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WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10972 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-20 18:06:07 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-20 18:06:07 [post_content] =>

Why women around the world are building their own DIY computers.

In March of this year, TikTok creator Annike Tan started learning about cyberdecks from YouTube. Usually designed for a specific purpose, a cyberdeck is a custom-built mini computer, often in a maximalist, cyberpunk aesthetic that contrasts with the factory-made, minimalist look of traditional, mass-produced technology. For Tan, this was appealing: She and her partner had been trying to be less online, even switching to dumbphones for a few months in 2025. But both quickly realized many things still required use of the internet—QR codes to open digital menus, apps to navigate public transport—and eventually decided to switch back.

Frustrated with her overreliance on being so plugged in, Tan was inspired to build a device that could blend her need to disconnect with at least some of the technological advances she’d grown accustomed to. Originally a music business major at the SAE Institute in London, she says that while she doesn’t have formal training in engineering or coding, the knowledge she obtained from watching video tutorials online gave her the confidence to build a DIY, mermaid-themed computer out of a vintage clutch bag with a Raspberry Pi computing system, a tiny keyboard, and a mini screen.

“I thought, ‘That looks really fun,’” she says over a video call. “So I made my first cyberdeck and I loved it; I thought it was the cutest thing in the world. At the time I felt like a kid who had just built their first LEGO house.”

On the outside, Tan’s cyberdeck looks like a caramel-colored clutch, but inside, the tiny screen is framed by a faux stone border and decorated with gold trim, meant to evoke the feeling of being a “mermaid in Southeast Asia.” (This is a modification from her original design, which featured more wood and rattan, but which Tan felt represented too "Western" an interpretation of a mermaid.) The keyboard sits atop a clear acrylic sheet painted with nail polish to look like murky water, allowing Tan to easily access its computing system. Next to it is a broken compass in a bed of fake foliage, which also camouflages the on and off switch. During a more recent refurbishing, she also added a little shell next to the keyboard for SD card storage, and made adjustments to the design to allow the clutch to close with the keyboard and mouse tucked comfortably inside.

Known as Ube Boobey on social media, Tan posted a video of her cyberdeck to TikTok, where it went viral earlier this year. Some even credit her with kicking off the recent wave of cyberdeck content on TikTok, with an emphasis on videos spotlighting “girlier” builds. She is now one of hundreds of people, according to the very active cyberdeck community on Reddit, learning how to make their own tiny computers and posting about it online. Many of them are other women just getting started in electronics and coding.

Tan’s mermaid cyberdeck was designed to be an off-grid piece of technology—which means it doesn’t rely on having an internet connection. While it can’t read a QR code, the tiny computer is loaded with the top most searched Wikipedia articles; books on gardening, agriculture, health, education, and philosophy; an offline version of Google Maps; a few TED Talks; and Tan’s favorite music, including Thundercat and Erykah Badu. For Tan, it was trial and error using materials she had—a clutch bag from her closet, gold jewelry she already owned—and others she bought herself, including the Raspberry Pi system, keyboard, and screen. But ultimately, she feels that the process of building her mermaid cyberdeck was an “act of rebellion,” as she has made a piece of technology that is also a piece of art.

“From the moment you wake up to the minute you go to bed, you're always accessible to anyone who has your contact,” she says. “People yearn for freedom. Building this cyberdeck was a fun way to have something be off-grid. It’s still technologically advanced enough where it can fill a lot of holes if you were to get rid of all of your other technology, but not down to the point where you're completely analog.”

This is just one way that building cyberdecks is challenging mass-produced, Big Tech advances that, more often than not, feel imposed onto people without consent or consultation. In a world where artificial intelligence is being pushed in every industry, and data centers are being built without the knowledge or input of their neighbors, creating a device for under the radar, specific offline use—rather than one designed for overreliance, addiction, and overconsumption—is a clever way to fight back.

For many builders, cyberdecks are also an opportunity to repurpose electronic waste. According to the World Health Organization, there was an estimated 62 million tons of e-waste produced globally in 2022 alone, and only 22% of that waste was formally collected and recycled. Experts argue that much of this electronic waste can be repurposed into new builds—though there isn’t much data on the subject since currently, very little e-waste is collected for recycling, thus impeding proper disposal. Learning how to build a cyberdeck from old devices can teach people about the value of each of its parts, what makes a device run, and which parts can still be functional rather than thrown into a landfill.

“Making cyberdecks educates people’s minds about technology,” says Giovanna Aguiar, a cyberdeck builder based in São Paulo, Brazil, known as @gio.yaml on TikTok and Instagram. In May, Aguiar, a trained programmer, noticed a gap in the digital cyberdeck community: most tutorials were in English and many of the necessary components were cost-prohibitive for people living in Brazil. Now, Aguiar makes content in Portuguese that teaches people how to refurbish their electronic waste instead of buying new parts, in order to create something completely new. “From the moment you create a cyberdeck with an old laptop that isn’t turning on, for example, you start to understand that that laptop is just a group of parts,” she says. An old device’s webcam can be disconnected and used separately, as can its screen. “You start seeing old electronics as objects with potential, and long-term, I think that can change the world,” she continues. “For me, sustainability is very connected to cyberdecks.”

Electronic waste is growing every day, with the United Nations estimating that by 2030, the volume of e-waste will rise by 32%, to 82 million tons. As a result of non-compliant waste management, e-waste continues releasing toxic and persistent substances into the environment every year. Hazardous materials like lead, mercury, and cadmium leak when discarded in landfills, poisoning water supplies. And even properly recycled e-waste often still harms the environment and the people in it: Around 75% of collected e-waste is shipped to “backyard recyclers” in the Global South where people and landscapes bear the brunt, according to EcoWatch.

For Matthew Lubari, co-founder and executive director of Community Creativity for Development, a youth-led organization that teaches young people in South Sudan how to reuse and recycle electronic waste, learning how to repair a device or reuse its parts for a new build is a great way to reduce e-waste.

“Recycling electronic waste is a way of fighting back against Big Tech, because every time they develop new technologies, consumers are abandoning old stuff,” Lubari says. He points to how Big Tech companies like Microsoft intentionally discontinue software updates, forcing consumers to buy newer devices. “There is a need for more awareness regarding that, so waste can be reduced. There's a need for more promotion of repair, reuse, and upcycling. We shouldn't jump into recycling before repairing, reusing, and upcycling.”

More generally, the tradition of repairing devices and electronics is making a comeback in industrialized countries where, for the last twenty years, the custom has been to throw away devices after they’ve broken. For many years, buying a new piece of technology was the cheapest, easiest option. But now, counter to the tech industry’s profit-driven approach, consumers are seeking repair cafes, organizers are lobbying for right to repair legislation—and the girls are making cyberdecks.

In addition to environmental impact, cyberdeck builders also cite growing concerns over online mass surveillance and sexual violence, as people—mostly men—increasingly use AI tools to create nonconsensual sexual images; join harmful, misogynistic communities where they teach each other abuse tactics; and utilize AI-powered surveillance to stalk women. For Aguiar, who got into tech as a child by taking apart any piece of technology she could find, this alarming trend is also why it’s so important that cyberdecks are getting more women interested in tech.

“Maybe if women had been in the tech field since the beginning, issues like surveillance and digital stalking could’ve been avoided,” Aguiar says. “When you have a more diverse team, there’s a higher chance someone will raise a problem that would probably go unnoticed by a more homogenous group.”

This is starting to happen in the rebuilding and repurposing space. Building cyberdecks, many off-grid, can allow women and girls to feel safe, because it allows them to disconnect from the online spaces where abusers most often reach them. For Afsaneh Rigot, founder and researcher at De|Center, an organization based across the US and Africa that works to reduce the mass-scale harms of existing and emerging technologies, creating access to technological tools—away from surveillance and gendered violence—makes a lot of sense as a path of resistance.

“For women and girls, it can be such a liberating feeling to be able to create your own modes of technology and communication,” Rigot says. “We’re seeing it with cyberdecks, but even with general tools, technologies, and devices, people are now navigating these systems of control and surveillance in their own ways.” Rigot teaches young people in marginalized communities how to protect themselves through workarounds and tools that increase privacy. For her, cyberdecks are a natural expansion and continuation of strategies people have used to “try and maintain their autonomy and privacy.” It’s about seeking less dependence on technology made to maximize the profits of Big Tech companies, instead of benefitting the people who use it. The easier it is to build the technology, Rigot says, the bigger the threat to these corporate models.

Unlike mass-produced technology, cyberdecks also have an element of exaggerated aesthetics that stand in stark contrast with the greys and blacks of laptops and cellphones most people use. Tan’s mermaid cyberdeck is only one example of how these homemade computers are aesthetically defying the boring, non-technicolor devices of Big Tech. There are cyberdecks made out of jewelry boxes, eyeshadow palettes, and clutch bags, bringing a camp-y, feminine vibe to technology that has been aesthetically sober and functionally masculine for decades.

“Because technology has been so minimalist and so sad in the recent decades, the pendulum's slowly swinging the other way,” Tan says. “And this is being pioneered by women. People want something that represents them. The physical things, the tangible things that we own should be a reflection of the user, and how can that happen when everything is made in a factory?”

Aguiar believes this particular aspect of building cyberdecks can motivate women to learn skills they’re not usually encouraged to learn in a male-dominated field—something that can change tech in the long term. And she’s right: Tan’s decision to build a cyberdeck became a gateway to building other projects without any formal coding experience or education.

“Through cyberdecks, you can motivate girls to understand a little more about building technology without them necessarily working in the field, because the point is that it’s fun,” Aguiar says. “It is something you can decorate with your personality, it becomes a hobby, and oftentimes you discover this is what you want to do. It’s about looking at this and being like, ‘I can do this.’”

The popularity of cyberdecks on TikTok and Instagram, particularly through content created by women, reveals a hunger for technology that serves our daily lives, but doesn’t dominate every single second of them, nor threaten our safety, our privacy, or our environment. Technology doesn’t have to enhance patriarchal rule or even create more profit for corporations—and in the right hands, it can even make cute, functional devices out of upcycled clutch bags.

[post_title] => The Politics of Cyberdecks [post_excerpt] => Why women around the world are building their own DIY computers. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => cyberdecks-politics-diy-computers-technology-tiktok-annike-tan-big-tech-electronics-waste-upcycling [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-20 18:06:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-20 18:06:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10972 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

The Politics of Cyberdecks

by Nicole Froio

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10961 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-18 19:09:53 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-18 19:09:53 [post_content] =>

As the genre continues to diversify, it's time for K-pop to reckon with its relationship to Blackness.

BTS’s long-awaited comeback was controversial from the start.

In March, following a year-and-a-half hiatus to fulfill their mandatory Korean military service, the seven-member boy group reunited with a short animated trailer teasing their new album Arirang. Inspired by a nationally beloved and UNESCO-recognized folk song of the same name, the album was positioned as somewhat of an homage to the group’s Korean roots. In the trailer, the group spotlights the “profound cultural significance” of the original song—believed to be over 600 years old—through a “modern reimagining” of the seven Korean students at Howard University who first recorded it in 1896.

But many fans noticed something strange: For a few seconds, BTS can be seen portraying the students while singing, on campus, to a mostly white audience.

“Who are [these] white folks at a historically Black college built so Black Americans could actually go to college because white people would not allow them into their schools?” one fan commented on YouTube. Others followed suit.

