. But climate change is shrinking the land that C. sinensis can grow on, and the farmers who have traditionally cultivated it are getting older, and they lack willing successors for the demanding work.

[Read: The drink Americans can’t quit]

And so, as interest spikes, things are getting weird. From 2024 to 2025, the average price in Kyoto for first-flush tencha, the whole leaves used to make matcha, nearly tripled. Farmers outside Japan—in China and South Korea, for example—are frantically cultivating tencha, hoping to catch the wave. Manufacturers are taking advantage of the market’s lack of regulation and are selling ground-up green tea as matcha. Joseph Sorensen, the chair of UC Davis’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the acting director of the university’s Global Tea Institute, estimates that 90 percent of the powdered matcha on store shelves isn’t technically matcha at all. “Unauthorized resellers” are scalping marked-up matcha powder on social media as if it were Bad Bunny tickets. Counterfeiters are—allegedly!—selling colored powder and hoping no one notices. Kelly Shaw, who leads marketing for the U.K. matcha brand PerfectTed, told me that her company has seen others bulk ordering its matcha on Amazon and reselling it at competing local shops.

Like Poltchageist, PerfectTed is a product of its time. Quite literally: It became popular in 2023, after two of its co-founders, Marisa Poster and Teddie Levenfiche, went on Dragons’ Den, the United Kingdom’s version of Shark Tank, when they were both 25. There, they sold matcha using the language of utility and the logic of enterprise: Matcha, Poster told the cameras, evoked a venerable ritual, but more important, it was a “massive opportunity in the natural-energy-drink sector.” Poster had learned of matcha while trying to manage her ADHD and anxiety as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. She was using energy drinks and coffee to stay awake while studying but was constantly crashing. Matcha—which contains less caffeine than coffee does but more than other green teas do, as well as an amino acid said to aid focus—offered her a cleaner buzz.

All five Dragons fought to give Levenfiche and Poster their money. PerfectTed is now the U.K.’s fastest-growing retail brand across all sectors; according to Shaw, it alone imports 25 percent of Japan’s matcha supply. In addition to its flagship product, an energy drink, the company sells canned matcha lattes, Nespresso-compatible matcha pods, and powdered, sometimes flavored matcha. Its website features photographs of sporty people in green outfits and ad copy suggesting that matcha is not only better caffeine but more interesting caffeine: One graphic juxtaposes an intoxicatingly swirly jade-green matcha latte with a generic paper coffee cup, the latter stamped with BORING in red, like a voided check.

The traditional Japanese matcha ceremony involves patience, special equipment, and zero high-fructose corn syrup. Most of the new-wave matcha companies courting customers outside Japan are offering something else entirely, by admission and design. “I think if it remained in a tea ceremony and required a cha-wan and a whisk, it wouldn’t have become as popular as it has,” Shaw told me, gently, using the Japanese word for the special vessel in which matcha is traditionally brewed.

But even as these companies reject historical authenticity, they employ it as a selling point: PerfectTed, like many, many others, calls its powdered matcha “ceremonial grade,” a newly popular designation that is unregulated and completely meaningless. Matcha, in these companies’ tellings, presents an ancient and vaguely spiritual answer to the trials of modern life—an easy-to-consume, crash-free caffeine hit to get you through a looming deadline, a monk-approved solution to a problem that a monk would never have. Like miso, tahini, gochujang, and so many other global foods that have become trendy in this context-collapsed, free-associative, flavormaxxed culinary era, matcha is no longer really a fully formed cultural product with a heritage to be fidelitous to. Rather, it is a collection of appealing attributes, ready to be stripped for parts and endlessly remixed—a novel flavor, a functional ingredient, a component, a value proposition, a brand.

[Read: The golden age of the fried-chicken sandwich]

Matcha’s shift from niche commodity with sacred associations to international celebrity is not, in Sorensen’s view, wholly negative, as long as people don’t “pretend that they’re participating in Japanese culture by having a Starbucks latte.” The matcha ceremony’s practitioners take it seriously, and they’re watching it get more expensive—but, he told me, this is a “pretty specialized group of enthusiasts.” To the degree that the teenagers buying my local Blank Street out of carrot-cake matcha lattes are driving up the price of a pillar of Japanese life, we’re talking about something that’s closer to golf clubs than to Communion wafers. And besides, Sorensen reminded me, much of the “matcha” flavor finding its way to the mass market isn’t actually matcha. “It’s pretty much the difference between something that is strawberry flavored,” he said, “and actual strawberries.” Food products can experience shortages, but flavors are a basically infinite resource, at least in food science’s modern era.

Sorensen and others are less worried about the rise in demand than they are about what comes after it. Matcha plants require three to five years to mature. Even if farmers were to have the arable land and the human labor to plant all the plants that the world wants right now, the world, at some point, is likely to stop wanting so much of it. Telegenic 20-somethings in the United States can get excited about a new way to stay focused or go viral, and almost immediately, a massive agri-industrial mechanism halfway around the world will shudder to life to satisfy them—a population that barely knows such a mechanism exists and that will probably move on soon anyway. Food, especially food that comes from plants, is slow. Trends, especially trends that come from the internet, are not.

The Innovation That’s Killing Restaurant Culture

2025-10-27T15:15:11-04:00

Updated at 3:10 p.m. ET on October 28, 2025

Collin Wallace wanted a snack. Specifically, he wanted one delivered to his classroom during lecture (he had long lectures). This was 2006, when delivery was mostly limited to a few types of food, and it was something you did by talking on the phone and then waiting awhile. Wallace was in engineering school at Georgia Tech, and he figured his problem was one the internet could help solve. He built a way for customers to order online, automatically syncing to food vendors’ systems. That project became a company, and that company was eventually acquired, in 2011, by Grubhub. Wallace was experimenting, making stuff with his friends, and then he was in leadership at a company that would go on to help change restaurants forever.

This article was featured in The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

Because today, of course, you can get not just a snack but almost anything you want sent to you just about wherever you are. You can have an ice-cream sundae, a martini, or an expertly seared Wagyu steak delivered to your door, without pausing the TV or finding your shoes. You can have coq au vin from an “extra-charming, French-inspired gastrothèque” long beloved for its perfectly styled shoebox of a space, and you can have it miles away from the very space that makes the restaurant so special. Whatever you order, it will come from a business that operates a bit differently than it once did: less like a restaurant and more like a pickup counter, the product on offer less like “an experience,” as the restaurateur Tom Colicchio told me earlier this year, and more like “a commodity.” It will, in all likelihood, be packed into paper and so much plastic, bundled up like a baby in a snowstorm, doing its best to survive a trip it isn’t entirely equipped to make. And it will probably be ferried by a precariously employed person who is financially incentivized to move quickly, not safely, and who has one of the more dangerous jobs in America. An entire commercial mechanism will have whirred to life the moment you clicked “Place order,” one that is part of an industry that barely existed 15 years ago but now brings in tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually.

In 2024, nearly three out of every four restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant, according to data provided to me by the National Restaurant Association, a trade group. The share of customers using delivery specifically, as opposed to picking up takeout or going to a drive-through, more than doubled from 2019 to 2024. In a recently released poll by the association, 41 percent of respondents said that delivery was “an essential part of their lifestyle.” For Millennials and Generation Z—the apex consumers of today, and of tomorrow too—it’s apparently even more essential: More than half of adults under 45 use delivery at least once a week, and 13 percent use it once a day. Five percent use it multiple times a day. But the delivery boom isn’t confined to young people or to urbanites: About one in eight Baby Boomers uses delivery once a week, and so does about one in five rural dwellers. We are a nation of order-inners. A world, really—earlier this year, DoorDash announced a deal to acquire the British delivery service Deliveroo for $3.86 billion; the new, combined company will have 50 million monthly active users, spread over more than 40 countries.

[Read: I’m risking my life to bring you ramen]

For as long as fast-food and pizza joints have existed, certain restaurants have been defined by, and designed for, takeout and delivery. But delivery has now come for what industry analysts call “full-service restaurants”—that is, the types of places where a server guides you through your meal from start to finish, or at least used to. These days, 30 percent of those restaurants’ orders are consumed somewhere else, according to the National Restaurant Association. The fanciest, most famous restaurants are still doing mostly table service, but just about every other establishment has been conscripted into the army that ferries hot food out of professional kitchens and into American mouths 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Meanwhile, the longtime industry analyst Joseph Pawlak told me, “you could shoot a cannon” through many dining rooms on a Tuesday night.

In effect, delivery has reversed the flow of eaters to food, and remade a shared experience into a much more individual one. If communities used to clench like a fist around their restaurants, now they look more like an open palm, fingers stretched out as far as possible, or at least to the edge of the delivery radius.

The history of delivery is long, but the important stuff happened in the 2000s. Around then, a new kind of company started popping up—Seamless in 1999, Grubhub in 2004, Postmates in 2011, Caviar in 2012, DoorDash in 2013, Uber’s delivery subservice in 2014. These businesses presented a modern solution to a modern problem. Nobody wanted to talk on the telephone anymore, but chefs and restaurant managers didn’t exactly know how to build their own websites and payment portals. Many restaurants already outsourced their human resources or legal or design to third parties; outsourcing delivery just seemed efficient. Soon enough, and without entirely realizing it, restaurants had turned a core part of their business operations over to technology companies. They wouldn’t get it back.

Tech companies tend to operate very differently from pizza joints. For one thing, they are typically obligated, by the venture-capital firms that fund them, to grow as quickly as possible. In this case, that meant that the delivery companies needed to ensnare people who had never made delivery a part of their life before. So throughout much of the 2010s, these companies followed what’s now a familiar formula: They attracted new customers by offering lots and lots of discounts, using all of that venture capital to subsidize the actual cost of doing business. Customers got inexpensive delivery, restaurants could make decent money from it, and Silicon Valley covered the difference. The logic was that whichever company won the delivery wars would have access to a potential consumer base of everyone who eats. The effect was that some of the most well-capitalized companies on Earth invented a product that did not previously exist, and then invented the consumer expectation that it came cheap.

[Read: The end of the Millennial lifestyle subsidy]

Then, the coronavirus pandemic. Eating restaurant food at home went from an indulgence to an occasional necessity to something virtuous, a sort of 21st-century victory garden. (“Think of all the places you want to survive and start ordering,” the food publication Eater advised.) All sorts of restaurants—many of which were carrying significant debt due to pandemic closures, and many of which had never considered delivery in the past—started offering it. They couldn’t afford not to. “You have to find revenue wherever you can find it,” Colicchio, who runs five restaurants in three cities, told me. From April 2019 to April 2020, the major delivery apps’ sales more than doubled.

Convenience is like sex: Once you’ve had it, it’s hard to forget how good it is to have it. As soon as Americans understood that it was possible to have any food they wanted whenever they wanted, they came to expect it. Once dining rooms reopened, many people didn’t return. Even if you didn’t order delivery yourself, you could probably see the transformation happening: The corps of gig workers moving around cities in a sort of technologically aided dinner ballet; the drivers rushing into restaurants, phones aloft; the jokes online about delivery as a lifestyle; the plastic bags on people’s doorsteps, latter-day lawn gnomes. Like so many tech innovations of its era, app-enabled delivery facilitated the easy trading of money for time, and introduced new categories of consumption. Like so many miracles, it became mundane surprisingly quickly.

The fact that diners love ordering in so much gives the huge companies that facilitate it tremendous power. “These delivery companies are basically saying, You have to use us, and there’s value in it,” Colicchio told me. “And if you don’t use us, you’re not gonna be in business.”

Delivery is essentially a weapon that restaurants can wield against their competition—and when your competition has a weapon, you need one too. “And so,” Wallace, the lecture snacker, told me, “what you get is this zero-sum game where you’re basically just selling weapons to both sides, but no one’s actually better off, because it turns out there’s only so much stomach space to go around.”

