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Amida Falls in the Far Reaches of the Kisokaido (Kisoji no oku Amidagataki), from the series “A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces (Shokoku taki meguri)” (about 1833), Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾 北斎

In a lot of ways, I like my food simple. When you have quality ingredients, you don’t need to do much more than cook and season them properly in order to eat extremely well — i.e., to taste the things you’ve cooked. Got salt? You can grill a steak, roast a chicken, broil a fish, though it never hurts to be generous with extra-virgin olive oil and fresh herbs. The same goes for vegetables: arugula with lemon juice, olive oil, and parmesan cheese; yu choy stir-fried with garlic; broccoli steamed with butter and salt. There’s almost no point even writing a recipe for these — the instructions should be self-evident. If they’re not, well, I’ve got a book to sell you¹ !

At the same time, the simple dish is sometimes not quite enough. As beautifully direct as a medium-rare slab of well-marbled New York strip can be, it occasionally needs a little extra — a sauce to remind your tongue and your brain of what its beefy richness stands in contrast to, of why you love it in the first place.

And still, when it comes to sauces, I also want to stay simple. The swirling whirl of French sauces is beyond me, requiring more technique and more time than I’m ever willing to put in. Instead, I take a very Southeast Asian approach to my saucing. I say “Southeast Asian” because I’m hesitant to present any of the sauces that I’m about to describe as authentically Vietnamese, or authentically Lao, Thai, Khmer, Hmong, or tied to any pinpointable locale or tradition (although surely each has its own specific history). I’ve spent months and years traveling that part of the world, and there’s so much spillover — ingredients that cross borders, ratios that vary from family to family — that it’s hard to say where one approach stops and another begins, and which belongs to which subregion or nationality. All I know is that these taste good, and they’re easy to make, and you’ll want to make all of them over the course of the next five months, when the weather is nice and you might as well fire up the grill.

Here are some sauce recipes

• The most basic sauce you’ll ever make

  • A note on slicing limes

• Sauce no. 1

• N+1 sauce

• Tiger-bite sauce

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The most basic sauce you’ll ever make

This one is transcendent in its stupid simplicity. In Vietnam, you’ll see it all the time, served with everything from steamed shrimp to fried chicken. And now that you know how to make it, you’ll serve it with everything, too.

• ½ teaspoon fine salt

• ½ teaspoon finely ground pepper

• 1 lime wedge

Put the salt and pepper in a tiny little sauce-sized saucer-ish dish. Don’t mix them together, but it’s okay if they do mix. Put the wedge of lime on top, skin side down, and when the time comes, you squeeze all the juice onto the salt and pepper. That’s it — there’s your sauce right there! Note: This is enough sauce for one person. I’ll leave it to you to figure out how to multiply it for more.

A note on slicing limes

Before we go any further, we need to talk about how to cut up a lime. That is, don’t take what seems like the obvious approach and cut your limes pole to pole. Instead, cut a few millimeters off to the side of the pole. Then rotate and do it again, and again, and again. You’ll wind up with four chunks of lime, all of slightly different sizes, plus the long thin bit that connects the poles. Why do this? For one, it somehow makes the lime chunks easier to squeeze for juice. I don’t know why, but it does. Also, it makes those chunks look nicer when serving — that pithy central bit just ain’t pretty, and this gets rid of it.

Sauce no. 1

I call this “Sauce no. 1” because that’s the only number you need to remember: 1² .

• 1 Tablespoon sugar

• 1 Tablespoon fish sauce

• 1 small shallot, finely chopped

• 1 clove garlic, finely chopped

• 1 (or more) red Thai chili, finely chopped

• Juice of 1 lime

• 1 Tablespoon cilantro, chopped (optional)

Mix everything together, and serve. The sugar may take a bit of time to dissolve, so stir well and give this a bit of time to sit before serving.

N+1 sauce

The second best part of this sauce is how it iterates on Sauce no. 1: You do a couple of bits slightly differently, add one more ingredient, and you’ve got what feels like a whole new creation. The best part, of course, is that it tastes so incredible it reverses the usual dish-sauce relationship — you’ll want to cook dishes just so you have the opportunity to eat more of this sauce.

• 1 clove garlic, finely chopped

• 1 (or more) red Thai chili, finely chopped

• 1 small shallot, finely chopped

• 1 Tablespoon sugar

• 1 Tablespoon fish sauce

• Juice of 1 lime

• 1 Tablespoon shrimp paste (kapi or ngapi)

Using a big mortar and pestle, add the first three ingredients one by one, churning each to a paste before adding the next. (This may take both time and effort. Tough.) Then work in the sugar, fish sauce, and lime juice, and finally the shrimp paste.

Tiger-bite sauce

This one is inspired by the Minnesota-based Hmong chef Yia Vang, who published a version of it in Bon Appétit some years back. I’ve been serving it at my barbecues for a long while now, and I can never make enough of it. Guests eat it with smoked tri-tip or pork butt, but they’ve been known to use it as a bruschetta topping, along with a bit of ricotta. This is the baseline recipe, but you can easily scale it up by doubling (or quadrupling) the ingredients.

• 1 pint cherry tomatoes

• 1 Tablespoon canola oil, or other neutral oil

• 2 shallots, finely chopped

• 4–6 cloves garlic, finely chopped

• 4 Thai chilies, finely chopped

• 1 Tablespoon fish sauce

• 1 Tablespoon oyster sauce

• A handful of cilantro leaves

Start a fire in your grill, or turn the broiler of your oven to high, with the rack about 6 inches away. Rub the cherry tomatoes all over with the oil. Put them in a grill basket and set them over the flame to char, shaking them occasionally until they burst and the edges are blackened. If you’re using a broiler, put them on a sheet pan and shake it every once in a while to cook all sides. When the tomatoes are done, add them and all the other ingredients to a mixing bowl or, better yet, a large mortar and pestle. Stir vigorously, so the tomatoes break apart and release their juices. Okay, now it’s done! Go eat! 🪨🪨🪨

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Read a Previous Attempt: Are you a domestic terrorist?

Are you a domestic terrorist?

Am I? Is everyone now?

Trying! • Matt Gross

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The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1455–1460), Giovanni di Paolo

Stay in any relationship long enough, and you will one day ask yourself: What happens when the other person dies? It could be your parents, your partner, your pets, friends, colleagues, enemies. None of them will last forever. And you, {{first_name|dear reader}}, will surely, obviously outlive them. What will it be like when they’re gone — when you can no longer DM them crude memes, when they can’t invite you to barbecues, when the adorably annoying way they sneeze begins to fade from your memory? And that’s perhaps skipping over the more painful question: How will you handle the days/weeks/months leading up to that inevitability? Will everyone stay cheery and pretend the end ain’t nigh, or will you all stone-facedly confront reality?

And, while you’re treading water in that dreadful suspense, will you at some point wonder: Maybe they should just die right now — it will be easier, kinder, better for everyone that way.

And this, {{first_name|dear reader}}, is where we’re at now with the president of the United States. Across the country and around the globe, at almost all points on the political spectrum, human beings have had enough. Everybody¹ wants him dead.

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A lot of that “everybody” is pretty obvious. It includes a good portion of the Muslim world, particularly in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and anywhere else that’s been suffering from the U.S.-Israeli war crimes machine. Throw in much of the American left, too. Sure, there were always angry radicals who dreamed of his death, not to mention the few incompetent nutsos who have haplessly attempted assassinations, but now even the most milquetoast liberals realize that as long as he lives, whether remaining in power or voted out of it, he’s going to menace our fragile democracy. They’re not deranged, they’re just exhausted — dead tired, you might say — and they want to put him out of their misery.

But the more interesting ones are on the right. Yes, his own people want him dead as well! This recent article in Wired spells out how everyone from conservative leaders to the Republican base is just done with him:

And that’s not all! MAGA Christians are done with him. White nationalist Nick Fuentes is done with him. MAGA conspiracy theorists are done with him. MAHA moms are done with him.

Regretting the president is, regretfully, not a sign that his supporters have changed political stripes. Instead, they see him as having betrayed the movement he and they started: Through his idiotic policies, pointless wars, and half-baked executive actions, he’s shown himself to be just as craven and elitist as the swampy neocons he was supposedly supplanting. He is now the main impediment to creating the America — the white, Christian, raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-eschewing, additive-free, immigrant-free America — they’ve dreamed of for decades. So now they want him dead.

What’s my evidence for this homicidal turn of heart? No, it’s not that I assume, sterotypically, that right-wingers dream of murder — come on, we know all Americans dream of murder! But in this case, my evidence is what these ex-supporters are not saying. That is, no one can come right out and say, “I wish the president was dead.” That right there earns you a visit from the Secret Service³ , and who knows what kind of punishment or attention.

But everyone is thinking it. Everyone is dreaming of saying it. It’s on the tips of their tongues, murmuring unspoken in their throats. All across the right, they want him dead — because he’s more useful to them dead. If he’s assassinated, he becomes a martyr, and they can use that to try to ram through their un-Constitutional, un-American restrictions. If he merely tumbles down a small set of stairs and bonks his head pretty hard, then he can be remembered fondly, an inspiration for the present moment who, both sadly and fortunately, won’t get to see the future. Either way, the president has outlived his usefulness² .

If you haven’t seen Pet Sematary in a minute, go check it out — it’s brutal.

Me? I want him to survive! Obviously, that’s in part because I’m hoping he’ll have a massive stroke, become incapacitated, and have to rely on home health aides for the basics — eating, bathing, communicating, wiping his ass — for two or three decades more.

But it’s also because the president is not really “in the way” of the fulfillment of the glorious MAGA dream. His wars, his tariffs, his militarized anti-immigrant (and anti-citizen) police actions are not a betrayal of his supporters. They are the logical consequence of that dream. He is doing everything you would and should do if your political movement is founded on lies and hallucinations: Immigrants create crime! Foreign countries will pay our taxes! Christians are persecuted and must fight back! Believe those insanities, and act on those beliefs, and you’ll find your economy in shambles, your nation isolated, your citizens engaged in violence at home and abroad. This man is doing exactly what he was elected to do, and the longer he remains in power, the more everyone — especially on the right — will come to see that his movement was built on bullshit and corruption, and that there’s no escaping that rot for the Republican Party. Some of those ex-supporters may come to the side of light, and some may not; let’s hope those who don’t at least have the decency not to try this crap again.

And so please join me in wishing a long (if not necessarily healthy) life to Donald J. Trump, president of these barely United States! 🪨🪨🪨

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Man Running From Elephants (1901), Peter Newell

During my very brief tenure as the digital director of Runner’s World — September 2017 to May 2018¹ — I accomplished only a few things worth remembering. I got the RW team to taste-test all 27 varieties of GU energy gel. I helped assemble a panel to evaluate Nike’s new sports hijab. I assigned this feature on segregation among runners in Baltimore. I told everyone about my thermos. And I had a writer answer the eternal question: Do runners even need toenails, anyway?

Not bad, I guess, for barely half a year on the job. Still, I regret that I didn’t have time to launch a series that I’m sure would have gotten some attention: “Running in the Age of Trump.” The idea was to look at how the then-new presidential administration was addressing the issues most important to runners. Clean air and water. Climate change. Access to parks, the wilderness, and public lands. Safety for runners, particularly women and minority groups. Pedestrian access in cities. The overseas manufacture of most athletic clothing. Chafing, in general. It’s easy to laugh now, but I wanted to approach these with the utmost seriousness, to delve into how the White House’s plans would affect the sport we loved. But before I could get it together, the layoffs came down, and I was out.

I had forgotten all of this until the other day, when I stumbled on this Washington Post opinion piece: How running can save democracy. In it, Scott Warren, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, recycles every hoary cliché about running as he imagines 30,000 people getting set for the Boston Marathon. Stretching, shoelaces, energy gels, GPS watches, the starting line — and he’s off to the sunniest of stereotypes: “I think the marathon — as with other marathons and half-marathons and 10Ks and other races in the United States this year — will have a subtle, added importance: It offers a shared experience, one that can actually inspire hope, at a time when America seems weighed down with cynicism and dread.”

His argument: While everything else in American life currently divides us — politically, economically, socially — when we’re running a marathon, we have no “partisan affiliation.”

Just as supportive are the onlookers, the cheering sections. Throughout marathon day, whether in Boston or elsewhere, runners can simply be runners: “The utter absence of political friction is delightful. It’s hard to imagine someone holding back a cheer because the runner going by might be MAGA or a tree-hugging progressive.”

Oh god, this is such bullshit.

More after the ad…

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I know, I know: It’s easy to dunk on WaPo Op-Eds. The newspaper that once warned that “democracy dies in darkness” has overtly shifted its opinion section to pieces advocating for “personal liberties and free markets.” No one is expecting bared teeth from its pages these days.

And I might’ve let this one slide, except that it represents a pretty common view in the running world: Our love of this sport — its ease and its difficulty, its endorphic joys and its chronic pains — unites us above and beyond any individual differences. It’s a wonderful view, and it’s even true… sometimes. The problem is that at some point, the race is over. The runners collect their medals, their bananas, their cold bagels and inedible Red Delicious apples, and limp to their hotels for a shower and a nap. The spectators toss their clever DIY signs (“Run like you stole from the Louvre!”) into the garbage. The clean-up crews scrape Dixie cups from the asphalt and load porta-potties onto flatbeds. Everyone feels awesome about themselves. And they should — they’ve all done (or helped someone do) a great and challenging thing.

And then some of them go home and vote for politicians who are gutting environmental protections, selling off public lands, and blocking middling trans athletes from playing sports in school. They love guns and sneer at electric vehicles. They’re abusive in one way or another to their partners and their children, or they’re threatening, or even outright hostile, to women, to immigrants, to anyone who doesn’t look like them. Yes, some runners are bad for running.

How many of them? What are the political breakdowns among runners? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone does. As recently as 2022² , the Global Running Survey, produced by the industry association Running USA, was not asking its 5,500 respondents about their political views. (Or if it was, it didn’t include them in the report.) The survey did, however, offer statistical portraits of Black runners, Indigenous runners, Asian/Hispanic/mixed-race runners, old runners and young runners and non-binary runners. Which is wonderfully inclusive — except that this inclusivity once again pretends that in certain ways all runners (and their adoring supporters) are the same, when the reality is that some — 50%? 25%? 7%? 80%? — may be making choices that actively harm the sport and those who enjoy it.

In some ways, I find it almost impossible to imagine. As runners, don’t we all want to breathe clean air, to freely explore the outdoors, to feel safe on the streets? Who among us, which of us who claim to love the sport, could act and vote against these interests Who are these people? Is it the race director, the roadside Nuun dispenser, the moms driving teens to cross-country, the rando who waves at you as you pass each other in the park every morning? (Is it you?) You can’t easily find out, and you can’t go around suspecting everyone of being the enemy. That way lies madness! (It also adds 1.2 km to your route.) But, well, some people are opposed to your well-being, whether they’re conscious of it or not. Let’s not pretend they don’t exist.

Nor should we, deep in the mire of our suspicions, change our behavior toward those we encounter on our runs. There is some truth to Scott Warren’s dream — we runners can and do support one another, regardless of age, sex, race, or ability, and we should not allow our political differences, real or perceived, to interfere with that. Many of us — most of us, I hope — continue that support long after we reach the finish line, in small ways and big ones. As we should; it’s the right thing to do³ . But some of us, well, let’s just say their gait needs adjusting.

One of the perennial debates in the running world — and one of the dumbest — is “How do you define a real runner?” Do you need to run every day, every week? Do you need to race at least one 5K? One marathon? Does a real runner need to be able to hit an 8-minute mile? An 11-minute one? A six-minute one? Does walking count as running? In that spirit, I want to propose a new qualification for “real runners,” the only one that matters: It’s not how you run — it’s how you vote. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: Travel is not a political act

Travel is not a political act

Rick Steves is wrong, and my life's work is a failure.

Trying! • Matt Gross

Sulking (ca. 1870), Edgar Degas

For much of the past year, I’ve been torn on an issue that matters to almost no one. But maybe, just maybe, you’re as nerdy as me, as addicted to abstract literary arguments that no Ph.D. would touch, as willing to pursue a thought to its absurd end. If so, then here’s the conundrum that’s been keeping me up at night:

First: AI writing is bad. This has been much discussed! The New York Times has been all over it, from a lengthy essay in December (Why Does A.I. Write Like That?) to this recent quiz, which asked readers to choose their preferred writing samples from a series of pairs across five genres, from literary fiction to science writing to poetry — one of each pair was written by a human, the other by A.I. Most readers chose the A.I.-written samples. Including me! Not because I thought they were “better” than the excerpts by, say, Cormac McCarthy or Ursula K. LeGuin but because they were simply cleaner than the human authors’ tortured, precious prose. In none of the cases did I think the writing was particularly “good,” and only in the poetry category did I “prefer” the human, Elizabeth Bishop. But, of course, we all know what I think of poetry.

This test, though, was a fake one: It reduces writing — novels, journalism, poetry — to a basket of sentences, asking us whether the barest, most arbitrarily selected part can stand in for the whole, and stand up against the output of a prediction machine that’s been trained on the corpus of all humans and asked to generate a handful of characters in imitation of its mentors. It’s a false, artificial choice. A real version of this would offer me the chance to read all of Blood Meridian plus an entire A.I.-generated novel, and only then ask which I preferred. Perhaps McCarthy’s “sparse punctuation … archaic vocabulary, and … biblical cadence” (as Google’s AI summary describes it) would finally appeal to me? But even if it didn’t, I can say for sure I would prefer it to whatever the LLM cooked up.

And that has nothing to do with the quality of the prose or the coherence of the story. It’s about intentionality. Cormac McCarthy had it. In all of his work¹ , he was attempting to communicate something he felt or believed — about how the world functioned, how human beings behaved, what it all might mean or not. The words on his pages constitute a unique point of view rooted in reality and experience, and whether I like that POV or not, whether I think it’s “good” or not, that origin and McCarthy’s desire to communicate it instantly elevate it beyond anything an A.I. engine can create. A.I.’s aren’t capable of intentionality, merely of mimicking it at the behest of their prompters — often convincingly! But there’s nothing beneath the surface. It’s sophisticated bullshit, an attempt to pass off calculated guesswork as the product of earnest, lived experience, an impossibility for a computer program. And bullshit is the province of conmen.

And so but here’s my problem with this line of thinking: At the same time, I believe in the death of the author.

More after the not-an-ad ad…

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I’ve always loved the concept of “the angel’s share.” This is the term distillers use to describe the small amounts of whiskey, brandy, and other spirits that slowly evaporate as they age for years in barrels — a treat for the celestials! If you’ve ever visited a distillery’s cellars (or warehouse), you can smell it: the loss of precious volume that inexorably shapes the drinks we adore. It’s one of the best smells in the world.

