Xochitl Gonzalez | The Atlantic

The Relentless Andrew Yang

2026-02-05T11:35:25-05:00

Remember the Yang Gang? The bros in MATH baseball hats behind Andrew Yang’s dark-horse presidential candidacy back in 2019? Yang ran on the “freedom dividend”—his proposal for a universal basic income of $1,000 a month for every American. Many wrote him off as a futuristic Chicken Little because of his predictions of mass job loss driven by automation and AI. That part of his message, at least, is now mainstream. According to a recent MIT study, nearly 12 percent of tasks in the American labor market—representing $1.2 trillion in wages—could be performed by AI today. A Senate committee report released in October warns that America could lose nearly 100 million jobs to AI and automation within the next decade. The technology is transforming work faster than the government, companies, and employees can respond.

But few people, and even fewer politicians, seem to be talking about UBI. Maybe there are better solutions, more effective policies—but no one is talking much about them, either. Did Yang come a few years too early—or did he just have the wrong idea?

Yang was a political outsider who had never run in an election before, yet with his UBI platform and bro-friendly delivery, he earned a spot in the presidential debates. He ended up suspending his campaign the night of the New Hampshire primary—he has joked that people dismissed him as “the magical Asian man from the future” who “wants to give everyone money.” But his goal was never to win, he told me in his office in December. “My design was to raise the alarm around AI and mainstream universal basic income.”

People stop him, Yang told me, “on the street, every day” to say: “You were right on AI, and we need universal basic income.” Or they tell him, “You were right. Run again.”

[Read: Andrew Yang doesn’t have any litmus test]

His new book, out this month—Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?—answers the question of what he’s been up to in the past few years, with self-deprecating humor. “The alternative title,” Yang said, had been: Hey, Am I Racist, or Are You Andrew Yang?

He sees himself as different from other politicians, for the simple fact that he’s a man who recognizes a problem and comes up with an idea to fix it. The trouble was that neither the man nor the idea were politically viable. As a politician, he didn’t capture enough voters’ trust or imagination. The other candidates might not have been offering much, but their stump speeches were familiar. UBI was solving a problem voters didn’t yet know they had.

Looking back, you might say that at least he proposed we do something … about anything. The “disease in American politics that is pushing us all into the mud is that you do not actually have to solve the problem,” Yang told me. Politicians are playing “you lose, I lose,” in which the parties take turns screwing up and returning to power. Meanwhile, “you have AI coming to eat tens of millions of jobs. And you don’t have a meaningful conversation about it.”

Since 2019, when Stockton, California, launched a basic-income pilot, more than 72 local governments in 26 states have experimented with such programs, according to a report published last year by a coalition of politicians who support UBI. The report found that the recipients experienced an increase in health and financial stability and a reduction in stress, without any decrease in employment. In some places, a significant portion of participants ended up working more during the pilot. (Other experiments have not proved to be as effective.)

UBI would, of course, be hugely expensive. But the bigger issue is that it’s politically unpopular, Robert Greenstein, the founder of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank that focuses on low- and moderate-income people, told me. “No disrespect to Andrew Yang or UBI proponents. I’ve always admired their dedication,” Greenstein said, before adding the inevitable but: “They didn’t pay sufficient attention to history.”

Americans are much more supportive of in-kind benefits, such as SNAP, than they are of cash assistance. Even benefits such as unemployment insurance have become harder to qualify for in the past half century. UBI hasn’t even gotten “to first base politically,” Greenstein said, because “we have one party that doesn’t want to raise taxes on anybody” and “the other party doesn’t want to raise taxes on anybody with incomes below $400,000 a year.”

Yang wouldn’t argue with that. Politicians, he said, are afraid of alienating donors in Big Tech, even though some tech CEOs such as Dario Amodei of Anthropic have said themselves that the government should tax them more.

Yang says that Republicans tend to hate UBI because it’s a huge entitlement program and they don’t like the idea of what he describes as a “capitalism where income doesn’t start at zero.” (But he does point out that Donald Trump, whom “I disagree with on just about every front, actually senses that that money is good in people’s hands,” which is why the president sent out baby bonds and proposed tariff-rebate checks.)

[Read: Yes, cash transfers work]

But Yang sees Democrats as even worse. “If you were to say to Democrats, ‘Hey, let’s say we tax the AI companies. Maybe we should give that money to people, families, displaced workers,’ a lot of Democrats would be like, ‘No, no, no. It would be much better if we put that money to schools.’” He describes Democrats as the last of the institutionalists, sinking money into programs and systems without ever questioning how well they are working. They don’t have to bother trying to think differently, because when voters tire of Republicans, they have no choice but to come running back to Democrats.

Yang, being Yang, has another solution for that.

Kevin C. Downs / Redux

Yang is loquacious, tall, affable, and very smart. And did I say “loquacious”? But he is no politician, despite having run for president and, in 2021, New York City mayor. (He was the Democratic front-runner for most of the primary race, before finishing in fourth place.) He doesn’t glad-hand or try to “make you feel seen.” Instead, he just talks—assuredly, and with data. Spending time with him feels like being seated next to your friend’s chatty husband at a dinner party. When the dinner’s over, you are happy for your friend—and relieved for yourself.

Our meeting in December wasn’t the first time I had spoken with Yang. A couple of years ago, I was an unpaid speaker at a small conference that he started, called the Hudson Valley Ideas Festival. Yang is always starting something. Businesses, nonprofits, political parties.

After graduating from Columbia Law School, Yang worked briefly at a corporate-law firm, then for a failed start-up, then in a tech job, before he worked for and eventually became the CEO of Manhattan Prep, a tutoring company. Pumping high-achieving students into the graduate-school-to-white-collar pipeline made Yang question a system that concentrates the best and brightest in a handful of cities and professions. So he began Venture for America, a nonprofit that recruited graduates to work at start-ups in B- and C-list American cities and then trained them to create start-ups of their own.

Yang raised millions of dollars for the organization and was praised by the Obama administration. But according to The New York Times, Venture largely failed to deliver. A decade into the program, only about a dozen of the start-ups were still in business in the targeted cities, employing about 150 people. “Andrew comes up with these grand ideas, and he loves to obsess about them and talk about how great they are, but he doesn’t think through all the details,” Cris Landa, a former Venture for America employee, told the Times.

[Read: Andrew Yang, political Kardashian]

By 2017, when Yang left Venture for America to run for president, the “grand idea” he was obsessing over was UBI. By his own benchmark, his campaign could be considered a success. He got people talking about a future in which a million truck drivers would likely be unemployed. Yet it left him “despondent.”

Yang could see that his message wasn’t connecting with enough voters. He would give his stump speech about labor-market trends and a fourth Industrial Revolution, but even if people found it interesting, it couldn’t compete with Democrats’ traditional applause lines about unions and women’s rights. He told me that he had tried to talk about job-loss numbers that “in theory describe some objective reality, which in theory matters,” but all that people really wanted was for his message to be “crammed into a tribal language” that could be summed up as: “Trump bad.”

“I could have said any number,” Yang told me, and it wouldn’t have mattered. “I got the sinking feeling coming off the trail, like, Oh, no. We’re actually even further away from solving this problem.”

The campaign was clearly a failure, but Yang took it as encouragement to try to remake the entire political system. He joined the board of FairVote, an organization that champions ranked-choice voting. In 2021, he left the Democratic Party and co-founded, with Christine Todd Whitman and Michael S. Willner, a new party: Forward, which describes itself as a solutions-driven alternative to Democrats and Republicans. According to its website, 71 elected officials, including mayors and congresspeople, are affiliated with the party. But if you haven’t yet heard of Forward, Yang has a theory that explains why.

In 2020, Yang was hired as a commentator for CNN. He claims that he was given an option to renew in 2021, but the offer was rescinded after he became an independent. In his telling, though 45 percent of Americans identify as independents, network executives stopped thinking that he had any value once he wasn’t part of the bipartisan political system. (In a comment to Fox News Digital, CNN said that the decision was based on the conflict of interest that would arise from Yang’s “intention to launch and serve as the leader of a political party.”) He was, however, inundated with requests to appear on Fox News. “They kept saying to me, ‘Hey, Andrew, you left the Democratic Party. Like, why did they suck so bad?’ I was like, ‘I don’t think Republicans are the answer. I think the entire system needs reform.’”

In 2024, Yang endorsed Democratic Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota for president. Phillips considered President Biden’s advanced age and his lack of popularity, and broke ranks to primary him. Democrats, Yang said, responded by saying, “We’re going to malign this guy, destroy his reputation,” because “how dare he try and cut the line and run for president when he’s, like, No. 54 in our pecking order?” Yang called it an “institutional shivving.” He was even more outraged by the lengthy postmortem on the election that the Democratic National Committee eventually decided against releasing.

“I’ve got five words for their postmortem,” Yang said. “Should’ve. Held. A. Fucking. Primary.”

When Yang gets stopped on the street by people asking what he’s been up to, many times he’s in New York City’s Garment District, where the office of his new cellular-service company, Noble Mobile, is located.

Yang launched the company in September after raising more than $10 million, and he said it now has thousands of subscribers. When I visited, the elevators of the nondescript building were plastered with flyers inviting other residents to the company’s upcoming holiday party.

“The average American is sad for two reasons,” Yang said. “More, but let’s just stick with two: No. 1, they’re not able to save enough money on a monthly basis. And No. 2, they’re spending too much time staring at what Hasan Minhaj calls ‘their rectangle of sadness.’”

[From the May 2021 issue: What if Andrew Yang wins?]

Powered by T-Mobile’s network, Noble Mobile’s service is relatively cheap—closer to what Europeans pay each month. Yang’s goal, he said, was to do with mobile plans what his friend Mark Cuban did with Cost Plus Drugs and prescription medications. In addition, the company encourages customers to limit their doomscrolling—“which, by the way, is also a polarizing force”—by giving them up to a $20 credit every month that they don’t use all of their data. According to Yang, the rebate pushes the average user’s phone time down 17 percent by their second month on the service. Last year, the company threw a series of no-phones parties across the country, with dance floors, themed cocktails, and a few inches of lawn—touch grass read a sign. (Yang was a party promoter in his 20s; the instinct clearly hasn’t left him.)

Yang describes the company as a logical outgrowth of his political work, including his advocacy for UBI: “For years, the focus of my career has been to build a human-centered economy to improve the lives of Americans,” he wrote in a press release. The reality, he found, was that “government action” happens “too slowly.” In Hey Yang, you get the sense that he almost can’t believe how easy it was to start this company—at least compared with his other ambition of remaking politics.

Yang says that he gets told “every day” that he “was right,” but he also says that he isn’t smug about it. AI is still going to destroy jobs. Politically, he has hopes for Forward. Young people, he notes, don’t have the same loyalty to political parties as older generations do. When I asked if he might run for office again in 2028, he was coy, saying that he gets asked that question, too, “every day.” The end of Hey Yang could be interpreted as a future campaign manifesto; in between one-liners, Yang outlines his vision of an America where poverty is a thing of the past, workweeks are shorter, and technology serves people instead of the other way around: “In a world of numbers and data and money, can our humanity save us? I still hope so.”

But for now, all Yang can offer us is a cheaper phone plan. He seems happy about it. And yet I couldn’t help but feel a bit dispirited by the whole thing. Yang had looked around and seen that a lot of Americans were going to find themselves out of work. He had an idea to address the problem, rolled up his sleeves, and sacrificed a few years of his life by taking it on—only to discover that politics isn’t about solving problems. Politics is about politics.

What I Lost When I Gave Up My Catholicism

2025-12-24T08:00:00-05:00

Catholicism is hot right now. The new American pope is popular for speaking his mind on political subjects such as AI and the death penalty. On Instagram and TikTok, Catholic influencers rank local Masses and their favorite Christmas hymns, and priests go viral for DJ’ing raves, while others protest ICE raids. The Catholic Church is at the center of the new Knives Out film, which premiered at No. 1 on Netflix this month. And more and more young people are going to Mass.

Today’s youth aren’t particularly religious. The Pew Research Center reports that 44 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds are unaffiliated with a faith. Yet at the same time, Catholic Gen Z is showing up strong. A new survey from the Catholic Leadership Roundtable found that members of Gen Z are now the most engaged Catholics—attending Mass, confession, and parish functions more frequently than any other generational cohort. (They are followed closely by Millennials.) Young people are also driving a spike in conversions. The National Catholic Register reports that many American dioceses are seeing annual increases in conversions of 30 percent, 40 percent, and even higher.

Many converts discover the faith on social media. Catholicism—with its stained glass and embroidered robes—is particularly well suited to a visual medium that sells beautiful imagery. But clergy members are also meeting the moment, evangelizing to young people where they are. Father Mike Schmitz, a handsome priest in the diocese of Duluth, Minnesota, has popular YouTube and Instagram pages and hosted a podcast called The Bible in a Year. Bishop Robert Barron runs Word on Fire, an online ministry that claims to reach “millions of people to draw them into—or back to—the Catholic faith.”

The Catholic Church is almost 2,000 years old. Its origins trace back to the Pentecost of the Upper Room in Jerusalem, and its earliest followers are believed to be the disciples of Jesus himself. About 500 years later, the Church gained strength in the chaos that followed the collapse of Rome, where a weak emperor had led to a power vacuum. The Church offered order. Leadership. Community. Ritual. Beauty. Education. Transcendence. These are the same values that young Catholics today cite as drivers of their devotion. The Church offers an answer to the synthetic remove of AI and digital culture, the isolation of contemporary culture, the disorder of government and institutions.

If more young people turn to the Church, Catholicism may finally see an end to its long decline in America. (Catholicism isn’t alone—the ranks of Christians in general have dwindled since the 1960s.) A 2023–24 Pew survey found that for every person who had converted to Catholicism, 8.4 Catholics had left the faith. Nineteen percent of Americans are Catholic; another 13 percent are former Catholics. The most recent big decline in church attendance began in the 2010s, right around the time that I stopped going to Mass.

Few experiences in modern life are as wondrous as a really good Christmas Vigil Mass. It’s a full sensory encounter: the sight of the chapel, decked out for the holidays; the smell of the incense; the sound of the choir singing “Adeste Fideles” or “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”; the taste of the Communion wafer; the heavy feel of the chalice when you sip your Communion wine. The message, every year, is that no matter the state of the world, goodness can be born anew.

I don’t remember the last time that I let myself experience this.

Many Catholics can’t tell where the Church ends and our families begin. The values and customs of the Church are as tied up in our identity as language and nationality. I was raised Catholic, as were my mother and father, and their mother and father before that, going back so long, time ceases to matter. We simply were as we always were: Catholic. Every week, we went to Mass. College threw me for a loop logistically, but I never had a crisis of faith. I was back in the pew in my young adulthood.

My break with the Church began, as it did for many, in 2002, when The Boston Globe published the story of priests preying on children that led to an avalance of heartbreakingly similar stories of sexual abuse and systemic cover-up. I was 25 and repulsed. But it was the Church. And these were a few bad eggs.

I met a nice Catholic boy and we married in a Brooklyn basilica. I even befriended the priest who married us. When he retired, I’d visit him in the old-age home for priests and we’d talk about books. And the stories of abused children kept coming.

In 2008, I got divorced. Committed a sin. And was told that for a $5,000 annulment—a sum I neither had nor wanted to spend—the Church could act like the marriage had never happened. And the stories of abused children kept coming.

I continued to go to Church. My cousin, who is gay, had recently moved to Brooklyn. Week after week, I was told from the pulpit that he shouldn’t have a right to marry. And the stories of abused children kept coming.

I was sitting in Mass as a sinner—a divorcée, unable to receive Communion. My nearest kin was unwelcome because of whom he wanted to love. And a Church whose own sins I was trying so hard to ignore kept telling me how to vote: always for the candidate who would best protect the lives of unborn children. I kept thinking, But who will protect the children from you?

I left Mass and the Church and can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve returned since.

But the Church never left me. I am secular, liberal, upper-middle-class—I’ve tried yoga, transcendental meditation, and other faiths, and nothing reaches me in the same way as those old smells and bells. My brain is wired Catholic. So I reconciled myself to this detached spiritual life—one where, to quote Sojourner Truth, “I talk to God and God talks to me.”

Then, this fall, I was at a book festival where the Italian American author Adriana Trigiani defended her Catholic faith as part of her cultural inheritance—a shaping force in her life as important as being Appalachian and working-class and Italian. I realized that this is what I gave up: communion and Communion; quiet genuflection and ritual; a cultural practice that had been in my family for generations. My grandparents are dead now—I gave up one of the last activities we shared.

Not out of laziness. Not even because of politics. I gave the Church up because, when it betrayed those children, it betrayed us all.

The Church reacted to the revelations at first with denial and hostility, and eventually with payouts and apologies. In 2018, Pope Francis issued a letter expressing remorse to all of the “people of God” who had been hurt by the decades of sexual abuse and cover-up. Still, until 2019, Church leaders in New York State attempted to block the Child Victims Act, which extended the statute of limitations on victims of child abuse so they could come forward (the Church withdrew its opposition after the law was broadened beyond the Church to include victims of abuse by members of public institutions). When, earlier this month, then-Cardinal Timothy Dolan announced that the New York archdiocese would sell off property to help compensate about 1,300 victims, he sounded exhausted by apologizing: “As we have repeatedly acknowledged, the sexual abuse of minors long ago has brought shame upon our church,” he wrote in an email. “I once again ask forgiveness.”

Repetitive apologies are not the same as penance, which many Catholics feel has never happened. I find myself almost envious of these Gen Z Catholics, who were too young to experience the abuse scandal as a betrayal, and who can receive all the goodness and glory of the Church without my ambivalence or resentment.

Anthony Gross is 22, a recent graduate of Washington University, and one of the new Catholic influencers online. He grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee and has been documenting on Instagram his recent move to New York City, including his effort to attend and rank the best Catholic Masses in Manhattan. The videos are charming, and often conclude with Gross tucking himself in at night, just beneath the cross hung over his bed.

Gross is, like me, a multigenerational Catholic. Unlike me, he has recommitted to the faith. When we spoke this month, he told me that he thought, “It’s time to start acting like a man.” He wanted to be more disciplined, more principled, more of a leader, and thought, “God is a big part of that.” (Church is also, he admits, not a bad place to meet like-minded young women.)

Young men are more religious than their female counterparts today. In an article called “How Catholicism Got Cool” in The Free Press, Father Charles Gallagher of Washington, D.C., said that the internet priests of the Church provided an answer to the “false prophets” of the “Manosphere.” The article also quoted a 21-year-old man and recent convert who said that the Catholic Church doesn’t “shame you for being a man,” and that he’s found both a wanted discipline and a brotherhood through the Church.

The priests Gross has encountered online and in real life, he said, have helped show him the kind of man he wants to be. When I point out that this feels ironic because they themselves won’t marry, the statement seemed to perplex him. “Priests are normal human beings,” he said. “It’s tough because there’s so much pressure put on them to be this perfect human being. And I feel a lot of empathy for them because they are human, just like every other person, and they screw up all the time, just like me and you.”

In that moment, I remembered that Anthony Gross hadn’t even been born when the Boston Globe story came out. His relationship with and appreciation of the priests he’s met and what his faith has done for him are not tainted by the pain of broken trust. And I could take that and dismiss it. Or I could remember the Gospel according to Matthew: When the disciples argue over who will be greatest in heaven, Jesus says, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

Pope Leo XIV has an opportunity to bring Catholics like me back into the fold. He has not softened the Church’s pro-life stance, but has taken pains to make the sentiment more consistent: noting that pro-life relates to immigrants and gun control as much as the unborn. And, in a moment when many American Christian political figures are abandoning empathy, Leo has spoken out against political leaders using Jesus to justify cruelty. Many lapsed Catholics are taking notice.

Still, the Church’s sins keep surfacing. Just this past week, the diocese of Grand Rapids, Michigan, released a “complete accounting” of 51 priests accused of sexual misconduct since 1950. Whatever gesture comes next—whatever buildings get sold or apologies issued—it won’t be enough. Perhaps the Church will never be able to stop apologizing, and the scandals will never stop coming to light.

But also, perhaps the Church is not really the priests or the pope. It’s the people. It’s the young people looking for solace and a place to commune in a reckless, violent time. It’s generations of family members loving one another as they’d like to be loved, offering kindness to strangers, and opening the manger to whoever needs shelter and warmth.

This Christmas, after many years away, I’ve decided that I’m going to go to Mass.

America Is Failing Its Children

2025-12-14T12:07:00-05:00

Updated at 1:20 p.m. ET on December 14, 2025

Nothing encapsulates the failures of our society more than what just happened to Mia Tretta. When she was 15, she was shot in the stomach by a classmate at her high school in California. Yesterday, she survived the second school shooting of her short life: A person opened fire at Brown University, where Tretta is a junior.

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Students were studying for finals when a shooter walked into an economics classroom and started firing, killing two students, injuring nine, and inflicting terror on not just a campus but an entire city. No suspect has been named yet, but authorities have detained a “person of interest.”

I left Brooklyn to attend Brown in 1995, when New York City had yet to shake its rough-and-tumble reputation. Of all the amenities that the Ivy League campus provided—bountiful libraries, a full-service gym—the most luxurious to me was a sense of safety. I’d walk around campus at all hours of the night; just the other day, my freshman roommate and I reminisced about keeping our dorm room unlocked so our friends could come and go. Despite how much has changed in the decades since I was there, it was that sense of security that had, after what she’d endured in high school, appealed to Tretta.

I’m a trustee at Brown now. Many of my friends have children there, and I know and care for countless staff members and administrators. When yet another tragedy like this takes place in America, everyone grieves. But it feels different when it happens so close to home. When you hear that your friend’s daughter is hiding in a bathroom in the Sciences Library, you can picture the tiny floor tiles she’s staring at. You can conjure the smell of the heat in the dorm where a student you recently had coffee with is sheltering in place. And you’re able to picture the streets where the shooter is rumored to have been running at large.

[Juliette Kayyem: Why the Brown shooting felt different]

I have always believed that the mass shootings that define our nation are preventable. But more and more, I have to wonder if that is not a bit of dated, magical thinking. In Donald Trump’s America, the idea of politicians passing “commonsense” gun legislation feels as removed and naive as hanging up a HOPE poster. It’s possible that the dual ills of creating the violent, misanthropic young men who tend to be the culprits and protecting the guns they arm themselves with are both too endemic to our culture to change.

I was a senior at Brown, sitting in a coffee shop a stone’s throw from where yesterday’s attack occurred, when I read about two boys in Colorado who’d donned black trench coats, walked into their high school, and opened fire with pump-action shotguns. At the time, it was a shocking story. It inspired a documentary, a film, and songs. If each school shooting that’s happened since had inspired such creative output, we could populate an entire streaming service.

Every mass shooting in America fills me with sorrow, but this particular incident has been coupled with a dose of nihilism. Across the nation this week, students will be opening emails announcing their early-decision college acceptances. For many of America’s children, it’s the culmination of the zero-sum game of elite college admissions. They have been trained from their earliest years to pass exams and write essays so that they may one day be lucky enough to study for their finals in an Ivy League classroom where, randomly, at any moment, a shooter might open fire.

Over the past day, I’ve found myself ruminating on Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. In Hobbes’s estimation, the natural state of things was chaos: competition, violence, greed, war, self-interest, and economic insecurity. Government was the only solution to provide order and create a functioning society. Even tyranny, according to Hobbes, was better than all of that. Today, we seem to have saddled ourselves with tyranny while being mired in more chaos than ever.

No matter how great our collective amnesia, these mass shootings add up. Tretta is not even the only student at Brown who had already been involved in one. Zoe Weissmann, now 20, was only 12 when gunshots were fired at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. She was in a classroom in the middle school across campus. Yesterday she told The New York Times, “What I’ve been feeling most is just, like, how dare this country allow this to happen to someone like me twice?”

This article originally misstated the number of shooters involved in the Columbine massacre.

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl

2025-10-02T07:37:00-04:00

Midway through the Packers-Cowboys game on Sunday appeared a 23-second commercial. Like all things Benito Ocasio Martinez, it was deceptively simple. The video begins close in on the face of the impish superstar in a palm-leaf pava hat, a stunning beachfront sunset—the kind that only Puerto Rico can deliver—behind him. Waves crash and seagulls cry as we hear the opening notes of his dreamy track “Callaita” and the camera begins to zoom out. The singer is sitting on a goalpost in a suit and flip-flops, casually swinging his legs. It’s official: Bad Bunny will headline the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show.

Tuning into the Super Bowl is one of the last shared cultural experiences in our divided country, and the announcement has ignited another round in the culture wars over what “real America” should look and sound like.

Bad Bunny, or Benito, as he’s affectionately referred to by his fans, is closing out a historic year. In January, his latest album hit a billion streams in just 13 days. Rather than tour to promote the album, the artist announced a summer-long residency in his homeland of Puerto Rico, called “No me quiero ir de aquí” (“I don’t want to leave here”). The 31 shows at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, known as El Choli, were an unapologetic celebration of Puerto Rican music and culture that reverberated far beyond those of us lucky enough to catch one of the shows in person. The final performance in late September was timed to the anniversary of Hurricane Maria and livestreamed on Amazon Music; it shattered the platform’s records, surpassing even Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

[Read: The trouble with Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rico takeover]

Bad Bunny has said he wanted to avoid touring in the continental United States to protect his fans from being targeted by ICE agents. But he had Latinos all over the U.S. dancing and singing in Spanish, our heads held high, during what has otherwise been a very, very bad year.