Upon release, the 14-track album followed the standard K-pop formula: a mix of Korean and English songs with a bit of AAVE slang thrown in, and a slew of high-profile Western producers and writers, including Mike-Will-Made-It, Tezzo Touchdown, and Diplo. In short, Arirang was less an homage to an unofficial national anthem than it was a catchy hip-hop album—a nod to the group's cultural influences, but not necessarily their Korean ones. Only the leading track (“Body to Body”) sampled parts of the historic song.

This wasn’t unusual: Over time, as the genre has diversified, K-pop groups have made music with expanding influences, ranging from house to trap. In recent years, the genre has only further loosened, often following global trends rather than strictly adhering to what’s popular in Korea.

It’s an identity crisis that’s been plaguing the genre since the beginning of the decade. While the earliest iterations of K-pop groups (also known as first generation K-pop) occasionally produced songs in English, such tracks didn’t determine a group’s popularity, nor did they dominate the genre like they do now. As K-pop reaches a critical mass of popularity among international audiences, with groups not only sometimes singing exclusively in English, but also branding themselves as “global groups” with members from around the world, the lines have started to blur on what specifically makes K-pop, K-pop. It’s also why it’s become increasingly necessary for the genre as a whole to reckon with its relationship to Blackness, both historically and today.

The word K-pop itself was a bit of an accident. Dr. Stephanie Choi, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that the label was “coined by outsiders, not by the K-pop industry itself.” Popularized in the 90s by Japanese and Chinese media, the term was used to refer to the global popularity of Korean dance pop, before Western media began using it throughout the decade. “Only by the early 2000s was the term introduced to Korean media,” says Dr. Choi.

It was around this time that Lee Soo-man, the architect of what's known as contemporary K-pop, created the idol trainee system that now defines the genre. Inspired by the assembly line approach of 60s Motown, Soo-man brought the same model to Korea, founding SM Entertainment in 1995, carefully crafting and turbocharging each trainee’s talents in dance, vocals, and visual identity through bootcamps notorious for their intensity.

This tradition has endured, eventually evolving into idol trainee reality TV-style competitions that have since produced some of the biggest K-pop groups in the world, including TWICE and Stray Kids. Like the rest of the genre, the success of these shows has now moved beyond Korea to the international stage, which is where The Debut: Dream Academy—the hit show behind the global girl group Katseye—was born.

In addition to commercial success, equally pivotal to defining K-pop is the loyalty of its fandoms, something that’s endured even as the genre has continued to diversify. All K-pop groups thrive on the intimate relationship fostered between idols and their fans, and through social media, this relationship has only intensified. But as the genre has globalized, this intensity has also proven to be a double-edged sword for idols of color. While there's, of course, virtue in national and ethnic representation, for idols, this has often manifested as overexposure to racism and bigotry—sometimes including from fans of color who project themselves onto what they believe an idol of their culture should look like.

It’s a part of why in late February, when Manon Bannerman, the only Black-identifying member of the global girl group Katseye, announced a temporary hiatus from group activities for unspecified reasons, the internet was abuzz with shock, confusion, outrage, and genuine concern on her behalf. Others, meanwhile, were suspicious.

“Definitely some anti-Blackness going on behind the scenes & you can’t tell me otherwise,” one fan commented on Reddit amidst all the speculation. “It’s very textbook.”

For an industry that has roots in Black entertainment, you’d think Black idols would be more common in K-pop. But while K-pop groups have always had members from other East Asian countries, having visibly non-Asian members is still rare. Alexandra Reid of girl group BP Rania was the first Black idol in K-pop history, debuting in 2015. After BP Rania disbanded and re-debuted as Blackswan in 2020, Senegalese-Belgian member Fatou joined her in the lineup. In 2025, Girlset (formerly known as VCHA) rebranded into a multinational four-person girl group, including a Venezuelan-Trinidadian member. But otherwise, Katseye remains the exception rather than the rule when it comes to racial diversity.

The Katseye girls hail from three continents and several different ethnicities and nationalities. Sophia, the group leader, is from the Philippines. Manon is Ghanaian and Swiss. Lara, Daniela, and Megan are all from the States, representing Indian, Cuban-Venezuelan, and Chinese-Singaporean heritages respectively. The only member born and raised in Korea is Yoonchae, who is also the youngest of the six. Their diversity has long been their strength—carefully engineered to capture the hearts of millions of fans, starting from their debut on 2023’s The Debut: Dream Academy, then in 2024, through their intimate Netflix docu-series Pop Star Academy. Following multiple successful commercials for Jollibee, Glossier, and The Gap (the latter of which went viral as a perceived response to Sydney Sweeney’s rather tactless American Eagle ad), the group became seen by fans as a paragon of what the future of K-pop could be.

“I found it interesting that there was a member with the same name as mine who also has Venezuelan ancestry,” says Daniela Bottini, a self-identified Eyekon, as the group’s fans are known. “It was refreshing to see that when they said global, they really meant it. They took the best parts of the K-pop training system, but also recognized that the rigid rules that govern it couldn’t work in a group mainly comprised of young Gen Z women raised in more liberal countries.”

Indeed, on paper, Katseye checks off every K-pop box: rooted in the trainee system, with a deeply interpersonal fandom, challenging choreography, and catchy songs perfect for a 30-second TikTok. Unfortunately, their success has also shed light on the uncomfortable ways global groups are still perceived—and treated—in K-pop compared with their all-Korean peers.

Unlike her Korean contemporaries, Bannerman has not been offered the same grace nor protection she might otherwise have found from fans, even before she announced her hiatus. Throughout her trainee days and well into her debut, she received online hate and death threats and was often called “lazy” and “ungrateful” for someone in her position. It’s an unfortunate reality that all idols, Korean or not, have to go through; but coupled with xenophobia and racism, often rampant against non-Korean idols within fandom spaces, the insults compound.

While anti-Blackness is a worldwide phenomenon, it feels especially glaring in an industry that has long been inspired by Black American culture. Historically, the genre has borrowed heavily from Black aesthetics and practices while divorcing them from the bitterness of Black history, thus turning them into something more “palatable” for a broader audience to enjoy. Across the genre, Black culture is simultaneously commodified while its originators go unrecognized—something increasingly harder to ignore when Black idols like Bannerman exist. Katseye and other global groups, then, present an interesting tension point within the genre, ultimately forcing K-pop’s global audience to reconcile its conflicting ideas of fetishized exotic orientalism—its own form of racism—with its disdain for Black people. It's also what makes BTS’s Arirang trailer snafu—intentional or not—so glaring.

As the genre continues to diversify and to innovate, we’ll likely see more attempts at recreating Katseye’s success, and songs that are not just in English, but in Spanish, French, and other languages, too. Maybe there will be a K-pop group that only produces house music and dance. Perhaps the next trend in K-pop will be country guitar riffs. Jeff Benjamin, a K-pop contributor at Billboard, made the prescient prediction that 2026 will be a defining year for how the genre shifts and how global audiences perceive K-pop overall.

“At this year's Grammy Awards, we saw Katseye as well as Rosé of Blackpink perform; additionally, KPop Demon Hunters won an award—but the bodies of work that these three acts were nominated for aren't traditional K-pop,” says Benjamin.

It’s likely we’ll see a shift happen sooner rather than later. As of June 2026, the Grammys have introduced a new award: Best Asian Pop Music Performance, a category recognizing pop music performances originating from or widely known in Asian markets. It isn’t limited to just K-pop, but J-pop, C-pop, and music from other countries across the Asian diaspora, too. Shortly after the category was announced, BTS said they would not submit Arirang for consideration in the 2027 awards.

“We hope our music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language,” reads a statement from all seven members of the group, explaining their decision. “We thank Army [the group's fandom] and everyone who has always stood by us.”

As barriers between cultures and languages break down on our screens, and the world as we know it inevitably changes, it’s clear that K-pop has the potential to be a bright spot in a new world order. It’s already crossed the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and language to become an international genre. Its music resonates and inspires millions of fans across the world. But if the genre wants to reach its full cultural potential, it will also have to reckon with its relationship not only to idols of color, but xenophobia towards idols outside of Korea, once and for all.

As of today, Katseye is a de facto four-member girl group with Bannerman’s hiatus ongoing, and Sophia's recent announcement she would be stepping back from the group until September. Prolonged hiatuses aren’t uncommon in K-pop groups, usually due to illness or injury or just the need for a mental health break. But whether Bannerman comes back to the group or not, one thing is for certain: the issue of anti-Blackness in K-pop remains, and it’s up to both the industry and its fans to dismantle it.

[post_title] => The Globalization of K-Pop [post_excerpt] => As the genre continues to diversify, it's time for K-pop to reckon with its relationship to Blackness. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => globalization-k-pop-music-genre-anti-blackness-katseye-manon-bannerman-idols [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-19 12:34:00 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-19 12:34:00 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10961 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 18, 2026August 19, 2026

The Globalization of K-Pop

by Niya Doyle

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10954 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-12 16:53:16 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-12 16:53:16 [post_content] =>

What the art world can learn from the jocks.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersections of art, capital, and politics with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

Should you find yourself at an art week any time soon, the most important thing to know is this: All the parties are fake. They aren’t even actually parties, per se. They are set pieces that maybe—maybe—might facilitate a simulacrum of networking; but parties they are not. No one has had a good time at an event thrown by a PR firm with a list, a venue, a production team, a brand in its heart, and a glimmer in its eye since maybe the first four cocaine salad years of Miami Basel. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to keep their job.

It’s all for the gram, honey. Since the advent of social media, the art party circuit has been purely performative. True, society pages have existed as long as newspapers have. But, now that the world is ruled by tech overlords who view human interaction as a problem to solve (read: monetize), brand value, relevance, and other phoney metrics drive content that absolutely no one went into debt over an MFA to create. These same metrics also now define the success of its “parties”: Rather than trafficking in actual relationships or connection, the art world, allegedly a community, can only manage to crap out one inane brand partnership after the next and throw meaningless events to “launch” them. Imagine an orgy where everyone smizes instead of getting off; then, for unclear reasons, someone trots out Patti Smith. Departing guests jostle one another for the last few swag bags, the Uber home is the cost of a ride to the airport, and yet everyone posts about it as if they are desperately trying to convince themselves they just had the best night of their lives. It’s no one’s definition of fun.

It could be said that the art world needs to touch grass, but I would argue it needs to touch hardwood. This past June, the entire city of New York did just that, when the city’s beloved, beleaguered Knicks broke a 53-year dry spell by winning the 2026 NBA Championships. Millions spilled out onto the streets in a state of delight and delirium that did something not a single corporately-sponsored art party or its online remnants has ever managed to do: spontaneously unite hundreds of thousands of strangers in public. New Yorkers danced on cars, hung off of street lights, sang from fire escapes, and lingered for hours in the streets—an electric togetherness that served as a reminder as to why anyone would live in a city as punishing and crazy-making as New York. The city seemed to remember itself in a way alien to the day to day adversarial experience of just getting by.

To that end, New York did what it does best: throw a tantrum of main character syndrome, ensuring the euphoria was not just about the Knicks, but about the city itself. As one viral tweet put it, “If you thought New Yorkers were insufferable before, you ain’t seen nothing yet!” The Knicks’ win—and specifically, the opportunity it allowed New Yorkers to converge in the streets—seemed to grant permission to publicly embrace a new era of civic pride and to define all the facets that identity entails. Rather than simply saying it wasn’t like the rest of the country, New York was asserting what it had become. Chants of “KNICKS IN FIVE, HAPPY PRIDE!” were heard everywhere. The Tribeca Film Festival had just wrapped. The World Cup was heating up, bringing the entire world to town and spotlighting our many immigrant neighbors. (New York is, after all, the most linguistically diverse city in recorded history.) And, presiding over everything, everywhere at once, DSA dimples and Knicks jersey under his suit, was Zohran Mamdani: a young mayor with the party stamina to stay up all night with the rest of his city and still make it to the Puerto Rican Day Parade the next morning.