This mysticism pervades the realm of spirits. I mean, “spirits,” amirite? The otherworldliness is there in the name, hinting at something that is at once lost forever yet still present. We can talk about peat and smoke, fruit and wood, but those tastes are allusions, not reality. They’re a way of translating complex chains of volatile molecules and their attendant chemical reactions into what we think we know and pretend to remember.

This is a very roundabout way of saying that if you like spirits — the kind that come in a bottle or the kind that float in the ether — you should head to Fog City Social this Saturday in San Franciso. It’s basically one incredible whiskey party, with dozens of producers from around the world offering samples (and whole bottles) of their wares. Alas, I can’t make it myself — guess I’ll have to take the angel’s share.

OK, I’ll get tickets now!

🪨

“The death of the author,” as you no doubt remember, is the literary theory espoused in 1967 by Roland Barthes, who argued that readers — critics, academics, reviewers, and regular old people — had ceded too much power to authors in interpreting their work. The cultural Establishment went looking for biographical details in novels, listened attentively to writers explicating their narrative decisions, and essentially put authors on pedestals.

Barthes, however, wanted to free readers from that cult — “To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing“ — and return to them the power of interpretation, experience, emotion. They (we) make the meaning of writing (or art, or music, or whatever), not its creator, who may or may not even understand the range of meanings he or she has created. (We writers can be surprisingly limited in this way!) Barthes saw this as a kind of liberation, and it really is: You can read a book without ever wondering, What is the author trying to get at here? and instead decide for yourself what the words — the text, as theoreticians would have it — amount to. As Barthes wrote, “the true locus of writing is reading.” And without readers, writers are dead anyway.

So, how do I square these two apparently conflicting ideas? Is an actual author essential for a work to have meaning? Or are actual authors, corporeal or not, beside the point when it comes to our finding meaning, pleasure, relevance in a text?

I wouldn’t say this conundrum has kept me up nights, but it’s certainly something my mind has churned again and again for months without resolution. Until a month or two ago, when I asked myself this:

What happens when an author dies?

Well, first of all, everyone is very sad. This is America, of course, where our literary heroes — especially travel writers and producers of ersatz philosophical essays — are held in the highest esteem! There will be rending of garments, wailing in the streets, live televised speeches by our most powerful politicians and public figures. Much, much sadface.

But then what happens to the author? After the lying-in-state at the Capitol, I mean. It’s what happens to all tortured, creative souls: They become a ghost. For all eternity, or at least while their works remain in print, they are condemned to haunt the earth, revisiting their triumphs and their failures, and making spooky noises in the homes of anyone who ever gave them fewer than four stars on Goodreads.com.

And so this is the metaphor I’m using: the ghost of the author. If we readers are going to kill our creators, we should expect to be pursued by their ghosts. We won’t always see them or hear them, and we won't always understand them if we do, but we want to sense them when we read and to feel the hairs on the back of our necks stand up in their otherworldly presence. I want books and movies and music and art I can interpret in my own way, but I also want to acknowledge the dearly departed² without whom these works would not exist at all. The best work has a way of conjuring up these spirits, of making you feel that viscerally ethereal connection whether you were seeking it or not.

A.I. can’t do this. What’s never lived can never die, can never haunt its realm. The words of the LLM’s dried voice remain quiet and meaningless, a whimper drowned out by the ceaseless shuffle of true ghosts.

Still, let’s be honest. The code can be convincing — it gets more so every minute. You may someday read an A.I.-crafted story that begins to persuade you, whose language and characters and form stir a sudden, spooky breeze in the still room of your soul. And you may wonder, Have the computers finally done it? Do I sense the ghost in the machine? And that’s when I would remind you of what we all also know about ghosts: They’re only real if you believe in them. Turn the lights on, and they go away. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: Q was the question she asked

Q was the question she asked

In the mid-1990s, Phuong Anh Nguyen made Q Bar the most important bar in Vietnam—and possibly the world.

J. Ellis Bonham (1825), William Bonnell

I know, I know: As soon as Hanya Yanagihara announced she was stepping down as the editor of ‘T’ Magazine, the New York Times style publication she’s run since 2017, everyone assumed I would be taking her place. After all, who else in New York media has my range of close, personal contacts across fashion, design, and high culture — not to mention my (ahem) exquisite taste?

Oh, right.

It turns out that many, many people have better contacts and better taste than me³ . In fact — and this may shock the more sensitive among you — my own sensibilities are fairly normal. Despite my love of both fart jokes and the Greek roots of existentialism, I’m neither philistine nor sophisticate. My tastes are good, maybe even gooder than yours, but not fancy or refined enough to earn me a spot in the uppermost echelons of American culture. At best, I’m upper-middlebrow.

And in the realm of the upper-middlebrow, the question of taste is an important one right now. “Is Taste the One Thing A.I. Can’t Replace?” asked the New York Times last month. The NPR show “It’s Been a Minute” brought that article’s author on for a 20-minute chat about “The hard work of having ‘good taste.’” And The New Yorker in February asked, “Is Good Taste a Trap?” then in March announced that AI-obsessed tech bros had fallen into said trap.

This is the paragraph, required by law¹ , in which we try to define “taste.” According to one of the New Yorker writers, it’s “knowledge, judgment, intention, discernment.” The Times, meanwhile, wonders, “Is it inborn or learned? A marker of distinction or a marker of class?” And for the tech bros, apparently, “taste is inherently profitable; it is the ability to discern what will make the most money, whether by choosing your next big software concept or by convincing users that your product is necessary.”

I think they’re all right!

More after the ad (which is not technically an ad)…

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One area where I’m confident in my taste: whiskey! I’ve been drinking it as seriously as my budget has allowed for thirty years now, ever since I attended one of Johnnie Walker’s “educational” dinners in San Francisco back in the mid-1990s. For a long time, I was enamored of Islay-style Scotch — as smoky and peaty as an arson in a bog — then segued into indie bourbons like Black Maple Hill, and lately I’ve found myself appreciating the balance (though not the price tag) of Japanese whiskeys, from Nikka Coffey Grain to Takamine.

All of which is to say: I wish I could go to Fog City Social! It’s a big ol’ whisk(e)y event taking place in San Francisco on April 25. They’ve got 60+ spirits producers there — Blanton’s and Tamdhu, Kavalan and Kanosuke, Ichiro’s and Macleod’s — all of whom have samples for tasting and bottles for buying. Plus, there’s a free “festival bottling” from Seattle’s Westland Distillery. If you like whiskey, you know there’s nothing as cool as an exclusive, can’t-get-it-nowhere-else-yet release.

Like I said, I can’t make it. But if you’re anywhere near the Bay Area on April 25, you should go! Tickets are $180, which isn’t that crazy considering how much whiskey you’ll probably sample, not to mention take home. Plus, you’ll get to dress up neat like this dude, who clearly has great taste:

Take me to Fog City Social!

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One of the problems in talking about taste is that we’re actually talking about two things: taste, and then also good taste. The former is pretty much just “personal preference.” What do you like, and what do you dismiss? And can all those thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs be assembled into some kind of coherent whole: your taste. It should be a neutral term, but it’s saddled with too much historical baggage. To describe a set of personal preferences as “taste” makes the term aspirational — you only wish you had my taste, or Hanya Yanagihara’s.

But once we start talking about “good taste,” we enter the world of ranking. To have good taste is to have a set of personal preferences that are each themselves somehow better than the alternatives. You prefer Thelonius Monk to Ella Fitzgerald, Kara Walker over Takashi Murakami, Borjomi to tap. And all of those rankings are then, again somehow, ranked not by you but by us. We deem your taste better or worse than our own, than someone else’s. To have good taste is to be seen as having ranked the world’s cultural productions correctly — or at least better than I have.

Which is not to say that I have bad taste, of which there are, of course, two flavors. In its original flavor, bad taste was, well, bad: an unironic embrace of the slipshod, the amateur, the underthought, the cheap and flimsy. What’s more, bad taste meant the inability to even discern the crappiness of these elements. You liked things that were terrible because you were incapable of identifying what was terrible and what wasn’t. Bad Taste 1.0 was the Dunning-Kruger of aesthetics.

Bad Taste 2.0 was John Waters. It meant loving crap specifically for its crappiness — its wholehearted, lowbrow underachievement. People like Waters found a kind of honesty in bad taste that was, and is, missing from the highbrow world: Kitsch doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, mass-market and designed for easy consumption and friction-free enjoyment. Some of these next-gen bad-tasters came at it from within the Bad Taste 1.0 world, having grown up with (and then outgrown) kitsch, while others came from outside, discovering the tawdry delights of pink flamingoes by watching Pink Flamingoes.

Instagram post

But Bad Taste 2.0 isn’t actually bad taste. It’s another way of saying, “I see something of value here that you don’t” — or “my taste is better than yours.” It may have as its object the lowbrow and overlooked, but make no mistake: Bad Taste 2.0 is good taste repackaged.

Not that any of that matters, because “bad taste” no longer exists. I can’t say precisely when it died, but I can identify the killer as the Internet and the nichification of culture it has enabled. In other words, pretty much anything and everything has its own vociferous fandom, eroding the monoculture that promoted good taste and suppressed bad taste. Who cares if an older generation (or your own) thinks your favorite band sux² when there’s ten thousand fans on a subreddit? I might think your taste is bad, you might think my taste is bad, but in this multipolar world we can each find legions to agree or fight with us. And that’s why the tech bros are probably right: Develop the right kind of taste — good, bad, whatever — and you’ll make a killing.

(Incidentally, this is why John Waters can’t make movies the way he used to: The tawdry aesthetics and tasteless behaviors that animated his underground enthusiasm are now so totally mainstream that he can no longer find anything to truly offend the bourgeoisie.)

In this sense, “good taste” to me seems out of step as well. Those who aspire to it in its most highbrow form rely on exclusivity — literally: Again and again, they have to say, “No, this isn’t good enough for me.” Their sets of personal preferences must remain small, therefore esoteric, therefore unrelatable, and yet also still aspirational for the rest of us. We only wish we could perceive the world with such effortless refinement! But that kind of naysaying can be exhausting, both for the tastemakers and for those of us looking to them for guidance and inspiration. Better, as I’ve argued before, to give up on “good” and instead define and seek out “good enough for me.” Embrace what you truly like, improve what you can as much as you can (within reason), and don’t sweat the occasional failure or shortcut. An attitude like that won’t win you a hifalutin cultural throne, but at least you’ll be happy. Probably. Maybe. Okay, slightly less unhappy. That works better for me — how about you? 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: Squawk, memory!

Squawk, memory!

My recollection of the past is crisp but scattered. Will a pile of ancient photos make sense of it all?

Trying! • Matt Gross

A Deathbed Scene (circa 1849), Frederic, Lord Leighton

A week ago Monday, I got a phone call that was identical — almost — to dozens I’d received before: My uncle Gary, my father’s younger brother, was being rushed to the emergency room at UConn John Dempsey Hospital, in Farmington, Connecticut. But I sensed this alert was different. Usually, it would be Gary himself calling me, from his Amazon Alexa, but instead I was speaking with a nurse at the rehab center where he’d spent the month since his last hospitalization.

Now, she was saying, his breathing was weak, he might have pneumonia. “He’s not responding as we’d like,” she said.

Did that mean he was non-responsive? I asked.

She mumbled a kind of agreement, then repeated herself: Gary was not responding as they’d like.

An hour or two later, as I was walking from a haircut to a burrito shop, a UConn doctor called me and laid out what he was seeing: A 76-year-old man, blind, with lifelong cerebral palsy and open wounds on his backside — bedsores that, because he had lost so much muscle mass, went straight to and infected the bone — was now being hospitalized with sepsis, for the umpteenth time in the past two years. Gary was weak, he said, with no energy reserves. He could not currently speak. Gary had a DNR order. He did not wish to be intubated. The hospital could, the doctor said, give him IV antibiotics, but in his state, this might only barely prolong the inevitable. Hospice care, he said, would make more sense. But I was Gary’s designated legal health care representative. It was up to me to decide.

Could I decide the next morning, I asked, when my parents and I would come to visit?

Yes, he said, but Gary realistically might have only 24 to 48 hours left.

I asked him to start hospice care. Four hours later, I was at Gary’s bedside in Connecticut.

🪨

When I was a very little kid, I didn’t know what to make of Gary. He wasn’t always around his parents’ house in Bridgeport when I’d visit for summer vacation, and if he was, I couldn’t relate to him. All I wanted was to play with Legos and Star Wars figures, and all he seemed to want was to listen to baseball games on the radio. With his crutches, his wheelchair, his thick glasses, he scared me a bit. I didn’t understand how he fit into our family of academic wanderers.

It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties and newly installed in New York that he and I started to figure out how to communicate. Since 1986, he had been a resident at New Horizons Village, an independent-living community for the disabled near Farmington, so I’d take the train up to see him from time to time, like for his 50th birthday, a wild afternoon of dancing and karaoke² . And he began to call me on the phone, often seemingly at random, just to talk about the news or politics. What did I think of Mayor Giuliani, Mayor Bloomberg, Mayor DeBlasio, Mayor Adams? For a while, he became obsessed with memory challenges — as a blind guy, he’d always had to rely on his memory, and was proud of his recall — so I tried to get him entered into the National Memory Championships. Alas, they wouldn’t take blind entrants.

Still, he’d keep calling, to talk about movies he’d seen and audiobooks he was reading. None of which he liked! “OK, Matt,” he’d say, “explain this to me: Why does everyone talk about…” The Godfather, say, or Toni Morrison. Pick your favorite film, your favorite author — he was probably going to hate them, or at least find them boring. The appeal would escape him. I’d say it was about five thumbs-downs for every thumbs-up. And yet he kept reading and kept watching because, well, he wanted to. It mattered to him to be engaged with the world, and engaged with other people in discussing it. Here’s his reading list as of last week:

• Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story

• Nightcrawlers: A “Nameless Detective” Novel

• The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, by John Bolton

• New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West

• All the Glimmering Stars: A Novel

• The Atlantic magazine’s December issue

And that’s just a partial list! How can anyone keep up with that? Sometimes he’d call me, and I’d see that 860 number on my phone and know that he wanted to get into a lengthy chat about whatever — and I wouldn’t pick up. I just didn’t have his energy.

Moments like that reminded me of a trip we took together back in 2000, when we flew out to Ohio for my brother Steve’s college graduation. We were checking in at Bradley airport, and the woman behind the counter looked at Gary and looked at me, and asked, “Can he talk?” 

And I thought: Oh my god, sometimes he never shuts up!

Through all these phone calls, these visits and trips, these boring novels and overrated movies, I began to get a sense of the scope of Gary’s life. That is, he lived as he wanted to — independently. He had his own tastes, his own ideas, his own friends and routines and pursuits. If I sometimes, or often, didn’t agree with him, that was fine, too. He wasn’t fragile. He built his own world, and invited us all in. He was part of my family, but I was also part of his.

🪨

What do you bring to a death? Forget emotional baggage, medical expectations, theories of the soul — what do you literally carry with you to witness the death of a loved one 120 miles away?

As you know, I pride myself on being prepared for anything. It took only a few minutes to fill a small suitcase with clothing for three or four days — including running gear — and my backpack was already prestocked with cables, a power bank, pens, KN95 masks, a corkscrew, and more. Still, though, I wasn’t ready to go, because: What should I bring to read? My shelves and windowsills were overflowing with options — books I finished a decade ago, books I meant to begin a decade ago, books I bought in March that I swore I wouldn’t start till I was done with the ones I bought in February. Among all these tomes, were there a few on which I imagined I could concentrate? Which might comfort me, or distract me? Which might make the hours of silent waiting ever so slightly more bearable? I chose five, at least one of them at random, and stuffed them in my bag, wondering if I’d crack any open even once.

I drove. I arrived. And there, up on the seventh floor, in a room with a big window showing the soft spring hills of central Connecticut, was Gary, curled up in the hospital bed, accompanied by his friends Ruth and Marie (who was also his longtime health aide). His eyes were closed, his breathing even; he was on morphine for the pain in his wounds, the pain from the arthritis in his hips. Usually, he would have been hooked up to all kinds of tubes and monitoring equipment, but this was hospice: Those measures were no longer necessary.

Ruth explained he could communicate… sort of. He could raise his eyebrows to mean yes, and shake his head to say no, but he was also in and out of consciousness and might not respond at all. Or maybe he just didn’t have the energy. I didn’t say it out loud, but I was imagining that actually Gary was fully aware of what everyone was saying to him, and was just ignoring us, not out of spite or resentment but as a kind of joke, playing the silent patient but waiting to spring on us a signature quip. “What, you forgot the matzoh ball soup?” or “Here’s what I’d say if I could meet Mayor Mamdani.”

If it was a joke, he was dragging it on too long. He remained silent, and after Ruth and Marie left, I carried on my end of the conversation, telling him about my daughters’ high school and college plans and letting him know I’d been laid off from my job. I dipped a swab sponge in his cup of water and let him suck on it; I couldn’t tell if this was intentional or a reflex. Eventually, when there was nothing left to say, I opened my backpack and began reading to him from the books I’d brought. First up was My Brilliant Friend. I wasn’t sure if he’d listened to the audiobook back during the novel’s heyday — or if he’d liked it — but I began the best book of the 21st century in earnest.

I had forgotten its first chapter was all about death:

After ten minutes, I changed gears and brought out Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Skipping ahead to book nine, when Odysseus recounts the most exciting and supernatural episodes of his travels, I read Gary the story of the Cyclops — how Odysseus brought his men into Polyphemus’s cave, hoping to be treated as a guest (and given treasure!), but instead found himself trapped inside while the one-eyed giant tore his men apart and ate them “like a lion on the mountains, devouring flesh, entrails, and marrow bones, and leaving nothing.” More death, I know, but of a fantastical, impersonal sort. Also, not boring!

Before I got to Odysseus’ clever escape, and the bragging that sealed his fate, I cut my reading short. It was nearing 8 p.m., the end of visiting hours, and I needed to check into a hotel, find dinner, sleep. But I also wanted to leave Gary hanging, anticipating the tale’s colorful conclusion the next day. I wanted him to want to stick around a bit longer.

It did not work out that way. The next day my parents arrived, and instead of reading to Gary, I sat with them at his bedside, chatting with them about the usual things: my daughters, my job search, our summer plans. Every once in a while, we’d talk to Gary directly, remind him we were there, ask a yes/no question to see if he’d respond. Mostly, he didn’t. Sometimes I’d put my hand on his head — his hair was cut very short, and the warmth emanating from him felt so vital, so easy, so familiar.

We were waiting for Gary to die. It’s hard to put this any other way: We were waiting for him to die. It was horrible. We did not want it to happen, yet we knew it would, and while we didn’t want it to happen any sooner than it was going to, we also did not want it prolonged unnecessarily³ . Perhaps some people would spend this time hoping or praying for a miraculous recovery, but that is not the Gross family. The rules of this reality would not be bent. The outcome was predetermined, the timeline a secret. It was horrible, most of all for Gary. But at least he could once again exert the independence he’d cherished all his life, if unconsciously: The end would come when he, and he alone, was ready. The rest of us could do nothing but wait.

