Category: Culture

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Conflict is inevitable. Parker's latest book is a helpful guide on how to better navigate it.

There are plenty of self-care books out there, but what about group-care books? Who’s looking out for the health and wellness of friend groups, work colleagues, neighborhoods, families, and other communities that fill our cups and sustain us in our personal and professional lives?

I think about this topic a lot. As the director of our small but mighty team at The Conversationalist (itself a global network of writers and artists!), as well as a neighborhood potluck organizer, a dedicated friend to my long-distance besties, and a mom/wife/sister/daughter/cousin who doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with loved ones, I know that conflict is inevitable for any group. But I also know how hard it can be to actually address conflict when we’d rather run for the hills and pretend it’s not happening.

Priya Parker’s new book, The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict, is a manual to help us navigate those inevitable bumps, kerfuffles, and painful rifts. It’s a collection of anecdotes and prompts that remind us that conflict is not only natural but essential for healthy, long-lasting groups. Parker also provides some other useful tools—often in the form of asking open-ended questions and really listening to the answers—meant as guides rather than prescriptions. Because even if we know that conflict is inevitable, it can be hard to know what to do with that awkward energy that seemingly comes out of nowhere in a work meeting or family holiday gathering or group chat with friends.

We could just take the easy route and try to ignore it. Let it simmer and deal with it later, or hope it goes away on its own. Because who has the time and energy to navigate complex social dynamics?! I’m too tired and you probably are, too. (Everything is on fire and somehow we still have to cook dinner tonight, am I right?)

But if we really want long-lasting relationships, and to build vibrant, diverse communities like we say we do, then we have to do the work. And in order to do that work, we need to have tools in our collective pockets to move through the inevitable conflict that comes with being a part of living, breathing, and ever-evolving groups of people.

“Healthy heat” is a term and idea Parker uses in the book that really stuck with me. “Healthy heat is the willingness and ability to hold tension, with care, long enough for it to become clarifying and generative. Heat is energy. It is information. It tells us that something, or someone, matters,” Parker explains. “Hold it long enough, with care and without judgment…pause before deciding whether it is good or bad.”

For starters, we can name this heat when we notice it. When we validate what we’re seeing, it often helps other people feel validated in what they’re seeing, too. This alone can help diffuse some of the heat.

From there, Parker says we usually need to take a step back and consider what she calls the “us-ness” of the group, as a way to bring the group back to itself. What makes us us?

“It can be helpful to tap back into your group’s central motivation force,” she writes. “Set aside the particulars of the conflict at hand. Step back and do a check-in with yourself and your sense of the group: When it gets bad, is there still juice here? …Is there still relevance and energy that comes from this collection of individuals contributing their time and energy to one another?”

Parker offers questions to ask yourself to get to the heart of the underlying issues causing the group tension. (Is this conflict touching on a core value of mine? Do I care enough about this group? What are we not saying right now? How might not facing this conflict hurt the group?)

Sometimes, this can help a group reach a resolution. But sometimes, the answers might reveal it’s not worth facing the conflict at all. You might still be able to lighten some tension, but as Parker attests, there’s also validity in strategic conflict avoidance.

“Sometimes fighting happens because, if we’re honest, the group has reached the end of its natural life,” she writes. (She recommends hosting a funeral event for the group in this scenario.) Other times, individuals don’t have the emotional infrastructure to process what’s actually happening in a group conflict. A conflict might even point to deeper clashes in worldviews or inherent racism and other bigotry, which of course is not a small or quick fix.

Parker points to another book, Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution by Louis Kiesberg and Bruce W. Dayton, to provide a framework for whether a conflict even can be addressed. “First: More than one person needs to see a problem. The second: They need to be connected to each other. Third: There needs to be an addressable party, responsible for that grievance, that can be changed. The fourth: They need to believe that they could actually bring about that change.”

If you believe you can bring about the change, and decide to face the conflict, good for you and buckle up! You’re not alone, and this book will be your friend, so keep it handy.

I already know this won’t be a one-time read for me. Parker’s first book, The Art of Gathering, is another one I keep on my shelf and flip through when I’m looking for inspiration and guidance. Confronting conflict and hosting gatherings like my weekly potluck are two muscles I try to exercise on a regular basis. They also work hand in hand — in order to create vibrant gatherings within our communities, we need to navigate the inevitably bumpy roads that come with group dynamics. This takes practice just like anything else, and often, a little sense of humor can go a long way.