But delivery companies have a problem too: Delivery is an inherently difficult proposition, financially speaking. Compared with eating in a restaurant (or even ordering delivery from a restaurant directly), involving a third party fundamentally requires the use of more labor, more infrastructure, more overhead. Somebody has to pay for it. Eventually, after years of venture-capital-funded subsidies, delivery companies had to find ways to pass all of these costs on to someone else—and they did, as the industry consolidated. DoorDash bought Caviar in 2019; Uber bought Postmates the year after. (Those two companies now control about 90 percent of the U.S. market combined. Grubhub, which was bought in 2024 by the food-hall chain Wonder, owns 8 percent.) And then, Wallace explained, “it just became extractive.” Customers are getting charged more; drivers are making less. One South Carolina DoorDash driver told me he recently chauffeured a single serving of ice cream five miles; he was paid $3.50 before taxes for about 20 minutes’ work, and estimates that the customer paid about $15 for it.

[Read: Delivery apps just did the impossible]

But mostly, restaurants are losing out. Delivery companies charge at least 5 percent commission and often much more, up to 30 percent. They typically charge for payment processing, for in-app advertising, and for favorable placement in search results. They charge for pickup orders. And the restaurants are thrashing. That’s the word Wallace used: “It’s like not swimming or treading water,” he said—“it’s just thrashing to survive. You spend more and more on the platforms trying to advertise, but it doesn’t fundamentally help other than subsidizing the platforms.” (A Grubhub spokesperson told me in a statement that restaurants use the platform because it helps them reach new customers, and that restaurants are “in control every step of the way, and only pay when an order is placed.”)

In a sense, what restaurants did during the early pandemic was take out a loan they didn’t know they wouldn’t be able to pay off. They were borrowing customers and got the immediate infusion of cash they needed, but at a rate that was excruciatingly high. Shannon Orr runs an eight-restaurant group on the West Coast. Recently, she opened her books to me, by way of illustration. In 2024, one of her restaurants made about half of its sales on delivery, for $1.7 million in gross receipts. Of that, $400,000—or 23 percent—went to delivery companies. “That’s somebody’s job, by the way, which is why I just laid off people,” she told me. “That’s two salaries.” The restaurant was previously one of her most profitable, but last year, she told me, it didn’t make any money. “Delivery saved us during the pandemic,” she said. “Now they are killing us.”

Orr’s restaurants are neighborhoody: the kinds of places a family might go for a birthday, or a couple might go for a relaxed weeknight date. About 10 years ago, a few years after Wallace started at Grubhub, I lived around the corner from one of them, a pub called Ben ’N Nick’s, in Oakland, California. It had wood paneling, a pitiless bar-trivia host, and perfect wings. I haven’t been in years, but from what Orr told me, it’s different now. Foot traffic is down; delivery is up. Because she has fewer customers sitting down for a meal, she’s shifted some of her waiters to a counter, turning people trained to serve into glorified cashiers. Sometimes she looks around her restaurants and doesn’t believe how empty they feel. She has been in hospitality for two decades, and doesn’t know what hospitality is anymore. “I’m a restaurateur,” she told me. “And now I don’t want to open a huge restaurant. I want to open a bar with five tables and a huge takeout window.”

Pawlak, the restaurant analyst, told me he hasn’t seen a wave of restaurants closing directly as a result of delivery. But he also told me that in three decades, he’s never seen a change quite like this. About a third of full-service restaurants have modified their space over the past few years to account for the delivery boom, according to data from the National Restaurant Association. Applebee’s recently opened a Long Island, New York, restaurant outfitted with a handful of tables and a big bank of lockers, “designed,” per a press release, “to maximize the speed of service for delivery.”

Soon, Pawlak predicted, we’re likely to see smaller restaurants with bigger kitchens, expressly designed to cook food not being eaten on-site. Interior-design firms are touting their ability to build restaurants around delivery, with bike parking, clear signage, dedicated entrances, wallfuls of cubbies to shove bags into—essentially trying to cram two experiences into a building that used to house one. (If you’re eating dinner, the restaurant designer Lauren Chipman told me, “and you’re getting jostled by third-party delivery and their big bags, and maybe people are queuing behind your seat and they’re talking really loud or standing over you eating, that would not be an optimal dining experience, right?”) At the most extreme end, many new restaurants opening in big cities aren’t meant for in-person dining at all—they are ghost kitchens, purpose-built for delivery: dinner factories.

[Read: How America lost its taste for the middle]

The food itself is changing too. Some restaurants are trying to save on labor costs by turning toward less intensive dishes—this is part of the reason everything is a bowl now. Many have reworked their menus to account for the simple physical fact that anything warm put into a container immediately begins to steam in its own heat, getting soggy. “It does not taste as good as it did when the restaurant put it into the box,” the writer and restaurant expert Hillary Dixler Canavan told me—it can’t. Chefs told me they’re doing fewer fried items, more braises, more dressings on the side. Everyone is trying to account for the subversion of a dynamic that has defined restaurants since they were invented: that the person cooking the food largely got to decide how it was consumed. “At a great restaurant,” Canavan said, “the flow and timing of how food and drinks arrive at your table is a major part of enhancing that experience.” Now there is no experience, and restaurants cede control as soon as the bag leaves.

Canavan is concerned—for restaurants, on a financial level, and for the food itself. “If a high percentage of any given restaurant’s sales is happening in delivery, that will inevitably shape menus to be more delivery friendly,” she told me. “What does that mean for culinary innovation and experimentation and creativity?”

It’s a great question, and it gets at the fundamental shift taking place before our eyes and under our feet. A restaurant that doesn’t serve people isn’t really a restaurant—it’s something else. “We opened up restaurants so you would come to them, not so we could go to you,” Phillip Foss told me. “Otherwise, we’re just a catering company.”

Foss is the chef and owner of EL Ideas, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Chicago. During the early pandemic, Foss, like so many of his peers, started doing delivery. Eventually, however, he had to stop; the math just didn’t work out. “My feeling at the time, especially during the pandemic, was, you know—this can destroy this entire restaurant industry, if we’re giving this much of our gross income to the services,” he said. At Foss’s restaurant, the prix fixe is $245, and the menu is over-the-top theatrical (for years, he served a course of dehydrated-coconut-and-lime powder, expressly designed to look like cocaine). His food is intended to be enjoyed in person, and after pandemic restrictions were lifted, enough people wanted to that he didn’t need delivery.

These days, what’s left on Uber Eats and DoorDash are the restaurants that can’t afford to do that. Those are the places laying off staff and rejiggering their menus. Some are passing the cost on to eaters, tacking a few extra dollars onto the price of dishes when ordered for delivery—but as the economy hurtles toward a possible recession, $31 for spaghetti in a cardboard box starts to seem like a bad idea too. In what sure felt like an omen to me, earlier this year, DoorDash announced a partnership with the payment-by-installment company Klarna, thereby allowing customers to pay off an order of pad thai over several weeks.

I love restaurants. They feel very real to me. They operate in physical space and linear time. They are made of things you can see and touch and smell and taste. They have people in them. They surprise me. Part of what makes them feel special is the feeling of being taken care of—all this work made visible, even if it is also elegant and subtle.

Tech companies are kind of the opposite. They’re abstract. They are very good at hiding the effort, and the people, involved. The product that delivery companies offer isn’t food or even hospitality; it’s convenience you don’t need to think too much about. It’s all externality—costs, to the environment and the community and the labor force, atomized into the air in such a fine mist that you can barely see it.

Wallace wishes people saw it. “I don’t know if people realize or recognize the consequences of this,” he said of delivery’s wide adoption. “I don’t know if they actually understand what they’re paying when they place a delivery order. Whether it’s infrastructure, whether it’s the restaurants or the character of their local neighborhood or just the sheer dollars. I don’t think they necessarily know.”

After a year as Grubhub’s head of innovation, Wallace left the company. It was a gradual decision, he told me: Something that had felt normal stopped feeling good to him. He became familiar with the costs of running a restaurant, and also with the people who do it. He found himself in meetings about raising Grubhub’s fees, and he felt certain that the restaurants wouldn’t be able to absorb them. He used the term collateral damage—to the restaurant industry and to those who make it run: “The idea of standing on those people in order to get yourself to the next rung—it just leaves a sour taste in my mouth.” He doesn’t regret everything, but he regrets not paying closer attention.

“I was just having fun with my friends,” Wallace told me. “I think when I realized what the impact of what I was doing was, it actually hurt me, like, a lot. Like, I was pretty disappointed in myself.” He rarely orders delivery.

This story previously misstated the details of Klarna’s partnership with DoorDash. Customers can pay off their purchases over several weeks, not months.

The Drink That Americans Won’t Give Up Without a Fight

2025-10-14T07:00:00-04:00

Coffee is in trouble. Even before the United States imposed tariffs of 50 percent on Brazil and 20 percent on Vietnam—which together produce more than half of the world’s coffee beans—other challenges, including climate-change-related fires, flooding, and droughts, had already forced up coffee prices globally. Today, all told, coffee in the U.S. is nearly 40 percent more expensive than it was a year ago. Futures for arabica coffee—the beans most people in the world drink—have increased by almost a dollar since July. And prices may well go up further: Tariffs have “destabilized an already volatile market,” Sara Morrocchi, the CEO of the coffee consultancy Vuna, told me. This is a problem for the millions of people who grow and sell coffee around the world. It is also a problem for the people who rely on coffee for their base executive functioning—such a problem that Congress recently introduced a bipartisan bill to specifically protect coffee from Trump’s tariffs.

Coffee is a bit of a funny place from which to start trying to legislate against import taxes. Many, many foods and drinks are currently being tariffed to outer space, but coffee has basically no nutritional value and plenty of functional substitutes—walk into any gas station and you will see a wall full of energy drinks in every flavor, color, and chemical composition. We do not need coffee.

But of course we need it. This is precisely why Ro Khanna—the Northern California Democrat who is sponsoring the bill along with Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska—introduced the No Coffee Tax Act, he told me. He had been talking a lot on cable news about the dangers posed by tariffs, but the message wasn’t getting through. Coffee is a vivid and concrete way into a broader conversation about what import taxes actually do. “This is something that a lot of people have in their house,” he said. “They’ve noticed that it’s more expensive. The cost of coffee really matters to people.” He pointed out that Americans have historically proved themselves willing to go to war over high taxes on what’s in their mug in the morning, and that President Richard Nixon, when he imposed wide-ranging tariffs in 1971, exempted coffee.

[Read: The quest to make the best worst cup of coffee]

Coffee is fixed in our culture, our economy, our rituals, and our brain chemistry. It is the country’s most consumed beverage aside from water, and its psychoactive ingredient, caffeine, is by far the most popular drug on Earth. On any given day, an American is likelier to drink coffee than they are to exercise, pray, or read for pleasure. The U.S. has more Starbucks locations than public libraries. Coffee gave us the Enlightenment, and insurance, and the most puissant bop of summer 2024. It is so crucial to the machinery of capitalism that many employers give it away, like pens or any other essential office supply. It is the only consumable I can think of that people regularly joke about dying without (which is funny because, again, it provides nothing our bodies actually need to live). It is the thing in a big carafe at every meeting, and on the menu at nearly every restaurant, and built into our language as a widely understood shorthand for “having a conversation with another person.”

It is also a fascinating symbol of the interdependence, and the limitations, of an internationalized food system and the free-trading global order. “Coffee is a good way to think about how the world works,” the author and food historian Augustine Sedgewick told me when I called him to chat about it. Aside from on a few comparatively tiny farms in Hawaii, California, and Puerto Rico, coffee doesn’t grow in the United States: We cannot make the drink that we cannot live without. And though we expect coffee to be cheaply and abundantly available, its production is tremendously costly and difficult, even before tariffs.

[Read: Capitalism’s favorite drug]

If human beings weren’t so addicted to it, coffee would make no sense as a mass-produced crop. It prefers rocky soil and high altitudes, where “mechanization becomes very difficult,” as Morrocchi put it; for that reason, coffee is typically picked by hand. After that, it is dried, hulled, cleaned, sorted, graded, and roasted—often by people making poverty wages, some of whom are children—before it is shipped around the world, and even then it is not yet ready to drink. Coffee is the driver of a great deal of work, but also the product of it. Eleven dollars is an awful lot to pay for a latte, but also not very much at all when you consider what goes into one. “We really have a really strange disjuncture,” Sedgewick told me, “where coffee is both too cheap and way too expensive.”

