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    Why are we so fascinated by the Coldplay couple? | Jessica Ciencin Henriquez

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    It wasn’t just that a man got caught cheating on his wife. It was that he did it in public. With the whole stadium watching. With Chris Martin, unknowingly, teeing it up. With a camera zooming in at the exact wrong – or maybe karmically perfect – moment. The CEO. The HR director. The affair. The panic. The humiliation. All of it caught, dissected and shared a million times over.We didn’t watch that video because we love Coldplay (though, don’t we?). We didn’t watch just for the scandal. We watched because – despite our small steps toward enlightenment – we’re all starving for the satisfaction of seeing someone finally get what they deserve.That’s the part we need to talk about.According to a 2023 study in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, the satisfaction we feel during public shaming isn’t just about justice – it’s about pleasure. Their research found that people experience schadenfreude not only because they believe the person deserved it, but because it simply feels good to watch someone face consequences. We’re not just looking for moral clarity. We’re chasing the emotional high that comes with it. We don’t just want closure, we want content. And cheating, exposed in public, has become the most satisfying genre of all.We as a culture are obsessed with catching cheaters – not just for the drama, but for the justice. We want to see betrayal punished. We want the liar exposed, the philanderer humiliated, the partner who was faithful and trusting to be vindicated. And if we can’t get that in our own lives, we’ll take it from strangers.This hunger has only grown over the years as the morally hollow have made careers out of turning scandal into spectacle and walking away untouched. But when the deception is undeniable, and the exposure unfiltered, it gives us something we rarely get: visible accountability.Within hours of that five-second clip surfacing, the internet did what it does best: turned a private moment into public symbolism. Their names were revealed along with their titles. Until the camera found them, they looked unbothered, cozy. Then her hand flew to cover her face. He ducked and waddled behind the seats. Then the entire internet gasped, and reached for their popcorn and pitchforks.You could feel the collective applause ripple through the comments section. We all know the feeling of being deceived. We know the sharp loneliness of loving someone who’s looking elsewhere, of having suspicions but not proof, accusations returned with a side of gaslighting. So when someone gets caught in 4K, we devour the moment. The visuals were almost too perfect: the Coldplay ballad, the cheering crowd turning confused, the abrupt shift from smug to stunned.Don’t we all wish we had that experience? A camera that didn’t look away. A crowd that said: “We see it, too.” Because in our own lives, we confront; they deflect. We cry; they move on. And there’s no applause, no witness. Just you and an unrelenting ache, their version of what happened and the truth.The CEO and the HR director are merely serving as stand-ins for the guy who ghosted you after two years, the woman who swore nothing was going on with her co-worker, the husband who moved on so fast you wondered if you hallucinated your entire marriage. Watching those two squirm on screen is a kind of spiritual revenge. We tell ourselves it’s about ethics, boundaries, accountability. But at the end of the day, don’t we just want someone to answer for the betrayal we never got closure for?Of course, pain is not performance. And justice is not the same as humiliation. Public shaming feels like accountability – but it rarely is accountability. As Jon Ronson warns in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: “An instant digital mob justice can devastate without offering redemption.” Watching strangers get exposed might feel good temporarily. We nod at the cosmic slap, but it doesn’t fix the trust broken in a marriage or the respect damaged in a workplace. It doesn’t change who they were when no one was watching.There’s a flip side to witnessing this embarrassment that flickers just below the surface. We might laugh, but something in us recoils as we imagine the real cost to those involved: lost jobs, fractured marriages, psychological fallout for their children. A hyperlink trail that will follow them to the grave.As Evan Nierman, author of The Cancel Culture Curse and CEO of the crisis PR firm Red Banyan, puts it: “The internet has a way of locking people into their worst moment. When a misstep goes viral, the court of public opinion rarely allows space for explanation, nuance, or repair.”And once the pile-on begins, it escalates fast. “Digital shame operates at a scale and speed our psychology isn’t built for,” he warns. “What starts as a laugh can quickly spiral into character assassination, with consequences that long outlast a viral moment.”Yet this moment – our collective gasp at betrayal made universal – revealed something crucial: we’re craving truth, acknowledgment. We’re craving slow, messy, quiet reckoning with accountability that extends beyond the tap-and-scroll. But in a world where real accountability is rare, a viral headline like this feels close enough – as though love, loyalty and truth might still mean something, even if only for a moment on the Jumbotron.