Parker shares an example of a leadership summit where employees practiced “healthy heat” through some “heavy topics.” They started with one guaranteed to get people riled up.

PINEAPPLE ON PIZZA. YES OR NO?

The group of colleagues divided into smaller groups and debated, then presented their arguments to the bigger group. Parker says “to grow heat, grow warmth.” If you want to get better at fighting, start with getting better at banter. “Banter is the secret sauce of pro-social conflict,” she writes. “It gives people a way of fighting with each other that feels playful rather than fatal.”

So your homework—whether you read Parker’s book or not, and if you’re ready for some healthy heat—is to do some bantering, a.k.a. some low-stakes fighting, and keep growing your own conflict resolution muscle. The communities we love depend on it.

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October 1, 2026October 6, 2026

Book of the Month: “The Art of Fighting” by Priya Parker

by Erin Zimmer Strenio

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Overnight, I lost some of my capacity to think and write. After fighting to get it back, I cannot imagine choosing to give those faculties over to a machine.

It started with a pain that felt—and sounded—like a crack of thunder at the base of my skull.

I had been prescribed a medication by my cardiologist that was meant to raise my blood pressure, which it did; so much that when I went to bed that night, I experienced a dangerous bout of supine hypertension, or raised blood pressure from lying down. Unaware of what had happened, I took my migraine medication as normal and went to sleep, not knowing that staying horizontal was the worst thing I could have done.

The next morning, I found myself unable to speak. I felt weak in my body, and even sitting up in bed took enormous effort. I lift weights regularly, but just bringing my hand to my head felt heavier than any deadlift. I have had migraines for almost 30 years, so I assumed I was just having one that was presenting differently. Over the days and weeks that followed, however, I felt progressively worse. I don’t remember the details well, but in my health diary, I diligently tracked every detail: My body was numb, my right side hurt, and I spent more time lying down than not. I also continued struggling to speak or even think. When I saw my headache nurse a month later, she was shocked by the state I was in. I was shaking and sobbing, trying to convey to her just how sick I felt. But while I have always had some difficulty with translating my thoughts into speech, all of a sudden, I found that my thoughts weren’t there, either. They were no longer trapped in my brain—I just didn’t have anything to say.

It took a few weeks for me to realize that the medication was to blame, and when I did, I stopped it cold turkey. Still, it took many months to recover. I wasn’t able to work or write unless the tasks were very straightforward and required no creative input, but even then, everything took me far longer than it once had. More than that, I suddenly couldn’t enjoy the things that had always made life worth living—reading, listening to music, watching movies. If an activity required any degree of focus or interpretation, it felt impossible.

After weeks of struggling to get out of bed or talk, I went to the doctor and asked for an MRI, which showed a white patch indicating brain damage. I took the results to my neurologist, who I regularly see for migraines and related disorders. He suggested that, based on the MRI and my symptoms, I may have had a transient ischemic attack (TIA), or “mini-stroke.”

In the months that followed, with aspirin and support from my medical team, I worked hard to be able to do the things I had previously loved, but still found no joy in them. Things that were once intuitive and essential felt insurmountable, like writing about how I felt or what I was experiencing. Reading—something that had provided escape and pleasure for my entire life—was newly boring. Relating things to others, even things I was ostensibly interested in, felt torturous; every conversation was excruciating.

My recovery has now taken years, but I am finally at a point where I feel almost as strong as I once did and as confident as I used to in expressing myself. Coincidentally, it is over these last three years that I have seen many people around me, even those I respect, struggle with the same things I found so difficult when I was re-learning how to think for myself.

Rather than being struck down by a neurological event, however, the main reason they have struggled with these things is because they have outsourced their faculties to AI.

There may be some application of so-called Artificial Intelligence, sometime, that benefits the lives of everyday people. Yet it is currently being forced into every area of art, marketing, and education, none of which have seemed to benefit. The Atlantic recently reported that film students (I studied film for both my BA and MA) now struggle to sit through entire movies. Many schools don’t believe that students can, or should, be assigned to read full novels. Many office workers increasingly use AI for every little task, while professional writers admit to using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Gemini to generate text instead of actually writing it themselves. (Not just ones you haven’t heard of, either: Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk recently gushed about the benefits of AI, too.)

