Category: Culture

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A new-ish community gathering, happening May 2026.



We’re back with another Conversation Club event, and you’re invited! Conversation Club is a friendly discussion group spotlighting some of our favorite stories through hosted conversations where our writers can answer your questions and share more about how their stories came to be. It’s kind of like a book club, but you don’t have to read a whole book! 



Join us Friday, May 29th, when we’ll be discussing Leila Seiitbek's recent piece, “We Must Hold the Line,” about rising global authoritarianism and billionaire-driven power. Leila is a human rights activist and lawyer from Kyrgyzstan who has spent years representing political prisoners, journalists, and activists at risk. (You may recognize her from our podcast episode on kleptocracy—same Leila!) She will chat with our Executive Editor Gina Mei, sharing what she’s learned about authoritarian repression and what we can do together in this moment to combat it. She will also answer questions from the community, including readers just like you.



Read the article, come with questions (or not—just bring your mug of tea if that’s what you’re feeling), and be in community with us. It’s an inclusive space to stay curious, informed, and connected with fellow Conversationalist readers. 



You can RSVP to our next Conversation Club below, and read Leila's piece right here. We can’t wait to be in conversation with you. See you there! 



RSVP: Add your email to the list and we’ll send you a calendar invite with Zoom link.
Date: Friday, May 29th
Time: 11-11:45 AM PT // 2-2:45 PM ET





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May 1, 2026May 1, 2026

Join the Conversation Club!

by The Conversationalist Team

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10449 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-04-29 23:09:07 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-04-29 23:09:07 [post_content] =>

The writer's new memoir is a feast, exploring how food can be both deeply personal and impacted by forces much larger than ourselves.

Our appetites are deeply personal, a reflection of our idiosyncratic tastes. They’re shaped, too, by what our communities feed us, by what’s available or accessible or shared. Growing up in New England, you might develop a love of fried clams; raised in Hong Kong, you might hunger for congee; spend enough time in France and you’ll probably become a pastry snob. In every extended family lies one recipe that’s an instant passport to time spent with a beloved matriarch, or a meal that feels like home. And who doesn’t have a dish they’ve sworn they’ll never eat again because it reminds us too much of an ex?

Food writer Alicia Kennedy knows these contours well. In her writing—including in her fantastic history of vegetarian eating, 2023’s No Meat Required—she explores how our relationships to food can be deeply personal, yet impacted by forces much larger than ourselves, from local climates and family histories to global supply chains and government policies. Her work illuminates the ethical and sociopolitical elements of what we eat and why, yet sacrifices none of the thrills our appetites expose us to. And her latest, On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites, is a feast, exploring her personal relationship to food and cooking as she journeys from an adolescent gourmand to vegan baker to established food and culture writer.

In her new memoir, Kennedy organizes each chapter around a specific food—beans, lamb, bread, pumpkin, and more—tying each to a moment in her life. She writes about developing culinary preferences via the plentiful apples of Long Island, where she grew up; about the Proustian power of a box of Entenmann’s doughnuts. When she goes to college, her coursework inspires her to think more critically about the systems of power that ensnare us all, and naturally, this leads her to consider how the food she loves has made its way to her plate.

She begins with a childhood obsession. “Chocolate, the first true object of my longing and love,” she writes, “was the way I learned about exploitation in the global food system.” When she reads about the enslaved child labor and exploited farmers up and down the cocoa supply chain, she starts seeking out fair trade-certified chocolate—then bananas, and sugar, and coffee. She goes vegan, then falls in love with baking, and stumbles into running a vegan bakery out of her home kitchen alongside her day job as a copy editor. As Kennedy traces her winding path to meatless eating, she continually challenges the reader to consider food as an extension of our ethics. But her clear moral stance—her assertions that one’s choices around food ought to reflect one’s principles—never feels didactic; instead, it offers a blueprint for self-interrogation that can help lead the reader to their own conclusions.

When a long romantic relationship dissolves in the face of her ambition, she shuts down the bakery and moves to Brooklyn. There, she immerses herself in the city’s vegan food scene while picking up assignments as a freelance writer, endeavoring to normalize vegan coverage in the world of food journalism—an especially difficult task given its love of meat and masculinity. After several reporting trips bring her to Puerto Rico, she decides to move there—in part, because she’s fallen in love with her now-husband, whom she meets by chance while reporting on a rum distillery.

From Puerto Rico, she tells the story of their romance through wine. She walks through the island’s sugarcane fields, considering the crop’s relationship to slavery and colonialism. In her chapter on plantains, she also reflects on her own Puerto Rican heritage: Her paternal grandmother was born on the island, but rarely spoke about her childhood, forcing Kennedy to negotiate her understanding of her identity after she moves there. “Here, in my Puerto Ricanness, was something I couldn’t disappear into,” she writes; “this was something I had to seek in order to claim.” In part, she ultimately achieves this via her relationship to food, incorporating the island’s seasonality and culinary history into her kitchen.

Writing many years and miles removed from her childhood, Kennedy also finds newfound perspective on her home and the food that grows there—and the indelible way it has shaped her. Most of all, she grows to appreciate Long Island’s oysters, which she devours in a period of mourning following the death of her younger brother: They had been his least favorite food. “Maybe that urge for an oyster, and all the urges after it, were a way of reclaiming my appetite from the immense sadness,” she writes. “A way of saying, ‘I’ll live, and I’ll live enough for both of us, but because I’m mad at you, I’m going to eat the food you hated most.’” Her grief rips a hole in the metaphysical center of the book, a wound she can’t repair but which colors the way she looks at everything—eventually prompting a renegotiation of the strictures of her veganism to allow for her newfound craving.

Much of Kennedy’s work evokes the complex systems and philosophical concepts underpinning how we nourish ourselves; her writing about grief—and love—offers a moving reminder of the deeply personal, human scale of these choices. We ought to consider how far food traveled to get to our plates, Kennedy argues; we should know how much work it takes to grow crops, to slaughter animals, to cut down sugarcane. But these are not merely ideological considerations—nor are they simply a setup for a joyless life, a way of prioritizing our principles over our pleasures. To truly consider our own appetite is a way of connecting us to ourselves and to each other. Seen through that lens, the ethical choices we make about our food aren’t a burden, but a gift.

The day after I finished reading On Eating, I made dinner for my sister and her husband, who had just welcomed their first child. They’re omnivores; meanwhile, I haven’t eaten meat in over a decade, drawn to vegetarianism’s respect for animals and the planet. I worried, as I cooked, whether they’d enjoy the meat-free, bean-centric dish I was preparing. But as I made it, I also kept thinking of Kennedy’s belief that “inevitably … cooking becomes care: for self, for others”—her insistence that the delights of a well-made meal and our responsibility as stewards of this planet are inseparable. Food is a means of tending to our own bodies; it’s something we share with those we love; it’s a way of putting our values into practice. Her words echoed in my head as I cooked, feeling nourished by each of these overlapping versions of care, and the many appetites we feed when we embody them.

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April 29, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “On Eating” by Alicia Kennedy

by Marissa Lorusso

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10428 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-04-10 23:52:48 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-04-10 23:52:48 [post_content] =>

How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history.

In 1979, as the Iranian hostage crisis played on American television screens 24/7, the television producer, librarian, activist, and intellectual Marion Stokes began recording the news broadcasts on tape. The live coverage—across all channels, at all hours—launched what we now recognize as the never-ending, ambient flow of media. Simultaneously, Stokes recognized a shift in the narrative America was telling about itself, and the role of media manipulation toward pro-American policies. So, for the next 30 years, she recorded any and all TV news broadcasts, commercials included. All of it was then archived, stacks of VHS tapes quickly accumulating in her Philadelphia apartment, as portrayed in the 2019 documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.

This kind of project by an individual who operates outside of an institution was a radical endeavor: When Stokes began, broadcast channels didn’t archive their own material, often erasing tapes so they could reuse them due to cost. But Stokes’ project and its often innocuous content would also foreshadow the long-term value of guerrilla archives, both in preserving an accurate historical record and holding the media—and government—to account. Activist archives began as a practice in the 1960s, when organizers filled in the historical gaps where universities and institutions could not. These, however, were collective efforts; Stokes operated individually, until eventually, her son donated the recordings to the Internet Archive, where digitized selections are now available online. “By [Stokes] having that collection, it means the scholars, artists, and researchers have access to the information without paying for it,” says Shola Lynch, filmmaker and Professor of the Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College. “Because when our history is bound up in commercial hands, that's problematic.”

Stokes’ practice of recording any and all materials resembles the history of what is now called “memory work,” or individuals who preserve the photographs, documents, and ephemera of a community. A relatively recent tradition, this form of archiving has taken on new meaning in a digital era where data sets can be wiped and personal data sold, seemingly without consequence. Following the start of the second Trump presidency in January 2025, more than 2,000 datasets suddenly disappeared from Data.gov, the U.S.’s government's data portal. Since then, the Trump administration has overhauled even more data, including entire web pages and important coding tools for researchers and climate scientists.

Over the last five decades, open source tools and government data have been integral to preserving the historical record and maintaining public infrastructure in the United States. According to America’s Essential Data, New Orleanians received smoke alarms because fire departments used American Community Survey (ACS) data to identify neighborhoods most in need. School districts could (previously) make the case for increased teacher salaries using the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) to highlight underpaid teachers. Residents could avoid scams in their community based on federal Consumer Sentinel data. Now, these records are liable to disappear from the internet, possibly forever.