    Jessica Ciencin Henriquez is a writer in Ojai, California, and the author of the forthcoming essay collection, If You Loved Me, You Would Know. You can find her on social media @TheWriterJess More

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      Leftists are determined to date each other – and not settle for liberals: ‘Politics are the new religion’

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      Zohran Mamdani gave Hinge an unofficial boost last month when the New York mayoral candidate revealed that he met his wife, Rama Duwaji, through swiping. “There is still hope on those dating apps,” he said on the Bulwark podcast a week before his stunning victory in the Democratic primary. The tidbit spread over social media, cementing the 33-year-old democratic socialist’s status as a millennial everyman. A subsequent Cosmopolitan headline read: “Zohran Mamdani could make history (as the first NYC mayor to meet his wife on Hinge).”Representatives for Hinge would not comment, but plenty of eligible New Yorkers did, claiming they would redownload the app due to Mamdani’s success, in spite of their dating fatigue. “Now I’m clocking in like it’s a full-time job,” one user posted on TikTok. “If he can find love on that app maybe I can,” another wrote in a caption.However, they could run into an ideological hurdle while filling out their profiles. Alongside answering basic questions – “Do you smoke, drink or do drugs? Where did you go to college?” – Hinge ask singles to choose their political affiliation: liberal, conservative, moderate, not political, or the mysterious “other”.Some people to the left say the label “liberal” does not encapsulate their socialist views. They associate it with establishment figures such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – or Mamdani’s rival, former governor Andrew Cuomo. Many liberals deem proposals by Hinge’s golden boy (freezing rent, taxing the super-rich, making buses free) too radical. A socialist might want to distance themselves from such center-leaning liberalism and instead embrace the “hot commie summer” that hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb warned his fellow billionaires of.“There’s a real appetite to date leftists now,” said Abby Beauregard, fundraising chair for Democratic Socialists of America’s New York chapter. She said that Mamdani’s victory reinvigorated the dating scene in in the city, “but it’s really hard to find explicitly leftist dating spaces. Most dating apps have a liberal option, but no leftist option, and it’s not a turn-on to see ‘other’, because that could mean anything.” (For instance, far-right or communist.)So lefty singles are finding more explicit ways to signal their politics to like-minded love matches, on Hinge and beyond.View image in fullscreenSome have turned their dating profiles into mini-manifestos, writing out their entire belief system as answers to the apps’ prompts. It’s common to see watermelon emojis as euphemisms for solidarity with the Palestinian people. Some users will warn that they’ll swipe left on Terfs (the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminists), cops or Donald Trump supporters.“It’s important for me to see those signifiers,” said Caroline, a 38-year-old florist who lives in Queens. (She and other sources are going by their first name for privacy reasons.) “There’s a nice feeling on the apps right now with people being proud to be communists or leftists, and they’re saying that.”But she’s wary of anyone who comes off as too lefty. “That seems kind of tryhard,” she said. “It can read as too performative, that you’re fishing for alt-girls or you’re a centrist who just wants someone freaky from Bushwick.”Tinder, OK Cupid and the kink-friendly app Feeld allow users to write their own bios, unlike Hinge, and they can choose within those bios whether they reveal their political affiliations. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Tinder also launched profile “stickers” so users could signal the issues they felt strongly about, such as “voting for reproductive rights”.For her part, Caroline, who uses Feeld, wrote in her profile that she’s “far left” and “COVID-cautious”. That feels like enough for her. “Saying ‘I love vaccines!’, ‘free Palestine!’ or ‘fuck Trump!’ would be trite. It’s all implied.”Dennis Mulvena describes himself as “very left-leaning”. He used to keep his affiliations private on Hinge because he believed there was room for nuance in discussing politics, but recently listed himself as liberal.