The Internet, as it is wont to do, took note, with art world commentary account @artnotnet noting, “THE ART WORLD NEEDS WHATEVER THE KNICKS ARE HAVING.” Diffuse, gate-kept, internet-facing, fake, and over-branded, this would seem to be a fair prescription for a culture sector with the vitality and diversity of the Mall at Short Hills. (I have lived in New York for over two decades, but I am Jersey born and bred: I write from expertise.) But this brings us to the next logical question: What exactly were the 2026 Knicks having, and how might anyone—let alone something so nebulous and often nefarious as the art world—actually replicate it?

As the financial capital of the world, it’s rare that NYC gets to play the underdog. That the Knicks hadn’t taken home a chip in half a century really didn’t bother the rest of the country; no one was sitting around feeling sorry for New York. The difference was the team itself: The 2026 Knicks were absolute charmers, captained by the deadpan Jalen Brunson, who turned down a massive contract extension of roughly $113 million in 2025, instead asking the back office to use that money to build a team that could win. On the court, that team achieved a cooperative flow state that would build over the course of a game and kick into a furious full throttle in the fourth quarter; off the court, they were droll, self-effacing, and funny enough to carry comedy podcasts. The chemistry was palpable.

Following a typical Hollywood formula, the NBA finals paired an incredibly likable team with a whiny, hair-pulling villain, whom the writers’ room went so far as to make French. Some framed the match as veteran Millennials going up against cocky Zoomers; an age gap that played out in interviews where the Knicks frequently spoke of the need to overcome ego to win.

This likability factor is not to be ignored. The Knicks win happened to overlap with the World Cup, an event heavily promoted by Mamdani, who is both a die-hard soccer fan and extremely invested in the city’s immigrant narrative as a Uganda-born mayor from Queens. In New York City, this concurrent enthusiasm for the world’s game felt jump-started by Knicks euphoria—all that energy had to go someplace after the season was over. As in the NBA Finals, there were controversies: FIFA is evil, Egypt was robbed, and of course, Trump interceded over a red card. However, none of that seemed to slow the excitement and earnest need to connect in troubling times, whether it was Koreans in Mexico or Scotland’s Tartan Army in Boston. The sweetheart of this proverbial rodeo (even if Dallas was where his run ended) was Norway’s Erling Haaland, whose personality cult felt familiar (at least to this Knicks fan). Rather than a podcast, Haaland had his Snapchat, which introduced the world to a very goofy, community-oriented, terrifying striker who chose to add his mother’s name to his jersey. This was no Maradona blowing rails in a mink. The media has framed Haaland as wholesome and hardworking, often mentioning that he’s still together with his childhood sweetheart—as are some key Knicks players.

Whether or not it’s true behind closed doors, there’s a reason the athletes the world has fallen for were the ones portrayed as having their priorities straight. If romanticizing the bedroom exploits of someone like George Best might be seen as projecting our fantasies onto one freakishly talented human being in his own time (the Swinging 60s), perhaps assigning down-to-earth qualities to Haaland and Brunson is a symptom of what we crave. The world is aching for the real and the relatable: In an era of apps and Amazon, we desperately lack day-to-day existences rooted in human interactions. Community—in so many forms—has ceased to exist. Tellingly, the person who got the loudest cheers at the Knicks' Victory Parade was neither Brunson nor Mamdani, but point guard Jose Alvarado, who grew up in public housing in Bushwick and still has close ties to his high school. His is a community connection that’s anything but performative.

And this is where the art world must take note: In recent months, the sense of joy and togetherness that both New York specifically and the world more broadly has felt around athletics has valorized humility, humor, and—in what has become Brunson’s signature quote—heart. Pouring into the streets to celebrate the athletes we believe to represent these qualities has been a healing experience for de-regulated nervous systems around the world.

Sports franchises are tied to cities that are meant to support community and culture. But those two things have migrated online behind paywalls. The physical art world—the siren song of any one of the world’s putative capitals—has retreated into fairs, auction houses, and private jets. It is completely disconnected from not only its creators but from any potential class of audience. That, more than anything, will spell its death if something doesn’t pivot.

No one outside the billionaire class is asking for the sun and moon and stars. But, in 2026, even affordability is aspirational. We want to feel alive in the communities we break our asses to live in. These sports moments have reminded us of that sensation. If the art world wants to feel vital again, it needs to tap into that sense of place, time, purpose, and togetherness. What does that look like? I have no fucking clue. But the art world needs a Brunson or a Haaland stat. Or at least, a place for the narrative we have projected onto them: that talent, discipline, sacrifice, and groundedness will pay off—and that a great personality on top of it all never hurt. We need a final countdown feeling of magic, we need uplift. Art can and should provide that—not just another VIP experience that even the rich who are privy to it (or the writers who cover it) can't fully remember.

Personally, I cannot wait to see what the art world will become in Mamdanistan. The city’s newest budget has ballooned arts funding, and what a relief it is to see taxpayer money going this way. We have seen what happens when only the rich pay for art: It becomes their plaything, their investment tool. We’ve seen how a billionaire mayor can make the city itself into a plaything and investment tool for the rich, too, rather than a livable city for everyone else. New York will always be smug and self-congratulatory, but—this summer at least—that stance was alive and well out in the streets for anyone at all. Now let’s see what art comes out of it.

[post_title] => Y'all Ready for This? [post_excerpt] => What the art world can learn from the jocks. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => yall-ready-for-this-cultural-currency-art-world-parties-world-cup-new-york-knicks-mayor-zohran-mamdani-jalen-brunson-erling-haaland [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-14 19:26:23 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-14 19:26:23 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10954 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 12, 2026August 14, 2026

Y’all Ready for This?

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10949 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-07 19:36:01 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-07 19:36:01 [post_content] =>

As my siblings and I become our own people, it'll be up to us to determine whether and how our relationships will thrive or crumble from the foundations we were given.

Since my maternal grandmother’s unexpected death last fall, the legacy of her life has weighed on me. She was authoritative, opinionated, and very close to everyone in the family, especially my mother. In my hometown, she was a hero—a city council member of the second largest city in New Hampshire, a school board member, and an advocate for civic engagement. In many ways, she was the best role model of leadership and independence I could have asked for.

Concurrently, my grandmother was a complicated figure whose strong morals and beliefs shaped the foundations of our familial dynamics. She always encouraged us grandchildren to be outspoken, smart, and strong-willed. But she also modeled emotional inconsistency, porous boundaries, and a pattern of partaking in conflict cycles without resolution or repair.

As I continue to grieve, I’ve been reflecting on how all of this has affected me in both obvious and quieter ways. But more recently, I’ve also started to wonder whether her influence is a part of why I’ve struggled so much to bond with my siblings.

My grandmother had a rough life, and sometimes, that trauma spilled over onto the rest of the family. She grew up one of eight siblings in the projects of Hartford, Connecticut, to a single mother. She had her first child at 16, married at 18, divorced at 27, then joined the military with three small children in tow. It’s likely she was never given the tools to cope with all she lived through, and when she was alive, her temperament was everyone’s responsibility. Whether she was sad or angry or anxious, it was our collective duty to manage her emotions and transform them into something better. Within my family, this form of enmeshment has now been passed down from my maternal grandmother and her siblings, to my mom and hers, to me and mine.

As with many eldest daughters, I was raised to take responsibility for the needs of both my siblings and my parents, consequently becoming hyper-independent at a premature age. This has continued into early adulthood: At 26 years old, if something were to suddenly happen to either of my parents, I am likely next in line to take care of my two siblings. My sister is 22 years old and disabled, and my brother, 13, is still a child. There’s no immediate reason to worry about imminent parental loss, but as I’ve been contemplating death more frequently, it’s a possibility I’ve chosen to prepare for. This has spurned thoughts of how atypical my relationship is with my siblings, at least compared to what I’ve seen between others, and whether it’s possible for these dynamics to change over a lifetime, especially now that my sister and I are both adults.

Theoretically, sharing the unique experience of being raised by the same two parents should be an unbreakable bond. At its best, it can mean having a built-in BFF with whom trust, history, and emotional depth are a given. But at its worst, even kin can become strangers: Regardless of age gaps or favoritism or birth order or familial dynamics, sometimes, two individuals just don’t click.

With four years between us that felt larger when we were younger, my sister and I would get into physical altercations over the smallest things, like who got control of the TV remote or my refusal to share my video games with her. Of course, most siblings bicker, fight, and get jealous of each other at some point, and none of these things have to adversely affect the totality of a relationship. But in our case, it often felt like they defined it: We never really played together, just fought.

Then, almost a decade after my sister was born, my brother arrived. I was resentful, already subconsciously anticipating my role as the family’s emotional sponge would expand, and knowing the age gap between us would mean, at least in part, that I would be responsible for his care.

As Canadian author, physician, and childhood development and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté asserts—no two children have the same parents. I can attest to this with my sister, a sickly child who required more attention, and with my brother, who has received a more laissez-faire style of parenting as the youngest in the family.

Perhaps partly due to my quiet nature, I had always been the child that my parents felt they never had to worry about. Frequently called “mature for my age,” this also meant I was expected to put everyone else’s emotional needs before my own. Sharing my feelings in any given situation was discouraged, and I was often called “selfish” for not considering how they might affect the family. I learned early to keep the peace by avoiding high-conflict subjects, and while we maintained a superficial relationship as children, my sister and I always shared a silent understanding that due to our mother’s sacrifices on our behalf, we had no right to complain. (I suspect this is my brother’s experience, as well, despite my mother’s insistence that “boys are just less work than girls.”)

This was especially difficult for me because, unlike my siblings, I was perceived as the responsible one, who therefore didn’t need additional support or care. While my physical needs of shelter, food, clothing, and even entertainment were comfortably met, my emotional needs were not. I was bullied at school for most of my childhood, and although sympathetic, my parents and siblings both regularly chalked it up to me being “too sensitive,” rather than actually listening.

This label—being “too sensitive”—became a recurring one throughout my life. It was also frequently reinforced by my grandmother, which eventually led me to hide more and more of myself from my parents and my siblings, and to rely on them less and less. Soon after graduating high school, I got as far away from them as I could.

Living away from home for the last eight years—with strangers, friends, other families, and romantic partners—has allowed me to connect to my own emotional needs and wants for the first time in my life. It’s also fundamentally changed the lens through which I see sibling friendships for the better, and changed the way I look at my own. I’ve learned that siblings can and do take an interest in each other’s lives and rely on each other for support, out of genuine interest rather than familial duty. I’ve also learned that conflicts can be addressed and resolved in healthy ways, rather than ignored and left to fester, eventually turning into resentments.

These lessons evoke a desire in me to do better for my younger siblings: I yearn for this kind of “elevated” relationship with them, where we can talk about our struggles and our interests, our shared and diverging upbringings and the ways we see the world. Above all else, I just want us to be able to be ourselves around each other, to free ourselves from the roles our family has given us, and to become genuine friends. More importantly, I want to be able to confide in them and for them to see me as a safe person to confide in, too—not as a part of an unspoken eldest daughter imperative, but because I am someone they can genuinely trust.

