Humanities & Cultures

Mid-century Americans knew how to throw a party, for better or worse. In some of the most famous titles of the 1950s and 1960s—Couples, by John Updike; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee; Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates—the drama (and martini-soaked melodrama) took place in middle-class living rooms. The stories were fictional, but the setting was realistic. Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.

Then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamental, they stopped visiting one another. From 1975 to 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. Although cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared with the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys.

In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update.

We still have far to go in the attempt to encode a land ethic sufficiently strong to temper our appetite for Earth’s resources and focus our work towards restoring land health. A land ethic, good land use, and an equitable and civil society arise from countless actions and conversations, constantly unfolding, as the nation’s citizens go about their daily lives.

Agriculture is an ecologically embedded enterprise, and we should not tolerate actions that degrade our natural capital, the diversity and function of our ecosystems, or the health of the atmosphere, soils and waters that surround and support us. At the same time, we must recognise that agriculture is embedded in society – a farm practice that runs counter to society’s goals is hard to maintain. I agree that a farm can and should be valued by its owners as a place to live, and as a source of pleasure in good farming, good eating and engagement with both domestic and wild neighbours. Society continues to measure farms, and judge farmers, on their production of grain, meat, biomass and other commodities. Farmers are caught up in a highly competitive market system that typically allows only a slim margin between money coming in and money going out. Meanwhile, the goal of public policy for agriculture continues to be guided by the desire for cheap food.

While the predicament of modern agriculture may appear so dire that we will inevitably adapt and organise a more sustainable system, ecologists at Murdoch University in Australia came to a different conclusion after analysing the problems facing farmers in the semi-arid southwestern part of that continent. Farmers and policy-makers continue to invest in production systems that don’t fit the land because they are now tightly bound up in patterns of modern agribusiness and food production. Financial capital goes to conventional farmers more easily than to alternative farmers, and social capital – in the forms of agronomic research, technical assistance (for addressing issues with animal health, soil fertility, soil erosion and water pollution), and especially processing, distribution and retail – supports the energy- and natural-capital intensive system. The authors describe this as a ‘lock-in trap’, ‘an industry that has so much “sunk-costs” that it may continue to degrade the resource it relies upon until the capital is totally removed.’ Shifting the system to a more desirable state – one that is ecologically as well as socially resilient – requires us to forge new social connections in the quest to establish more sustainable patterns of land use.

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I’d started to suspect that something was wrong with me when a friend I’d known since childhood died and I didn’t shed a tear. I sat at her memorial service and felt something worse than nothing — a calcified layer around where feeling should have been, as if something were trapped in my body with no hope of emerging on its own. I noticed the absence at other times I would usually have sobbed. A late-night fight with my husband, at the point where any other form of communication feels impossible. Fifth-grade graduation, when the valedictorian thanked her teachers for helping her when she was going through chemo. Pixar movies, Call the Midwife, Sarah McLachlan singing “in the arms of the angel” — none of it moved me to tears. I wasn’t a monster, I was pretty sure. Something was wrong with me. I craved the cleansing sensation after the tears stop, that feeling in your sinuses that’s like you’ve been swimming in the ocean. The boneless relief that comes after sobbing has ceased to wrack your body and you can finally rest, absolutely drained. I had no idea what it would take to get back there, the place I’d been effortlessly able to access for the first 41 years of my life. But I would spend the next six months trying. I hoped it might even be fun.

L., my therapist, mostly wanted to know why crying was so important to me — a valid question, as her questions tend to be. I didn’t have a good answer. I told her I craved crying’s cathartic physical release, then clarified that I still had orgasms (just to get that out of the way). Joking around about how much of a therapist she was being, L. asked me to think harder about the significance of crying, to go beyond the moment of triumphant weeping to imagine what it would mean. I realized that I didn’t really know. I’d just understood it as a goal and also something to write about. Unlike every other therapist I’ve ever had, L. doesn’t treat my writing as something separate from the excavations of self that we talk about in therapy but as an inextricable part of my whole deal. It wasn’t that she worried about professionalizing my emotional journey; she was just wondering if I had a thesis beyond “I haven’t cried, and I want to.”

I didn’t have a thesis. Instead, I described sitting at my friend’s funeral, watching as the rabbi sobbed her way through the service, and glancing around to confirm that mine were the only dry eyes in the room. Didn’t she think it was strange that she’d never seen me cry? With my previous therapists, many sessions had ended in tears. But I’d been a different person before I started seeing her and B., before I’d gotten on this exact drug regimen, before the events of 2022 had split my life into a clear “before” and “after.” I wanted the tears back, but I didn’t want the rest of it; I didn’t know whether that was possible, but I wanted to try. When I thought about the project in those terms, I understood why L. and B. were wary. The “before” version of me had done her best to ensure there wouldn’t be an “after.”