The government is ultimately responsible for preserving a record of its own actions. But when federal agencies are unable to preserve all their data, or willfully choose not to, it begs the question if this work is best done by civil society and those outside of the government. Guerrilla archives—whether digital or analog like Stokes’—are generally nonpartisan acts of preservation to serve the public good. There’s the Internet Archive, which has been archiving the web and other cultural artifacts since 1996, and Vanderbilt Television News Archive, which provides the most comprehensive chronicling of evening television news broadcasts in the world. There’s also the End of Term Archive—one of the largest of these projects in progress—which downloads all government information at the end of each presidential term. It’s a grassroots alternative to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which notoriously did not receive all of the presidential records from the first Trump administration in 2021 as mandated under the Presidential Records Act. (Trump promptly fired the head of NARA when he re-entered office in 2025.)

Despite having distributed its data more digitally over the last 20 years, the government has not issued any dedicated preservation or access strategy for its information. Additionally, the current laws and policies around government data preservation are outdated and inadequate. This hole in the system has compelled librarians to join the race to copy digital federal archives, beginning in 2016 with the Data Rescue movement, which drew over 1500 volunteers for dozens of hackathon-style events throughout the year. “Distrust re-orients care,” researcher Laura Rothfritz wrote in her analysis of these early efforts for Big Data & Society. When a public distrusts a system and a possible threat is identified, however, anxiety can be mobilized into producing future forms of infrastructure.

As the situation becomes more dire, these efforts have only expanded. Today, the Public Data Project runs within the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, collecting and authenticating all federal datasets, more recently including the Smithsonian Institute’s public domain data. So far, they have downloaded the entirety of Data.gov, copied it, and digitally signed it with a provenance mark to authenticate its origins. The project launched in early 2025 as part of Harvard Law School’s repository system, which dates back centuries.

“I think a lot of us in the library and technology communities are sort of waking up to the fact that we need to have a strategy in place for the preservation and access of government data beyond what the government provides,” says Molly Hardy, the Project Lead for the Public Data Project. Their team also works closely with the Data Rescue Project, a grassroots nonprofit preserving massive data sets and consisting entirely of volunteers.

“Public data infrastructures have long been considered essential components of democratic governance, scientific accountability, and civic participation,” Rothfritz continues in her Big Data & Society piece. Much like our city’s infrastructure, however, we don’t recognize its value until it's broken. It is the invisible fiber that holds democracy together, from our roads and postal service to job numbers and environmental data. Increasingly, its preservation is also a task that has been left to individuals and communities. In October 2025, the nonprofit organization Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth web page on its most popular service, the Wayback Machine, an initiative that allows users to find web page screenshots from specific dates. It has become an essential tool and digital service for independent organizations and guerrilla archivists alike. (The largest archive on the internet, dedicated to “universal access to all knowledge,” has not been without its setbacks however: In 2024, it suffered a data breach affecting millions of users and a copyright infringement case over its digital lending library.)

The Invisible Histories Project, a nonprofit organization based in North Carolina, has been preserving the digital history and cultural memory of LGBTQ+ life in the South using tools like the Wayback Machine. “We could no longer trust institutions to protect marginalized histories,” says Maigen Sullivan, the Co-Executive Director of Invisible Histories. She recalls a community effort at the start of last year to preserve government and university pages with references to diversity offices, along with flyers and photos. According to Sullivan, by August and September 2025, when universities returned to term, about a quarter of those pages were already gone. “This is the only evidence, other than what individuals might hold, that exists,” she says.

Invisible Histories has also built its own server because of mistrust in corporations like Google and Microsoft that store and hold onto their data, another issue facing digital archivists. The organization has endured two cyberattacks—one in 2023, and the other in 2025—since its founding in 2017. Because of this, they’ve considered cybersecurity training and increased security for potential threats against the archive. “If you feel like you're hopeless and helpless and have nothing to do, archiving is a tool of resistance and anyone can do it,” says Sullivan.

These examples of digital mutual aid have become essential for documenting history, and are one way to combat historical revisionism. Activist archives also continue to challenge which institutions have a say in the historical record, nationally and beyond. Zakiya Collier, a Brooklyn-based archivist, says individual archives preserve more than just data. “I think that memory work has a liberatory capacity to it,” she says. “I use that term because it calls on a legacy of people who dedicated their time and energy to preserving history in their homes, communities, churches, attics, and basements. They decided something was important to document and keep.”

Collier, who has worked as the digital archivist in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the New York Public Library, now works with the organization Archiving the Black Web, which trains archivists to document a more inclusive history of the internet. Its potential to create more live archives and documentations of the web aims to contribute to a more equitable historical view of how we catalogue our lives online.

As data and information is getting purposefully disappeared from the internet—an increasingly fertile ground for fascist ideology—archiving becomes increasingly necessary, or else, the public cannot bear witness to itself. In April 2025, the National Park Service erased references to Harriet Tubman on its webpages. The following month, Trump issued an executive order sanitizing federal cultural institutions by accusing the Smithsonian Institute of promoting “race-centered ideology” in its exhibit, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.” The USDA ended its annual survey of hunger in America two weeks before the government shutdown in October 2025, affecting the distribution of food stamps.

Data is information and has become a weapon in the digital age. But both individuals and communities are not powerless to fight back. With the rapid monopolistic takeover of media platforms, it’s no surprise that users are beginning to archive their own data and leaning towards physical media. Sales of vinyl are up, print book sales are rising, and DVD collections are in.

“All archives create futures,” says a voiceover in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, as news broadcasts and infomercials from Stokes’ archive flash in rapid pace onscreen. The organization of information by the lay person may help overcome barriers of the institutionalized index and history, as the threat of excessive online information and its disappearance still looms large for activist archives. But this work has become even more critical, not only for deciding how the past will be remembered, but how an imagined future might pull from its past to mobilize this kind of anticipatory care in the present.

[post_title] => On Guerrilla Archives in the Disinformation Age [post_excerpt] => How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => guerrilla-archives-activism-protest-history-preservation-politics-marion-stokes-media [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-04-23 15:59:16 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-04-23 15:59:16 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10428 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 10, 2026April 23, 2026

On Guerrilla Archives in the Disinformation Age

by Jessica Jacolbe

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10407 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-03-31 19:27:25 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-03-31 19:27:25 [post_content] =>

Unlearned historical lessons from Jacques-Louis David’s retrospective at the Louvre.

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

Many of us have had enough of living through Interesting Times. As an American raised in the misguided, batshit optimism between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, I often feel as if my adult life has been lit by the glow of a global garbage fire no one conditioned me to anticipate—a garbage fire lit by the US government, and tended to with as much care as it lavishes on the Eternal Flame. For this reason, I was eager to see the monumental Jacques-Louis David retrospective at the Louvre earlier this year: David is, in many ways, the official court painter of Interesting Times. He lived through some of the most shocking regime changes in European history and both painted and propagandized them.

Born in 1748 during the ancien régime, David rose through the traditional, royally patronized ranks to become a painter known for his austere style and his focus on Neoclassical themes. Though socially connected, during the heyday of the salon, he was tormented by a benign facial tumor that impeded his speech, somewhat setting him apart from polite society. When the French Revolution kicked off, he dove into radical politics and befriended Maximilien Robespierre, the architect of the Reign of Terror, which saw some 17,000 public executions by guillotine. David served in government designing festivals, monuments, and uniforms; he also sat on the Orwellian Committee For Public Safety and voted for the death of Louis XVI. When Robespierre fell, David went to prison for the better part of a year, but kept his own head. A few short years later, he rose to prominence once more as the official court painter of Napoleon, outliving the empire, only to die in 1825 in exile in Brussels. Remarkably, this was a voluntary exile: the restored Bourbon King had invited him to serve as court painter, despite knowing David voted to guillotine his brother.

If this Louvre show was any indicator, the French curatorial class is still vaguely terrified of one of its most emblematic painters and unsure of what to make of him, the same way French elected officials are still afraid of an electorate that once managed to chop up its ruling class. The Internet likes to joke the White House would be covered in shit and on fire if Trump were governing France and, there is, perhaps, some truth to this. The French are known as feisty, indignant, and quick to strike or riot in a way that we Americans deem “bad for business.” Each time I’m in the country for any kind of civil unrest, it is not hard to imagine how they conceived of the guillotine, a sublime machine of both political horror and political theater concocted under the cynical pretense of science, democracy, and progress (cf., Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité).

"Napoleon Crossing the Alps" by Jacques-Louis David

A Neoclassical master, David’s most famous paintings include “The Oath of the Horatii” (1785), “The Death of Marat” (1793), “Madame Récamier” (1800), “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” (1801), and “The Coronation of Napoleon” (1807). The show was organized chronologically to chart the violent, winding historical path between these paintings, and David’s relationship to each regime he served. His evolution marks him at best as a cipher, and at worst, the most corrupt hypocrite. But David was hardly alone in changing alliances to survive: Talleyrand, the French statesman and contemporary political chameleon survived five regimes in succession, brazenly switching sides to do so. When he died, Metternich, his Austrian nemesis, sarcastically remarked, “I wonder what he meant by that?” In many ways, that question felt like the animating force of the David exhibition. One could easily assert he was an artist without scruples who went where the moment and money took him. But, that’s too simplistic. David painted the long, strange journey through the phases of one’s life, one’s country, and one’s era. He painted the life and death of ideas and the flesh-and-blood people who lived them; his works testify to the gap between espoused ideals and lived reality—between pulling the trigger and watching the body fall.