Sedgewick’s excellent book Coffeeland traces coffee’s centuries-long role in the exploitation of millions of workers in Central and South America and beyond; he knows more than anyone I’ve ever talked to about the historical problems with the beverage and the industry that produces it. But he’s still human: He cherishes a well-made quad cappuccino—though, “at some point relatively recently,” he told me, “that became a $10 drink.” He has cut back, begrudgingly. He loves the caffeine, obviously (“I hate to work as much as anyone else”), but he also loves the ritual of it, the way it thrusts him out into the world in the morning.

Sedgewick stopped short of saying something such as Coffee brings us together, probably because that is a cliché, even if it is true. Everything he or you or I have ever eaten, we have eaten because someone—probably someone we will never meet—picked or processed or nurtured it, and then someone else prepared it. All food is the product of a colossal global apparatus designed to make pleasure and sustenance accessible; coffee, because it requires so much hands-on labor, is even more a product of it. Needing it makes us need other people. “Our lives depend on the lives of others,” Sedgewick told me, whether they live a hemisphere away or work at the Starbucks down the block. A tariff is protectionism— closing oneself off from the world. A cup of coffee is a reminder of how hard doing that actually is.

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Clues That a Recession Is Coming

2025-09-25T18:14:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Alan Greenspan knows a thing or two about underpants. American history’s second-longest-tenured Fed chairman also knows a thing or many about recessions, obviously, and the two are related: Sales of men’s underwear, Greenspan once reportedly suggested, are inversely proportional to economic anxiety. As the theory goes, men see underwear as a luxury, not a necessity. When money gets tight, boxers get holey.

According to folk wisdom, when a recession is imminent, sales of snacks, cigarettes, champagne, and cardboard boxes also go down. Demand for lipstick, laxatives, instant noodles, used clothing, high heels, scary movies, and mini liquor bottles, meanwhile, goes up. Hemlines drop; law-school applications rise. Baby butts get rashy. Halloween gets less spooky. People gravitate toward public libraries and private labels. They spend less at restaurants. They stop dyeing their hair and dry-cleaning their clothes and going to the strip club, and they definitely do not buy an RV.

Well, supposedly. If you ask an economist, they will almost certainly tell you that a recession is indicated by things such as mounting unemployment, falling industrial production, and short-term interest rates rising relative to long-term ones. If you ask the people working at National Bureau of Economic Research, who actually make the call about a recession, they will say it is a “significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.” They are highly unlikely to tell you that the best way to understand the state of global markets is to take a look at your ankles.

That’s not to say that pop-culture recession indicators are meaningless. A recession is a phenomenon necessarily defined in hindsight, usually long after life has changed on the ground: The Great Recession officially began at the end of 2007, but NBER didn’t announce that it had until the following December, right around when more than half a million people lost their jobs in a single month. Consumer behavior is a reactive measure of how much money people have in their pocket, which is probably why Greenspan was apparently paying attention to underwear. Many other pop-culture recession indicators—including the rise in law-school applications, the decline in demand for cardboard boxes, and the growing use of libraries and generic products—have been validated as useful signals about the health of the economy. They currently show what the more traditional indicators also show: The American economy is full of uncertainty, even though it has not yet tipped officially into recession.

But taking anecdotal intuition about individual consumer psychology and extrapolating widely can lead to some odd and unhelpful conclusions. The way people spend their money is personal, and the product of a complex set of factors. It’s also sometimes illogical. Case in point: In 2008, when the Nielsen Company did an analysis of consumer behavior during a recession, the firm’s findings indicated that whereas candy is recession-proof, soda—liquid candy—is among the most recession-prone consumer goods. And societies don’t respond to crises the same way every time. The hemline index, which holds that in bad times hemlines go down and in good times they rise, is one of the most cited pop-culture recession indicators. It originated in the 1920s, when most women didn’t work outside the home, style (and society) were far more rigid, the fashion industry operated completely differently, and the miniskirt did not exist. Even if it were possible to reliably measure hemlines on a large scale, they are also influenced, in the short and long term, by trends, weather, and norms. Economic anxiety is a powerful force, but it is not the only force dictating the way people act.

Here is what we know, according to Joanne Hsu, who runs the University of Michigan’s consumer-sentiment survey program. Generally speaking, the less money people feel like they have, the more likely they are to skip big expenses and to substitute cheaper, lower-quality goods where they can. (Indeed, sales of Hamburger Helper are up 14.5 percent this year, as sales of most luxury goods are down.) They seek out stress relief, good deals, and cheap indulgence.

They also apparently seek out economic folk wisdom. This may not be a recession, but it is definitely a boom time for talking about being in a recession. According to various reports, people are, at this moment, listening to “recession pop,” going “recession blonde,” and getting “recession nails.” Online, the recession indicator has quickly gone from pop-economic trivium to absurdist meme. Among the supposed signs of our impending economic catastrophe that whizzed past me this spring and summer like the world’s most depressing rewrite of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: Labubus, urban lumberjacks, messy buns, capri pants, hot women in eviction court, Hot Pockets changing its packaging, the Coachella lineup dropping early, the resurgence of frozen yogurt, a new Air Bud sequel, an American pope.

Some of these are legible enough; many are ridiculous. (Recession indicator is this season’s Sir, this is a Wendy’s, the blank form through which anyone can launder a basic observation into something that sort of resembles a joke, especially if you’re not paying very close attention.) None of these meme indicators have, to my knowledge, been formally validated by the academic establishment. But I find it very telling that young people on the internet are casually invoking an arcane economic concept in order to explain the way their world feels. Maybe the ultimate recession indicator is how much people are talking about recession indicators.

Not that I blame them. “Recession indicators” are appealing like the 10-day weather forecast is appealing. We turn to them not because they are accurate, but because they offer the illusion of control. Everyone gets rained on in a monsoon, but it’s still nice to know to pack an umbrella. These little predictors make the abstract feel concrete and the future feel foreseeable, maybe even manageable. They reduce the economy—sprawling, complex, scary-big—down to something as small as a tube of lipstick. And maybe most important, they’re a quasi-academic way of corroborating your own reality—a vibe check, a pat on the shoulder, a Ph.D. for your dread. Starting in 2022, as inflation surged post-lockdowns, economists have been predicting a recession. Thus far, one hasn’t officially arrived. But try saying that to people paying $8 for eggs. “People don’t feel like they’re thriving as they should be, as they might expect to,” Hsu told me. “So I think it makes sense that people are looking for things that validate their experiences.”

Of all the unorthodox recession indicators, cardboard-box production is one of the most reliable, because cardboard boxes are a very straightforward proxy for the quantity of goods being shipped around the world. The outlook isn’t good: On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that box shipments are at their lowest levels since 2016. All across the economy, people are buying less and doing less. They’re forgoing the things they really want because they cannot afford them, because they don’t have enough money. At a certain point, that’s indicator enough.

Related:

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Today’s News

President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving a deal that would keep TikTok operating in the United States by transferring majority ownership to American investors. This will give control of the algorithm to a U.S. joint venture. At the signing, Trump said, “This is going to be American-operated all the way.”
Yesterday, a memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget directed federal agencies to prepare for mass layoffs if Congress does not pass a funding bill before the government-shutdown deadline on October 1.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered all U.S. generals and admirals from around the world to attend an urgent meeting at Marine Corps Base Quantico next week, but provided no reason; the Pentagon confirmed the gathering but gave no further details.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: James Parker writes about Allen Ginsberg, the great American poet-buffoon, and the lesser-known Ginsberg who preceded him.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

If I Work Harder, Will You Love Me?

By Arthur C. Brooks

Between teaching MBA students and speaking to a lot of business audiences, I’m often interacting with successful people who work extremely long hours. It’s common for me to hear about 13-hour workdays and seven-day workweeks, with few or no vacations. What I see among many of those I encounter is workaholism, a pathology characterized by continuing to work during discretionary time, thinking about work all the time, and pursuing job tasks well beyond what’s required to meet any need. Workaholics feel a compulsion to work even when they are already earning plenty of money and despite getting minimal enjoyment from doing so.

Does this sound familiar?

Read the full article.

Elon Musk’s Utterly Mundane Vision of Dining

2025-09-22T10:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Yasara Gunawardena

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

The spiral staircase leading up to the roof-deck at Los Angeles’s Tesla Diner is beautiful, or at least it is expensive-looking. It has video screens overhead and glowy lights at the base of each step and its own special soundtrack, a down-tempo, bleepy-bloopy composition that whooshes in as a notable contrast to the main dining room’s dad rock. Glass display cases set into the walls hold human-size robots. Otherwise, every surface is covered in slick plastic, pure white. Like a lot of spaces these days, the staircase seems engineered to facilitate selfies.

When I visited one evening last month, an employee was stationed at the top of the stairs with a request: Those interested in returning to Earth should please take the elevator down. The staircase is too narrow to accommodate two-way traffic; people were bumping into one another. The beautiful staircase could do a lot, but it could not, as it turned out, perform its basic intended function, which is to give people a safe and simple way to move between floors using their feet.

I went to the Tesla Diner because I needed to see it for myself. The restaurant has been in the works since 2018, when Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, announced his intention to put an “old-school drive-in” at one of the electric-car company’s existing supercharging stations in Los Angeles. The waitstaff would wear roller skates, and you could get food delivered to your car. It would be a rest stop for the electric-vehicle era, and more directly, a solution to the problem of EVs taking significantly longer to charge than a gas car takes to fill up, leaving their owners with odd chunks of time. Tesla has already placed its superchargers near restaurants, and unaffiliated charging companies have recently begun to add amenities to their stations. The diner is an opportunity for the company to exert control and extract profit from all aspects of the charging process. On paper, it makes perfect sense.

Musk has said that if the response was positive, he would expand worldwide, ostensibly remaking restaurants in the way he has remade so much else. This didn’t, and still doesn’t, seem all that implausible to me. Musk has a demonstrated history of making real objects in the real world, even if they tend to come late and not work very well. People buy what he sells. He is, for better or for worse, his generation’s loudest spokesperson for the future, and for seven years, he has been promising the future of diners.

Yasara Gunawardena for The Atlantic

[Read: My day inside America’s most hated car]

Now the future is here, a hulking mass on an unlovely corner at the border of Hollywood and West Hollywood, surrounded by luxury apartments and empty lots. The restaurant is run day to day by Eric Greenspan, the chef most recently behind a chain of ghost kitchens founded by the YouTuber MrBeast, and Bill Chait, a restaurateur most famously involved with the beloved California bakery chain Tartine. It is about half drive-in, half quick-service restaurant. Tesla drivers can order from, and get food delivered to, their charging cars 24 hours a day, but anyone can walk in during standard business hours.

When I did, late on a Friday afternoon, a man in black was sitting at an outdoor table, considering a piece of paper titled, in heavy capital letters, “EMPLOYEE EXIT INTERVIEW.” The 80-spot parking lot was about two-thirds full, mostly with Teslas. Looming above, on the walls of neighboring buildings, titanic screens played an episode of the 1960s sci-fi TV series The Outer Limits; later, they switched to a Spider-Man cartoon aimed at the preschool demographic. Clusters of people walked up to what sure looked like an entrance, on Santa Monica Boulevard, and were directed by an employee to a different door, a few paces away. That first door, apparently, is the exit. Yes, it’s a little confusing.

Yasara Gunawardena for The Atlantic

Inside, everything looks like the staircase: smooth and clean, chrome and plastic, blasted white and laptop-light blue, retro-futuristic references and curvilinear shapes—imagine the Jetsons running a vape shop. Walk-in customers order on a touch screen, get a number, find a seat themselves among circular tables with padded seats, and pick up their order at a counter when it’s ready. On the roof-deck—which there is called a “skypad”—they’ll find more seating and, beyond the parking lot, a nice view of the Hollywood Hills, though in late August the space was punishingly hot. There had, at one point, been shade screens, but one had reportedly fallen down and hit someone.

