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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.


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Y’all Ready for This?

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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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.


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Can Siblings Eventually Become Friends?

by Niya Doyle

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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 let's have 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 how we'd coincidentally spent time in the same small town in Ireland. 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 something so similar to what 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.


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Everyone Needs an Intergenerational Friendship

by Erin Zimmer Strenio

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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
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Friends from Far Afield

by Francisco Attié

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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.


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Befriending My Reflection

by Allison Baker

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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.


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Friendship as a Second Language

by Ruxandra Guidi

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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. 


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

by Ruxandra Guidi

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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.


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Let Men Eat Cake (and Women Eat Ramen)

by Kiera Wright-Ruiz

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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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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





Book cover for Arundhati Roy's "Mother Mary Comes to Me"





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





Book cover for "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





Book cover for "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





Book cover for "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





Book cover for "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
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What We’re Reading This Summer

by The Conversationalist Team

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In their own words, how people in Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Los Angeles are still showing up for their neighbors in the fight against ICE.





Minneapolis, MN — Molly M. 





In early December, kids stop coming to school. My daughter’s third grade class shrinks from 22 to 15, then eight. Over the next two weeks, a handful of parents and teachers raise funds for Christmas gifts and toiletries; organize rides; deliver big hunks of meat, tortillas, eggs, and beans. Families begin planning to send their kids back to school after the holidays. After my final food and supply delivery, I pat myself on the back. Wow, look at us. We did it!





Then, three days after winter break, Renee Good is shot in the face a mile from our house. ICE agents indiscriminately teargas a nearby high school. The city of Minneapolis cancels class for the week. The district announces distance learning for children terrified to leave home. I arrive at school to help organize tablets, Chromebooks, hotspots, and food. Hundreds of brown paper bags fill the room adjacent to the cafeteria; 175 students at my child’s school have opted into distance learning, and every single one needs something in this room. Our principal hovers over a spreadsheet. This is the craziest shit ever, she mumbles under her breath. I see a teacher crying, then another. 





I deliver supplies to four families. At the first stop, an apartment building above a Somali shopping center, a masked ICE agent marches past me. I’m a blonde, white, middle-aged woman carrying three grocery bags; I’m his sister, his cousin. I’m someone he knows from high school. I take the elevator to the seventh floor and hand everything to a terrified mother who hasn’t left her apartment, or her children, in weeks. 





"The news cycle has moved on. We have not."





The version of me that existed way back in 2025 could not fathom what we’ve pulled off in the months since. A small team of parents and educators raising over a quarter of a million dollars for rent, utilities, legal fees, groceries, hygiene products. We’ve organized food and supply deliveries for 75 families. We’ve patrolled the streets around school, scanning for ICE vehicles while simultaneously smiling at children—letting them know Everything will be fine! As if we know. 





Operation Metro Surge ended in February, but did it? The week Tom Homan announced the departure of 700 ICE agents from Minneapolis, three parents at my kids’ school disappeared. ICE has merely changed tactics—they’re quieter, less overtly violent, but they’re still here. The news cycle has moved on. We have not. 





Our mutual aid group is exhausted, as is every other one just like ours. We’re just regular people, primarily moms, with regular jobs and responsibilities—cooking and cleaning for our own families, caring for aging parents, driving our kids to swimming lessons. Teachers should be focused on instruction, not learning the habeas petition process or figuring out a 1:1 tutor to help homebound kids desperately behind. They should not be scrambling to find emergency mental health services for children. 





For the families we’re supporting—our kids’ friends and classmates, their parents, their siblings—things aren’t even close to normal. They’ve depleted their savings. Parents have lost jobs, and even if a position is being held for them, many businesses teeter on the brink of closure, unable to offer the hours required to support a family. 





Yes, Minnesotans deserve accolades for showing up 50,000 strong to protest on the coldest day of the year. And frankly, I think we deserve that Nobel Peace Prize, too. But the fight is not over. Springsteen has left, and what remains is the basic, boring, unsexy work of feeding people and keeping them in their homes. And because no one else is coming to save us, we will continue to fight ICE ourselves, one $20 donation, one box of diapers, and one carpool at a time. 