If you allow the most wealthy and powerful segment of society to opt out of public services, those public services will get worse. The reason is simple: You have removed the incentive for the most influential people to use their influence to improve public services. Indeed, we see this dynamic in action everywhere we look. If rich people can all go to a private hospital, the public hospital is worse. If rich people can buy their way out of the TSA security lines, the experience for the regular people who have to wait gets worse. And when the rich people’s kids all go to private schools, the public schools are worse than they would have been if they educated everyone’s kids.

From the perspective of an individual parent, the purpose of school is to give their own kid the best possible education. But from the perspective of society—from the perspective of an architect of public policy—the purpose of schools is to give everyone a good education. Wealthier parents often observe that poorer public schools are full of poorer students with more severe needs. They respond to this by opting out and putting their kid into a private school where the student population has less severe needs, and more resources to address them. This may be rational if the goal is to give their kid the very best, but by isolating the neediest children in poorer public schools, it produces a worse outcome from the perspective of public policy, where every student is equally important.

Roughly 30% of China's population plays mahjong. That's over 500 million people... But what surprised me wasn't the amount of people that play mahjong here. Rather, it was the distinct, negative outlook that people have toward the game. It's even exempt from the Chinese Cultural Heritage list because of this collective "distaste", even though the association has enlisted analgous games such as Weiqi (Go) and Xiangqi (Chinese Chess). So I took to the parlors to understand why.

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I could feel her looking at me. Her body slung in adolescent impertinence against the front passenger seat door, shoulders turned so she could face me fully. Usually when I picked up my daughter, Najya, from middle school, she’d tumble into the car and bombard me with the day’s escapades, chattering nonstop about her friend group or complaints about an annoying teacher or her wonder at the test she’d aced despite thinking she’d failed it. But not this day.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.

As they neared the end of her seventh-grade year, Najya and her closest girlfriends were thinking about their futures. Honors students, they searched the nation’s top colleges, and that led to a curiosity about New York City’s highest ranked public high schools. Wondering about their chances of getting in, they decided to Google their own school and its ratings. And in doing so, Najya and her tight trio of Black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city’s deeply segregated educational landscape but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide.

By dismissal time, Najya’s shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me. I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.

I’ve lost count of how many times I have written some version of this sentence: Nationally, a Black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced, and to be offered rigorous and college-prep curriculum, to have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernized facilities.

In New York, a combination of housing segregation and “academic” sorting, called school choice, that begins as early as pre-K means most Black students — even middle-class ones — are forced to attend racially segregated schools with high rates of poverty. And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more. And so the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools.

New York City is a diverse school system — there is no racial majority among its student body — and yet Black children remain the most segregated of all student groups. As the U.C.L.A. Civil Rights Project describes it, New York “is a four-race city where white and Asian students, on average, attend middle-class, predominantly white and Asian schools and Black and Latino students are increasingly going to school with each other in schools where poverty is the norm.”

Black parents put their children forth as plaintiffs in lawsuits argued by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund that ultimately ended legal segregation in the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. When the federal government refused to enforce the new law of the land, Black parents sent their children to wade through white mobs to enter white-only schools, pushing their doors open for the rest of us.

And yet decades later, integration now exists for a minority of Black children — usually those born to families like ours who have the money to pay for private schools or live in tonier ZIP codes zoned to heavily white public schools, or who can pay for tutoring that allows their children, from a very young age, to test into programs for “gifted” students. Most Black students, however, languish in the type of schools that the law was supposed to have eradicated.

So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality, — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools. Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.

We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.

But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.

I lived through the end of a civil war — I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.

This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.

I was looking through some old photos for this article and the mix is shocking to me now. Almost offensive. There’s a burnt body in front of my office. Then I’m playing Scrabble with friends. There’s bomb smoke rising in front of the mall. Then I’m at a concert. There’s a long line for gas. Then I’m at a nightclub. This is all within two weeks.

In this video, I share a personal story. I analyse the psychology of the "creep" and explore the psychological landscape of the outsider. When we stop outsourcing our safety to habitual "bubbles of belonging", we also enter a space of personal agency. The idea that the inside world is safe and the outside world is dangerous might be an illusion altogether, created by those who do not want us to escape systems. I recommend a life lived off-script.