Adjusted expectations seem to be the way of the place. Early visitors to the diner were greeted by robots, but on the day I came, none was to be found, disappointing the many, many people I heard ask about them. No roller skates, either. And although it is ostensibly a diner, it has no table service; this is more like a fast-food joint with higher prices and extra seating. The menu has also shrunk considerably since opening day: When I visited, the only options were a burger, a grilled-cheese sandwich, a tuna melt, a fried-chicken sandwich, a hot dog, chili, fries, and apple pie. Most of these dishes were served in a cute cardboard container made to look like a Cybertruck, and had been made fancier in ways nobody asked for. The chili is made of Wagyu beef. The house cheese—available on 60 percent of the entrees and 100 percent of the sides—is not regular American but instead a premium substitute created by Greenspan after five years of research and development. The burger sauce is “electric” (tasted like mustard).

The chili was oversalted and oddly smooth, with a slab of nonmelting cheese sitting on top of it like a pillbox hat. (It did not come with a spoon, and when I asked for one, I was given a piece of wood, basically flat but for the faintest pucker of what may have been a Cybertruck silhouette.) The french fries had a disconcerting astringency, like they’d been dusted in the same stuff that’s put on Hint of Lime Tostitos. All together, the food, like its surroundings, is simultaneously over- and underconsidered, high form and low function. It isn’t bad so much as odd.

Yasara Gunawardena for The Atlantic

[Read: The self-importance of luxury dining]

But really, no one is at the Tesla Diner on a Friday night for the food. When I asked around, the most commonly cited reason for visiting was to charge one’s car. The second was TikTok. In the elevator, a family on vacation from Taipei told me that they were there because they’d heard about the restaurant online. A man eating a hamburger alone underneath a wall declaring Tesla’s mission to “accelerate the world’s transition to renewable energy” shrugged and told me that he’d come because it was “something new.” An older woman in a Four Seasons–branded zip-up had driven from Orange County to charge her car and see what the fuss was about. Everywhere, people took photos.

Less than two months old, the Tesla Diner is already a self-referentialist hall of mirrors, right down to the artifacts on the walls and the merchandise for sale everywhere you look. On offer: hats, T-shirts, salt and pepper shakers, a wind-up Cybertruck, a Tesla robot action figure, a pack of “supercharged” gummies—alas, not supercharged with anything fun. (According to an employee, the action figure is the best seller.) This is a diner where no one seems particularly interested in dining, a restaurant whose most important feature is actually the parking lot. Los Angeles contains hundreds of mediocre burger joints and hundreds of electric-vehicle charging stations; the appeal of this one is that it is also basically an Instagram museum, one where the theme is “Tesla Diner.”

Yasara Gunawardena for The Atlantic

[Read: The library of possible futures]

So much design, so much technology, so much effort, so much money, all in the service of making something that is fundamentally the same as what we already have, just weirder and worse: Mostly, the Tesla Diner is a failure of imagination. As such, it’s consonant with the political project and campaign slogan put forth by Musk’s frenemy Donald Trump. Both men seem less interested in earnestly trying to imagine a new world than they do in sloppily re-creating an old one. They tend to do this by focusing on the superficial, dispensing with historical fact when inconvenient, and relying on nostalgia to a borderline anti-intellectual degree.

The nation’s best-known futurist had a chance to reinvent American dining, and what he came up with was hamburgers and pie and white-plastic furniture, with classic rock on the stereo and 60-year-old television on the drive-in screen. Musk became powerful and rich by selling something adjacent to environmentalism, but his restaurant does not, for example, do anything at all to reimagine beef, the production of which is significantly responsible for greenhouse-gas emissions. Rather, the most it has done for food innovation is remake American cheese into a higher-tech version that melts goofy and tastes like nothing new. If this is a vision of what’s next for dining, it’s a remarkably conservative one, rendered in the most backward-looking way possible. It’s not the future; it’s the past’s idea of the future. It’s not tomorrow; it’s Tomorrowland.

People love to romanticize the diner, but the truth is, it was never exactly the thing anyone acts like it is. In the ’40s and ’50s, it was just a smart business opportunity—easy to construct, simple to run, and eminently legible to would-be eaters, especially those who had recently come out of World War II with more kids and more discretionary income than before. Then, as those kids grew up and, inevitably, got sentimental about their childhood, the diner adopted a standard set of surface-level signifiers and effectively turned itself into a nostalgia factory. Now it’s a symbol. It’s not inherently special by virtue of being old or familiar. A lot of diners are really quite bad. But when they are great, it’s because people have taken care to make them great—to make sure they feel lived-in and sincere, to make sure the fries are seasoned just right.

I left the Tesla Diner feeling overstimulated, sunburned, and lightly queasy (not a metaphor—I ate a lot of cheese). A few days later, I watched the Outer Limits episode that had been showing when I arrived. In it, a man wakes up with no memory, his hand replaced by a computer. He soon learns that he’s a savior of sorts: the last surviving member of the human race, sent from a thousand years in the future to fight aliens and rescue his species from extinction. The final twist is that he’s not a man at all, just a robot very carefully designed to look like one—bloodless and brainless, stuck alone in a past he thought was the future.

What Claire’s Once Gave Tween Girls

2025-08-20T18:35:13-04:00

Mostly, I remember the fluffy pens. When I was in elementary and middle school, nothing could be cooler than a fluffy pen, at least until it got covered in backpack grime and started to look like an exceptionally long-tailed subway rat. And no place had fluffy pens in abundance like Claire’s, a chain that sold accessories and other trinkets and, at the time, seemed to exist in every shopping center in America. Mine had an entire wall of fluffy pens, in every color, usually for some kind of absurd deal that allowed even a child to feel the intoxicating rush of acquisition. This was what Claire’s was for. It was a temple to girlhood, a place where everything was frivolous and where tooth-fairy money could make dreams come true.

But Claire’s is in trouble. Earlier this month, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, for the second time in a decade, and began liquidating. Today, it announced that it would be selling the majority of its North American business to the private-equity firm Ames Watson, for $104 million, with the intention of keeping some of its stores open. Claire’s has been saved, at least in the short term, but Ames Watson has its work cut out for it. Claire’s is a mall store, and malls are dying. Inflation, higher interest rates, and rising labor costs have further squeezed profits—true for basically every company, but when your primary customers don’t have jobs, they don’t react well to raising prices. Recently, President Donald Trump’s tariffs have complicated Claire’s business model, which is heavily reliant on imports: From November 2024 to April 2025, 56 percent of its inventory came from China. The company is about half a billion dollars in debt.

Claire’s started as a wig shop in the 1960s before merging with an accessories retailer in 1973, and then getting into the ear-piercing business and staking its claim on preteen girls. It specialized in cheaply made, kaleidoscopically tacky junk, destined to dye your skin green and then end up in a landfill. It was bad, in the aesthetic sense and the environmental sense. But Claire’s was special to me, because it was for me. It wasn’t the checkout aisle at a store for older women or the costume corner of a kids’ store. It wasn’t for impressing boys; it was for impressing girls. It felt like a clubhouse. I can still remember how it smelled, like chemicals and vanilla cookies. I remember the purple walls, covered floor-to-ceiling in all the instruments of tweenage self-expression: charm bracelets, toe rings, impractically small purses, hair clips made to look like gummy bears or butterflies. I remember how easy it was to buy a pair of clear-lensed glasses or a flimsy flower crown and try on a new identity, how Claire’s made figuring out who you were and what you liked feel fun and low-stakes.

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]

I remember getting my ears pierced there, obviously, by someone who couldn’t have been much older than I was, one of my hands clutching my mother’s and the other clutching my best friend’s. Claire’s seemed to exist for precisely that time in one’s life: old enough to get your ears pierced, young enough to be scared; old enough to want a purse, young enough to not have much to fill it with; old enough to have the allowance money to buy a scrunchie, young enough to think it could change you. That moment is sacred, and I know now that it ends quickly. By the time I got my nose pierced, only a few years later, I didn’t even consider going to Claire’s. I wanted to go to the local tattoo place instead.

Two decades later, retail has changed. So, I think, has childhood. When I was shopping at Claire’s, my desires were largely assembled in the self-contained ecosystem of King Middle School. Sometimes a friend’s older sister would give me advice, which I treated with biblical reverence, but for the most part, the people telling me what to like were girls my age, whom I knew in real life. This wasn’t totally logical—in retrospect, I probably should not have allowed Gemma S. and An-Hae C. absolute power over my moods, interests, tastes, and values—but it was at least straightforward. I was a kid who shopped like a kid, because the people I was imitating were kids too.

Today’s young people are learning what’s cool on the context-collapsed, algorithmically driven social web, much of the time from professional influencers who are older than them. Tweens still exist as a market category and a chronological distinction, but in practice, they act a lot like teens or even 20-somethings. To the degree that they are even shopping in person at all, it’s often at grown-up places such as Sephora, where they can obsess over which expensive creams to add to their elaborate anti-aging skin-care routines, and Brandy Melville, which stocks clothes that I, an adult, would be perfectly comfortable wearing: high-necked cardigans, striped tops in tasteful neutrals. Maybe they should go to Claire’s while they still can, though, and get their hands on a fluffy pen.

Why Is Everything Spicy Now?

2025-08-18T08:00:00-04:00

Updated at 4:06 p.m. ET on August 18, 2025

The Carolina Reaper is so hot, it makes jalapeños taste like milk. It’s so hot, it causes people to hallucinate, vomit, pass out, wish they’d never been born. It’s so hot that the guy who invented it—in 2012, by crossbreeding habaneros and Naga Viper peppers, each of which were once thought to be the hottest in the world—has said it tastes like eating “molten lava.” Original-recipe Tabasco sauce is up to 5,000 Scoville heat units; habaneros are up to 350,000. The Reaper has been known to reach 2.2 million.

To be clear, I have never tried it—none of the above sounds that fun to me. But you are welcome to. You can have it dusted onto cheese curls sold at your local grocery store, or on a slider at one of the more than 300 Dave’s Hot Chicken locations nationwide, so long as you sign a waiver. I can’t get over this: 15 years ago, our species could not imagine a pepper as hot as the Reaper, and now we can eat it with a lemonade and fries for lunch before heading back to the office.

America is setting its mouth on fire. According to an analysis provided to me by Datassential, a food-and-beverage-industry consultancy, more than half of American consumers are likely to buy an item described as spicy, up from 39 percent in 2015. Those who already like spice are eating even more extreme versions of it, but the interest in heat is happening across the board, even at the moderate level, among people who might never touch a Carolina Reaper. As of this year, more than 19 out of every 20 restaurants in the United States—a category that, notably, includes ice-cream stores, bakeries, and coffee shops—offer at least one spicy item, according to Datassential. Frito-Lay now sells 26 different Flamin’ Hot products, and sales of those products increased by 31 percent from 2022 to 2023.

[Read: The golden age of the fried-chicken sandwich]

To put it generally and reductively, American food has not always been known for embracing spice. But now a large and apparently growing number of people in this country are willingly chomping down on fruits that have been expressly cultivated to bind to their body’s pain receptors and unleash fury with every bite. “It’s one of the great puzzles of culinary history,” Paul Rozin, a retired psychologist who spent much of his career studying spice, told me. “It is remarkable that something that tastes so bad is so popular.”

This trend, like basically every trend, is being driven by young people: According to a survey by NCSolutions, which helps packaged-food companies advertise, 51 percent of Generation Z consider themselves hot-sauce connoisseurs, and 35 percent have signed a waiver before eating something spicy. But it is also the result of a collision of several changes in the way Americans eat. Food costs are high, and the industry is crowded; spice can be a cheap way to produce flavor, get consumer attention, and mask less-expensive ingredients such as corn and chicken. New techniques have enabled manufacturers to tweak flavors much more easily, injecting spice into just about any mass-produced food: ice cream, lemonade, Gushers, boxed mac and cheese, the sandwich bread at Subway.