Hot-headed and famously difficult from the jump, David attempted suicide the second time he failed to win the Prix de Rome in 1772. His third time was the charm, however, and he proved to be a prescient artist: His themes of stoicism and self-sacrifice conveyed through Neoclassical renderings of Athens and the Roman Republic foretold a great deal of politics and fashion, from the empire waistlines to the rise of democracy in modern Europe. His earliest successful paintings, such as “The Oath of the Horatii”, are impressive, even as they are also re-imagined scenes from a mind untested by political reality. The 1784 painting is literally bloodless: men swear to die for a cause while their wives cry in a corner. Nine years later came “The Death of Marat”, a visceral masterwork of propaganda. Oddly, when I first came upon it in the exhibit, I said to myself, “Welp, there it is,” and meandered into the next room. It wasn’t until I re-entered the gallery, painted green to match the solemn background of the composition, that I realized I had seen a copy: The entire room was filled with painted copies that had been disseminated across France. I turned around to face the utterly electrifying Real One. You didn’t need to know a thing about art to figure out which one it was: a painting of the cold, calculated stabbing of a vulnerable man in his bathtub, the artist’s own murdered best friend, dead for the Republic.

"The Death of Marat" by Jacques-Louis David

David’s political journey is also evident in the gap between his stiff, slightly asexual representation of so many female figures in his earlier allegorical paintings, versus the real and vibrant women he painted with loose brushstrokes and incredible intelligence in his portraits, such as that of Marie-Louise Trudaine. David’s own wife, Marguerite-Charlotte, divorced him in 1789 for being a regicide, but they remarried after he was released from prison, raising four children together who sat for him often. For a painter often criticized as unfeeling, his portraits of married couples are a delight: “father of chemistry” Antoine Lavoisier and his wife (and underappreciated fellow chemist) Marie-Anne Paulze dominates his depiction of them together in the lab; he also painted a tender double portrait of Antoine and Angelique Mongez, simply because they were great friends of his, as an inscription attests.

That he eagerly chased an ideal (or three) is nothing novel or noteworthy, but his art became more compelling the more tested he was by events. The more shit spiraled out of control, the more David understood the power of the narrative—as well as when to turn it off completely. His self-portrait in prison is a high watermark of decontextualizing. It’s a testament to that ever-present gap between our personal political thoughts and our complicated, shared realities. Finding an authentic perspective on that gap is impossible: If the Renaissance painters taught us about visual perspective, David demonstrated that perspective on current events is a lie. In fact, his best use of literal perspective is a metaphorical one. In his great portrait of Comte Antoine-Français de Nantes he shows us the cost of living through Interesting Times: The count, once a fiery, young revolutionary, became a Napoleonic crony. David painted him from below, so he literally looks down his nose at viewers. His contemptuous face and saggy jowls are articulated with unsparing detail, a countenance juxtaposed with and choked out by finery—the lace, the velvet cape, and a medal for the ideals he betrayed along the way. Survival is an exercise in brutality. This sellout—the sellout—David says, is what winning actually looks like. This is the political happily ever after.

I came to this show as a citizen of a different empire presently running amok. France forged the United States’ first alliance and, like so many American allies to come, was left holding the bag. (This should have been a caveat emptor for future allies: Leopards do not change their spots, and Americans do not change their stars and stripes—but we Yanks are, if nothing else, fantastic at sales.) Funds sent to aid the American Revolution helped bankrupt the French crown and sparked a chain of events that cost the French king his head. All the while Thomas Jefferson meddled in The Declaration of the Rights of Man from his Parisian salon, Sally Hemings was enslaved in the next room. From this eventful early alliance, France and the US allegedly share ideals (cf., the Enlightenment), but we don’t exactly share historical roots. One major difference was reflected in a telling piece of wall text in the show: the role of the Catholic church. Next to the OG “Death of Marat”, the curator alluded to how revolutionary France needed martyrs to fill the void left by the abrupt banishment of the Catholic Church and the monarchy. Hours after Marie Antoinette was beheaded, “The Death of Marat” was unveiled at the Louvre, recently changed from palace to museum. That is to say, a cult of the state was invoked to fill the void of state religion.

Self-portrait by Jacques-Louis David

To this New Yorker, it often feels laïcité—the French principle of secularity—demands its own sort of worship. Religious freedom in France looks to me more like a hole in the ground where a Catholic church once was. Rather than a new structure where all are welcome and inclusion is additive, it’s one that demands the sacrifice or sublimation of all other cultural tenets for those wishing to be included. This creates toxic conditions as France wrestles with a number of postcolonial realities, including a large Muslim minority. Those limitations on the public imagination for an honest plurality were, to me, somehow reflected in this state-funded exhibit’s unwillingness or inability to reach final conclusions about David—and his attempts to fill that civic-religious void with new meaning. If America’s fundamental struggle is with equality, France’s is with diversity. Today, the French do not understand their secularity is exclusionary, much the same way we Americans don’t understand our democracy is a fiction.

Unlike France, we never have had a class revolution in the United States. In 1776, a bunch of rich lawyers told a king far away to fuck off, then immediately turned around and did business with him without changing all that much on the ground. That’s why the 13th Amendment is still, somehow, just sinking in. Ironically, white Americans scored many of their freedoms from Britain when the country was still a colony: Even the pope of the Enlightenment himself, Voltaire, envied the British their Parliament and the rights it accorded in the mid-18th century. From France, we may have learned exceptionalism, but we never learned real revolution. In America, the “revolution” was just another nice thing that only rich white people could have; in France, the revolution cost the upper class their heads.

If the French figured out how to stop deifying the king, maybe someday we can figure out how to stop deifying billionaires. And if we do, maybe someone will stay alive long enough to paint the whole drama as it unfolds. Doing so requires vanity, opportunism, gall, cruelty, and a profound degree of hypocrisy. However, it also requires bravery, and for that bravery, David was rewarded with awareness of some very modern dilemmas that keep his work relevant: of knowing it is impossible to portray a scene without altering it; of knowing all art is inherently political; of knowing the stories we tell control our realities; and of knowing that you will be judged as harshly as you judged others—and going through with it anyway, charging into The Void, no matter the cost.

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March 31, 2026April 3, 2026

Painting as It Burns

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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How the ephemerality of the internet and the many ways we present ourselves online has warped our ability to know who we really are.

Will the Future Like You? Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention begins with a declaration: Our personal identities have not kept pace with the tempo of technology. And, according to author Patricia Martin, this imbalance has made us wholly unprepared to explore—let alone answer—the age-old question of who we really are.

In her book, Martin, a cognitive psychology-informed cultural analyst and host of the podcast Jung in the World, frames many of her arguments using Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, applying them to identity formation in the digital age. If Jung’s original thesis proposes that humans rely on universal themes and inherited behaviors in the psyche to present who we are across self, shadow, persona, and anima, Martin contends the ephemerality of the internet has warped our inheritance. Her primary concern are the selves we present to the world via our various performances online, often manufactured as authentic while being anything but. Carrying out numerous ethnographic approaches including content analysis, narrative interviews, and sorting and coding “15,000 online users across 500 million posts,” she concludes these performances are also occurring at an exorbitant rate never experienced before in human history, sowing mass identity confusion in the process.

Having become increasingly skeptical (and weary) of internet self-presentation via social media, I devoured Martin’s latest work, which utilized psychoanalytical language and frameworks to explore observations I’ve mainly considered through a cultural and anthropological lens. But even those who don’t agree with Martin (or me) about the current state of affairs will likely find instructive value in the book’s summations about our ever brave new technological era and its effects on identity.

According to Martin, there are three main elements contributing to our modern distortions of self-construction and development: “personal fog,” “chronic self-doubt,” and “cascading crossroads.” Borrowing from Jung’s definition of the persona as a complex system that helps the individual relate with the world socially by wearing a kind of mask, Martin argues that personal fog comes from the continuous amplification and proliferation of various personas online, which obliterate our sense of who we are. Chronic self-doubt, meanwhile, delineates the distances between our digital presentations, which rely on external validation, and the selves we present offline, a gap that can cause tremendous self-uncertainty. Finally, cascading crossroads is characterized by how previously reliable identity anchors—such as family and work, or even other modes, such as class, gender, and where we consider home—now fluctuate more frequently, making our shape-shifting far more incessant.

Among the many examples Martin offers of this increasing ephemerality, she cites the story of the trailblazing confessional blogger, Heather Armstrong. In the early aughts, Armstrong’s blog, Dooce, was a “mommy tell-all” magnet to millions, especially young mothers, who regularly consumed her relatable personal accounts of raising two children in Salt Lake City, Utah. But even before Dooce’s eventual decline due to the rise of social media, Martin points out that as Armstrong “matured, she found her light waning,” and the blogger increasingly divulged more serious confessions, including daily alcohol consumption and marital issues, not to mention the details of her history with depression. Martin isn’t explicit about whether Armstrong’s solemn shift was a cry for help or an effort to reinvigorate the blog. She does, however, add that “Dooce attempted several comebacks. But traffic never bounced back.” In 2023, Armstrong died by suicide. Examining how she was remembered, Martin notes “how little was said about her massive output of content, the effort it took, and the emotional toll of constant reinvention…”

While Armstrong’s story is a particularly dire case, there are others—admittedly less tragic—throughout the book that still speak to the toll our relationship to having an audience is taking on our relationship to ourselves. Martin also makes clear this goes beyond those who are, in some shape or form, attempting to be influencers: All of us online are liable to the emotional struggles of trying to juggle various presentations at cost to our psyche and identity development.