“With the return of Trump in the last two years, it’s important to have that out there,” said Mulvena, 30, who works in customer service for a car manufacturer. “Admittedly gay people who live in Brooklyn tend to lean left, but I have had the experience of going on a date with someone who then revealed he was part of his college’s Young Republicans club.” That was the last time he assumed that everyone he matched with would share the same views as him.According to an NBC News poll from April, the partisan gap between gen Z women, who are more likely to say they are Democrat, and gen Z men, who have shifted right, is the widest of all generations. And, increasingly, a person’s politics have an impact on their perceived desirability. While past generations may have thought nothing about a conservative and liberal romantic pairing (“don’t talk about politics or religion at the dinner table”), 60% of 18- to 24-year-olds think it’s important to date or marry someone who shares their political beliefs.“Politics is the new religion,” said Dr Jess Carbino, a former sociologist for Bumble and Tinder who studies dating apps. “It’s become the way that people choose to frame how they look at the world and their values.”Lily, a 23 year-old socialist who was recently laid off, is wary of seeing someone identify as “not political” on Hinge. “I’m immediately scared of what that means,” they said. “As a queer person living through everything that’s happening in this country, I need to know someone has a baseline care for people and their community.”In New York, more voters between the ages of 25 and 34 – a mix of gen Z and younger millennials – turned out to vote in the Democratic primary than any other age cohort, indicating a vigor for leftist politics. Recently, Lily has seen young people write on Hinge that they’d only go out with someone who voted for Mamdani or that they’d never go out with a Cuomo supporter. They have seen multiple people answer the Hinge prompt “when was the last time you cried?” with: “when Zohran won”. (They presume these were happy tears.)This is not to say New York is a young Bolshevik paradise: conservatives in the city are also trying to find each other. Some have gone into voluntary exile from mainstream dating apps, creating their own options. “Our dating apps have gone woke,” reads the description for Date Right Stuff, one such app backed by Peter Thiel. “Connect with people who aren’t offended by everything.”In March, Date Right Stuff hosted a singles event at New York’s Trump Tower called “make America hot again”. It was a coming-out night for what the app’s former chief marketing officer Raquel Debono called “city conservatives”, or Republicans who prefer urban life to small towns and tradwifedom.They are not the only ones going off-app: the Mamdani effect on New York’s lefties could not be contained to Hinge.In early July, young people gathered inside a cocktail bar on the Lower East Side for a “sexy socialist singles” event hosted by New York’s DSA. Those looking for something casual – or, as the host put it, “if you just want fast and free, like Zohran’s buses” – were sent to one part of the bar, while those who wanted “a slow burn, like taxing the fucking rich” went to another. At one point, organizers directed polyamorous attendees to a room upstairs, where they could mingle with other non-monogamous individuals.Upstairs, Sven, 25, an economics master’s student who lives in Bushwick, said that young people view the DSA as a social club just as much as a platform for socialist candidates. “I saw a post on Reddit talking about how all Zohran’s canvassers are hot, and we have soccer leagues and book clubs,” they said. “It’s a great way to make friends.”Downstairs, back in monogamyville, Lauren, a video editor who lives in Astoria (the Queens neighborhood Mamdani represents as a New York assemblymember), waited for a friend who was off flirting. “There’s definitely an energy when I wear my Zohran T-shirt out,” she said. “People are revved up. They’ll call you from across the street saying, ‘What’s up?’ or ‘I love that guy.’ It’s a real conversation starter.”New York’s DSA will continue its sexy socialist mixers in youth hubs Bushwick and Williamsburg, and in the Upper West Side for those over 30. In the meantime, singles will have to keep parsing political signifiers on dating apps. More