Immigration, the internet, cheap shipping, and inexpensive international travel have ushered in a truly global food era, one in which people are much more familiar with, and able to access, ingredients and ideas from other countries’ heat-seeking culinary traditions. And at the same time, spicy food has also gotten better, moving away from the blunt-force trauma of what Dylan Keenen, who runs the online hot-sauce store Heat, described to me as “stupid hot stuff that didn’t taste good” in favor of more nuanced flavors: the back-of-the-throat burn of the Trinidad Scorpion, the lip-numbing kick of Sichuan peppercorns. The Reaper, despite sounding intense, still tastes more interesting than the pepper extract that used to supercharge hot sauces and snack foods; it’s sweet and a little fruity, supposedly, at least before the pain sets in. All told, spicy food is easier to make, easier to find, and easier to love than it was just a few decades ago.

The body’s spice receptors adapt over time, like feet get calluses. So spice creep is ceaseless and self-perpetuating: We’re getting used to spicier foods, so we are eating spicier foods, so we are getting even more used to even spicier foods, as though our taste buds are all on a flywheel that can’t stop speeding up. In 2022, responding to customer demand, Fly By Jing introduced an even hotter version of its Sichuan chili crisp, made with what its founder, Jing Gao, described to me as “the hottest Chinese chili you can grow.” (Xtra Spicy is now the company’s second-best seller, behind its original recipe.) At Heat, Keenen told me, sales of extra-hot sauces are growing faster than milder ones, and What’s the hottest thing that still tastes good? is the most common customer request. “I do think it’s likely that within a generation or two,” he wrote to me in an email, “the median American will be able to handle spice levels that would have sent a medieval peasant into anaphylactic shock.” Historically speaking, he pointed out, spice tolerance has only moved in one direction.

It’s true. The first person to eat a hot pepper probably did it somewhere in the lowlands of southern Mexico more than 10,000 years ago, and I would guess they probably thought it would kill them. But they went back for more, or at least they told their friends. Part of this is pure neurochemistry: Capsaicin, the compound that makes many spicy foods spicy, transmits pain signals to the brain, which the brain then counteracts by releasing endorphins—it’s like a runner’s high, except you can get it while sitting in your car outside of a McDonald’s. Rozin calls the phenomenon “benign masochism”: a little bit of pain, as a treat. “It’s bungee jumping and roller coasters and swimming in cold water,” he said, and it is a uniquely human impulse. (Imagine what would happen if you put a dog on a roller coaster.) “We somehow get a pleasure out of our body telling us not to do something, but we know it’s okay.” In the 1970s, when he was studying spice in Oaxaca, Rozin found that even children had learned to tolerate spice. When he offered the local pigs and dogs a choice, they picked bland food every time.

[Read: What your favorite grocery store says about you]

The dogs might be onto something. Then again, they don’t know about viral food challenges, or about the idea that your food choices reflect your identity, or how powerful it can feel to confront agony and swallow it whole. Mao Zedong is said to have suggested that anyone who couldn’t tolerate chiles couldn’t be a revolutionary; all over the world, and for centuries, spiciness has been something to conquer, and chiles have symbolized strength, bravery, national pride, and virility. America, it seems, is finally catching up. Self-taught superhot cultivators have spent the past decade trying to outdo themselves, crossbreeding progressively more infernal peppers with progressively more ridiculous names, ones like Death Spiral and Dragon’s Breath. (The Reaper isn’t even the world’s hottest anymore: That would be Pepper X, which has an average Scoville rating of above 2.6 million.) Rich and famous people with much, much better things to do are willingly humiliating themselves on Hot Ones, a web show that invites celebrities to eat hot wings while answering interview questions and that sold last year for $82.5 million. Internet-facilitated food challenges have become both more common and more extreme.

The extreme has, as it tends to do, seeped into everyday life. Blandness has become not just a culinary flaw but a moral failing, evidence of spinelessness and unsophistication. Being able to withstand spicy food, by contrast, is probably the most meaningless matter of personal preference people feel comfortable bragging about. (Think about it: Beyoncé would never sing about keeping ketchup in her bag.) The whole thing does feel very human: The impulse to defeat nature and find ever more extraordinary ways to test the limits of having a body, even if (especially if) it hurts a little. So we swill milk and cry in front of an audience of millions, or battle against our own biology at breakfast—just for the thrill, just because we can.

This article originally misspelled Dylan Keenen’s name. This article also originally misstated how common spicy food is in Central America. In fact, though some Central American cuisines feature spicy dishes, heat is not common throughout the region.

The Self-Importance of Luxury Dining

2025-08-14T19:49:09-04:00

A few years ago, during the coronavirus pandemic, Daniel Humm had an epiphany. Human reliance on animal products was cooking the planet, and, as a chef, reducing his reliance on them could be part of a solution. When his New York City restaurant, Eleven Madison Park—which had once been named the world’s best restaurant—reopened, it would be free of animal products, making it the first three-Michelin-star dining room to bear that distinction.

Humm seemed reinvigorated by the change, and very, very eager to talk about it. “From a creative place,” he told his friend Gabriela Hearst in Interview magazine at the time, “the world does not need another dry-aged ribeye or butter-poached lobster.” He went on The Tonight Show and Morning Joe; he released an illustrated journal featuring observations such as “our cooking should not conform to society,” as well as his own hand-drawn portraits of lentils, broccoli, and a popsicle, rendered in a rustic, neo-Expressionist-by-way-of-nursery-school style. He talked about going plant-based as both an ethical and an artistic imperative. “It became very clear to me that our idea of what luxury is had to change,” Humm said at the time. “We couldn’t go back to doing what we did before.” He would make a small but decisive correction to a food system that was “simply not sustainable.”

Four years later, vegan luxury dining is apparently the thing that wasn’t sustainable. Yesterday, Humm announced that, after creating “a new culinary language,” building “something meaningful,” and igniting “a debate that transcended food,” he will go back to speaking his previous culinary language. Eleven Madison Park will continue to offer a plant-based menu but will also serve “select animal products for certain dishes.” These select animal products, he said, will include “fish” and “meat.” And “honey-lavender-glazed duck.” And oysters, and lobster. Also, chicken, maybe.

[Read: The meat paradox]

In an interview with The New York Times, Humm said he was moved to return animals to the menu for reasons of inclusion. “I very much believed in the all-in approach, but I didn’t realize that we would exclude people,” he said. “I have some anxiety that people are going to say, ‘Oh, he’s a hypocrite,’ but I know that the best way to continue to champion plant-based cooking is to let everyone participate around the table.” Elsewhere in the piece, he was somewhat more direct: Diners had become less interested in what Humm was offering. Sales of wine—which tends to come with a heavy markup and is thus a highly important part of many restaurants’ business—were down, because people seemed to be less inclined to uncork a $1,500 bottle of Côte-Rôtie when a big, bloody steak wasn’t also involved. Bookings for EMP’s private events were also flagging, Humm said: “It’s hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant.”

Well, yeah. The thing is, people really, really like meat. All the time, but especially when they’re paying up to $365 a head for dinner before tax, tip, and beverages. From 2014 to 2024, annual per-capita meat consumption rose—even as various publications heralded the end of beef, even as the consequences of climate change became even more unignorable, even before the secretary of health started telling people to eat tallow. Sales of plant-based meat have been declining since 2021, according to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit devoted to alternative proteins. In June, the CEO of Impossible Foods, which sells high-tech meat substitutes, told The Wall Street Journal that his company was considering taking an approach similar to Humm’s, developing a half-beef burger. Plenty of animal-free restaurants seem to be doing perfectly well, but in fine dining, they may be the exception rather than the rule. Of the United States’ 263 Michelin-starred restaurants, just four are exclusively vegetarian or vegan. Americans just cannot seem to quit meat, no matter how good the alternatives taste.

[Read: Everything can be meat]

But then again, part of Humm’s problem might have been that his alternatives didn’t taste very good. When Pete Wells, then The New York Times’ restaurant critic, went to EMP in 2021, he found food that he described as “acrid” and “distorted,” including an extraordinarily fussy-sounding beet dish that “tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint.” The people who are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for food tend to pay attention to reviews, and they tend to want to feel like they’re getting what they’ve paid for. What happens in fine-dining restaurants does, eventually, trickle down to the rest of the food industry, but the problem with appointing yourself as an agent for the revolution is that then you really need people to buy what you are selling. And you can be one of the world’s most influential restaurants only if you are making enough money to stay open.

The idea of a place such as Eleven Madison Park being on the vanguard of social change was funny even before it was revealed to be temporary. A nice meal is fundamentally a luxury good—one where no expense is spared, customers are always comfortable, the linens get washed every day, and the appeal is a sense of perfection. It is the opposite of sacrifice, which is what responding to climate change will require from all of us. Humm is right, of course—meat really is unsustainable. So is hubris.

The Problem With Rewards Credit Cards

2025-07-24T10:18:00-04:00

I don’t mean to shock you, but being a coal miner at the turn of the 20th century was not super fun. The work was dangerous, unpleasant, and low paid. The industry was extractive and poorly regulated. The people who ran it could be irresponsible and indifferent to human suffering. Also, the shopping was abysmal—when you wanted groceries or new clothes, you generally had to buy whatever was available at the company store, often using scrip: fake money issued by your employer as credit against a future paycheck. Even if you felt like you had consumer choice, you were really locked into a closed system run by one company, your life weirdly governed by something sort of similar to—but fundamentally different from—actual money.

I was thinking of the coal miners because Chase recently changed the terms on its highest-end consumer credit card, the Sapphire Reserve. Most notably, the annual fee increased by nearly 45 percent, from $550 to $795. That hike was theoretically to be offset by an increase to the card’s rewards, which are now purportedly worth $2,700 annually, offered not in the form of legal tender but rather as a long and complex list of credits, many of them issued in the conditional tense. For example, you can get $500 off stays at hotels—if those hotels are on a special list picked by Chase, and if you book for at least two nights. And the credits are actually meted out in chunks, so to get the full reward, you need to book two different stays: one in the first half of the year, the other in the second. You also get a host of similarly caveated coupons to Chase’s corporate partners—Apple, StubHub, DoorDash, Lyft, Peloton. The line item advertising $300 in DoorDash promos reads like an ancient riddle: You can get up to $25 off each month, though only $5 can be used on restaurant orders, and $20 can go to two separate grocery or retail orders. (I have omitted the asterisks, of which there are many.) It is technically possible to save money—if you can figure out how to do it.

To be clear, being a coal miner in 1903 was pretty different from being a high-net-worth individual in 2025. But not completely different: As coal mines did for their miners, today’s credit-card issuers have essentially invented their own fiat currency—“points,” usually—that can be redeemed only within their apparatus, for rewards the company has designated, at an exchange rate that it can change at will. Three out of every four credit cards are now rewards cards: They are how Americans, especially rich ones, shop. As the cards get more popular, though, reaping their benefits is becoming harder and more like homework. Last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported a 70 percent increase in complaints about points-issuing credit cards since 2019: The agency found card issuers hiding complex redemption requirements in fine print, forcing borrowers to use janky proprietary portals to book rewards travel, and failing to resolve technical glitches or customer-service issues, among other things. The report concluded that 82 cents out of every dollar in rewards that American credit-card holders earned in 2022 went unclaimed at the end of the year—a 40 percent increase since 2019. In effect, credit-card companies are selling consumers a book of coupons they are unlikely to use.

The Sapphire Reserve is a fascinating product. It costs money, but it’s not exactly something you buy. You can’t sell it, because it has no inherent market value. But it comes packaged like a $10,000 watch and is advertised via perplexing billboards designed to make the card look like a high-fashion accessory, which maybe it kind of is. At any rate, the message is not subtle: This is a fancy card for fancy people. It enables the purchase of luxuries, and is itself a luxury.