I filled the time with logistics. I called the funeral home in Fairfield to arrange services, including a livestream video for his friends at New Horizons, who could not easily make the journey. I sought a rabbi to officiate. Although Gary was proudly Jewish, he did not have connections with the community⁴ . Once, my dad told me, Gary had been friends with a local rabbi, but they’d had some kind of falling out. This was unfortunate, I guess, but again I saw it as a barometer of Gary’s independence: He was self-sufficient enough to go on without that friendship, and the rabbi did not see this disabled man as so delicate that the relationship had to be preserved at all costs. Besides, falling out with your rabbi is about the most Jewish thing ever. It was more or less Gary’s bar mitzvah.

I looked for an appropriate restaurant to host a post-funeral “meal of consolation.” I talked to my sister in Seattle and to my brother, who was on vacation with his family in Japan. I tried to send work emails. I put off applying for jobs. My wife and I got in a fight with our 17-year-old daughter that resulted in her not speaking a word to us for five days. I wrote an obituary for the newspapers. I started thinking about the eulogy I would also have to write and deliver. I did not read any of the books I’d brought, although my mom briefly opened The World of Odysseus. Evening came, and I put my hand on Gary’s head again, and my parents and I went to dinner.

Gary died the next morning, April 1, around 4 a.m.

By 7:30, I was again at his bedside. His body was now lying flat, his face relaxed; he looked more like a Gross than ever before. The shape of our heads, the contours of our hairlines, the beaks of our noses and drapes of our earlobes — we share them all. I remember speaking to Gary a bit, though I don’t know what I said. Probably something about how his silent-treatment joke was finally up, or that this conversation was now about as one-sided as it ever gets. I do know that after a while I apologized to him: I had to get my laptop out and start letting everyone know. It was time for logistics again.

And that is what it has been ever since: logistics. Calls and meetings with the funeral home to settle on our options and our schedule (they found us a rabbi). Texting and emailing our family members, and Gary’s friends and aides, to let them know the details, and collecting from them all the photos on their phones, hung on walls, stuffed into drawers. I drove to New Horizons, where the staff told tales of Gary’s long tenure (he was one of their first residents, having moved in on September 8, 1986, the day he turned 36½) and I retrieved from his apartment his Connecticut ID and benefits cards. I drove home to Brooklyn, where nothing had changed — groceries needed to be purchased, dinner cooked, children nagged to do their homework. I ran, I climbed. I went shopping for a black suit. I sat and stared at the TV. I skipped a Passover Seder. My sister flew in for the funeral; my brother and his family couldn’t. I didn’t read anything, but I did go to my book club. I did all the things that needed to be done — because I was (I am) a good son, a good nephew, a responsible boy, but also because logistics are easier than feelings. When this was over, I told myself, I’d have a chance to feel something. I could breathe and… I don’t know. I wouldn’t know until it happened.

Still, though… Throughout all of this, as I made the details of Gary’s remembrance the focus of my days, the emotions would bubble up out of nowhere and threaten to break through. My eyes would well up, my voice crack. At the funeral, delivering the eulogy (which I’ve incorporated into this essay), I stumbled on lines I’d thought were simple and direct, and wasn’t sure how I could go on and finish the sentence. But I did. Somehow I did. I had to.

I’m surely not the first person to talk about the randomness of grief. You think it’s gone away, and then suddenly it’s there, occupying your whole being with a grip that’s irrational and implacable — until it dissipates just as unpredictably. When will it return, you wonder, or will it return at all? Have you held it at bay so long that it’s given up on you, or is it merely playing possum, like Gary silently waiting to spring a surprise on those who thought he’d drifted off or couldn’t raise his voice?

I waited for death. And now I’m waiting for grief.

This essay is, I guess, the final logistical element. The funeral was held Monday, followed by the meal of consolation. My suit is in its garment bag. The staff at New Horizons will be organizing a memorial, but that’s on them now. All I have to do is send these words off into the ether, and I’ll be done. I can feel whatever is left to feel, on grief’s erratic timetable.

🪨

As far as I know, there were only two things Gary dreamed of that he never got the chance to do. One was to live in New York City. Gary loved to discuss New York news, whether he was worrying about safety on the subway — especially about whether my daughters were okay — or tracking political scandals. And I think he wanted to live in New York so that he could claim ownership of that discussion in a way that’s tough to do from Connecticut: He wanted New York news to be his news. He wanted to have something at stake in the schools and the potholes, the bike lanes and the taxes. He wanted to vote. Also, he wanted to go to Yankees games.

The other was to visit Thailand. Why Thailand? Because, he told me (and as always, he told me this several times over the years), he’d heard that the women in Thailand were the most beautiful in the world. I mean, sure! Gary may have been blind, but he had his priorities. And I was not about to argue with him on that one.

And so now I keep thinking: What if he’d been able to achieve those? I like to imagine Gary sitting on a beach in Thailand, a gorgeous girl on one side of him, a towering stack of novels and political memoirs on the other. He’s watching the sunset behind the palm trees, but also listening to a baseball game on the radio. This is exactly when he’d call me up — not to kvetch about the tropical weather or the Yankees but to complain about Mayor Mamdani. That there would be a dream come true for him. He’d be so happy. And so would I. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I’m Going: “Man to Man: How Do We Feel About Our Bodies?”

My friend Augustine Sedgewick is cohosting this session on “men and their bodies, in the age of body hacking, GLPs, plastic surgery and more.” It’s at NeueHouse Madison Square tonight at 6:30 p.m., tickets are free (and still available), and I am going! Whether or not you are a man¹ and have a body, you are welcome to join.

Man to Man: How Do We Feel About Our Bodies?

Let’s get real about how guys see their bodies and what that means for confidence and self-love.

Eventbrite

Des Mots! Des Mots! (1896), Abel-Truchet

When I think about living forever — which is often, because I think about dying all the time — I wonder what language I’ll be speaking a few millennia from now. The English we use is only about 500 years old, and I’m skeptical I could communicate easily with an Elizabethan, so just imagine how much that language, so forgiving, so flexible, so assimilationist, could change in ten times that stretch. Chances are, it would be unrecognizable.

And it could even go away entirely. As we all know, oceans rise and empires fall, and with them new tongues come to prominence. Maybe the language of the future will more closely resemble Brazilian Portuguese or Bahasa Indonesia, or some amalgam whose ethnic or national identity has yet to be invented. Whatever the common tongue winds up being, I’m sure I will, in the fullness of my eternal lifespan, learn to wield it like a native. If all goes well, I won’t even realize my entire means of communication has shifted.

What I’m less certain about is how much English I would retain. It seems unbelievable that I could lose it: English isn’t just my mother tongue, it’s a language I’ve embraced wholeheartedly — I’m a goddamn writer after all, and one, I hope, who takes joyful advantage of its endless quirks and cadences. Writing these little sentences and paragraphs for you a few days a week makes me enormously happy. How in the course of a few thousand years could I let that slip away?

No, really, how? Because English isn’t my only language: The French I learned in high school is still reasonably good, as is the Italian I took a semester of in college. My Vietnamese and my Chinese are not reasonably good, but their level of badness hasn’t changed much since the late 1990s. Thanks to a three-week class I took in 1995, I can still read (or at least sound out) Korean’s hangul alphabet, even though I can’t count higher than five. In other words, words stick in my brain like nothing else. It’s almost inconceivable that a whole collection of them, hundreds of thousands of discrete chunks of meaning and symbolism and history, would drain entirely away over time.

And yet I know it does happen. Immigrants, especially younger ones, often lose much or all of their first languages, or wind up in stasis, speaking like children into adulthood. Just last week, at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office — the equivalent of the Taiwanese consulate in New York City — I watched my wife, Jean, struggle to conjure up some of the more technical and bureaucratic terms she needed to get our daughter a second passport. Jean grew up in Taipei all the way through high school, reads Chinese, and speaks it as the native she is — and still there were gaps, created both by time and by circumstance.

Truth be told, it has already happened to me — I’ve lost one language in which I was once nearly fluent: mathematics. I discovered this just a couple of days ago, when my 17-year-old daughter asked for help with her calculus homework. Thirty years ago, this would have been easy for me. I knew the ins and outs of double integrals, linear algebra, complex analysis. The hidden rules and secret connections of numbers and functions, sets and fields, were everyday elements of my domain. I wasn’t particularly good at math — I was better at French — but it was a system of meaning, a language, in which I could comfortably communicate. The other day, however, I was flummoxed by my daughter’s problems. On the one hand, I could read them. The “words” of the formulas and variables were familiar; I hadn’t forgotten about exponents and radicals and derivatives. But the meaning eluded me. I couldn’t understand what the questions were asking or how, once Sasha had explained them, you’d go about solving them. These were empty signs. It was like reading hangul.

Occasionally, I’d have a flash, and the underlying grammar of math would teasingly expose itself. I could reason out why, for example, you can calculate the volume of a torus by multiplying the area of the cross-section by the circumference of the doughnut, and how that might apply to the cross-section of any shape — say, one created by the intersection of two functions — rotated around a point in space. But a disconnect remained. I couldn’t then translate that thought back into the necessary language of math, and without that I couldn’t help my daughter with her homework. I had forgotten.

Just as I will one day forget this language I’m writing in now — if, that is, this “immortality spell” I bought on Etsy works as advertised. But even if it doesn’t, I can still look forward to a future where the me of the past, scribbled down digitally in a series of email newsletters, becomes a virtual stranger. Language ages as surely as the body. Will I seem to myself an alien, an immigrant to a country I will have long ago left behind? Or will there remain in these sentences something that jogs my memory, that brings me happily if briefly back to myself, whoever that may be? I spend a lot of time in Trying! trying to understand who I used to be, and how the Matt of decades ago became the Matt behind these words today, and so I hope this endeavor will make sense to the Matt of decades hence. The span from now till then is vast and unpredictable, and I don’t know what I will lose in the journey, only that something, somehow, will be lost. And whether that loss is tragic or trivial, it will also be necessary — to name what has been forgotten is what makes remembering so sweet. It’s how those losses are restored, and our sorrows end. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: Shutdown Survival

I wrote this piece about the Palm Springs airport during the government shutdown seven years ago, and it feels oddly relevant today:

How One Airport Made Do With Half the Screeners

When 50% of its TSA screeners did not show up because of the shutdown, Palm Springs managed to make it work.

thepointsguy.com/news/airport-made-do-with-half-the-screeners-shutdown

Shoes (1888), Vincent van Gogh

When I was a travel writer, I was obsessed with shoes. Well, to be frank, I was fairly obsessed with shoes before that, too. For a time in the early 2000s, I was a sneakerhead. Unlike most sneakerheads, however, I wasn’t hunting for rare Air Jordan colorways to display behind glass in my parents’ living room. Instead, I lusted after obscure models, like handball shoes you could only import from Europe, or a space-age, stripe-free Adidas slip-on in white leather. And I actually wore them, because what was the point otherwise?

But when I began to travel extensively, and for weeks or months at a time, my footwear needs shifted. On these long trips, I needed to pack light — i.e., bringing a single pair of shoes that could function in any situation. And I really mean any situation. In the span of a few days, I might go from wandering Moroccan souks or hiking the Austrian Alps to dining at the home of a wealthy couple I’d just befriended, or blending in at an art-gallery opening, or working a sailboat in the Caribbean. Across Asia, and when passing through U.S. airports, I’d need shoes I could get off and back on quickly. I wanted shoes I could wear without socks if I had to.

I don’t think I ever really found the ideal pair of shoes, though I cycled through many pairs over the years. But the approach soon began to extend to my entire wardrobe: How could I dress on any particular day and be ready for whatever might happen? Every morning when I woke up, I truly did not know where I might be come bedtime; this was the most exciting, and sometimes challenging, part of the travel writer’s job — relying on spontaneity, hoping for serendipity, improvising, accepting, exploring every possibility.

To embrace that, however, was not always a natural act. And while I was pretty good at it, it was still an act I had to work at, and so I had to dress the part. I bought clothes that were comfortable, sometimes athletic, but not too casual; I wore unstructured blazers and sporty polos, as if to say I didn’t take these nods to formality too seriously. I avoided logos, graphics, brand names. I appreciated hidden pockets and understated backpacks. To outsiders, I didn’t quite appear to be a local, but also not quite a tourist. To learn which I was, you’d have to approach me. I was ready for any intrigue.

Maybe I was over-prepared. Travelers who are more confident, more imposing, and simply better-looking than me — which is, of course, most travelers — probably don’t need to make such strenuous efforts. They can show up as is, in flip-flops or combat boots, in a sundress or a three-piece suit, and not worry whether they’ll fit in to wherever the day may lead. But that wasn’t me. I knew my limitations. And I had to hedge against them.

The Artist Sketching at Mount Desert, Maine (1864–1865), Sanford Robinson Gifford

In the years since my travel-writing heyday, my personal style has evolved into, or maybe been subsumed by, gorpcore. First defined in 2017 by Jason Chen in New York Magazine, gorpcore¹ embraces an elevated outdoorsy aesthetic: puffers, fleece, trail runners, climbing pants; North Face, Patagonia, Teva, Arc’teryx. The clothing isn’t always blatantly technical, but it could be, even though it is always also stylish. More important, Chen wrote, is what it telegraphs: “an enlightenment beyond urban, bourgeois concerns: I can survive perfectly fine outside of the city — and in style, thank you.” Gorpcore really had its moment in 2021–2022, when the pandemic had eased and we all rushed to get outside as often as possible. Gorpcore hit a peak and subsided, but lately it’s been mounting a crampon-assisted, gusseted-crotch comeback, now less the trend du jour and simply another fashion tribe.

My version of gorpcore is definitely in the cosmopolitan-traveler vein, fit for trekking across the Adirondacks or across Brooklyn, at home at Clover Club or in the Chase Sapphire Lounge. My outfit for running errands yesterday, when it was sunny and 32 degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind chill of 17, was typical:

• Darn Tough hiking socks, one of about seven pairs I own

• Black Uniqlo HeatTech T-shirt

• A gray textured hoodie from Rails, bought on a whim last summer 

• Dark green twill pants from North Face’s purple label

• A green Uniqlo puffer vest

• A Barbour waxed jacket, which I got on sale (40% off!) several years ago

• A blue cashmere beanie from Meg Cohen’s sample sale

• These sturdy, water-resistant Nike “Special Field Boots,” bought with a friends-and-family discount

• This compact Yeti backpack (won at a raffle), which contained my MacBook Pro, a 45W power bank, a Sony PCM-A10 recorder, a tiny CRKT Scribe knife, a corkscrew, my Global Entry card, a Sharpie, SPF50 chapstick, assorted cables, a few KN95 masks, and The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason

So, as you can tell, I was ready for anything, from a trek through Central Park or a breaking-news event to long stretches of downtime or an unexpected disaster.

None of which took place. I got on the train, visited an office in midtown, had lunch, bought a bottle of Japanese whiskey (Akashi remains affordable), and came home. I was comfortable and warm, yes, but also unchallenged. There were no puddles in my path, the wind died down, and I didn’t even have time to open the novel.

It has been like this for many years now: The mindset I evolved during my travel career remains in place, even though my free-range lifestyle has contracted into lightly caged domesticity. And still I persist in this approach, in part because I don’t relish replacing my whole wardrobe, but also because another mindset has crept in and replaced that of the travel writer:

I want to be ready to run.

I can’t say whether this is a pandemic attitude, or a dealing-with-fascists attitude, or just an attitude I’ve always had, growing up Jewish in America. But these days it’s more crystalline than ever: I feel like the moment may arrive when it’s time to depart. Flee the block, flee the city, flee the country. I imagine disasters — crumbling buildings, skyscraper fires, ICE raids, hurricane-backed floods — and I imagine them hitting so swiftly that there is no time to make a deliberate getaway. I don’t know if the disasters will be targeted or impersonal. I don’t know if they’ll be overtly deadly or implicitly so. I don’t know if they’ll happen at all or just in my head. Still, I want to be ready.

I don’t think I’m being paranoid. Terrible things have happened in the recent past; they’re happening right now, depending on where you look. Is it crazy to make sure that if I’m stuck outside unwillingly I won’t die of exposure, or of boredom?

At the same time, I have limits. I don’t have a go-bag. I’m no prepper² — I’ll never be organized enough to cache food at a storage locker in Vermont. I own no weapons but my wit and my knife roll, both of which need sharpening. If the shit hits the fan in a way that requires a 4×4, a shotgun, and a bunker, I’m doomed.

Instead, the apocalypse I’m preparing for is the one we’re already witnessing: a slow-rolling, upper-middle-class doomsday of deportation and evacuation, bureaucracy and neglect. When it comes — or when it comes for me — I want to be ready, my papers safe in waterproof pouches, my devices charged, my undergarments wicking moisture away from my sweaty zones as I plead with officials to let my family through to, well, if not safety then at least the next, fantastic phase of our burgeoning refugeehood. If I can look good doing it, then all the better. I’m ready for a spot on the cover of GQ’s stateless edition.

Really, my approach to fashion hasn’t changed in decades, not since I was a teenager. Then as now, I wear clothes to hide myself — the nakedness of my fears, my anxieties, my awkward insecurity. Perhaps, I have always hoped, by adopting a particular costume, I can get people — friends and strangers alike — to see that Matt instead, to interact with whoever they imagine him to be: chill, adaptable, confident, amusing. Because I can play that Matt, all those Matts; I’ve had years of practice, you know, so much that even I forget the distance between us. Until, sometimes, even though I’m fully clad in my armor, warm and dry and cool and at ease, I’ll find myself in a situation no outfit can protect me against, where my method fails me, where I simply can’t relate or perform or participate the way I’ve dreamed it. I’ll clam up, retreat into myself, and inhabit the Matt the clothes are meant to mask.

Even then, though, I remain prepared: In my dark and neutral tones, my clean lines and subtle silhouette, I am able to turn invisible! A shift, a slump, a downcast look, and no one notices me at all; for as long as I like (which is not very long) I can stick around, unbothered and unchallenged. And then, when I’ve had enough, when I finally give up on myself, I can flee without a word, my Vibram soles silent on the carpet as I creep to the door, and freedom. No one sees me go, but if they could: Goddamn, what a beautiful sight! 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: Why drink?

Why Drink?

The evidence is clear: Alcohol is bad for you. Is there any reason to keep raising a glass?

mattgrossistrying.com/p/why-drink

Newspaper Carriers (Work Disgraces) (1921), Georg Scholz

Until one week ago, I had a job — the longest-held job of my entire life. Then, on Monday morning, I walked into the office, a mostly empty 20th-floor space in Manhattan’s Financial District that I was not in the habit of visiting, to meet my boss, who was visiting from Washington, D.C., for the day. Immediately, I learned the reason for her visit: The company was eliminating my position.