New Orleans, LA — Rachel T. (Unión Migrante)





Last December was a hurricane of emotion. Agony. Terror. Heartbreak. You can't unhear girls sobbing as their dad is taken away by masked agents. 





But New Orleans weathers every storm of government abandonment. People are used to helping their neighbors survive, and that includes helping immigrants remain in our city. 





Our system is called Ojos (Eyes). It works in limitless chats and social media posts on Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, wherever. Neighbors share information about ICE and police activity: the exact location, a time stamp, a description. We communicate verifiable, protective facts, not fear. Community “dispatchers” comb through group messages, call eye witnesses, and signal boost confirmed alerts in Unión Migrante forums. Allies head to the scene to film, sometimes exposing ICE live, often just arriving to post “DESPEJADO” once ICE leaves, so folks can transit there again. 





Ojos is operated by everyone at once, in real time. Thousands of people participate. Some are confined to their homes for their safety. Some are citizens who parked up in churches, bars, and Mardi Gras krewe warehouses every day and night but Thanksgiving during the height of the Border Patrol occupation. 





In a state where the Attorney General threatens prosecution of anyone who “interferes” with ICE arrests, we remind our participants that we're not impeding ICE’s operatives—the Constitution is; we just witness. We’ve learned to peacefully, legally, safely and effectively film and expose ICE and police, without getting Obstruction of Justice charges. 





Limiting ICE’s ability to make arrests is paramount—we can't pay rent for everyone in the city for as long as these attacks may continue. People have to go to work. Rather than falling short with a finite band-aid of charity on these deep wounds, peaceful confrontation slows harm at its root. 





"You can't unhear girls sobbing as their dad is taken away by masked agents."





We can't stop every arrest. But we can do a lot. Beyond alerts, Ojos educates followers on our rights to demand a warrant, to remain inside, to maintain silence, to film. Peaceful filming in the streets becomes a daily protest broadcast live as soccer moms, bartenders, and tech workers film ICE and Kenner cops, and then share their own families’ immigration stories on Facebook Live—Sicilians who fled gang violence not unlike in Honduras’; Jews who were kidnapped off the streets in broad daylight. It changes the public narrative. 





Footage has aided civil lawsuits and deportation defense. Ojos led a 14-hour stand off between neighbors and ICE agents and cops at a trailer park in red voter Hammond, a suburb north of New Orleans. There were solidarity pizzas, politicians, journalists, thousands of viral views, and substantially fewer arrests than might have happened without so many ojos watching. Hammond’s City Hall exploded with vitriol against the agreement of local police collaborating with ICE in the aftermath.   





Putting our bodies publicly and peacefully on the line isn't just about keeping our neighbors here. It's about keeping our democracy. I know this personally: Federal agents have come to my home to intimidate me. An eerie echo of the state violence I hear in the asylum interviews I interpret for. It’s the same violence my child’s father endured when he was beaten and wrongfully arrested while filming ICE, profiled as an undocumented Hispanic construction worker, though he's a citizen. 





But We The People create our government and our reality. We the People of New Orleans choose love and peaceful, public, unified resistance, rather than cowering in fear and doom-scrolling in isolation. This choice is the future of our democracy. We hope others choose it, too.





Los Angeles, CA — Bitta S. (Mar Vista Voice)





When immigration raids intensified across Los Angeles last summer, almost every day seemed to bring another report of a neighbor’s disappearance. On the Westside, where I live, a beloved paletero was detained while selling ice cream on the street corner. Immigration agents kidnapped workers from a local car wash and day laborers outside a Home Depot. Neighbors reported seeing ICE vehicles staging at familiar shopping centers and church parking lots, turning ordinary places into sites of fear and uncertainty. 





Suddenly, families across the city were faced with impossible choices, and many stopped working because they feared they would be next. Others returned to work because they felt they had no choice: The alternative meant falling behind on rent and risking their ability to support their families.





Like many, my neighbors and I wanted to do something concrete to help. Around that time, we saw that Ktown For All, a mutual aid organization in Koreatown, had begun buying out street vendors, and had published a guide explaining how other communities could do the same. That was the moment it clicked. Mutual aid is strongest at the hyperlocal level, where trust already exists and people can stay connected long after the immediate crisis has passed. We didn't need to invent something new to support and protect our neighbors. We could learn from organizers who had already done the work, and adapt it to our own neighborhoods.