However, the book doesn’t propose that we all abandon the internet (to the extent that we can) to counter these identity disruptions. Nor does Martin suggest that we wholly desert digital performance and presentation altogether. Rather, she asks the reader to more carefully consider the repercussions to our relationships—both to ourselves and others—online, where our identities are overwhelmed by seemingly endless transmutations, and ultimately underpinned by digital spaces extorting our identity confusion for profit.

This inevitably has affinities with Karl Marx’s concept of the alienation of the factory worker from anything that could give their work meaning. But for me, it brought to mind Aimé Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, and its thesis that the thingification of the colonized subject turns them into a commodity, isolating a person from themselves and the other. Transposing Cesaire’s contentions onto Martin’s begs questions worth probing further: Are we being colonized by the internet? Or by the tech bros that run it?

Luckily, Martin doesn’t leave us without specific resolutions for alleviating our identity disruptions, the greatest of which is—perhaps surprisingly—a spiritual recommendation: that we reconsider the soul. Some anecdotes in the book are even dedicated to people who've been able to subvert identity confusion by relying on time-honored means of transformation and soul-enrichment: insulating themselves offline, and leaning on close bonds in the flesh.

Martin also challenges us not to render onto technology what cannot be done by technology. Instead, she encourages us to create and honor our most true selves beyond the curations the internet can only offer. “We set boundaries, we verify claims, and we don’t give ourselves away too easily for the sake of a little fawning attention,” Martin writes in the concluding chapters of the book; to me, sound advice regardless of which continuum of internet identity discourse you choose to be on. She also offers perhaps one resolve for the question the book’s title proposes, Will the Future Like You?: Ultimately, the quest to answer this in the digital space is a hollow endeavor, because it requires an endless reconfiguration of selves, often to our own detriment. So, whatever selves we do offer up as performance in digital spaces, at the very least, we should refuse to give in fully—saving us perhaps not only from ourselves, but for ourselves.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Will The Future Like You?" by Patricia Martin [post_excerpt] => How the ephemerality of the internet has warped our ability to know who we are. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => march-book-of-the-month-botm-will-the-future-like-you-patricia-martin-identity-online-social-media-nonfiction-psychology [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-04-29 18:07:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-04-29 18:07:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10374 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 27, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “Will The Future Like You?” by Patricia Martin

by Kovie Biakolo

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How samba schools in Brazil are teaching Black history through the parades at Carnival.

The torrential rain couldn’t stop Unidos da Tijuca, one of the oldest samba schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from rehearsing in the streets. On an evening in early February, dancers flooded the Morro do Borel community, moving their bodies in unison as a crowd cheered them on, shouting their loyalty to the samba school and dancing alongside them. The crowd had been waiting for hours for the rehearsal to begin, drinking beer and barbecuing, the evening already a celebration. Now, the sound of snare drums, quick and sharp, moved each spectator to sing along to the music, as the year's anthem began to play. The performance had officially begun.

Though the parades in Rio are world-famous, attracting a global audience for Carnival each year, the greatest show in the world still belongs to these communities, where the parades—a pivotal part of the season’s festivities—originated. It is also here that these samba schools work hard year-round to honor the parades’ original purpose: bringing marginalized histories that aren’t taught in Brazilian schools to the national stage.

“Since the 1930s, samba schools have been addressing themes closely related to Brazilian history,” historian Luiz Antonio Simas tells The Conversationalist. “This created a tradition in which Brazilian history, important figures from Brazilian history, and the country's natural beauty became recurring themes [at each parade].”

Leonardo Carrato

Founded in 1931, Unidos da Tijuca is one of 12 samba schools that compete during Carnival, each putting on a parade built from scratch that highlights a different piece of forgotten Brazilian history. For this year’s parade, Unidos da Tijuca chose to tell the story of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Black Brazilian memoirist, poet, composer, playwright, and best-selling author, most known for her book Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, published in 1960 and translated into 14 languages. Last year, the school chose to tell the story of Logun-Edé, an orisha of the Black Brazilian religion Candomblé, and the year before, the influence of Portuguese folk tales on Brazilian samba music.

Other competing schools chose different figures to celebrate this year: Acadêmicos do Salgueiro paid homage to Carnival designer and professor Rosa Magalhães, a samba school legend who won six Carnival championships in the 1980s. The samba school Paraíso de Tuiuti performed a parade about Afro-Cuban religious practices, with a whole chorus written in the Yorubá language. And the 2026 winner, Unidos do Viradouro, honored Moacyr da Silva Pinto, or Mestre Ciça, the school's legendary percussion conductor.

In telling these stories, Unidos da Tijuca and other samba schools aim to make marginalized histories—and Black history in particular—more accessible through popular culture, allowing them to keep these histories alive. The construction of the parade is a year-long process that starts again right after Carnival ends, beginning with each school democratically electing a theme, running a song competition, and translating history into a visual performance through choreography that involves hundreds of dancers.

But while the parades are a joyful culmination of the schools’ efforts, for the communities each samba school represents, it’s the lead-up to the final performance that often most solidifies the history being celebrated.

Leonardo Carrato

That rainy Sunday was Unidos da Tijuca’s last street rehearsal before the official parade at the Sambadrone, and party dwellers excitedly gathered to watch an intimate preview of what would later earn the school 7th place in the official competition. At 6 PM, onlookers dressed in the colors of Unidos da Tijuca—blue and yellow—waited outside of the school, a tall building painted in yellow. The energy was high as people gathered, and the song composed for this year’s parade played loudly through speakers at the closest bar, along with songs from previous years: "Logun-Edé - Santo Menino que Velho Respeita" (“Logun-Edé - The Holy Child Old Men Respect”) and "O Conto de Fados" (“The Tale of Fairies”).

As the time for the performance neared, people began singing along to the story of Maria de Jesus, one that mirrors the stories of many Black women in Brazil today. A single mother of three, Maria de Jesus lived in the favela of Canindé in São Paulo, where she spent her time picking up recyclables to sell, taking care of her children, and writing about her day-to-day life. One of her notebooks from this time would eventually become her first best-selling book, Child of the Dark, which sold 10,000 copies in its first week of publication in 1960—an achievement that was unheard of at the time, and still rarely met in Brazil now.

But the majority of the community was unfamiliar with these details of Maria de Jesus’s life before Unidos da Tijuca chose to tell her story for the 2026 parade. “It’s essential that we talk about a person who has been made invisible by society and by the Brazilian people,” Mariah Dantas, one of the principal dancers, tells The Conversationalist. “Almost nobody remembers her importance, or how impactful she was at the time, and how important she is today. Because many women still live in poverty like she did… This isn’t just about telling Carolina’s story, but also about highlighting that Black women still live like that, and that this needs to change.”

Many of these same women also live in Morro do Borel, and saw themselves reflected in Maria de Jesus’s story for the first time. “It was the perfect choice,” Carlos Batata, member of Unidos da Tijuca and president of Unidos da Tijuquinha, a version of the samba school for children, tells The Conversationalist. “The story was unknown, [but] with time, people got to know more about Carolina’s work, and now people sing the samba song and relate and cry to it, because there are parts of the lyrics—a phrase, a chorus—that represents each woman’s story here.”

Leonardo Carrato

To accurately tell Maria de Jesus’s story, Unidos da Tijuca worked with an academic consultant on everything from the writing of the samba song’s lyrics, the design of thousands of costumes and five floats, and even some of the choreography. (The practice of hiring a consultant is relatively new across samba schools, a union of institutional education and popular education that only began around 10 years ago.) This year, Unidos da Tijuca collaborated with researcher Fernanda Felisberto, a literature professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who is a part of an editorial committee that has salvaged, re-edited, and published Maria de Jesus’s work in recent years.

“For a long time, we used to say that there are histories that traditional schools don’t tell, but that Carnival will tell those histories, almost as if they’re in opposition to each other,” Felisberto says. “But in reality, we are building a process that goes hand-in-hand, especially because hiring consultants has become more and more common for samba schools. So, samba schools today are learning from these traditional sources of knowledge. The challenge for Carnival is to translate that knowledge in a way that reaches more people.”

The act of performing in community is a large part of this translation, and in Morro do Borel, it is what has brought Maria de Jesus’s story back to life. “Sou a liberdade, mãe do Canindé / Muda essa história, Tijuca / Tira do meu verso a força pra vencer / Reconhece o seu lugar e luta / Esse é o nosso jeito de escrever,” both members of the samba school and party dwellers alike screamed at the top of their lungs during the street rehearsal. (“I am freedom, mother of Canindé / Change our history, Tijuca / Get the strength to win from my verses / Recognize your place in struggle / This is our way of writing.”)

Leonardo Carrato

For this year’s parade, Felisberto says the school intentionally focused on lesser known works by Maria de Jesus, like the music she composed and recorded, and the plays she wrote, which remain unreleased to the public. They hoped to show Maria de Jesus was more than her biggest successes, in part so that she is recognized for the breadth of her creative work, which never got as much exposure as her first book. “We want people to understand that Carolina was a multidimensional artist,” Felisberto says. “Child of the Dark constructed an image of Carolina that spotlighted precarity, which is how people see her today. The challenge was to humanize her, show her failures and successes beyond a narrative around her best-selling memoir.”