My response: “It’s about time!”

I had been expecting this. In mid-November, the company — a medium-sized media company where I was the vice president of “digital initiatives” — had transferred administration of three of its publications to another division, one in which I was not involved. In practice, this meant that roughly half of my daily duties went poof! I had little left to do, and figured I’d be out the door by January. Instead, I lingered, and lingered long enough to shrug it off and start to think, Maybe I’m safe! And that, of course, is when the other shoe dropped. As a screenwriter, God is a total hack.

Surprised or not, I was far from upset or freaked out. We’ve got some money saved, I’ll receive severance payments (not enough, but still), and there’s New York State unemployment to count on — which maxes out at around twice the weekly rate it did the first time I filed for benefits, back in 2001. So, yes, I have a history of being laid off: FoxNews.com sent me away from its news desk 25 years ago, and in 2018 Hearst told me bye-bye after it acquired Rodale, including Runner’s World, where I was the digital director. And somewhere in between I lost another job, the story of which I told on Canned, a podcast about getting fired. That’s four jobs in 30 years — not too bad for a career in media, where nothing is ever stable for long.

As layoffs go, this most recent was one of the kindest I’ve experienced. It made sense. Given the circumstances, I would’ve laid me off, too. So once it was over, I felt liberated. No longer would I have to care how the company was doing or fret over how I’d solve its myriad problems. In fact, I simply wasn’t allowed to anymore! Now I could breathe. I’d experienced this kind of thing before, in smaller doses, every time I’d filed a freelance story on deadline: A weight I didn’t even realize I’d been bearing was removed from my shoulders, and I could relax and clear my mind. This layoff was that times a thousand — all my deadlines had been erased. I was free.

But as we all learned in the 2004 classic Team America: World Police, freedom isn’t free. No, there’s a hefty fuckin’ fee. And the price I’m paying for my suddenly limitless amount of free time is this: deep anxiety over how to spend it.

Three Working Girls Out for Lunch (1900), Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen

The New York City white-collar layoff dream is this: Without work occupying the better part of your day, you’re suddenly capable of enjoying all the city has to offer, from coffee dates with friends to museum visits to just walking around your neighborhood and seeing what’s going on. (Oh, hey, look, they’re renovating Sam’s!) Yes, you’ll be applying for jobs from time to time, and the prospect of poverty is always lurking in the back of your mind, but for once both the future and the present are open to your whims. Write that novel, study Italian, forage wild chives in Prospect Park, crochet a scarf, begin the daily stretching routine you’ve promised yourself for a decade, clean the bathroom, clean the pantry, get the hell out of town for a few weeks to see friends down South or in Southeast Asia, put a cardboard box full of things you don’t want anymore on the sidewalk so that you don’t feel bad about picking up items from other people’s cardboard boxes full of discards, or just do nothing at all. Sit, be still, think, wait, observe.

The anxiety — my anxiety — kicks in because I want to do all of the above, and more, but because of the very nature of time, I have to make choices. My days are still only as long as they ever were, which was never long enough. Within them, I want to do things: I want to write that novel¹ , I’m working on a podcast (more details soon!), I have two newsletter projects starting to simmer that are nothing like Trying!, and there’s Trying! itself, of course. But I can’t do all of them, and I certainly can’t do all of them while also making space for doing nothing at all, for relishing the dolce far niente of joblessness. Or can I? Can I use this “empty” time to establish a routine so disciplined that it allows me to be both productive and lazy, occupied and unoccupied, depending on when you happen to glimpse me?

Probably not, because I also just joined the Park Slope Food Coop, so I’ve got shifts to plan, shifts to work, shifts to bank so that when, inevitably, I take a new job and my free time evaporates, my family and I can still have access to affordable produce.

I can no longer tell what’s important and what’s not. When I had a job, I often felt my life trickling away. I didn’t have the time to spend on the things I thought I could accomplish that would make my existence meaningful. And I despaired, thinking it would never end, that I’d never get the opportunity to create the works I was meant to create. Now I’m trying to do all of them, which means I’ll probably finish none of them, because I’m unwilling to sacrifice one for the others — or, really, to bet on the success of one at the expense of the others. I can’t calculate those odds.

The stupid irony is that my daily life has not really changed since the layoff. I wake up, make coffee, go running or climbing, then sit at the computer for most of the day, reading and writing until it’s time to make dinner. I continue to spend more than 16 hours a day in one room of my apartment. And as weird and perhaps boring as it sounds — and as crazily different it is from the life I once led as a travel writer — I like this existence. I’m comfortable with the routine, the occasional monotony. Like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, I can think, I can wait, and I can even fast² . I’ve learned to tolerate boredom just as, when I was a teenage skateboarder, I learned to tolerate pain.

Boredom is itself a kind of freedom. Within boredom, my mind can play — I puzzle things out, toy with sentences and stories I may someday write, imagine encounters that will never occur. At work, I liked to think, I was good at my job because I was willing to take on the tasks that were boring but also essential, that needed to be approached with forethought and care. And now, still, I’m doing the boring things. I’m getting our taxes ready. This morning I rolled over my 401(k). When this newsletter is out the door, I’ll bake a loaf of bread that’s been rising since last night. I will fold the laundry. Nothing may change, but nothing has to change right away. I can wait. I can think. The novel(s) will get written. The podcast will get produced. Dinner will be on the table. The life I have always imagined for myself will be the life I live. Enlightenment, I’m pretty sure, is just around the corner. I hope it comes with a paycheck. 🪨🪨🪨

Today’s advertiser is Gladly. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $1.87.

A Monday Washing, New York City (1900), Detroit Photographic Company

First up, some personal news: I got laid off! Yes, I know these essays read as if they’re my full-time job to create, and obviously the cult I’ve built with them has showered me with riches, but it’s true — I was, until yesterday, a working stiff. And now I’m not. For the moment, I’m trying to figure out what to do next. Obviously, I’ll keep writing Trying!, and if you want to help me with that, you can always upgrade to a paid subscription. And if you happen to know of a media company that needs someone who deeply understands every part of the business, from newsletters and analytics to e-commerce and AI, I would probably like to be that someone. (Here’s my LinkedIn.) Anyway, on with the essay!

There’s a guy who lives across the street from me who I’ve always considered to be kind of a dick. He’s young, probably in his early 20s, and he walks around our block with the kind of “I’m cool” swagger that I find deeply annoying. Naturally, he owns a gorgeous, white, late-model Mercedes, an unnecessary flex when you’re parking it on the street among RAV4s, Priuses¹ , Subarus, dented vans, and a maroon mid-’90s Honda Accord held together with duct tape.

To be clear, this guy, whose name I still don’t know so let’s call him Mr. G, has never done anything bad to me, or to anyone I know. But on our relatively tight-knit Brooklyn block, Mr. G’s attitude appeared out of place — he wouldn’t be the first of my neighbors, many of whose names I do know, that I’d turn to in a pinch. All this despite the fact that he and I had never even spoken.

Until, that is, a little over a month ago.

It was during alternate-side parking, that fabled New York City tradition where, once or twice a week, we car owners are required to move our vehicles aside for 60 to 90 minutes so that a Sanitation Department street-sweeper machine can come along and suck up all the trash and detritus tossed aside by Uber drivers, sloppy teens, and willfully shedding trees. The rules of ASP are: You can drive around aimlessly or you can double-park, and once the street sweeper has gone by, you can re-park, provided you stay in the car until about five minutes before the alternate-side period is over. Our block has ASP from 9:30 to 11 a.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays (one side for each day), and I typically use the time to tap away on my laptop in peace and quiet, often parked close enough to access my home Wifi. In some quarters, I believe, this is referred to as “work.”

On this Wednesday, the street-sweeper vehicle arrived early, well before 10 a.m. As soon as it had shuffled past, I folded my laptop and eased my car across the street, right to where it had been parked less than 30 minutes earlier, behind a car that hadn’t budged at all. I opened the computer back up, made sure the Wifi was still connected, and turned my attention back to work.

But almost immediately, there was a knock at my passenger-side window. A traffic cop. I rolled the window down, and he ordered me back across the street. I was confused. The street-sweeper had come and gone already, I explained.

Still, he said, I had to move, not because he thought the sweeper hadn’t yet passed by but because, he said, I’d been parked in this spot the whole time, and hadn’t moved for it. If I didn’t move, I’d get a ticket.

I was even more confused. How could I prove I’d been double-parked until just minutes ago? And if I did move, when could I return to this spot (since the sweeper had already gone be)? How do you tell someone with authority that they are flat-out wrong in their observations and beliefs?

While I was figuring out how to respond, Mr. G appeared from the other side of the street. He called out to the traffic cop: Yo! This guy was double-parked — he just moved over now. I see him every week at parking, he’s good! 

Mr. G went on, describing my conscientiousness, my attentiveness to the unwritten ASP rules, in what started as an argument with the cop but quickly turned into a conversation. I couldn’t hear it all, because as they talked they walked down the block a bit, and I kept waiting and waiting for the cop to return, to either tell me to move or tell me all was okay, but he never did. Nor did my savior Mr. G, the neighbor I’d misjudged, the neighbor whose name I didn’t know, the neighbor who had my back precisely when I needed it.

I fucking love my block. Here we are, a few hundred people living in small buildings sandwiched between NYCHA housing projects at either end of the street, on the border between a historic brownstone neighborhood and an industrial zone rapidly reinventing itself as a waterfront paradise for renters. Our block is a low-traffic island where we know one another by face if not by name, and we pay attention to what’s going on, and take action when necessary. Jane Jacobs would be proud. I love my block, and I love my neighbors. What’s more, I trust them — just as, in general, I want to trust everyone. I want to believe, maybe I really do believe, that people are good, even if I don’t agree with their choice of automobile or personal styling.

But in this, {{first_name|my friends}}, I am increasingly alone. According to this brand-new Pew survey, 53% of Americans say that other Americans — their neighbors, their fellow citizens — are, well, bad.

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The survey, conducted across 25 countries, from Brazil to Kenya to Sweden to Indonesia, looked generally at attitudes about morality. That is, do people consider certain behaviors morally good or morally bad? Among those behaviors: gambling, marijuana use, divorce, extramarital affairs, abortion, and homosexuality.

Some of the results are unsurprising. Germans and Swedes don’t see homosexuality as bad; it’s the opposite in Nigeria and Indonesia. Christians in almost all countries tend to have the most negative views of abortion. Women are more likely to condemn pornography use as unacceptable. Older people are more judgmental than younger people. And in every country, extramarital affairs are seen by the majority as morally bad (though in France it’s a mere 53%).

A few correlations are surprising, at least to me. Apparently, the less educated you are, the more likely you are to see marijuana use as morally bad. And there seems to be a big split between Argentina’s Protestants and Catholics on the moral acceptability of abortion (the Protestants don’t like it).

What sticks out to me, however, is not what the people of each country accept or condemn but what they think of their fellow citizens: Are they saints or monsters, or somewhere in between? Well, in these United States, 53% of us consider our fellow Americans to be either somewhat bad or very bad people. That’s the worst of 25 countries — worse than South Africa, Hungary, and even the Netherlands, which as we all know is filled to the brim with serial killers, scam artists, child traffickers, and D.J.’s. We are the only country where a majority thinks everyone else is awful.

Want to guess which country is the rosiest, where 92% of people think their fellow citizens are good? Scroll to the bottom of the chart:

While the survey looked at a number of demographic factors — age, sex, religion, political affiliation, etc. — one they did not report on is “Metropolitan status,” or whether respondents live in cities, towns, or in rural areas. They do seem to have collected this data, but it’s not reflected in the report, which I find frustrating because I think it’s a key to understanding this country right now.

It should come as no surprise that we have an urban-rural divide in America right now. In a lot of ways, we always have, but the split is more noticeable and more significant now as 67 of the 100 biggest cities, across both blue and red states, have Democratic mayors, while much of rural America votes Republican. Suburban voters, meanwhile, tend to split nearly evenly, with the leader by a few points tending to change every few years. So what I want to know is: Who considers who morally bad? Do city dwellers sneer at country bumpkins, or vice-versa? Do we all just hate on the suburbanites? Or are the attitudes lopsided in some way, revealing who is more judgmental?

And more than that, I want to know how much being morally good or bad matters to the respondents. In other words, I may think you’re evil because you condemn homosexuality and abortion, but what does that mean in reality? Would I treat you differently? Could we be neighbors?

That’s where I think the urban-rural-suburban segmentation becomes really important. Because here in cities, we are surrounded by people with whom we do not agree, on subjects ranging from taxation and school choice to the proper volume to blast reggaetón from your apartment window and whether you should wear flip-flops in the subway² . Anyone who disagrees with me is, obviously, morally bad. Yet I tolerate them, as they tolerate me (which is easy because I am delightful). And because I can tolerate them, I am over time less likely to consider them irredeemably evil, and more just really annoying. And really annoying I can live with, because at least it’s not really, really annoying. Besides, what could I do about it? Harass them? Fight them? Kill them? But I can’t, I won’t, because if I had the right to do that to them, then they could do it to me, too, and the city — this ridiculously dense place we all happen to call home — would cease to function. Once upon a time, from the 1970s into the ‘90s, it did cease to function, but since then I feel like we’ve all made the conscious choice to shrug off the foibles of our neighbors, both intentional and accidental, in the hope that they’ll shrug off ours. And now this city more or less works, as do most of the cities in this country.

And out there, in the spacious suburbs and raw, sprawling, half-empty farmlands and back country, how does that work? Am I too harsh to imagine that without close neighbors, it’s easy to imagine that your own point of view is the only one that matters? This is not to say there is no neighborliness outside of cities, but there is a fundamental difference between having people live down the road and being surrounded by people on all sides: above, below, next door, everywhere. In a city, you’re constantly aware that your behavior, both at home and in public, has immediate effects on the world, and if you want to survive, you adjust accordingly. But out there [waves hands wildly], why bother?

There’s surely some chicken-egg going on here. We choose to live in rural, urban, or suburban situations not just because we want a particular level of interaction but also because we want that preference reinforced by the environment. We know going into our lives that the city will make us more tolerant or that countryside solitude will enable our solipsism.

Mahantango Farm (late 19th century)

I’m trying very hard not to disparage those who choose not to live in cities³ . But I think the urban-rural divide in this country goes beyond simple tolerance to something even more basic: Do you like people? Or, really: Do you want to like people?

If your answer to those questions is no, then I guess I’m going to be judgmental. For as crabby and cynical and dark as I can be, in my heart I not only like people but think it’s important for our collective future for us to want to like one another. Misanthropy can be entertaining, can even be a just response to the world, but it’s not a sustainable worldview.

The rise of widespread misanthropy today, as evidenced in the Pew survey, echoes the circumstances surrounding the rise of the original misanthropist, Timon of Athens. As you no doubt recall, or as I learned was reminded on page one of the 2017 book Misanthropy, by the literary theorist Andrew Gibson, Timon appeared in three plays in the late fifth century B.C.E., and of course was the subject of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. His story is a classic: Timon was a wealthy man who showered his friends with generosity, but when he lost his fortune, they abandoned him. Then, when he was eking out an existence working the fields, he discovered gold and was rich again. His friends, naturally, came back to him — and his response was to throw clods of dirt at them and curse all of humanity:

The Greek plays featuring Timon were written between 414 and 411 B.C.E., and as Gibson explains, these were dark times for Athens. Sparta had trounced the city-state in battle, the Athenian general Alcibiades defected, Sparta allied itself with the enemy Persian Empire, and in 411 Athens’ democracy was overthrown by a military coup. “It is precisely at this time that Timon begins to loom large in the Athenian imagination,” Gibson writes.

So perhaps our current national misanthropy is inevitable, the result of years or decades of disappointment and defeat. As a coping mechanism, I get it. Who doesn’t want to stand at the window right now and scream, Fuck all y’all!? But misanthropy is not a philosophy, or at least not a viable one. It encourages a retreat from society, from cooperation, from tolerance — the attitudes that, in sunnier times, enabled us to reach the heights from which we now feel ourselves tumbling. It feels good, but so (I’m told) does heroin.

But as natural as it may feel, misanthropy is still a choice. Faced with the shitshow that is the 21st century, we can either pull back from the world and condemn our fellow citizens for their misguided and idiotic beliefs, or we can decide to bear them, and in bearing them show those fools that they can bear us, and our own stupidities, as well. In times like these, “Love thy neighbor” is more than anyone can ask of you. But “Like thy neighbor”? That, I think, we can handle. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: That’s So Brooklyn

That's So Brooklyn

I never expected anything but an itinerant life. So how did I wind up with an honest-to-god community?

mattgrossistrying.com/p/thats-so-brooklyn

Today’s advertiser is The Bouqs Co. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $2.25.

I wish I could tell you that I’m furious about Iran. But I’m not. I’m annoyed, frustrated, despondent, but I just can’t summon up the righteous anger that feels appropriate in the face of this brand-new war the president of the United States has launched. Often, I’m bored. It’s like watching the reboot of a TV show I hated the first time around: the same hopped-up accusations, the false pretense of negotiations, the cynical claims of liberation, the lack of a realistic plan for the postwar era, the sheer hammy performativeness of the whole monstrous endeavor. I changed the channel in 2003, and I’m changing it again, or whatever the streaming metaphor is, in 2026. Whoever greenlighted these series should be cancelled. Again. Permanently.

The problem is that the rest of the “channels” are “airing” ragebait as well. Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. and CNN. Venezuela. AI. Crypto. Voter suppression. The one that most enrages me right now is the story of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, the blind 56-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar who died in Buffalo, New York, on February 25. Honestly, “enrages” doesn’t begin to describe how I feel about what was, philosophically, a murder by Customs and Border Protection. For the record (and what is Trying! if not a catalogue raisonné of the horrors of our times?), here’s a timeline of the last year or so of Shah Alam’s life, courtesy of The Independent (don’t worry, we’ll get to noodle soup soon):

• In December 2024, Shah Alam — who was blind (or “nearly blind,” as some reports have it) and spoke no English — came to the U.S. as a refugee from Myanmar, where as a Rohingya Muslim he’d been persecuted by the authorities. Accompanying him were his wife and two sons.

• On February 15 a year ago, having just bought a curtain rod, possibly to use as a cane, Shah Alam apparently wandered into someone’s backyard … and the cops were called. They demanded he drop the curtain rod, but of course he didn’t speak English, instead “speaking Ruáingga throughout the incident.” The cops tased him, swore at him, and punched him in the head when he was on the ground. They arrested him, claiming he bit an officer.

• By May, Shah Alam was still in a local jail, now under indictment for “felony assault, burglary, and criminal mischief.” Bail had been set at $5,000, but Shah Alam’s family left him in jail out of fear that ICE might pick him up at home and deport him.