I’m still struggling to form this deeper connection with each of them, and to break the ice of emotional superficiality that everyone in my family seems to be comfortable with. After all, we are the outcome of a multigenerational combination of emotional detachment, dysfunction, and our respective and sometimes clashing individualities. But even if the adults in my life—from my grandmother to my parents—were most culpable for the conditions that produced this emotional environment, ideally, it’s my siblings and I whose lives will succeed theirs. And it’ll eventually be up to us to determine whether and how our relationships will thrive or crumble from the foundations we were given.

Of course, my perspective is just that—mine. My siblings and parents have their own readings of our relationships, and maybe someday, we’ll find places where they intersect. It’s entirely possible that as a sensitive child who has become a sensitive adult, I’ve been too hard on them. And despite the origins of my sister and I’s discontentment, there’s a sincerity with which she relates to me today: When I ask about her day, she tells me in earnest, and genuinely wants to know how mine is, too.

I make every effort to actively listen to her when we speak, because I truly want to know about her and her life. But I still struggle to share my emotional truths with her in return. No matter what day or week or month I’m having, as far as she knows, I’m fine. I don’t want her to worry, and besides, my grandmother would have encouraged me not to share those feelings, in order to protect the family’s peace.

But in my grandmother’s absence, there’s also no longer anyone here to manage how everyone in the family should feel, or what they should share. So, despite grieving her—or maybe because of what this grief has afforded me—I’m gaining more courage in facing my family: in standing up for myself, in choosing to remove myself from discomfort, in refusing to absorb my family’s emotional dysregulation. I’m also choosing to be hopeful about what sort of relationships I want to forge with my siblings, and choosing to be hopeful about the person I can still become.

With this new courage comes new insight. Just as I am doing now, my younger siblings will one day become their own people. Amid pondering about how this one death has changed our present, and how subsequent ones may change our future, there’s no guarantee that my relationships with my siblings will get any better. What if we’re never able to overcome the emotional barriers that were formed early? What if the only way to maintain our individual emotional health and change our family’s future is to build and preserve strong boundaries between us that might keep us from ever being truly close?

I hope not. But, maybe the best eldest sister and friend I can be to them is in maintaining my own developing boundaries as I understand them and myself better. Maybe the form of courage I can work towards is mirroring a sibling friendship built on healthy communication and respect, and taking chances, little by little, in trusting them with who I am. That way, as we all grow, we can truthfully see whether it’s possible for us to become closer, or whether it’s healthiest for all of us to care for each other as best we can from a distance.

[post_title] => Can Siblings Eventually Become Friends? [post_excerpt] => As my siblings and I become our own people, it'll be up to us to determine whether and how our relationships will thrive or crumble from the foundations we were given. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => friendship-week-can-siblings-eventually-become-friends-family-dynamics-relationships-childhood-upbringing-grief-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-07 19:36:03 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-07 19:36:03 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10949 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 7, 2026August 7, 2026

Can Siblings Eventually Become Friends?

by Niya Doyle

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10830 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-06 16:30:55 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-06 16:30:55 [post_content] =>

There’s something magical about the comfort and interconnectedness that comes with befriending someone a few decades older.

We’ve all had a friend crush before. You meet someone and immediately feel that special spark and a deep desire to get to know them better. Suddenly, you want to know where they grew up, what their childhood was like, what neighborhood they live in, and what recipes they’ve been cooking up lately. Your friend crush pulls you in with their shimmering light, and the next thing you know, you’re imagining future hangouts together. Maybe you even feel some nervous butterflies, hoping they might want to be your friend, too.

For me, that person has often been three or four decades older. Sure, I’ve had plenty of friend crushes with people closer to my age, but there’s something magical about the comfort and interconnectedness of an intergenerational friendship. Befriending someone older can provide a certain steadiness, almost like they’re reaching out a soft hand and saying, “I’ve seen it all, darling. Come sit with me and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

When I first moved to New Orleans, it was Jeanette. I met her through my job at the time in the food and farming space. She’d walk into our warehouse with bundles of basil and bouquets of zinnias and “shrimp flowers” (named such because they resemble—yep, you guessed it—boiled shrimp!). It was hard not to smile when Jeanette entered a room, beaming with sunny energy and greeting us in her charming Southern accent.

Then 72 years old, Jeanette spent most of her days gardening in her signature wide-brimmed hat. But for her, this wasn’t just a fun retirement hobby (not that there’s anything wrong with that). She was growing flowers and food on vacant lots around the city—including land that had been overgrown and neglected since Hurricane Katrina—both to enjoy at home and to sell to local businesses. You could find her basil in a fresh pesto at a neighborhood Italian restaurant and her rose petals in a fragrant body oil made by a New Orleans skincare brand. In her free time, she taught neighbors how to grow their own herbs, veggies, and flowers, too, demonstrating what was possible in their small backyards and on their windowsills.

Jeanette has that go-getter gumption that’s inspiring at any age, but especially for someone in their 70s. This was immediate friend crush material for me, and inspired me to channel my own go-gettery-ness to take the first step and call her. After I dialed her up, we ended up chatting on the phone for over an hour. Within a few days, I was walking through her garden as she proudly pointed out every plant she had grown, as if they were her children.

Flash forward to our many hours together in the car running errands, pulling weeds in her gardens around the city, shopping at Costco (often with matching items in our baskets—great minds!), and assembling bouquets for my wedding. Jeanette was in my regular friend rotation just like anyone else. She also modeled to me what healthy aging could look like. Whether she was planting a new round of shrimp flowers, or teaching another gardening workshop to a new group of students, she reminded me that you can always keep learning, dreaming, and reinventing yourself no matter your age; that you can always nurture and sprout new seedlings, even if they don’t all blossom.

During times of transition—navigating new jobs in a new city—Jeanette was an especially important friend. She always picked up the phone when I called, and always provided a refreshing levity that reminded me not to take life too seriously. This felt especially remarkable coming from someone who’d already lived 70-something years of challenges, grief, ups and downs, and all the juicy life bits in between.

This ability to keep showing up and her commitment to getting to know her neighbors was also what first drew me to Ava, another New Orleans friend crush.

Also in her 70s, Ava posted on a neighborhood message board that she was offering sewing lessons. This was a few years after meeting Jeanette, when I was pregnant with my first child. I’d wanted to sew a quilt for my future baby (and maybe some cute rompers, too), so I decided to send her a message.

Learning to sew with Ava wasn’t anything like watching a how-to video on YouTube. She invited me over to her house to sit beside her at the sewing machine and watch her do basic stitches, then had me do them, guiding me through each tangly thread and unwieldy bobbin.

We’d sit together and stitch while sharing stories about our families, religious journeys, and favorite recipes, interspersed with quiet moments of just sitting next to each other at our sewing machines. This was another season of transition for me—preparing to enter motherhood—and without my mom nearby, I appreciated Ava sharing her nuggets of maternal wisdom, and her understanding on a deeper level that everything was changing for me, but somehow still staying the same.

I knew our friendship was really reaching a deeper level, too, when Ava and I started going on our own Costco trips together, which seems to be a trend in all my closest friendships. (Is it just me, or do those wide aisles and free samples create the perfect space for meandering conversations?)

More recently, both of these friendships have evolved. When I moved from Louisiana to Rhode Island a couple years ago, I also moved away from both Jeanette and Ava. While we no longer have regular in-person time, we still text and share photos; and whenever we do get on the phone together, you better believe it’s going to be at least an hour-long chat, since there’s always so much to cover.

I’ve been lucky enough to make new friends in my new neighborhood, often at the playground with fellow parents around my age (or at least within the same decade), and I’m starting to feel more settled. But while this has been a blessing, it’s also been a stark reminder that I’ve been lacking in the intergenerational friendships department. This hole has felt even bigger when I think about my daughters growing up without their grandparents nearby. I knew I’d have to be more intentional about seeking intergenerational friendships if I wanted to share their magic, and show my daughters that friendship has no age limit.

Our weekly neighborhood potlucks—a tradition we had in New Orleans that we brought up to Providence—are a natural place to meet folks of all ages, and Nancy has become a recent regular. She has two daughters, born in the 1980s like me, so there was an instant familiarity when we met. She seemed to get me on some level, knowing what it was like to raise daughters around my age, and I seemed to get her on some level—she was a nurse just like my mom. We bonded over the challenges of weaning your last baby after years of breastfeeding, our shared love of recycling, and our having spent time in the same small town in Ireland coincidentally. On top of that, her sesame noodles at potluck were SO good—all enough to spark a new friend crush.

Like me, Nancy had recently moved to the neighborhood. She had grandkids about an hour away but wanted to deepen her relationships with nearby neighbors. I texted her the next day inviting her to go for a walk. She accepted with a purple heart emoji, so I knew we were off to a good start. We’ve been on a couple walks since, and our conversations continue to flow.

In 2021, Jeanette and I were featured in a beautiful book called Collective Wisdom by Grace Bonney, which spotlights intergenerational friendships and life advice from women over the age of 50. After speaking with over 100 women for the book, Bonney reflects that “while age brings wisdom, it rarely offers closure or perfection.” We’re all still evolving. We’re all still curious about ourselves and the world around us. That curiosity doesn’t expire with age.

The best kinds of friendships create a safe space for listening, sharing, and learning, but in an intergenerational friendship, it feels like unlocking another dimension. Almost like time traveling forward and back, weaving between decades, getting a glimpse into the future and remembering what it was like in the past. It’s a refreshing reminder that we’re all just figuring it out as we go, and very little in life is actually linear.

In our interview for the book, Jeanette said I changed the way she approaches young people about gardening. “I’ve learned from how Erin just walks up and starts talking. There are young people I probably wouldn’t approach because I would expect them to not be receptive. But Erin doesn’t see it that way; she just moves forward.”

I was surprised to learn that I had taught her something, let alone almost the exact same thing she had taught me. That you’re never too old (or young) to make new friends, to put yourself out there, and to keep feeling those nervous butterflies, whether you’re meeting a new friend crush, or planting a new seed in hopes of watching it grow.

[post_title] => Everyone Needs an Intergenerational Friendship [post_excerpt] => There’s something magical about the comfort and interconnectedness that comes with befriending someone a few decades older. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => everyone-needs-an-intergenerational-friendship-week-old-friends-age-gap [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-06 16:30:57 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-06 16:30:57 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10830 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 6, 2026August 6, 2026

Everyone Needs an Intergenerational Friendship

by Erin Zimmer Strenio

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10821 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-05 17:41:07 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-05 17:41:07 [post_content] =>

How a shared love of soccer transformed my long-distance friendship.

On a rainy and unseasonably cold summer night last March, my friend Mendes and I walked the long way around the stadium of a fourth division soccer team in São Paulo, Brazil. Neither of us had ever been there before and we’d gotten out of the taxi on the wrong side of the grounds. But even though we were cold and a little lost, we were determined to make it to this game.

Mendes and I have been friends for more than 15 years, although going to soccer games has only recently become a staple of our friendship. We met when he switched schools in the fifth grade, bonding over our shared love of Batman, Black Sabbath, and Scorsese films. As kids, we’d go to the movies and the bookstore together, and at the time, it felt like we were the only two people in our class who liked doing either. We’d talk about girls, study for tests together, and go looking for good burgers after late-night movie screenings.

After I went to college in New York and he stayed to attend film school in São Paulo, we remained friends. Back then, we’d find time every other week to catch up via the old video call app, Skype. But there was still physical distance, and as the years passed, there rose a feeling of a wall between us, keeping us apart.

I felt as if I was leading two lives that didn’t quite get to meet. There was the life in São Paulo I shared with my family and my old friends, filled with all the experiences that had made me who I was up until that point. Then there was my new life in New York, which I could only tell people back home about—a new school, new friends, and new experiences in a new language—that felt completely my own. Whenever Mendes and I would talk about it, I felt like I was translating a movie for him that only I got to see.