As ICE raids have continued into another summer, street vendors remain among the workers most exposed to immigration enforcement. Their livelihoods depend on being visible in public spaces, often in the same locations every day. Many are women balancing the work of running a small business while caring for children and supporting their families. When those spaces become unsafe, they lose the ability to earn a living at all. 





"Mutual aid is strongest at the hyperlocal level, where trust already exists and people can stay connected long after the immediate crisis has passed."





Our idea was simple. If the community could temporarily replace a vendor's lost income, that vendor would have one less reason to choose between personal safety and paying the bills. We started by visiting vendors we already knew. As the project grew, we partnered with local rapid response networks whose trusted community relationships helped us reach many more vendors than we ever could have on our own. 





We expected to help a handful of people here in Mar Vista. Instead, our work has expanded to the entire Westside. 





When we first started Westside Vendor Buyout, we realized almost immediately that the challenge wasn’t convincing people to care. It was giving people a tangible way to turn their concern into action. Hundreds of neighbors donated, and volunteers stepped up to contribute however they could. Some helped with translation or behind-the-scenes support, while others connected us with families we never would have met otherwise. 





As we spent more time with vendors, we began to understand that the raids were doing far more than sowing fear. They were destabilizing entire households and livelihoods. Vendors described living day to day as plummeting sales turned to mounting debt and missed rent payments. One mother told us her son had considered leaving college because weeks of lost income made it impossible to keep up with household expenses. Another vendor received an eviction notice after staying home because she was too afraid to return to the corner where she had built her business. As customers disappeared, neighborhood businesses struggled. 





We had originally imagined the Vendor Buyout as an emergency fund, but every conversation revealed another way the community could help. We created a Hire a Vendor program so neighbors could continue supporting local vendors whenever they needed food for an event. When families faced eviction, we organized emergency fundraisers to help keep them housed. We also partnered with community organizations to host tenant rights clinics and organized a Thanksgiving gathering where we broke bread with vendors and their families, shared groceries and holiday gifts, and spent time together outside the pressures of work and immigration enforcement. The gathering met immediate needs, but it also gave people a chance to get to know one another and build relationships that couldn't be forged through a cash transfer alone. 





"We weren’t starting from scratch, but instead joining a much larger tradition of community care."





One of the most important lessons has been recognizing that our efforts did not emerge in isolation. Long before the current wave of raids, immigrant communities across LA were already building rapid response networks to combat years of immigration enforcement, creating trusted systems for sharing information and supporting families in moments of crisis. At the same time, mutual aid networks have expanded across the city, especially in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2025 fires, creating new ways for neighbors to care for one another. We weren't starting from scratch, but instead joining a much larger tradition of community care, and have continued learning from those who have been doing this work for years.





Today, whenever possible, we also use Buyout funds to purchase food from participating vendors for mutual aid efforts already happening across the city. A contribution meant to support immigrant vendors can also help feed unhoused neighbors at a local distro or help sustain another community organization. It’s the main lesson I think we'll all carry forward, even long after ICE has left. The strongest mutual aid isn't a collection of disconnected projects. This work is about building a network of relationships where each act of solidarity makes the next one possible.












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Helpers On the Ground

by The Conversationalist Team

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Across the United States, activists and organizers are 3D printing one of the most surprisingly effective weapons against ICE. 

So far, they've distributed over 1.5 million of them. 





Before I even get a chance to ask my first question, Heidi DiJulio, Operations Manager at Protoplant, Inc., is off and running. A Vancouver, WA-based producer of filament for 3D printers, the company has become a part of a growing grassroots movement in the United States, whose organizers need what they sell in order to make one of their most effective weapons: 3D-printed whistles.





Across the country, whistling has become an ever-present background noise in communities invaded by ICE, a low-cost, instant-alert system that anyone can participate in. Everyone from crusty gutter punks to activist grandparents have been blowing whistles to alert people to immigration raids; as well as gathering outside hotels and other spaces used by immigration enforcement to ensure they cannot rest, eat, or move without being accompanied by a cacophony. It prevents abductions, saves lives, and makes ICE agents absolutely miserable. And, as noise protests have continued to grow, 3D printing has proven to be one of the most effective and affordable ways to get more whistles into more hands, fast.