• In mid-February 2026, Shah Alam pleaded guilty to “criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree and one count of criminal trespass in the third degree,” lesser charges that would allow him to avoid deportation. Sentencing was set for March 24.

• On February 19, at 5:25 p.m., sheriff’s deputies handed Shah Alam over to Border Patrol agents, who quickly realized he was not supposed to be deported. So, just after 8 p.m., they dropped him off at a Tim Horton’s, which they “determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address.” It had closed an hour earlier. Also, his family had moved five miles away. Also, the temperature was 37°F (real feel: 32°), and Shah Alam was shoeless, wearing only the orange prison booties he’d been issued. He was still (nearly) blind and still spoke no English, but the agency said in a statement he had no disabilities requiring special assistance. Neither Border Patrol nor sheriff’s deputies contacted his family or his lawyer.

• Over the next few days, Shah Alam’s Legal Aid lawyer reported him as a missing person to Buffalo police, who closed the case after determining he was in federal custody. Whoops! On the 24th, they put out missing-person alerts on social media.

• The next day, he was found dead, having wandered five miles south of where he’d been abandoned. The Erie County medical examiner has not yet reported a cause of death.

Now, I’m no doctor, but I’m willing to report the cause of death: the Border Patrol. The cruelty here is familiar, but especially outrageous in its offhandedness. They had in their custody a blind or nearly blind man with no English ability and no real footwear, and they dumped him at a closed Tim Horton’s on a cold February night in Buffalo. They could have contacted his family, they could have contacted his lawyer, they could have dropped him at his last known address (where someone might have known his family had moved), they could have verified that the doughnut shop was open. Any of these actions would have taken five minutes. And any of those actions would have kept Shah Alam safe; he would, I’m pretty sure, still be alive.

While the Border Patrol agents who abandoned Shah Alam to his fate may eventually argue they were not at fault, there is no reason to believe them. They made a choice to abandon him at that place, in those conditions. Any decent human being would have realized they were putting him in danger — at the very least condemning him to suffer until a private citizen or the local police intervened, and at the very worst (which is what happened) pushing him down the road to a lonely death. The agents had to have thought about this, even if maybe none of them discussed it aloud. (We don’t know yet.) Did they just say Fuck it, let’s dump him here? Did they want him to die because they couldn’t deport him? I don’t know the law here, so they may have a legitimate defense, but even if they are not legally responsible for his death, they remain morally responsible. If anyone involved in his abandonment had acted like a decent human being, Shah Alam might still be alive. But they didn’t. Those Border Patrol agents should kill themselves out of shame.

Which brings me to noodle soup.

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All last week, as Shah Alam’s tragic story was unfolding, first privately, then publicly, I was thinking about noodle soups. On Sunday the 22nd, I’d started a beef stock using marrow bones, but after refrigerating it I realized it needed … something more. It had a base layer of umami, but nothing beyond that — none of that deep beefy richness that perfumes a house. Luckily, I had a whole gallon, and some ideas on how to use it.

The first was to make Taiwanese beef noodle soup. When I visit Taiwan, this is not a dish I often seek out — I’m usually there in the summer, when the weather does not inspire me to eat a big, hot, heavy bowl of wheat noodles and meat. But back here in Brooklyn, in late winter, it’s a sure winner, especially since I discovered that it’s not hard to make.

My approach sits somewhere between that of Cathy Erway and that of Clarissa Wei. At midday Friday I began by searing three bone-in short ribs on all sides in a Dutch oven, then removing them and quickly sautéing garlic, ginger, and scallions in the residual fat. When these aromatics softened quite a bit, I added a few tablespoons each of light brown sugar, tomato paste, and doubanjiang (豆瓣醬), the fermented chili bean paste that is essential to Sichuan cooking (and which more or less made its way to Taiwan after the communist victory over mainland China in 1949). Once that mess was stirred and combined and fragrant, I poured in a couple of cups of rice wine, light soy sauce, and dark soy sauce — I used Erway’s ratios, though next time I might go with less soy sauce — followed by two quarts of the bone broth. I returned the meat to the pot, added some water to cover, and brought things to a light simmer, skimming off any foam that accumulated. I filled a metal-mesh spice ball with Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, cassia bark, red cardamom, sand ginger, and cloves, and sunk it into the liquid. After 90 minutes, I¹ added several cups of daikon chunks, and half an hour after that, the broth was finished.

What I hadn’t understood until recently was that with only two hours of braising, this would produce a pretty darn good base for Taiwanese beef noodle soup: spicy, rich, meaty, and well-perfumed. For some reason, I’d always assumed that beef broths required hour upon hour of slow cooking to coax flavor from the bones. But nope! Friday evening I extracted the short ribs from the broth and sliced them into small slabs, discarding the bones entirely. The meat was tender but still bouncy: just right. At dinnertime, I boiled some good Chinese noodles — they’re flat, with ruffled edges — and carefully composed four bowls. Noodles, short rib slabs, daikon chunks, and lots of broth, topped with chopped scallions and cilantro and, for me, minced red Thai chilies. This was it! And it was good.

For a moment or two, I admired my creation⁴ . Composition is one of the first joys of noodle soups. You don’t want to just heap toppings on willy-nilly (except maybe at Ramen Jiro, where that’s the point). Instead you have a circular canvas on which to arrange your ingredients. The noodles can be a tangle or a neat skein. The meats can be chunks studding the surface, or a sheaf of slices in one corner. Eggs, bamboo shoots, leafy greens, pickled greens, pickled tubers, sliced onions, chopped scallions, fried shallots, fried garlic, dustings of black pepper or white pepper, drizzles of oil, tangles of mushrooms, dumplings large and small — each has a texture and dimension that determines its proper place in the bowl, and the variations are nearly infinite. For a sense of the aesthetic possibilities, check out my friend Michele Humes’s lovely cookbook The Noodle Soup Oracle, which she both wrote and illustrated.

Yu xiang pai gu mian (fish-fragrant sparerib noodle soup), in Chengdu, China.

The number of possibilities also speaks to the cooking challenge noodle soups present. You are not just making a soup and dropping in whatever’s at hand² ; you must consider how anything and everything fits together. And you have to prepare it! You might be roasting pork, poaching goose, pickling quail eggs, wrapping wontons, and infusing oils with a souk’s worth of spices. And if you really care about your noodles? Hoo-boy! Pasta-making adds a whole extra layer of culinary challenge, one I’ve never been brave enough to take on. Noodle soups may appear humble, easy snacks, slurped down in seconds on anonymous streets from Makassar to Mandalay, from Cần Thơ to Chongqing, from Seoul to Sapporo. But even the most minimalist bowl requires all of a chef’s talents.

I appreciate, too, the tension that noodle soups create between the collective and the individual. If you are going to make a noodle soup, you are going to make more than one bowl at a time. You’ll prepare broth by the gallon, stockpile pasta, array your proteins, and outfit a mise en place with dozens of ingredients, condiments, herbs, and other accoutrements. Noodle soups begin as community-minded endeavors, food for the masses, which is why they can be so daunting at home. But they end with uniquely curated bowls — a diner selecting toppings, then modifying the whole with yet more sauces, herbs, chilies, sugar, vinegars, and whatever else happens to be on the table. No two bowls are alike. Yet this is only logical: If we’re going to make food for lots of people, we’d better make sure those lots can enjoy it. We share in the communal experience, but each in our own way.

All of that, though, is subtext, at least for me. I like noodle soups because I like them in their unending variety: broths that are salty, spicy, sour, meaty, thick, spare; noodles that are chewy, slippery, supple, wispy, alkaline, bouncy. I like them topped with roast pork and braised brisket, cockles and fishballs, oysters and intestines, wontons and pickled bamboo shoots and little crispy fried things. I love the comfort of soup and the comfort of noodles and the joy and surprise that emerge from a novel combination of familiar flavors. Give me tonkotsu ramen, give me bún riêu, give me assam laksa and kalguksu. Give me boat noodles; give me o a mi sua; give me this bowl I ate at the morning market in Tachileik, Myanmar, in 2005:

This is what I want for breakfast every single day.

Really, this paragraph should start with “And give me phở.” But I don’t need you to give me phở — I can make it just fine. (🎶 I can give myself phở-lowers… 🎶) The process takes longer than Taiwanese beef noodle soup, even if many of the ingredients are the same. Last Saturday, I began with several pounds of beef neck bones (meatier than I expected), simmering them in more of the leftover marrow-bone broth and two quarts fresh water along with an onion and a knob of ginger — both well-charred over a gas flame. A quarter-cup of fish sauce, two tablespoons of brown sugar. A mesh spice ball with star anise, cloves, cassia bark, coriander seeds.

This soup went for a long while — nearly eight hours, during which I occasionally had to add water to replace what steamed away. In the end, after straining everything through a chinois, I had slightly more than two quarts of dark but clear soup, with only the thinnest layer of fat. It sat a day, turning to wobbly gelatin in the fridge, and meanwhile I prepared the accoutrements: Thai basil, bean sprouts, sliced yellow onion, chopped scallions and cilantro, red chilies, and well-marbled boneless short rib, frozen till I could slice it paper-thin, so it would cook instantly in the heat of the soup. {{first_name|Reader}}, it was so, so good. Phở was the first noodle soup I can remember eating (Campbell’s meatball alphabet and instant ramen don’t count), back in high school, at Chez Trinh in Williamsburg, Virginia, and it continues to strike a chord in my soul that no other can. And maybe that’s the reason I’m often hesitant to take it on — to mess up, to produce weak phở, would be to disappoint the 16-year-old who lives inside of me, who is in so many ways still the true me.

Trust me, there’s noodles under there.

All last week, as I was making noodle soups — adjusting flames, skimming foam, slicing and chopping and charring — I was also thinking about Shah Alam. I won’t pretend there was some thematic connection. These were separate strands. Shah Alam had lived, faced danger in Myanmar and escaped it, and met an unnecessary end in Buffalo. I was preparing bougie food for my family in comfort and security in Brooklyn.

Did I feel guilty? Only in the most superficial sense, the way I often acknowledge to myself (or to you) that I wish I could do more to end the disparities of this country, then move on, powerless but well-fed. I made dinner, and I enjoyed dinner, and I’ll continue to enjoy my meals both despite and because of the collapse of our society — because the fascists want our lives robbed of delight, and because at least in the kitchen I maintain control over how things turn out. My conscience is as clear as a long-simmered cauldron of stock.

To live today is to live two lives, one engaged with the struggle to survive this absurdity, the other revolving around the age-old routines of work, family, food, friends — life. These dual existences can continue for months or years, intertwining without ever quite intersecting, like movie characters pursuing their own arcs, vaguely aware that a momentous encounter awaits before the end of the first act. How will that encounter proceed? When will the strands connect? Will they — will we — make it into act three and, more importantly, into the sequel? As always, it’s up to the screenwriter. And so we slurp on, bowls atop the counter, bone broth steaming us through this repast. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: The B+/A- Life

In Praise of the B+/A- Life

Can't get no satisfaction? I've got some ideas!

mattgrossistrying.com/p/in-praise-of-the-b-plus-life

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The Rope Dance (1871), Léonard Defrance

Last week, I know, you were all wondering, Why isn’t Matt writing anything? Where are the Trying! emails I’ve come to depend on for wisdom and advice in these tortured times? Has something happened? When will he return? Well, I’m back now, as you can tell, and I was gone because I was gone: My family and I were off on our annual ski trip, this time visiting Mont Tremblant, outside Montreal. Every day, accompanied by two other families, we dined richly — from dollar oysters and poutine and obscure cheeses to a hunter’s pie stuffed with at least four different animals — and at night we played endless rounds of mahjong. Most of our time, of course, was spent riding the gondola to the top of the mountain and hurling ourselves down at top speed, my wife, Jean, and I on snowboards, everybody else on skis. The snow was excellent (for the East Coast), the temperature neither too cold nor too warm, and the lift lines uncrowded.

In the middle of one of my runs, however, in a speedy part before a transition to a different piste¹ , my brain, which usually goes quiet while my instincts and muscle memory take over, suddenly started throwing questions at me. Why so fast? What if you get hurt? And, more fundamentally: Why are you doing this in the first place?

As I carved through the snow, I tried to break down what I was feeling in that moment. With enough velocity, the arc of a turn created a kind of centrifugal force that my body both fought and embraced, tensing pleasantly, exerting but relaxed. At times I'd hit a little bulge of snow and catch a tiny air — a minute hop at best, but the sudden release from gravity was liberating, and the ease with which I could bounce around the mountain spoke to another delight, that of mastery. I hesitate to use that word. I’m no serious shredder; I avoid half-pipes and terrain parks; dude, I’m 51 years old. But I have enough ability to ride through just about anything within bounds on a mountain. And more important, I am comfortable doing that. I know what I’m capable of, and I enjoy being able to perform without stress or fear, and to luxuriate in a steady — not erratic or spiky — flow of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine.

All of that ran through my mind while I was coming down the mountain, and all of it felt … inadequate. These explanations and intellectualizations might make sense now, on the page, to a reader like you, {{first_name|my friend}}, but they only hint bluntly at the real truth, the finer truth. Which is this: I ride a snowboard because it is fun.

But that explanation is inadequate, too. Because it’s fun? What kind of childish, reductive reasoning is that? It can be applied to anything any of us do: I run because it’s fun, write because it’s fun, drink wine because it’s fun, watch movies because they’re fun. There are longer, more complex motivations behind the fun of each of those, but the most superficial and most important part is the fun. Without it, nothing else matters. But to state it earnestly is ridiculous. I sound like one of my teenage daughters, who get exasperated when I probe their tastes. They like the things they like because they like them. Fun things are fun. Especially tautologies!

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Fun was a constant problem back when I was a travel writer. I’d be leaping into alpine lakes in the mountains of the Wyoming-Montana border, or I’d climb a tree in a Paris park, or I'd eat couscous at a weird Algerian restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, and when the time came to render these experiences into words for my editors and my readers, I’d have to set aside the visceral purity of those moments and transform them into something more meaningful, more edifying, more grown-up.

On the whole, I think, that’s a good thing! You wouldn’t want to read reportage that stops at “I liked it. It was fun.” I wouldn’t want to write that kind of thing, either, because I enjoy breaking down what I see and feel, connecting my experiences to my memories, to history, to the broader culture — and then assembling it all into a work that is, if I’m lucky, more than just a collection of closely observed moments. That’s my idea of fun!

But that’s not why we travel. I mean, many of us probably set out from home with the hope that the journey will amount to something significant, but even so we tend to line up destinations and activities that are — fingers crossed — fun. Maybe the itineraries are familiar, sure bets, or maybe they’re novel experiments, but either way we are hoping to enjoy them as they are, well before we understand the context and delve into the subtext. The pleasure is the point! (Yes, even when we’re talking about type 2 fun.) We’re in it, first of all and most important of all, for fun.

At least, that’s what I’m always telling my daughters — growling through gritted teeth — when they’re skeptical about a planned excursion, like ice skating in a flooded forest: “It’ll be fun, goddamit!” That’s all they really want, right?

Obviously, we don’t all consider the same things to be fun. I, for one, don’t much like dancing or drawing or singing, which a whole lot of people consider fun. I wish I did! I wish the movements I make with my hips and hands and vocal cords would line up with how I imagine them in my head, and I could begin to crawl toward the kind of comfortable proficiency I have on a snowboard. But they don’t, they just won’t, and the superficial experience of trying and failing at these activities doesn’t provide me enough pleasure — enough fun — for me to persist and to improve. Maybe, one day, if I really tried, I’d become good enough to enjoy a tango, a sketch, an aria (!), but with so many crossword puzzles, boulders, novels, and whiskeys calling out to me, with their come-hither delights, why bother? I fail at plenty of things already — I don’t need to add to the list. Failure is definitely no fun² .

Whatever things we consider to be fun, I think we do all believe that fun itself exists, even if that definition, too, is going to mutate from person to person. I like to imagine Socrates puzzling this out in a dialogue with some lesser Athenian: “I have had fun, Coalemos, but these entertainments you present to me as fun — the exaggerated battles of painted wrestlers, the throwing of rocks both large and small into the wine-dark sea, the berating of the slight, the weak, the timid — diverge from my own experiences. I must ask myself: Do I know what fun is? For what can unite your violent tastes with my own preferences for roundabout arguments and the company of young people?” Well, okay, Sock, but fun ain’t as complicated as, say, virtue or the nature of good and evil. While examples of fun may vary wildly, we can say that fun itself is merely pleasure, easily and superficially accessed³ , and pursued for its own sake.

Under this definition, I admit, there’s something a little solipsistic, almost masturbatory, about fun. We seek it out for a pleasure that can seem, to outsiders who don’t share our preferences, selfish — that’s how personal the experience can be. But if fun is selfish, it’s not necessarily greedy. Fun can be shared. It can be enhanced, multiplied among a group of people pursuing the same end. (Again I wish I could dance!) Fun may be hard to communicate, but it’s infectious, self-amplifying.

And it can, logically, be the opposite. Just think of the Debbie Downers unable to enjoy the supposedly fun thing the rest of us love — their anhedonia sucks joy from our own experience. Without their pleasure, ours weakens. They push the rest of us into deeper solipsism. We become aware of the uniqueness and fragility of our sense of fun and cling to it more tightly, perhaps for fear that the easy joy we’ve grown accustomed to might degrade or evaporate. Because fun is always ephemeral, flourishing scarcely longer than the fun activity lasts, and in its throes we try not to anticipate the quick dimming of the afterglow. I love crossword puzzles, and I race to solve them faster and faster, but the joy of completion almost always collapses into a cold emptiness that has me wishing all manner of violence on Will Shortz.

There are, I suspect, people for whom “fun” holds no appeal at all. Perhaps they consider easy pleasure fit only for children, babies, teenagers — creatures who play, and play unselfconsciously. Or maybe they’re somehow dedicated to seriousness. To work. To difficulty. Maybe they don’t have time — or patience — for fun. Are such people real? I’m having a hard time imagining what it would be like to reject fun of all sorts. (Obvious joke: They’re in the White House!) But if these fools do exist, I pity them. Life is hard — harder every day. To cut yourself off from joy because it seems too easy or immature only makes the daily slog rougher and less rewarding. Fun may not be highbrow. It may not make sense in the pages of our most illustrious newspapers and magazines. Fun can be downright stupid and embarrassing. But fun is ours. We humans are attuned to it, ready for it, designed for it. We’re monkeys at heart, primed for silly gestures and slapstick spontaneity just because.

What I’d like is to return some mystique to the term. Knowing what lurks beneath fun, what perturbations and tricks hide beneath its sugar-slicked surface, we should be able to toss it out at will, in conversation or in feature articles. We need to start accepting that those three little letters are not a mute but a sly invitation to an ineffable, untranslatable world of personal joy: What’s your idea of fun? Finding out is the funnest part of all. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: ‘Teenage Suicide’ by Big Fun

This is the song by the fictional band Big Fun from the movie Heathers. It’s kind of hilarious, and kind of awesome.