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      in US Politics

      Parenting is not just for pronatalists: the progressive case for raising kids

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      A few months ago, I was at a playground just a couple of blocks from our home in Washington DC, when a mom I barely knew turned to me mid-conversation and said: “I think I might be the deep state.”It was mid-March. Doge was tearing through the city, dismantling federal agencies at dizzying speed. Donald Trump, re-elected on a promise to “shatter the deep state”, had fired thousands of longtime civil servants in his first weeks back in office.The job cuts have been top of mind in Washington. Most of my kids’ playdates these days begin with nap schedule updates and end in quiet dread.It isn’t just jobs. International students are being deported. Measles outbreaks are creeping closer. The climate crisis is at our doorstep: blizzards one week, wildfires the next. Every day brings fresh threats to public safety, democracy and the planet itself.“It makes you wonder,” she said as we pushed our daughters on the swings, “what kind of world did we bring our kids into?”View image in fullscreenIt’s a question I can’t stop thinking about. I’ve lived in and reported on parenting across five continents, and what continues to astonish me is how uniquely punishing early parenthood is in the west, especially for those most committed to building a fairer world. Progressives are rightly vocal about how hard it is to raise kids, but too often, we forget to make the case for why it’s still worth it.In the face of so many overlapping crises, the decision to have children can feel reckless, or worse, like an act of denial. But parenting can also be something else entirely: a stubborn act of hope.Raising children offers a crash course in progressive values. It’s a way of tying ourselves more deeply to the future, of feeling the stakes of climate change, inequality and injustice – not as distant headlines, but as urgent matters affecting someone whose lunch you just packed.By failing to make a case for children and families, the left has surrendered these issues to the pronatalist right. We’ve handed over the “family values” agenda, allowing it to be defined by a rigid, exclusionary vision of parenthood.Project 2025, the policy blueprint shaping much of Trump’s current agenda, pledges to “restore” a Christian nationalist view of the family unit as “the centerpiece of American life”.Figures such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, as well as the conservative Heritage Foundation, have declared childbearing a moral and civic duty. Some have even proposed medals and cash for mothers. At this year’s March for Life, Vance called for “more babies in the United States of America” and more “beautiful young men and women” to raise them.View image in fullscreenWhen we see child rearing as a private project, we forget that many of the movements that shaped the left – civil rights, labour, climate justice – were powered by people who looked at the next generation and decided they were worth fighting for. In his most well-known speech, Martin Luther King Jr didn’t just dream of a better world for himself, he dreamed that his four little children would grow up in a nation where they would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. His vision was rooted in legacy.That’s what parenting does. It gives shape to our politics. It puts flesh on our ideals. It forces us to ask: what are we building and who is it for? Raising children doesn’t distract from that work; it clarifies it.Of course, parenthood isn’t the only path to caring about the future – but it makes it harder to look away. It compels us to feel the weight of policy decisions in our bones. It blows open our empathy and softens the edges of individualism. Suddenly, every child becomes your child. Every policy becomes personal. You start noticing the stroller-unfriendly sidewalks, the unaffordable summer camps, the lack of paid leave – not just for yourself, but for all parents.There’s science behind this shift. Researchers have found that becoming a parent activates a “parental caregiving network” in the brain, lighting up areas tied to empathy, emotional processing and social understanding. It happens in both mothers and fathers. For dads especially, the extent of this neurological change is closely tied to how much hands-on caregiving they do. In other words, caregiving rewires our brains to connect more, care more and notice the needs of others. At its best, parenting strengthens the very instincts progressives say they want to build society around.I’ve seen this empathy in action. Before I had kids, I was reporting on the Rio Olympics and walking the beach one night with a colleague, a mother of two, when we were approached by a group of children begging for money. I clutched my purse and walked faster. But my co-worker slowed down, took off her blazer and wrapped it around a shivering child about her son’s age. “Get home,” she said gently. “Your mom is probably looking for you.”I could tell right away we were operating on different levels of empathy. She saw that child as an extension of her own kids. I wasn’t there yet. But eventually, I got there, too.When I finally became a mother, I began to see stories I covered differently. Now, when I interview parents who’ve lost children to gun violence in Brazil’s favelas, I understand their grief in a new way. I report with deeper urgency and deeper care, seeing myself in their shoes, and my children in theirs.View image in fullscreenThis rewiring of the brain creates a political opening. It expands our sense of who counts as “us”. It softens the boundary between self and other. In doing so, it changes how we interpret harm, not as something happening “out there”, but