“Protoplant is very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish,” DiJulio says. “We’re very proud to bring it into our workspace, and figure out how to be part of a better future.”





While the ICE occupation—and noise protests—aren’t as visible as they were on social media in February and March of 2026, the demand for whistles is going strong. Over the last six months, Protoplant alone has shipped out over 500 kilograms and counting of their filament at a specially discounted price, and an additional 100 kilograms in gifted spools, enough to make approximately 300,000 whistles.





This steady supply of filament is essential for the activists and organizers—many working invisibly and unheralded—who continue printing and distributing thousands of whistles a week.  





It’s also just one piece of a much larger movement still fighting back against ICE and showing no signs of slowing down.





Sounding the Alarm





When ICE first occupied Chicago, mutual aid organizers Emily Hilleren and Lauren Vega were quick to spring into action. They started distributing whistles at mass scale, among other supplies and support, and put out a call asking people with 3D printers for help meeting demand.





“I saw a neighbor in Chicago posting about leaving whistles in little free libraries and I was like ‘ooh I can probably do that,’” Hilleren wrote on Bluesky. “[S]uddenly I had tens of thousands of whistles passing through my condo.”





Chicago-based journalist Mo Ryan was early to join these efforts, and shared a few of the whistle calls with her friends, romance authors Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan. Though not local, the two were eager to help: both have large social media platforms, extensive networks, a love for 3D printing, and experience organizing under fascism. They began sharing information, boosting tips, and gathering resources and support, helping to raise awareness for what was quickly becoming a nationwide effort. As more and more people joined in, others were encouraged to contribute in whatever ways they could.





Before long, the group—alongside a rapidly growing collective of printers, activists, and organizers—became known as the Whistle Crew. Today, they’re one among many distribution groups across the United States rising up for community defense against ICE.





"Everything is very grassroots, driven by ways to put information in front of the people who need it."





They’re also still growing: As ICE has invaded more and more cities across the country, Hilleren and Vega have applied their experience in Chicago to supporting efforts in Minneapolis and beyond. So have Milan and Rocha, alongside the rest of the Whistle Crew, in an ongoing mass-distribution effort made possible through collaboration, skill-sharing, and organizing that is responsive to the needs of individual communities—rather than a top-down approach, one rooted in principles of mutuality and care.





The origins of this incredible mutual aid effort reflect a lengthy history of feminist organizing, drawing upon decades of lived experiences that value collectives over individual work. It also taps into the glorious side of human ingenuity that utilizes tech for good—a welcome disruption to our current tech dystopia.





Mary Sturgeon, who runs Solder and Bubblegum—a Seattle-based makerspace where visitors can use equipment (including 3D printers), learn technical skills, and connect with fellow nerds—was quick to get involved with the group after she saw Rocha posting about it. “Something I studied very heavily before I opened my space is the riot grrl movement and women in making,” she tells The Conversationalist. “What fascinated me was how underground it was, how record companies, everyone official said, ‘We’re not interested,’ so women just said, ‘We’ll figure this out ourselves.’”





A similar ethos, she believes, is core to how the Whistle Crew operates. “Everything is very grassroots, driven by ways to put information in front of the people who need it,” she says. “That’s it, that’s all we need to do.”





In the case of the Whistle Crew, as their work has expanded, so has their need for structure: to track who needs whistles, who can print them, and how to get whistles where they need to go. Both Milan and Rocha stress that while they are very public faces for the group, they are far from the only organizers in a leaderful movement—adding that some core contributors to the Whistle Crew remain invisible for safety reasons. Today, their network includes a distributed and diverse collective contributing logistical experience, tech expertise, and other critical moving pieces. They also resist hierarchical structures, rooting their work in the “we,” as Milan puts it, which is essential for effective, sustainable, and anti-patriarchal community organizing.





So far, the Whistle Crew has produced and shipped over 1.5 million whistles.