Maybe it felt the same for him. Back in São Paulo, he ran around shooting films and became a regular at old-school bars that I’d never even heard of. He fell in love with Carnaval and the hidden charms of a city we hadn’t gotten to explore fully as teenagers. But in some ways, I think it was easier for me to feel tethered to his life in a way he couldn’t be to mine. Every summer break, when it was winter in Brazil, I’d fly back home and we’d go back to our old ways. I’d meet his new friends and go to parties or ride in their cars listening to Liniker, Guilherme Held, or Baco Exu do Blues, the music that was bopping in São Paulo at the time. For about three months each year, the wall between Mendes and I became porous, and we would pass through it together. Then the summer would end, and I’d hop on a plane and go back to my other life, and the wall would turn solid again.

Soccer entered our friendship during the pandemic, which I spent back in Brazil. Though I’ve long been almost unhealthily addicted to the sport—I’ve woken up at 5 a.m. to watch random league games in different time zones, and more than once cancelled plans after my team lost a big game—Mendes had a more off-and-on relationship to it. We became fans of the same club in 2005, a few years before we’d met, when our dads introduced us to the soon-to-be champions of South America: São Paulo FC. Neither remembers much—we were eight years old at the time—but our dads have told us different versions of a similar story. Whenever São Paulo won, they’d show off the cover of the next day’s newspaper at breakfast, reading the recap of the match out loud. As São Paulo advanced in the knockouts, our dads would let us watch more and more of the games during the week, even though they came on late at night after our bedtimes. At the end of that year, São Paulo beat Liverpool FC to become world champions. I remember putting on my little uniform—shirt, shorts, and socks—and going out with my family to eat a burger and celebrate. São Paulo fans filled the streets of the city that day, dressed in their own uniforms, waving flags, wearing crazy hats, blowing horns and lighting red, black, and white smoke flares.

After those glory days, São Paulo went through a dire cold streak in the 2010s. Mendes and I would catch the occasional game together, but even then, it would be a European champions league game, or a World Cup match on TV. Then, when professional sports came back at the end of 2020, São Paulo made an improbable run at the Brazilian title. Though it ended in abject failure in the last weeks of the season (let’s not talk about that), it was enough to get Mendes and I talking about the team for the first time since I can remember.

After the end of lockdown, Mendes spent weeks at my house with me and my brother Thomas, who also lives in New York and had come home during the pandemic. If we weren’t watching a movie, the TV would be tuned to a game, or the sports channel, or old São Paulo highlights on YouTube, often on mute so we could talk over them. And it’s probably because of us specifically, but at the beginning of 2021, São Paulo won the state championship for the first time since we started supporting them.

Later that year, I left Brazil for New York again, this time for grad school. Our video chats now came through Zoom, but it didn’t take long for Mendes and I to fall into the traps of my previous years abroad—weekly conversations that turned monthly, texts that became more infrequent as we got busy with school and work. The only difference this time was our shared befuddlement with São Paulo FC (the good times were few and far between), which brought us together after every game. We’d found a way to share the same experience every week, thousands of miles between us.

By 2023, we started going to games together whenever I was home. Sometimes we’d go to cheer on our team, which desperately needed our help, but often, we just went to hang out and talk about what was going on in our lives while the match played in the background, as if we were back in my living room.

I have told Mendes many times that I have a problem: if I could, I’d go to every game, no matter the weather or the opponent. I have dragged my dad to matchdays when there were storm warnings in effect; I have taken Mendes and my brother to games we were sure to lose. And so it was again, in March of this year, a couple of weeks before I was due to fly back to New York for work. São Paulo was playing a league game in the stadium of a fourth division team because our homegrounds had been rented out for a series of AC/DC concerts. It had been raining for days and the weather was dour. The stadium was on the other side of the city; it had no roof and none of the modern amenities and infrastructure you’d find in the home fields of higher division teams, including ours.

Mendes met me after work, unprepared for the rain, and I lent him my dad’s rain jacket. After we made our way around the walls of this stadium we’d never been to before, we were caught in a wave of fans trying to enter through the small entrance on the side of a highway. Because the stadium didn’t have metal detectors, the military police were patting down every fan, and we only managed to get in halfway through the first half, just as the rain got thicker. The pitch was muddy, the play meager, and we spent most of the match squinting to avoid the water flogging our faces, as the stormy winds teased the smell of barbecue from the restaurant next door, making us half-wish we’d stayed back to watch the game on TV.

When the final whistle blew, we’d won: two-to-zero. Mendes and I went back to my place, drenched, ordered a pizza, and talked about things I don’t even remember. The food, like the match, was an excuse to spend more time together before I left for New York again. The season carried on in unsurprisingly mediocre ways, but every other week we’d connect over watching soccer before opening up about moments with our partners, our friends, and our family that we couldn’t share in person.

Over a decade into this long-distance friendship, we’ve grown used to looking for the openings in the wall. They may not always be there. Sometimes the rain, or the military police, or losing our seven-point lead in the national championship with a handful of games left in the season only to capitulate into agony and a fourth-place finish, slows us down. But we keep looking.

Not long ago, during one of those times when I was back from school, I remember overhearing my mom on the phone with a friend, telling her I was home. “He’s seeing his brother tomorrow,” she said. “He has a brother in New York and a brother in São Paulo.”

[post_title] => Friends from Far Afield [post_excerpt] => How a shared love of soccer transformed my long-distance friendship. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => friends-from-far-afield-adult-friendship-week-soccer-sao-paulo-fc-brazil-long-distance [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-05 17:41:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-05 17:41:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10821 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 5, 2026August 5, 2026

Friends from Far Afield

by Francisco Attié

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10817 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-04 17:02:07 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:02:07 [post_content] =>

Growing up, I was afraid to look at myself in the mirror. Then my friends helped me recognize the woman looking back.

A mirror might be an innocuous part of your life, but for most of mine, it was filled with the unknown. Each accidental glance meant confronting abstract shapes that filled me with dread. I knew my real reflection was buried somewhere underneath. But I feared if I looked too closely I still wouldn't be able to comprehend what I saw; a fear equal to the tales of Lovecraft.

I wasn’t born afraid of my reflection, but instead, taught to bear witness to my incongruence by the world around me. As a child, my gender was irrelevant to me until people started telling me how it was supposed to be; how it was supposed to look. I’d never wanted to wear a dress, had never liked the color pink, and had never cared for unicorns. But I chafed at the obligation that I had to be something at all.

Growing up, I found an unconscious comfort in a digital social life, where I was freed from those gendered obligations. I recessed into this world, filling my days with hours-long voice calls while playing video games with strangers online. I felt safe from the abstract fear I’d always carried. In the digital world, it didn’t matter what I looked like, or what body I was born into. I had full agency over how others “saw” me. This is the reason so many young trans kids find comfort in communities online: a separation from the physical. But I wasn’t ready to look inward yet.

My connections became tethered to a screen. Even when I did get together with neighborhood friends to play video games or watch movies in their families’ basements, the chances that I'd catch myself reflected were limited. The screen acted as bait so we wouldn't have to look at one another. For a kid who would put a blanket over their bedroom mirror, this was a pretty nice situation to be in. It was only when the monitor shut down that I could see the unknown looking back at me again.

This abstract discomfort I’d always felt finally took shape as I entered an all-boys high school. Standing in a hallway amongst a jungle of teen boys for the first time, I had only one thought: I’m not like them. Maybe every mirror I'd encountered before that moment was unfocused, and this one epiphany corrected my vision, revealing what was always buried on the other side of the mirror: myself. And now, I could see that she was suffocating.

As realization and panic set in, I recessed further online. My only gasps of air came from my growing digital social life. Unlike the grand stage it often feels like today, the internet of my adolescence felt like a town square, where I could meet people I’d otherwise never would. Slowly, my digital circle expanded. Along with select friends from previous school years, I began building a community of trusted people across the country, picked up in different virtual lobbies. I’d spend hours on Skype calls with dozens of friends late into the night, talking about gaming and politics and movies. Much to the certain dismay of our parents, these strangers became some of my closest friends.

After I left the jungle, I was ripped away from the safety of that digital circle. College revealed that my digital life was just a band-aid on a much deeper wound. It was there I finally understood that I was trans, and that hiding this would not only leave my reflection suffocating, but leave me suffocating, too. This urgency forced me to find trusted people around me, and begin to transition socially—online and off. I changed my name to Allison across both worlds, and slightly altered how I dressed offline to feel more congruent with who I wanted to be. I became recognized at school and at work as myself.

In the process, something surprising happened: other people saw the woman in my reflection before I could. I began relishing in my newfound community, many of them other queer folk on their own identity journeys. It was healing to see, in living color, that I was not alone. They encouraged me to celebrate milestones; hormone anniversaries became an additional birthday worth celebrating. The thoughts and feelings I’d hidden my whole life became open conversations. Panic slowed, and the tightness in my chest and the weight on my shoulders began to ease.

To be accepted was like a breath of fresh air on the first warm day of spring. I wish it was simple enough to say this solved all my problems; I still feared my reflection and would flinch whenever I accidentally caught a glimpse. But occasionally, I’d recognize the woman looking back at me, and even be able to meet her eye.

What I previously thought impossible and out of reach was suddenly right in front of me. I wasn’t born loving myself, but I was taught how to. And the people who taught me this—the people who allowed me to be myself—are who I consider family now.

During the pandemic, I traveled across New York visiting state parks with two of these friends from college. We’d take long hikes together, and whenever we’d reach the top of a mountain, I’d finally feel untethered from a screen. On one of these hikes, I decided I didn’t want to make it to the peak. I let my friends go off as I clambered up a small boulder, two-thirds up the trail. For the very first time, I allowed myself to just sit and breathe. I was unburdened by the weight of my own fears, and my body relaxed, allowing me to take a nap on top of the comfiest boulder in central New York.

Those dear strangers online are now family, too. A year ago, we all traveled across the world to meet for the first time in Tokyo, Japan. It's a beautifully strange experience to finally meet people you’ve spoken to through a screen for around a decade in the streets of Asakusa. Yet it never felt like we were “meeting” for the first time; instead, we were celebrating our collective friendship. With roughly a dozen of us, we explored a new country together, visiting shrines and possibly every 7-Eleven in Tokyo. They even helped my now-wife plan her proposal to me on that very trip. (They were also the first to know about our engagement, almost a week before our blood families did.)

This community pulled me out from the other side of the mirror. Each person was a hand stretching out. Without them, I likely would not be here. I cherish my community so deeply, and even though life has taken its grip, we still find ways to talk and to see each other; we find ways to make time.

These days, I don’t cover the mirrors in my apartment. I’m not immune to the fears I once had, and will probably always harbor some form of self-reproach. But mostly, I am living with enthusiasm, despite how hellbent this country is on targeting people like me. With each new policy enacted, any moment of fear I have is quickly assuaged by a friend sending support or a loving message. At a time when I have less protections than ever, I somehow feel the most safe.

You don’t notice healing, you realize you’ve healed. Walking on the street used to require the mental anguish of shutting my peripherals off in fear of catching a distorted reflection of myself in a car or shop window. Sitting in a subway car meant closing my eyes to not see a blurry reflection in the glass on the other side. Until one day, it didn’t.