Latino dehumanization is a hallmark of the Trump administration. Videos of masked ICE officers making violent arrests have been shared regularly across social media. Latinos are hardly the only people being rounded up and deported, but it is Latino faces—shoved to the asphalt, crying for their children and for mercy—that symbolize victory to the MAGA radicals. It is Latino faces that have been turned into degrading memes. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that ICE and Border Patrol officers are within their rights to stop anyone who, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work in a low wage job.”

Attacks on Latino people have happened in tandem with attacks on Latino culture. English has been declared the “official” language in the U.S.; the White House deleted its Spanish-language website on day one of this administration. Plans for a Latino-history branch of the Smithsonian have been halted. In all of these ways, the Trump administration is trying to purge Latinos from this country—some of us physically, all of us symbolically.

All of this is what makes the selection of Bad Bunny in 2026 so remarkable, and why the Latino-verse—and millions of Americans who don’t agree with Donald Trump’s policies—went so wild.

This year, 191 million people watched the game. Although so many of the old status markers for musicians, such as the VMAs, have vanished or lost their relevance, the Super Bowl halftime show, America’s largest stage, can still turn artists into icons. Bad Bunny is not just a Spanish-speaking artist. He’s a political one. He endorsed Kamala Harris, supports Puerto Rican independence, and, in one mocking music video, had a voice that sounds just like Trump’s declare that “this country is nothing without the immigrants. This country is nothing without Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Cubans.”

Surely the companies behind the halftime show—the NFL, Apple Music, and NBC, which will broadcast this year’s game—knew their decision to platform Bad Bunny would be controversial.

The “average halftime viewer in Des Moines doesn’t speak fluent reggaeton,” one commentator complained on X. The Newsmax host Greg Kelly called for people to boycott the NFL because of the choice, and lamented that Bad Bunny “hates America, hates President Trump, hates ICE, hates the English language! He’s just a terrible person.”

“There were many reasons why I didn’t show up in the U.S.,” Bad Bunny told I.D. Magazine, “and none of them were out of hate.” But presumably, having grown up in an American colony where citizens lack the right to vote for or against Trump, Bad Bunny does have more conflicted feelings about the role and history of the U.S. than, say, the average halftime viewer in Des Moines.

The companies didn’t choose Bad Bunny because they like, or even care about, his politics. They chose him because he’s enormously popular—he is the most-streamed male artist in the world on Spotify—and that’s good for business.

The Super Bowl, of course, is a private event—and a hugely lucrative one. Businesses, in theory, have no obligation to embrace the current government’s politics by hiring or firing stars according to its preferences. The past few months, however, have given Americans reason to doubt that corporations have much willingness to defy the Trump administration. Big media companies have caved to his demands. See: Jimmy Kimmel. Tim Cook of Apple has been working hard to stay on Trump’s good side. See: the made-in-America glass-and-gold trophy-like object that Cook gifted the president last month. And the NFL is not a venue Trump is likely to overlook, considering his possessive attitude toward it. See: his order that the 2027 draft will be held on the National Mall in Washington, and his 2017 fixation on Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling.

But the NFL counts about 39 million Latinos among its fans, and they are not only loyal watchers, but also loyal consumers of merchandise. Half a million people attended Benito’s shows at El Choli, with more than a third of them traveling from the continental U.S. The residency is estimated to have pumped $400 million into the Puerto Rican economy. And he is global: His world tour, which starts this fall, sold more than 2.6 million tickets in a week.

[From the November 2022 issue: Let Puerto Rico be free]

Laid out this way, it’s clear why the Super Bowl wants Benito. But why does Benito want the Super Bowl?

Not for the money: It is, notoriously, an unpaid gig. He has little need of more “mainstream” American approval—he already has plenty. So why come stateside, after so publicly refusing to go?

Some have suggested that the decision is hypocritical: Maybe he’s willing to set aside his concerns about ICE in return for a big-enough venue. But to those of us who follow Bad Bunny, this seems absurd. He is not an artist to waste a platform—nor one to bite his tongue. If Benito is doing the Super Bowl, we have to assume that there is something he wants to say, in this venue, in front of this enormous audience. “What I’m feeling goes beyond myself,” Bad Bunny said in a statement shared by the NFL. “This is for my people, my culture, and our history.”

There is a scene in the documentary Jennifer Lopez: Halftime—about J.Lo’s own Super Bowl performance, in 2020—in which the NFL tries to strong-arm her out of commenting on ICE’s family-separation policy by putting child performers in cages onstage with her. Lopez pushed back, and she got her way. It’s hard to imagine Benito even being willing to negotiate. This is a man whose breakthrough album was called YHLQMDLG (short for “Yo hago lo que me da la gana,” or “I do whatever I want”). The NFL, Apple, and NBC may have banked on booking a global superstar who happens to speak and sing in Spanish, but I wonder if they fully realize what a political artist he is.

Those who don't think Latino culture is American culture, as well those who delight in the degradation of Latino people, will surely find it difficult to watch a man in a leisure suit joyously rapping, dancing, and singing in Spanish alongside a full salsa band on the biggest stage in the nation.

This Super Bowl announcement is a win for anyone who wants to celebrate Latino music. But it’s also a win for anyone who cares about corporate complicity as our nation slides into autocracy. It suggests that some institutions are still willing to resist Trump’s attempts to whitewash American culture.

Will Trump be able to restrain himself from attempting to censor the show as the prospect of him being criticized on America’s biggest night of entertainment looms? The 2026 Super Bowl won’t be about just the match playing out on the field. It will also be about the struggle over whom America is for.

Lunch With Virginia Woolf

2025-07-04T07:31:00-04:00

For many years, I did not read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I suppose the thesis seemed so familiar, so foundational to feminist thinking, that I never felt the need to actually open the book. Of course a woman needs personal space and financial security in order to create art!

But the truth is it was more than that. When I showed up at college in the ’90s—a working-class Latina plopped onto an Ivy League campus—I didn’t think feminism had much to offer me. I was juggling schoolwork with multiple jobs, preoccupied by economic survival and the stigma of affirmative action, while the college women’s center seemed focused on eschewing bras and makeup and organizing Take Back the Night events. “Feminism” seemed less a political framework for equity than a rebellious identity for privileged white women. And Virginia Woolf was their patron saint.

Instead of Woolf, I read Cherríe Moraga, bell hooks, Ana Castillo, Alice Walker—writers and thinkers who understood the challenges of being a woman and living at the intersection of economic, racial, and social circumstances that each press in on you in different ways. Many times, I felt I had to set aside my interests as a woman in favor of my interests as a person of color, and I blamed much of that on the exclusionary white lens that, until recently, dominated feminist discourse. And I placed all this emotional baggage onto poor Virginia Woolf.

This essay is adapted from the introduction to a new edition of A Room of One’s Own.

But that was a long time ago. In the subsequent years, life taught me that I could put other aspects of my identity first but that society would almost always put women last. And so last year, I finally cracked open A Room of One’s Own. I knew that the book—technically a long essay—was based on two lectures Woolf gave in 1928, just a few months after universal suffrage was passed in England. I knew that Woolf argued that the right to vote was less crucial than financial independence. And I knew that the essay had been rediscovered in the early ’70s by second-wave feminists. But now, page by page, what had once been to me nothing but a totem to feminist history revealed itself to be what I should have realized it was all along: a piece of another woman’s soul.

In one afternoon, Woolf became known to me, and all my years of blind grievance melted away. Her honesty and fire and rage at the limitations put on women’s minds dissolved all the layers of feminist signifiers that she had been freighted with and all the distance between us.

[Read: 24 books to read this summer]

Oh, to spend an afternoon in thrall to her brilliant, incandescent mind! Woolf makes an elegant argument about the many ways that women’s voices have been silenced, suppressed, and otherwise forgotten. And she’s a beguiling polemicist, shifting easily between allegory and assertion. I found she had plenty to say to this moment, in this country where, on the one hand, I can cast a presidential ballot for a woman for the second time in my life, but on the other, my citizenship is still valued less than that of my male compatriots. I felt myself both encouraged by all that has changed and enraged by all that has remained the same.

For instance, stereotypes about what men and women can write are still going strong. A man’s fictions—novels, stories, plays, films—are still more likely to deal with matters of sport or disaster or battle. And a woman’s are still more likely to be concerned with domestic matters. “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war,” Woolf wrote. “This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.” The dismissal of women’s storytelling persists.

More important, we are still asking ourselves, a full century later, Woolf’s central question: Why are women poorer than men? Woolf was disappointed not to have found “some important statement, some authentic fact” to explain this. Now we have concrete data: White women are paid 83 percent of white men’s wages; Black women and Latinas, only 69.8 percent and 64.6 percent of white men’s wages, respectively. We can precisely measure the gap, and yet the gap persists. The media report on it and legislation is proposed, but the will to change is never strong enough.

Woolf knew why. The patriarchy, she wrote, depends upon man’s “feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power.” Reading this, I found myself nodding so vigorously I nearly strained my neck.

The book is, of course, limited by the blind spots of Woolf’s era and experience. She is addressing her peer group: upper-class white women whose families were so bold as to allow them to be educated. Yet I still felt that, if seated across from me today, Woolf—who understood the link between the economic control of women and the control of our minds—would embrace the intersectionality that is crucial to feminism’s present and future.

Early in the lectures, Woolf introduces us to the character of Mary. She is idling by a river on the campus of a university when she is struck with an “exciting” and “important” idea. She rushes off to write it down, but when she is stopped and scolded by a university official for walking in an area where only men are allowed to stroll, she loses her thought. I cursed the official, mourned the lost idea, and wanted to tell Woolf about Toni Morrison.

During a university lecture in 1975, Morrison spoke not of gender, but of racism, and specifically its role in limiting productivity. She warned her listeners about “the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”

As I read of Mary being shamed and turned away from the library for being a woman, I thought of Jim Crow. I wanted to tell Woolf about the reading tests given to Latinas to block them from the voting booth, and of all the other institutionalized methods of shaming and othering that have arisen since her time on earth.

Mary has a succulent lunch at the men’s college, only to return to her poorly financed women’s college for a paltry supper. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” Woolf writes. I wanted to tell her about my life during the recession years, when my phone rang more frequently from debt collectors than from friends, and I had no energy to write.

And so in Mary’s journey, I saw parallels not just to the upper class and highly educated, but to the socioeconomically and racially marginalized as well.

[Read: Seven books for people figuring out their next move]

If I could sit across a lunch table from Woolf now, I would also point out—lovingly—that she has probably overestimated the coddling required for a woman to produce art. Woolf, you see, hated to work. Her Mary has inherited £500 a year—the equivalent today of about $55,000. Now she need not do anything but sit in her room and think. But before the inheritance, Mary had to earn money teaching kindergarten or addressing envelopes or reading to old ladies. The work forced her to live on a budget, which she disliked, but worse “was the poison of fear and bitterness” over having to do “work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave.”

I rolled my eyes. Inheritances don’t grow on trees, and many women writers have been quite productive while working. Morrison wrote Beloved while sitting in traffic, commuting to her job at Random House. Ada Limón wrote three poetry collections while working in the marketing department of Condé Nast. I wrote much of my first novel while commuting to Hunter College to work as a fundraiser. Working, I might argue, actually helps the writer/artist access a different kind of truth in her fictions.

I might press Woolf to consider an additional requirement for freeing a woman’s mind: time. Women today can obtain money and, with it, a room with a door and a lock. But this does not mean they will have the time to spend there. Since Woolf’s era, time has become perhaps the rarest commodity of all for women. After the time spent earning the money, many of us run households, even when we have a partner. We are still the primary caregivers for our children and older relatives.

We have more freedom than Woolf ever had, but do we have the freedom to while away time by a river so that our thoughts can go out like so many fishing lines until they catch onto something real? Well, when that happens, it still feels as elusive and magical as it did when she gave her lectures.

This essay is adapted from the introduction to a new edition of A Room of One’s Own.

The Three Marine Brothers Who Feel ‘Betrayed’ by America

2025-06-27T11:00:00-04:00

Updated at 11:30 a.m. ET on June 30, 2025

The four men in jeans and tactical vests labeled Police: U.S. Border Patrol had Narciso Barranco surrounded. Their masks and hats concealed their faces, so that only their eyes were visible. When they’d approached him, he was doing landscape work outside of an IHOP in Santa Ana, California. Frightened, Barranco attempted to run away. By the time a bystander started filming, the agents had caught him and pinned him, face down, on the road. One crouches and begins to pummel him, repeatedly, in the head. You can hear Barranco moaning in pain. Eventually, the masked men drag him to his feet and try to shove him into an SUV. When Barranco resists, one agent takes a rod and wedges it under his neck, attempting to steer him into the vehicle as if prodding livestock.

Barranco is the father of three sons, all of them United States Marines. The eldest brother is a veteran, and the younger men are on active duty. At any moment, the same president who sent an emboldened ICE after their father could also command them into battle. That president has described Latinos as “criminals” and “anchor babies,” but the Barrancos and so many like them, immigrants or the children of immigrants, are not “invading” America; they’re defending it.

[Read: Trump’s deportations aren’t what they seem]

In 2015, 12 percent of active-duty service members identified as Hispanic. By 2023, that number had increased to 19.5 percent. In the Marine Corps, the proportion was closer to 28 percent. Latinas are more represented in the military than in the civilian workforce—21 percent of enlisted women compared with 18 percent of working women. (One explanation might be the military’s guaranteed equal pay: In the civilian workforce, Latinas earn just 65 cents on the dollar compared with white men.)

Communities of color have long been targets for military recruitment. When I went to public high school in Brooklyn in the ’90s, recruitment officers used to visit classrooms. The military offers financial stability, a route to college. But for many Latinos, as for other immigrant groups, it offers more: a path to belonging, whether for citizens who have been treated as outsiders in their own nation, or for the undocumented. Immigrants who serve at least a year in any branch of the armed forces can become eligible for naturalized citizenship.

In 1917, just before entering World War I, the United States passed the Jones-Shafroth Act, bestowing citizenship (but not a right to representation) on Puerto Ricans. This would have the effect of making them eligible for the draft when it was instituted a few months later. An estimated 18,000 to 20,000 Puerto Rican recruits were soon shipped off to fight in Europe.

During World War II, approximately 15,000 Mexican nationals fought in American uniforms, many earning citizenship. This was in addition to the 500,000 American Latinos of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent who enlisted and fought for their country, including my own grandfather. He was a decorated member of the 9th Infantry Division who fought in Tunisia, landed in Normandy, and was one of the first American soldiers to make it into Germany. He was proud of his role in history, but also of the lifelong friendships that he, a Puerto Rican man from Brooklyn, had with veterans from across the country.

In one oral history, Armando Flores, a veteran of World War II, recounts a lieutenant scolding him in his early days of service: “American soldiers stand at attention.” Rather than feeling chastened, Flores was stunned. “Nobody had ever called me an American until that time.”

Hispanic veterans came home to a country where signs were posted in Texas restaurant windows announcing: No Dogs Negroes Mexicans. Like their African American counterparts, many were the victims of redlining that prevented them from buying homes. Latino veterans created the American GI Forum to demand that benefits such as medical care and burial rights be available to Latino as well as white veterans. During the Vietnam War, Latinos were about 5 percent of the U.S. population, but they accounted for an estimated 20 percent of the 60,000 American casualties.

This country has a long history of treating the veterans who have served it shoddily. And yet what’s happening now—as Donald Trump’s agents violently detain some Latinos in the streets as other Latinos serve their country in strikes against Iran—feels extreme.

Johnathan Hernandez, a city councilman in Santa Ana, where Barranco was beaten, describes what’s happening in his community as a kind of war itself. Santa Ana is 77 percent Hispanic. It has become a popular target for ICE. Hernandez told me that he is seeing “a culture of fear, a culture of people not feeling safe, and people feeling under attack.” He said he worked to get the video posted on social media because no one knew who the man in it was, and he hoped that someone in the tight-knit community could identify him. “Because of the fact that these agents are unidentified and they’re taking people without due process, it means that you’re leaving very little for a family to be able to put the pieces together and find their loved ones,” he said. A woman saw the video on Instagram and commented that it was her friends’ father.

[Read: Stephen Miller triggers Los Angeles]

Nearly 24 hours after the violent encounter, Barranco’s eldest son, Alejandro, was able to finally make contact with his father, who said that he still had not received medical care, and that he was hungry and thirsty. (The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Barranco had “assaulted” agents with his string trimmer—sharing a video in which he can be seen turning toward the agents and briefly lifting it—and that he had declined medical care.) In interviews with news agencies, Alejandro said that he and his brothers “feel hurt; we feel betrayed.” Their father taught them to “respect this country, thank this country, and then that led us to join the Marine Corps and kind of give back to the country and be thankful,” he said.

Alejandro was deployed to Kabul in 2021, when the U.S. was evacuating from Afghanistan.

Had a Marine treated a detainee the way that the Border Patrol agents treated his father, he told MSNBC, it would have been considered a war crime.

He also spoke with Task & Purpose, which covers the military. “I don’t believe that they followed their training,” he said about the agents. “Repeatedly punching a man in the face while he’s on the ground while he’s been maced or pepper-sprayed, I don’t believe that that was in their training.” (He also noted that the agents could be seen running with their weapons, which is “a very unprofessional way of holding a firearm.”)

Many Latinos are sharing in the Barranco family’s trauma. We are a highly diverse identity group, whose common bonds can feel tenuous at best. Forty-eight percent of the Latinos who voted in the 2024 election chose Trump—and many Latino members of the military, which tends to lean more conservative than the general population, were probably among them. And yet even some of those Trump voters, seeing on a daily basis the violence and haphazard cruelty with which the Trump administration is executing its mass-deportation agenda, must share my terror and anger. (ICE’s recent actions have already led some of Trump’s supporters to regret their vote.)

How can any Latinos feel secure if “looking” Hispanic or speaking Spanish or even going to Home Depot puts you at risk? How would you feel if you were deployed half a world away and wondering each day if your mother or father or sister or brother or wife might have been snatched up by ICE?

This is a personal question for Latino service members, but it is a personnel question for the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, who have to worry about military morale as an essential dimension of combat power. The psychological toll of ICE raids isn’t borne only by the new immigrants whom Trump calls “invaders,” but also by many of the Americans tasked with protecting us from real foreign threats. In the barracks at Camp Pendleton where the younger Barranco brothers sleep, they must be struggling to focus on their mission while fearing for the safety of their father in the hands of the very government they are sworn to defend.

Brad Lander’s Stand

2025-06-21T07:31:00-04:00

As ICE agents dragged Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and a candidate for mayor, down the hallway of a federal courthouse this week, he repeatedly—and politely—asked to see their judicial warrant. Lander had locked arms with an undocumented man he identified as Edgardo, and refused to let go. Eventually, the ICE agents yanked Lander away from the man, shoved him against a wall, and handcuffed him. Lander told them that they didn’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens. They arrested him anyway.

The courthouse is only a few blocks away from the one where Donald Trump was convicted last year of 34 felony crimes for falsifying business records. His supporters painted the criminal-justice process as a politically motivated witch hunt. But none of them seems to mind now that masked ICE agents are lurking behind corners in the halls of justice to snatch up undocumented migrants who show up for their hearings. This was not the first time Lander had accompanied someone to the courthouse, and it wouldn’t be his last.

[Read: America’s most destructive habit]

The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Lander had been “arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.” The whole thing is on video, so anyone can see that there was no assault. Lander is about as mild-mannered a politician as they come. Matt Welch, a libertarian blogger and no fan of Lander, wrote on X that the only things Lander had ever assaulted were “Coney Island hot dogs and school-zone speed limits.” He’s the kind of old-fashioned elected official who doesn’t much exist anymore, the kind you see at public-library events or can call when your kid’s day care is shut down and know he’ll actually do something about it. A different kind of politician would have milked the attention for all it was worth. But if Brad Lander were a different kind of politician, he might be first and not third in the polls. “I did not come today expecting to be arrested,” he told reporters after being released. “But I really think I failed today, because my goal was really to get Edgardo out of the building.”

People who are used to living in a democracy tend to find it unsettling when elected officials are arrested, or thrown to the ground and handcuffed for asking questions at press conferences. They don’t like to see elected officials indicted for trying to intervene in the arrest of other elected officials. And they find it traumatizing when, as has been happening in Los Angeles and elsewhere, they see law-abiding neighbors and co-workers they’ve known for years grabbed and deported.

The question now is what Americans are going to do about it.

Los Angeles has offered one model of response. Although Trump campaigned on finding and deporting undocumented criminals, in order to hit aggressive quotas, ICE has changed its tactics and started barging into workplaces. Citizens have reported being detained simply because they look Hispanic. Residents of one Latino neighborhood recorded ICE officers driving in an armored vehicle. Many residents felt that the raids were an invasion by the president’s personal storm troopers, and marched into the streets in response.

The first groups of protesters were organized by unions, but soon, other Angelenos—of many ages and backgrounds—joined them. Most of the protesters were peaceful, chanting and marching and performing mariachi around federal buildings in downtown L.A. But others were not. They defaced buildings with graffiti and summoned Waymos, the driverless taxis, in order to set them on fire.

[Read: I am running out of ways to explain how bad this is (again)]

The right seized on a chance to reinforce the narrative that California is in the grip of dangerous radical-left activists, categorizing the protests as “violent riots.” Trump overrode Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, to deploy the National Guard, and sent in Marines to protect ICE officers. Of course, that meant only that more Angelenos came out to protest. There were arrests and rubber-coated bullets and clouds of tear gas.

I would have thought that the reaction to the protests from anyone outside the MAGAverse would have been pretty uniform. Democrats have been warning Americans for years about Trump’s descent into authoritarianism. Now it is happening—the deportations, the arrests, the president’s face on banners across government buildings, the tank parade. “Democracy is under assault right before our eyes,” Newsom said . And yet, so many Democratic leaders, public intellectuals, and members of the media seemed distinctly uneasy about the protests. Yes, they seem to say, ICE has been acting illegally, but what about the Waymos?

In The Washington Post, David Ignatius fretted about protesters waving Mexican flags and wondered if the “activists” were actually working for Trump. Democratic leaders were “worried the confrontation elevates a losing issue for the party,” The New York Times reported. Politico raised a more cynical question: “Which Party Should Be More Worried About the Politics of the LA Protests?”

Many Democrats denounced vandalism while supporting the right to protest. But the Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was harsh in his criticism of the protesters, lamenting that the random acts of violence and property damage by a few bad actors would cause Democrats to lose the “moral high ground.”

There is a time for politicians to fine-tune a message for maximum appeal. But this is a case of actual public outrage against the trampling of inalienable rights. This is not a fight for the moral high ground; this is a fight against authoritarianism.

Democrats made themselves hoarse warning against the threat to democracy Trump’s second term would present. They invoked autocracy and even fascism to stir the public to keep Trump out of office. Obviously, it didn’t work. But that threat is no longer abstract. It’s now very real. And for all the speeches imploring Americans to save democracy at the polls, the Democratic establishment seems remarkably tepid about supporting Americans defending democracy in the streets.

Yes, Democrats would have an easier time in the court of public opinion if no protester ever picked up a can of spray paint. And certainly, setting cars on fire is not good. I myself would love to have a nice, quiet summer. But I want to save our democracy more. We can’t afford to get distracted for even a moment by the excesses of a few protesters, which are vanishingly small compared with the excesses of the president of the United States.

Defending liberty is a messy business: You might remember all that tea tossed into Boston Harbor. The phrase “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” was once considered for the Great Seal of the United States. (Thomas Jefferson adopted it for his own seal at Monticello.) And yet, although the civil-rights movement is remembered for Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil disobedience, the movement included riots and armed activist groups. Violent protests, such as the Oakland riots of 1967, were a significant part of anti-draft and anti–Vietnam War movements. Their violence did not invalidate the causes those earlier movements sought to advance, any more than the property damage caused by a few activists today invalidates the claims of the great majority of peaceful protesters. Historically, protest movements are seen as “civil” only in retrospect.

For a party that you’d think would be fighting with everything they’re worth, Democrats seem remarkably focused on preserving the status quo. Even after the loss of the presidency and both houses of Congress, Democrats won’t shake anything up. Despite her popularity, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been kept out of any committee-leadership position. David Hogg, the young anti-gun activist, was ousted from his position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee after he announced his plan to back primary challengers against older Democratic incumbents in hopes of breathing new life into the party.

Earlier this week, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had directed ICE to focus on what he sees as enemy territory: Democratic-leaning cities that have “turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.” New York and L.A. are both sanctuary cities—they have passed laws pledging to limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities. We shouldn’t be surprised to see more citizens of these cities stepping up to protect their neighbors and their communities.

That is exactly what Lander was attempting to do when he was arrested. “This is part of what authoritarians do,” Lander told Democracy Now following his release. “Our challenge is to find a way to stand up for the rule of law, for due process, for people’s rights, and to do it in a way that is nonviolent and insistent, demands it, but also doesn’t help them escalate conflict.”