To continue this work, the group practices both conscious security practices and redundancy, calculated to avoid burnout and to avoid creating bottlenecks. Coordinating over Signal, they get supplies where they need to go as quickly as possible. If you’re a person who needs whistles, you email whistlerequests@proton.me. The person wrangling the inbox adds it to a list of requests for individual printers to claim, print, and ship directly to the requester. The group has been so overwhelmed with support that they’re not currently accepting new volunteer printers, but they have published a Wiki with information on printing and distribution so anyone can pick up this work in their own community. People who can’t print or be involved in logistics can also donate funds or purchase filament directly via Protoplant or Amazon wishlists, to ensure their printers have a steady supply.





“The goal,” says Zoe Quinn, one of the printers involved in the effort, “is obsolescence. I would love to not be doing this.”





Anti-Patriarchal Organizing for Fascist Times





There’s an interesting undercurrent to this incredibly rapid mobilization: It’s rising to meet a need, but has also at times been surprisingly whimsical. There are sparkly whistles. Transparent ones in a range of hues. Whistles in metallic rainbow tones. Fun shapes like fish and cats, and designs intended to be beautiful and sometimes silly as well as functional. A whistle is a whistle is a whistle, but there are more unconventional ways to get one, too. You can go to https://linktr.ee/3Dwhistles if you want, but toottootmotherfucker.com, whistlegoblins.fun, and whistlecoven.com will all get you to the same place.





One reason for that playful approach amongst the Whistle Crew? Many of the people doing the work are linked to Romancelandia, the community of romance readers and writers that moves mountains, and rarely shies away from hard work and fighting on the right side of history.





"Political resistance is women’s work and always has been."





As a historically gendered genre read predominantly by women, romance readers and writers are frequently derided and discounted, even though romance is consistently one of the best-selling fiction genres. (According to industry group BookScan, 51 million units sold between May 2024 and June 2025.) Unlike many other genres, romance also isn’t dominated by traditional publishing, and many authors choose to self-publish or engage in a mix of both. Romance writers often have incredible business acumen as a result, acting not just as authors, but editors, publicists, web developers, designers, and more, with incredibly diverse backgrounds and skillsets. (Milan, for example, is an attorney who clerked at the Supreme Court—and far from the only lawyer-romance writer.)





Milan and Rocha are also no strangers to political organizing: Their Romancing the Vote project, which started with 2020’s Romancing the Runoff in collaboration with fellow romance author Alyssa Cole, has raised more than a million dollars to support nonpartisan voting rights organizations, and the 2026 edition just launched, with auctions running through July 5. That experience—with promotion, logistics, and coordinating—has been critical for the whistle distribution effort.





Political resistance is women’s work and always has been. Even as people dismiss romance as unimportant and inherently less valuable because it is feminized, romance writers are engaging in an ancient form of unappreciated work traditionally performed by people who are not cis men: getting things done, cooperatively. “We have seven admins, zero are masculine,” Sturgeon says. Not everyone involved in the Whistle Crew is a romance writer or reader, of course; but feminist mutual aid and support principles are core to their work.





Fundamentally, it is also important not to mistake the Whistle Crew’s whimsy for unseriousness. The reason people are printing whistles is not fun. The way some are building sustainable networks for printing and distribution, though, is joyful, kind, and spacious—all necessary in the inclusivity and sustainability of this essential work. It's an approach that makes room for both people who are new to activism as well as old hands, for people who want to print no-nonsense, matte black whistles right alongside Quinn’s glow-in-the-dark ones.





"People of minoritized genders are used to working collectively for survival."





Perhaps unsurprisingly, some people are not happy about this “rainbow sparkle agenda,” as Rocha puts it, noting that a very small but sometimes loud group of people—mostly cis men—seem to be very upset about women making 3D printing cute. (Though everyone is quick to state that the positive responses far outweigh the negatives.) The response reflects a larger history of pushing women out of tech spaces, hearkening back to the treatment of women’s creative work as that of hobbyists and crafters, in contrast to men’s.





It's also a theme that long predates 3D printing, or for that matter, whistles.





The devaluation of women’s work replicates itself everywhere, including in online conversations as well as offline makerspaces, which are often where people curious about 3D printing are first introduced to it. These sites provide access to equipment, training, and space for a wide variety of projects, but are often heavily male-dominated. This is despite the fact that the original makerspaces were sites of women’s “craft” and housework, such as sewing circles and other resource-sharing activities, enabling women to teach each other skills, perform tasks together, and access equipment and other resources too expensive to afford individually—all of which is echoed in how the Whistle Crew operates today.