Like Felisberto, many view the Carnival parades not just as a celebration marginalized histories, but as a collective experience with a lasting impact. “I consider samba songs by samba schools to be historical documents,” Simas says, adding that in his 30 years working as a history teacher in public schools in Rio, he has used samba songs as pedagogical sources. “It’s a tool to start debates, we can analyze the lyrics, study the trajectory of some historical characters who are less talked about in formal education.”

For Unidos da Tijuca member Douglas Coutinho, studying samba songs even helped him to pass his university entry exams. “My history teacher used the samba song from 2008, ‘João e Marias’ by Imperatriz Leopoldinense, [in class],” Coutinho says. “The samba song helps teachers teach, and it helps students understand the material that is being taught.”

Leonardo Carrato

Perhaps most importantly, in telling and preserving these stories through samba parades, communities are able to reclaim the narrative from the dominant classes, which tend to dismiss or downplay the importance of marginalized histories. Sometimes, it also allows these stories to become the dominant narratives—at least, during Carnival, when the media’s attention turns to the communities these samba schools represent.

“Samba schools will tell us stories that are important for the people,” says Iara Cassano, a member of Acadêmicos do Salgueiro and a samba teacher. “The dominant narratives will tell histories that are important to the elites… Carnival gives us autonomy to tell our own histories.”

[post_title] => A History Lesson Through Samba [post_excerpt] => How samba schools in Brazil are teaching Black history through the parades at Carnival. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => samba-school-forgotten-marginalized-black-history-rio-de-janeiro-brazil-carnival-parades-unidos-da-tijuca [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-03-20 02:25:49 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-03-20 02:25:49 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10356 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 20, 2026March 20, 2026

A History Lesson Through Samba

by Nicole Froio

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A memoir interwoven with historical research that might leave you wondering if anything really changes in these United States.

The Mixed Marriage Project’s title will more than likely give an onlooker pause. Perhaps that’s the point. But before conjuring up too many presumptions based on the name, one might also note it is the work of renowned law professor and sociologist Dorothy E. Roberts. Amongst other books, Roberts is the author of Killing the Black Body (about black women’s reproductive history in the United States) and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. In her latest, a memoir interwoven with historical research, she unfolds her parents’ interracial relationship, and through it, partly unravels a United States’ history of the subject itself.

The “project” of the book’s title is personal for Roberts: In the 1930s, her father, a white American of Welsh and German descent, set out to examine interracial relationships between black and white people specifically, while studying to be an anthropologist at the University of Chicago. His interview-based research, which explored interracial unions formed as early as the late 1800s, continued till the 1960s and ’70s, and included interviewing the children of couples he’d earlier surveyed. This feat was supposed to become a book, sold to a publisher while her father was working as a professor at Chicago’s Roosevelt University. But the book was never published, and its stories left untold until now.

Roberts theorizes the reason for this was that her father’s work had become so interwoven into his identity—and their family life—that its completion would have caused a real identity disruption. Who was he if he wasn’t working on the project? And where did that leave her and her family?

Through her own research, Roberts learns her mother, a black, Jamaican immigrant, was also involved in this work, conducting interviews alongside her father for many years. Both were committed to the project’s objectives, one of which was to demonstrate that interracial relationships are not inherently abnormal, because black and white people are not fundamentally different. This was also how her parents met: While majoring in chemistry at Roosevelt, her mother became her father’s research assistant. (In the book, Roberts explicitly states she “wonder[s] how their professional partnership evolved into a romantic one—and whether they worried about the perception of impropriety.”) This prompts Roberts to question an underlying reason for her parents' marriage: Were they supposed to be embodiments of their own mixed marriage project? If Roberts’ parents were indeed as much a part of the study as they were leads of it, she concludes, it would make her and her sisters its subjects, too—or, at least, its personified outcomes.

Rather than be rattled by this possibility, the author measures it against the people she personally knew her parents to be—curious, culturally-aware, well-traveled, and community-minded. Her parents’ relationship, after all, existed beyond their work, and they were initially drawn to each other by their shared sense of adventure, similar values on education, and complementary sensibilities—her mother as the planner and her father as the spontaneous one. By her own admission, Roberts gives them a latitude that an outsider might not. But I reckon this is where the book shines as memoir, rather than an investigation of an investigation: the reader gets to know Roberts’ parents through her loving eyes. Loving eyes that, for the record, do not condone the same politics her parents—especially her father—may have arrived at through their work: that interracial relationships offer some kind of medium to restore black and white relations in the United States, shaped by white supremacy and violence. (On this, Roberts pointedly disagrees.)

Beyond family history, the themes in Project will be recognizable to anyone versed on the discourse, likely causing you to wonder if anything really changes in these United States. The politics of the study’s participants—black men, black women, white men, and white women in heterosexual, interracial relationships—reveal how black men-white women couples were seen as more “acceptable” but also more arduous in the long-run; white women often lost privilege they couldn’t regain unless divorced. The research also highlighted the sexual tropes attached to black women-white men couples—and the misogynoir that informs outsiders' views of them. Recurring themes, regardless of interracial pairings, showed how marital cutting across the color line affected one’s choice of neighborhood and the life afforded to them and, possibly, their children. Also recurring—especially in the civil rights era—were the many well-meaning couples who entered these marriages in the hopes of proving to the world as much as to themselves that interracial coupling inherently combats a racist society. This hope, Roberts argues, was often an erroneous one, as countless couples later found out.

In the lasting analysis of her father’s work, Roberts arrives at the same conclusion that she began with regarding interracial relationships: They are not panacea for a society, a country, or a world that has yet to unravel itself from white supremacy, let alone repair its many casualties. But in Project, Roberts shows us that despite flawed, socially-constructed and racialized societies, people will enter unions and arrangements of all kinds, her parents included. These unions may not transcend race, but they do demonstrate that, in spite of the race politics attached, people will deem them worth fighting for. Some do so naively and are thus confronted with seeing the depths of racism like they never have before. But others, especially the curious, culturally-aware, and community-minded, go into them with eyes wide open, prepared to confront all of its politics united.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "The Mixed Marriage Project" by Dorothy E. Roberts [post_excerpt] => A memoir interwoven with historical research that might leave you wondering if anything really changes in these United States. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => february-book-of-the-month-botm-pick-the-mixed-marriage-project-by-dorothy-e-roberts-memoir-interracial-relationships-dating-history-research [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-04-29 18:07:19 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-04-29 18:07:19 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10212 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 26, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “The Mixed Marriage Project” by Dorothy E. Roberts

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10167 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-02-12 19:38:24 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-02-12 19:38:24 [post_content] =>

A look at the cross-continental sloshing of capital beneath the art market bubble.

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

Lately, a series of memes, graphs, and cartoons have gone viral, all asserting variations of the same thing: “The entire U.S. economy right now is 7 companies sending a trillion fake dollars back and forth to each other.” The source diagram for this claim was published in Bloomberg last October, in a piece highlighting why all these circular deals—largely between the usual AI suspects, such as Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI—indicate a likely bubble. Together, this cloud-based clusterfuck has generated a $1 trillion AI market and $192.7 billion in 2025 Venture Capital investments. As of yet, however, they’ve also yielded scant indications of any productivity gains whatsoever.

…Cue Steve Carrell in The Big Short. (Not for nothing, a leaked internal Nvidia memo recently name-checked Michael Burry.)

This cross-continental sloshing of a cool trillion is perhaps the only path I see to reconciling two recent, noteworthy art market headlines. The first, I mentioned in my previous column: In September, the Financial Times reported that blue chip gallery Hauser & Wirth’s London profits have slid a staggering 90%. The news of the mid-tier market collapse had dogged the art world all year, as many art loans began defaulting, and overleveraged galleries continued shuttering, unable to weather a shaky economy. But Hauser & Wirth’s blue chip standing made its numbers an especially macabre indicator of an imminent art market crash, cowing even the most optimistic.

The second, taken in context of the first, truly gave me pause: Frieze, which bought Armory two years ago, just announced a new Abu Dhabi "edition", which means that one group now has eight fucking art fairs a year, an even crazier cadence than the fashion calendar.

At a glance, the two headlines might seem in opposition to each other. How can an industry simultaneously report both catastrophic losses and breathless expansion in the prestige area of its retail sector? Well, one might also ask how 36% of American households are in medical debt (21% with bills past due) and the vast majority of millennials and Gen Z Americans cannot afford to buy homes, while the stock market is at an all-time high. Much as the American economy is increasingly a misery for those who live in it and incredibly profitable for those who invest in it, the art world remains very profitable for the tiny tranche of collectors who treat art as an investment tool, and a house of horrors for those who live and work in it.

Unsurprisingly, we’re starting to see this reflected in the art itself. To my eye, the art fair circuit of today largely seems to exist to dare to dream what slop—Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year—might look like in the flesh, spread out across a couple of hundred booths. Nearly 55 galleries participated for the first time at New York’s Armory fair this year, the second since Frieze purchased it in 2023. When I attended, I wondered how many of them actually belonged at Javits Convention Center. Surely, taste is subjective, but to me—and the art advisor who gifted me a VIP Pass—there wasn’t enough champagne in the joint to make the fair look anything close to well curated. I heard many whispers that the Armory show hadn’t sold all of its booths and, as a result, what they let in looked like the kind of upscale beach art you’ll see next to a store that only sells white clothing or Vilebrequin swim trunks in Amagansett. When you figure booths are about $40K, the metallic driftwood art made sense: That's nothing to the very rich, who spend about as much if not more on a Christmas vacation. A booth might placate any number of ailing family dynamics, from a bored spouse to a listless kid.