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The Dead Mother and Her Child (1901), Edvard Munch

Fatherhood is not easy. In large part, this is because of children, who are generally understood to be terrible creatures, filthy and rebellious. They have few useful skills, need constant attention to prevent them from inadvertently injuring or killing themselves, and have little interest in grown-up topics like which part of your body hurts today and why. This unpleasant immaturity continues not only for years but for decades. How is a man supposed to relate to these small people?

Maybe once upon a time, it was easier. A dad worked, earned money, and left the task of raising children to his wife; he perhaps took a moment here and there to terrorize the kids with drunken violence and ill-considered vacations — the social expectations of his day. Whether these parenting techniques worked, or how you’d even measure success, was immaterial.

But in my era, the social expectations are different. For at least the last 20 years, American fathers are supposed to be involved. We are partners with our partners (be they female or male) and must make an effort at child-rearing, even if the split is never quite 50-50. We are supposed to care — which is exhausting just to think about. In my 17-plus years as a dad, I have changed diapers, given baths, read and invented bedtime stories, folded laundry, cooked innumerable dinners, helped with homework, and organized vacations both enjoyable and ill-considered. I have been present as much as is possible for a guy who used to be a travel writer and now spends most of his time somewhere deep in his own head. I have tried, and I’ve succeeded and I’ve failed, and I’m happy and grateful that this is the type of father I’ve been allowed and encouraged by society to be.

These are the end times, however, and for almost as long as I’ve been a parent, I’ve been anticipating what happens after. You know, when the ICBMs launch or the mega-caldera explodes or the seas rise or the fascists rise or the dead themselves rise. At least one of those is going to happen, right? And when it does, here I will be, a mostly competent father responsible for two daughters in a world gone to shit. Will I remain mostly competent in the face of food shortages and inexplicable violence? Or will I lose them, and my own fatherly identity, to the apocalypse?

In search of wisdom, I turned to my favorite oracle: the television. And after a non-comprehensive survey of a couple of decades of shows — from The Walking Dead to a pair of mid-2010s series no one watched, to Paradise, which just began its second season on Hulu — I think I have an idea of what fatherhood will be like after the end of the world. It will be really, really fucking hard.

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It takes a special kind of masochism to rewatch an entire series that was canceled after three seasons, leaving all of its story arcs unresolved, its heroes unfinished, its central mysteries unanswered. So I guess that makes me a special kind of masochist. But that’s what I did recently with Colony, which ran on USA Networks from 2016 to 2018 and is now on Amazon Prime.

From Lost co-creator Carlton Cuse and showrunner Ryan J. Condal, Colony stars Josh Holloway — yup, Sawyer from Lost! — as Will Bowman, who with his wife Katie (Sarah Wayne Callies, a.k.a. Lori from The Walking Dead) is trying to raise his three children in Los Angeles amid an alien invasion. This invasion has a twist, of course. On a day known as The Arrival, approximately a year before the pilot episode takes place, the aliens dropped huge walls around major cities across the planet, sealing off residents and installing a new collaborationist human government to run these “colonies.” (L.A. is headed by the wonderfully slippery Peter Jacobson, who you may remember from House.) Unfortunately for the Bowmans, their middle child, 12-year-old Charlie, was at some sporting event in Santa Monica that day, and has been unreachable since. So they’re behind in parenting points from the get-go.

What follows is not a “find the aliens’ secret weakness” narrative. The aliens, in fact, are rarely seen, their motivations mostly inscrutable. They have swarms of killer drones that turn miscreants to red splotches on the L.A. concrete, and they seem to be collecting humans to work in a factory on the Moon. Even the humans in positions of power have little access to their overseers.

Instead, Colony is all about the interplay between insurgency and collaboration. Desperate to find Charlie in Santa Monica, Will agrees to become a cop for the hated Occupation because they’ve offered to locate the kid — if Will helps take down the armed Resistance groups that have been bothering the government. Meanwhile, Katie, unbeknownst to her husband, has joined that very Resistance! That secret doesn’t survive the first season, but it makes things beautifully messy, as Katie takes stray details her husband mentions and uses them to foil his work — except that he’s really good at being a cop, so he foils their foilings. Mistrust multiplies on all sides: The Resistance worries Katie’s a double agent; the police department doubts Will’s loyalties. (The delightful cast, which mixes unknowns with recognizable character actors — Carl Weathers! Adrian Pasdar! Laura Innes! — makes this delicious.) This goes on for the entire series, as the Bowmans escape L.A. for the Sierras, where they are taken in by a rebel camp run by a former conspiracy theorist, then migrate to Seattle, an apparent utopia whose leader is a charming, guitar-playing tech bro with ulterior motives.

All they want is a bit of stability for their family… and, of course, to defeat the aliens, known variously as Raps, Clicks, and Morks (ha!), and their venal human enablers. But in the apocalypse, stability is worse than elusive — it’s a trap. To survive, you have to buy into the worldview of the people in power, whether they’re kooky ET-killers or status-obsessed bureaucrats from Davos. The Bowmans are constantly questioning their own motives and their own sense of reality. Is the governor of L.A. trying to help them or to use them? Are the aliens bad, or is there something worse out there? Is there any way to make things better for their kids — now and in the future — without betraying their own ideals?

As it turns out, nope! Their kids are all kinds of messed up. In L.A., a regime-connected religious zealot begins tutoring the youngest Bowman, a bland little blonde named Gracie, who later witnesses the tutor assassinated by a rival resistance group. Charlie is rescued by his dad from Santa Monica, but clearly traumatized by his experience there under the thumb of a beachside Fagin — he’s hoarding food, hiding under the bed with a knife, and listening for the soft pad of evil footsteps outside the door. The oldest son, Bram, is an older teen frustrated with the apparent complacency of his parents; he helps blow up a space-supply ship, joins the rival rebels, and murders an ambassador — then lies about it all, pretending through tears to be a conflicted teen rather than a stone-cold psychopath.

And it gets worse from there, because Mom and Dad are so obsessed with their work — not just their jobs but their all-consuming anti-authoritarian activities — that they neglect basic parental duties: meals, attempts at schooling, just being around and available for the kids who need them. And so Charlie dies a meaningless death during a raid on the Sierra camp, and Bram, sick of his parents’ irresponsibility, moves out of the family’s new Seattle home, taking hollow-eyed, mistrustful Gracie with him to the house of his girlfriend, whose own dad is a snitchy police sergeant. The series ends on a miserable note, with Will turning himself over to the aliens, having given up on parenthood entirely, and Katie trapped outside Seattle, not even knowing where her family is.

The Bowmans have failed as parents. And they’ve failed for the reasons that parents always fail in these apocalyptic shows: They’re just trying to protect their kids in an exceedingly dangerous world, where threats are everywhere — but because those threats are everywhere, the parents use up all their time and energy fighting, with none left over for the less exciting but ultimately more important task of communicating openly and honestly with their kids. (My own kids agree: If there’s a fascist takeover, they said, my wife and I are not to join the Resistance. Because who’s going to make dinner?) And so the kids go bad, wander off, rebel, and the parents don’t notice until it’s too late. Workaholics, amirite?

I feel like this happened all the time on The Walking Dead, where moms and dads kept losing their kids to zombies (and humans), and reacted by becoming incomparable killing machines themselves. And still they kept losing their kids, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. It’s the apocalypse, after all. Shrinkage is expected.

In a way, this has to happen, because if it doesn’t — if the kids remain safe and the families intact — then the show feels unrealistic. That’s what happens on Falling Skies, which ran from 2011 to 2015 and is getting promoted on Netflix these days because it stars The Pitt’s Noah Wyle as a Boston University history professor (and single father of three boys) who winds up leading the resistance to an alien invasion. Although one of the kids gets kidnapped by the aliens and partially mutated into one, nothing truly bad happens to any of them, including the sickeningly adorable youngest one. They all survive, Dad finds a new woman to replace the wife who died before the series starts, and they defeat the aliens in one shot by killing the alien queen. You will not be surprised to learn that Steven Spielberg was one of the executive producers.

Even there, though, the apocalyptic parenting arc remains the same: Whoever Dad was before the end of the world — i.e., a dorky academic who brings up Ancient Rome and the American Revolution at every opportunity — cannot survive. Instead, he must become a soldier, a warrior, a military leader, a man who both directly and indirectly wields violence to protect his family and the human race. Whatever other fatherly qualities he might once have possessed, and might still despite everything retain, pale in comparison to this capacity for fighting. The future of fatherhood looks a lot like the distant past.

Right now, I’m wondering how Paradise will turn out, parenting-wise. This Hulu show, which stars Sterling K. Brown (who is awesome) as Secret Service agent Xavier Collins, takes place in a pleasant small town that happens to exist under a mountain in Colorado, where the U.S. president and an elite group of 25,000 have fled a climate apocalypse and also possibly a nuclear one. Conspiracies abound, and as Xavier — whose wife was left behind in Atlanta and is presumably dead — tracks them down, he pretty much neglects his son and his daughter. They’re organized, competent kids, and the city is safe, but… really, the dude is not present. The son, for example, has been working up the courage to ride a Ferris wheel, and Xavier has promised to be there for him when he does, but instead he wanders off to do some conspiracizing, leaving the kid to ride it alone. The show underplays the moment — the kid seems happy — so maybe that’s the point? That Xavier didn’t need to stick around? Even so, it’s odd to see this modern dad show not a bit of guilt. He doesn’t even realize his failing!

Maybe that’s because his mind is elsewhere. Late in the first season, he learns that his wife may have survived the apocalypse, so after solving that season’s conspiracy, he leaves Bunkertown — and his children! — to seek her out, which is now the plot of season two. Who does that? I mean, I love my wife, but the romantic gesture is not the realistic one: For the kids’ sake, it’s infinitely better I stay underground with them. Besides, my wife is pretty tough. I’m sure she’ll be okay on the surface. That’s how you survive the apocalypse — by not taking the kinds of chances that make for great television.

In one scene, early in season two, Xavier learns how just little the apocalypse cares for his parenting skills. Having landed in Arkansas, he finds himself being cared for by a group of weird, nearly silent children hiding in a beached boat. From his bag, he pulls out his beloved copy of James and the Giant Peach and says, “I could read to you. Would you like that?” In response, one of the kids asks if he can have Xavier’s jacket “when you’re dead.” There’s not much Xavier can do but answer, “Okay. Maybe no book.”

I am fairly certain that the apocalypse, if and when it comes, will not resemble what I’ve seen onscreen. I won’t need to become a super-soldier, won’t need to play rebels and collaborators against one another, won’t need to sacrifice my high-minded parenting ideals in favor of reflexive ultra-violence. But if there is a lesson in these shows for us pre-apocalyptic dads (and moms), I think it’s this: There may be little we can do to protect our kids from the world. Bombs will fall, zombies will bite, the oceans will rise and engulf us all, the fascists will seize power. So very, very much is out of our control. But what is in our control is how we relate to our kids, how we explain to them a world of madness, and how we at once project an image of strength and reliability even as we allow them to see that we may fail, will probably fail, and give them the wisdom and skills to survive our failures¹ . After that, the future seasons are up to them. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: I ate a bad sandwich

I ate a bad sandwich

And it taught me the meaning of life.

mattgrossistrying.com/p/i-ate-a-bad-sandwich

“Isaac and Rosa, Emancipated Slave Children, from the Free Schools of Louisiana” (1863–4), Myron H. Kimball

At this point in human history — in an era in which we have electric vehicles, widespread free pornography, moisture-wicking athletic fabrics, bubble tea, and erratic and extreme weather events for which we are responsible — you should not be surprised to learn that the president of the United States is a racist. He’s not the first racist president, of course! But he’s the one we’ve got right now, and his history of racism, in both word and deed, is extremely well-documented.

It goes back at least to the early 1970s, when the Department of Justice sued the Trump Organization for violating the Fair Housing Act, claiming it “refused to rent to Black tenants and lied to Black applicants about whether apartments were available,” according to this Vox article (and lots of other articles). In 1989, he took out ads in New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty and its application to the so-called Central Park 5, who were accused — wrongly, as it turned out — of raping and beating a jogger. (Despite the overturning of their convictions based on DNA evidence, he still insists they did it.) Starting in 2011, he began insisting that President Barack Obama had not been born in Hawaii — which he was, with copious evidence to back it up — but instead was born in Kenya. Before, between, and after all of these incidents were many, many, many others. The dude’s a racist, okay?

His latest act, posted to the social media network he owns, is less elaborate, but possibly more blatant than ever before: a video¹ that includes a shot of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces photoshopped onto the bodies of chimpanzees.

This is where I heave a big sigh. That sigh conveys a lot: disbelief, exhaustion, annoyance, resignation, but most of all disappointment. To be clear, it’s not that I’m disappointed that the president is a racist, nor that he’s so shamelessly willing to show off that racism. No, I’m disappointed in how utterly boring and uncreative his racism is.

Depicting Black people as apes is one of the oldest racist tropes. As I understand, it traces its history back at least to the Enlightenment, when a more scientific understanding of animal species established differences between humans and apes that were moral as well as biological (i.e., we’re civilized, they’re savages). In the 19th century, that moral distinction got another kick when new ideas about evolution suggested that humans were descended from — or, as is widely and incorrectly thought, were more evolutionarily advanced than — their primate relatives. Now apes weren’t just savage but backward, left behind, inescapably genetically inferior. From there, the racism was a gimme.

It’s the easiness that bothers me so much. This racism is lazy and thoughtless. It’s not like you’ve got Klansman doing research on other primates to find the most insulting comparisons: Which is worse, bonobos or chimps, rhesus monkeys or lowland gorillas? Are they tailoring the comparisons to specific individuals they’re insulting? No, it’s always just: monkeys! apes! Black people! Don’t racists themselves get tired of the same old same old? Or is the trope so sidesplittingly hilarious that it still kills, unchanged, two or three centuries on?

Obviously, this is a very non-racist way of thinking about racist “humor.” And definitely a very Jewish way of thinking about it. Whenever I see things like the president’s post, I’m reminded of the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest of 2006, which was created in response to a Holocaust-themed cartoon contest held by Iran’s largest newspaper, which itself was in response to caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. It’s a particular point of pride to say, “No one can make fun of us, particularly in a reprehensibly stereotypical way, better than we can!”

The results, alas, do not represent the best of Jewish humor. You can see ten of them in this Der Spiegel photo gallery, where they range from a “Jew Hitler” — Adolf in Hasidic garb — to a rabbi blowing a shofar that is actually one of the Devil’s horns. The winner, “Fiddler on the Roof,” depicts a silhouette of Tevye atop the Brooklyn Bridge on 9/11, the Twin Towers smoking in the background. I kind of like “Bleeding Heart,” in which a Catholic priest labeled “Europe” slaveringly gawks at the gigantic bosom of an aging Jewess labeled “Holocaust,” while an Arab lies dead at his feet — the priest has cut out his heart, labeled “Palestine.” All kind of obvious, pretty meh. The best cartoon, as Art Spiegelman, who helped judge the competition, points out, is really the contest’s own logo: a “glowering hook nosed spider astride a world in flames.”

Puppetmaster, too!

The artistic failure of the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoon Contest suggests there’s a case to be made that racism can’t truly be funny. But that depends on what your definition of funny is. The persistence of “Black people are monkeys” “jokes” means that someone out there — i.e., racists — finds them amusing, but that, I think, is because their sense of humor is fundamentally different. For racists, and for assholes more generally, humor is directional. They laugh not at ironies, disjunctures, surprises, absurdity, but at people — at their perceived inferiors. Their laughter is a laughter of triumph, a Nelsonian ha-ha that shoves the upstarts and the uppity back into their rightful place (down below). I guess if you’re going to look at things like that, these racist jokes are hilarious.

In a weird way, there’s a tradition here that goes back to classical Greece. In ancient Greek comedy, you had two main stock figures, the eiron and the alazon. The alazon was, literally, a “boaster,” someone who considered himself superior — an overly proud soldier, a crotchety old man. The eiron’s job, meanwhile, was to cut the alazon down to size. Therein lay the humor: Who doesn’t long to see the puffed-up laid low? I certainly do, and the racists as well. In their view, they are the eirons, the Obamas the alazons.

The difference between racist humor and ancient Greek humor is that the eiron didn’t annihilate the alazon by photoshopping the braggart’s head onto a monkey’s body. No, he did it through self-deprecation, by understating his own abilities and allowing the alazon’s own failings and inferiority and hypocrisy to expose themselves. Shooting the alazon in the dick is certainly amusing. Handing the alazon a gun so he can shoot himself in the dick, however — that’s comedy fucking gold! And that’s what the racists consistently get wrong and will never understand, no matter how many times they shoot themselves in the dick.

For my money, which is how we Jews are required to phrase things, the greatest literary eiron in America today — the one using racism to hand every alazon a special dick-shooting pistol — is Paul Beatty. The narrator of his novel The Sellout (which won the Booker Prize in 2016) is a young Los Angeles watermelon and weed farmer who, over the course of the book, acquires a slave (Hominy Jenkins, “the last surviving member of the Little Rascals”) and reintroduces segregation on the buses and schools of his forgotten neighborhood. Naturally, he winds up in front of the Supreme Court, where, extremely baked² , he conceives a theory of Unmitigated Blackness, defined as “simply not giving a fuck,” that encompasses everyone from Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, and Maya Deren to “Gong Li, David Hammons, Björk, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permutations.” This book is nuts in the absolute best way.

And all Beatty’s novels are like this. In Slumberland, a Los Angeles D.J. moves to Berlin in the 1980s where he plays up every aspect of his Blackness — and spends occasional evenings at a tanning salon. In Tuff, a plus-sized Harlem drug dealer decides to change his life after a near-death experience, enlists a Black rabbi as his spiritual guru, and winds up a sumo wrestler, a generous Film Forum patron, and running for a seat on the New York City Council. (If Cord Jefferson is reading this, please turn Tuff into a streaming series!) Each of these tales stacks stereotype on top of stereotype, ties them up with tropes, then tosses them like a stink bomb into the genteel realm of American race relations. They’re over the top, explosive, so precise and outrageous that there is no other meaningful reaction but to cackle, chortle, snicker, guffaw, and weep deliriously over the myths and monstrosities we’ve all made ourselves believe in the last few amazing and miserable centuries. In other words, they’re essential.

Frustratingly, Beatty hasn’t published a novel since The Sellout, leaving us without what I hope would be a commentary on the years under this current president. Beatty works at his own pace, I get it, but at a time when the R word, trans gags, and sloppy AI editing pass for satire among a frighteningly large segment of the population, we need him — I need him — to weigh in. Whatever he comes up with will, I have little doubt, make fun of ineffectual “Resistance” liberals like me, but again, that’s what I need. It’s what we all need. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you don’t deserve to laugh at anyone else. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: Let’s replace white people!

Let's Replace White People!