When the Reserve was introduced, in 2016, the highest-status credit card on the market had been the American Express Centurion, which you may know from rap music and James Bond as the Black Card, and which was available by invitation only. The Reserve, though, required only decent credit and a willingness to shell out for a sizable annual fee. It kicked off a new era in spending money: “That’s where we really saw this premium-card market go mainstream,” Nick Ewen, a senior editorial director at the credit-card-review website The Points Guy, told me. The Reserve, and cards like it—most notably Capital One’s Venture X and American Express’s Platinum—had high fees, high rewards, and high-spending customers who dined out and traveled a lot. Like the Centurion, they signaled exclusivity, but in a different way: The Black Card’s conspicuous consumption largely involved shopping; the new cards were for consumers who prioritized experiences. They advertised by using imagery of hot urbanites at restaurants and on vacation, their lives rich with money but also adventure. “What they did was they made it about your values,” Stephanie Tully, a consumer-behavior expert at the University of Southern California, told me. Wealth wasn’t just about how much you had; it was about how you spent it. Literally.

[Read: There are two kinds of credit cards]

And spending is what card issuers are hoping you will do. The Reserves of the world generally make money not from the interest on unpaid balances but from transaction fees charged to businesses. In other words, these cards want you swiping. They encourage it by offering benefits—fat introductory bonuses, cash back on all kinds of purchases, ungettable restaurant reservations, access to airport lounges. Recently, they have gone beyond flat-rate rewards and added more and more complex, hyperspecific perks onto the pile, partnering with businesses that are happy to offer the card companies a discount in exchange for access to their customers. Card issuers have also increased their annual fees, presumably betting that people will either not notice or not care, and that they will happily trade real money for fake money, or at least the promise of it.

Rewards make the consumer feel in control and empowered, as if they’re making money even while they spend it. They reduce what behavioral economists call “pain of payment”: They make parting with your wealth feel fun, as if you are a video-game protagonist collecting magic stars, even when you are buying diapers or booking flights to a funeral. Rewards seem somehow different from normal currency. “It’s not your income minus your expenses; it’s just this extra pool of money that has been accumulating through other things that you do,” Tully told me. “It feels like free money”—like a windfall or winning the lottery, even if you paid hundreds of dollars for the right to earn the rewards in the first place. In a 2024 poll, 37 percent of rewards cardholders said they’d spend less on their cards if points weren’t offered.

In 2023, the CFPB received 1,200 complaints about credit-card rewards across a number of brands. Cardholders report that rewards are devalued, denied, disappeared, or fine-printed to oblivion, their actual redemption details dramatically different from their marketing materials. They are often subject to dynamic pricing; sometimes, a card’s portal will glitch, and the number of points required to book a flight or hotel will spike. Sometimes, the airport lounge that a customer is theoretically entitled to is full, crowded with all of the other people who are also trying to maximize their rewards. Sometimes, dealing with it all is just too complicated—hence, all of the unredeemed credit-card points.

[Read: A fancy card is becoming the only way to get a restaurant reservation]

Of course, nobody emails the government about how much they love their credit card, and an unredeemed point is not necessarily a wasted one. Still, Ewen has noticed that his readers—who presumably have a more sophisticated understanding of credit-card rewards than the average person—are having a hard time figuring out how to use theirs. People are so flummoxed by the logic puzzle of spending their points that they sit on them, something he called “analysis paralysis.” But, he told me, that’s not a great strategy, because card companies reserve the right to change terms whenever they want. Suddenly, points that were worth $300 might be worth much less. The Points Guy’s official stance on rewards is “earn and burn,” Ewen said: “Points are not a long-term investment.”

Ewen has 24 credit cards, and he loves to get the most out of them. Every year, he sits down and crunches the numbers to make sure he’s made back his annual fee on each of his cards. This is both his job and his hobby—he’s a points guy! But not everyone is. “For some people, it absolutely is kind of like a game,” Tully said. But, she said, even for the people who don’t think about credit-card points for a living, “it can become a job almost.” Consumers, she continued, need to weigh “how much time and effort they want to put into their credit cards when they’re choosing what credit card to buy.”

Fancy cards are like coupon books or miners’ scrip, but they are also, in this sense, more like high-end gym memberships. The commodity they offer is access to a rarefied place, one where everyone else is attractive and competent, putting in the work and reaping the rewards. The product is a subscription to do more work—it’s a tax on laziness or a deposit on your future self’s conscientiousness. But it seems to me that credit-card companies, and gyms, know something consumers don’t: Everybody thinks they’ll be a more diligent person tomorrow.

The Golden Age of Flying Wasn’t All That Golden

2025-07-17T16:28:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Of YouTube’s many microgenres, one of the most popular and most enduring is the airplane meltdown. There are thousands or maybe millions of these videos online: Passengers going nuts over spilled drinks or supposedly bad service; flight cancellations turning grown adults feral; tiny inconveniences disrupting the brittle peace of the temporary societies that exist in the air above us all the time. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll find a compilation, a clip show of modern misery.

The Atlantic’s early aviation writers would have a lot of questions about this. Those questions would probably start with “What is a YouTube?,” but I suspect they’d get more philosophical pretty quickly. In the early 20th century, flying was a source of intense curiosity and great wonder; if anyone was melting down, it was probably because they were simply so dazzled by it all, or maybe very scared—not because someone used their armrest. “For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man,” Wilbur Wright wrote in a letter to a friend in 1900, eventually published in The Atlantic. Three years later, he and his brother, Orville, managed to get a biplane in the air for 12 seconds. Only 18 years after that, Kenneth Chafee McIntosh wrote that “aviation has superposed itself upon civilization. Its future is limitless, not predictable.”

Its present, however, was not fun. Early airplanes were used mostly for warcraft and mail carrying; occasionally, a passenger might come along for some reason or another, but they had to sit with the pilot in an open cockpit, exposed to whatever the weather was. Even once we figured out how to put more people inside planes, cabins weren’t pressurized, so they flew low and jiggled everyone around. Until 1930, there were no flight attendants, which I suppose means there was no one to scream at. Some engines were loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage.

Even so, the airplane’s world-changing potential was obvious. By 1941, people were writing poetry collections about it, and The Atlantic was reviewing them. After 1945, the era of mass air travel began, aviation having been “transformed by the war from a government-subsidized experiment into an economically sound transportation industry.” In the ’50s, airplanes overtook trains, and then ships, as America’s preferred means of long-distance transportation. This era is now widely considered to be commercial aviation’s golden age, when the technology was established enough to be comfortable, safe, and fast, but still novel enough to feel remarkable: human ingenuity made material. In the popular imagination, at least, this was the last time flying was dignified. Stewardesses wore fabulous outfits and meals were served on real plates and nobody knew what a vape was.

But that moment existed more in theory than it did in reality. In the century’s middle decades, flying was significantly more expensive and more dangerous than it is today. Airports were segregated until the early 1960s. Every new advance seemed to come with a downside. As soon as planes got faster and flights got longer, passengers started reporting strange symptoms, ones they would later learn to call jet lag. As more people flew, the experience became both more banal and more crowded—just another form of mass transit. More flights and faster speeds meant mounting safety concerns (some warranted, some not). In 1978, the airline industry was deregulated, which resulted in less stability, lower quality of service, and, eventually, higher fares.

By June 2001, three months before air travel was to change forever, it was already pretty bad, per the pilot and longtime Atlantic writer James Fallows. The industry was “nearing the limits of its capacity,” he wrote, having routed more and more flights through hub airports in an effort to keep planes full and maximize profits. Delays were reaching record levels. After 9/11, security theater turned flight attendants into cops and passengers into would-be criminals. The airlines continued to cut costs, squooshing seats closer together and charging for just about everything they could: legroom, internet, checked bags, overhead space, food, even water, as Ester Bloom reported in 2015. “To travel by air,” Lenika Cruz wrote in 2022, “is to endure a million tiny indignities.”

Flying really has gotten worse, due to greed and war and corporate decision making. But the truth is, the experience has always been somewhat unpleasant, because transporting human bodies through the air at hundreds of miles an hour is so difficult, it almost shouldn’t be possible. I looked in our archives expecting to find stories about air travel’s supposed midcentury glamour. I didn’t find much. But I did find a piece from 2007, in which Virginia Postrel examines the collective longing for such a time, a time “before price competition, security checks, and slobs in sweatpants ruined everything.” She quoted Aimée Bratt, who, as a flight attendant with Pan Am in the mid-’60s, “was struck by ‘how crowded it was on an airplane, no place to put anything, lines for the lavatories, no place to sit or stand … Passengers got their food trays, there was no choice of meals, drinks were served from a hand tray, six at a time, pillows and blankets were overhead, and there were no extra amenities like headsets or hot towels.’”

But people didn’t complain. “Travel itself,” Postrel wrote, “was privilege enough. Airline glamour was not about the actual experience of flying but about the idea of air travel—and the ideals and identity it represented.” Flying was budding internationalism, uncomplicated awe, wide skies, endless potential, the future made present and the impossible made real. Flying wasn’t thrilling because the stewardesses dressed amazing—it was thrilling because up until very recently, the very concept of a waitress in the sky had been science fiction.

Air travel has changed, but so have we. This is the noble life cycle of any technology: It is unimaginable, and then it is imaginable, and then it is just there. Fire, windmills, eyeglasses, the steam engine, pasteurization, cars, air-conditioning, microwaves, miniskirts, email, smartphones, bubble tea—every miracle eventually becomes mundane. It has to, I think: We need to make room for new miracles. We need to find new things to write poems about.

When this magazine was first printed, in 1857, our species thought we were stuck on Earth. We eventually figured out how to liberate ourselves from the laws of physics and fly through the air, and then we figured out how to get live television and cold orange juice and fully reclining beds up there. And then we figured out how to make all of this dreadfully tedious. That’s a remarkable human achievement, too.

What Your Favorite Grocery Store Says About You

2025-07-10T11:57:07-04:00

A couple of months ago, Shannon Fong woke up before dawn; drove to the Trader Joe’s in Montrose, California; and waited. And waited! So did dozens of other people at this location, and thousands more at other Trader Joe’s around the country. They brought lawn chairs and picnic blankets; they wrapped around the block in New York City and baked for hours in Los Angeles. (Some stores hired extra security to account for the crowds.) Before the Montrose store opened at 8 a.m. sharp, Fong told me, she and everyone else counted down, as though the diurnal operation of a discount grocery chain was New Year’s Eve, or a rocket launch. Then they got what they came for: canvas shopping bags, not much bigger than a box of cereal, with the store’s name and logo on them, available in four Easter-eggy colors, $2.99 each. The totes sold out in minutes at many locations and are now going for up to $1,000 for a set of eight on eBay. Later, when Fong posted a short video diary of the experience on Instagram, more than 19,000 people smashed the “Like” button.

It’s a little like being a superfan of the bank: A place that was once entirely utilitarian is now a place to line up to get into. On social media, people profess their love for the Pennsylvania convenience store Wawa and talk about Target like it’s a habit-forming substance. Recently, I saw a guy at a bar wearing $300 pants and a sweatshirt with a logo for Kirkland Signature, the Costco house brand. When Wegmans, a supermarket chain based in upstate New York, officially opened on Long Island in February, people—they prefer the term Wegmaniacs—started waiting in line the night before. (Wegmania is so almighty that the company recently opened a high-end sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan.) Fong’s Instagram account, @traderjoesobsessed, has more followers than Fiji has residents. The supermarket is now a brand unto itself, not just the building that houses the other brands, and its shoppers aren’t just brand-loyal—they’re fanatical.