Questionable curation aside, it was also unclear if, and by what measure, the fair was even successful. Art media did a tentative dance around the Armory numbers: some press focused on individual stand-out sales, rather than overall figures; other articles emphasized how the absence of blue-chip galleries created opportunities for smaller ones. (This is a trend I also saw in press related to Art Basel Miami last December.)

Of course, many large corporations simply fudge the numbers when the going gets tough. They pay good money for sunnier analyses. But when paired with the news of Frieze’s expansion, this dissonance should ring alarms: Something is up. Why open more fairs when the ones they already have are neither profitable nor novel and of dubious artistic merit?

This discrepancy—and the chasm between plain facts—is instructive in matters far beyond the art world. Even superpowers are in on the trend: While the US unemployment is reported by the Department of Labor at 4.4%, the functional rate of unemployment (accounting for those who are underemployed) has been calculated at 24.7%. The Trump Administration used the government shutdown as an excuse not to release the October jobs report at all. Across the Pacific, China was accused of concocting its own low unemployment fiction all summer, too. Similarly, tech is in deep shit: Open AI is reportedly covering up for nearly $140 billion in losses over a four year period.

The cross continental slosh has a pattern, after all. It’s a game of appearances played across the globe until resources totally, utterly run out, and crash violently. As Ernest Hemingway famously put it: “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ ‘Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.’” And, in the meantime, it is of the utmost importance to set up shop someplace new while the goods still have some value, and the brand hasn’t yet been completely tarnished.

In the art world, this is panning out in a palpable way. It's one thing to talk about AI slop as a harbinger of economic doom, or the imminent insolvency of Social Security, but it's even wilder as a bubble indicator to see mid-tier and blue chip galleries sliding horribly in Western world capitals, while the same art fairs that are coughing and wheezing in the West open entirely new ventures in Gulf States. Rather than cultivate a new base of collectors that might sustain art markets on a local level, the industry is continuing to cater to the uber wealthy, wherever it can find them—even as this model fails miserably in the West.

Of course, the art market isn’t quite a Ponzi Scheme, if you consider that the original investors aren’t technically promised an artificially high rate of return off the bat. But neither is, say, Nvidia, which hasn’t stopped its CEO from openly insisting his company “isn’t Enron” as its stock price tumbles. Like other markets, the art market continues on by force of its ability to lure in new investors. Frankly—to bring up Michael Burry again—the notion of carrying a certain tranche of goods from market to market in search of new investors while bundling them together (in this instance, as a fair), strikes me as a sort of arty CDO (collateralized debt obligation). Magical circular thinking abounds in budget offices across the board, from art to tech to government. But, I would argue, when consulting the US Treasury’s page explaining how the national debt is structured seems helpful in understanding our current predicament…it’s not looking good.

Perhaps there is someone in Abu Dhabi who will be thrilled to learn of the art world’s KKK: Koons, Kapoor, and Kaws. But you don’t need to read that US Treasury page to know who will be left holding the bag when the cross-continental slosh finally goes splat. Even if Frieze is able to eke out an existence from selling balloon dog sculptures to billionaires, it won't protect them from the inevitable pop, although it might provide a little delusional cushion in the meantime. As critic Jerry Saltz recently cautioned in an Instagram post, quoting Yale School of Management’s Magnus Resch, “Let’s be clear: multi-million dollar trophy auctions don’t reflect the health of the market. They reflect its distortion. What the art world needs isn’t more $50 million headlines. It needs more $5,000 collectors.”

To any working artist, that Resch observation has the infuriating tenor of the proverbial “Fork Found In Kitchen” headline. We need more art for art’s sake, much as we need communities that are affordable for creators. However, today’s collector class values art that functions as investment, not the health and cultivation of anything so quaint and unremunerative as artistic communities, or even individual artists. In the same way, corporations now chiefly exist to create value for investors, rather than to provide goods and services to consumers—let alone provide any kind of reciprocal benefit to workers.

To be perfectly clear, today’s billionaire class is one mostly disinterested in public works or philanthropy. Art collection itself is not about collecting objects that carry beauty or even status, but rather ones that accrue value and allow them to hide more money from the tax man. After all, the art world KKK is not an unholy trinity of art but rather a bundle of financial tools. If 1989’s independent cinema gave us The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, 2026’s art market has given us The Collector, the Tax Attorney, His Wife & Her Art Advisor. Whether or not Frieze’s latest venture succeeds, the West cannot flatter itself that these new markets of Middle Eastern buyers seek Western signifiers of wealth so much as access to more of our gloriously opaque financial tools: to wit, the art itself. (That Richter will really tie the Swiss bank vault together!)

Perhaps the greatest work of art right now, then, is this art market bubble itself, that sloshes so showily as it grows. It is the work of a collective that daringly splits the newly irrelevant hair between metonymy and metaphor, spanning continents, industries, and banking systems. It performs the same wistful, elegant, melancholic drift of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 children’s classic, The Red Balloon, aping the film’s Gallic ennui with a Chanel sweater set for the booth and Ruinart champagne in the VIP room, dragging a damning homogenizing aesthetic in its wake like a dead zone in the ocean. And all it touches turns to slop as it grows and grows, for only homogenized slop signifies fungible, quantifiable value.

This homogenizing force and its flattening aesthetics are not unique to the art world, and might be handily encapsulated in 2025’s Q4 neologism, “chubai,” meaning something “chopped but also spiritually Dubai.” (Examples were given as Soho House, Goyard, and Carbone.) All the world’s a shopping mall, to borrow from the Bard. Beige is inescapable. Travel to any continent you like and you’ll find the same shit at every fair, much as the same internationally braindead flagship fashion stores anchor every fancy downtown strip in every major city around the world.

After all, that’s what a bubble does: it floats away, to foreign lands, all year round. As long as the ultra-rich need to keep their money safe from taxes, the art market will obviously continue to spurn its own sustainability—and why shouldn’t it? What market model indicates a path that creates something other than a tiny panic room full of winners, and utter doom for every other poor schmuck who won’t make it to the slopes of Gstaad this winter? Middle and working classes are so 20th-century, and the art market bubble is just one of many that’s eventually going to pop.

We live in a global society that valorizes the iterative as novel, lionizing AI and utterly unable to tell the difference between a tool and its master. Asses and elbows are easily conflated and confused. The art market itself has more to say about the state of contemporary art—and of the economy, of what the government has promised us and won’t deliver, and to what ends the tech world will go to deem anything innovative if it might push up stock prices to enrich that selfsame collector class—than a lot of art does. The sound of shit hitting the fan is perhaps a soothing one, a sort of white noise pedaled in Instagram ads. Or perhaps that sound is the sloshing itself, crossing continents and coming home in a fantastic, tidal fashion, to crash upon our shores.

[post_title] => "The Collector, the Tax Attorney, His Wife & Her Art Advisor" [post_excerpt] => A look at the cross-continental sloshing of capital beneath the art market bubble. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => the-collector-the-tax-attorney-his-wife-her-art-advisor [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-02-12 19:44:35 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-02-12 19:44:35 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10167 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 12, 2026February 12, 2026

“The Collector, the Tax Attorney, His Wife & Her Art Advisor”

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9787 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-02-03 20:58:23 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-02-03 20:58:23 [post_content] =>

While at surface level, #WeirdTok is all fun and games, it also cuts to something deeper about being human.

Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.

The user who makes delightful felt animations. Wild, dramatically narrated video montages about horses at Costco and skeletons at Subway. A creator building a sprawling fortified terracotta city in a forest, an armored hand periodically creeping into frame to demonstrate the latest structure. Programming cards to play Coldplay’s “Clocks” on an antique mechanical organ. Witches in unsettling paper maché masks. A man who goes in deep on the technicalities of the musculoskeletal anatomy of mythical creatures. A tractor set to EDM.

“This is a hilarious and brilliant way to use your weed zapper technology LMAO how do you always find the best TikToks??? My FYP is never this obscure,” my friend and colleague Erin Biba replied when I shared the tractor video to Bluesky. I took her question as a challenge: How weird could my For You Page get? With a bit of effort, as it turns out: very, very weird.

#WeirdTok is a magical, fascinating, bizarre, wonderful, confusing, sometimes horrifying place filled with myriad wonders, delights, and, unfortunately, the inevitable incursion of AI slop. It is also art I genuinely, unironically love. It’s fucking great. And thanks to TikTok’s highly powerful algorithm, the app has learned what I like—and what I do not—with uncanny alacrity. If the FYP throws most people a hodge-podge of content it thinks is popular—horses for the horse girls, tradwives in beige kitchens cooking cereal from scratch, political commentators weighing in on the minutia of the Trump administration—for me, it has been forced to come up with the unpopular. The artisanal videos made by fellow strangeness enthusiasts, with 200 views and three baffled comments from normies wondering how they got there.

Delightfully, the more #WeirdTok I interact with, and the more extensive those interactions—watching all the way through, saving, liking, commenting—the more the weird juice flows. And flow it does. Surrealist skits in a Japanese restaurant. An artist projecting an animation of a horse onto a cityscape from the back of a bicycle. Musical stylings. A heavy equipment operator riding in the bucket of an excavator to the tune of “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” Elaborate frame-by-frame stereoscopic graffiti. Cats playing theremins. Dizzying animations of skeletal anatomy. More musical stylings: Suited brass bands chasing runners in a park while playing the “Mission Impossible” theme. Dazzling woodcock fancams. People wearing cardboard bug costumes with cutouts for their faces and writhing around in a parking lot.