It's time to move from theory to practice.

mattgrossistrying.com/p/lets-replace-white-people

“Terror Mixed With Pain, Torture” (1854–56), Guillaume-Benjamin-Amant Duchenne (de Boulogne)

In my late-night TV watching, I keep seeing these very brief but very disturbing ads: A person is in an awkward situation — elevator doors repeatedly closing on them, kids carving “I ❤️ DAD” on the side of the family minivan — for a mere two to three seconds, then we cut to a checkout guy at a supermarket, who’s facing, it turns out, a flayed, skinless person, their naked musculature on full display, joyfully eating a protein pudding. Finally, we cut back to the original person for another second or two. And… scene!

What is this? Why is this? The first time I saw one of these 15-second spots, I’d popped a THC gummy to help me sleep, and I suspected I might be hallucinating. Then, the next night, fully sober, I saw the ads again, this time with my wife, who was just as confused.

Now, I don’t mind weirdness. In fact, I love weird! Still, I’m perplexed. These are ads for protein pudding. In what universe are flayed humans a persuasive pitch for protein pudding? The voiceover tries to make a connection between what your “body” needs and this protein pudding, but the sudden, disorienting cuts and the image of a skinless fucking human being completely overwhelm that attempt. These ads are wonderfully, horribly terrible! Even as they haunt my imagination, I’m so, so glad they exist. And I’m hoping other companies follow their lead: skeletons in Ozempic ads, thumbscrews for the Xbox, Carnival Cruise aspirants being torn apart by wild horses…

Today’s email is not a normal one

I haven’t had the time or the concentration this week to finish a real essay, so instead you’re getting bits and bobs. And everyone love bits and bobs, right?

First up, here’s a piece I recently wrote for Inverse.com, whose editor asked me to keep a sleep diary for a week for … reasons? If you’ve ever wanted to know how a 51-year-old Brooklyn dad makes it through the night, this is it!

The Overly Revealing And Totally Annoying Truth About Sleep Diaries

A dad in Brooklyn tracks his sleep and promises he's not bragging when he says he really can sleep through anything — bad habits and all.

www.inverse.com/science/dear-sleep-diary-nih-essay

Some great screenwriting

Ten minutes after she left to catch the 2 train to school this morning, my older daughter, Sasha, called to say she’d forgotten her Yondr pouch. That’s the pocket-sized neoprene Faraday cage into which New York City public school students are now required to put their cell phones when they show up for classes. Leaving yours behind isn’t that big a deal — they have extras at school — but Sasha was planning to join today’s ICE-protest walkout, and wanted her phone with her. If she used a school Yondr pouch, she wouldn’t be able to retrieve her phone till 4:30 p.m. So, she asked, could we bring it to her?

Um, no. It was 6 degrees out! (It’s now 9.) Couldn’t she call one of her protesting friends, I said, and ask to share a pouch? Fine, fine — she’d do that.

Almost one hour later, sitting at this very desk and beginning to think about writing this newsletter, I heard a yelp from the other room. It was Sasha’s younger sister, Sandy, who it turned out had just stepped on the Yondr pouch and had punctured her foot on the little magnetic spike that seals it closed. She was fine, minimal blood, minimal pain, no big deal. What was lovely was the subtle continuity of detail in this real-life event — the kind of coincidental dramatic centrality of a child’s forgotten item. How will it play out over the rest of the day? Will Sasha share a pouch with a friend? Or will she be temporarily phone-less for much of the day? What will that mean at a teenage political protest?

So far, reality’s writing has been good: consequential, but not overblown. I’m hoping the rest of the day successfully builds on this smart opening.

The best gas masks

I am thinking of investing in a few of these — you know, just in case.

‘Faces of Death’ is back!

The other day, I started my essay with a reminiscence of Faces of Death, the documentary-esque movie series that purported to show lots of people and animals actually dying in miserable ways. Well, I was really onto something! It turns out that Sony is releasing a new Faces of Death movie, only this one is, according to Polygon, “the fictionalized story of the female moderator of an online video platform whose job is to remove offensive content. When she finds a group of people who are recreating the murders seen in the 1978 Faces of Death, she has to figure out if they're real or not in an era of AI fakery.” Fun!

I was going to embed the teaser trailer right here, but it’s already been removed from YouTube for violating their policy on “violent or graphic content.” The teenage horror fan in me is already salivating…

‘The Mythology of Conscious AI’

Last year, my book club read Being You, an exploration of the “new science” of consciousness by the neuroscientist Anil Seth. At the time, I found it a little dull and hard to get through — but ever since, I have not stopped thinking about it: about the ways in which we can now measure consciousness, about the importance of the our brains being “embodied.” It’s very good! And now Seth has a great new essay in Noema about whether AI can ever be truly conscious:

‘Whenever Saigon got depressing I went to the zoo’

When I lived in Ho Chi Minh City, I was always fascinated by the Saigon Zoo, which was run-down and occasionally horrifying — but which continued to exist, to serve some kind of purpose for the city and its people. Recently, the writer Connla Stokes took a deep dive into the zoo’s history:

Let’s end with Eakins

I like this one.

“The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull)” (1871), Thomas Eakins

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“Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins” (1836), Edouard Henri Théophile Pingret (1788–1875). Credit: The Wellcome Collection.

All throughout high school, my friends and I talked about this one movie we’d heard of and wanted to see. It was called Faces of Death, and it was no run-of-the-mill horror film. Instead, it was purportedly full of real footage of real people (and real animals) dying, or being killed, in all kinds of miserable ways. Accidents, mutilations, war, suicides, police shootouts — we didn’t really know, because we couldn’t find Faces of Death at any of our video stores in Tidewater Virginia. It had been banned or censored by numerous countries, so maybe that accounted for its absence from the shelves. But its reputation persisted, as did our interest, and one day, in 1991 or 1992, Faces of Death IV — one of its sequels — appeared at the video store. We rented it immediately.

Reader, it was not good.

The series had apparently always mixed real footage with staged events, and though this was gory enough for a bunch of teenage boys, even we did not buy it. The scene I remember best¹ is of an ambulance flying down a street, running over a pedestrian, then loading the victim into the back of the vehicle and departing. Why, I wondered, was a camera there to capture this particular moment?

We had gone into this movie hoping for graphic violence of a kind we’d never before witnessed, video’d deaths that would reveal to us something of the nature of death — something inescapably real — but instead we were bored and disappointed. We’d learned nothing. We’d been had.

Now, after the events of the past weekend, I have to say: I miss those days.

Saturday was the Faces of Death experience I guess I’d been hoping for 30+ years ago. It began with the news that someone — eventually revealed to be ICU nurse Alex Pretti — had been shot and killed in an altercation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minneapolis. One cell-phone video made the rounds of social media almost immediately: a pile of federal agents atop an almost invisible man, beating him and holding him down, until suddenly we see Pretti’s long legs kick up at an angle and the agents back off. (I watched without sound, so didn’t hear the gunfire.) He is dead.

Over the next several hours, more videos emerged, as they do: different angles, different timeframes, all of them adding their own piece of the narrative. What happened before? Did he speak to anyone? Did he have a gun? Was he holding the gun, or reaching for it? Since no one on the scene can predict the future, no one knows what details to focus on. These are wide shots, attempting to capture everything, whatever everything might be. This is not filmmaking. No close-ups, no flashbacks, no expository dialogue. The footage is intended to be archival, but is necessarily incomplete. The people behind the cameras don’t know what they’re seeing until it’s too late. And then, as more videos come out, serious news outlets race to reconstruct the events, syncing up the various clips, ticking some of them by in slow motion, circling guns and phones and badges for clarity, and finally deciding whether the videos contradict or merely “appear” to contradict accounts from the Department of Homeland Security, whose officials seem to have watched an entirely different movie from the rest of us.

As terrible as the news was, there was an exciting aspect to it as well. The way it rolled out — text messages, cryptic social media posts (“Be careful friends near 26th & Nicollet. Those fuckers just murdered another person.”), then a flood of images and videos, analysis and commentary — lent it palpable suspense. Anything might come next! Another clip, an Internet history, hyperbole from the government, quotes from the victim’s friends and family. Above all, I was hoping, as I often do lately, for an explanation, a crystal-clear and incontrovertible story of what took place and why it took place, so that we could all stop arguing and see — all of us see! — that a man had been killed because the government feels like it can kill people for no reason, label anyone in opposition a “rioter” or a “domestic terrorist,” and just get away with it.

By evening, as my family was preparing for the big snowstorm, the flood had slowed to a trickle, and the only thing that was clear was that everyone would go on arguing about what had happened in Minneapolis, with no resolution. The videos were not enough, and would never be, no matter how many new angles appeared in our feeds, and no matter how much we actually know what happened.

It was with this in mind that I tuned into Skyscraper Live!, Netflix’s live presentation of rock-climbing legend Alex Honnold’s attempt to free solo the 1,700-foot Taipei 101. Delayed a day by rain, Honnold would have no ropes, no safety net. If he slipped and fell, he would surely die, a fact he and his wife and every single one of the no doubt millions of viewers understood. This is precisely why he was doing it, and this is precisely why we were watching it — he was taking the ultimate risk.

And if he did fall and die, his fate would be captured by countless high-definition cameras. This was a production. There were cameramen on ledges, cameramen on wires, cameramen in a helicopter. People inside Taipei 101 were shooting videos of Honnold as he climbed by; they took selfies with him on the other side of the glass. He even took one himself, when after about 91 minutes he reached the tippy-top unscathed:

Instagram post

The crispness of that image is emblematic of the production. It was a lovely day, blue sky, gentle sunlight, air free of murkiness and smog. In shot after well-composed shot, you could see Taipei spread out below, its dense buildings giving way to a ring of mountains. Or you could focus in on Honnold, the careful and precise way he moved his feet, the tightness with which he pinched the skyscraper’s steel, his unnerving lightness as he hopped up each of the ten “dragon” features. Nothing here was blocked or fuzzy, nothing left to the imagination. Honnold was mic’d up, talking to the show’s hosts, to its producers, to himself. (His words on reaching the summit: “Siiiiick.”) No one will argue about what Alex Honnold did at Taipei 101, because every second of it — including preamble and aftermath — was captured from almost every angle imaginable² .

But that incomparable clarity is also somehow disappointing. Throughout the hour-and-a-half climb, my kids and I were locked into “can’t turn away” mode³ . It was too stressful to watch, too stressful not to watch. Our hands were sweaty with empathy. But did we want to see him succeed? Or did we just not want to miss his fatal failure? Since he lived, I can say that once it was over, once he’d finished his selfies and started rappelling down to where he could catch an elevator, there wasn’t much to do other than marvel for a few more minutes at his superhuman abilities and his inhuman fearlessness the way we’d been doing more or less since 8 p.m. The lifespan of Skyscraper Live! had reached its natural end.

Frankly, I’m still trying to make sense of these two video “productions.” Both were realer than my high-school horror fantasies, therefore more terrifying. That I could see them in quick succession — hours apart, slotted in among pre-snowstorm errands and meal prep — is monstrous, but also a key feature of our flattened age. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once, produced by bullies and directed by morons.

Perhaps it’s better to focus less on the production and more on the protagonists, who are negative images of each other — identical opposites. One woke up knowing he might die, and that his death would be captured on video. The other could not have predicted his fate… though he could have suspected it. Each had a script he hoped to follow, and hoped the rest of their supporting cast would improv through it. And in each case, the difference between their survival and their annihilation came down to the tiniest of matters: a grip here, a step there. One second’s miscalculation and there would be — or there was — no second chance. I watched them knowing all of this, and hoping it would not also apply to me.

But it does, and to you as well. There will be sequels to each Alex’s story, and we’ll surely watch them, whether passively, as they flit across our feeds, or actively, staring in mute horror or following rabbit holes in a quest for answers that may not exist. One of those sequels, I fear, is coming very soon to a theater near you, and near me, and for that I hope we’ll be needed only as extras in crowd scenes, not as featured players. As much as we may crave attention, not all of us are ready for a starring role. The director, however, may have other ideas. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Snow Day NYC

Some things in this world are still nice.

Instagram post

Read a Previous Attempt: Are you a domestic terrorist?

Are you a domestic terrorist?

Am I? Is everyone now?

mattgrossistrying.com/p/are-you-a-domestic-terrorist

Today’s advertiser is Wallstreet Prep. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $1.50.

“Spring Herbs, from the series ‘A World of Things (Momoyogusa)’” (1910/11), Kamisaka Sekka

Late January means just one thing in New York City: The farmers’ markets are awash in color! From white to gray to tan and beige and even brown, the season’s best produce is a delight for both palate and palette. These are the months we New York foodies dream of, a nonstop riot of cabbages and cauliflower, potatoes and sweet potatoes, turnips and onions, and, of course, well-aged apples, frost-softened and pockmarked. Can you believe we’ll be feasting on nothing but this cornucopia until late April or even early May? Lucky us!

Still, amid this otherworldly abundance, I now and then crave a splurge. As you already know, {{first_name|dear reader}}, my sense of a splurge is somewhat different. I don’t need Champagne if I’ve got a good Crémant du Jura, I’d rather slurp gobs of salmon roe than bumps of beluga, and I’m happier smoking an affordable tri-tip than searing slices of A5 Wagyu. I like the good things in life, but I also like the pretty good things in life, especially if I can afford to have them all the time.

And my favorite splurge, the one I consider the most luxurious of all, is deceptively humble: fresh herbs.

More after the ad…

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Little leaves, big flavor: That’s how I think of herbs, though I’m sure there’s a more formal botanical definition. I want them on everything, in everything — and I want them available to me at all times, for whatever purposes I cook up.

I like them all. I’m a fan of parsley, both Italian and underrated curly. I adore everything in the mint family, from thyme, sage, rosemary, and basil (holy or un-) to lavender and lemon balm, which has not only taken over one of the planters in my yard but now sprouts through every crack in the concrete. Shiso or perilla, red or green, I’m there. And cilantro! In high school, I took a trip with my dad to San Diego, where we ate at a restaurant that was actually called Cilantro’s — possibly my first real Mexican food — and I fell in love with the namesake herb. (Are you a genetically deficient hater? You have my pity.) In Vietnam, I tasted rau răm (a.k.a. laksa leaf) and sawtooth leaf (a.k.a. culantro), and at a market in Udon Thani, Thailand, my friend chef Num fed me little leaves whose names I never learned but whose flavors — by turns bitter, sour, fragrant, peppery — are burned into my memory.

It’s not enough, though, just to like all the herbs. No, I want to be able to use them at will, and in great quantities.

The former is the biggest challenge, since I live in New York, where the Paul Simon collection is about what you can expect from most markets. To go beyond, you must seek diligently. The Japanese bodegas that are popping up tend to have overpriced packs of shiso leaves, while my neighborhood Ctown tends to stock sawtooth leaf for its Caribbean customers. A Vietnamese-inflected shop on Grand Street between Bowery and Christie usually sells not only rau răm but often ngò ôm, or paddy herb. Bangkok Central Market will have holy basil and makrut lime leaves — usually.

Still: Where do I find fish mint? Who’s got the freshest curry leaves? Or borage? Or fairywand?

This is frustrating! I want these herbs to be ubiquitous, delivered by corporate food distribution trucks, in overpriced organic varieties for Union Market and conventional bundles at the Mr. Fruit chain. In summer, I grow as many as my street-side garden will allow. (If you pop by, you’re welcome to clip yourself extras.) At the same time, the rarity of these herbs is what makes them special — if they were everyday ingredients, they would not be luxuries.

But they’re not only rare — they’re ephemeral. Apart from hardy parsley and thyme, few of these herbs will last a week in your fridge, no matter how you pack them. I usually wrap them in paper towels inside a plastic bag, but that doesn’t always help. Cilantro especially likes to turn itself into a puddle before I get a chance to use it all.

Which is dumb, because my approach to herbs — the approach that treats them as the luxury ingredient they are — is to use waaaaay too much of them. Seriously. Whenever I see recipes that ask for a mere tablespoon’s sprinkling of minced chives or a delicate chiffonade of basil leaves, I scoff. Who treats these miraculous sheafs of flavor with such trepidation? Who, faced with an overgrowth of fragrant leaves, decides to use just one or two of them? Western chefs, I guess? But not, say, Vietnamese cooks, who set out copious platters of greens, both lettuces and herbs, alongside all manner of dishes. (I still dream of this one back-alley bò kho, or beef stew, topped with a fistful of green.) To them, it’s normal; to me, a luxury.

And so when I do have herbs, I use them in great quantities. A Thai curry garlanded with basil, a chicken tagine whose olives are outgreened by parsley. I cram them in the cavities of the branzino and sea bream I’m about to broil, and I blend them into pestos no Genoese nonna would countenance. Culinarily speaking, I make it rain.

Perhaps my favorite is the tomato salad I set out at barbecues. It is not complicated: Thinly slice one large red onion (or several shallots) and put it in a large serving bowl with one or two grated cloves of garlic and a big pinch of salt. Then cut up three or four pounds of the best in-season tomatoes you can find: beefsteaks, heirlooms, Sun Golds — whatever. Sprinkle on more salt (preferably Maldon), a few tablespoons of sherry vinegar, and a lot of high-quality olive oil, at least a quarter-cup, even half a cup. (Crumble and add feta if you feel like it.) Now for the herbs: Whatever you’ve got, use them all! Basil, obviously, but mint, parsley, lemon balm, laksa, and shiso, too. Just chop them up and dump them on, till the tomatoes are nearly invisible under this verdant toupee. This — this is it. It’s a dish whose ingredients, both rare and quotidian, come together to express their transient perfection, an almost accidental confluence that we humans somehow have the good fortune to witness. It is profligate and indulgent, and right now, here at the ass end of January, it feels as fantastical as faster-than-light travel or universal health care. But unlike either of those, my tomato salad will become a reality if I simply wait and survive another six months (or, ahem, move elsewhere). Then, for a season and a half or so, I will have the opportunity to feel rich — we all will! — and without the mortal guilt of actual wealth. There is no greater luxury than a clean conscience. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Practical Tips on Filming Immigration and Law Enforcement

IDK, I figured some of you might find this useful.

Practical Tips on Filming Immigration and Law Enforcement

This slide deck is from a training session on “Practical Tips on Filming Immigration and Law Enforcement”, created in collaboration between WITNESS and the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC). The slide introduces the topic of how to safely and ethically film immigration enforcement activities.

library.witness.org/product/practical-tips-on-filming-immigration-and-law-enforcement

Read a Previous Attempt: Thomas Pynchon and me

Thomas Pynchon and me

His writing shaped my life, and he's now at a literary and cultural apex. But is the mysterious postmodernist's work still any good?

mattgrossistrying.com/p/thomas-pynchon-and-me

Today’s advertiser is CBDistillery. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $2.25.