Advocates for LLMs promote them on the basis that they make everything easier, friction-free. But art is not supposed to be friction-free, nor the same as something anyone else could have produced with access to the right program. This is part of why it was so painful to lose my own ability to write after my TIA. Writing is how I make sense of the world, of my own thoughts, of what has happened to me. It is that combination of my own experiences, perspective and cultural input that makes my work unique. You might not like my work, or relate to it, and that’s OK: Nobody will ever write or create or interpret from the exact same place as another person. That is what makes writing worth reading, and what makes it worth the time and effort, not a randomly generated string of words. Learning and education, too, should be somewhat challenging, because the challenge is a significant part of what makes it so rewarding—something I would soon experience firsthand throughout my recovery.

At some point during the slow crawl through this period, I realized that the skills I’d lost might not come back to me without intervention and tremendous effort. I started to read books and articles again, very slowly, despite struggling to retain any information. I wrote just for the sake of it, even though it wasn’t as easy, rewarding, or even readable as it had once been. I started playing the piano, hoping that learning something new would spark something in me. I focused on studying Spanish. None of these things came easily, but they felt essential if I was to return to the person I had once been. Without my memory, without the capacity to be curious about the world, I was not myself. To come back to her, I had to force myself to do those things, no matter how difficult.

Maybe there were easier routes to normalcy, or at least a facsimile of it. Early in my recovery, if I had turned to AI, maybe I could have given the impression to my editors and friends that I was working at full capacity. But even when I was struggling most—even before I fully understood what had happened to me—it never occurred to me to use it. If anything, my experience made me double down on my aversion to LLMs, particularly in my line of work.

I personally boycott AI for a few reasons; the environmental impact is one. As an author, the wholesale theft of artists’ creative output is another, and something I find abhorrent. The end result of AI-generated text and images pretty much always sucks, and as a person who likes to look at and read things that don’t suck, that’s important. But I’m also old-fashioned: I write by hand, I paint, I take film photos, I listen to vinyl. I like things that are made by people, things that I can touch. I also think art matters, even when it’s imperfect or when it isn’t something I personally enjoy, because it was made by a person transmogrifying their experience into something that we can all share. “Art” made by a machine, then, is not art.

What I find most worrying, though, as a person who shares the world with so many heavy LLM users, is the impact on their brains’ ability to function—especially as someone who temporarily lost a degree of mine. In 2025, a study by MIT found that people who used ChatGPT to “write” showed less brain activity in neural networks associated with cognitive processing. The study divided 54 18- to 39-year-olds into three groups, and asked each to write SAT-level essays using ChatGPT, Google, or nothing. Using an EEG, the researchers found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and consistently underperformed at “neural, linguistic and behavioral levels.” This isn’t really surprising news—after all, the LLM users in the study didn’t actually use their brains for the study. What is far more alarming is that their level of effort degraded over the course of several months, and they got lazier with each essay.

If you stop doing something because it’s hard, you will eventually lose the ability to do it entirely. Maybe turning to ChatGPT as a one-off for a late assignment won’t affect you, but the science shows that turning to it time and time again will. Think of other technological leaps, like the shift from writing by hand to typing on a typewriter or computer. Studies have found that handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. While I type for work, I have kept a handwritten diary since 2004, because I don’t want to lose that skill. In almost every area, doing things the hard way enables you to think and engage with ideas more deeply. Reading an article or a book yourself and determining its point will help you to remember the information in a more meaningful way than looking at a summary on Google.

There are many writers who are not luddites like me. There are writers, filmmakers, and artists who once produced great works without AI, who now vouch for the technology. But as someone who, overnight, lost some of their capacity to think and write, I cannot comprehend why a person would choose to give that faculty over to a machine.

Your thoughts are all you have. Your experiences, your unique way of seeing the world, your tastes. These are hard-won, often over decades of exploration. You may have to read hundreds of books or watch hundreds of movies that you don’t even like to arrive at what you do. If you’re a writer or artist, you might have to spend years being bad at the thing you love before one day, you aren’t so bad anymore. That work is worth doing.

When I was in the midst of my recovery, I was accepted into an artists’ residency in the dry, water-starved mountains of southern Spain, in an area currently blighted by wildfires. I was to spend two weeks in a house that was so isolated it took 15 minutes just to drive off the property on a dirt path. It took even longer to reach anything that resembled a store. This meant I was trapped, for two weeks, with no excuse to do anything but write. I was still very unwell, struggling to get out of bed and get myself together. But I didn’t want to let the opportunity pass.