Refusing to keep these gems to myself, several nights a week, I select a carefully curated #WeirdTok to share on Bluesky. I always tag Erin, who replies with a different weird video SHE has found. Over the months, our interactions have attracted a small band of loyal followers akin to those who wait to see how many eels show up under a bridge every morning; a small, fun, silly bright spot in dark times.

This shouldn’t be mistaken for escapism—delightful as it may be to watch remote control cars carrying a payload of pastel plushies while crushing autumn leaves, or a man’s surreal video series about his sleep paralysis demon, or a woeful potato taking a shower. Rather, the utter randomness of #WeirdTok—and the community that has formed around it—feels inherently strange and ungovernable, a necessary connection to humanity during a fucking scary time to be alive. We cannot survive if we cannot find joy: Surrounded by the fall of empire and the rise of fascism, I DO want to watch a whimsical video of wizard puppets jerkily animated in outdoor locations, thank you—and as it turns out, other people do, too.

While at surface level, #WeirdTok is all fun and games, it also cuts to something deeper about being human and the way art can transcend linguistic and social boundaries. I’m a long-time fan of so-called “outsider art.” Strange performance pieces. Unsettling musical compositions. Surreal found object exhibitions. Art cars and bohemian silliness. Whole communities centered around radical living, such as Bombay Beach along the Salton Sea.

These spaces feed my deep and abiding affection for weirdness, but also for making a place for art that is unconventional, highly specific, challenging. #WeirdTok, too, is often produced by self-taught, working-class artists exploring the world without feeling bound to whatever the rules of art are supposed to be. Art that is increasingly difficult to make in the modern era because of how expensive it has become to simply live. Gone are the days of the WPA and its serious investment in arts and creativity in the United States, or the arts grants that contributed to a flowering of culture in the U.K. in the 1960s and ‘70s. Instead, our cities are filled with creeping homogeneity, Airbnbs, and flipper homes trying to cash in on reputations of countercultures that now can’t actually afford to exist in those same places, while the true radicals are forced to the margins, such as the Ghost Ship collective in Oakland, destroyed by a fire in 2016 that killed 36 people. In the face of this, supporting weird art is essential.

It's also a surprisingly human thing to do. The cream of the #WeirdTok crop doesn’t use artificial intelligence, and in fact, actively defies even the most feverish robot hallucinations. Human weirdness is original. It comes from somewhere deep in the heart, not a blender filled with other people’s creativity and run on high for 30 seconds before being blorped out and shoved in your face. It is produced for the love of the game.

To discover a truly unhinged video feels hard-earned, a sort of reverse algorithmic manipulation. It is also, fundamentally, a rejection of technofascism and the bland hegemony tech companies want to force upon all of us, to turn us into passive consumers gobbling up slop and rolling in garbage while the world burns. As a very specific niche, #WeirdTok often only makes it way to the right viewers, often without captions, hashtags, or explanations. It simply is, waiting to be discovered as you scroll. Some nights I am hit with banger after banger, saving every other video for future enjoyment and sharing, the FYP and I in a groove, unstoppable. It is like wandering the streets of a new city with no destination in mind, my favorite way to travel, finding new, intriguing things around every corner. It’s an experience that reminds me of the “old internet,” a long-gone place that we all once inhabited and loved, where it was possible to randomly stumble upon a painstakingly hand-coded website, human-made, then never see it again.

The ephemerality of TikTok is also an important element of #WeirdTok, and not just because the videos can vanish at the click of a button. At times, it feels like a fever dream, one that is frustratingly elusive to explain to people outside this liminal space. From an entirely practical perspective, there is also a “you had to be there” sense that is escalating as the app’s future in the U.S. grows increasingly uncertain. After a forced deal with Oracle, it appears ByteDance will be licensing its algorithm, but TikTok’s future overall is a big unknown as its new parent company brings its own biases and priorities to the table, all under the looming hand of the Trump administration. Will this change squeeze the joy from the FYP, as weird art serves no purpose under capitalism? If so, where will the weird art go next?

There is a sense of being on the rooftop at a wild party, watching the grey fingers of dawn slowly creep over the horizon, knowing that in daylight, everything will look very different. Yet, #WeirdTok is a reminder that even if this party ends and people trickle home, shedding feathers and sequins on transit, weird art, human ingenuity, joyous creativity, will endure. There will always be another party, and no matter where it shows up and who will be there, it will exist.

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February 3, 2026February 3, 2026

How Weird Can Your For You Page Get?

by s.e. smith

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9993 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-01-29 23:07:30 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-01-29 23:07:30 [post_content] =>

A memoir that grapples with changing ambitions and the myth of having it all.

Many millennials (or non-millenials, for that matter) will be familiar with the overarching plight of Amil Niazi’s Life After Ambition, her "good enough memoir": the experience of being stuck in the rat race of chasing one dream after another, only to find yourself on a never-ending grind. In this race, there’s always one more goal to achieve—one more professional hurdle to overcome, one more career ambition to attain—before the dream can be realized. For women especially, relentlessly pursuing a profession, while ensuring all other aspects of your life are left unscathed, becomes an ever-shifting goalpost; the quintessential “having it all”.

As the book’s title implies, Niazi unfolds the futility of this chase, made especially futile given the instabilities accompanying her career of choice—journalism and writing. But the memoir is as much a personal unfolding as it is a professional one. In it, we learn of Niazi’s parents' almost romcom-like origins before she disabuses the reader of the myth of their marriage and the prospect of an idyllic childhood. There are the anticipated working-class migrant struggles, the family never having quite enough, which takes them across oceans to seek a better life in England, where the author was born, and eventually, to Canada, where the author has spent most of her life. There’s also the abuse between her parents, which Niazi touches without ever quite expounding on, even as she informs of their eventual divorce and sketches her own experience of intimate partner abuse later in life.

In Niazi’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, there’s a persistent feeling of lack. There’s little romanticizing of her circumstances, and she admits her personal rat race was likely born from this instinct: Storytelling—reporting and writing—was the one endeavor that allowed her to make sense of the world. In distressing but humorous episodes, she depicts a life of underemployment before eventually landing a job that sets her on a viable career path. Amid all the instabilities, she moves from Vancouver to Toronto with a boyfriend who physically abuses her—and there, the violent ending of their final contact results in a hard-to-shake addiction to prescription drugs. Through all of this, Niazi continues to work, uncertain of who she can trust with the vulnerable parts of her life, but finding stability through her ambitions—learning along the way, her calculus won’t always pay off.

There are bright spots throughout Niazi’s ordeals, despite the numerous and varied difficulties. There is a dog she loves and cares for, friends who intervene, and a reliable boyfriend who eventually becomes her husband. Yet her career ambitions remain the driving force that shapes her life, until suddenly, it isn’t; and for Niazi, a large part of this shift happens when she becomes a mother. After a period in London—chosen, of course, for her career ambitions—she ultimately returns to Toronto with her family when she realizes those ambitions have changed.

Indeed, in the final analysis of Life After Ambition, I wonder if the author doesn’t slightly betray the title. She gains fresh perspective through her choice to pursue having a third child, and by attempting the kind of writing career she’s always longed for, one less defined by output, and instead, by balance. For her, motherhood and writing are intertwined and related; one aids the other, and though she must make sacrifices to have both, neither can be forfeited.

Perhaps less than delineating what life looks like after ambition fades and falters, what the author concludes is what becomes of us—especially of many women—when our ambitions include more than the careers we set out to have. In so doing, what Niazi offers in her debut book is not only a re-think of our lives as she unravels her own, but a re-defining of ambition entirely, demanding we consider the whole of our lives, and not just the parts we keep separate in the name of career.

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January 29, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “Life After Ambition” by Amil Niazi

by Kovie Biakolo

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A new community gathering, coming February 2026.



We’re kicking off a new gathering for our community, and you’re invited! Starting in February, we’re launching Conversation Club, a special new way to spotlight some of our favorite stories, by hosting conversations where writers can answer your questions and share more about how their stories came to be. It’s kind of like a book club, but you don’t have to read a whole book! 



Read the article, come with questions (or not—just bring your mug of tea if that’s what you’re feeling), and be in community with us. It’s a casual, friendly discussion group and an encouraging space to stay curious, informed, and connected with fellow Conversationalist readers. 



Our first Conversation Club will feature our Executive Director Erin Zimmer Strenio’s recent piece “A Helping of Something Hopeful”, about her weekly neighborhood potlucks and how they've nourished her community on multiple levels. How did she get the potluck up and running? How did she keep it going? How can you get one started in your own community? Erin will chat with our Executive Editor Gina Mei, sharing what she’s learned and answering other questions from the community, including readers just like you. 



You can RSVP to our first Conversation Club below, and read Erin’s piece right here. We can’t wait to be in conversation with you. See you there! 



RSVP: Add your email to the list and we’ll send you a calendar invite and Zoom link.
Date: Friday, February 20th, 2026
Time: 11-11:45 AM PT // 2-2:45 PM ET

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January 21, 2026January 21, 2026

Join the Conversation Club!

by The Conversationalist Team

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9891 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-01-09 00:16:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-01-09 00:16:00 [post_content] =>

For months, I've tried to make sense of my sudden inability to write about societal collapse. Then, I found out I was pregnant.