[Read: The end of the ‘generic’ grocery-store brand]

Maybe this was inevitable. Over the past two decades, after all, fandom has escaped sci-fi conventions and high schools to become the animating force in cultural and political life. Fans drive what art gets created, what products get made, who gets canceled, and who gets venerated. They have remade language and remodeled social life: We stan now, and we find fraternity in our fandom, and we expect the corporations we love to love us back. Susan Kresnicka is an anthropologist who now studies fandom on behalf of corporate clients; she told me that in surveys, some 85 percent of Americans consider themselves a fan of something—a film franchise, a product, a music group, an influencer. Fandom, Kresnicka told me, is now “part of our lexicon of self,” a means of connecting with others and making sense of who we are. Political and cultural affiliation have declined, and the internet has enabled a new kind of community building and identity signaling, one that is anchored to consumption rather than creed. “I mean, consumer behavior and signaling has taken the place of religion at this point,” the Wharton marketing professor Michael Platt told me. All culture is consumer culture now, and the grocery store is the physical store that the most people go into most often—a place that Americans visit more often than church.

Kresnicka compares identity to a gem with many facets—regional identity, political identity, professional identity, demographic identities. The grocery store can map onto several of these facets, she told me, and the ones with devoted fan bases do it exceptionally well. The San Antonio–based chain H-E-B has explicitly made itself a stand-in for Texan identity; you could, if you wanted, outfit a kitchen with the state-shaped gallimaufry it sells: waffle irons, chicken nuggets, Post-it Notes, charcuterie boards. The Los Angeles–based chain Erewhon, meanwhile, explicitly caters to the MAHA-curious and disposable-incomed; 99 Ranch, H Mart, and Vallarta have all built loyalty by providing authentic ingredients to a diasporic audience—Chinese sauces, Korean noodles, Mexican snacks. In all cases, shopping at one of these places says something about who you are, something deeper than I need to eat to stay alive. “There’s a general underlying biological and social driver for that kind of connection and social signaling,” Platt told me. “It all boils down to tribalism, right?”

[Read: How snacks took over American life]

Platt has training in both anthropology and neuroscience—he’s interested, he told me, in how consumers make decisions generally, especially when they’re choosing based on “something beyond the actual product.” An avocado or a box of cereal is more or less the same at any grocery store, so what is it about some stores that inspire lines-down-the-block fandom? Platt and his colleagues recently conducted a study in which they hooked Trader Joe’s shoppers and Whole Foods shoppers up to EEG machines and showed them good and bad news about the various brands: product recalls and launches, earnings, that kind of thing. His team had previously studied the brain activity of loyal Apple consumers—the first modern consumer megafandom—and suspected that they might discover a similar phenomenon among Trader Joe’s obsessives. They found that Trader Joe’s people do in fact have “much higher brain synchrony” than Whole Foods people—they think alike, in the same way Apple people tend to. “This is a real characteristic of a tribe,” he told me. “You know, a community that’s dialed-in and self-reinforcing.”

Grocery stores are much more robust and specialized than they used to be: They’re easier to love, and more reflective of their shoppers. They are also where we enact our values—about nutrition, about the climate, about caring for our families and what’s worth spending money on—and find like-minded people. “You have all of this complicated morality going on with our food choices and our health and our bodies,” Kresnicka told me; the grocery store is a neat metonym for what we deem important.

The grocery-store thing reminds me of a lot of the way we exist these days. Online, we are tinned-fish girlies or Carhartt bros. We are defined by our tastes, which, usually, are telegraphed by what we buy. And so we walk around advertising our local pizza place or bookstore on our chests, for free, and do unpaid marketing for the supermarket: little billboards everywhere.

The Dark Poetry of the Bezos Wedding

2025-06-30T15:31:27-04:00

The Gritti Palace was built in Venice in 1475, with no expense spared. Its chandeliers are made of handblown Murano glass, its bathrooms of polychrome Italian marble. Its terrace looks out over the Grand Canal onto a domed basilica. For years, it was home to Venetian nobility, but now it’s a luxury hotel, where suites can cost €14,000 a night. Last weekend, it was booked solid by a new kind of nobility, in Venice for a new kind of no-expense-spared spectacle: the wedding of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and fourth-richest man in the world, and Lauren Sánchez, a former TV presenter.

The Trumps have Rome; the Bezos-Sánchez family, apparently, has Venice. In at least one way, the city is an apt wedding venue for one of this era’s most successful merchants. It’s an archipelago of sandy islands in shoal waters that, largely thanks to Venice’s placement at the head of the Adriatic, became one of the Mediterranean's dominant ports and one of civilization’s first centers of global commerce, through which the world’s spices, silk, fur, and jewels flowed for centuries. It was, in other words, a city that became important not because of what it made but because of what you could buy there, the beneficiary of right-place-right-time magic that someone like Bezos might today call synergy.

[Read: Welcome to wedding sprawl]

For many years, it was one of Europe’s richest cities, defined by its ostentation and swagger, the spoils of all that wealth: mansions filled with art, basilicas filled with stolen artifacts, marble and gold everywhere you looked, impossible magnificence rising from unstable ground. Today, Venice’s primary industry is tourism, and its primary export is its own mythology. The Renaissance-era tradesmen are long gone; in their place are people there to gawk at what the Renaissance-era tradesmen bought. Modern Venice is “an amusement park,” as the historian Dennis Romano, who recently wrote a book on the city, told me. It’s a living museum of obscene wealth. It’s whatever the opposite of quiet luxury is. It’s big and literal, unapologetic and unrestrained, a type of old-world vulgarity newly back in style, at least among people so powerful that they don’t need to care about taste. (Should Ivanka Trump, a wedding guest, have happened to look up while killing an afternoon at the Gallerie dell’Accademia this past weekend, she might have recognized something: The gold-leaf ceiling in the living room at Mar-a-Lago was explicitly modeled after one at the art museum.)

The wedding festivities began with a foam party on a $500 million superyacht, continued with a welcome event at a church whose walls are lined with Tintorettos, and culminated with a Friday-night ceremony on the same secluded island where the G7 once met. The Gritti and other high-end hotels were filled with guests including Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey, and several Kardashian/Jenner sisters. Estimates have placed the cost of the whole event at somewhere possibly far north of $20 million. If the vibe of the wedding was, at least to some observers, tacky, that’s beside the point. Venice is rich—world-historically rich, one of the richest places money can buy. It’s a place where even the bathrooms are exquisite, where every square inch is drenched in beauty, where a wedding guest or a former TV news anchor can feel like royalty. Of course Bezos and Sánchez wanted to marry there.

[Read: What Venice can teach American cities]

Still, there’s something funny about it all: a couple whose wealth is derived from modern convenience tying the knot in a place so thoroughly, proudly antiquated; Bezos, a man responsible for unleashing thousands of delivery vehicles onto American streets, getting married in a city with no cars. Sánchez recently climbed into a rocket ship and flew to the edge of space, but for one of the most important days of her life, she chose a city where the most efficient way to get around is to hire a guy in stripes to locomote you using a method that has existed since before Jesus was born.

Venice is now a sinking place, a place being destroyed by modernity and consumption—pollution, climate change, mega-tourism. Moto ondoso—“wave motion”—from large boats is eroding the centuries-old foundations of the city’s buildings. Venice has about 20 million tourists a year, and fewer than 50,000 annual residents. Many of those in town protested the Bezos-Sánchez wedding: They papered over the city’s ancient stone walls with flyers suggesting that Bezos leave, sent effigies of him floating down the canals, and unfurled a massive banner that read, If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax. Romano predicts (as do I) that the wedding and its attendant publicity will likely just drive more tourists to the city. Everyone, after all, loves an amusement park—especially people with plenty of money to burn.

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The Worst Sandwich Is Back

2025-06-25T08:00:00-04:00

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Updated at 6:41 p.m. ET on June 25, 2025

Wraps are awful. At best, they ruin perfectly serviceable fillings by bundling them up in a gummy, cold tortilla. At worst, they do this with less-than-serviceable fillings. They’re like a salad, but less refreshing, or like a sandwich, but less filling—a worst-of-all-worlds Frankenstein’s monster, an indistinguishable food slurry wrapped in edible cardboard, like the world’s rudest present. They’re desperation food—“the stuff,” Lesley Suter wrote a few years ago in the food publication Eater, “of refrigerated airport deli cases, conference center lunch trays, and the dark side of a Subway menu.” Every single part of them is the wrong texture.

And yet: This month, McDonald’s announced that it would be bringing back its chicken Snack Wrap, after nearly 19,000 people signed a Change.org petition arguing that it was “easily the best thing” on the chain’s menu. The announcement came a day after Popeyes introduced three new chicken wraps. TikTok is now filled with wrap-recipe cook-alongs and clips of attractive young people hunting for the best chicken-Caesar wrap in their given city.

[Read: The golden age of the fried-chicken sandwich]

If you are over 40, this might sound a bit familiar. Wraps were one of the biggest eating fads of the 1990s, after a group of enterprising friends decided to put Peking duck inside a tortilla and see if San Franciscans would buy it. They would, and they did, and then so did the rest of the country. Soon enough, the nation’s leading newspapers were running careful, anthropological explainers about wraps, as though a sandwich were a newly discovered animal species. (The Washington Post, 1996: “They’re called wraps—big, fat, tortilla-wrapped bundles similar to burritos but with a wild choice of international fillings.” The Post again, six months later: “It looks like a giant egg roll.”) Tavern on the Green, which had at that point been selling down-the-middle American classics in New York City’s Central Park for two generations, introduced a pork-and-potato wrap. Around the country, as The New York Times wrote in 1998, “tiny stores selling wraps sprang up like weeds.”

Wraps, like garbage cans, can hold anything; for this reason, they aligned perfectly with the ’90s fascination with so-called fusion food, which combines dishes from different culinary traditions. But more important, they were a vessel for the era’s body anxieties. Extreme thinness was trending; Dr. Robert Atkins had recently reissued his diet guide, one of the best-selling books in history. Wraps were—in marketing, if not always in reality—lower-calorie and lower-carb than normal sandwiches, all that pillowy, delicious bread having been replaced with a utilitarian tortilla forgery that tasted and looked virtuous, especially when it was flecked with spinach or tomato. If traditional sandwiches were greasy and chaotic, the province of children and cartoon slobs, wraps were tidy and sensible, the province of working women with slim hips and pin-straight hair. They were fuel more than food, practicality more than pleasure. The fact that they didn’t taste good was maybe even part of the point. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a woman about this story at a party, and she mentioned that she used to eat a lot of wraps. I was incredulous—until she explained, breezily, that she had had an eating disorder for many years.

[Read: How snacks took over American life]

Trends are pendulums. Wraps and extreme thinness eventually became less fashionable, but not because they were a terrible waste of time and imagination—they became less fashionable simply because new orthodoxy about how to eat and how to look replaced them. Bowls became the dominant healthy-ish working lunch, and a curvier silhouette—less ruler, more Jessica Rabbit; less Kate Moss, more Kim Kardashian—became the aspirational female body type. Third-wave feminism and its attendant media turned dieting (or at least talking about it) into something archaic and deeply uncool. But America’s golden age of body positivity had its limitations: People were still expected to fall within a narrow band of acceptable sizes and shapes, and they were expected to have a particular body by accident, without effort or deprivation or shame or depressing sandwiches. For a while, the feminine ideal was a beautiful woman with a tiny waist, a giant butt, and a hamburger in hand, meat juice spilling down her forearm.

But recently, the mood has shifted again. Hip bones are jutting out once more from above low-rise jeans. The Kardashian sisters have been talking about their “weight-loss journeys.” Estimates suggest that up to one in eight American adults has taken Ozempic or similar drugs since they were introduced. In the extreme, influencers are building social-media empires by bullying women into cutting calories and exercising for hours a day. Everywhere I look, the aesthetic values of the ’90s have returned, even if the vocabulary has changed: Low-carb has been replaced with high-protein; dieting has been replaced with wellness; starvation has been replaced with fasting. Diet culture is being revived, repackaged, and resold for a new era, and so are the foods that fed it.