There were several people in my residency—a poet, three other longform writers, and a photographer—in addition to the two people running it, who were both visual artists. I found writing very difficult over this period, but I managed to start working on some pieces that I was close to proud of. Each day, I would spend hours chained to my laptop just to produce something, even if it was something that would be edited or scrapped wholesale tomorrow.

It was on this trip that I gained new respect for the craft of writing—the fact that it is hard and takes so much time is part of its value. That struggle is how we figure out what we mean, what we think, what we really believe. I became more cognizant than ever of the importance of processing thoughts, words, and emotions myself. Prompting an LLM to produce text, meanwhile, does not require any effort, insight, or cognition whatsoever.

Writers and journalists who rely on AI often say that they only use it for this or that: only research, only editing, only outlining, not the actual writing. But it is all the writing. The time I spend swimming and working over an idea in my head is also writing, even if there isn’t a laptop in sight. When I am lazily cuddling my dog on the couch and suddenly realize how I’m going to write the next part of a story, I am writing. When I am in the bath and remember the exact right word for a feeling, I am writing. The fact that writing—that any form of art—requires so much of us is a part of what makes it so valuable. The fact that it is by a person, with their own experiences of the world, makes it even more so.

There are parallels to be drawn between the loss of cognitive capability that I experienced and had to work hard to regain and the degradation that cognitive offloading can cause in people who are overly reliant on LLMs. The good news is that being a loyal ChatGPT user doesn’t give you brain damage—at least, as far as we now know. If you want to, there is nothing medically stopping you from regaining the skills you may have lost. If you once knew how to do something that you’ve since spent months handing over to LLMs, it is likely that when you try to do that work alone again, you will struggle without the support of the machine you’ve come to rely on. What worries me more is the people who have never learned to do the work themselves at all, such as students and young people, who may never develop the skills necessary to do anything on their own. Teachers and professors are fighting to change this, and to get students to think for themselves, even tricking them with hidden AI prompts in exercise briefs, but it’s not enough. People have to want to do things themselves, and we have to foster a culture that supports and encourages this.

Those months I spent not being able to read, write, speak, or otherwise communicate the way I had always been able to were frightening and isolating. It took a long time to claw myself back, and it could just take another neurological episode to set me back months, or worse, again. I don’t take those regained skills for granted anymore, because I learned firsthand how much is lost when we can no longer form our own opinions or share our perspective with the world. Finally, I can take great pleasure in reading, in watching movies, in talking and writing about what I think and feel again. Being able to do something yourself, even and especially when it’s difficult, is rewarding. Seeing a paragraph or a painting, however imperfect, and knowing that it came from inside you feels good, even if it’s not where you’d like to be right now. It’s never too late to keep trying—no matter how difficult it is to get to where you hope to be.

[post_title] => In Defense of Difficulty [post_excerpt] => Overnight, I lost some of my capacity to think and write. After fighting to get it back, I cannot imagine choosing to give those faculties over to a machine. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => personal-essay-artificial-intelligence-llms-brain-damage-transient-ischemic-attack-chatgpt-opinion-op-ed-recovery [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-09-29 17:27:38 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-09-29 17:27:38 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11069 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 29, 2026September 29, 2026

In Defense of Difficulty

by Marianne Eloise

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For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool passed down through generations. It is also largely sustained by women like my great-aunt Nerissa.

I credit much of how I live my life to the wisdom of the women in my family. From my grandmother’s tip to drink chamomile tea after dinner ahead of an early morning, to my mother’s insistence on cleaning chicken with vinegar and lemon juice; from learning to grow aloe vera at home to heal wounds in an emergency, to knowing that blowing air into an infant’s face will stop them from choking. All this is part of my inheritance.

While the benefits of chamomile are easily found on the internet, in my family, such knowledge was passed by word of mouth. In some ways, that’s still common today: For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool that is sharpened, exercised, and passed down through generations. Encompassing stories, songs, beliefs, and customs that preserve history, memory, and cultural practices, this tradition influences the choices we make and how we navigate the world.

In Jamaica, where my family comes from, oral tradition was as much an old practice taken from enslaved Africans as it was an act of survival, because they were forbidden from reading and writing. “During slavery, enslaved people were denied literacy and formal education, so oral tradition became the most crucial tool,” says Mickayla Whyte, a library assistant at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica in Kingston. “Oral tradition is the oldest form of traditional preservation, and it allows communities to remember who they are, where they come from, and even where they're going."