Lander’s clarity in this moment makes him a rarity, even in the highest levels of the Democratic Party. Last Saturday, when an estimated 5 million Americans protested the Trump administration and New Yorkers marched up Fifth Avenue, two of New York’s most powerful elected officials, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the minority leaders of the House and the Senate, were in the Hamptons, dining on bavette and chilled English pea soup to celebrate the marriage of the megadonor Alex Soros to Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide. Meanwhile, Lander was out in the streets, side by side with his constituents.

A few days later, leaving the courthouse, he assured New Yorkers that he was fine, his only lasting damage a button torn from his shirt as a result of ICE’s rough treatment. But, he warned, “the rule of law is not fine, and our constitutional democracy is not fine.”

Seven Books for People Figuring Out Their Next Move

2025-06-13T11:20:00-04:00

A well-lived life isn’t always a perfectly navigated one. Many days will evoke the feeling of choppy waters and, just as common, being completely adrift. These rudderless moments can come after joyful milestones, such as graduations and weddings, or they might be driven by unwanted changes—a breakup, for instance, or the loss of a job. Whether such pivots are expected or not, they might send us off into the unknown, make us wonder what comes next, or have us turning to others for advice. Trusted friends or mentors can help—but so can books, which can offer huge amounts of wisdom from authors we’ll never meet.

When the right book finds you at exactly the right time, it can change the course of your life. A perceptive memoir or a relatable novel can shift your perspective on the troubles you’re facing, or even illuminate a new way out of the doldrums. The seven titles below helped guide me during times of transition, and they’re great tools for anyone trying to navigate new opportunities, new places, or new phases of life.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, by Alexander Chee

This exquisitely written essay collection is, on its face, about living a writer’s life, but its true concern is self-discovery, invention, and—perhaps most important—reinvention. In these chronologically organized essays, Chee loses and finds himself again and again. As a student in a foreign-exchange program, he locates an unusual sense of belonging; later, as a queer activist in the Bay Area during the height of the AIDS crisis, he discovers his voice at a time of tremendous loss. Taken together, the essays celebrate the cumulative experiences of being alive, and, from the wise distance of Chee’s 50s, argue that detours and even missteps only make life richer. I didn’t discover this book until I was past 40, but I can imagine what a beacon it might have been to me if it had been around when I was just starting my adult life.

[Read: The toll of hiding one’s true self]

The Seat of the Soul, by Gary Zukav

Few transitions are quite as jarring as going from full-time student to working adult. After years of having school define the rules of play—where to live, what to do with your days, what to dream of—the graduate is suddenly faced with a host of independent, anxiety-provoking decisions to make, quickly. No book could be a better companion at this time than Zukav’s guide to taking control of your own life. The author takes an analytical approach to spiritual growth. First, he examines how humankind has evolved into a species aware of external power; then he moves to the possibility that we can each harness our own, unique internal power, specifically by understanding consequences and aligning our actions with our intentions. Along the way, Zukav explores ideas about human potential and karmic cycles of reincarnation. His beliefs aren’t universally appealing (though both Jay-Z and Oprah are fans), but they are sincere. Even if the reader doesn’t fully subscribe to his worldview, his end point is a place many of us wish to reach. Through developing a sincere process of considering our motivations and goals before we make decisions, we can, Zukav promises, find ourselves in more fulfilled, less anxious lives.

A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

Egan’s rightly lauded collection of linked stories found its way into my hands just as I was crawling out of a midlife mess in which I was making a lot of questionable choices. The book drops in on a highly populated world revolving around the music business, and for obvious reasons, I found myself drawn to the endearingly disastrous producer’s assistant Sasha. Paradoxically, her story gave me a tremendous sense of hope that, regardless of my mistakes in the moment, everything would be okay in the end. We first meet her as a 20-something living in New York who steals a wallet while on a date. We see her teenage years as a runaway sex worker in Europe, watch her as a misanthropic college student, and ultimately glimpse her as a content and loving mother, living in California and channeling her love of music and curiosity into her children as well as artwork of her own. Sasha’s life, like mine—and like all of ours—is full of low moments, but while those times shape us, they don’t need to define us.

[Read: The Goon Squad gets old]

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley and Malcolm X

At moments when I’ve felt lost in the world, I’ve repeatedly turned to this account of a life as a political and religious awakening. The early facts are familiar: Malcolm Little was born to a poor Black family in Nebraska. His father was suspiciously murdered and his mother committed to a psychiatric institution while he was a child. Little ventured East, got involved in organized crime, and was eventually sent to prison, where he joined the Nation of Islam and rose to become a national, and then global, face of the civil-rights movement. But X’s memoir is especially valuable for how it relates lesser-known, more personal milestones: He dwells, for instance, on the way a pilgrimage to Mecca caused a shift in his relationship with Islam; next to radical passages about embracing identity on your own terms and rejecting the conditions of an oppressor are self-interrogating studies of our boundless capacity to change both our life and our belief systems. X’s account is a fantastic and inspiring primer on examining our past steps, recognizing when they are no longer working for us, and using that sense of discomfort to find something new—and ideally more fulfilling.

The Red Car, by Marcy Dermansky

This taut, speedy novel is a delightful reminder that messy living can make for interesting lives and that, sometimes, interventions of fate are actually what get us where we need to be. Dermansky tells the story of a woman named Leah who is bequeathed a red sports car by an old co-worker. Despite having the kind of husband who makes dinner every night at home, she unexpectedly sets off, alone, from Queens to retrieve it in California. Leah’s inheritance becomes the inciting incident in a series of events that unravel her life: Her trip awakens a latent violence in her husband and an invigorating independent streak in her. Every moment with the red car seems to take her further away from what she perceived was her neatly charted course but closer, in the most exciting way, to a different kind of fulfillment.

[Read: How I demolished my life]

Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain

Often, the first steps in illustrious careers are unglamorous, modest, or even incongruous. When you’re at the beginning, you can easily feel that things aren’t moving fast enough, or begin to suspect that you’ll be stuck in that early stage forever. Bourdain got his start as a dishwasher in a watering hole in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for instance, because he was generally broke and needed beer money—but the job gave him the passion and the skills he would need to make a living as a chef in several celebrated restaurants. This clever, dishy memoir recounts that journey; it’s also what launched his lauded second act as an author and a journalist. Reading Kitchen Confidential today, with Bourdain’s legacy in mind, is a great reminder that it's possible to overcome your early circumstances, no matter how modest, if you know yourself, stay curious, and commit to learning along the way.

Sex and the City, by Candace Bushnell

Before they became the show of the same name, Bushnell’s columns in the pink pages of The New York Observer documented, with light fictionalizations, the sex and social lives of New York’s ambitious and powerful—and her own, though she frequently disguised her run-ins as the affairs of her “friend,” the character Carrie Bradshaw. In this volume of collected Observer columns, most of them focused on Carrie, Bushnell reveals herself to be a sage of power and social capital, an expert on relationships and how they can be used to build careers, accumulate social clout, and stomp on feelings. For anyone with a sense of ambition, whether you’re moving somewhere new or settling down where you already are, her work is both an entertaining read and an instruction manual for how even the most casual acquaintanceships can transform your life. Cultivating them intentionally, Bushnell implicitly argues, can turn even the biggest metropolis into a small town where your next opportunity (or at the very least a good party) is just a conversation or two away.

Inside the Exclusive, Obsessive, Surprisingly Litigious World of Luxury Fitness

2025-06-12T09:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Caroline Tompkins

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Each day, thousands of women, myself included, engage in a ritual. We flail our arms like orchestra conductors. We wiggle our rib cages. We get down on all fours and raise our knees to our ears. We roll on the floor. For up to 90 minutes, gathered together at studios or in front of our laptops, we perform The Method. We “do Tracy Anderson.”

The workout is not Pilates. It includes dance cardio, but it is not dance cardio. Though some moves are inspired by ballet, it is not the Bar Method. Anderson, who rose to fame training celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna, does not wish to be referred to as a trainer. She describes herself as a “self-made scholar” and an artist who has created a “canon of work.” The movements, she told me, are a combination of choreography (“being creative with the biomechanics of what’s possible in our body”) and science (understanding movement from “a body and energy perspective”).

Wander around the Hamptons or Tribeca and you might notice solitary men in T-shirts explaining their solitude: MY WIFE IS AT TRACY. Ordinary people like me can do prerecorded workouts online for $90 a month, but membership at one of Anderson’s studios is a status symbol, the fitness equivalent of waterfront property. Her empire includes eight locations: in Manhattan (one in Tribeca and one in Midtown), the Hamptons (one in Water Mill and one in Sag Harbor), Los Angeles (one in Studio City and one in Santa Monica), and Madrid. Her newest studio is in Bozeman, Montana.

Studio membership costs upwards of $10,000 a year. Many clients spend far more, opting for private sessions designed by the Prescription Team. If you want to train with Anderson in person, you can book a spot during “Vitality Week” (actually a long weekend) for $5,000. I know one woman—a successful entrepreneur married to an even more successful financier—who budgets $36,000 a year for her Tracy Anderson body. (For the record: She looks amazing.)

In addition to legions of rich wives and women who work in the beauty and fashion industries, fans of The Method include celebrities and entrepreneurs: Tracee Ellis Ross, Jennifer Lopez, the power Realtor Claudia Saez-Fromm, the New York City political lobbyist Suri Kasirer. When the cash-strapped developer Brandon Miller committed suicide last year, many blamed it on the pressure that he and his wife felt to keep up with their Hamptons neighbors. She did Tracy Anderson every morning.

I’ve heard rumors of powerful women threatening to blacklist people from joining the studio. I’ve heard that byzantine rules govern the hierarchy of spots near the front of the class. For years, the tabloids have been full of stories about feuds between Anderson and former trainers she believes stole her moves. She built an empire on the perception that she was a glamorous fitness doll, and now she doesn’t want to be perceived as a glamorous fitness doll. She wants to be taken seriously.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: In the age of Ozempic, what’s the point of working out?]

Anderson’s goal is to transform how people think about the mind and the body, and to prove that her workout is her own intellectual property, both an art and a science. She’s created “thousands” of moves, she told me, and “done actual studies.” She compared herself to Leonardo da Vinci, who, just like her, “used his scientific knowledge to enhance his art.”

Tracy Anderson devotees can buy clothes in her workout line, or her exact ankle weights, or Tracy Anderson magazine, which includes testimonials from famous studio members, plant-based recipes created by a team of chefs, and photos of Anderson modeling thousand-dollar designer sweaters over workout gear. Her Instagram features slick videos of Tracy Anderson, the trainer, performing Tracy Anderson, The Method, while wearing Tracy Anderson, the brand. Yet there is very little of Tracy Anderson, the person, available. She existed for me—as she does for so many others—in her workout videos as a silent body in motion, upon which we could project our feelings about our own bodies.

And then, one day last November, I came face-to-face with her. This was no ordinary celebrity sighting. For years, I’d been emulating this woman’s every move. When she wiggled, I wiggled. When she shook her hips, I shook my hips. When she went into a full split and rolled backwards onto the floor before scissoring her legs in the air, I … waited for the next exercise.

Anderson greeted me at the door of her house in Brentwood, California, followed by a pack of beautiful dogs, including a cavapoo, standard poodles, and another breed I couldn’t place. It turned out to be the product of the male cavapoo and a female poodle that had fallen “madly in love,” according to Anderson. When they “anatomically could not express themselves to their fullest ability,” Anderson asked science to step in. “They deserve to be helped because they were trying so hard to procreate that his, like, his male parts were bleeding.” The poodle was artificially inseminated, and they went on to have eight puppies.

Her way of speaking—warm and Midwest-earnest—makes even something as outrageous as doggy IVF seem like a gesture of compassion. In that moment, all I felt was happiness for those dogs. Shouldn’t we all be able to express our love?

Anderson grew up on a small ranch in Noblesville, Indiana, surrounded by goats, geese, and turkeys. Her mother ran a dance studio. Her father worked in his family’s furniture business, but was also a poet and chess enthusiast. Anderson described the household as “sometimes middle-class, sometimes not.” One day she’d be told she could buy new school clothes; the next, she’d be told the family was out of money and she’d have to return them. Her parents had dueling ambitions for their daughter. Because she was good at chess, her father imagined her as a future lawyer. But because she excelled at dance, her mother imagined her on Broadway. For a time, her mother’s plan won out.

At 18, she moved to New York to study at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. It was the early ’90s. She found a job at the Gap and lived on $5 ATM withdrawals and H&H bagels with mustard and tomato because she couldn’t afford turkey. Just 5 feet tall, Anderson didn’t have the “dancer’s body” she was told she needed. She dieted, considered taking up smoking, and eventually, demoralized, left school.

She got engaged to the former NBA player and Hoosier legend Eric Anderson, whom she had met while playing a cheerleader in the movie Blue Chips. In a few years, they were married; living in Indiana with their son, Sam; and running a facility for youth sports and dance. They were young and inexperienced, and fell behind on rent and closed the facility. They opened a Pilates studio, then closed that too. In February 2005, judges ordered the Andersons to pay $334,375 in unpaid bills. In April, they filed for bankruptcy.

But Anderson also co-owned another studio that had a branch in Los Angeles, and she was developing her theories around fitness. She had long been fascinated by Olympians, such as swimmers and gymnasts, whose physiques were shaped by the repetitive motions of their sports, and wondered if she could design a series of movements to shape the dancer’s body that had long evaded her. After what she describes as a period of research and study, she came up with a program to strengthen the major muscle groups while working smaller “accessory” muscles through a series of repetitive rotations and movements. In L.A., she introduced clients to a piece of modified Pilates equipment she called the Hybrid Body Reformer. One of these clients happened to be the wife of Gwyneth Paltrow’s agent at the time, Anderson told me. Paltrow, who’d recently had a baby, complimented the woman on her body. When Anderson tells her own story, this is usually where she begins.

Anderson has been famous since 2008. That year, in London, paparazzi photographed her with Madonna and Paltrow, both in sweaty workout gear. Suddenly, she was not just a trainer to the stars but the trainer to the stars. These were the glory days of celebrity magazines and gossip blogs, and Anderson was ubiquitous, proselytizing about how to get J.Lo’s butt or Gwyneth’s … anything. “I’m giving you Gwyneth’s legs right now,” she told a beauty reporter during a workout. “Trim and Trimmer!” a headline read.

In 2008, Paltrow invested in Anderson’s business. Anderson started planning another studio in New York and headed to London, to train and tour with Madonna. That same year, she and Eric divorced, and she released the Tracy Anderson Method: Mat Workout DVD, which laid out her fully developed theories for the first time.

Tracy Anderson and Gwyneth Paltrow at a 2019 event in London for Paltrow’s wellness and lifestyle company, Goop (Darren Gerrish / Getty)

“Genetically, we are all shaped differently, and we all have our own set of problem areas,” she says in the introduction. “The good news is it’s completely possible to reengineer your muscular structure any way you want”: to get “teeny tiny” arms and “feminine” abs and thighs without “bulking.” Central to the workout was silent instruction—she demonstrates the moves without speaking—and a near-torturous number of reps with very, very light weights.

The celebrity-lifestyle-obsessed late aughts were an ideal environment for what Anderson was selling. Fixating on “problem areas” was seen not as self-loathing, but as self-empowerment. Talking explicitly about working hard just to get skinny sounds awkward now that we live in an era that celebrates wellness and body positivity. Anderson seems to regret her role in the 2000s skinny-industrial complex, when she would tell people, “Let’s go; you can get teeny tiny!” But she said she had no choice: “I had to contribute to it too, or else nobody would do my workout.” Besides, “you can’t change a culture before it’s ready.”

Now any one of Anderson’s clients could be on Ozempic or Wegovy if she wanted to, and Anderson has to offer something beyond thinness. But although the way she talks about the moves has changed, the moves themselves have not.

Clients go to her because they “know that their body’s going to look the best that it can look,” she told me. “And they’re not going to go anywhere else, because they know how smart I am.”

Anderson is 50, a thrice-married mother of two. She doesn’t like to talk about hard times, but she’s definitely had them. Eric Anderson died in 2018 of a heart attack. “He was such an incredible human being and he was such an incredible father,” she told me. She said she always thought they might end up back together someday. Having to tell Sam that his father was dead was “the worst moment of my actual entire life.”

Two years after Eric died, during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the father of Anderson’s younger child, Penelope, died too, of a brain tumor. “I did not have the relationship with Penny’s dad that I had with Eric,” she told me. But she took Penelope to see him before he died, and thanked him for the gift of their daughter: “Penny’s part of both of us. And she’s extraordinary.”

When I pressed her to say more about what she’d learned from her experiences of loss, she told me she’d become “very understanding of people’s journeys”—even “the people that steal from me.” She said she always asks herself, “Gosh, what happened to them as a child? ”

The fact that Anderson has experienced death and divorce, debt and failure, is one reason I was drawn to her. I could relate. I divorced as a young woman, and I ran a small business through the Great Recession, and I was sick to my stomach for years worrying about the possibility of bankruptcy. Starting a business, losing a business, starting a new one—this is what entrepreneurs do. I also knew from experience that if you’ve spent years fighting for your business’s survival, you don’t take kindly to anyone you see as stepping on your turf.

I came to Tracy Anderson sometime in 2009 or 2010. My grandfather, who’d raised me, had just died, and I had been working frantically to save my company. In the process there had been a lot of stress eating and crying on my sofa, and the resulting weight gain created a new wave of sadness as I felt lost inside myself and my grief. I had seen Anderson in celebrity magazines and turned to one of her DVDs.

The Method made me thinner. But it also made me feel incredible. The choreography was so unusual—and the work so intense—that it required my full concentration, which eased my anxiety and helped me feel present in my body. Unlike yoga, where you were constantly being instructed, or fitness classes, where you were being “motivated,” Anderson didn’t talk at all, something I found incredibly soothing.

I have strayed over the years. I craved the dark, loud music of SoulCycle; I wanted to try running a marathon. I was making a TV show and was so sedentary, for so long, I developed sciatica and a slipped disk. But I’ve always come back to Tracy Anderson. (“Most of them always come back,” she told me.)

[Read: The workout that actually makes me happy]

Anderson herself interested me, but I was hardly a member of the #TAmily, as fans have branded themselves online. (The hashtag is shared, a bit awkwardly, by the Tamil diaspora.) You’ll see gushing comments about how Anderson changes women’s lives, or questions about what brand of sneakers she’s wearing. “What a gift to learn from you,” one fan wrote on Instagram. “You talk to us like that beautiful sister that loves you so much and wants the very best for you,” wrote another.

Anderson says she doesn’t want to be a guru. Of the women who credit her with changing their lives, she said: “No, no, no, no, no. You don’t have me to thank; you have you to thank.” But in many ways, she encourages her clients’ feelings of intimacy. Occasionally, she’ll get on Zooms with dozens of studio members that are then preserved in a section of her website called “Conversations.” Women ask Anderson for advice on their diets and workouts and lives, but for a lot of the time, Anderson simply listens. If her Instagram videos are slickly produced, these calls are remarkably DIY. And long. One call last year ran for five hours.

Other aspects of the business remain frustratingly (or charmingly) mom-and-pop. Products—such as Kenko, four-pound minimalist weights made of Canadian maple—appear with great fanfare and then are rarely spoken of again. Members who pay (a lot!) to livestream classes often complain that they start late. Had someone forgotten to turn on the camera?

Many of Anderson’s peers have been bought out by wealthy corporations or private-equity firms. Barry’s (formerly Barry’s Bootcamp) was co-founded by Barry Jay in 1998 and is now owned by Princeton Equity Group, among others. SoulCycle was founded in 2006 by a spin instructor, Ruth Zukerman, and two of her clients before it was acquired by Equinox in 2011. Even CrossFit—known for its spartan gyms—was taken over by Berkshire Partners.

Anderson at her home on Long Island, New York, March 2025 (Caroline Tompkins for The Atlantic)

“To me, being bought someday by private equity is not in my—I don’t even hold space for that,” Anderson told me. “I’ve had people with their M.B.A.s mess up my business,” she said. “Fancy educations—Wharton on there, Stanford on there, Harvard on there.” But they didn’t have the right mindset, she said. Was she a control freak? “I’ll tell you what I was,” she replied. “I was a wild fucking stallion.”

Now she is married to Chris Asplundh, a scion of the Pennsylvania-based billion-dollar tree-trimming empire Asplundh Tree Expert. (Mehmet Oz is a relative through marriage; he used his in-laws’ address for his voter registration before his failed bid for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat.) Asplundh bought out Anderson’s other investors. “This is a family business now,” she told me.

Anderson’s employees describe themselves as a family, too. Steven Beltrani, the company’s president, walked her down the aisle when she married Asplundh. Employees’ Instagram accounts are full of loving posts about one another. But every family has its fissures.

Megan Roup was hired to work for Anderson in 2011. Roup was a member of the #TAmily for six years—schooled in The Method and given access to training manuals and Anderson’s celebrity contacts. All of these surely proved valuable when Roup left and opened the Sculpt Society, a mostly online fitness class.

Roup quickly amassed many clients, some of whom—including the Victoria’s Secret model Shanina Shaik—had formerly trained with Anderson. When the pandemic forced fitness online, more people found their way to Roup. Anyone familiar with Anderson would recognize many of her signature moves in Roup’s workouts. Roup’s website stated that she had “seen something missing in the fitness industry,” and sought to fill this void. Anderson saw contractual violation and theft—and the latest in a long string of betrayals.

For nearly as long as Anderson has been famous, she has worried about her former trainers stealing her moves and clients. For good reason. By 2014, so many Anderson apostates were operating in New York City alone that one blogger took the trouble to rate them according to their “Level of Tracy-ness.” Anderson describes herself as “low conflict.” But most anyone who does her workouts and listens to the chats she delivers after class will be familiar with her bitterness toward the “rip-off trainers” who keep “stealing” her work. The frustration, at times, sounds more like paranoia.

Anderson didn’t name names publicly, but the tabloids were happy to report on her scuffles: The Daily Mail, for example, quoted an anonymous source saying that Nicole Winhoffer, who launched a DVD collection with Madonna’s backing, was “overweight” before she started training with Anderson, and that she didn’t “understand the reasons behind the moves, just the motions.”

In 2022, Anderson brought a lawsuit against Roup and her business through her parent company, Tracy Anderson Mind and Body, for breach of contract and copyright infringement, among other claims. Anderson attributed her new aggressiveness toward Roup to finding “my voice,” and the wisdom she’d gained in her 40s. Also likely helpful was the cash infusion her new husband offered the business.

But by bringing the case to court, Anderson has subjected her own workout to new scrutiny. When I set out to profile one of the most famous women in fitness, I never imagined I would have to learn so much about copyright law. Yet here we are. Copyright is designed to protect creative expression. Performance choreography is considered creative expression and has been protected by copyright law since the 1970s. Physical fitness is not. In their defense, Roup and her team relied on a copyright-infringement case brought against rival studios by Bikram Choudhury, the inventor of a series of yoga poses performed in a hot room. The court had dismissed Choudhury’s case on the rationale that the poses involved were not creative art, but “functional” movement.

A federal judge in California tossed out Anderson’s copyright claim for similar reasons. Anderson calls her program a “method,” the judge pointed out, and methods are exempt from creative-copyright protection. In addition, he wrote, Anderson says her Method is the result of research and markets it as “designed for the purpose of improving clients’ fitness and health.” Functional movements, in other words, just like Choudhury’s.

Anderson ultimately settled with Roup on the breach-of-contract count for an undisclosed amount, but she is appealing the copyright decision. Amanda Barkin, an IP attorney at FKKS in New York who has been observing the case, told me that Anderson’s accusations will be hard to prove. Roup is “allegedly incorporating these choreography and other elements from The Method that she learned through, like, the confidential employee handbook,” Barkin told me, but those moves are also “all over TikTok, so I don’t know how confidential a lot of it is.”

I wondered, when speaking with Barkin and reading the court summation, if I detected a whiff of dismissal. At the end of the day, these are just women’s workouts—things of vanity—so what’s the big deal? A male attorney, writing about the case on the FKKS blog in 2023, noted that although Anderson faced an uphill battle, at least she had the glutes for it.

In a statement, Roup’s lawyer, Nathaniel Bach, called Anderson’s lawsuit “ill-conceived and frivolous” and insisted that Roup had “developed The Sculpt Society on her own.” But the judge’s decision to toss out the copyright claim, he wrote, was “a significant victory both for Megan and the whole fitness industry, as the Court’s rulings reaffirm that no one can claim ownership over physical exercise or dance cardio.”

Whether or not some of Roup’s moves are based on Anderson’s Method, the big question is if anyone can invent and own a fitness move in the first place. Evan Breed was a professional dancer for 10 years before she became one of Anderson’s master trainers. She told me she could understand why Anderson would object to someone “copying exactly the choreography of her dance cardio.” But that doesn’t apply to the more basic movements—the arm workouts and the muscular-structure work done on the mat. Dancers like her—and like Anderson and Roup—“grew up doing those rib isolations, moving your ribs side to side, moving the hips side to side.” The arm exercises, she said, are essentially what you do while warming up for a ballet class.