I wish I could go back in time and tell younger me to not look away. I know if she ever did look for long enough, she would’ve seen herself with a now common smile, surrounded by friends who love her. Just because she didn’t know who she was looking at didn’t mean it was some Lovecraftian horror. Sometimes, it’s just your reflection waiting to be recognized, waiting to be freed.

[post_title] => Befriending My Reflection [post_excerpt] => Growing up, I was afraid to look at myself in the mirror. Then my friends helped me recognize the woman looking back at me. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => befriending-my-reflection-adult-friendship-week-old-friends-identity-mirror-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:23:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:23:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10817 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 4, 2026August 4, 2026

Befriending My Reflection

by Allison Baker

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10823 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-03 15:56:25 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-03 15:56:25 [post_content] =>

Beyond the classroom and in real life, a teacher-student friendship can be one of the best and most enduring kinds there is.

A card arrived in the mail last week, my name written in a cursive I know well. It had been a couple of weeks since her last letter, and I eagerly sat down on my couch to read it. She told me how everyone at home, “both human and animal,” was doing well, how many cats she was currently fostering (thirteen), and yet, that she didn’t mind the label that came with it. “The Crazy Cat Lady is definitely somebody I identify with,” she wrote, and of course, that made me giggle. Her playful way with words paired with self-deprecation have always been uniquely hers. This I’ve known since long before we became friends.

My penpal and I met one morning more than three decades ago, when I walked to the end of a high school hallway full of lockers and into her classroom. I can only imagine how confused I looked to everyone on that first day of school: Shy and slightly awkward, I spoke no English and was dressed very differently from my peers. I’d only landed in that small New Jersey town a couple of weeks prior, from my home in Caracas, Venezuela. I was fourteen years old, and had attended the same school for most of my life. Suddenly, I was one of the “new kids,” and only one of three in the high school who spoke Spanish, who had the great luck of being assigned to Mrs. Boutin’s English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) class.

I don’t remember her being a Cat Lady in those years. In fact, in one of her many letters this year, she told me she used to be a dog person until she’d helped a neighbor trap, neuter, and return a bunch of feral cats, then decided to keep doing it. She found the work humbling. It made her feel useful. I guess it wasn’t much different than teaching English to a bunch of deer-in-the-headlights scared and somewhat feral adolescents who had come from all walks of life and many corners of the world, including Vietnam, Argentina, India, and China, in my class alone. Some of us had experienced trauma, others came from families seeking work, but no matter how we ended up in that New Jersey high school, every one of us took refuge in her classroom. I’d like to think we all needed it.

We all looked up to Mrs. Boutin because she was patient, laughing off our teenage drama and championing us as we uttered our very first English words, thick accents and all. Like many of my classmates, I’d often swing by after the school bell rang just to talk. She would ask me about my old life. Did I miss it? Would I get to visit home again, and if so, what would be on the top of my list of things to do? Who did I most want to see? She listened intently to my melancholy answers like few others did. It kept me emotionally present at a time in my life when it would have been much easier to push my complex feelings under the rug and simply do whatever I could to fit in (which I did anyway).

Within a year, I was able to defend myself in English; in another three years, I graduated and left for college. I discovered journalism, moved around—within the U.S. and abroad—got married, and, almost twenty years after leaving high school, had a kid. Now that I think about it, becoming a parent must have prompted my search for her: caring for a new life made me appreciate the old ones all the more. I found her through social media. When she responded a day or two later, she insisted that I call her by her first name: Juanita.

In Sister Outsider, poet and essayist Audre Lorde says that being a teacher means learning to talk to students to get “through to them” so that “their own processes would start.” She likens it to a fire, something you could “literally incite, like a riot." By the time I found Juanita again in 2014, I’d been teaching storytelling for a few years, trying my best to incite my students like she had me. Until then, I hadn’t realized how teaching could be political, both an act of kindness and of rebellion. How, beyond the classroom and in real life, a teacher-student friendship could be one of the best and most enduring kinds there is.

After a few email exchanges, we realized snail mail was much better for us both. Juanita would often finish her letters with an invitation to visit until, four years ago, I decided to accept and travel to Mississippi, where she lives with her husband, dog, and a rotating crew of at least a dozen former street cats she’s trying to find homes for. She was the same Juanita I remembered—with her Puerto Rican Spanglish, her hair short and her skirts long—except both she and I were a few decades older. She insisted I stay at their home and sleep in a hot pink guestroom she’d dubbed the “Pepto-Bismol.” That first night, I dreamt I was back in high school; it was a good dream.

Even though she’s long retired, Juanita still works most weekdays as a volunteer for local trap, neuter, and release efforts, which are few and far between in Mississippi. The morning after I arrived, I came along as she drove us around town to all the spots where she knew there were feral cat populations. I watched as she counted how many cats were in each, gave them food and water, and took note of any new litters or sick animals. Most of the cats scampered away as soon as they saw me. But they knew and trusted Juanita, just like the workers we ran into at the University of Mississippi campus, and the man at the gas station where she and I grabbed “the best fried chicken on a stick in all of Mississippi” after her volunteer shift. And just like me and my fellow classmates who used to seek her out after school.

I left Mississippi feeling grateful and whole. In just three days, we’d visited three art museums, ate obscene amounts of delicious fried food, went on long sightseeing drives, discussed religion and politics and race, and visited her friends who seemed delighted to hear that I, Juanita’s former high school student, was now her friend, too.

Sometimes I think the term “friend” doesn’t quite do our relationship justice, though. Not because of our age difference or the deep respect I continue to feel for her as my former teacher. Juanita knows me like a parent; her gentle yet no-nonsense life advice has always reminded me of my late grandmother whose Spanish-language proverbs were just as funny and true. But she also continues to be a source of comfort, like she was many years ago. “Be at peace,” she texted recently, when I told her I needed to put our beloved cat to sleep. “You will know what to do as each moment arrives.” She was right.

Can a fairy godmother be a “friend”? Absolutely. We are lucky to find (and keep) even one such friend over the course of a life, and I believe Juanita is mine. Her letters arrive in the mail with printed out poems or books I haven’t yet read that seem to address my moods in ways that sometimes spook me. Like the Mary Oliver poem, “How Would You Live Then?,” which she’d cut down to a four-by-five piece of paper and slipped inside a card that arrived last week. “What if the mockingbird came into the house with you and became your advisor?” its third line read, which I happened to scan early one evening while I sat on my bed, listening to our resident mockingbird sing in the front yard.

I am still drafting my latest snail mail response to her, in our now-customary English mixed in with Spanish, following our thread, asking about summers in Mississippi, her garden, and her foster cats. I am also planning another visit, already knowing which room she’ll insist I stay in when she replies, in that playful way that’s uniquely hers, and never fails to make me laugh.

[post_title] => Friendship as a Second Language [post_excerpt] => Beyond the classroom and in real life, a teacher-student friendship can be one of the best and most enduring kinds there is. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => old-friends-adult-friendship-esl-english-second-language-teacher-student [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 15:56:27 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 15:56:27 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10823 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 3, 2026August 3, 2026

Friendship as a Second Language

by Ruxandra Guidi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10797 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-07-30 20:25:57 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-07-30 20:25:57 [post_content] =>

A strangely hopeful book that looks at the longer arc of history to find lessons for abolition today.

A few years ago, I spent a couple of nights at the Panama Hotel in Seattle’s International District. The 1910 five-story brick building was designed for migrant workers by the city’s first Japanese-American architect, Sabro Ozasa, and smelled as mildewy as it was old. The wooden floors creaked loudly and the water traveling down the pipes roared whenever someone above me flushed the toilet. When booking the hotel, I had no idea about its quirks nor its story.

On February 19, 1942, after then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forcefully removed from their homes and taken to internment camps. As a hub for Seattle’s Japanese community, the Panama Hotel offered to store many of these families’ heirlooms, their furniture, and trunks full of other valuable objects, until they’d be able to come home. But even after the last of these internment camps was shut down in 1946—after myriad families lost their homes, their livelihoods, and were forcefully relocated yet again—many personal possessions went unclaimed. Today, there are still around 8,500 objects in the hotel’s basement—a beautiful and devastating testament to its place in history, and to the immeasurable harm these camps left behind. If you go to the tea house on the first floor, you can see many of them through a glass panel: dusty leather trunks, silk kimonos, books, purses, and the yellowed front page of a newspaper announcing forced evacuation orders during World War II.

I think about those unclaimed family objects every time I read yet another headline describing the terrors of Trump’s turbocharged deportation campaign. In 2025 alone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 442,637 people; according to the latest data, there are between 60,000 and 70,000 migrants stuck in ICE detention in the U.S. More than 70% of them have no criminal convictions.

Author John Washington (a fellow journalist and friend) has been investigating what he calls the “immigration enforcement regime” for years. His 2023 book, The Case for Open Borders, called for the abolition of border control as a way to minimize suffering and bring more equitable global economic growth. His latest, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, is an unapologetic look at the echoes of Japanese internment. As its title suggests, it is also a timely how-to guide for blocking the creation of new immigrant detention centers and the repurposing of old ones, and for changing the perception of migrants as “a population subject to detention under the guise of military necessity.”

How to Close a Camp shows how the more things change, the more they stay the same. How, just like Chinese migrants were detained as soon as they crossed the U.S.-Canada border in the 1880s, today’s brown and Black migrants are being kidnapped by masked federal agents and kept behind bars in horrid conditions for months. Part of that history, too, is the prison boom of the 1980s tied to the “War on Drugs,” and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security two decades ago as a response to the “War on Terror.”

“A camp warps and degrades reality both for those in fear of ending up in one and for those living alongside them,” Washington writes. “Our decisions as a society, meanwhile, are uprooting more and more people from their homes, pushing people to flee, and failing to meet them with the protection, basic rights, freedom, or dignity they seek.”

In spite of all this, How to Close a Camp is a strangely hopeful book. It is much more interested in the longer arc of history and what lessons it brings for abolition today. By examining successful direct action and pressure campaigns from the past, Washington identifies six main ways to get communities involved in exposing—and shutting down—the brutal for-profit immigrant detention system. “Closing a detention center is rarely a single strike,” he writes. “It’s a siege: conditions exposed through sustained communications with those inside, licenses challenged, permits denied, inspections weaponized, contracts terminated.” The sixth step? Let everyone know about your findings and what they mean. “You need to harness the research into a narrative, then start pressing on those levers of power.”

Albeit slowly, this shift is already happening: “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention facility built in the Florida Everglades, shut down last month after multiple lawsuits and public outcry over its inhumane conditions. With How to Close a Camp as our guide, we gain a better understanding of how we can begin to close more of them.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "How to Close a Camp" by John Washington [post_excerpt] => "How to Close a Camp" is a strangely hopeful book that looks at the longer arc of history to find lessons for abolition today. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => how-to-close-a-camp-by-john-washington-immigration-detention-internment-book-of-the-month-botm [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-07-30 20:25:59 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-07-30 20:25:59 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10797 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 30, 2026July 30, 2026

Book of the Month: “How to Close a Camp” by John Washington

by Ruxandra Guidi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10772 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-07-22 19:39:36 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-07-22 19:39:36 [post_content] =>

It's been over four years since I moved to Japan, and I'm still baffled by the country's food sexism.

My first visit to Japan was a flurry of city lights, fresh sushi, and cherry blossoms in 2017. Between crying (joyful tears) three times in the Studio Ghibli Museum, and chasing down a cotton candy rainbow in Harajuku, I returned to the U.S. thinking, That was the best trip of my life. But on my second visit two years later, I started seeing the societal cracks I’d initially overlooked. While talking to a local near Tokyo’s Arakawa River about our favorite Japanese foods, I excitedly shared my love for strawberry shortcakes.