• 00:00 Intro: A pimp tried to recruit me
• 03:38 The safe belongers
• 08:38 A Personal story
• 12:49 Individuation cannot go backwards
• 14:46 The existential wasteland
• 16:42 Creepdom agency
• 17:15 The "outside world" is not so dangerous

She describes a situation others would describe as creepy, but she did not experience it as such. She explores why she sees creepiness and safety traveling alone differently from others.

Goes into attachment to social bubbles and views and risks of social bubbles compared to outside of them.

Assassin's bullets and upsets at the polls. The world is facing a crisis of governance. I explore why that might be through a reflection on the tragedy of the Treuhandanstalt and the rise of the AfD.

Pretty fun little story.

I suppose I can see how this is a solution to a problem, just not the one in play.

I just can't see this being anything other than boring. Partners are supposed to be predictable to a certain point -- it's nice to cuddle up without worrying about being murdered -- but that's not what I'm looking for with coding.

That said, this:

Asked about the company’s responsibilities or processes if a doll was asked to be modelled on a real person without their knowledge, a spokesperson at Coeros told the Guardian: “The fact that a custom design can be created from reference images should not be interpreted as permission to use another person’s likeness without their consent. We do not encourage or support the use of our customisation service for harassment, impersonation, or other non-consensual purposes.” Details for prospective buyers on the website include specific services from eyebrow hair implantation to shipping, but do not appear to include any directions as to obtaining the permission of women in any photographs uploaded. One member of the Doll Forum wrote of Coeros’s invention: “The most obvious candidates are the ones who turned you down, the ones that got away, the ones you had no hope of winning.”

That last quote is pretty damning. The one who I had no chance of winning turned me down in 2004, and she was in my bed last week. Oh, and we've been divorced for a decade, so she also falls under "the one who got away."

But Jesus Christ, the last thing I'd want is something modeled after her. I have a propensity for adopting Korats because they're going to have a consistent baseline of characteristics, but recreating my ex-wife is beyond dystopian.

Bluntly, I know how her body works holistically, so an AI vagina isn't going to provide the package deal. Also, if I'm going to be impaled by cone spikes, they'd better be on a real person.

Worthwhile relationships include friction and, well, skin contact.

Anyway, now that I've shot my load, here's the opening:

Two weeks ago, two distressed citizens stumbled across what they assumed was the mangled corpse of a woman, stuffed into a suitcase in a small town about three hours south of Sydney. They called the local police, who in turn issued a statement that a body in a suitcase had been found. The wider public waited sombrely for Australia’s tally of dead women to tick up by one.

But instead, a day later, after forensic analysis, it was determined that the woman in question wasn’t a woman at all. The “body” was that of a sex doll, marked with fake bruises, left to rot on a lonely dirt road. In Australia, as in the UK and some other European countries, it is not illegal to own a sex doll unless it resembles a child. Given the doll’s seemingly mature presentation, police investigations were called off.

The sex doll trade is flourishing. A 2026 market analysis estimates that the global market was valued at US$6.6bn in 2025, with a projection that it will more than double, to US$13.4bn, by 2033. As the market booms, and involves increasingly lifelike facsimiles of women, does how these dolls get treated matter?

And when a sex doll with “bruises” and rain-matted hair is tucked into a suitcase and left on a roadside, should we be concerned?

I'd argue the answer is yes.

Marcella Patino was hunched over a table at the South Salt Lake Community Center, her pizza getting cold and her nerves fraying. Patino is a single mom with three kids, and kid­like in her own way, tiny and sweet-voiced. When I met her, in the summer of 2024, she was 33 years old and earning $300 a week doing manicures and pedicures. To bump up her income, she had recently gotten a degree from aesthetician school, meaning she could start offering her clients facials and eyebrow lamination too. She would start making $450 a week soon—$23,400 a year, assuming she was able to work year-round with no breaks.

Her rent was $1,550 a month. Then she had to pay for electricity, heat, food, clothing, cell service, health care, child care, gas, and everything else. To keep Patino and her children out of abject poverty, the state of Utah was providing her with Medicaid, SNAP (benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps), and $600 a month in cash assistance. “Is it enough?” I asked. She blushed, picking at her nails, hand-painted with miniature strawberries and lemons. She went to food banks, she said. Her mom and her neighbors pitched in. Still, she kept falling into debt.

Whether the help was enough was less of a pressing matter than whether the help would be there at all. A few days earlier, the state of Utah had dropped Patino from its cash-assistance program and SNAP. She didn’t understand why; her caseworker had been no help. That’s why she had come to Circles, a self-empowerment nonprofit that helps its clients boost their income to double the federal poverty line or more.