Anderson isolated the movements and shifted them down to a mat. But they did not come out of nowhere. Perhaps those Anderson accuses of theft feel they’re only doing what she did herself, and continuing her practice of reinterpretation.

Why, I wondered, did Anderson keep emphasizing her workout as a research-driven method, if that was exactly what was going to hurt her copyright case? Why did she insist on having it both ways? Maybe it was that original tension—between the Broadway chorus girl and the sharp attorney—playing out all over again.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about a trainer arguing that their program is more effective than others, but Anderson’s emphasis on her own research is notable. She started out with insights, she said, but she wanted proof. And so, in 2001, she began what she frequently refers to as “the study” or her “clinical study,” gathering “five years of quantitative and qualitative data from 150 women.”

Anderson leads a workout at her Water Mill, New York, studio employing her new HeartStones weights. (Caroline Tompkins for The Atlantic)

She recruited mothers who would drop their kids off at the Indiana youth center that she and Eric opened, along with other women, and provided them with choreography to shrink their problem areas. After the center shut down, she told me, she kept following up with the same women: For five years, every 10 days she would measure them in more than 28 different places and provide them with new moves. What she discovered in that process, she says, is the foundation of her Method.

Anderson insists that clients are coming to her because of this research. And it’s why she doesn’t feel bad about charging so much for it.

And yet the study is not, of course, an actual clinical study—it was not performed by independent researchers and was not submitted for peer review at an academic journal. When I followed up with Beltrani, the president, to ask if Anderson could share the data with me, he told me they were proprietary.

Even so, Anderson argues that only the close-minded would ignore her findings because she’s an outsider to the scientific establishment. What bothers her most is the idea that others are copying her moves without properly understanding the science. “To create my life’s work has taken so much research, so much focus, so many people believing in me financially. For me to be able to test, experiment, create, and do this, and for anybody, especially a woman, to come in, work for me, learn from me, leave, take me off their résumé, and steal from me?” Anderson’s voice was full of passion as she called this “morally bankrupt.”

Although Anderson wouldn’t send me any of her data, she said, when pressed, that they included records in notebooks and Polaroid shots. She also agreed to put me in touch with one of the women she’d trained in the early days of her career.

Julie McComb is a mom and teacher with a bakery business in Westfield, Indiana, and she’s remained friendly with Anderson ever since she started training with her in the mid-2000s. Back then, McComb was new to the area, and Anderson was Indiana famous.

Chatting with her dentist during an appointment one day, McComb mentioned that she liked to work out. The dentist said, “I have to tell you about this girl. She’s amazing. She’s fabulous. She’s the best in the area.” She has “this whole philosophy,” the dentist added, “and she’s done all this research.”

“I remember her lifting my shirt up,” McComb told me, and Anderson saying, “ ‘Oh, we’re going to take care of this, and we’re going to do this, and we’re going to shrink this in, and get this smaller,’ and her hands were all over my body.” McComb started to laugh, she told me, because “my problem areas were always—even when I was in high school—the sides of my hips. I said, ‘Tracy, there’s nothing we can do about this.’ ”

But Anderson made her personalized workout routines every couple of weeks, and she used a tape measure to track her progress, “and Tracy literally took me from a size eight to a size zero.”

When McComb became pregnant with her son, she did The Method all through the pregnancy. Anderson recommended her own ob-gyn. It was such an incredibly easy birth, in McComb’s telling, that she looked up at the doctor, surprised that it was over already. “He laughed,” she told me. “And he says, ‘Julie, that’s because you’ve been working out with Tracy Anderson.’ ”

McComb had known that Anderson was gathering research but wasn’t aware that the measurements she took from her were part of the “study” she’s been talking about ever since. But she didn’t seem to mind. She told me she’d had a minor stroke and some surgeries for a heart arrhythmia a few years back, and had largely stopped exercising. She’d gotten back into The Method after that, but then dropped off again. She would have liked to do online workouts, but she and her family had moved into a smaller house and there wasn’t enough space. She feels bad about gaining weight, she told me, but what she truly misses is how The Method made her feel, and “the environment and the sisterhood that we all had when we were there.”

She said, “It was more than a workout.”

For months leading up to my visit to Brentwood, Anderson had been promoting her latest product, HeartStones—a set of 2.8-pound beveled spheres beset with a circle of rose quartz that were meant to be lifted through a series of slow-burn, tai chi–like movements. They were made of iron, and they were going for $375. I could not imagine why even the most devoted of devotees would buy them. “Sis you have lost your damn mind,” read one comment on Instagram. I hoped to ask Anderson about the HeartStones during our meeting.

But first we talked about climate change, and inequality, and the reelection of Donald Trump. Anderson rarely discusses politics publicly. She knows that she serves women on both sides of the partisan divide. When she posted on Instagram about supporting Kamala Harris last fall, one angry user wrote on her website that Anderson had “abused her position,” adding that she was supposed to be “a trainer, not a guru.”

But Anderson sees politics as a wellness issue. “I cannot stand the hate. I cannot stand the division,” she told me. “That is so unhealthy for us.” Over lunch (a vegan fried-green-tomato salad) she talked about “how our nervous systems as women have been epigenetically so compromised” by living in a “system that is so corrupt and unfair.” Then we had to pause: A package from Goop had been delivered in the mail.

She went on to talk about how she had “creatively unlocked” women and enabled them to learn to “hear their bodies” and their “nervous systems” so that, when a woman’s husband asks, “What’s for dinner tonight, honey?” she can say: “Fuck you. Get your own fucking dinner.” She also expressed a wish that she could make her workouts more accessible to “people that are making a difference, like teachers, you know what I mean? Nurses, people who are underpaid and making a difference? They need it.” (She didn’t offer any specifics, however, for how she might do this.)

We talked, at last, about the HeartStones: She recommends that anyone who wants to lose weight start with the HeartStones, “because they have to hear their body.” They have to stop hating their bodies, their metabolism, “the fact that exercise might have been challenging for them.” If they hate themselves, they will “always feel miserable. They will not feel better even if they’re thinner.” It seemed like sound advice, though I still had no idea how the weights themselves were supposed to achieve these goals. I think she could tell I was skeptical.

When it was time for me to leave, Anderson packed up some gluten-free chocolate cake that her chef had made and some flowers that had been on the table and—oh, also, why not throw these in?—a set of HeartStones from her personal stash. She asked her husband to walk me to my car, and it was only on the drive home that I realized I’d just accepted a gift of significant value from the subject of a profile—something forbidden by the ethical codes of journalism. I had to return the HeartStones! But this was Los Angeles; I was already on the 405—I couldn’t just turn around. I decided that I would mail them back.

But not before I tried them. I wanted to dismiss them as silly and frivolous and overpriced. They certainly didn’t transform how I think about myself or my metabolism. But holding them had the soothing quality of a weighted blanket; the movements slowed my breathing and opened my chest and back. When friends came over, I would show them the HeartStones, tell them the price, watch them laugh, and then make them hold them. I’d show them a few movements. They’d mimic me mimicking Tracy. No one wanted to give them back. Including me: I forked over the money to keep my weights.

Like much of what Anderson is selling, the HeartStones remain a mystery to me. If they have any grounding in science, I have no idea what it is. But they feel nice, and my arms look better.

Anderson is still appealing the case against Roup, though when we spoke a few months ago, she expressed some doubts. She didn’t really care about Roup, she told me; she cared about fighting a system that tries to “narrow artists.” What if, she suggested, “I want to make a Broadway show about what I’m doing?” Then she could copyright the products of her creative genius, and no one could rip off her moves anymore.

I’m still not sure if she was kidding.

This article appears in the July 2025 print edition with the headline “The Tracy Anderson Way.”

Diddy’s Defenders

2025-05-29T08:00:00-04:00

America is riveted by the Diddy trial for many reasons: celebrity, kink, drugs, violence, guns, baby oil. You can almost hear Ryan Murphy calling FX now to pitch American Crime Story: Diddy Do It? Influencers are staking out the courthouse, live-updating X with witnesses’ testimony, and providing TikTok updates that one creator calls “Diddy-lations.” And people are eating it up.

Diddy—whose legal name is Sean Combs—has pleaded not guilty to the charges he faces of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking. Many Americans have taken to the comment sections to offer their full-throated belief in his innocence. Despite the video evidence of domestic violence, the photos of Combs’s guns with serial numbers removed, and the multiple witnesses testifying that Combs threatened to kill them, this group insists that Diddy’s biggest sin is nothing more than being a hypermasculine celebrity with “libertine” sexual tastes.

The trial is estimated to take eight to 10 weeks; we’ve made it through just two. No one can predict the outcome. But why do so many men—and a surprising number of women—feel the need to defend this man? The jury has already watched the now-infamous surveillance footage of Combs dragging Cassie Ventura, the prosecution’s star witness, by the collar of her sweatshirt through a hotel—and that’s not even one of the things he’s on trial for.

I can’t look away from the Diddy trial, because it feels like the trial not of one man, but of something much larger. The jury—made up of eight men and four women—will decide whether to convict Combs, but the broader culture, in its response to this trial, is deciding whether #MeToo was a movement or a moment.

[Sophie Gilbert: The movement of #MeToo]

At the center of the trial is the question of coercion. Did Ventura participate in hundreds of drug-fueled sexual encounters with strangers for Combs, who liked to watch, because she enjoyed them? Or did Combs use his power over her to force her? When they met, she was 19, an eager and ambitious singer. He was 17 years older, and arguably the most powerful man in the music industry. His label, Bad Boy, signed her to a highly unusual, long-term 10-album deal. He was her boss and, soon, her boyfriend. The evidence presented by both sides serves as a Rorschach test. How you see it says a lot about how the #MeToo movement did—or did not—alter your vision.

The facts seem clear. Ventura was a legal adult, but barely, when her career was effectively handed over to Combs in 2006. Today, musical artists such as Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter invent their own persona. But in the mid-2000s, many artists were strictly controlled by their labels. Particularly when the artists were women. The people paying the bills didn’t just dictate what these women sounded like—they dictated their hair color, their weight. You have to watch only one episode of Combs’s MTV show Making the Band to get a taste of the climate he created. He made artists compete in singing battles to earn a bed to sleep in and ordered them to walk miles from Manhattan to Brooklyn to get him a specific slice of cheesecake. Behind the scenes, things were worse. One singer said Diddy controlled every aspect of her appearance “down to my toenails.”

Sure, maybe Ventura loved him. But sometimes hostages fall in love with their captors. Even the ones who beat them. Sure, women have an array of sexual tastes, just like men. But it’s hard to imagine a woman enjoying having intercourse while, as Ventura said in her testimony, suffering from a painful urinary tract infection. It’s hard to imagine feeling aroused after your partner threw a glass bottle at you, as a male sex worker said he witnessed Combs do to Ventura. And when people are having a consensual good time, they don’t usually try to sneak out of the room, barefoot—as Ventura was seen doing in the hotel surveillance footage—only for their partner to catch them, grab them by the back of the neck, throw them to the ground, and kick them. Repeatedly. Ventura said that the sex acts made her feel “worthless.” But, as the video showed, attempting to extract herself came with a price.

It’s been almost eight years since the Harvey Weinstein story broke and the #MeToo movement forced a reassessment of abuse and power. In the future, I remember thinking, we will not just speak out against bad actors; we will refuse to participate in the systems that protected them. Going forward, everyone would understand that, in a world of power imbalances, the difference between what a woman chooses and what happens to her can be very big indeed.

[Danielle Bernstein: #MeToo has changed the world—except in court]

Instead, something else happened over the subsequent years. American women have seen our rights eroded and our access to lifesaving health care curbed. An accused sexual abuser is president of the United States, and his administration is hard at work on schemes to persuade more women to stay home and have kids. Many men have fought hard to undermine the progress of the #MeToo movement. Like Combs running after Ventura in that video, they have tried to drag women back into the past, where they could do as they liked.

And lately, they have been having a lot of success.

What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get

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

Recently, I accidentally overdrew my checking account. That hadn’t happened to me in years—the last time was in 2008, when I was running a small business with no safety net in the middle of a financial crisis. Back then, an overdrawn account meant eating canned soup and borrowing cash from friends only slightly better off than me. This time, I didn’t need to worry—I was able to move money from a different account. And yet all the old feelings—heart palpitations, the seizure of reason in my brain—came right back again.

I have one of those wearable devices that monitors my heart rate, sleep quality, activity level, and calories burned. Mine is called an Oura ring, and at the end of the day, it told me what I already knew: I had been “unusually stressed.” When this happens, the device asks you to log the source of your stress. I scrolled through the wide array of options—diarrhea, difficulty concentrating, erectile dysfunction, emergency contraceptives. I could not find “financial issues,” or anything remotely related to money, listed.

According to a poll from the American Psychiatric Association, financial issues are the No. 1 cause of anxiety for Americans: 58 percent say they are very or somewhat anxious about money. How, I wondered, was it possible that this had not occurred to a single engineer at Oura?

For all of the racial, gender, and sexual reckonings that America has undergone over the past decade, we have yet to confront the persistent blindness and stigma around class. When people struggle to understand the backlash against elite universities, or the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, or the fact that more and more Americans are turning away from mainstream media, this is why.

America is not just suffering from a wealth gap; America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a “comfort class.” These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant.

Take, for instance, those lawmakers desperately workshopping messages to working-class folks: More than half of congressional representatives are millionaires. In academia, universities are steered by college presidents—many of whom are paid millions of dollars a year—and governed by boards of trustees made up largely of multimillionaires, corporate CEOs, and multimillionaire corporate CEOs. (I know because I serve on one of these boards.) Once, a working-class college dropout like Jimmy Breslin could stumble into a newsroom and go on to win the Pulitzer Prize; today, there’s a vanishingly small chance he’d make it past security. A 2018 survey of elite newsrooms found that 65 percent of summer interns had attended top-tier colleges.

College attainment is more than a matter of educational status; it is also a marker of class comfort. Seventy percent of people who have at least one parent with a bachelor’s degree also have a bachelor’s degree themselves. These graduates out-earn and hold more wealth than their first-generation college peers. At elite schools, about one in seven students comes from a family in the top 1 percent of earners. Graduates of elite colleges comprise the majority of what a study in Nature labeled “extraordinary achievers”: elected officials, Fortune 500 CEOs, Forbes’s “most powerful,” and best-selling authors.

What we have is a compounded problem, in which people with generational wealth pull the levers on a society that they don’t understand. Whether corporate policies or social welfare or college financial aid, nearly every aspect of society has been designed by people unfamiliar with not only the experience of living in poverty but the experience of living paycheck to paycheck—a circumstance that, Bank of America data shows, a quarter of Americans know well.

The dissonance between the way the powerful think and how the rest of America lives is creating a lot of chaos. It can be seen in the rejection of DEI and “woke-ism”—which is about racism, yes, but also about the imposition of the social mores of an elite class. It can be seen above all in the rise of Donald Trump, who won again in part because he—unlike Democrats—didn’t dismiss the “vibecession” but exploited it by addressing what people were feeling: stressed about the price of eggs.

These phenomena might not be rational. But anxiety isn’t rational. Studies have found that working through a challenging financial time can a ffe ct one’s brain as much as missing an entire night’s sleep, or a loss of 13 IQ points. Financial anxiety is linked with higher rates of depression and psychological distress, which can manifest in physical health issues such as heart disease and reduced immune response. The feeling of scarcity can also affect people’s ability to make sound decisions and retain information—not helpful when you can’t afford the late fee on a bill. In short, the haves are literally in a different head space than the have-nots.

Exacerbating this problem is widespread class dysmorphia. One reason so many well-off Americans feel capable of opining about less well-off Americans is because they don’t realize that they are, in fact, well-off in the first place. The explosion of the American billionaire class—from 272 individuals in 2001 to 813 in 2024, according to Forbes—has made millionaires feel relatively poor. There are more of them too. The number of Americans worth $30 million or more grew by 7.5 percent in 2023 alone. And still, according to a survey of millionaires done that year, two-thirds of them did not consider themselves wealthy.

Here’s the broader situation: 30 percent of American households are classified by Pew as low income, and 19 percent are upper income. And yet a 2024 Gallup survey found that only 12 percent of Americans identified themselves as “lower class” and just 2 percent as “upper class.” In short: No one wants to be perceived as poor, and no one rich ever feels rich enough.

As a result, the very term middle class has become a meaningless catchall for a disparate range of lived financial experiences. No wonder so much policy and rhetoric geared toward this group fails to stick. Who are these policies actually for? And what theoretical problems do they aim to address? Those of the third-generation college-educated social worker, whose parents helped her with a down payment on a house? Or those of the first-gen woman with student loans who holds the same job and lives in a rental apartment? Technically they earn the same wage and both likely see themselves as middle class, but they have extremely different lives because only one is a member of the comfort class.

Members of the comfort class are not necessarily wealthy. Perhaps one day they will earn or inherit sums that will put them in that category. But wealth is not the marker of the comfort class. Security is. An emergency expense—say a $1,200 medical bill—would send most Americans into a fiscal tailspin; for the comfort class, a text to Mom and Dad can render “emergencies” nonexistent.

This helps explain why the comfort class tends to vote differently. Someone who feels they don’t fundamentally need to worry about money if things go south will be more willing to vote on their values—issues like democratic norms or reproductive rights—than someone whose week-to-week concern is how inflation affects her grocery budget.

Many things drove voters to Trump, including xenophobia, transphobia, and racism. But the feeling that the Democratic Party had been hijacked by the comfort class was one of them. I recently saw—and admittedly laughed at—a meme showing a group of women from The Handmaid’s Tale. The text read: “I know, I know, but I thought he would bring down the price of eggs.”

To many Americans, classism is the last socially acceptable prejudice. It’s not hard to understand the resentment of a working-class person who sees Democrats as careful to use the right pronouns and acknowledge that we live on stolen Indigenous land while happily mocking people for worrying about putting food on the table.

Even when Americans of different classes are in close proximity, they tend to talk past one another. I still remember, my freshman year of college, coming back to my dorm to discover that my roommate had eaten the leftovers I’d saved from dinner the night before. I flew into a rage, and she had no idea why. She came from a household where leftovers were disposable. From her perspective, all she’d done was have a harmless drunken snack. From my perspective, she’d eaten my next meal, and I couldn’t afford another one.

I move in circles now where everyone’s zip code and alma mater alludes to a homogeneity of experience, but when I start discussing policy or politics with people—be they on the left or the right—I often feel that invisible gap yawn between us.

Just the other day, in honor of Indie Bookstore Day, I was asked to share a childhood memory of an independent bookstore. But I did not have a childhood memory of an independent bookstore. I grew up going to the library because there was no bookstore—independent or otherwise—in my blue-collar Brooklyn neighborhood. I didn’t go to a bookstore until I was a teenager, roaming Manhattan with my friends. For a moment, I felt embarrassed. But then I remembered how much unexamined presumption was behind the question. Most authors come from the comfort class, raised in homes full of books in quaint neighborhoods with local bookstores.

That’s a harmless example. But in the past eight weeks, life for working-class Americans has deteriorated in real ways. Millions of senior citizens are nail-biting about their Social Security benefits. People are worried for their jobs. The costs of eggs, orange juice, and utilities are on the rise. Mortgages and medical bills need to be paid. Rents will be due. Blood pressures will spike; judgments will be clouded; debts will no doubt be incurred. And the pundits and politicians, on all sides, will watch it from a safe, comfortable distance.

Students Yelled at Me. I’m Fine.

2025-04-01T15:59:00-04:00

Updated at 5:20 p.m. ET on April 1, 2025

One day this fall, while on campus at Brown University, I was met by two students—cellphones raised, cameras recording. They had spun off from a larger group protesting Brown’s decision not to divest from Israel. They recognized me as a trustee of the university and saw an opportunity to take me to task. They followed me for perhaps a block or two, calling me a hypocrite.

For at least one of the students, the war in Gaza was not some cause du jour that he’d picked up from TikTok. He has Palestinian relatives on the ground. I knew this because I’d spoken with him before. That time, he was passionate but measured. Now, in protest mode, he was angry. I’m sure he felt betrayed by the decision, and I was one of the only people he could hold—at least verbally—accountable.

Understandably, some of my colleagues who were singled out by protesters were more rattled by the experience. But in my view, these were students in America doing what students in America should do: questioning authority (in this case, me) and using their rights to free speech and free assembly to engage with issues they are passionate about.

That is not to say I didn’t find this period of campus unrest unpleasant or this particular incident annoying. No one likes to be called a hypocrite and accused of being indifferent to human suffering. And certainly no one wants to be shouted at. But I never for a moment felt that these students were a threat to me, let alone to America’s national security.

And yet, that is the justification the United States government is offering for its decision to revoke the visas and green cards of international students who have spoken out against the war in Gaza.

When I read about the detention of Rümeysa Öztürk, the first thing I thought is that she must have been very hungry. The Tufts University doctoral student had been fasting since dawn when a group of hooded and masked plainclothes officers surrounded her near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts. I imagine that the friends who were planning to host her for iftar that evening were merrily preparing their table, oblivious that Öztürk had been seized in the street, handcuffed like a criminal, and put inside the back of an unmarked car in what looked, to passersby, like “a kidnapping.” Perhaps, when Öztürk didn’t respond to their texts, the friends—all hungry themselves—began without her. Their concern must have curdled into fear as the night wore on.

Öztürk’s friends and colleagues were shocked when they learned what had happened. They must have known, of course, about the detentions of students at other universities that began in early March with the seizure of Mahmoud Khalil from his New York City apartment. Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and a green-card holder born in a refugee enclave in Syria, was a pro-Palestinian activist and one of the organizers of a march where some attendees praised Hamas. Although the Trump administration has not accused Khalil of any crime, it has portrayed him as a radical terrorist.

But Öztürk was different. “The only thing I know of that Rümeysa’s organized,” one of her friends told reporters, “was a Thanksgiving potluck.” No one seemed more stunned than Öztürk herself, who was chatting on the phone with her mother when the officers swarmed.

Undocumented immigrants are used to living in fear of ICE knocking on their door. But Öztürk is not undocumented. She is one of the roughly 1 million international students studying in the United States this academic year. She came from Turkey at the invitation of an American university, an invitation made possible by the State Department through the student-visa program. As long as Öztürk stayed out of legal trouble (which she had) and remained enrolled in school full-time (which she had), she had no reason to expect that she could be removed from the life she had been building here.

Öztürk was apparently detained because she co-wrote an op-ed for The Tufts Daily last year. When a reporter asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio why Öztürk’s visa was revoked, he replied that if a student applying for a visa said up front “that the reason you’re coming is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa.” If a student took part in “that sort of activity” once here, he said, the government has the “right to remove you.” He added, “We’re looking every day for these lunatics.”

No one has alleged that Öztürk vandalized or took over any buildings. Did the op-ed create a ruckus? It urged the administration to take more seriously a vote from the student senate calling on the university to divest from Israel. In the context of the Israel-Palestine discourse of spring 2024, the op-ed is civility at its finest. In the context of op-eds, it is a snooze.

Rubio has been leaning on a Cold War–era law that he says allows him to personally revoke green cards and visas. The law refers to immigrants whose presence in this country the government has “reasonable grounds” to believe could “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” A former head of America’s Immigration Lawyers Association pointed out that this provision of the law has not been applied since 1997.

Welcome to Donald Trump’s America, where the Cabinet texting about war plans on a nongovernmental messaging app is “not a big deal,” but an op-ed in a school paper is a threat to national security.

[Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]

Rubio says he has signed off on deporting or revoking the visas of 300 or more people, an unknown portion of whom are student activists. Some have been snatched from their home or the sidewalks outside. Others, such as Rasha Alawieh, a medical-school professor at Brown whose H1-B visa was sponsored by Brown Medicine, have been turned away at the airport. In at least a few cases, more than a day went by before anyone figured out where the disappeared students had been taken.

Rubio’s interpretation of the law is just one more example of the Trump administration’s attempts to change America from a nation of rights to a nation of privileges that can at any moment be revoked. “We gave you a visa to come study and get a degree,” Rubio said about the students, “not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”

Green cards may be a privilege, but once they reach American soil, these students also have rights—to speak freely, to peacefully convene, to enjoy due process under the law. Those rights don’t depend on citizenship status; they are embedded in the founding of this country. The students do not, as Rubio correctly points out, have the right to “tear up” campuses. But they absolutely can become social activists about any political issue they choose.

Criticism—even at its most odious—does not imperil a nation any more than being yelled at by students imperiled me. How could I hold my head high as an American if I didn’t defend their right to tell me what they think?

This article originally misstated which institution sponsored Rasha Alawieh’s visa.

New York Belongs to Trump Now

2025-02-19T08:00:00-05:00

New Yorkers, despite our reputation for being cantankerous, agree on many things—primarily things we dislike: rats; subway crime; our mayor, Eric Adams.

Adams’s polling was dismal well before he was indicted on federal corrup tion charges. A 2023 Quinnipiac University poll put his approval rating at 28 percent—the lowest result for a mayor since Quinnipiac began polling New York voters, in 1996. Adams got negative marks on every measure: the city’s handling of homelessness, education, crime, migrants, and the budget. But perhaps most notable were respondents’ views of Adams, the man. More than half of New Yorkers felt that he had poor leadership qualities, didn’t understand people like them, and wasn’t honest or trustworthy. (Less scientific, but equally telling: For the past couple of years, a meme has circulated of a “Club Promoter” Halloween-costume pack featuring a photo of Mayor Adams and the words Includes: Nothing helpful.)