“That’s for women,” he replied.

I was stunned.

It’s been over four years now since I moved to Tokyo. My early ignorant bliss of Japan being a fantasyland—when it is in fact a very real place with very real problems—has long subsided. But my echoing bafflement over the country’s food sexism has remained and only grown over time.

Japan has a misogyny problem. In June 2023, the country faced international criticism for sending a male minister, instead of a woman, to lead a G7 meeting on women's empowerment. According to the 2024 Global Gender Gap Report (a way to measure gender equality across categories like economic participation, education, health, political empowerment, and more), Japan ranked 118th out of 146 countries. And despite electing its first female prime minister in 2025, which on the surface, seemed like a win for equality, it was a superficial victory: Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi ascended to power as a hardline conservative who championed traditional gender roles. She even voted against a woman becoming Emperor in 2021, echoing her political party’s stance on maintaining the country’s sexist male-only succession rule. The decision risks the end of Japan's 1,500-year-old monarchy, the oldest continuous hereditary dynasty in the world.

In a society built upon patriarchy (and actively maintaining it), these entrenched beliefs have far-reaching ripple effects that seep into the fabric of everyday life. Groping on packed commuter trains and notorious workplace harassment are just the tip of the misogynistic iceberg. From lingering high heel mandates to the negative social stigmas around showing cleavage, there are countless other everyday instances that feel like never-ending microaggressive daggers, magnifying the depths of the country’s prejudice and discrimination against women. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that this bleeds into the country’s relationship with food. It’s even unusual for women to be sushi chefs, due to false beliefs that women’s hands are too warm to handle raw fish and that menstruation can impact a person’s ability to taste.

As a professional food writer, I’ve long been privy to how sexism impacts dining culture. But in Tokyo, it’s something I’ve seen and experienced firsthand. Recently, while working on a restaurant guide, I pushed my normal ramen-eating limits by visiting 10 different shops in a month, continuously finding myself in a line of mostly, if not all, men. It’s common to see queues of men in business suits waiting for hot ramen throughout the city, but it was only after seeing it so often up-close that I picked up on—and felt—the stark gender imbalance.

Reading restaurant reviews in Japanese only further confirmed my growing suspicions. “This ramen isn’t good for women because it’s too big” was a common theme; or on the flip side, “This place is amazing! Even I, as a [mere] woman, can eat the whole bowl!!!” There was also a constant pattern of reviewers mentioning whether it was acceptable for women to dine alone at certain ramen shops, or if the ramen was “light” enough for women to eat.

The message across these reviews was clear: Women can have ramen, but it can’t be too large, or too fatty, and must be somewhere acceptable to the male gaze.

What I’ve seen for ramen is the same for sweets, but the inverse. Inside many dessert shops, a sea of women customers quietly sit and enjoy their cakes and other pastries, without a man in sight. The bare walls, minimal decor, and ambient slurping sounds of a standard ramen shop are replaced with detailed crown modeling and the clinking of tiny forks on floral porcelain plates. Lines of men in business suits are swapped with lines of women in dresses and skirts. While I have also seen men in these shops on occasion, they are often accompanied by a woman on what appears to be a date.

As an “outsider,” especially as an American living in Japan, I recognize it’s easier to notice and be critical of a culture that’s not my own. After all, the U.S. has its own sexist food norms, and is far from immune to toxic stereotypes around food. Remember Women Laughing Alone with Salad? Or when tall, bearded men were wrapping meat logs in bacon? Today, guys are slapping raw meat down on countertops so hard and so often that it’s become background noise on TikTok, all while the current administration uses MAHA and MAGA to strengthen the stereotype of meat consumption as a cultural symbol of “traditional” masculinity. The U.S. might have slightly greater gender parity with regards to desserts (even though they still lean more heavily towards women), but like many countries, we are not exempt from our own forms of food misogyny.

This is to say, Japan’s culturally-specific gendered relationships with food do not live in a void. There is home-grown food sexism in Japan, yes, but there are just as many beliefs that have developed via global influences, including its diet culture amongst women.

Despite the ongoing patriarchal stronghold, cultural shifts in food have also started to emerge here. There’s a rise in a movement called ramen girls (or ramen joshi in Japanese), where some women make a concerted effort to slurp down as much ramen as they can. Women ramen influencers have also attracted large audiences in recent years, like Satoko Morimoto, who proudly claims to eat more than 600 bowls of ramen a year and has amassed over 53,000 Instagram followers. More men are leaving the post-war “carnivorous” image behind and are embracing the sweeter things in life, too. Some refer to them as “herbivore men,” a term that can carry a derogatory image because of its outward rejection of old masculine ideals—but they persist all the same.

When I do witness a man enjoying dessert alone in a room full of women, or a woman dining solo going ham on a bowl of tsukemen—I think to myself, YES! To me, it’s a small, quiet act of resistance against gender expectations. There’s a lot of room for progress, but these small changes can have a snowball effect in changing not just Japan’s food culture but more widely, its entrenched national sexism. I believe anyone, regardless of their gender, should be able to eat ramen, little cakes, and whatever else they want, whenever they damn well please. The food doesn’t care, so why should we?

When I think back to my second trip to Japan, I always remember my chat with that Tokyo local. After he told me that cake was only for women, I asked him, “Do you not like shortcakes? They’re so good!” He looked away shyly. “I do,” he said, “but I don’t tell people.”

Wherever he is, I hope he’s more than just occasionally throwing down on the tallest, thickest slices of strawberry shortcake out there, fully owning his sweet tooth for all to see.

[post_title] => Let Men Eat Cake (and Women Eat Ramen) [post_excerpt] => It's been over four years since I moved to Japan, and I'm still baffled by the country's food sexism. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => japan-food-sexism-culture-ramen-cake-desserts-tokyo-eating-sanae-takaichi-soapbox [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 20:28:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 20:28:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10772 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 22, 2026August 3, 2026

Let Men Eat Cake (and Women Eat Ramen)

by Kiera Wright-Ruiz

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10768 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-07-17 20:38:29 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-07-17 20:38:29 [post_content] =>

Györgyi Gálik on trust, agency, and the invisible work of peacebuilding.

What are the conditions that make democracy possible?

This is the question that animates the work of Györgyi Gálik, the Hungarian co-founder of Governing Together at Dark Matter Labs, a non-profit research and design lab that builds alternative models for future economies. Unlike many democracy practitioners, Gálik is less interested in designing the next civic platform or participation process than she is in understanding the invisible conditions that ensure their success: trust, agency, kindness, dignity, psychological safety, and fostering relationships that allow people to govern together.

For Gálik, peacebuilding is not something that begins after violence, but rather the work of cultivating the social, relational, and institutional conditions that make violence less likely in the first place. In that sense, peacebuilding and democracy are not separate projects to her: They are expressions of the same underlying work.

"Peace begins much earlier,” she tells me “It begins in the everyday conditions that help people feel seen, valued, connected, and capable of shaping the world around them. Peacebuilding is the slow, everyday work of creating the conditions where people can act, choose, disagree, repair, and shape the systems that govern their lives.”

“Peacebuilding is less about the absence of violence and more about the presence of agency," she continues. "That is also how I understand democracy."

Learning Democracy Through Loss

For Gálik, this understanding emerged from both political observation and personal experience.

Raised in Hungary and having lived across Europe and North America, she became fascinated by the ways political systems shape everyday life. But her deepest lessons came from watching how people lose meaning when they lose agency—something she witnessed in her own home.

Throughout her life, Gálik’s father struggled with alcoholism, and died tragically at a time when addiction was treated primarily as a moral failing or personal weakness, rather than a consequence of trauma, disconnection, and unmet needs. What he lacked, she now believes, was not willpower alone, but community, dignity, empathy, meaning, and purpose.

Over time, she began to understand what happened to her father not simply as a family story, but also a political one: The same conditions that leave individuals vulnerable also leave democracies vulnerable.

Citizens who are filled with resentment and hurt, and feel powerless, unseen, and unheard, become easier to manipulate. People stripped of purpose and dignity become susceptible to cynicism and authoritarian appeals. Far more alarming, this can happen without most even realizing it: It has always frightened Gálik how much people can normalize almost anything if the conditions are made gradually enough.

"The personal and the political were never really separate to begin with," she says.

When Democracy Exists Without Genuine Choice

Few people understand this dynamic more viscerally than Hungarians.

Gálik points to recent investigations documenting how authoritarian governments can maintain the appearance of democracy while systematically narrowing citizens' choices in reality. Elections continue. Participation technically remains available. Yet fear, dependency, poverty, and intimidation hollow out any meaningful sense of agency.

This is something Hungarians have experienced firsthand. The former government stayed in power for 16 years, not simply by putting money in people’s pockets, but by deliberately maintaining widespread vulnerability with a disturbing level of precision. Threatening parents that their children could be taken away. Telling elderly people they could lose their place in care homes. Threatening families that their heating, gas, or electricity could be switched off, or that they’d lose their jobs. Letting criminals off in return for their votes.

What makes this system so chilling is how functionally, it narrows people’s choices without ever pushing them outside a system that depends on their votes and participation in order to maintain the illusion of a functioning democracy.

"A society can have consultation, elections, surveys, town halls, and participation processes, and still not have genuine democratic choice," Gálik explains.

For her, democracy is not simply the presence of participation, but meaningful participation.

That distinction feels increasingly relevant far beyond Hungary. Across many democracies, citizens are invited to participate while struggling with economic insecurity, housing crises, burnout, and declining trust in institutions. Formal participation remains, but if people cannot afford to lose their job, speak up, move home, access care, or have the capacity to imagine a different future, then democracy becomes procedural rather than real.

Democracy's Invisible Infrastructure

One of the most striking ideas in Gálik's work is her belief that, like any seed, democratic ideals need the rich microbiome that sustains healthy, regenerative soil to grow.

In politics, we tend to focus on what is visible: elections, policies, public meetings, constitutions, and institutions. But just as a plant depends on an unseen ecosystem of microorganisms to survive, healthy democracies depend on countless invisible interactions and flows of exchange. Integrity. Curiosity. Reciprocity. The ability to repair harm. The willingness to work across differences.

Without these, both on an individual and societal level, democratic institutions may continue to function on paper while becoming increasingly brittle in practice.

As a result of New Public Management, society’s dominant doctrine since the 1980s, and our broader desire to control complexity, most governments have invested heavily in measurable outputs and performance targets. Yet many technocratic reforms designed to improve efficiency and enable growth have unintentionally weakened the relationships that allow societies to function. Gálik argues that we have become experts at producing outputs, visions, and strategies while neglecting the human infrastructure that turns those outputs into meaningful outcomes for people and communities. A city can produce an award-winning climate strategy and meet every reporting requirement, yet still struggle to deliver meaningful change when departments are siloed, staff lack the capacity to collaborate across mandates, public trust is low, and political leaders are unable to sustain collective action over time.

"We are meeting the targets," one of Gálik’s colleagues observes, "but missing the point."

The Gendered Labor of Holding Society Together

The consequences of this invisible infrastructure are not distributed equally. Much of the work required to maintain relationships, build trust, manage conflict, and hold communities together is often performed by women, yet they remain largely unseen, undervalued, and uncompensated.

Like many women working in politics, public institutions, and social change, Gálik is familiar with the invisible labor required simply to be heard.

Having lived in seven different countries, she has encountered remarkably similar patterns. Many women learn very early that they need to be significantly overprepared to be taken equally seriously. They watch as strategic contributions go unnoticed. They learn to manage their tone, language, appearance, and demeanor to navigate institutions that were rarely designed with them in mind. They learn to present as smart enough, but never too smart.