Women are consistently early adopters and creators across tech, from Ada Lovelace to Katherine Johnson to Reshma Saujani. They also currently lead several high-profile 3D printing companies, including Cinderwing. Still, men enjoy being loud and wrong, convinced that they are the original innovators and that work only becomes serious when they’re involved.  





The whistle goblins are having none of it. Among other things, Sturgeon notes, mansplainers who complain it’s wasteful to use sparkly or rainbow filaments for 3D printing seem to have a skill issue.





“It’s not inefficient,” she tells me, “when you know what you’re doing.”





These derisive comments about colorful, playful whistles have often been accompanied with equal surprise that women can be such effective organizers. In January, one Twitter user complained, “The ‘No-Go-Zone’ in Minneapolis is getting fully stocked like a pop-up leftist supply depot, free hand warmers, winter gear, coffee, food, milk, you name it. This is PROFESSIONAL-grade logistics. Someone is BANKROLLING this autonomous zone.”





For organizers, though, it was just another day ending in "Y." People who are not cis men are often accustomed to being the logisticians both at home and at work, expected to make sure everything runs smoothly, with labor that remains largely invisible. The ones who cook the meals and wash the dishes, who shop for school supplies, who manage all the appointments, make the office coffee, and become the de facto note takers at meetings.





If you want distributed logistics to run smoothly, you need people who can work cooperatively and efficiently together—and people of minoritized genders are used to working collectively for survival.





They’re also the ones physically showing up for their communities to push back against ICE.





“The bravest and fiercest defenders of their neighbors,” shares one supply runner, who asked to remain anonymous, “have been women and especially teenage girls in Chicago.”





Making Organizing Sustainable with Play





For Quinn, who has been outspoken about their experience with depression and anxiety, finding a fun thread for their brain to focus on, like experimenting with a new filament or whistle design, has helped them build community. It has also helped them cultivate sustainability for themselves, something that has not only been critical for avoiding burnout so they can continue doing this work, but also, for their mental health. 





Sometimes, Quinn says, a person just wants to “have a better day. I like having better days.”





“We’re printing whistles to fight back against people with guns and immunity,” an activity that can feel incredibly existential, depressing, and enraging, says Quinn. “If that’s all you have, it’s going to be really hard to sustain that. Play matters. It allows people to engage in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. It allows us to get through the shitshow.”





This is not just about finding joy for those involved in the herculean whistle distribution effort, but also making whistle use more accessible for people who are new to mutual aid and direct action. Anyone can carry and blow a whistle. But whistles are only effective if you wear them, and if you’re a person who loves fun and whimsy, you may be more likely to consistently carry a purple sparkly whistle than a plain one. That approachability is very much by design, allowing people to be more comfortable getting involved. For some, this might start and end with whistles, but it can also turn into more engagement with community organizing.





"An expansive approach to activism makes room for everyone and builds long-term sustainability."





This doesn’t mean the Whistle Crew doesn’t have room for those who prefer the plain and understated. As a marginalized person who has been treated like political fodder, Quinn stresses that they “don’t fault anybody who’s in a space where they can’t engage with [whimsy],” recognizing the essential value of diversity in organizing tactics. An expansive approach to activism makes room for everyone and builds long-term sustainability. Both whimsical and deeply serious people are essential to the ultimate cause of fighting fascism and protecting our neighbors. So is letting go of the ego behind wanting to be right, to fix what isn’t broken, to tell people who have been engaged in this work for a very long time that they’re doing it incorrectly. Feminist organizing, like the Whistle Crew has practiced, highlights how important this is, and provides a model for doing it.





A whistle a day—whether printed in army drab or trans pride stripes—keeps the jackboots away.





“I’d rather be printing swords,” Quinn says at the end of our conversation, returning to what got them interested in 3D printing in the first place. “Swords are cool, swords are fun. But we have to do what we’re doing because our country is setting up concentration camps, they’re kidnapping our neighbors, they’re scaling up at an alarming rate.”





“Hear me out,” I reply. “Whistle sword.”





“Hold on,” they say, as their eyes light up. “I gotta write this down.”


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Welcome to the Whistle Rebellion

by s.e. smith

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