These traditions from West and Central African nations blended over time with Indigenous Arawak practices on the island. The survival of folklore like Anansi the Spider—about a mischievous spider who creates and escapes trouble with his wit—alongside the use of herbal remedies, like cerasee tea to lower blood pressure, exemplify the intergenerational strength of oral tradition and the syncretism found across diasporas. Across the diaspora, as in my own family, this tradition is largely sustained by matrifocality.

“In its most simplistic form, matrifocality means mother-focused,” Dr. Leighan Renaud, University of Bristol lecturer and author of Mothering and Matrifocality in Contemporary Caribbean Literature, tells me. “What that means is that women in their roles as mothers—not necessarily biological mothers—are central to the organization of families and therefore the organization of communities.”

Unlike patriarchy, matrifocality subverts modern ideas of familial and cultural hierarchy. Dr. Renaud notes that women are not so much at the top of a structure, but are instead the nucleus around which society operates.

In my family, this tradition was led by my late great-aunt Nerissa. She was witty, generous, and supportive, with a deep passion for sharing her faith with friends, family, and strangers. Born the fourth of 14 children and a mother to six of her own, Great-Aunt Nerissa was as beloved for her caretaking as she was for passing on family and cultural lore, like knowing not to whistle after dark for fear of attracting ghosts. Before she passed away this spring at 76, she took pride in knowing and sharing our history, and would always wrangle our large family together to tell us stories during holidays. She did this with little complaint, but now, in her absence, I recognize the enormous responsibility she held in carrying our family’s legacy for as long as she did.

Because of her, I learned how much my family sacrificed when they journeyed to the United States. I attended her naturalization ceremony when I was in middle school and remember hearing about all the preparation and studying she did in order to pass the interview and test. She was asked questions about American presidents, laws, and wars that I admittedly still don't know the answers to. As a first-generation American citizen, it left me with a profound understanding of the legal and cultural challenges so many immigrant families face as they attempt to embrace a country that doesn't always return the sentiment.

In the aftermath of grieving her, I also realize the important task of preserving tradition and passing on memory has now fallen to my mother, myself, and the rest of the younger women in my family. This is not a role that I take lightly: In the Caribbean, women like my great-aunt Nerissa are simultaneously regarded as family, community, and cultural pillars.

While they are revered as leaders inside the home, however, women and girls across the Caribbean still experience objectification in both pop culture and daily life, as well as violence, fewer leadership roles, and unequal power relations. Still, misogynistic and sexist ideals often clash with the values taught in many Caribbean homes, where maternal figures are respected for nurturing families. Through her research on child socialization in the region, Dr. Renaud found this paradox exists because “girls are socialized to become mothers, and boys are socialized to stay boys.”

“Even though there is this patriarchal ideology that's kind of pervasive everywhere, girls are being raised to parent,” Dr. Renaud says. “Not just to parent children, but also to parent everybody.”

This caretaking role has been thrust upon Caribbean women for centuries, persisting during slavery and beyond. As Dr. Renaud points out, for enslaved Africans, nuclear families couldn’t exist due to labor divisions that frequently separated men from their wives and children in the home. But the expectation that women should take on a more significant role in preserving and implementing cultural values and practices likely predates transatlantic enslavement altogether.

According to Dr. Renaud, some theories suggest that these truncated traditions derive from West Africa. “So much of who we were as Africans culturally was outlawed in slave plantations,” she says. “What that meant was that so much of the culture happened in the house, and if for whatever reason it's women who are in the house with the children, then it's the women who become responsible for making sure that the culture passes on.”

Whyte agrees, adding that historically, women’s sharing of a family’s oral traditions built community and combated oppression. Our ancestors persevered through stories, songs, and proverbs, using them to transmit lessons on survival, intelligence, and resistance. These practices have continued long after emancipation: When slavery was outlawed across the Caribbean by 1873, we still retained our oral traditions. Like other women across the region, my own foremothers bore the responsibility of remembering health needs, birthdates, and anniversaries, along with preserving skills like foraging, gardening, and cooking. All things necessary for remembrance and survival.