I've been promising, and failing, since before the 2024 U.S. election to write about the world on fire, and the arsonists fanning the flames. The essay I'd had in mind was called "Don't Be Fucking Stupid About Dictatorship", a warning I’d been repeating to anyone who’d listen, that felt increasingly urgent as the months went by. There's been plenty to write about since: Just this week, the Trump administration sowed global chaos when it kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Unlike Bush's invasion of Iraq, his administration didn't bother with any pretense for regime change beyond dick-swinging dominance and oil. They also don't even have a concept of a plan beyond further threats to invade Greenland, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. Yet still, I couldn’t get myself to write about any of it.

This was unusual. For the last decade, I've written extensively about abusive tyrants and their destructive attempts at control. In that time, they've only gotten more brazen—enough so that arguments that used to get me accused of tin-pot hysterics have now become common sense for the same people who used to do the accusing. The U.S. is, in fact, a corrupt billionaire-backed authoritarian regime staffed by rapists and racists with imperial delusions, in league with a fanatical Supreme Court and a global network of gangster heads of state. The behemoth that is the climate crisis is real and accelerating, as monstrously strong hurricanes hit the Caribbean, and monsoon flooding across South and Southeast Asia kills thousands and displaces millions. Dehumanization continues to lead to countless atrocities: in immigrant detention camps, on Venezuelan fishing boats, for civilians in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, and Ukraine. Meanwhile, the free press is eroding worldwide, and Elon Musk, world's richest man, has killed humanitarian aid for the world's poorest people. Simultaneously, fellow techbro Sam Altman wants us to believe the same chatbots that insist there are two r’s in "strawberry" will solve all of our problems, when so far, they mostly seem to be causing psychosis in users while killing the job market, making bikini pics of children and women without their consent, and stealing people's water.

In the midst of all this, I've tried to make sense of my writer’s block. Perhaps it's because I have a hard time repeating myself—my ADHD brain is wired to seek out novelty—or because it's too painful to write about societal paralysis and collapse.

Then, eight months ago, I found out I was pregnant.

Suddenly, I had a much better excuse for my inability to focus on all the shitheads ruining everything. But also, something far more welcome: a new surge of hope, and with it, an urge to write again, this time about something slightly different. As I write this, I’m in my third trimester, anxious and excited for my daughter’s arrival, which feels imminent. While this baby wasn't planned, she was very much wanted: I've known I wanted to have a kid ever since my mom died when I was 24. My mom had always mothered me so well, in a way even my adolescent self recognized, and when she died, I felt untethered. The only clarity I got from that awful time was that I was meant to pass on all the unconditional love she'd given me to a child of my own.

But I also wasn’t sure how or when I’d get there. At the time, I was still stuck in abusive dynamics, and would be for years to come. Like many survivors, I had a lot of grieving and healing to do before I eventually broke the cycle. (As Philip Larkin famously wrote, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to but they do.")

Luckily, I've been blessed with financial stability, which allowed me to take my time and find my way. But it still took many years of therapy, loving community, and good decisions—freezing my eggs; ending bad relationships, whether familial, romantic, platonic, or work-related; getting blessed by Buddhist monks while cradling a baby-sized wooden penis in a fertility ritual at Chimi Lhakang, the temple of the Divine Madman in Bhutan—to prepare me at forty to become a mom.

It's a funny fact of modern life to have the old-fashioned way of doing things—meet a wonderful man, fall in love, get pregnant—be the surprise. I had an appointment booked with my fertility doctor and was set to pursue single motherhood with a sperm donor when I met my partner last fall. I joked with my friends, "The minute you light a cigarette, the bus comes." But we’ve both been grateful for the ride.

I'm also old enough to be immersed in all the doomerism around what until recently was called "geriatric pregnancy", so I was shocked at how easily we got pregnant. (Thank you, Divine Madman of Bhutan!) It took me eight weeks to even realize what was happening—already too late in many U.S. states to make an informed decision about keeping a pregnancy. I'd chalked up the first trimester exhaustion to depression over rising fascism, and spent the night before my blood test googling "pregnancy or perimenopause?”, genuinely unsure which was to blame for making my boobs so sore. The morning after we got the results, I got an email from my fertility doctor asking how I was doing. I thanked him for checking in, and shared the fortunate news that we wouldn't be needing his help after all.

I’d been excited but daunted to undertake parenting alone, and it's been a beautiful gift to go through the process with a partner, especially someone so loving and supportive. Simultaneously, there have been so many aspects of this process that have felt out of our control, and it's scary to be bringing a little girl into a world of rising temperatures and white supremacy. The Trump regime, and RFK Jr. in particular, has a eugenicist fixation on breeding white women to produce more white babies, while simultaneously showing extreme hostility to pregnant people. Our future pediatrician needed to check we still believe in vaccines, and that we understood that Tylenol and infant formula are safe. Meanwhile, my partner was turned away from getting the recommended COVID vaccine because becoming a new parent does not qualify him under the new, absurd restrictions.

But in the face of this, I'm also confident that our daughter will be well-loved, both by us and the village that supports us, and that we will do what we can to model a better way of life for her in our home and in our community. I hope she always feels that sense of comfort and safety with us, even as the world rages on. And I hope that the strong foundation we’re building together gives her the courage to face the challenges that we know we can't shield her from. Our daughter hit the jackpot with two parents who cannot wait to meet her and surround her with love—something she’s already repaid by kicking her dad hard in the face when he put his cheek to my belly. (He's a soccer player, and a true believer that "football is life!"; so you can imagine his delight.)

I got lucky that I could feel her little flutterkicks super early. This summer, at the beginning of my second trimester, I took a long-planned trip to Berlin with friends. I'd debated trying to get into the nightclub Berghain with them, and even got a pleather raver dress that fit my growing bump for the occasion. Baby had already attended Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour with me, and stayed up to see Cardi B (also pregnant at the time!) perform at Pride, so I was tickled at the thought of us sober dancing together in a warehouse. But I ate too much schnitzel at dinner and my feet hurt, so I stayed in watching Irish murder mysteries instead; probably the wiser choice. That night, I felt little twitches in my tummy for the first time. I thought maybe I was imagining things—but I'm confident now that she was just already saying hello.

On that same trip, I dragged my friend to the Stasi Museum, converted from their creepy former headquarters. It was easy, and terrifying, to see the parallels to the U.S.: The East German secret police's growth over time reminded me of ICE and Border Patrol's expanded reign of terror, both in terms of mission creep and surveillance techniques. Even the recruitment perks mirrored one another, though the Stasi had much higher standards for who they let in the club. Once again, I was confronted with the dichotomy of bringing new life into the world as other lives are being torn apart.

It’s been hard not to think of the Stasi murdering border crossers and street protestors when ICE just executed a mother of three by shooting her in the head through her windshield in broad daylight, her wife sitting next to her and neighbors recording the scene on video. Renee Nicole Good was not the first person Trump’s paramilitary thugs have bragged about inflicting violence on, either. After shooting Marimar Martinez in November, a Border Patrol agent reportedly texted his buddies with the line, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”

As I’m discovering firsthand, having kids nowadays is apparently a never-ending lesson in this kind of cognitive dissonance. I realize, too, it’s both totally natural and a bit crazy to be excited and hopeful about growing this new little human inside me, considering all the horrors I’ve already listed, and the many others I haven’t. Many people I love and respect are foregoing having children entirely, whether because they simply don't want them, because they're too expensive (especially in New York City, where I live), or because ecofascism has robbed them of any hope for the future. My loved ones who do have kids have shared the joys of parenting, but also the struggles, especially during COVID. As their kids grow, they're facing difficult questions about declining prospects, school shootings, and how adults let the world get this way.

I recognize that the aforementioned financial stability takes care of some, though not all, of these concerns. As for those that remain, I think, in spite of everything, here's my vote of confidence for perpetuating the species: Humanity can be pretty awful, but also pretty amazing. There's still so much joy and wonder to be found in this world, something I've witnessed from people who continue to live and love under the direst of the circumstances. I don't agree with people who say that having children is what gives life meaning—my life had meaning and purpose before. But I do think my daughter has already challenged me to remain hopeful on her behalf, and to take action to better myself and my community to create a softer landing for her when she’s here.

She's kicking me as I write this. I'm congested, my joints hurt, I’ve developed gestational diabetes, and I miss carbs. As excited as I am for her to arrive, I'm also terrified of giving birth, and how much I have to do and learn before then. But I also take solace now in all the good news I can find, because it gives me new hope for the future—for her future. Zohran Mamdani won his mayoral campaign with a promise to bring affordable childcare to New York City. CUNY researchers recently discovered a potential universal antiviral that can defeat multiple families of viruses at once, including Ebola, COVID, and SARS. Chicagoans are telling ICE to fuck off, whether that's dads in pajamas or the Pope. Chinese and European solar power technology is moving forward in leaps and bounds, with renewable energy overtaking fossil fuels in most parts of the world, even as the U.S. lags behind. The African Union passed a Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls, lapping many parts of the world with its second regional treaty on women's rights. Trump and Putin won't live forever, and Stephen Miller, RFK Jr., and Pete Hegseth aren't immune from prosecution. Bolsonaro and Duterte are in jail. Elon Musk is the loneliest man on Earth.

Yes, it's an extremely dark time, but that's not exactly a historical outlier. People have been making babies throughout the worst of them. And nothing motivates me more to build a better future for all of us than this little girl, who, like every child, deserves safety, stability, love, and care, and a world equipped to give it to her.

I can’t wait for her to see it.

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January 9, 2026January 9, 2026

The Strange Hopefulness of Growing a Human While the World Burns

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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