as something personal, urgent and unacceptable.Yet, the demands of caregiving can pull us away from political life. A 2022 UK study found that parenthood temporarily reduces political participation among mothers. The reason is obvious: we’re exhausted. Calling your representatives between diaper changes feels impossible. I get it. Some days, I fantasize about deleting all my news apps, retreating into a cozy, apocalypse-adjacent bubble with my kids, and calling it a day.View image in fullscreen“Generally, I think parents are the worst at advocating for themselves because they are just too damn tired. It’s one more thing in the lives of people who already have too much expected of them,” Jennifer Glass, professor at the University of Texas’s department of sociology and Population Research Center and an expert on parental happiness, told me.But parenting doesn’t have to distract from political work. It can fuel it. When we do organize, our sharpened parental empathy can translate into political power. Around the world, it’s progressive movements, often driven by the demands of parents, that have expanded what family support can look like. In Sweden, it was working mothers who pushed for what became the world’s most generous parental leave system, eventually adding incentives for men to take their fair share. In Singapore, multigenerational bonds are built into policy: the government gives housing grants to families who live near grandparents and tax breaks to elders who help with childcare. In France, parents helped lead the 1968 protests that birthed a cooperative childcare system.But when progressives step back from family values, conservatives fill the void.This is not a uniquely American phenomenon. According to the United Nations, the share of countries with explicit pronatalist policies has nearly tripled since 1976. But these visions often center on traditional gender roles and narrow definitions of family, excluding anyone who doesn’t fit the mold. We shouldn’t let the only cultural narrative around parenting come from those who see it as a tool for enforcing hierarchy and control.Progressives must also fight for a say in the values shaping the next generation. A 2023 Pew survey found that 89% of teenagers raised by Democratic parents identify with or lean toward the Democratic party. For Republican parents, the number is nearly as high, at 81%.That suggests political identity is often passed down through environment and lived experience: what kids hear at the dinner table, what they see modeled at home and which communities shape their worldview.From there, each new generation brings fresh ideas about justice. Social progress doesn’t only happen by changing the minds of the old; it happens through generational renewal. Throughout the country, youth raised in the shadow of mass shootings are leading the charge for gun reform. In Montana, young people took the government to court over climate change and won. In Sweden, Greta Thunberg sparked a global climate movement at 15.These movements exist because someone raised those children to believe they had not just the right, but the responsibility, to shape the world around them. But if we step back from parenting, or treat it as apolitical, we leave that space wide open.View image in fullscreenThe right is more than ready to fill it. That’s why they’re fighting so hard to control what children are taught, which books they read, whose families are visible in their classrooms and which identities are allowed to exist.This is the moment for the left to reclaim family as a public good. Progressives shouldn’t just defend the right to abortion, we must fight for people’s ability to have families and raise them with dignity. That means paid leave, universal childcare, affordable healthcare and a livable planet.It also means rejecting the caricature that progressives are a party of “childless cat ladies” while conservatives corner the market on family values. We are, and always have been, the natural home of pro-family policy.After all, children tether us to the future, but also to each other. Progressive values thrive in that space of interdependence, where no one is expected to go it alone. Caring for kids – whether as parents, educators, neighbors or policymakers – demands a communal ethic of care.I’ve seen this ethic in action across the world. While writing my book, Please Yell at My Kids, I spent years studying how families around the world raise children in community. In the Netherlands, children as young as eight walk themselves to school. Parents trust that if they need help, a community member will step in. In Denmark, babies nap unattended in strollers outside cafes – not because parents are careless, but because they trust the society around them. In Mozambique, where formal support systems often fail, mothers rely on each other for food, childcare and safety, transforming neighborhoods into extended families. These cultures aren’t perfect, but they understand that raising a child isn’t a private endeavor. It’s a collective one.Some understandably hesitate to bring children into a world on fire. Others worry that parenting means stepping back from activism or ambition. But for many, becoming a parent doesn’t dilute that drive; it crystallizes it. Climate change isn’t just a policy failure – it’s the air your child will breathe. Gun violence isn’t abstract – it’s a possibility you carry every time you drop them off at school. The broken systems you tolerated suddenly become intolerable when your child has to navigate them, too.This isn’t about idealizing parenthood. It’s about refusing to surrender this human experience to those who would use it to divide us. So yes, the world is on fire. But refusing to bring children into it won’t put the flames out. What may, perhaps, is raising a generation bold enough to rebuild it.