Mayor Adams’s low popularity had as much to do with the chaos and swirl of corruption around his administration as it did with residents’ dissatisfaction with his management of the city. Much like our president, Adams favored putting friends and relatives in positions of power. He installed one friend as chancellor of education and made another his senior adviser on public safety and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. After the charges against Adams were announced, a number of his associates were indicted too. Many others have since resigned. (Adams pleaded not guilty and maintained that the case was politically motivated.)

Reading the Southern District’s indictment was, for many New Yorkers, simply confirmation of what we’d long suspected: Our mayor was an arrogant egoist using his position to enhance his and his cronies’ lifestyle. It was also embarrassing. Adams’s charges—for conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud, and solicitation of illegal campaign contributions from foreign businesspeople—center on allegations that he did real-estate favors for the Turkish government in return for free travel and perks on Turkish Airlines. I can’t help but feel that a city as great as this one deserves, at the very least, corruption more sophisticated and ambitious than Adams’s alleged attempts to score flight upgrades.

[Read: What Trump is getting from Eric Adams]

Maybe the crimes go deeper. But now we may never know, because Donald Trump’s administration has ordered prosecutors to dismiss the charges against Adams. Emil Bove III, a Trump appointee in the Justice Department, has argued that the charges were politically motivated and the dismissal necessary because the prosecution interfered with the mayor’s ability to govern. It was, he wrote, a threat to “public safety, national security, and related federal immigration initiatives and policies.”

To anyone who believes Bove’s claims that the investigation into Adams was a “weaponization” of the federal government: I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. Immigration initiatives is the key phrase here—Adams has met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and in December hosted Trump’s border czar at Gracie Mansion. After that meeting, Adams said he might consider an executive order to “unravel” immigration rules that he sees as restrictive. The impression is that he has pledged to cooperate with Trump’s deportation agenda in return for his protection.

The Trump administration’s meddling is a perversion of the principles of the Department of Justice, and at least six prosecutors in New York and Washington have resigned in protest. But more than that, it is an insult to the intelligence and common sense of New Yorkers. Today, a judge will hear from Justice Department lawyers and decide whether to grant the administration’s request. If the case is dropped, the mayor’s constituents will be deprived of the opportunity to see him held accountable, and they will be saddled with a mayor who is beholden not to the will of the people but to Trump.

Trump won 30 percent of New York City voters. His national “mandate” is debatable, but in the city it doesn’t exist, in part because so many people reject Trump’s dangerous belief that a president is above the law. Now the Trump administration is telling New Yorkers to apply that logic not just to their president but to their mayor as well.

[Read: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

One thing the Trump administration gets right is that Adams’s legal troubles are a distraction from doing his job. Back in 2023, when a number of his personal aides had their phones seized, Adams bailed on an important meeting with the White House and congressional leaders about New York’s migrant population. Last week, Kathryn Wylde, from the business advocacy group Partnership for New York, said that the controversies had “derailed” the execution of many policy goals.

After the indictment became public, nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers said Adams should resign. A true public servant would do that, but Adams is a mayor for our times, and seems to care less about serving the public than about serving himself. One of the protesting officials described succinctly in her own resignation letter what she saw as a “quid pro quo”: “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.” (Bove and Adams denied any improper quid pro quo.) Adams has not just agreed to be Trump’s puppet: He went to the administration and brought his own strings.

Regardless of what the judge decides, there is someone who can do something: Governor Kathy Hochul, who could—and should—just fire the mayor already.

To many non–New Yorkers, this scandal might seem an abstraction—the way the Los Angeles fires might feel if you’re in Nebraska, or how a Texas school shooting might feel when you’re all the way in Maine. But what’s happening in New York should matter to all Americans, because it is yet another example of the president imposing his own agenda over the law and public consensus. He pardoned the January 6 rioters, renamed Mount McKinley, turned an astonishing proportion of the government over to Elon Musk—and now there’s Eric Adams. In each instance, Trump is sending a message: I’m in charge, whether you like it or not

What’s Up With All the Sex Parties?

2025-02-04T07:00:00-05:00

Updated at 8:24 p.m. ET on February 4, 2025

Should you find yourself invited to a sex party, it might be helpful to know that you are not obliged to have sex. You can listen to music or watch performances, observe your fellow guests, and, with permission, touch them. But no one will consider it rude should you leave without having sex. If you’re invited to an orgy, however, that’s a whole different ball of wax, and people will most certainly be offended if you don’t participate. Especially if you are the sixth person in the room, in which case your presence is technically crucial. An orgy requires six to 20 people. Fewer than six, and the encounter is simply categorized by the number of participants: threesomes, foursomes, and so on. More than 20, and we’re back in the terrain of the sex party.

This isn’t information that I, personally, ever felt I needed to know. Among other things, I have an aversion to crowds, especially in the bedroom. The performative aspects of sex parties that participants seem to enjoy most are, to me, a turnoff, another way that social media—and the image-driven FOMO culture it spawned—has made life into content.

But I decided to do my journalistic due diligence on sex parties because I kept reading about them in the news. For instance, New York’s former COVID czar acknowledged participating in what the New York Post called “drug-fueled sex parties”—during the first year of the pandemic, no less. (It’s probably not worth a letter to the editor, but given that he said his parties were limited to 10 people, we now know that technically the proper terminology for such a gathering is not sex party but orgy. Each participant, he says, took a COVID test before having sex. Turnoff doesn’t even begin to describe nasal-swab foreplay.)

In the course of my research, I did not—I would like to be clear here—participate in any sex parties. I think it’s wise not to get that close to your sources. I learned that “play parties” can take place in people’s homes, but many happen under the auspices of private clubs. I reached out to a number of prominent ones, wondering if the sex-club boom was real, and what actually goes on at them. One of my major findings: People, especially rich people, come up with extremely elaborate justifications for getting laid.

To be clear, these clubs are not brothels—guests have sex with one another, not with the club’s employees. Some say that they are putting on performances of “high erotic art”; others want to promote “equitable pleasure.” They all try to sell erotic experimentation less as a means of gratification than as a moral virtue. They are creating, they insist, not so much a venue for sex as a gathering space of “like-minded individuals.” People who are “liberated” from social mores. People who think differently. People for whom the normal rules don’t apply.

Snctm, a members-only sex club in Beverly Hills inspired by the movie Eyes Wide Shut, opened about a decade ago, and growth “was slow and steady” at first, Robert Artés, the club’s managing director, told me. “But the last three to four years, there’s been tremendous growth in this space.”

Snctm members pay $12,500 or more a year for access to masquerade parties that can cost upwards of $2,000 a ticket. KNKY Rabbit, a sex club in L.A., offers annual memberships that range from $10,000 for the “Fluffy Tail” level to $250,000 for the “Burrow Elite Membership.” NSFW, an exclusive sex club in New York, also has a tiered membership. The most basic, a reasonable $300, gets you access to a members’ chat group and invitations to parties. The “Tribute” and “Status” tiers can range from $750 to $2,500. Members, referred to as “lovers,” can purchase VIP-party upgrades for $1,000 a piece, or hire NSFW to create custom play experiences for themselves and their friends, starting at $5,000. Memberships are for life.

NSFW stands for New Society for Wellness, its owners say. The club claims more than 10,000 members around the world, and considers itself as much a movement as a club, dedicated, according to its mission statement, to helping members “Live Adventurously”: “We believe sex is a gift that should be explored, honored and mastered through experience and education. Knowledge gained from expanding your sexual wisdom is one path to real happiness.” Among the people seeking real happiness through such ends are CEOs, politicians, and celebrities, Daniel Saynt, the club’s founder and “chief conspirator,” told me. “We’re looking for the most creative, most interesting people. We’re trying to collect individuals who see sex as something that needs to be prioritized.” A 14-point questionnaire evaluates people on categories such as hygiene, goals for their “sexual journey,” wealth, career accolades, and travel history. An applicant must hit nine or more points of “attraction.”

This is not a key party with your schlubby neighbors. Members are not just rich and influential; they’re beautiful. Particularly the women, who at many parties are eligible for reduced-price or free admission. At clubs like KNKY Rabbit, applicants submit photos in addition to describing their sexual desires. Artés confirmed that Snctm screens “based on appearance”: “While we are inclusive of race, religion, gender identity, and everything like that, we do want a party of beautiful people.”

Snctm’s big selling point is anonymity. Artés said that its members are “affluent and prominent leaders in their field or in business, entertainment, or arts.” Some of the guests “keep their masks on all night long.” (Does a little mask over the eyes actually make a celebrity unrecognizable? Perhaps the illusion of anonymity is part of the fantasy.)

Putting on a show is essential. Guests arrive, mingle, and then take in performances—elaborate burlesque, shibari demos, flogging. NSFW exhibits highly produced erotic performances that make you feel “like you’re in a gallery,” Saynt told me. Snctm’s black-tie masquerades incorporate “erotic theater.” KNKY Rabbit combines “artistic innovation and exclusive experiences.”

Club owners say it’s just like interactive theater—except instead of giving a standing ovation at the end of the show, you can lie down and have sex with your fellow patrons of the arts. “What we do, you can’t do onstage at Lincoln Center,” Artés said.

It’s easy to draw a line from the libertines attracted to high-end sex clubs to the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley technocrats. And the kink industry is thriving in the valley. In a Medium post, the product designer Chris Messina, famous in some circles for “inventing” the hashtag, described nonmonogamy as nothing more or less than a design solution: “Out here, we’re data-positive and solution-oriented and if your product (i.e. marriage) is failing for 50% of your customers, then you need to fix it or offer something better.”

In Brotopia, Emily Chang’s 2018 book on Silicon Valley, she writes about tech bros who speak frankly and “proudly” of their frequent industry orgies—“about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule.”

A 2007 survey of individuals worth $30 million or more found that 70 percent felt like their wealth gave them a “better sex” life, and that the majority felt their sex life was more “adventurous and exotic” than other people’s. Threesomes are the most common sexual fantasy among Americans. For most people, they remain just that, but among the rich and famous, abundance is the word.

One of the things that draws people like these to sex parties is the fact that the standard rules don’t apply, that they’re places where the answer to every desire seems to be yes. These are people who are “chasing the rainbow,” as Jan Gerber, who runs Paracelsus Recovery, one of the most expensive rehab centers in the world, put it to me. Gerber has a front-row seat to the sex lives of the ultrarich because his clinic, which is based in Zurich, provides rehabilitation and psychiatric services to billionaires and the globally famous. It’s possible, he suggested, to become desensitized even to pleasure. You can do “something very exciting the first time,” he told me—whether it’s skydiving, shopping, or sex—but the brain’s “tolerance” builds. Soon “plain vanilla sex” just isn’t so “exciting anymore.” He said he sees a “higher incidence of narcissism” among “people of wealth, especially self-made ones.” They feel they deserve to be indulged.

Clay Cockrell, a therapist who specializes in working with the very wealthy, says he sees a lot of patients who feel like, “I’m bored. I’m numb.” Eventually, “you’ve flown on the private planes, eaten at the best restaurants … What else is there? Some of this then gets transferred into high-risk behavior, kink sexual behavior, because they’re bored and they want more.”

To each his own, I guess. But I can’t help but see these people’s dismissal of the simple joys of life—their insistence that monogamy is dull and middle-class—as a tragically snobby form of cynicism. In the course of my reporting, I often found the marketing of the clubs comic and absurd, but I came to see the people joining them as deeply sad.

Club managers stressed to me that even the rich and entitled have to follow the rules—that rules are in fact central to their business.

Touching other attendees requires affirmative consent. Touching paid performers is strictly forbidden. Some clubs, such as Snctm, don’t allow drugs and have strict rules for alcohol. “Whenever you have sex involved, you have consent issues,” Artés told me, “so we can’t have anybody on drugs or intoxicated.” This is not just about protecting guests; it’s also about staying in business. Performers have to sign contracts, and the club has a 38-page policy manual laying out the rules: Performers cannot touch any of the guests. Guests cannot touch the performers. “Otherwise, you could be in violation of prostitution laws,” Artés told me. The businesses already struggle against the biases of the financial industry, club runners told me. “We’ve had difficulty with banking, with credit-card processing,” Artés told me. “There are tax companies that have turned us down.”

Everyone I spoke with mentioned the importance of consent. Saynt told me he wanted to “create a space that feels safer than a bar … where you can walk around naked and you don’t feel like anyone’s going to harm you.” In this context, consent is not meant to be restrictive, but liberating. You can feel free because you’re told that nothing will happen to you that you don’t want to happen.

But no one stressed consent as much as Luis Cortes, at Sucia NYC. He and his wife, Morgana, started throwing their own parties after finding themselves uncomfortable in much of New York’s play-party scene, which he described as “very white,” not just in terms of demographics, but in terms of relationships to privilege and standards of beauty. They founded Sucia NYC in 2020 after the sex parties they were hosting in their own apartment got too big for the space. (“It was a lot,” he told me. “Like, we live here, right? I use the couch during the week.”) They now run the club out of a 2,200-square-foot space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and charge a relatively affordable rate—$100 to $150 per event, with a sliding scale for teachers, artists, and activists. Their Instagram account emphasizes “community” and “decolonizing your pleasure.”

Sucia, Cortes told me, aims to center “the joy and pleasure of Black and Indigenous women and Black and Indigenous LGBTQI-plus populations.” It eschews traditional beauty standards and welcomes bodies of all shapes and sizes. It doesn’t charge men more than women, a practice Cortes objects to: “If you have women coming in for free and men are paying X amount of dollars,” he said, those men are “coming expecting something.” He sees consent as especially paramount because Sucia caters to a population that has historically “had less connection with bodily autonomy”—people who haven’t always been taught that they can say no.

Cortes said he’s seen people have breakthroughs and breakdowns at parties as they process shame, religious guilt, or past sexual trauma. The club offers aftercare workshops, and brings in experts for talks about sexuality and religion and combatting heteronormativity.

Cortes was also one of the only people I spoke with who never used the word fantasy. When I brought it up myself, he seemed offended. “That is lazy,” he told me. “That is dangerous. That is some fucking, like, knight-in-white-armor bullshit. It’s like, no—this isn’t fantasy; this is real things.” Then he said it even more emphatically: “We don’t, we don’t, we don’t, we don’t sell fantasies.”

[Read: At group sex parties, strict rules make for safe spaces]

But all club runners sell something. Everyone, including Cortes, is in the “sexpitality” industry. At a Sucia party, after a talk about consent, you can listen to Afrobeat and take in a performance. Cortes shared with me a list of some of his favorite acts: “Eli the naked trumpeter. They do flogging. They do impact play”; “You know Sir Marvelous. His thing is he does forced orgasms”; “Clavel Marchito, she is a sex-workers’-rights advocate out of Chile … and she’ll come in and do fire play and some flogging and stuff”; “Selena Surreal … She walks on glass. She does a knee dive into Lego bricks.”

Yes, these acts are real. Personally, I can’t imagine enjoying watching someone walk on glass, and playing with fire sounds less erotic than a Tony Robbins retreat. But these acts seem to offer another version of what Gerber and Cockrell were talking about—a way to break through all the boredom and numbness. Rich people might go to a sex club because they’re deadened by excess and privilege. Working-class people might go because they’re tired of being ground into dust. Either way, they all want to feel something again. Whether the club is promoted as a “path to real happiness,” art appreciation, or social justice, these are all businesses finding an ideological or class-appropriate way to market the pursuit of pleasure.

For some patrons, the party may not be an excuse for the sex at all; the sex may be the excuse for the party. Saynt told me that he’s noticed that younger patrons, especially Gen Z, are mostly interested in the “performance of eroticism.” “They’re not having sex at these parties as much,” he said. “They’re just coming for the costumes.”

All of this is in contrast to many of the sex-party stories I’d been reading in the news, about events such as Sean Combs’s “freak-offs,” at which he allegedly coerced drugged women into having sex with male prostitutes. That’s not a sex party: That’s a crime. (Combs “denies as false and defamatory” claims that he drugged and sexually abused people.) Recently, The New York Times reported on a document prepared by federal investigators showing “a web of payments” among former Representative Matt Gaetz and associates “who are said to have taken part with him in drug-fueled sex parties.” Court filings also accuse Gaetz—who was briefly Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general—of having sex at one of the parties with a 17-year-old girl. Also a crime. (Gaetz denied any wrongdoing and called the allegation that he’d slept with a teenager “a false smear”; the DOJ investigation was closed without any charges.)

And yet it’s not hard to imagine someone enjoying a sex party at Snctm or KNKY Rabbit, chafing against their limits, and then going off to do their own, independent thing. Saynt described to me a benign-sounding version of this: Members might meet for the first time at a play party, hit it off, and start “going on trips and going on yachts and boats and having little sex parties everywhere.” But presumably no one’s monitoring those sex parties in the middle of the sea to make sure the sex is safe and respectful.

We’re talking, as Cockrell put it, about rich people who are in “control of every aspect of their life. Nobody’s going to tell them no. And if somebody does, they’re just going to go build a castle where no doesn’t exist.”

People do bad things in castles like that.

Sex clubs promise people that they can push the limits of sexual freedom without going too far. They sell rule-breaking sex in a rule-bound environment. They say they’re breaking barriers—not repackaging the world’s oldest profession. As in any business, their promoters are hunting for an audience and building a brand.

Speaking of branding. I learned something at the end of my reporting that seemed to highlight the thin line between the sexual freedom promised by these parties and the darker impulses that the rules of our society exist to contain. When Robert Artés shared with me Snctm’s policy manual, full of rules to ensure the safety of its employees and guests, I saw another name listed on the front: Robert Testagrossa. After going down a few rabbit holes, I learned that Artés was a pseudonym, and for good reason. In 2007, Testagrossa pleaded guilty to assault and served five years in prison for what he acknowledged to me “were serious events, for which I accepted serious consequences.” He expressed regret for choices that were “driven by misguided passion and a lapse in judgment.”

His girlfriend at the time had lured a man who had ghosted her after sex to a hotel room. There, Testagrossa and another man Tasered the victim and held him down, while the woman heated up a piece of metal that had been twisted into a four-inch letter R. She then seared it into her former lover’s skin.

You can’t do that at Lincoln Center, either.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Snctm performers are not allowed to touch one another sexually. They can consent to do so.

Altadena After the Fire

2025-01-11T08:00:00-05:00

On Wednesday morning, in Highland Park, Los Angeles, dawn never broke. The morning light that normally streamed into my rental house simply shifted from pitch-black to gradations of orange-brown as smoke from the Eaton Canyon fires billowed over the hills. Outside my window, a woman used the flashlight on her phone while walking her dog. My own dog and I barely made it around the block; the soot-filled air was dry and pungent, and the winds—those relentless winds—smacked us with a combination of dry pine needles, fallen bark, and chunks of ash. Most of my neighbors wore masks as they loaded their cars with shopping bags and suitcases. By the time we got back, all the phones in my house were buzzing with evacuation alerts.

We were a full house: three middle-aged adults, a 6-year-old, and a naughty dog (mine). The night before, after losing power in her home in Altadena, my best friend and my goddaughter went to kill time in classic L.A. style: by driving through their local In-N-Out. Power outages from the Santa Anas are not unusual in L.A., and despite the Palisades Fire raging across town, they were trying to act normal—perhaps the only way to psychically survive in a city prone to fires is to push the constant threat of imminent natural disaster out of your mind. In any case, by the time they got their burgers, the street was illuminated by flames, the night sky hot yellow from Eaton Canyon, just a few blocks away. They drove the 15 minutes to my house, where we immediately lost power too. Her husband hunted down every candle he could get his hands on in a drivable radius.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

In my living room, we texted friends and neighbors, checking on their homes and kids and evacuation plans. Outside, the sound of the wind was terrifying—because of the howling, but also because of the danger it represented, each gust potentially carrying embers this way, taking out homes and businesses and, eventually, in the case of Altadena, most of a community.

Altadena is an unincorporated community of about 40,000 residents nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Having spent a lot of time there, I get the appeal—even something as mundane as putting the trash out, at the right time of day, is a chance to experience majestic levels of beauty. When people think of life in the hills around Los Angeles, they tend to think of millionaires and movie stars—and, for sure, there are some splendid homes and a sprinkling of celebrity residents, such as Mandy Moore, there. But Altadena is racially and economically diverse, and middle-class life remains at its center.

It was founded by two well-off brothers from Iowa in the late 1880s, and workers with jobs in the nearby city of Pasadena moved there. After a long battle against redlining, Black homeowners began arriving in the 1960s. This made Altadena one of the first integrated middle-class communities in Los Angeles, and residents today are particularly proud of this history. (One of those residents was Wilfred Duncan, the first Black fireman in Pasadena.) In 1960, Altadena was 95 percent white; in 2024, it was 46 percent white, and the bulk of the rest of the population was made up of Black and Hispanic residents.

This was partly why, when my best friend and her husband decided to move back to her native California to raise their Black and Latina daughter, they chose Altadena. The other parents they met at their daughter’s school included local business owners, house cleaners, and government employees. They made friends with their neighbors, including an older public-school teacher who’d raised her family across the street. On Tuesday night, her house burned to the ground.

In recent years—and particularly since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when the rise in remote work let people live farther from downtown and West Los Angeles—home prices in Altadena have soared. But newcomers haven’t been house flippers or private-equity firms running Airbnbs; they’ve been families looking to set down roots—like my best friend. A remarkable 78 percent of the households are owner-inhabited; it’s not unusual to meet people who’ve lived in Altadena for decades or even residents whose ties to the town go back a generation or two. That’s part of the strong community atmosphere. Neighbors make cookies for neighbors and invite one another over for drinks. Kids trick-or-treat down the streets in unchaperoned groups, and families have post-parties after the Rose Bowl parade.

The local economy was also exactly that: local. Minus a few fast-food joints and big chain pharmacies, the neighborhood was as close to mom-and-pop as one can find today. For 25 years, kids from Altadena and Pasadena have studied with Sipoo Shelene Hearring at Two Dragons Martial Arts. Locals who met at the Rancho, Altadena’s premier dive bar, became so close that they were known to spend holidays together. If you were bored, you could take your family to the Bunny Museum and browse more than 30,000 items of collectible rabbit memorabilia.

Every single one of those businesses burned to the ground this week. One local official told NPR that “probably half of our small businesses are gone.” Five of Altadena’s public schools suffered substantial damage, as did a couple of private schools, a senior center, a public golf course, a country club, several houses of worship, and a yet-to-be determined number of homes and apartment complexes. So far, more than 5,000 structures have been reported as lost.

[Read: The particular horror of the Los Angeles wildfires]

An unofficial Google Doc tracking the destruction has been going around, and the pace at which it was being populated on Wednesday was terrifying. Each new address correlated to a person you knew or a business that made you love where you lived. On Facebook, a woman was looking for an older man named Willie who lived near a particular intersection. “I don’t know his last name,” she wrote. ”I speak to him on my daily walks. I’d like to make sure he’s alright.” Neighbors were texting one another videos of block after block of devastation.

So many people are in the same situation as my friend: evacuated and unsure whether their house will still hold. Ten hours after she and her family arrived at my house, they learned they’d have to flee again, when my neighborhood was evacuated too.

I’d always judged people who, faced with a natural disaster, chose to stay in place. But experiencing the situation firsthand, I understood. We were a ragtag group. Who would take us in? But how could we split up? For almost an hour, we stared at one another, paralyzed. Eventually, we heard from a generous friend in Palm Springs who had room for us. Into the cars we went.

But others did stay, or have dared to venture back. They hose off the lawns of the absent to keep the floating embers from catching, offer to break into homes at risk and grab personal photos or other belongings, and take pictures of the damage that’s left behind.

As we drove past the halo of black smoke over L.A., we saw tractor-trailers turned sideways by the wind. Text messages continued flooding in, announcing home losses and relocation plans. Most hope these moves will be temporary, but, depending on insurance payouts and school closures, they might wind up being permanent. “We hope to see you all again one day,” a father wrote to my friends’ dad group. His family was heading up north to stay with relatives and knew that they might not be able to return. Some kids leaving town with no return date in sight FaceTimed classmates to say goodbye. Still other children don’t yet understand what’s happened to the place they call home.

All of Los Angeles, regardless of socioeconomic class, is sharing in one deep, traumatic loss. Schools, cultural institutions, the businesses that make hometowns feel like home—so many have burned. But there’s a secondary sadness hovering over middle-class Altadena, and certainly over anyone on the margins of poverty. Altadena will build itself back. But how? And for whom?

[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]

On the Altadena Facebook group, residents are attempting to guide one another through FEMA applications and encouraging everyone to file their insurance claims quickly. But in one-on-one conversations, no one is naive. Everyone anticipates pushback from insurance companies, and payments that will be a fraction of what their homes were worth or would cost them to rebuild. Will the teachers whose homes burned down still be able to afford to live there? What about the firemen? Where will all these people go in a region that is already plagued by a shortage of affordable housing?