A Circles volunteer, Stephanie Burdick, hugged Patino and logged on to her account at the Utah Department of Workforce Services (DWS) website, as she had done dozens of times over the prior year. She reviewed the notifications Patino had received, read the emails between her and her caseworker, and looked at her pay stubs. “I can’t figure it out,” Burdick said. It was not the first time the pair had been stumped. Her benefits get “turned off all the time,” Patino told me. Because Utah was asking her to substantiate her poverty all the time.

In Harlan County, USA, Barbara Kopple’s camera doesn’t just film a coal miners’ strike, it becomes part of the fight.

The fall of an empire is supposed to be a dramatic thing. It’s right there in the name. “Fall” conjures up images of fluted temple columns toppling to the ground, pulled down by fur-clad barbarians straining to destroy something beautiful. Savage invasions, crushing battlefield defeats, sacked cities, unlucky rulers put to death: These are the kinds of stories that usually come to mind when we think of the end of an empire. They seem appropriate, the climaxes we expect from a narrative of rise, decline, and fall.

We’re all creatures of narrative, whether we think explicitly in those terms or not, and stories are one of the fundamental ways in which we engage with and grasp the meaning of the world. It’s natural that we expect the end of a story—the end of an empire—to have some drama.

The reality is far less exciting. Any political unit sound enough to project its power over a large geographic area for centuries has deep structural roots. Those roots can’t be pulled up in a day or even a year. If an empire seems to topple overnight, it’s certain that the conditions that produced the outcome had been present for a long time—suppurating wounds that finally turned septic enough for the patient to succumb to a sudden trauma.

That’s why the banalities matter. When the real issues come up, healthy states, the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction, have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing toward their end. But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late. The disaster—a major crisis of political legitimacy, a pandemic, a climate catastrophe—doesn’t so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was.

Growing up in Tokyo, where entire neighborhoods can feel like shopping corridors, my grandparents sometimes took me to Mitsukoshi, one of Japan’s largest retail emporiums. The store was a veritable monument to beauty and abundance, stocked with everything from fine silks to sweet treats and plush sofas. As we walked from floor to floor, they would buy me “proper” clothes and take me to the fruit parlor on the top floor to eat strawberry parfaits while overlooking the entire city.

As I got older, I grew more curious about how these stores evolved into the grandiose institutions they are today, particularly in Japan. What I found as an academic surprised me: They have a very long and rich lineage, starting as comparatively humble enterprises hundreds of years ago.

We can trace many of Japan’s most prominent department stores, such as Mitsukoshi, Takashimaya, Shirokiya, Matsuzakaya, and Daimaru, back to the premodern Edo period (1603–1868).

Mitsukoshi, for example, started off as an expansive kimono fabric store (gofukuten) in 1673 in Edo (today’s Tokyo). Inside the establishment, originally called “Echigoya,” well-off customers shopped while seated on tatami mats, selecting designs from fabric pattern books (hinagatabon). In the premodern print below by Okumura Masanobu, one can see attendants presenting several bolts of fabric to a group of customers, while other patrons are being served tea. The seated figure in the foreground smokes a pipe while shop attendants bundle her purchases. The shopping experience was meant to be both leisurely and luxurious, reserved mostly for wealthier customers.

archive.is link

At the beginning of 2024, as big tech slashed its human workforce to fund the AI revolution, fashion romanticized the geek. The prior fall, Miu Miu models descended the catwalk in frumpy cardigans, gray hoodies, and chunky frames, wearing their hair disheveled as if they’d pulled an all-nighter at the library. “I have always been driven by the idea of understanding how women deal with the interaction between vanity and thought,” remarked Miuccia Prada, the brand’s namesake and visionary. Prescription glasses became fashion’s hottest accessory. “It” girls started to look like librarians, or more relevantly, start-up founders. Uncool was cool. This was supposedly a good thing: “In a period in which it’s easy to succumb to the pressures of adopting every micro-trend or the aspiration to curate an immaculate image on social media, this aesthetic offers women the opportunity to opt out of the illusion of perfection,” praised one Who What Wear writer.

If only. “Geek chic” wasn’t liberation from the social-media rat race, just a deceptive new manifestation of it. (Tellingly, the faces of the aesthetic were mostly supermodels like Bella Hadid.) In the years since, our image-conscious culture has grown only more extreme, giving rise to looksmaxxing and the normalization of treatments like peptides and GLP-1s. At the same time, appearing smart has become even more aspirational. In April, Vogue heralded the rise of the “intellectual influencer,” one who shares content “rooted in their expertise, hyperfixations, knowledge, or insights on a specific subject, rather than their looks or style.” (Listed examples include a Substack writer and the podcaster Jay Shetty.) TikTokers advise their audiences on how to be “disgustingly educated”; pop stars now open libraries and curate film series. Last month, Prada and the cult South Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster debuted a limited-edition glasses collection with a book-themed campaign that features Japanese actor Kentaro Sakaguchi reciting a poem in a lecture hall.