The endless examples of code-switching she’s collected from women around the world are both humorous and sobering: wearing glasses to appear more serious, wearing a ring to signal they have a husband and are therefore to be taken seriously, bringing brothers as stand-ins to unlock credibility during negotiations.

But Gálik also sees an unexpected strength in these experiences.

Women, she argues, often become experts at reading power because they have spent their lives navigating it. They know how to build trust, maintain connection during conflict, and hold complexity without collapsing into domination.

These are not secondary skills. They are precisely what modern democracies so desperately need.

Gálik has never accepted a passive role in public life. Nor has she believed that the capacity to initiate change should be reserved for those who occupy positions of formal authority. Her advice to women facing authoritarianism is practical and urgent: find each other, protect each other, document what is happening, and refuse isolation. Throughout history, women have created new forms of communication when official channels become dangerous—from underground publishing networks to other mediums of resistance (including quilts, sewing circles, and silent public gatherings). That creativity and resourcefulness remain one of democracy's most enduring resources.

Trust as Democratic Infrastructure

Throughout our conversation, Gálik repeatedly returns to one word: trust.

Not trust as a feeling, nor as a given. But trust as infrastructure, and daily practice.

Roads do not emerge spontaneously. Neither do water systems, bridges, or electrical grids. They must be built, maintained, repaired, and protected. Trust requires the same kind of investment.

When trust collapses, participation becomes performative. Citizens may still show up, but they no longer believe their contributions matter. Democracy continues as a procedure while losing its legitimacy as a shared project.

The question should not be whether citizens trust institutions. The question is whether institutions behave in trustworthy ways. Do they listen? Repair harm? Share power? Tell the truth? Follow through?

These are governance questions, Gálik argues. But they are also peacebuilding questions.

The Work Ahead

Just weeks before our conversation, Hungarian voters ended their sixteen years of increasingly authoritarian rule. Yet Gálik cautions against viewing electoral victories as endpoints. Removing an authoritarian leader is only the beginning. The deeper challenge is rebuilding trust, institutions, civic confidence, and the everyday habits of democratic life among a population long treated as invisible and disposable.

The other challenge is dealing with the rightful resentment these governments leave behind. How might we see possibility in the widespread anger that results from an oppressive regime? Anger is a healthy and necessary response to injustice. It can be one of the most powerful motivating forces for change. The problem is what happens to anger when it has nowhere to go, when it is met with indifference, with the expectation to just move on, with contempt, or with further exclusion. There, it hardens into something more destructive.

As Gálik puts it, “The answer is not to suppress anger or to fear it. The question is whether we can create places where it can be transformed into agency, participation, and collective action. Democracies do not heal by asking people to suppress or forget what happened to them. They heal when people experience that their voices matter again.”

As our conversation ends, Gálik returns to the same idea that has guided her work from the beginning. She hopes that in ten years, Governing Together will have helped to build a serious field of practice around the relational foundations of democracy—one that nurtures both individual and societal wellbeing.

Democracy is not solely defended in court or in government halls. Peacebuilding doesn’t only happen after conflict. Both depend on whether people still believe they have agency in shaping a better future together—and whether they feel their lives carry meaning and purpose within it. Democracy, then, must be something we practice every day in our workplaces, neighborhoods, families, institutions, and communities. These everyday acts are the nutrients of democratic life. They sustain the social microbiome—the living ecosystem of relationships from which trust, cooperation, collective agency, and the belief that change is possible can grow.

It is a deceptively simple idea. And perhaps one of the most radical democratic arguments of our time.

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July 17, 2026August 3, 2026

The Soil Beneath Democracy

by Lorelei Kelly

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A few books to add to your TBR pile, whether you're on vacation or just trying to avoid the heat.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me absolutely floored me. How do you write honestly and with love about a single mother who, as she puts it, was “her shelter and her storm”? A brilliant but often cruel woman, Mary Roy ferociously took on the patriarchal world, building a school in Kerala on a shoestring budget, and inspiring cultish devotion in the students and staff while showing none of that love to her own children.

Mary Roy's children were molded by her, and also by their fight to break free of her. Having been raised by a similarly tyrannical, brilliant, and selectively generous parent, I found this book riveting. Arundhati Roy doesn’t always spell it out, but you can find echoes of her childhood in her relationships, her writing, and her activism. She's also a gorgeous writer, and the life she goes on to lead is fascinating. In addition to family stories, she chronicles her student architecture days, brief career as an actor and screenwriter, her conflicts with Hindu nationalists, and her relationships with communist counterinsurgencies.

—Anna Lind-Guzik, Founder

Real Americans by Rachel Khong

Once I started Real Americans by Rachel Khong, I couldn’t put it down. It’s a multi-generational novel that dives deep into the lives of a Chinese-American family, touching on topics like race, class, sci-fi, and the American Dream. The story is broken down into three main sections, highlighting a different family member from each generation. By the end of every part, I was 100% invested in the character; and then, a big twist would be revealed, leaving me glued to the book. It’s a first-generation American story that I’ve never seen before. Even after finishing it, I keep replaying scenes in my head because it was just that good.

—Kiera Wright-Ruiz, Social Media Manager

The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit

I’m a longtime fan of Rebecca Solnit, so I knew her latest book would immediately go on my library request list. The long line of people ahead of me just proves how hungry people are for her hopeful vision and thoughtful reflections on a more interconnected, antiracist world. I’ve just started the audiobook, read by Solnit herself, which is a soothing balm to listen to amidst the chaotic news headlines flying at us all the time. She zooms out to look at the bigger picture of history since the 1960s, and how social change happens slowly and incrementally over time because of courageous ordinary people, like any of us.

As Solnit writes, “This is a book about things that happened only because people showed up, only because people believed the world could be different, only because people became the forces for change, sometimes by joining together, sometimes by chasing down new frameworks of possibilities and telling the world about them, only because people didn’t give up when it looked like they were losing, only because they married the wildest idealism to the staunchest pragmatism.”

—Erin Zimmer Strenio, Executive Director

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu

Growing up in Rhode Island, Ruth—the narrator of Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds—is a little isolated and a little inhibited; then, she becomes obsessed with the brave, outspoken Maria, the only other Black girl in her Catholic school class. They become best friends, and from there, the novel tells the story of their tumultuous relationship: from growing up in their small hometown to attending a liberal arts college together to navigating the New York art scene as adults. My experience differs greatly from the narrator’s, but I’m also a former student of both New England Catholic schools and a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, and a current voyeur of NYC’s creative class. Spending time with Wambugu’s novel both affirmed and expanded my understanding of those experiences—but I think the book also offers an opportunity for any reader to consider powerful questions about friendship, family, art, class, identity, and belonging.

—Marissa Lorusso, Newsletter Editor

Kin by Tayari Jones

I’m a few chapters away from completing Tayari Jones’ Kin and it’s easily my favorite novel of the year so far. I am a fan of Jones’ writing, and as with all her books, in Kin, I've been seamlessly transported into the world she's created. Kin’s story begins in rural Louisiana, where the relationship between two friends—Vernice (Niecy) and Annie—is the central focus, then follows them as they set out on two seemingly divergent paths. Their friendship stems from both having grown up without their mothers: Niecy’s mother was murdered by her father when she was six months old while Annie’s mother abandoned her just days after she was born, with the former’s aunt and latter’s grandmother raising the girls respectively. As much about friendship, motherhood, and the segregated South during the civil rights period, Kin has enveloped me in grief, courage, and what it means to love and be loved through loss. A true gift of a book.

—Kovie Biakolo, Contributing Editor

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

While I lean into my soft girl era in Upstate New York this summer, I've found myself with a little more space to listen to the whistling of the trees, admire the fuzz on a bumble bee, and smell the flowers in bloom. My instructor for an herbalism course recommended this book to me, and it's been a perfect reminder that there is a whole lot more to learn from nature when you give yourself the time to study it.

The Serviceberry is a short but humbling meditation on how nature and Indigenous traditions can show us the power of gratitude and reciprocity, which its author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, identifies as the "gift economy." In observing the serviceberry tree, she shares how its fruit circulates throughout ecosystems, nourishing and supporting many forms of life. She also shares examples of Indigenous traditions that further remind us of this mutual exchange, and our obligation to respect living systems and be good stewards for future generations.

Kimmerer’s dual perspective as Indigenous woman and botanist informs her poetic and illustrative writing style: While she mentions the challenges to achieving this in our modern, consumer-driven world, her hope remains that the "gift economy" will live on, and create a larger web of gratitude culture.

—Jessica Granato, Project Manager

The Witch by Marie NDiaye

I have a weakness for contemporary fiction about witches—though not the pointy hat, black cat, Salem types—as it can be the perfect vessel for stories about shifting ideas on gender. The Witch by Marie NDiaye leans on some of the common stereotypes but turns them on their head; its main character, a suburban French mother, has “mysterious powers” she’d like to pass on to her daughters, yet she’s also refreshingly insecure about her ambitions. She is a witch like you and me, of this world, and the novel reads as if it could be set anywhere.

—Ruxandra Guidi, Managing Editor

Drop In by Deborah Stoll

As a long-time fan of professional skateboarding, I found Drop In by Deborah Stoll to be a desperately needed remedy to the culture’s male-dominated narrative. The first of its kind book focuses on the many women and LGBTQIA+ pioneers who embody what it means to be a skater: always getting back up, no matter how hard the fall. Stoll takes the reader through the career highs and lows of athletes ranging from Alana Smith, the first openly nonbinary athlete to compete in the Olympics, to Marbie Miller, an inadvertent trans icon who came out in the late 2010s.

It’s impossible not to feel like a fly on the wall as Stoll reveals these athletes' stories in such vibrant detail, you can almost hear the pop of an ollie and the wheels of a skateboard slamming into the ground. With a unique blend of narrative storytelling, direct quotes from the skaters, and expert voices to give larger cultural context, any reader will come away from Drop In with a much deeper understanding of a gnarly culture ready to skate forward from its complicated past.

—Allison Baker, Summer Intern

The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day

The Oldest Bitch Alive is the most original book I've read in recent memory. Living in a literal glass house in upstate New York, a French bulldog named Gelsomina contracts a pair of parasitic worms, and gains newfound consciousness of her mortality and a growing restlessness with her domestication. It's absurd without lacking depth, and weird in all the right ways; a stunning, philosophical meditation on what we consume, and what consumes us. Partly told from Gelsomina's perspective, partly from the worms' perspective, and occasionally through Gelsomina's human-parents and dog-brother (a younger French bulldog named Zampanó), the book is equal parts tender, funny, and devastating as it plumbs the depths of one dog's (and two parasites') ideas of freedom and containment. A life-affirming book that stares into the void, only to find something unexpectedly hopeful on the other side. (There's also a passage about a strawberry dog toy that absolutely gutted me.)

—Gina Mei, Executive Editor

[post_title] => What We're Reading This Summer [post_excerpt] => A few books to add to your TBR pile, whether you're on vacation or just trying to avoid the heat. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => summer-reading-2026-team-books-beach-reads-novels-nonfiction-fiction-arundhati-roy-rachel-khong-rebecca-solnit-stephanie-wambagu-tayari-jones-robin-wall-kimmerer-maria-ndiaye-deborah-stoll-morgan-day [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-07-13 02:42:46 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-07-13 02:42:46 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10738 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 10, 2026July 13, 2026

What We’re Reading This Summer

by The Conversationalist Team

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