Even if one isn’t familiar with Naomi Klein’s term disaster capitalism, most Americans are, by now, well versed in its hallmarks. A natural disaster occurs, locals are forced to evacuate, and small businesses close. Their returns are delayed sometimes indefinitely by failures to restore infrastructure such as schools and electricity quickly enough. They might be stymied by red tape and bureaucracy. Needing stability for their family, they are forced to build a life elsewhere, to stop “waiting” to go home. In their place, developers and private equity swoop in, reshaping these areas for the rich and ultrarich.

This happened after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and Superstorm Sandy in the coastal areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Los Angeles’s economy is already in a precarious state, with a housing crisis and a glut of workers in the TV and film industry. I can easily imagine that, without government intervention and intentional counterplanning, something similar will happen here. Surviving financially in Los Angeles was already challenging; how many families can manage not to just get by, but to completely rebuild their lives?

When my best friend moved here, I was immensely depressed to lose her from my life in Brooklyn. But in the subsequent two years, I’ve visited many times, sometimes for weeks-long stints. I’d come to love it here so much, I’d call it Brooklyn West: It had that same neighborly generosity and quirky moxie that had gotten squeezed out of my hometown, one Blank Street Coffee and luxury high-rise at a time. It’s painful to imagine that Altadena could now, in this moment of speculative opportunity, suffer the same fate.

Accusations of local-government incompetence are flying around this week, nearly as forceful as the winds. But the local government has work to do now. Federal aid is crucial, but so is getting schools reopened quickly, and expediting the rebuilding of established small businesses. Altadena needs not vultures seeking to maximize profit, but creative developers who can protect and expand the kind of community Altadena was.

When they are done with mourning, I know the residents will do their part.

*Sources: Library of Congress; Getty; Justin Sullivan / Getty; Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty; Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty; Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times / Getty

Why Did Latinos Vote for Trump?

2024-11-09T07:31:00-05:00

Donald Trump called Latino migrants rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. After one of his final rallies, at which a comedian described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage,” many people, myself included, thought Latinos would decisively turn against him. We were wrong. Exit polls show that 46 percent of Latinos voted for him, and among Latino men, he won 55 percent of the votes—a huge increase from 36 percent in 2020.

Many Americans are baffled. How could Latinos—many of whose family members could be targeted by the mass deportations that the Trump team is promising—make this choice? But seeing the results—and hearing from Latino Trump voters—it made perfect sense to me. This was, simply, a vote for capitalism.

American values are especially powerful in groups with large immigrant populations; those values are what draw people here. Though many of America’s earliest immigrants came here seeking relief from famine and poverty, our freedoms—to worship freely, to speak freely—are what we became famous for. The promise was mythologized on the Statue of Liberty: our welcome to the tired, poor, huddled masses, who yearned not to grow filthy rich, but to be free. In the 20th century, immigrants fled religious persecution and political oppression to find in America freedoms that they, and their descendants, cherished and took seriously. I was raised by my grandfather, a Puerto Rican veteran of World War II. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I was taught that our political freedoms and our moral obligation to democracy mattered more.

At the same time, from the very beginning, the land of the free has also been about the freedom to make and spend money. America put God on our money, but for many Americans, money is God. This nation put profit over morality through centuries of slavery. Individual expediency in the name of capitalism is as American as the right to bear arms. Around the world, no idea has been marketed more effectively than the American dream. America: where even corporations can be people! And when we talk about someone living “the American dream,” we aren’t referring to their trips to the voting booth or the way they utilize their freedom of assembly. We are praising people who have achieved financial success and accumulated material things.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters]

We deify and elevate these people in the media, in social settings, and online, and we rarely question the ethical price that may have been paid to get them there. Just look at Trump, the “self-made man” whose father’s real-estate fortune launched his career. Until Trump became a political villain, he was an American success story. He was regularly on Oprah and sung about in hip-hop songs, and he had that cameo in Home Alone 2. And the truth is, for many Americans—Latinos included—he still is that man. He is living the dream; he has buildings with his name on them.

Latinos broke for Trump for many complicated reasons, including sexism, religious conservatism, racism (or a desire to assimilate into whiteness). But the simplest answer is often the best: To many, Trump represents prosperity. And the ability to financially prosper is what America is all about. People believe this, because America told them so.

In polls, Latinos consistently put economic issues at the top of their list of concerns. After the election, the media was full of voters reaffirming this. As one Pennsylvania voter of Puerto Rican descent told NBC News, he wasn’t bothered by Trump’s comments about the island: “For me, it’s work. It’s the economy. It’s groceries.”

Why, one might ask, was this narrative so much more persuasive to Latinos than to Black Americans? Perhaps because the American dream wasn’t created with Black people in mind. The civil-rights movement was painstakingly built by exploiting America’s political rights to assembly and free speech. When Black Americans in the North couldn’t buy homes because of redlining, many could still—despite obstacles—vote. Perhaps Black voters understood better than many Latino voters an essential truth: Access to the American dream is elusive, but America’s freedoms are indispensable.

One of the great takeaways of this election is that the narrative of America as the land of the free has ceased to be many voters’ top priority. This election was a battle for the soul of the nation—but the fight wasn’t between American ideals and un-American ones. It was between our best and worst selves.

What Can Women Do Now?

2024-11-07T14:28:46-05:00

How should the women who didn’t vote for Trump go about their lives, knowing that a majority of Americans voted not just against their immediate health and well-being, but for a candidate who actively sidelined and maligned people like them? After months and months of watching Donald Trump and his band of bros belittle Kamala Harris and all women generally—the childless, the childbearing, and the post-childbearing—55 percent of male voters supported him, according to CNN’s exit polls. So did 45 percent of female voters. What are the other women—those who feel that they’re living in a nation that is hostile to their very existence—to do?

The answer is something different from what they did the last time.

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s loss sent thousands of women into the streets of Washington, D.C., with their signs and their pussy hats, many assumed that the sexism Clinton had experienced was a bug of the Trump era. That if women banded together, expanded their notion of feminism to include experiences across race and class, and fought back, they could change things.

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

And in some ways, they did. That collective strength laid the foundation for the #MeToo movement in 2017. More women ran for office, and won, in the 2018 midterms than ever before. But the ground has shifted in the intervening years.

Sexism, it turned out, was not a bug but a feature of the Trump years. Misogyny certainly appears to come naturally to Trump, but it was strategically amplified—through surrogates and messaging—to attract supporters, particularly younger men of all races. Elon Musk’s political-action committee even put out an ad referring to Harris as “a big ole C-word”—and Communist was only one of its intended meanings. Trump has always been good at exploiting the ugliest aspects of America, and the growing isolation and rightward drift of young men was a perfect target.

American men are lonely—in 2021, 15 percent were likely to say they had no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. They are also more likely to not be in a relationship: In 2022, s ix in 10 men under 30 were single. In a 2023 survey of men ages 18 to 45, a majority agreed with the statement “No one really knows me.” Many find solace online, where they consume their news on Reddit and X and soak up content from influencers such as Andrew Tate, Adin Ross, and Joe Rogan. The content, like its creators, is often blatantly misogynistic.

Many of these young men apparently see Trump—with his microphone-fellating pantomime and his crowds chanting the word bitch—as presidential. He spoke to young men, in a voice they recognized. More than half of men ages 18 to 29 voted for him.

But Trump didn’t just pick up support from young men; he picked up support from almost every group. For many older white men, and the many, many Latino men who broke for Trump—well, the misogyny may have seemed macho. And what about his female supporters? Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for president, wrote in 1970 that “women in America are much more brainwashed and content with their roles as second-class citizens than Blacks ever were.” This remains true today. No matter the number of marches women hold or memes they post online about sisterhood, many women are unswayed: 53 percent of white women (and a growing percentage of Latinas) voted for Trump. Women can enforce patriarchy just as well as men, as the “trad wives” on the internet have demonstrated.

Many had hoped that as president, Harris would have reached across not just the political aisle, but the gender divide. In her concession speech yesterday, she listed women’s rights as one cause among many, speaking of the need for women to “have the freedom to make decisions about their own body,” for schools to be safe from gun violence, “for the rule of law, for equal justice.”

No such repair will happen under a second Trump administration, for the obvious reason that division benefits him. Misogyny helps disempowered men feel empowered. After Trump’s victory, the right-wing activist Nick Fuentes tweeted: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” It really is a man’s world now.

The situation isn’t hopeless, but it may require new tactics. The time for thumping on our chests and railing against the patriarchy might be past. The protests that felt so powerful in 2016 may have backfired to some extent, by causing the people women most needed to listen to their message to tune them out instead. But women can’t simply retreat, either—their lives and futures depend on it.

The answer is engagement: soft diplomacy in everyday life. “We will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts, and in the public square,” Harris said in her speech. But “we will also wage it in quieter ways.”

Start easy: Thank the men in your life who supported Harris; thank them for trusting and respecting women and believing that they can lead. It seems small, but millions of men apparently don’t feel that way, so let’s encourage the ones who do.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

For mothers and aunties of young men and boys: You may not be able to control what they are reading on the internet, but you can combat it, through conversation and counterprogramming.

And most important, women who voted against Trump should talk honestly with the men in their lives—their cousins and fathers and colleagues and friends—who voted the other way. Talk to them about women’s lives and values. Better yet, enlist other men to help you. One reason fewer Black men than Latino men drifted toward Trump is that, in the months leading up to the election, on social media and in private conversations and at church, many Black people talked honestly about the importance of valuing women. They addressed voters’ hesitance about female leadership directly, by discussing the long history of excellent Black female leaders. Minds can be molded by the internet and its algorithms, yes, but minds can be changed by conversations as well. As Harris reminded everyone, “You have power.”

Despite what many say, the modern woman doesn’t need a man. But women’s lives can certainly be improved by men not hating them.

Trump Pays the Price for Insulting Puerto Rico

2024-10-30T09:35:00-04:00

On Sunday, at a rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York, Donald Trump and his supporters gave their closing argument. It began with offensive, identity-based jokes straight from the ’80s; continued with a shout-out to a Black man involving watermelon; and at some point implied that Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States, was a sex worker. Along the way were sprinklings of anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic comments, including this gem from the Trump adviser Stephen Miller: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

The vitriolic event included some choice lines about Latinos from Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian chosen by the Trump campaign to kick off the event. Hinchcliffe, who is also a podcaster, began with juvenile sex jokes about Latinos—“They love making babies”—before moving on to describe Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

As a Nuyorican—what New Yorkers from the Puerto Rican diaspora affectionately call ourselves—I am keenly attuned to any mention of the island and my people. And for most of this campaign, little has been said. So it was a surprise to see that on the same day that Hinchcliffe spoke at Madison Square Garden, Vice President Harris released a video outlining her plan for Puerto Rico and visited a Puerto Rican restaurant on the campaign trail in Philadelphia.

The coincidence was fortuitous, because it offered Puerto Ricans a real-time split screen. Many saw Harris attempting to learn and address the concerns of Puerto Ricans; Trump showed that he was willing to welcome Latinos to his tent only if they were complicit with his racist worldview. The language used at the Trump rally “was so simple, and it just very genuinely showed how they really feel,” Paola Ramos, the author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, told me.

After getting blowback for the “island of garbage” remark, the Trump campaign attempted to distance itself. (As everyone knows, Harris is responsible for everything anyone around her does, but Trump is innocent even of things for which he’s been found guilty.) “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump,” a campaign representative said.

As much as the campaign may try to disavow Hinchcliffe’s joke, it can’t avoid the way that that language merely reinforced the sense of disdain that Puerto Ricans had already experienced from Trump. The insult gave Democrats the perfect opportunity to remind Latino voters—and Puerto Ricans in particular—of something Harris raised in her video: Trump’s anemic, and insulting, response to islanders after Hurricane María, in 2017.

[From the November 2022 issue: Let Puerto Rico be free]

Hurricane Harvey had hit Texas a month earlier; there, FEMA had approved $142 million in individual assistance to hurricane victims within nine days. Nine days after María, FEMA had approved just $6.2 million for Puerto Ricans. In Texas, there were far more helicopters, meals, water, government personnel. When then-President Trump did finally visit the storm-ravaged island—nearly two weeks after the hurricane had passed—he told residents they were lucky they hadn’t endured “a real catastrophe, like Katrina,” and, in lieu of more meaningful assistance, threw rolls of paper towels to the crowd at a media event.

This year, Puerto Rican celebrities including Marc Anthony have already been working to remind voters of all of this while campaigning for Harris. After Sunday’s rally, Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez shared Harris’s video and announced that they were voting for her. Lopez will appear with Harris tomorrow.

But none of these endorsements has as much significance as that of the musician Bad Bunny’s. His fan base is enormous and young, and includes both men and women. And unlike many stars who avoid bringing politics to their platforms, San Benito, as he’s known to his fans, has made politics, and particularly the politics of colonialism, central to his art. He’s been active as Puerto Rico has approached its election for governor, also happening on November 5, purchasing billboards arguing that a vote for the ruling party is a vote for corruption. His take has weight.

For months, as megawatt celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have thrown their support behind Harris, I’ve heard people asking where Bad Bunny has been. Why hasn’t Bad Bunny been helping Harris? The answer seemed obvious to me: Despite being a U.S. citizen and a global superstar, Bad Bunny can’t vote in presidential elections.

Bad Bunny is a resident of Puerto Rico, and disenfranchisement is just one of the many inequities that define islanders’ second-class citizenship. But even if Puerto Rican residents can’t vote, they can influence the diaspora on the mainland, which can. And that’s what Bad Bunny is doing.

After Trump’s rally, Bad Bunny shared a segment of Harris’s Puerto Rico video with his 45.7 million Instagram followers several times. Specifically, he selected the segment in which Harris says, “There’s so much at stake in this election for Puerto Rican voters and for Puerto Rico,” and where she reminds people of Trump throwing paper towels to island residents after the hurricane.

Harris’s plan for Puerto Rico involves creating what she calls an “opportunity economy” on the island by shoring up the power grid, providing clean-energy credits to islanders, and developing affordable housing, job-creation incentives, and investment in Puerto Rican entrepreneurs and creators, among several other major initiatives. Her plan noticeably evades the big colonial issues, such as repealing the Jones Act—the 100-year-old tariff on produce and goods shipped to the island that costs residents an estimated $692 million a year. Nor does it address taking up the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act—a bill that Representatives Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have championed, which would allow islanders to vote on Puerto Rico’s status as a commonwealth. However, what Harris’s plan does offer are thoughtful solutions to many of the problems that have afflicted the island, especially in recent years, which is more than anyone can say of Trump.

The more that the “floating garbage” line is repeated—on television, on the radio—the more riled up Puerto Ricans are getting. More Puerto Ricans live on the mainland than on the island now. One result of the botched response to María has been, ironically, the migration of thousands of islanders—many to swing states such as Pennsylvania, where there are now nearly half a million Puerto Rican residents. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans currently reside in Georgia and Arizona as well. The Democratic strategist José Parra told The Hill that what happened at Madison Square Garden might make a real difference: “If Pennsylvania swings toward the Democrats, I think you can look back on this as a pivotal moment.”

Much has been made of the growing support for Trump among Latinos, and this offense is unlikely to sway any of his true believers. But it may motivate some Latinos who’d planned on sitting the election out. Victor Martinez, who owns a local Spanish-language radio channel in Pennsylvania, told Politico that a large portion of the community there had been on the fence about voting at all. The Trump rally shifted that. “If we weren’t engaged before, we’re all paying attention now,” he said.

Puerto Ricans love their island—even those who have never had the chance to go there. Yes, it has stunning beaches, lush green mountains, the sound of the coqui. But what we love most is the warmth of our culture: the music, the dance, the food, the art, our people. It is a place that calls to us when we’re far away and embraces us when we come home. The joke was not just an insult; it was a reminder of the neglect and disrespect the place and its people have faced for decades at the hands of the United States government, and especially during the Trump administration.

Once, when Bad Bunny was asked about his political engagement, he said, “I am not getting involved in politics; politics gets into my life because it affects my country, because it affects Puerto Rico.”

The Poet of Loose Women Everywhere

2024-10-13T07:31:00-04:00

This year is the 40th anniversary of the publication of Sandra Cisneros’s classic The House on Mango Street. The novel tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a Mexican American girl coming of age in a Latino enclave in Chicago, observing her family and community as she decides who she wants to be. Cisneros was only 21 when she started writing the book; it has sold more than 7 million copies, and earlier this year became the first title by a U.S.-born Latino writer to become part of the Everyman’s Library.

I was a teenager in the 1990s when a librarian gave me my first copy of The House on Mango Street. As a mixed Latina—Puerto Rican and Mexican—I had never seen either of my backgrounds on the page, and it was a revelation. Oh, how I hated the ugly house where I lived in Brooklyn with my grandparents, and how awful I felt about it until I read about Esperanza, too, wishing for a “real house” like the ones she saw on TV. We both harbored a desire for something more, something bigger. Neither of us knew what it was, only that it was out there, on the other side of leaving. But what struck me most—perhaps more than anything that was actually inside the book—was the author’s biography on the back of it: Sandra Cisneros, it said, “is nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.”

[Read: Why parents don’t mind if their kids don’t marry]

Even at that young age—far from marriage or child-rearing—I found the sentence shocking. I’d been conditioned to believe that all women should want both of those things and be quietly apologetic if we failed to achieve them. The line was like some of my favorite poems of hers—shameless about what we’d been told we should be ashamed of. Sin vergüenza. Today, when Childless Cat Ladies are boldly defending their choices, such an assertion might be seen as cheekily feminist, but in 1984, it was outrageously radical. Not only had a Latina writer showcased the pain and joys of Latina lives; she had done so while defying the traditional roles of womanhood. With one sentence, she declared her independence and provoked her readers to do the same.

Fewer than 8 percent of published authors are Latino, and among writers for TV and film, the percentage is even lower. When we do show up in stories, Latinas are still far too often flattened, reduced to the roles of mothers and wives and other caregivers, nothing else. But Cisneros depicts us as the vivid, complex human beings we are. We suffer and have secrets, but we also travel the world and while away the hours over poetry and take lovers and lose lovers and make love again—and again and again. We are allowed to feel. Everything.

This independence is most perfectly embodied in Cisneros’s 1994 poetry collection, Loose Woman. I came across the titular poem a year after it was published, when I was a freshman at a predominantly white university in New England. The poem begins:

                  They say I’m a beast.

                  And feast on it. When all along

                  I thought that’s what a woman was.

                  They say I’m a bitch.

                  Or witch. I’ve claimed

                  the same and never winced …

I did not think I was a poetry person; the only poems I’d encountered at that point were part of the Poetry in Motion series on subways. But this one required no explanation or understanding of the form’s technical rules. It simply seized me and cracked me open. I took my hard-earned, saved-up pennies and went to the school bookstore—where, I assure you, there was no special section for Latino writers, no selected readings for any kind of “Hispanic Heritage Month”—and I bought this book of poems.

Women like me—Latinas with college educations, Latinas who left Mango Street—now seem commonplace. Today, more than 3.5 million of us live in America, but back in 2000, that number was only 1 million. Latinas like me being educated in the ’90s had no model. We had been told to go forth and obtain as much education as we could, but then we were expected to go back home, to wherever we were from, so we could meet and marry a nice man and become—as our mothers, without our education and experiences, had done before us—mothers ourselves. But in the Land of Loose Women, verse by verse, page by page, Cisneros lays out an alternative path. Here is the big rebellious sister most of us have never met, raised under the same expectations and cultural mores, shaking them off and forging a different future. And my God, was I excited by it.

                  “¡Wáchale! She’s a black lace bra

                  kind of woman, the kind who serves

                  up suicide with every kamikaze

                  poured in the neon blue of evening.

I’ll tell you right now, that poem made me run out and buy my first black-lace bra. The poem is dedicated to a woman named la Terry. She’ll ruin your clothes and make you miss your curfew, and all I wanted was to know her or be her.

Later in the collection, in “Mexicans in France,” we meet a traveler making her way through the south of France. Her French “is not that good,” and she’s talking with a guy who seems a little ignorant—“Is it true / all Mexicans / carry knives?” he asks. But what stuck with me was this woman—this Chicana!—so far out in the world. Alone! In Europe! I had, until then, thought Rhode Island exotic. Cisneros showed me that such an adventure was possible for someone like me, and the notion nestled in my head and grew into an idea, and then a plan. In 1997, I found myself traveling through the south of France, fielding ignorant questions with my own bad French—alone and delighted.

[Read: We expect too much from our romantic partners]

Oh, and the sex and sexiness that I had been told was a secret or a sin unless it was happening with a man to whom you were married? That sex and sexiness were celebrated here: “Make love to me in Spanish, / not with that other tongue.”

The first time I fell in love—truly in love—I remember muttering her words to myself: “I want you inside / the mouth of my heart, / inside the harp of my wrists …”

There are lines on these pages that made my younger self blush—lines about being machete-d in two and suggestions of red lipstick on penises and a poem titled “I Am So in Love I Grow a New Hymen.” But as I walked through the bedrooms of my first lovers at that young age, I knew—because Cisneros had told me—that pleasure was my right. That pleasure was the purpose.

In those college days, during our long-distance calls home, my friends and I could not confide in our mothers about the lovers who were driving us crazy. Our mothers would not patiently tell us that it was normal for love to drive us mad. But we had Cisneros’s poems.

Cisneros has never stopped writing. Her 2002 novel, Caramelo, was a part of The Atlantic’s great-American-novels list. She released a new poetry collection, Woman Without Shame, in 2022. And she’s never stopped breaking new ground for Latino writers; she founded the Macondo Writers Workshop to support and nurture new voices. Today, it’s impossible to read the depictions of carnal pleasure and crazy longing in the works of contemporary Latina writers such as Carmen Maria Machado, Elizabeth Acevedo, Lizz Huerta, and Angie Cruz without hearing the echoes of Cisneros. After all, she was a mother, in a sense, to many—all of the Latinas striving to add to the literary landscape full-throated, complicated women rendered beautiful and bitchy and real.

I will admit now that at too young an age, I did, in fact, do what was expected of me. I went home after college, and I became somebody’s wife. And it was not, I realized quickly, a role I was intended to play. I’d been called early by Cisneros’s siren song to be a loose woman, a black-lace-bra kind of woman, to live a life that no one else I knew was living but that I knew Cisneros had lived, because she had put it into those beautiful words. So I cast off the husband and the normal job and the normal life, and I embraced who I truly was. Nobody’s mother, nobody’s wife. A writer.

Trump Called Harris ‘Beautiful.’ Now He Has a Problem.

2024-09-09T13:03:09-04:00

Donald Trump has a remarkably binary view of the world: Walls are good; migrants are bad. Tariffs are good; taxes are bad. People who love Trump are good; those who don’t are bad. And women are hot—or not.

Trump cares about everyone’s looks, of course. But as a former owner of the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants, he is a self-proclaimed expert on women’s beauty. He spent multiple appearances on The Howard Stern Show rating women on a numeric scale. You can see him, like a teenage boy, sizing up every woman he encounters.

This is boorish, of course, but politically, it has proved useful. When he thinks a woman is unattractive, Trump has an easy way to dismiss her. He rips her apart. Carly Fiorina, he said, had “that face”: “Would anyone vote for that?” He once tweeted: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” He reportedly wouldn’t make Nikki Haley secretary of state because of “blotch marks on her cheeks”: “She’s not good for me. She’s got that complexion problem.” (He calls himself a “skin man.”) During their primary battle this year, he insinuated that Haley’s husband—a National Guardsman who was deployed to the Horn of Africa—had run out on her. He’s extended this same bullying strategy to his legal issues. His main line of defense in his civil trial for the rape and sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll was that she was not “his type.” (Jurors found him responsible for the latter charge.)

Depressingly, this has been pretty effective. Erotic appeal is a form of power that Trump seems to actually respect. By declaring these women undesirable, Trump has portrayed them not just as bossy, unattractive shrews, but as weak.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]

When Trump thinks a woman is hot, however, the situation gets a lot more complicated. And Trump thinks Kamala Harris, whom he will face for the first time onstage in tomorrow’s debate, is a certified hottie. He told Elon Musk in an interview that Harris, on the cover of Time, looked like “the most beautiful actress ever to live,” comparing her favorably to his own—presumably hot—wife, Melania. “I think we finally found the one thing Trump is incapable of lying about,” Desi Lydic joked in a Daily Show segment about the interview. “If he thinks someone is hot, he’ll say they’re hot. He’ll lie about winning an election, but he has deep respect for the sanctity of bangability.”

Still, there’s an election to try to win, so Trump is forced to take a different line of attack: suggesting that because a woman is beautiful, she must be dumb, and if she’s successful nonetheless, that’s only because she slept her way to the top. He’s used this strategy before too. He called Megyn Kelly a bimbo and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “not even a smart person.” He said Mika Brzezinski had a “low I.Q.” and implied that she had made it to Morning Joe only because she was dating her co-host. He told a female reporter once, “You wouldn’t have this job if you weren’t beautiful,” and wrote that “early victories by the women on The Apprentice were, to a very large extent, dependent on their sex appeal.” And so now Vice President Harris is “dumb as a rock,” “really DUMB,” “VERY STUPID,” and so on. She only got this far, he has said, thanks to a romantic entanglement she had with the mayor of San Francisco almost 30 years ago, and she “doesn’t have the mental capacity to do a REAL Debate.”