Take my mother’s mother, Grandma Carmen, Great-Aunt Nerissa’s immediate younger sister. Born in the south-central Manchester parish, she was raised in Kingston before emigrating to New York in the 80s at 30 years old. Like my great-aunt, Grandma Carmen has passed on adages like, “Make a friend before you need a friend,” instilling in me the importance of sustaining relationships. She also has shared stories about her childhood pet goat, inspiring me to imagine a slower, “country” life, which eventually led me to buy a pig that was raised on my grandfather's farm in Jamaica. Simultaneously, I’ve often noted her discomfort when telling stories about her childhood. Her life wasn’t an easy one: Grandma Carmen was raised apart from some of her siblings, and in addition to the oral traditions they inherited, they had to create their own form of play, teaching themselves most of the skills they needed to thrive despite limited resources and an unconventional upbringing.

After Great-Aunt Nerissa’s funeral earlier this year, I spent time with my grandmother and her sisters as they pieced together family stories I’d never heard of before, relying only on their memories to corroborate events. I was surprised to learn that some of my family members’ legal names were apparently misspelled on their registration documents when they were newborns. In a couple cases, the names I know them by turned out to be nicknames—my Great-Grandaunt Madgie is actually “Margarita” and my great-aunt Nerissa was legally “Norissia.” I also learned that my great-grandmother died of kidney failure and high-blood pressure around the age of 44 (though nobody seems to know how old she was for certain). It struck me how vital this information is to our family’s medical history, especially considering the ways we’ve combated illnesses since, often following tradition and our ancestors’ wisdom.

“When you live in the Caribbean, usually instead of going to the doctor most of the time, they just practice what they learn from their foreparents,” my grandmother Carmen says. She is 74 years old and lives in New York. “Each generation, they look at life from a different point of view. But then, because you, as a parent, know what works for you, you try to pass it on to your children.”

Oral tradition is a living tradition. As culture evolves alongside technology and other discoveries, so can the ways we document our memories, giving each new generation space to adjust according to our own experiences. I realize now that some advice passed onto me was not always given in the name of custom. In some cases, they were suggestions based on lived experiences that were not mine, leaving me with the choice to take what I needed for my own life and leave the rest to our family’s collective memory.

Still, new technology and methods of documentation could disrupt oral tradition and storytelling as we’ve known it for centuries, potentially causing it to become obsolete. Women’s roles in communities have also changed, as has women’s labor, altering traditional storytelling avenues and frameworks that were once central to family and community life. But Whyte argues we’re still engaging in oral tradition when we use technology, we’re just doing it differently.

“I think we're still sharing stories, because I think social media is still a form of preserving stories,” Whyte says. “If you're to create a video and put it out there, the internet is forever, it's everlasting. That video is going to always be out there, the story is still being preserved, so regardless of women having to work more, we're still connecting.”

Growing up, my great-aunt Nerissa and Grandma Carmen did not foresee a reason to document their experiences beyond word-of-mouth in their small, tight-knit community in Manchester, where traditions were passed vertically. As the family grew and dispersed, my mother’s generation embraced analog recording methods, exchanging Polaroids with those who lived far away and making home videos on VHS tapes that were stored away for years at a time. My generation obsesses over documenting big and small moments with our smartphones and sharing them online instantaneously, with the hopes that others might relate or take interest. We may have a tendency to overshare, but I believe it is fueled by a desire to build community beyond physical limitations, giving more opportunity to spread oral traditions horizontally.

I may be living a vastly different life from the women who came before me, yet we are mirrors of each other. And as long as we keep finding ways to pass on tradition from one generation to the next, our memories and principles, and those of the many ancestors who came before us, will live on.

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September 4, 2026September 4, 2026

My Family’s Wisdom Is My Inheritance

by Amaya McDonald

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10980 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-27 21:42:46 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-27 21:42:46 [post_content] =>

A staggering and tender collection of short stories about Mapuche youth in modern day Chile.

Daniela Catrileo begins Piñen with an invocation. In a short preface, she asks the reader to imagine a river, powerful and pulsing; to imagine its sounds, its smells; to picture the way it moves, how the water snakes through the earth.

“Now come with me to the river,” she writes. “Give me your hand.”

For Catrileo, this invocation is both purposeful and personal. Piñen is a book of short stories about Mapuche youth, largely centered around girls navigating childhood and adolescence against a backdrop of othering: The Mapuche are the largest group of Indigenous peoples in Chile, where these stories take place. The author asks us to invoke the river as a path through “continuity and exile,” and chooses it, in part, for its significance to her family’s lineage and name. (In Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, Catrileo means “cut river,” a symbolism she interweaves throughout her work as a way of exploring how Indigenous people have been “fractured by dispossession” and displacement.)