This is a convenient public distraction for the true geeks — tech broligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman — who are busy colonizing our reality. They’ve captured us on their platforms, engineering algorithms for maximum addictiveness — facts and ethics be damned — and hollowed out countervailing institutions like journalism and academia. (Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Grok AI spat out nonconsensual sexualized deep fakes of real women, including minors; when emailed for comment, XAI replied with the message, “Legacy Media Lies.”) In a quest for AI domination, they have strip-mined the intellectual commons, automated workers out of jobs, and commandeered local water supplies.

Now, big tech is literally coming for our retinas with AI-powered smart glasses through which it will attain a total view of our lives. Backlash to its agenda has necessitated it market these wearables as stylish and empowering lifestyle accessories, not disruptive new tech products. It is doing so with the help of a desperate fashion industry that has already glamorized glasses, reduced to selling the illusion of agency in an attention economy over which it has little authority. (Prada and Gentle Monster are collaborating with Meta and Google on AI smart glasses, respectively.)

Living grief lacks the tapestry of rituals, language, and social permissions around grieving that a person is offered with death. In death, that commemoration can help us feel closer to our loved ones. With living grief, it’s the opposite: ritual is like death by a thousand paper cuts, as it only reminds you of what you’ve lost. It can also lead to confusion or distance in relationships. I frequently hear from patients whose families or friends have ghosted them, sometimes after telling them they ‘ought’ to be better by now or are keeping themselves sick.

Living grief diverges from the collective and is an exercise in othering.

In a 1999 book entitled Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, Pauline Boss discussed losses that remain unclear and unresolved because a person is simultaneously present and absent. Her own examples were family members grieving someone physically present but changed, such as with dementia or addiction, or someone who is missing in action. However, the concept also applies well to patients’ own experiences. We are, after all, grieving the parts of ourselves that are simultaneously here and gone. The illness itself can create ambiguity because symptoms fluctuate, which may prevent patients from fulfilling the roles society expects of them. It can also prevent validation of the loss of self, because a crisis of meaning has less objective ‘proof’ when it’s tangled within the dense webs of chronic illness — especially invisible illness. And the interminable duration of chronic illness is exhausting for the patient and their loved ones.

While my grief stems from one precipitating event, there is no one ‘thing’ it organizes itself around. It seeps into all sorts of nooks and crannies where I never thought to look, and creeps in without warning even during the times that I think I’m ok. What causes my grief is also the thing I need to make peace with and accept; every symptom, limitation, medical appointment, failed treatment, or activity that I can no longer do is a reminder of the identity I no longer have.

It’s constant work to reframe and not let myself stew in the emptiness of what I lack.

We don’t have the societal tools to support living grief, perhaps in part because of its ambiguity. But I think also because we don’t want to collectively admit that you can’t will your way to being better. I’ve discussed this in part in a piece I wrote about how people have told me to ‘just fight harder’ to seal my leak. In reality, I am determined to live every single day. Unfortunately, the output is not always what society thinks I ought to show for it. My life is reflected in the advocacy I’ve been fortunate enough to engage in, the papers I’ve helped co-author, and the writing that I hope helps people understand what it’s like to be this unwell. I don’t have progress pics or quantifiable changes to share with the world. Some days I can take a walk; other days I am stuck in bed. Vastly fluctuating capacity, even when mobility is limited, is part and parcel of long-term disability. Yet the discourse is often focused on poking holes in the patient: someone ‘is faking it,’ someone is ‘performing illness.’ That disconnect between the unified expectation of progress and the reality of chronic illness is part of what makes being sick this long so isolating.

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyMx3pF3qY4
• Invidious, a privacy focused YouTube wrapper: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=YyMx3pF3qY4

In this video, he just sits and talks about his recent trip and experience in Europe and compares some things as an American. So no video footages other than him sitting there, no music (which I like).

Context: Before the trip, he was already visiting some places and there are some cultural shocks which he got used to and is not listed here. He also often watches (and reacts) to documentary and videos about the differences from American and European stuff. So this was not an entirely blind trip going in Europe for him. I can highly recommend his other videos, if you are interested into this topic (as I am).