This probably works on some people, but it’s hard to persuade the general public to dismiss observed intelligence in women just because they are conventionally attractive. On a dumber level, sexualizing women backfires because it reinforces the idea that women have a form of power. And it reveals that that power is working—even over Trump. Because when it comes to beautiful women, Trump is a lover, not a fighter.

[David A. Graham: He could have talked about anything else]

We make so much of Trump’s sexism that we seem to dismiss Trump’s sexuality—and his open obsession with it. His comments about women are demeaning, but they are also lascivious. He’s a civilly convicted sexual abuser who has described his lack of impulse control around beautiful women on multiple occasions. As he told Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood tape, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet.” Lest we think age is slowing him down, just this year he told a female supporter at Mar-a-Lago, “All these beautiful women, you’re driving me crazy.” He accompanied this with a n emphatic gesture. Had his hand been just a few inches closer to the woman, he might have grabbed something.

He honestly can’t seem to help himself: These women are more powerful than he is. “I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part,” he wrote in The Art of the Comeback. A famous germophobe, he’s always been terrified of STDs, but he still can’t help himself: “If you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam—it’s called the dating game,” he told Stern, and vaginas are “potential land mines.”

One really gets the impression that Trump would prefer not to be on the wrong side of any woman he’s deemed hot. Maybe one day, we can have a politics where female candidates aren’t judged by their physical appearance. Harris, unlike Clinton, has so far downplayed her gender, but Trump can’t see past it. Given where we are, it matters that Harris’s attractiveness is a challenge that Trump hasn’t figured out how to solve. It must make him nervous. If he finds Harris alluring, there is no doubt in his mind that America will too. After all, he’s the expert.

To Save the World, My Mother Abandoned Me

2024-08-12T07:00:00-04:00

When I was in grade school, my prized possession was a button. It went on my quilted coat in the winter, and my jean jacket in the spring, and when it got too hot, I’d reluctantly pin it to my book bag. This was the ’80s, and buttons featuring Smurfette or Jem were sartorial staples. Still, my button stood out. Vote Socialist Workers it said, and below that: GonzÁlez for Vice-President. It had a photograph of a woman’s face in profile: black hair, big glasses, ribbed turtleneck, determined look. My mother.

The button was a souvenir from her 1984 campaign for vice president of the United States—my mother, Andrea González, was the first Puerto Rican woman to run for national office. The day it came in the mail, I was 7 years old and hadn’t lived with her for nearly four years. Her running mate was a former Black Panther named Mel Mason. Obviously, they lost. But that didn’t make me less devoted to the thing. If asked—and I always hoped people would ask—I could rattle off the talking points of their platform.

Lots of kids don’t have mothers. The teachers at my Brooklyn public schools made sure we motherless children knew that we weren’t alone, that there were others whose permission slips and parent-teacher conferences were tended to by an aunt or a sister or a grandparent. We were the ones the other families whispered about: whose mother had died, whose mother had left with a no-good man, whose mother was lost to the streets or prison or drinking or drugs.

I remember feeling terribly sorry for the kids whose mothers had abandoned them, and terribly afraid I’d be mistaken for one. Because my mother hadn’t ditched me; she was working to save the world from the ravages of capitalism. There was a reason she wasn’t with me. A good reason. The button was my proof. And for years, it was enough.

When I was 3, my mother sent me to Brooklyn to live with her parents. According to family lore, shortly after I arrived, my grandfather, Pop, took me to ride the city bus. We joined a crowd of commuters shuffling their feet at the corner stop. Confused, I asked one of the adults where their signs were. Until then, I’d never seen a gathering of grown-ups who weren’t protesting something.

I’d spent the first years of my life being shuttled from meeting to rally to picket line. Hugo Blanco, who had led an Indigenous-peasant uprising in Peru, was one of my babysitters; so was Fred Halstead, the 6-foot-6-inch anti-war activist. At rallies, especially pro-choice ones, I was a useful prop. See? We don’t hate babies! There I was, on my mother’s hip, a cigarette in her mouth and a stack of flyers in her hand, as she spread the word of the revolution.

In Brooklyn, it was Pop who kept my mother present for me, in addition to overseeing potty training and taking me to dance class. My grandmother was less involved; after working all day in a school cafeteria and fastidiously cleaning our home, she often took to her bed. In those early days, my mother was writing for the Socialist Workers Party’s newspaper, The Militant, and making a lot of trips to Latin America, giving speeches to the proletariat. I knew this because the party videotaped these speeches and my grandfather mail-ordered all of the videos. Although he had voted for Richard Nixon, Pop supported whatever his children pursued. On rainy Saturdays, he would screen my mother’s speeches while I sat cross-legged on the floor, transfixed. In this way, my mother and I had a perfectly lovely relationship as virtual strangers.

Each week, he scanned his copy of The Militant for articles she’d written or references to her. He read to me about how she was advocating for women’s rights in Puerto Rico; next she was in Washington, D.C., speaking about the transit workers’ union negotiations; then she was running for mayor of New York in 1985 on a platform of preserving the city for “working people.” When she wasn’t giving speeches, she was embedded in factories—an auto plant, a bra maker—galvanizing the unions while working the assembly lines. My grandfather would clip out the articles, and I would underline the words and phrases I didn’t know and look them up in our big dictionary: colonialism, collective bargaining, fascism. Concepts that seeped into my consciousness before I had any context for understanding them. These were my mother’s things. These were the reasons she’d left me. And therefore they must be very important.

Andrea González in a 1985 clipping from The Militant ( foreground ); the author and her mother around 1979 (background ) (Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: Clipping courtesy of The Militant; photo courtesy of Dave Paparello.)

Once a year, my mother would come to visit for a week around Christmas. Normally my grandparents and I spent our Sundays having dinner with 20 or 30 cousins and great-aunts and -uncles. But when my mother came to town, our family shrank to the four of us. If a cousin or an aunt stopped by for cake and coffee, a tense silence would fall. No one knew what casual bit of conversation my mother might take as a political provocation. There was no wrong time, she seemed to feel, to fight for justice.

She always brought me a doll from the countries where she’d gone to battle the bourgeoisie. The dolls came in shades of brown and black and were made of fabric, with native dresses and elaborate hairdos. They were better than any Barbie or Cabbage Patch Kid, my mom would say, because they were made by hand, not by a corporation; they sprang from tradition, not a marketing department. She told me about the women who made the dolls—how they faced many oppressions but would someday rise up.

During the day, my mother would head into Manhattan and meet up with friends from the party, and I’d play with my new doll at home. At night, she’d chain-smoke and watch TV with my grandparents. But sometimes, during these visits, I’d catch my mother staring at me. “You’re pretty,” she’d say. I’d reply that we looked alike—people were always commenting on how we looked and talked and even moved alike. But inevitably she would say, “No, you’re prettier.” As I got older, this made me uncomfortable. I could plainly see that my mother wasn’t vain. If she was giving me a compliment about something of such little consequence to her, it must be the only thing she could think to say.

After a few days of this, she would leave—go back to a factory or the campaign trail. In my room, my grandfather had built a shelf for the dolls, each under a clear protective dome. When my mother was gone, he’d ascend the stepladder and add the new doll to the others, the task becoming a ceremony that marked her departure. Over the years he expanded the shelf until eventually it wrapped around my bedroom, and the totems of Black and brown women from across the world looked down on me while I slept.

Not long ago, a young author whose work I enjoy invited me to dinner. It was a pleasant enough meal until, over oysters and charred octopus, the author began throwing out socialist jargon—class struggle, oppressors, imperialism—and talking about us, two white-collar writers dining in a lovely restaurant, as “exploited laborers.”

The idea of me—paid a comfortable wage to sit around all day, think thoughts, and type them out—being an “exploited laborer” felt insulting. It was an insult to people like my grandparents, who worked blue-collar jobs all their life. It was an insult to my mother. “What are we risking,” I asked my young companion, “carpal tunnel?”

I had spoken with my mother maybe four times in the past 15 years. But I found myself wondering what she’d make of the conversation. What would she—who’d devoted so much of her life to her ideology—make of the soft lives and hard absolutism of so much of today’s far left?

My mother’s parents grew up in the same tenement building in Red Hook, Brooklyn, during the Great Depression, in the kind of poverty that might have been depicted by a Puerto Rican Charles Dickens. My grandmother and her siblings were orphans—10 of them in a railroad apartment, the eldest still a teenager. Pop’s family lived a floor above and was a little better off—his parents weren’t dead, and he was one of only seven. At 18, he fought in World War II. A year after he came home from Europe, he married my grandmother, and he eventually got a job fixing trains for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

By the spring of 1969, their family was doing well. Their oldest daughter, Linda, a bottle blonde with a German Irish husband, was working as a receptionist at General Electric; my mother, the bookish, black-haired sister, was in her first year at Brooklyn College; and Alberta, the youngest, was 11 and enrolled in Catholic school. Then one day at the train yard, Pop was lying underneath a subway car, repairing a break, when a motorman turned the engine on and began to drive the train forward, dragging Pop along with it.

He was lucky to survive, but one of his legs had been shattered. He was in a cast up to his thigh, trapped in the apartment for months, unable to work. His union and workmen’s comp were the only things that ensured our family’s survival. Just a few months later, while Pop was still laid up in bed, Alberta went to a Mets game and came home complaining of a headache. A week later, she was dead. My grandmother, already prone to depression, was leveled. My mother was radicalized.

Alberta died from encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain linked at the time to mosquito-borne viruses. My mother learned that such illnesses were sometimes traced to poor sanitation in low-income neighborhoods. This opened her eyes to many other unfair things in the world. She was reading Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, and one day on campus she encountered some people selling copies of The Militant. They, too, saw the injustice of the world. Moreover, they had a theory for how to change it—a vision for a new world order. They were from the Socialist Workers Party.

My mother joined their movement, first as part of the Young Socialist Alliance, and later as a full member. The revolution required devotion. Membership involved many meetings: educational forums on the “Cuban situation,” organizational meetings on anti–Vietnam War efforts, lectures by comrades visiting from abroad, branch meetings, executive meetings, youth meetings, committee meetings. Members were responsible for selling Militant newspapers each week. For a time, The Militant ran a scoreboard that tallied which branches were performing best. Many comrades spent Saturdays hawking books with titles such as Sandinistas Speak and The Housing Question from the group’s publishing imprint, Pathfinder Press. They handed out flyers at factories and joined striking workers to show their solidarity. All of this added up easily to 10 or more commitments a week. Failure to participate could result in expulsion.

The revolution was also nomadic. The party’s ranks were growing—the anti-war movement had brought many young people to the party. New branches needed to be opened, others revitalized. Members were deployed and redeployed by party leadership. A steelworker in a union in Detroit might be sent to live in the South, where a labor grievance was brewing. A year later, he might be ordered to Pittsburgh. The blow of a cross-country move was softened by the fact that you’d always have a place to stay: Party members were expected to open their homes to newcomers. They were glad to do it—and why wouldn’t they be? They weren’t hosting a stranger; they were hosting a comrade they simply hadn’t met yet.

Each August, members from all over the United States, and sometimes from overseas, would descend on the campus of Oberlin College, in Ohio, for the party’s convention. There would be educational sessions on the Russian Revolution and rallies to raise spirits and funds. Comrades would spread out on the lush, green lawns, debating the minutiae of the party’s position on Cuba or Grenada. They shared wine, cigarettes, and often each other’s beds.

That’s where my parents met, in 1975. My mother was working on desegregation in Boston, and would soon move to L.A. to run a new branch office there. My father was handsome and three years her junior. Soon, they were married. And in 1977, I was born.

Here is an incomplete list of the many people who raised me in my mother’s absence: my grandparents. Their brothers and sisters and children. Mister Rogers. The librarians at the Brooklyn Public Library. Maria from Sesame Street. Judy Blume. L. M. Montgomery. Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. The entire cast of A Different World. Seventeen magazine. Mariah Carey. The women on the Planned Parenthood hotline. My English teacher. My drama teacher. My friends’ moms. Zora Neale Hurston. Kurt Cobain. John Hughes. Every shopgirl at Patricia Field and Ricky’s. All of my high-school boyfriends. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sandra Cisneros. Lil’ Kim. The streets. The club.

My friends. All of my beautiful friends.

There were others as well, people I was too young to remember but who felt they’d played some role in my upbringing. After my first novel came out, many of these people sent me messages because they had held me on their knee once or had babysat me, and ever since then had wondered, as one woman wrote to me, “what had happened to that bright-eyed little girl.” That woman said she’d thought of me often over the years, but, “for a long time, I was reluctant to ask either of your parents what happened to you, because I thought it might be a sad story.” Old Socialists I’d never heard of sent baby pictures of me; told me that I’d lived with them for weeks or months; had stories about taking care of me, facts I’d never known about my own life. A few described reading to me, claiming some credit for my literary career. And maybe they were right.

My novel Olga Dies Dreaming was not about my mother, but it did borrow the basic premise of our lives. It follows two siblings who were abandoned as children by Blanca, their mother. Blanca is a member of the Young Lords, a Latino civil-rights organization, and she left to pursue the liberation of Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island, brings Blanca suddenly back into her children’s lives. And in an indirect way, it brought my mother back into mine.

I wanted Blanca to be historically accurate. Researching the radical movements of the era, I stumbled upon an article in The Militant, from 1984, about my mother. There she was campaigning in Puerto Rico, denouncing the repression of unions and cheering on the independence movement. It was funny—I was over 40, and I’d had access to the internet for half my life, but I had never thought before to use it to piece together my mother’s life.

A 1985 clipping from The Militant ( foreground ); the author and her grandparents in 1979 (background ) (Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: Clipping courtesy of The Militant; photo courtesy of Xochitl Gonzalez.)

I found an op-ed she wrote about the need for bilingual education reform: “Memories of my own school days in New York City include teachers telling us ‘to go back to San Juan’ (Puerto Rico) if we didn’t speak English and washing our mouths out with soap for speaking Spanish in class. The message they sent was clear: you, and your language were inferior.” Here was a memory that I could relate to, just not one that I’d ever heard before.

The New York Times featured my mom in an article about the female candidates running for vice president in 1984. Angela Davis, the Communist candidate, thought that the slate of women was fantastic and that everyone should do whatever they could to stop Ronald Reagan. My mother was, to my amusement, less impressed. The Times quoted one of her articles for The Militant : “The Ferraro candidacy is another attempt to convince women and other victims of capitalist society that progress can indeed be won through the two-party system.” The article then mentions that my mother was from Brooklyn, Geraldine Ferraro from Queens, to which my mother was sure to add that the differences between them were “more than just boroughs.”

I looked further back in time, and read about a press conference she gave denouncing President Gerald Ford’s proposal to make Puerto Rico a state: “Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. This move is just an attempt to cover up the colonial status and to continue to make profits.” She popped up year after year, like the Forrest Gump of socialism. The date at the top of the article was the only proof that she was, at that moment, newly pregnant with me.

By the time I wrote Olga Dies Dreaming, I’d achieved quite a bit of healthy peace around our estranged relationship. Still, when I found a small mention in the Times, from 1984, about her vice-presidential run that said she was living in New Jersey, I was shocked. The whole year I was 6, she’d been right across the river, and all I could remember clearly was her Christmas visit.

Worse was a story about her candidacy for mayor of New York, when she ran against Ed Koch. That placed her even closer—in New York City, when I was 7 and 8. I had somehow never thought about this before: Of course one needs to reside in a city in order to run for mayor of it. All that time I was wearing her campaign button, she was only a subway ride away.

When I was about 13, my mother didn’t come back to Brooklyn for her Christmas visit. She’d been playing Norma Rae on an automobile assembly line in St. Louis when she met a Vietnam vet who had two small children—a girl and a boy, then 3 and 4. That year, my grandmother informed me, my mother was going to stay in Missouri and have Christmas with him.

In the summer, it was suggested that I go out to visit her—something I’d rarely done—and meet her boyfriend. They were living with his children and planning to get married. In all the talk about her new life, I noticed that we no longer discussed her work with the party—no one mentioned any speeches, or campaigns, or trips abroad. She had retired, apparently, given it all up, and no one said a thing about it. All I knew was that where there had once been sparse furnishings and perpetual calls to offer new addresses, she now had a new family and a big home with a “great room.” They raised dogs, including one that was allegedly 86 percent wolf. At the wedding, there was country line dancing. After, a Costco membership. Her days of activism were over.

My grandfather was shocked, my grandmother bemused. I quietly seethed. Socialism had been my mother’s religion, and my mother had been mine. Now none of it mattered. I declared myself too old for dolls and packed my watchwomen into a box.

After my mother settled down in the Midwest, our relationship got both more intimate and more estranged in unpredictable turns. It was my mother, for instance, who taught me to use a tampon during a summer visit to St. Louis, when her husband—a totally lovely man—insisted on taking us camping. We were going to swim in the river, and when I complained that I had my period, my mother handed me a Tampax. “Grandma said virgins can’t use these,” I remember saying. “Grandma also thinks men have less ribs than women and that’s not true either,” my mother said, as she gently shoved me into a campground stall. (My grandmother, for what it’s worth, did believe this—because of Adam and Eve—and could not be convinced otherwise.)

I remember eating dinner with them outside as a storm came over the plains. “That’s what weather looks like,” her husband said. It was big and wild and interesting. And I saw how it must feel that way to my mother too—so different from the cramped skyline back home.

But then I would see her with his children and it would fill me with rage. Or she would take the mother act too far and try to weigh in on my studies or whom I was dating. We would spend a week together, erupt into an argument, and not speak again for months.

Once, before their wedding, when I was about 15, I was sent for a visit and we went on another camping trip. The little kids wouldn’t come, my mother promised me. Instead it was just me and her and her fiancé and a young relative of his. I guess it never occurred to the adults that us sharing a tent might be a bad idea. That night, the boy’s aggressions sent me silently running from the tent. I hid in the campground bathroom, empty save for a stray dog and a scapular, a Catholic devotional necklace made of fabric, hanging from the mirror. I woke in the morning with the dog curled beside me and the scapular in my hand, and I walked back to our campsite. Save for two postcards I sent to friends back home, I have never said anything about that night until now.

In my mother’s absence, I looked for meaning in all the things that were not hers. As a high schooler, I tried on Republicanism, but then Republicans gave us Clarence Thomas and Rush Limbaugh, and even as a teenager, I couldn’t get down with that. Instead, I embraced stories of meritocracy and individualism—of people who made a life for themselves without following in anyone’s footsteps. I worshipped Jim Morrison and obsessed over The Fountainhead ’s Howard Roark. Oprah was my idol. Bill Clinton was my role model. My mother was appalled, but I saw that he was like me: someone with no one around to help him except the good teachers who saw just how special and smart he was.

When I got into Brown, my mother was no more approving. She thought that an Ivy League education was a waste of money, the schools just a breeding ground for snobbery. But I was learning things. Money, until then, had existed in degrees of scarcity. Rich was a relative term, one bestowed in regard to the number of Jordans someone owned or whether their parents could afford to buy them a car. At Brown, I discovered that real wealth was something else. It was access: to culture, to experiences, to power. I believed that with enough hard work, those things would all come my way.

My memory of my college graduation is marred by a fight my mother picked with her older sister at dinner. My aunt Linda, an English teacher, had been the one to drive me around on college tours and proofread my papers. I’d sent her my senior thesis to read, and it had won a departmental prize that was awarded during the ceremony. But the topic—colonialism and Postimpressionistic painting—irritated my mother. She hadn’t read the paper, but I remember her railing against it anyway. Something about artists making decorations for the moneyed class. Aunt Linda defended my paper. My mother proclaimed her an out-of-touch member of the petite bourgeoisie. I recall a glass of wine being thrown. Or maybe it was just spilled and I have watched too many telenovelas. Either way, my mother stormed out of the restaurant, and my grandparents ran after her.

[From the July/August 2023 issue: Confessions of a luxury-wedding planner]

In my 20s, my mother and I were distant acquaintances. Unconsciously or not, I ended up in a career that I knew she would despise: planning weddings for the very rich. When Pop died, in 2009, my mother swept in. She gave the eulogy, and in it she memorialized all the things her father had done for her: taught her to read, to write, to be independent, to fix a car. All the things he’d done for her, that is, with one exception—raising me. And that omission was the one thing I could never forgive.

This spring, my mother and I had our first real conversation in years. Outside of family funerals, we’d rarely talked; I didn’t even have her phone number. We spoke on Zoom, which she hadn’t used before, and when she finally got the camera working, I could see a wood-framed landscape painting hanging over her head, the kind you might find at HomeGoods. Her lifestyle had changed, but her politics had not. When I asked about her position today, she told me, without hesitation, “I still do believe totally in the power and the capacity of the working class on a world scale to bring about a just world.”

After she left the party, she continued working in the Missouri factory she’d been deployed to. For two decades, until the plant closed, she installed fenders on minivans. She enjoyed the work; she says the auto industry attracts freethinkers. Despite those years in the Midwest, her Brooklyn accent is still so thick that the transcription service I used could barely understand her. At one point, she paused in order to gather her thoughts without using “words that have come to mean nothing.” I could see what so many comrades had admired about her. She is pragmatic on one hand and uncompromising on the other. (She described the left’s beloved Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “a very smart young woman” who “does not really advance the self-confidence, self-consciousness, or the organization of working people. Because she is a Democrat.”)

But when I tried to talk about personal matters, the conversation foundered. Only through politics could we seem to access each other as humans. The few memories my mother shared about me as a child were almost always anecdotes from her political life, tales more about my absence than my presence.

I showed up in a story about a labor rally in D.C., where my mother was passing out flyers in support of making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday. Some white men took offense, started to rough her up a bit, and grabbed her bag. She yelled at them: “My kid’s pictures are in there!” They gave the bag back, and she showed them the photos. It helped them realize, she said, that “you may have ideas different from them, but you’re still a human being with kids.” And then, without skipping a beat, “So yeah, we were really trying to convince working people that the way we live now is not the beginning and end of the way we could live.”

We discussed her run for mayor. She said she used to joke that our family was so big, she could come in second with their support alone. That campaign, she said, “was more fun because I was home.” I should have said, “You were home—why didn’t you come see your daughter?” But I didn’t. Perhaps I didn’t want to hear the answer.

When I did finally ask if she regretted not raising me, she answered my question with a story. Two comrades were having a baby and considering giving it up. Someone said that they should talk to her. “I said, ‘Are you outta your mind? Don’t do what I did. That was terrible. That was a stupid thing … Don’t do anything that I did. Don’t do that.’ ”

She told me she had missed the “pleasure of watching you grow and change.” At that moment, I felt sad for her. I felt the need to comfort her. I told her how proud I was of her. I told her about the button. My mother changed the subject.

There’s a kind of powerful woman who can make every member of a crowd feel like the only person in the room, but meet her one-on-one, and you barely register. I’d always seen this as a flaw until I sat down to write the Blanca character in my novel, and recognized it as something else. In a letter about the father of her children, Blanca writes, “I could spend my time soothing his loneliness and hurt, trying to motivate him back into purpose, or I could spend my time working towards the liberation of oppressed people around the world. Both, you must understand, are expressions of love.”

To my surprise, my mother told me she liked the book, and when I asked if she saw herself in Blanca, she said, “Oh, very clearly.” Then she said that the novel had made her consider, for the first time, how her absence had made me feel: “I know how I looked at things, and the book made me think, ‘Well, this is how you saw things.’ ” She thought at the time that she was doing the right thing: “Okay, this is the best situation I can create given my situation.” Now she realized that to me, “it had to have felt the other way, like I was dumping you.” She wasn’t apologizing or trying to win me over; her tone was completely matter-of-fact.

The conversation knocked the air out of me. I’d spent a lifetime trying to understand my mother’s experiences, and she had never bothered doing anything of the kind for me.

In her telling, my father was a good person, but he drank and was no help. One day, when I was a few months old, she said she came home from work to find the door bolted from the inside. She could hear me crying, but no one would answer. Eventually she broke in and found my father passed out in a chair and me lying on the floor, covered in urine. “You were soaked to the gills,” she said. The next morning, she told him he had three months to pull it together. (My father, now long sober, denied this account. He always believed she’d left him for another man. My mother said, “I left him because I wanted to be sane.”)

She was a single mother on a working wage, effectively doing three jobs: She had a gig at a factory, she spent her breaks trying to recruit her colleagues to the cause, and she devoted her evenings to party or union work. The party—while empathetic to workers at large—was often insensitive to the individual needs of female comrades. (When the “problem” of women breastfeeding during meetings arose, for example, leadership decided that it was a nonissue: Babies were not full members of the party and therefore should not be at meetings in the first place.)

But also, my mother had been a star. The man she dated after my dad, a fellow comrade named Dave Paparello, told me that she “was a fucking natural.” She wasn’t pretentious or faux folksy, and she had a knack for getting people to listen to her. She could also be, he said, very intimidating. Mel Mason, the former Black Panther who was her presidential running mate, told me that meeting her was “one of the high points of being in the Socialist Workers Party.” She was “a real revolutionary.” But motherhood changed the way people saw her.