“A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania” (July 1863), Timothy O’Sullivan

The president of the United States wants you to die. He — along with his advisors, toadies, financial supporters, and minions — wants you gone, not just from the public sphere, where you might protest or vote or otherwise oppose him, but from this earth entirely. He would prefer you dead.

I don’t mean this as some sort of whiny hyperbole. It’s not a warning. This isn’t a metaphor. I’m being about as earnest and literal as I can be, and we all know how annoying that is. I’m looking at the policies this administration has enacted, and their likely effect on large swathes of humanity, both within this country and abroad. Here’s a quick rundown of the past year:

• He’s sent ICE to multiple cities. They’re poorly trained, uninterested in de-escalation, prone to error, armed to the teeth, and so far shielded from prosecution for their actions, whether intentional or inadvertent. ICE agents have killed people and will continue to kill people, probably with impunity.

• His Department of Health and Human Services has reduced the number of recommended childhood vaccinations, cast doubt on vaccines generally, and reordered nutritional guidelines toward saturated fats.

• The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer consider saving lives when setting rules on air pollution.

• His party in Congress failed to renew subsidies that made health insurance affordable for millions of Americans.

• The Federal Emergency Management Agency is poorly staffed, underfunded, and reluctant to provide any emergency aid to states.

• The shuttering of USAID cut off food and medical aid to millions of hungry, ill, and impoverished around the world.

• His military actions and advances in Venezuela, Greenland, Iran, and Israel threaten to destabilize large swathes of the globe and damage or destroy international alliances preserving peace (or something like peace).

Whatever the stated reason for any of these moves — eliminating waste and fraud, expanding U.S. territory, providing some possibly illusory sense of security for U.S. interests — each one has the corollary effect of death. People have died and will die as a result of these decisions. Maybe a few, maybe a lot, maybe a whole lot. The latest measles epidemic has killed 3 people — so far. In 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody, the most since 2004, and that doesn’t count those who were not technically in ICE custody. Around 100 people died in the U.S. military’s Maduro-snatching effort in Venezuela; not all of them were combatants. Oh, look, here’s a Harvard study that says the USAID shutdown led to “hundreds of thousands of deaths” already.

All of these deaths were unnecessary, and none of them was accidental. Each was the result of a set of choices made by the president and his people, and each was predictable. When you erode trust in vaccines, communicable diseases spread. When you send ill-trained, ill-tempered agents to Minnesota or Chicago or Maine on ill-defined missions, they are going to wield violence carelessly. When you cut off HIV medication and food assistance, people die of AIDS, starvation, and malnutrition. No one should be surprised about any of this. When in a few years we see rates of heart disease start to spike because too many idiots are eating too much beef tallow, we should not raise an eyebrow. It’s the inevitable consequence.

The dead-simple question I want to ask, and that I want you to consider, is: Why?

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Before I go any further, let me first say that I hate writing about this. This situation that we — the people of the United States, not to mention the people of Earth — find ourselves in is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen. Did you read that letter/text the president sent to Norway? I could feel my brain cells committing seppuku one by one as I strained to get through it. I would much rather be writing about butter or paper clips or fresh herbs, but instead I have to put out this analysis of why the president wants people to die. If you don’t like this, if you’d prefer I return to food, travel, and ersatz existentialism, blame that guy, not me.

Okay, so: Why does the president want people — almost certainly including you, {{first_name|dear subscriber}} — to die? We can simplify that question by asking another: Are the deaths the point, or do they serve another goal?

I used to think it was the latter. I used to hope it was the latter. The president and his people have so venerated the 1950s that I wondered if shrinking the population — through deaths and deportations — was their attempt to recreate that country, where in 1955 only 165 million people lived here, or less than half the present-day number. It’s horrific, but on some level understandable. Maybe this country was not meant to support 350 million people. Maybe we’ve become unwieldy, fundamentally inefficient. Trying to maintain the smoothly functioning nation of 70 years ago with twice as many people, and a hundred times as many complications, is insanity. Better (maybe!) to downsize, to adjust our ambitions. Though the MAGA crowd won’t like it, this would also reduce the country’s carbon footprint — fewer people, fewer cars, fewer cows. This isn’t just a right-wing fantasy; you see it in some sci-fi as well, where a sustainable future is one with less of us overall. It’s like a compromised post-apocalyptic scenario: Lots of people die, but not everyone, and what’s on the other end just makes more sense.

Of course, none of us want to be the ones killed for this imaginary future — and to get us back to 1955 population levels, that would require a whooooooole lot of killing. (And deporting. But mostly killing.) At the rate the current administration is killing and deporting people (and one must always be skeptical of the administration’s own claims), it would take about 66 years to shrink us down by half. As always, these schmucks are incompetent² , even when it comes to murder.

Perhaps¹ they just want to ethnically cleanse the United States, ridding the nation of everyone who’s neither white nor Christian. That’s still an enormous number of people: about 140 million, give or take. They are not remotely on track to get rid of that many in the near future. It’s almost like no one takes Stephen Miller seriously!

—Barbie, one of the “Toy Story” movies

With that in mind, I feel like the deaths cannot be serving some larger goal — the deaths are the goal, in and of themselves. The United States is not killing people because they’re brown, or Muslim, or so that oil and real-estate executives can make billions of dollars. (Those are just welcome side effects!) The United States is killing people simply because it can. And because it wants everyone to know that it can, and that no one can stop it. It will blow Venezuelan fishermen out of the water and shoot Minnesota moms in the face and strangle detainees in Texas and condemn faceless Africans to starvation, and so what? What are you, what is anyone, going to do about it? Write a letter? Throw water balloons? Dance in protest wearing a fox mask? They will kill you — us — to remind you that you are powerless. Each pointless death is the point. No one is targeted, no one is considered, no one is an individual with a set of circumstances, eyewitnesses, video evidence, and forensic testimony. We are all just bodies in waiting, corpses who have fooled ourselves into thinking our lives matter to the nation we still somehow love. Each one of us who falls is a warning, sure, to those who remain standing, but more important (to the administration goons doing the killing) is that when we’re dead, we’re gone — one less voice to mute, one less mail-in ballot, one less obstacle to their dream of total power.

This is all idiotic, and ultimately self-defeating, but it’s what we’re dealing with right now. For me, it clarifies things: There is no compromise you can make in the face of a power that would prefer you dead. We all must fight, in every way that we can, to expose their murderous hypocrisy — and to continue to exist in their faces and remind them of the hollowness of their ambitions and the poison they’ve accepted into their souls. We are living, breathing obstacles to their enshittified vision of the world, and each minor act of resistance, or at least noncompliance, is the kind of sabotage they just can’t bear. Don’t make it easy for them. Don’t die.

And remember this: They can’t kill all of us. I mean, they can kill a lot of us, but they can’t kill us all. They’re just not that good at it. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: Q was the question she asked

Q was the question she asked

In the mid-1990s, Phuong Anh Nguyen made Q Bar the most important bar in Vietnam — and possibly the world.

mattgrossistrying.com/p/q-was-the-question-she-asked

Today’s advertiser is The Daily Upside. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $1.31.

“The Red Room, Etretat” (1899), Félix Edouard Vallotton

Sometime early in the afternoon, I decided I had had enough. It was during a lull in the workday. The winter sun was shining directly through my bedroom window, making it impossible to sit at my desk and type words and click on things. I couldn’t see. It was hot and stuffy. And then I looked to my left, at the little loveseat that has sat in the corner of the room since before the pandemic, and I knew I couldn’t take it anymore.

I got up, and moved a bunch of plastic bags and disintegrating cardboard boxes away from the loveseat. There was a big old IKEA drawer underneath it; I pulled it out and moved it across the room. Then I took hold of the loveseat and dragged it forward a bit. I rotated it 90 degrees and pushed it back. Where once it had faced south, its back against the wall, now it faced west, a window behind it. This, you will no doubt agree, even though you’ve never seen my bedroom, is infinitely better. There’s more room to stretch out your legs. There’s better light if I want to sit there reading. It just looks cleaner overall. I made the right move.

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Perhaps you’re like me. Perhaps these days, for who knows what kind of reason, you feel like you don’t have much power over your world. Perhaps you spend your waking hours feeling the frustration build in your chest with each new ping on your phone. Maybe you are even angry all the time. I know I am.

And sometimes when I feel like I’m going to explode, or implode, or just somehow plode in every direction and dimension at once, I get up off my ass and fix something small. Last week I tightened some screws on the plate that holds our front doorknob together. A week before that I sharpened my favorite knife. Tomorrow, if I have time and the rage hits me right, I might match up the plastic takeout containers with their tops, and discard any extras. Or I could dig out the special miniature tool that fits the miniature bolt that should keep our bathroom’s toilet paper holder — now annoyingly crooked — perfectly level.

I’m not particularly handy. I’m going to stay away from the pipes under the kitchen sink. Last year I assembled a flat-pack dresser and a flat-pack bunk bed, so I’m not going to undertake anything that ambitious before this decade is over. When it comes time to replace the crummy light fixture hanging over my bed with a nice ceiling fan unit, I will hire a professional.

But in the meantime, I will try to take care of the little things. I’ll find a box for all of our old and new cameras. I’ll replace the lamp next to my bed, just as I replaced the one that sits on my desk. I’ll collect the safety pins and SD cards and power banks and outdated maps and put them somewhere. (Under the loveseat?) I’m not going to clean the whole apartment — that’s daunting, paralyzing. I’d need days. But I’ll dust off the surfaces that are getting furry and apply a Clorox wipe to that spot under the bathroom sink that’s starting to look blotchy with mold and condensation.

I’m not trying to bring order to a world gone insane, or to pretend I’m the lord of my own tiny domain. All I can do is to make things work a little better, a little smoother. I can improve a corner or two, and enjoy a fleeting moment of comfort. When the powers that be, both political and corporate, seem determined to make things work worse in every way imaginable, even my scant ohms count as surreptitious resistance. As our Titanic civilization sinks literally into the seas, I will adjust at least one deck chair, possibly two. As we now know, they sorely needed rearranging.

When I make my minor tweaks, I often think of Sisyphus, and imagine him at the foot of Mount Tartarus, facing another day in an eternity of days with his boulder and his pointless mission. Up he will go, he knows, and back down he will come, but wait! There are problematic pebbles in his path to be brushed away, and what will the Olympians care if he spends ten more minutes shaving down the callouses on his palms, and the breeze from the land of the living has brought down the faint echoes of flutes and drums. The mandate of his endeavor remains, its absurd challenge defining his existence as unwaveringly as it defines ours, but, well, not yet. The space around him is neither a prison cell nor a coffin, and so he remains free to make it his own, one pebble at a time. 🪨🪨🪨

“Misery Under the Snow” (January 1894), Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen

A couple of summers ago, this girl showed up at one of my big Brooklyn barbecues. She was a friend of a friend. Mid- or early 30s, long brown hair, and self-consciously “hot,” she thrived on male attention — and boy, did she get a lot of that. She was loud, and outspoken, and my friends mobbed her, seeing if they could get her to say something outrageous about men, about sex, about life¹ . Thing is, no one was really interested in her. No one wanted her. One friend later admitted he’d be willing to “hate-fuck” her, but that was a hypothetical at best. Instead, she was a curiosity. She did not fit in — which is weird, since Franciscan monks, mail carriers, and Italians fresh off the plane from Rome have showed up at my parties and meshed without effort. But not her. She was surrounded by people in their 40s and 50s, all of whom were perplexed by her attitude — myself included.

What I eventually decided was this: She cared about being cool — about seeming cool, about appreciating only other people who were cool — while the rest of us had long since given up caring about coolness entirely. Maybe some of us had once been cool, and maybe some of us had never been. But that quality, so prized for so many decades, had ceased to matter to any of us.

This girl is not alone. For instance, there’s this one food-media guy I can’t stand. You’d know his name, but I’m not going to write it here, because I don’t want to start some kind of war, so I’ll just have to describe what he’s like: He cares about streetwear and sneakers and watches; he’s got a podcast, where he’s a big talker on fashion and sports and nightlife. He spouts a lot of slang, some of it current, some of it dated, and his talk is tinged with the porn-friendly bravado of the early ‘00s — in fact, his entire manner reminds me of how cool people (or wanting-to-be-cool people) spoke 20 years ago. (I may have spoken that way, too.) He’s not evil, per se, but he comes off as a guy who not only wants to be seen as cool but also thinks coolness still matters in some fundamental way.

And I’m here to say it doesn’t. Miles Davis may have given birth to the cool in 1957, but here in 2026, coolness has been dead for quite some time, possibly since the turn of the millennium. The signature cultural quality of the twentieth century has expired, and something both new and old is rising up to replace it.

My high-school friend Ian was cool, maybe even the only truly cool person I knew in high school. He wore ill-fitting thrift-store pants and dyed his hair and stole candy from 7-Eleven; he drew and he played drums and when he skateboarded, his tricks came out of nowhere, unrehearsed and effortless. He said whatever he wanted to whoever he wanted. He was a natural, one of a kind, uninterested in what other people thought of him. He could often be pretty goddamn annoying. But he was cool.

I wasn’t. I was, and always have been, self-conscious. I’m not a natural. I have to work to get things right, or at least not wrong. I have many times hidden what I think and who I am because I’ve been concerned about how others might judge me. I have pretended to believe things I didn’t believe, because I thought I would seem cooler. I failed. Anyone looking at me, at any point in my 51 years on this planet, could sum me up in two words: not cool.

But god, how I wanted to be cool! I was always aware of coolness not just as a quality that could improve my life in high school, college, and beyond, but as a historical force, something that had motivated huge swathes of American culture for decades. Sure, you could trace it back to Shakespeare — “More than cool reason ever comprehends,” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream — but it feels obvious, visceral: When shit gets real, the cool keep cool.

Still, it has its origins. This National Endowment for the Humanities article says “cool” began to appear in the 1930s “as an extremely casual expression to mean something like ‘intensely good’”:

And that way of life was obviously associated with Blackness. I was aware of this, too, but really had it driven home by Might Magazine’s November 1997 cover story, which asked the eternal question “Are Black People Cooler Than White People?” Writer Donnell Alexander not only asked it but answered it directly:

All my life I’ve craved that “surplus of ease,” and all my life I’ve notched a deficit. My desires have remained desires, my deeds strained and obvious. I’ve never been cool. And the same goes for you, I’m sure. Anyone who reads this far into an email newsletter can’t be cool. Sorry, {{first_name|dude}}.

But something has changed in the past twenty years or so. Maybe it’s that completing the task of living has become ever more difficult, and even those who manage it have little spontaneity left to splurge on bystanders. Maybe economic shifts have made coolness less valuable, transforming it into a pointless, self-defeating, and (worst of all) unprofitable pose. Maybe it’s that the vast majority of us — white, Black, and otherwise — all came to the realization that we were not cool, could never be cool, and gave up trying.

Or maybe it’s because I’m an old man now.

Whatever the reason, I see less coolness around me than ever before. At the turn of the millennium, the cool (white) Hollywood actors were guys like Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp — their coolness was essential to their appeal. They didn’t need to try, they just were. All you ever needed was that surface, that image; did anyone ask or care who Pitt or Depp were on the inside? But today, in 2026, the actor of the moment² is, for better or for worse, Timothée Chalamet, who lets you see — who makes you watch — every ounce of effort he puts into his work and his persona. He’s not cool, and he’s not even trying to be! He is comfortable enough with who he is and what he does and how well he does it that the default pose of a previous generation has become an unnecessary burden. This is cool in its own way, but it’s not cool.

I can cherry-pick other examples³ from across the cultural spectrum — John Mulaney, say, or Ocean Vuong. They can’t be cool, so they don’t even try. They embrace cool’s opposite. They are their own weird selves.

And there are Black artists and performers who aren’t cool, either. Donald Glover isn’t cool, nor is Tyler, the Creator. Same for Doechii. They all do incredible work, but it doesn’t look effortless — you can’t rap about anxiety or the American death cult and pretend you’re and outsider with a surplus of ease. In fact, the transparency about the pain, frustration, and fear that undergirds the work is central to its appeal. Who’d want a medicated Doechii strutting, crooning, acting as if there’s no pressure or crisis she couldn’t shrug off? By that measure, you could almost slot Beyoncé in among the uncool of the 21st century: Despite her utter mastery of her voice and her presence, her emotions and desires are too big, too raw, too fierce, ever to be simply “cool.”

“Our Officers Scouting the Enemy Camp in a Snowstorm” (1894/95), Taguchi Beisaku

Was coolness always a trap, or did it become one along the way? Through most of the last century, from Hemingway to Breathless to Eddie Murphy in a red leather suit, it was the aspiration — a look, an attitude, an essence you hoped to achieve. And maybe you managed for a minute or two, the time it took your best friend to snap a photo with a disposable 35mm camera. But it was fleeting, a taste of something you could never really possess, because cool was what a person was, not what a person did. First, coolness tempted you, then it taunted you.

But what was it like to be cool? The interiority of a cool person is difficult to imagine. Who is Denzel Washington? Who was David Bowie? Does someone who can live like that even think the way the rest of us human beings do? Are they more sophisticated or less? How can they move through life with such a surplus of ease when the rest of us struggle? How can they remain psychologically and stylistically apart in a troubled era that demands engagement and action? Or is it all just an act, one so well-practiced and all-encompassing that it buries a humanity that needs to be expressed? My high-school friend Ian, the cool one, died by suicide in his twenties; his coolness couldn’t protect him.

I’d like to think we all recognize this now — that those of us who are not cool are the lucky ones. We don’t have to pretend. We don’t have to hide. We don’t have to maintain an image that, though it may appear to come naturally, requires enormous physical and emotional strain. No one expects anything of us. We can instead treat life at large as the challenge it has always been, and measure ourselves not by how dashingly we surmount it but by how hard we try, and how faithfully, and often just by getting through a week in one piece. We don’t need the anxiety of coolness watching us at all hours.

That’s not to say we can’t or shouldn’t recognize coolness when we see it. We should not become inured to the wonder of sprezzatura — it is a breathless joy to behold natural talent wherever it demonstrates itself. Nor should we deny ourselves the opportunity to play at cool occasionally: Dress up, look good, find a way to relax into the world such that you can splurge your stylish surplus of ease on the bystanders. (We’ll appreciate it!) Just don’t for a minute forget that your coolness, however innate or ephemeral, doesn’t matter. Though it’s delicious, it carries no moral weight. It means nothing. It’s not enough, not anymore. A quarter of the way through this century, what counts is frankness, directness, transparency — show us who you are, not who you want us to see. The world we live in is one of lies, of manipulated images and corruption masquerading as charity. The only way we survive it is through unashamed honesty. If that makes me sound like a dork, like some hopelessly earnest and naive do-gooder, I have only one response: I know I am, but what are you? 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: When smoking was cool

Let's Face It: Smoking Was Cool

On the aesthetics of a dangerous, addictive routine—and what we lost by quitting.

mattgrossistrying.com/p/let-s-face-it-smoking-was-cool