Her request sets the tone for the rest of the book. “To understand the river, a sensory relationship with its body is essential,” she writes. “If we can manage to understand its song, its language, its movement, perhaps we can translate tomorrow.”

With Catrileo as our guide, we are pulled through Piñen’s currents, both gentle and violent. In one story, the narrator considers the death of a classmate, shot and killed just beneath her window. In another, a young woman remembers her brother, years after he’s disappeared, while stuck on the Santiago Metro. In “Warriache,” a woman reflects on her childhood friendship with another Mapuche girl, a fellow outcast named Yajaira, as a means of remembering and understanding herself. “When I imagine Yajaira, I have an easier time of seeing me, too,” she says. “I am trying to sketch my life, beginning with hers.”

Much of the book explores the idea of collective memory, and the deep wound that colonialism leaves behind. It is also an exercise in how we might begin to correct and defy colonial narratives by uncovering the truth hidden beneath them. (As Catrileo writes, “In the dance of writing, it’s important to open the wound.”) “Colonial shards produce colonial images: fragments that lodge like splinters,” she writes in the book’s preface. “The question of how to create images that fold and divert the colonial gaze runs through my creative practice. Though it may seem like an aesthetic question, it’s also deeply political. To interrogate the image is to interrogate the instruments of geopolitical domination that continue to operate.”

Piñen—which means “dust or grime stuck to the skin” in Mapudungun—is a book about identity and survival, and how they are inherently intertwined; how gender and race and class can change the shape of how a person perseveres. Specific to the Mapuche, it is about how a displaced people and culture can endure, even when forced out of their ancestral home to cities and other places unknown.

Yet while the stories are specific—all take place in Chile around the turn of the century, and follow characters trying and failing to shed the piñen that clings to them—the collection feels most universal in Catrileo’s deep understanding of the precarity of adolescence, and the feeling of gradually becoming who you are. Through this lens, its stories feel both exceptionally jarring and undeniably tender. Perhaps most unsettlingly, in “Pornomisery,” the narrator grapples with the violence that surrounds her: Next door, her neighbor Valeska—a girl around her age—suffers incestual rape at the hands of her father, who eventually kills himself after he learns his daughter is pregnant. Later, the narrator discovers her grandmother had been abused by her own father, and that her mother, too, had been abused by an uncle, something her mother only remembers much later in life.

Much of the story is about feeling helpless in the face of other people’s suffering, and for those who have suffered, domestic rage as a response to silence. “The kitchen was my mother’s place of liberation,” the unnamed narrator says. “I always imagined that instead of crying, she cooked… It was her way of escaping, of screaming.” As the narrator begins to go through puberty, she is hurdled towards something she feels both unequipped for and uninterested in. Still, she knows that the change is entirely out of her control. “Everyone went through the motions to make me a woman,” she says, resentfully. “But they never explained to us why, nor did they ask if I wanted to become one.”

Through all of this, Catrileo does not shy away from the darkest depths of her characters’ pain, particularly the pain of women and girls. But she also never abandons us in its pursuit: Just when you think you might be starting to drown, her hand is there to pull you out of the river, and back into the light.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Piñen" by Daniela Catrileo [post_excerpt] => A staggering and tender collection of short stories about Mapuche youth in modern day Chile. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-pinen-by-daniela-catrileo-translated-fiction-short-stories-mapuche-chile [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-27 21:42:48 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-27 21:42:48 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10980 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 27, 2026August 27, 2026

Book of the Month: “Piñen” by Daniela Catrileo

by Gina Mei

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

The Politics of Cyberdecks

by Nicole Froio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 18, 2026August 19, 2026

The Globalization of K-Pop

by Niya Doyle

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

What the art world can learn from the jocks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 12, 2026August 14, 2026

Y’all Ready for This?

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 7, 2026August 7, 2026

Can Siblings Eventually Become Friends?

by Niya Doyle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 6, 2026August 6, 2026

Everyone Needs an Intergenerational Friendship

by Erin Zimmer Strenio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 5, 2026August 5, 2026

Friends from Far Afield

by Francisco Attié

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 3, 2026August 3, 2026

Friendship as a Second Language

by Ruxandra Guidi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 30, 2026July 30, 2026

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

by Ruxandra Guidi

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