I could feel the anger in her voice, all these years later, as she recounted traveling with me from Houston to Dallas to attend a class led by a visiting senior party member, an older man. During his talk, she told me, “you were making a little noise, but you were not crying. You were very well-behaved.” In front of the entire room, the man said, “You have to shut her up or leave.” And so she left.

It wasn’t the last time she would be thrown out of a meeting for bringing her baby. It bruised her ego, but it also bruised her perception of the party’s leadership. She was out there trying to recruit working women from the factory lines, and the party seemed clueless about what life was really like for them.

I asked my mother if she had felt overwhelmed by motherhood, and she admitted that she had. Changing the world, for some of us, feels easier than raising a child. They are both, I suppose, expressions of love.

I’ll probably never fully understand why my mother left the party—it was the one subject related to her career that she was reluctant to discuss. But by the time she resigned, many others had done the same thing. The late ’80s and ’90s were a period of decline. The exodus was a response, in part, to the exhaustion from civil-rights battles fought and won, and to the end of the Vietnam War. But for many members, the problem was not a loss of faith in the cause, but frustration with the autocratic nature of party leadership. Just as members felt they were making progress in a posting, they might be told to leave. Anyone who questioned their assignment was assured that someone else would be sent to take their place, as if they were all interchangeable.

Dave Paparello had been a member of the party since he was a teenager, but he quit around the same time as my mother. He said the intellectual openness that had drawn him to the party started to “degenerate” and leadership became more “corporate.” Meetings became less about strikes and actions and more about internal party affairs. “Trials,” once rare disciplinary events, became more frequent. The threat of expulsion loomed.

Diana Cantú, a former comrade who briefly dated my father, has kept in touch with me over the years. She majored in medieval studies and worked as a publicist for the Gilbert & Sullivan Repertory Company before she joined the party, learned to solder, and took a job at an electronics plant—mortifying her bourgeois family. She told me that her last days in the party felt like being on one of those centrifugal-force rides at an amusement park, or on a spinning wheel at a playground. Everything went round and round, faster and faster, until people couldn’t hold on anymore. “You see them fly off. And I remember that sensation … You just fly off.”

All of this made sense to me. But none of it explained St. Louis, the Costco membership, and the stepkids. None of it explained how, after decades of radical independence, my mother had seemingly changed her whole life for the love of a man. Talking about my mom, Dave said he just couldn’t “make the puzzle pieces fit.” And that’s true for me too.

I felt betrayed when she left the party, but even more aggrieved that she had raised these two other kids. “I wouldn’t blame you for that,” she told me, during another call. But she insisted that she’d married her husband, “not the kids.” Living with two small children … “I didn’t really care much for doing that, to be totally honest. I thought I wasn’t really good at it.” Sometimes, she said, the kids would give her a hard time, telling her, “You’re not my mother.” And she would say that was right: “ ‘That’s why I don’t love you unconditionally. I don’t love you no matter what you do. Sometimes, I don’t love you.’ ”

In theory—as a matter of policy—my mother did love children. I recently came across a decades-old article about her running for a school-board seat in D.C. that seemed to sum her up. The Washington Post reported that she had been “involved in a program to increase parent involvement in the New York City school system before coming to Washington,” and was pushing for the D.C. board to “more actively involve parents in policy-making decisions.” This was in 1981. Back in Brooklyn, I would have been starting kindergarten.

In the past few years, support for labor movements has been ticking up. Some people compared this spring’s college encampments demanding divestment from Israel to the protest movements of the 1960s. Online, people throw around the word socialism, though many have only the vaguest grasp of what the ideology entails. Much of the far left’s energy seems more focused on rhetoric than on real work. It’s hard to imagine those college students, for example, packing up their tents and pulling a swing shift at a bra factory.

But one thing feels similar, and that’s the absolutism required to be “down for the cause.” The righteousness of the collective pursuit serves as justification for all kinds of callousness. Dissent, or even nuance, is unwelcome. And nothing is too precious to sacrifice to the cause.

I grew out of my rebellious politics a long time ago. On most issues, my mother and I are aligned. I’m a member of two unions, including the Writers Guild of America, and I supported our strike last year. But life imbued me with a journalist’s skepticism of all brands of certainty. I’ve seen too much of movements to trust them. Protests give me claustrophobia. Rallies cause heart palpitations. Honestly, even stadium concerts make me uncomfortable. Collective power moves me; collective thought freaks me out.

The Socialist Workers Party still exists, but its ranks have dwindled, though my father is still a supporter. Some of its positions—for example, its staunch support of Israel (the party argues that Iran, not Israel, is the main aggressor in the Middle East)—have left it out of step with many on the left. The most influential socialist party in the U.S. now is probably the Party for Socialism and Liberation. It’s running two Latina candidates for president and vice president this year, Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia. They agreed to an interview with me. They are passionate and eloquent and—not that it matters—beautiful. I thought I detected some mild disdain from one of the women over having to engage with such a centrist mainstream-media hack as myself. (My politics are far more Elizabeth Warren than Trotsky.) I was not offended; I was relieved. This woman knew that my struggle was not the home attendant’s struggle or the minimum-wage worker’s struggle. When I asked what their goals were, they said: Burn it all down. Start from scratch.

I agreed with many things that they said: Our democracy was structured to protect capitalism and disenfranchise labor. The two-party system is broken, and we are absolutely living under the whims of a billionaire class. But when they talked—with radiant clarity—about the need to sublimate the individual to the collective in order to create true change, I bristled.

When my mother told me she hadn’t ever considered how I felt about growing up without her, my first reaction was that her wiring was off. But speaking with those two Socialist candidates, I came to view it differently. All around my mother, people were being told to give up one life here and start another there. And they did, no questions asked. She must have seen me as just another comrade being relocated for the movement. She had not considered my feelings because, I suspect, she had not considered her own.

The happiest my mother sounded during our calls was when she was talking about the successful organized-labor actions that took place last year—strikes by health-care workers, United Auto Workers, the Screen Actors Guild. “I love that guy!” my mother said about Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union leader from Staten Island. “I love him, right, where he wore his leather jacket and his cap. I thought: This is what union organizing should look like. Everyday people.”

She sounded like a proud parent.

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “My Mother the Revolutionary.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What the Kamala Harris Doubters Don’t Understand

2024-07-25T09:33:00-04:00

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The June 27th debate was barely off the air when my phone began buzzing with messages from anxious Democrats I know: “He needs to pull out. Will he pull out?” President Joe Biden eventually did the patriotic thing and ended his campaign. But in the three weeks in between—as the text threads moved from “if” to “when” to “who”—I was shocked at the certainty with which people dismissed the idea of Biden being replaced by his obvious successor: Vice President Kamala Harris.

Let me be specific. It was not “people” dismissing her; it was men. I have many male friends, and they frequently include me in barstool-punditry sessions where they pontificate, often with wisdom and insight, on the issues of the day. Usually I enjoy this, but over the past few days, I’ve found myself more and more irritated.

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

I’ve had men I know (and love) explain to me the many reasons Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, J. B. Pritzker and—as if to prove that it’s not a “woman thing”—Gretchen Whitmer would all be better and more exciting candidates. I’ve been told about Harris’s mediocre polling (yes, I know about it), reminded of her awkward 2020 presidential bid (yes, I remember). My male friends bring up “likability,” and her made–for–Fox News–fodder role as border czar. I get it: Asking whether someone can actually win is one of the most basic questions in politics. But when I push back on their trepidation, many give me some version of: “I have no issue with her; I’m just worried about how she will play with white midwestern male voters.”

I have been haunted by this unnamed white midwestern male voter for longer than I can remember. He turns up anytime a woman runs for anything, tucks his polo shirt into his jeans, and starts listing all the ways the candidate just doesn’t share his values. If only I could find him and talk with him! If only we could grab one of those proverbial beers. I would explain that although he matters and is important, now is not the time to make things about himself. Now he has to do what I and so many women and people of color have done in this country for generations: hold our nose and vote for a politician who might not totally get us, but whom we have to trust to do their best by us anyway.

I lived through the roller coaster of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. I watched Elizabeth Warren supporters campaign while Bernie bros told them they were wasting their time. Then the Supreme Court took away the right to choose that I had thought belonged to all American citizens. Now I’ve run out of patience. My friends’ barstool logic is not only maddening; it’s dangerous.

It is not that I don’t understand the electoral map, or that I’m dismissing the importance of the white male swing voter. Of course he’s important, and of course there’s a very good chance that, after leaving a diner and speaking to a reporter about what really matters to voters like him … he’s going to vote for Donald Trump. But the Harris candidacy is no longer hypothetical. She is almost certain to be running against Trump, and our democracy hangs in the balance. What do my male friends gain from fretting so much over this particular voter now? I’m beginning to think that they bring him up because they don’t want to admit to their own biases—that he’s a cover for their own hovering doubts about a female candidate, and an excuse for why they’re not getting more enthusiastic about Harris.

Such doubts may reflect a deep desire to defeat Trump. But these men—and the women who secretly or not so secretly agree with them—can’t afford them any longer. The only way to beat Trump is to support Harris. And all sorts of other voters are already doing so. In that spirit, I thought I would provide nervous Democrats with a list of them.

Black voters, and especially Black women, have saved the Democratic Party time and again. Yet non-Black voters continually dismiss the power and potential of this community, which includes supporters, donors, and many swing-state residents. Some people have questioned Harris’s appeal among Black voters. She is half South Asian, and married to a white man, and was a prosecutor whose work, Republicans will point out, resulted in the incarceration of young Black men. But if the past few days are any indication, many Black voters aren’t just enthusiastic about her; they’re gleeful. Harris has long been vocal about issues that affect Black women, such as their disproportionately high mortality rates during childbirth. And she’s a graduate of a historically Black university, where she was a member of a Black sorority.

On the night Biden endorsed Harris, the group Win With Black Women mobilized more than 44,000 women to join a Zoom call; they donated more than $1 million in three hours and some stayed on past 1 a.m. One friend told me she “couldn’t log off, because I didn’t want to miss a word.” The next night, a similar call for Black men was organized.

If Harris wins, she will be the first Asian American president. Her mother was an immigrant from India; the now viral “coconut tree” meme came from one of her mother’s favorite expressions. South Asian Americans are not only the largest Asian American group in America; they are the most politically enga ged on many issues. Many live in swing-state cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta. And, despite the high profiles of conservatives such as Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal (and now Usha Vance), most South Asian Americans are Democrats. Tech investors and entrepreneurs such as Nihal Mehta are already lining up behind Harris.

The vice president has the potential to excite women of all races. Anyone who says that they don’t think America is “ready to vote for a woman” has not been paying attention. In 2016, many felt that voting for a woman was a way to shatter glass ceilings and celebrate “girl power.” This time is different. It is not about a milestone. It is about our bodily autonomy and right to control our own health care. Which is why, over the past two years, women have come out even in the most conservative states to vote against ballot measures limiting their reproductive rights. No man can campaign as passionately on this issue as a woman can.

Harris has already gone on a “Fight for Reproductive Freedom” tour in battleground states. And who can forget her exchange with Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings? Harris, like many senators, tried to get him to say what he thought about Roe v. Wade. When he wouldn’t, she asked him something different: whether he could “think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” He could not. When comparing her with the retrograde MAGA president who put American women in this predicament in the first place, people wouldn’t need to even like Kamala Harris all that much to confidently vote for her.

Perhaps one of the most surprising things about her candidacy is how quickly she’s been embraced by young people on the internet. At nearly 60, Harris would hardly be considered young in any other context. But after watching last month’s Showdown at the Geriatric Corral between a septuagenarian and an octogenarian, Harris seems positively sprightly. Not only can she walk (in heels!) with a spring in her step, but she can dance, and have that dance go viral on TikTok and Instagram. As the artist Charli XCX has already proclaimed to her youthful followers: Kamala is brat. If you don’t know what that means, it doesn’t matter.

[Read: The Brat-ification of Kamala Harris]

What matters is that young people are meme-ing and tweeting and engaging with this candidate. Celebrities such as Cardi B, who had previously said they’d sit the election out, are now endorsing Harris. (Or “Momala,” as her 20-something stepkids call her.) For the cynics who say “Young people don’t vote,” I won’t refute that. But … they might. And in the run-up to November, their excitement will influence the culture. I am old enough to remember when everyone was behind a seasoned political figure named Hillary Clinton until it became clear that all the cool kids were supporting a young senator from Chicago who’d made a speech at a political convention.

On Monday, in her first speech since Biden dropped out, Harris asked: “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion, and rule of law? Or a country of chaos, fear, and hate?” It’s a pressing question. And the kind that reminds us that another broad voter group might be moved to support Harris: people who want to feel optimistic about America again.

Harris is kind of a goofball. She’s earnest when you wouldn’t expect earnestness. She tells awkward stories. She laughs often and loudly. She is not at all cool. And people seem to like it? Many of these things worked against her back in 2020, but now it’s like seeing an ex at a high-school reunion: Suddenly the old flaws look different. Is it us? Are we lonely and desperate now? Probably.

The point is that for some time now, the only place for laughter in politics has been at a Trump political rally, in response to one of his cruel jokes. Politics has been about mass death and mass deportations. Harris takes these things seriously, but she can also provoke joy, which this country desperately needs. At that event Monday night, Harris told Biden—with warmth and sincerity—that she loved him. And then she spoke with a smile on her face about the future prospects for our country. Listening, I felt transported to a time before Trump came down the gilded escalator and turned the conversation from hope to carnage. We live in an era of cynicism, but Americans are still attracted to joy. We might find that even our white midwestern male voters want more of that.

Abortion Isn’t About Feminism

2024-07-20T09:43:00-04:00

Updated at 9 a.m. ET on July 25, 2024

One of the greater indignities of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision—besides stripping millions of American women of their bodily autonomy—was how deeply out of step it was with the majority of Americans’ beliefs. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, a record-high 69 percent of Americans believed that first-trimester abortions should be legal. Considering this statistic, it’s surprising that Democrats haven’t more robustly rallied people around this issue. One reason may be that they just don’t know how.

Roe gave American women decades of false comfort: Abortion access and reproductive rights could remain firmly in the dominion of feminist causes. Keep Your Hands Off My Reproductive Rights T-shirts became nearly as ubiquitous as Girl Boss tote bags. But although most Americans support abortion access, feminism remains more polarizing. Only 19 percent of women strongly identify as feminists. That number is far higher among young women, but among young men, the word has a different resonance: Feminism has been explicitly cited as a factor driving them rightward. Democrats might not like how this sounds, but what they need to do now is reframe a winning issue in nonfeminist terms.

One way is to talk about abortions as lifesaving health care, which more women have been doing. Another model is to talk about it not as a women’s issue, but as a family issue. This is the strategy of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. For 15 years, NLIRJ has worked in states such as Florida and Texas, training community leaders it calls poderosas to speak with their neighbors. The conversations don’t necessarily begin with abortion at all.

[Read: It’s abortion, stupid]

Most Hispanics in the United States are Catholic. Despite a deeply ingrained religious taboo against abortion, 62 percent now believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That number has risen 14 percentage points since 2007. This remarkable change is partly a reaction to draconian abortion restrictions in several Latino-heavy states. But much credit should also be attributed to years of grassroots work by organizations like NLIRJ to shift the culture.

“We ask them what keeps them up at night,” Lupe Rodríguez, the group’s executive director, told me. Rodríguez holds a degree in neurobiology from Harvard and was a scientist before she shifted into reproductive-justice work. That opening question might yield answers about problems at home or a lack of functioning electricity in their neighborhood. The point, Rodríguez said, is to go past individual “rights” and to connect “reproductive autonomy and bodily autonomy to the conditions that people live in, right? Like whether or not they’re able to feed their kids, whether or not they have money to pay the rent—like everyday concerns.” In this way, reproductive rights go beyond a niche women’s issue to something that affects every aspect of a community.

None of NLIRJ’s materials uses the term feminist. Rodríguez said this wasn’t a conscious decision, but she stands by it. “Our approach is a lot about certainly freedom, certainly bodily autonomy, certainly folks being able to make the best choices for themselves and their families. But it’s very connected to community and family.”

Poderosas are trained on how to discuss faith and abortion, and voting and abortion. Crucially, they are not required to personally hold pro-abortion views. The organization is nonpartisan. Involvement has no ideological requirement other than believing that everyone should be entitled to make decisions that are appropriate for themselves and their family. “We’re bringing people in that way, by not casting them aside” if they don’t share the same perspectives, Rodríguez told me.

This has proved an effective strategy for Latino advocates across the country, and one that Democrats can learn from. In Florida, NLIRJ and other organizations, such as the Women’s Equality Center, have shifted the narrative around abortion bans to be about the government interfering in private family matters. In Arizona, a recent poll by LUCHA, a family-oriented social-justice organization, found that 75 percent of Latino voters agreed that abortion should be legal, regardless of their personal views on the matter. In New Mexico, male Hispanic Democratic politicians are campaigning on reproductive rights even in conversations with Latino male voters, whose primary concern is typically the economy. Representative Gabriel Vasquez is banking on this being a matter of family and personal liberty—exactly what drove so many Latino immigrants to America in the first place. “It is not about whether we are pro-choice or pro-life,” he recently told The New York Times. “It is about trusting the people that we love to make those decisions for themselves.”

Latinos have played large roles in getting abortion-rights measures on the ballot in Florida and Arizona this fall. And although just 12 percent of the general electorate considers abortion access a leading issue, according to a 2022 national survey, that number was 19 percent among Latinos.

[Read: Are Latinos really realigning toward Republicans?]

So often, political analysts look at how Latinos vote without asking why. It’s as if they assume that Latinos’ rationales are too foreign to understand. Democrats should not make that mistake now. This pragmatic approach is appealing to Latinos because they are largely politically moderate, working- and middle-class people concerned about their family, and about kitchen-table issues—just like much of the population in swing states. The Republican Party seems to have caught on to this; Democrats can’t afford to miss it.

No self-identified feminist who deserves the title will be supporting the intergenerational-bro ticket of Trump-Vance in 2024. The Democratic Party doesn’t need to pander to those voters, or pass a rhetorical purity test on women’s rights to galvanize them; they’re voting Democratic no matter what. Democrats need to focus on all the other voters—who may not care about feminism but do care about their families’ health and ability to thrive—and reframe abortion as an issue that affects everyone.

This article originally misstated that NLIRJ works in Arizona.

Alice Munro Was a Terrible Mother

2024-07-10T11:07:00-04:00

By now, we should be used to this story: A beloved artist is undone by their own bad behavior, knocked off their pedestal, their works removed to a remote shelf. Since the #MeToo movement began, publishing, just like film and music, has seen its share of idols abandoned. But the distress over the Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro has a different tenor.

The death of Munro, at 92 years old in May, was followed by an outpouring of encomium by her many fans. Her obituary in The New York Times called her the closest thing there was to a “literary saint” in her native Canada. But this week her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner published an op-ed in the Toronto Star revealing that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had molested her when she was a child, and that Munro had remained married to him even after learning the truth. As a young woman, Skinner went to the police and—in part on the strength of letters Fremlin had written to Skinner’s father and her stepmother that graphically described the abuse—he was convicted of indecent assault. But Skinner never spoke publicly about the case, or about her estrangement from her mother, until now. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather,” Skinner wrote. “It had nothing to do with her.”

Measuring horrors is an unpleasant business. Although Munro did not herself abuse her daughter, her behavior was unfathomably revolting. In his letters, Fremlin blamed Skinner for what happened, saying the 9-year-old girl had been a “Lolita” who seduced him. The decision to stick by him suggests that Munro may have accepted this disgusting defense. According to Skinner, whose account has been backed up by many sources, the abuse was an open secret not just in their family, but in literary circles. Her mother was protected by her fame and persona, and, Skinner wrote, “I was alone.”

[Read: What Alice Munro has left us]

How, many of Munro’s fans are now wondering, can they ever reconcile the saint with this history? Can they still read and admire her stories?

The #MeToo movement has given us one answer to the question of how to manage art we love after it has been recategorized as the output of a morally “bad actor.” We throw it out. We rip the artist from their pedestal and cast the films, music, novels, paintings, clothing that we formerly admired into the nearest cultural refuse bin. We do so with such great public ceremony that even engaging with the contents of the bin thereafter, even trepidatiously approaching it, becomes a violation. There are now scores of films we should not watch, albums we should not stream, and brands we should not wear.

In the beginning this was, I admit, a thrilling act. As woman after woman came forward with long-kept secrets about powerful men, we found catharsis in rising against these protected predators. We were invigorated by seizing our power as consumers of art and devaluing perpetrators with so much wealth and fame and glory.

But this reaction was not only culturally immature; it was also unsustainable. At this rate, we risk throwing away the art and culture that define us. In the gray and nauseating light of the Munro revelations, we can perhaps see a different answer to the question of how to separate the art from the artist: We can exalt the art without deifying the artist.

There is a cascading effect to genius: We think that because someone has all that talent, they must have the virtues to go with it. And because Munro was a woman, that virtue extends to our presumptions of her as a mother (perhaps one of the few benefits of sexism). We seem unable to imagine that someone who was such a good writer could be a bad mother.

But it is our very investment in that cascade of genius, and in the idea of the virtuous artist, that has protected so many predators. Of the many outrages in this story, one of the most upsetting is that the family stayed silent in part because they felt an obligation to preserve Munro’s reputation. This happens all the time, though most members of the protected class of genius have been men, whose misdeeds must be kept behind locked doors because there is—always—“too much at stake.” I wrote about such a man in my most recent book: a character based on the art titan Carl Andre, a sculptor who was accused and acquitted in a trial by a judge of murdering his wife, Ana Mendieta. Though doubt lingered around the acquittal, he largely enjoyed the defense and support of the art establishment up until his own death at 88.

Inevitably, someone is reading this and thinking: If we don’t shun the work, how will we punish the artist? That’s the wrong question to ask. For one thing, Munro is dead and doesn’t care anymore what we think. But even for artists who are alive and well, the more effective response is to stop putting them on pedestals in the first place.

Just as there are terrible, troubled people who are excellent mechanics or stock brokers, there are terrible, troubled people who make excellent art. Perhaps they are even overrepresented. Perhaps, in some cases, it is precisely their troubled terribleness that helped make that art excellent. That, alone, might be reason enough to keep engaging with the art after our idols have fallen. Not blindly, like acolytes. But critically, to see what it was about their work that made it resonate. Art is powerful not because it mirrors only our innate goodness, but rather because it reveals our innate complexity: the delicate balance of love and sin that exists, to varying degrees, within us all.

[Read: A quiet genius]

Munro published a story called “Vandals” in The New Yorker soon after she was first told, in a letter from her daughter, about the abuse. The story is about a woman whose husband molested a much younger neighbor. The woman can’t or won’t admit that she knows, at some level, what happened, and she does nothing. It was the last story in her 1994 collection Open Secrets. It should not only be read again; it should be read again in that gray and nauseating light of what we know now.

Trump and the ‘Champion of the Migrants’

2024-06-24T10:30:00-04:00

Over the weekend, at two campaign events, Donald Trump bragged to audiences about another of his big “ideas,” this one presented to his friend Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. “Dana,” Trump said he suggested, “why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league—these are the greatest fighters in the world—fight the champion of the migrants?” This anecdote was in addition to his usual routine: claiming, erroneously, that migrants are violent, mentally ill criminals, while riling up his crowds with talk of mass deportations.

White confirmed that Trump had floated this idea, but assured everyone that it was meant as “a joke.” If you don’t think it’s funny, a Trump-campaign spokesperson suggested, it’s probably because you’re one of those “elitists” who “are the same people who stupidly think combat sports is human cockfighting, showing their ignorance to the sweet science of mixed martial arts.”

I am, admittedly, not an expert in the “sweet science” of MMA, but I do know my nation’s history, and I have, like many high-school graduates in America, read Invisible Man. Trump’s comments immediately conjured up the battle royal at the beginning of Ralph Ellison’s classic—Black boys are being paid to box each other blindfolded for the amusement of drunken white spectators in the Jim Crow South.

Invisible Man was a work of fiction, but the battle royal was drawn from reality. After emancipation, white audiences who resented the end of slavery would organize fights between Black men—a racial segregated blood sport for entertainment.

Like most Trumpian strokes of rhetorical genius—including “Make America great again” and the notion that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”—this idea of a migrant cage match is scandalous (or sticky, depending on your POV) not because it is original, but because it is familiar. Once again, Trump has reached into the back closet of history and dragged out one of our ugliest and most hateful conceits.

[James Parker: A gory amalgam of truth and spectacle]

Trump has long considered race battles to be good entertainment. The Migrant Championship is just an upcycled version of his idea for a “Black versus white” season of The Apprentice. He told Howard Stern in 2005 that the Black team would include light- and dark-skinned Black people, but the white team would be “all blondes.” “It would be the highest-rated show on television,” he claimed.

Why is Trump continuing to excel in polls—even among Latino voters, some 40 percent of whom support him—despite his obvious racism? One reason is that they trust his handling of the economy. But America also has a long tradition of the newest immigrant group seeking membership in white America by beating up on the most recent people through the door—even in cases like today’s, when the newest immigrants might look and speak like them.

Latino voters be warned: Trump has repeatedly said what he thinks of us and what the future holds should we not be ready to present our papers.