Two decades ago, when Subway launched a new line of wraps, they were advertised as a “carb-controlled” option compatible with the Atkins diet. In 2024, when Subway launched a new line of wraps, a company press release foregrounded their protein content and promised to “fuel you up without weighing you down.” The Snack Wrap Change.org petition explicitly cites the wrap’s calorie count, which is typically below 300. On TikTok, fitness bros are bragging about the “macros” on their “XL Grinder Salad Wraps,” and women are posting recipes for 300-calorie buffalo-chicken wraps to a chorus of comments such as “YALL THIS IS SOOOOO FILLING. I LOVE HIGH VOLUME LOW CAL EATING 🔥🔥🔥.” A thinness-obsessed nation is turning once again toward joyless tubes of functional slop, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This article originally misidentified the author of a best-selling diet guide as Dr. Richard Atkins. In fact, the author of the guide is Dr. Robert Atkins.

No One Is Better at Being Looked at Than Kim Kardashian

2025-05-19T18:50:09-04:00

Kim Kardashian always knows what people want to see. In the early 2010s, what people wanted was Kim, and Kim obliged. She was everywhere: on her show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians; on other people’s shows; on magazine covers; and, mostly, on the internet. There, she built an apparatus of self-surveillance out of newly available technology and newly acquired cultural hunger for unfiltered celebrity. Other stars were on social media, sure, but no one used it quite like Kim, endlessly and seemingly without shame. The effect was a magic trick: Kardashian had tens of millions of followers, and each felt like they were getting a special peek into a charmed world. Her feeds from Paris Fashion Week 2016 are a representative sample—a pacifying stream of cream and white, diamonds and lace, outsize wealth made as banal as breakfast. Here is Kim getting ready. Here are Kim’s outfits. Here is Kim’s engagement ring, a gift from her then-husband, then known as Kanye West, its stone as clear as glass and as big as a grape.

It was all breezily aspirational, and then it really wasn’t. A few hours after posting those Fashion Week photos, Kardashian was getting ready for bed in a Paris apartment when five men wearing balaclavas burst into her room. They duct-taped her mouth, bound her with zip ties, held her at gunpoint, locked her in a bathroom, and went about stealing millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry, including that engagement ring and a watch given to her by her late father. They had abducted the building’s night watchman and forced him to lead them to Kardashian’s room; she begged him to tell her attackers, in French, that she had young children at home. She was hoping that if they knew, they might spare her life.

They did—Kardashian emerged from the attack physically fine. But then came the news cycle. People magazine built a story around quotes from a security expert suggesting that Kardashian had made herself a target by “advertising what she’s doing and advertising her wealth,” as though that wasn’t exactly what people (and People) had been rewarding her for this whole time. The New York Times wondered why Kardashian had been traveling with such expensive jewelry. (The fairly obvious answer to the question is that she was on a work trip, and her work is wearing expensive jewelry.) Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel both made cruel jokes on late-night TV. The fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, for some reason, spoke to the press about the incident, voicing what seemed to be on everyone’s mind. Kardashian is “too public, too public,” he said. “You cannot display your wealth, then be surprised that some people want to share it.” The mainstream consensus solidified: The robbery was karma, comeuppance, a corrective to all that vacuous extravagance and clueless exhibitionism.

[Read: The pandemic clarified who the Kardashians really are]

If the attack was some kind of cosmic lesson for Kardashian, she appeared to have learned it. She stopped posting her real-time whereabouts and dressing so ostentatiously. She went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and sounded less like the survivor of an unprovoked, violent assault than like a child apologizing for misbehavior. “It was meant to happen to me. Things happen in your life to teach you things,” she said. “I was definitely materialistic before, but I’m so happy that my kids get this me, because I just don’t care about that stuff anymore.” The very things that had made her famous were a liability, and she knew it. A few years later, she revealed on her own show that since the robbery, she hadn’t “really been about wearing jewelry.”

Until recently, it seems. Last week, Kardashian appeared in a Paris courtroom to testify against her alleged attackers. She wore—along with a vintage John Galliano dress, six-inch Saint Laurent slingback heels, and Alaïa sunglasses in an exaggerated cat-eye shape—diamond earrings, a diamond ear cuff, a diamond ring, a diamond anklet, and a $3 million white-gold necklace set with 80 diamonds. The necklace was meticulously engineered brand synergy: Samer Halimeh, the jeweler who’d designed the necklace, sent a press release to journalists as Kardashian testified. The necklace was also a message, and not a particularly subtle one—Kardashian is reclaiming her freedom, and for Kim Kardashian, freedom is diamonds.

The Times called Kardashian’s outfit an “unconventional” choice, but for the most part, the response was fairly neutral. To some degree, this is a reflection of the kinder and gentler moment we are in, at least as far as the mainstream media is concerned: In the near-decade since the robbery and the backlash, an entire subgenre of content has sprung up to reexamine, and atone for, the viciousness that society inflicted on female celebrities in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Much of the press simply knows better than to openly hate women in the same way it used to. Kardashian was in court to share new details from a horrific assault in the name of seeking justice; to comment meanly on her outfit would have been a weird move.

[Read: Why were we so cruel to Britney Spears?]

But also, such a comment would have revealed a grave misunderstanding of the world we live in, the world Kardashian built. It’s one where every moment is a photo opp, every uncapped lens is a tool for brand building, every iota of attention is a chance to make money, and every flat surface is a red carpet. The rapper A$AP Rocky wore head-to-toe Yves Saint Laurent daily during his February trial for felony assault, and he looked so good doing it that the brand shared paparazzi photos on social media even before he was acquitted. In 2023, Gwyneth Paltrow captured the internet’s attention with the clothes she wore during her trial for reckless skiing, to the degree that Town and Country ran a feature on where to buy them, as though the Park City civil court were a fashion shoot. (Paltrow was found not at fault.) “Is this a courthouse or the Cannes Film Festival?” a court security guard asked Le Parisien as a scrum of reporters waited for Kardashian. The answer, of course, was both.

In this case, the star witness is a woman who has been selling her family, her likeness, her glamour, and her trauma for almost half her life. She writes her narrative through her appearance, and she’s great at it. In the language of Instagram—a language she helped invent—she knows her angles. (Not for nothing did she release a 445-page book of selfies.) In the mid-2010s, she became a symbol for a certain kind of highly conspicuous consumption and was lambasted for it; in 2025, she has reclaimed her right to engage in that same conspicuous consumption. The critics have had it wrong: As it turns out, there’s no such thing as being “too public” about your wealth. Here are Kim’s outfits, here are Kim’s diamonds, still as banal as breakfast.

The Brands Are Very Sorry About Your Trauma

2025-05-07T10:08:58-04:00

Cameo is a platform that allows everyday people to commission B-to-Z-list celebrities to record personalized videograms for any occasion. Some time ago, when my friend Caroline was in the hospital, I used it to buy, for $12.59, a 2-minute, 14-second pep talk for her, delivered by a man who is famous online for dressing like a dog.

More than two years later, Cameo wants me to know that if I would like to not receive Mother’s Day–related promotional emails, I can opt out. So does Heyday, the Millennial skin-care company, and Parachute, the Millennial linen store, and Prose, the Millennial shampooery, and at least two different stores that have sold me expensive candles. They offer this service using the whispery timbre and platitudinous vocabulary of therapy-speak: This time of year, I am told, can be “meaningful” but also “tender.” I can take care of myself by electing not to receive Mother’s Day marketing emails. Very often, there is a JPEG of flowers.

This is well intentioned, of course: This holiday really can be difficult, for any number of reasons. “The death of a beloved,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “is an amputation,” and every mother, without exception, eventually dies, leaving lots of people without someone to celebrate. Being a mother and having a mother are also two of the most profound experiences a person can have, and profundity is rarely uncomplicated. Not being a mother if you want to be one can be a sadness you carry in your pocket every day. There are so many ways to wish things were different. Whatever’s going on, I can guarantee that no one wants to be reminded of their familial trauma by the company they bought a soft-rib bath bundle (colorway: agave) from five years ago. And so they email us, asking if it’s okay to email us.

[Read: Why I’m skipping Mother’s Day]

The practice took off in the United States a few years ago, shortly after the coronavirus pandemic started and George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. Because of social media, people were already used to multinational corporations talking to them like friends, but when the world started falling apart, they wanted those friends to be better—to seem more empathetic, more human, more aware of things other than selling products. Younger customers, especially, “want to feel like they’re in a community with their favorite brands,” the business journalist Dan Frommer told me. “There’s this level of performance that becomes necessary, or at least, you know, part of the shtick.”

The Mother’s Day opt-out email suggests that the brand sending it sees you as a whole person, not just as a market segment (at least for a moment). It uses an intimate medium to manufacture more intimacy, appearing between messages from your human loved ones and talking like them too. (A recent email from Vena, a CBD company co-founded by a former Bravo housewife, begins by saluting me as “babe” and reassures me that if I “need to push pause for these emails, we totally get that.”) It allows the brand to suggest that it is different from all of the other corporations competing for your attention and money—while simultaneously giving them more access to your attention and money.

[Read: Brands have nothing real to say about racism]

For companies, sending the Mother’s Day opt-out email is like buying insurance on a highly valuable asset: your inbox. “Email is, probably for every brand, the most profitable marketing channel for e-commerce,” Frommer told me. The people on any given company’s email list are likely on it because they’ve already engaged with the brand in some way, whether knowingly or not. In the argot of online marketing, they’re good leads—a consumer relationship just waiting to be strengthened, one strenuously casual email at a time. This is why every start-up is constantly offering you 10 percent off your first purchase if you sign up for their email list, and also why they will do anything to keep you on it. If a Mother’s Day opt-out prevents even a small number of people from unsubscribing to all of a brand’s emails, it will be worthwhile. “It’s the kind of thing that probably means a lot to very few people,” Frommer said, “but those people really appreciate it.”

But like a lot of what makes for good business these days, the effect is a little absurd. So many emails about Mother’s Day are flying around, all in the service of sending fewer emails about Mother’s Day. Advertisements are constantly shooting into our every unoccupied nook and cranny, but the good ones are now sensitive to our rawest family dynamics. Also, not to be too literal about it, but: The idea that pain, or regret, or tenderness, or whatever the brands want to call it, is something a person can decide not to participate in is fiction. “Everyone is grieving something at any given point in time,” Jaclyn Bradshaw, who runs a small digital-marketing firm in London, told me. (She recently received a Mother’s Day email that cannily combined a sale and an opt-out, offering 15 percent off just above the button to unsubscribe.) If someone’s grief is acute, an email is unlikely to be the thing that reminds them. “No, I remember,” Bradshaw said. “It was at the very forefront of my mind.”

[Read: When Mother’s Day is ‘empowering’]

Mother’s Day originated as an occasion for expressing simple gratitude for child care and the women who do it; people celebrated by writing letters and wearing white carnations. It is now a festival of acquisition, a day mostly devoted to buying things—$34 billion worth of things this year, according to forecasters. The brunch places in my neighborhood are advertising Mother’s Day specials, and the ads on my television are reminding me that it’s “not too late to buy her jewelry.” I’m planning on going to a baseball game that day, and when I get there, a free clutch bag, designed to look like a baseball and “presented by” a mattress company, will be pressed into my hand, in honor of the concept of motherhood. My friends will post on Instagram, and my co-workers will ask me how my day was when I get to work on Monday.

This doesn’t bother me, personally. I love being a mother, almost entirely uncomplicatedly, and I love my mother, almost entirely uncomplicatedly. (In this, I know, I’m very lucky.) I have no particular problem with Mother’s Day, which is to say I’m as happy receiving an email from a brand about it as I am receiving an email from a brand about anything.

But every year around this time, I think of my friend Mimi, who died the day after Mother’s Day in 2018. That’s not fully true, actually—the truth is that I think about her all the time: when I see a dog she would have delighted in petting, or find myself walking behind a woman with wild curly hair like hers on the street, or am served an old photo by my phone’s “memories” feature, or talk to someone who loved her too. Most of the time, I like it. Other times, if you gave me a button I could click to stop being reminded that she’s not here anymore, I’d push it until my forefinger broke. It wouldn’t work, of course. Brands are some of the most powerful forces in modern life, but they cannot do everything.