      Marina Lopes is the author of Please Yell at My Kids: What Cultures Around the World Can Teach You About Parenting in Community, Raising Independent Kids, and Not Losing Your Mind, out now More

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      in US Politics

      ‘What’s so controversial about kids learning?’: students compete over history in the face of Trump cuts

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      View image in fullscreenIt only took 10 minutes for the trio of eighth-grade girls to recount the life story of Carol Ruckdeschel, the alligator-wrestling environmental activist sometimes called the “Jane Goodall of sea turtles”.Inside the student union at the University of Maryland, about a 20-minute drive from Washington DC, and armed with papier-mache reptiles, they embarked on a performance that included a litany of costume changes and a pony-tailed rendition of the late president Jimmy Carter, an ally of the 83-year-old Ruckdeschel’s work.When it concluded, the scary part began. A panel of judges peppered the girls with questions.Why did some people consider Ruckdeschel to be controversial?The girls hesitated. “Sorry,” said one, “but what does that word mean?”It was the first day of National History Day (NHD). In its 51st year, the annual US-based competition invites the top middle and high school students from more than half a million competitors to present their projects: documentaries, performances, websites, papers and exhibits on any topic from history, as long it adheres to the year’s theme. The winners get cash prizes and the admiration of their teenage peers.View image in fullscreenThe students come from all over – places like Oregon, Indonesia, North Dakota, Guam, Arkansas and China. Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, competed more than 20 years ago, as did Guy Fieri, whose project on the soft pretzel’s origin helped inspire a future career as a TV star restaurateur.I also competed in NHD, reaching the Florida state competition in 2007 and 2009 with my twin brother. As I reported this year, I joked with students that I’d finally made it to nationals, just 16 years too late. Hardly any of them were even alive then, and the national reality couldn’t have changed more.In April, NHD lost $336,000 after the Trump administration and the “department of government efficiency” slashed funding for the National Endowment of Humanities, putting NHD in jeopardy.“We had so many messages from kids saying, ‘Please, please, please we can’t let History Day go down,’” said Cathy Gorn, NHD executive director since 1995 and “the Taylor Swift of history”, as one student dubbed her last year (to many, there is no greater compliment). On social media she made an impassioned plea for donations. Last-ditch fundraising followed, including contributions from students, like a group from New York that held a bake sale and sent Gorn more than $300 in proceeds.With that, the competition found new legs – for this year, at least. “It’s kids learning,” said Gorn. “What is controversial about that?” And these students want to learn the full history – both its roses and its thorns, or what Alexis de Tocqueville called “reflective patriotism”.View image in fullscreen“They have no filter,” John Taylor, the NHD state-coordinator from Maine, told me. “They’ll call anyone and ask them anything.”When I competed, the cardinal rule was to abstain from any citing of Wikipedia, a transgression that today seems nostalgically benign. Students now learn to hunt down reputable sources in an era defined by untrustworthy generative AI and revisionist histories. Some students even found that sources they had cited in their research this spring – from governmental websites, no less – had disappeared altogether.“You start to realize that many of them do more research for NHD than you did for your master’s thesis,” Taylor laughed. He told me about a 130-page bibliography a student once turned in: “That thing could have taken down a woodland creature.”These are history-defining times. Do students at NHD see the parallels, the precedence, in their projects? “Oh yeah,” said Gorn, “they get it.”The scene from the student union last Monday could have come straight from a Where’s Waldo book. In one corner, a life-size cutout of George Washington leaned against a wall, until it was scooped up by girls in colonial-era ballgowns. Four lanky boys huddled together, their traffic-cone-orange dress shirts illuminated in the morning light. I heard a boy reading through a script, his manufactured accent undulating between George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and wild west cowboy.In another hallway, lanyarded coordinators carried folders full of research papers and flash drives loaded with digital backups of student-directed documentaries (after a snafu at the state level, one group told me they had brought eight). Nervous students were tailed by teachers and nervous parents with little brothers and sisters in tow, just happy to be along for the ride.View image in fullscreenAs I walked in and out of competition rooms over the next three days, I saw a spectrum of stories that spoke to this year’s competition theme, “Rights and Responsibilities” – the Elgin marbles, birthright citizenship, lobotomies, Martin Luther King Jr, social security, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the first Black character to appear in Charlie Brown. The theme, which sought to magnify the relationship between individuals and society, seemed especially prescient, even though it is one of several that NHD has recycled over the years.At a table finishing up a meal from Chick-fil-A sat Chloe Montgomery, an eighth-grader from Indiana, with her father, Ryan. The topic she chose to research – the Salem witch trials – had been bubbling up for years. “You grow up hearing about the trials a lot,” said Chloe, “like in Hocus Pocus!”Her project had ascended from the local competition in her home town of Mishawaka, through regionals and states, all the way to nationals. Now, father and daughter were in the US capital for the very first time. She, too, was impressed by the spectrum of project topics: “I saw one about Green Day!”In the hallway after the performance about Ruckdeschel, I caught up with the eighth-grade trio. “We’ve had hundreds of sleepovers to work on this!” said Zoe Otis. Not only that, they had traveled from their homes in Knoxville, Tennessee, ferried from mainland Georgia and then biked about 35 miles roundtrip – “half of that was in the dark!” – to meet Ruckdeschel on Cumberland Island, where she lives alone in a cabin.They had spoken with the octogenarian recluse, who still keeps a research lab with jars of turtle guts and bugs. For the girls, it was an eye-opening experience that at times bordered on gut-wrenching. “There was a giant, dead boar on the side of her house,” said Gemma Walker. “She hunts, and eats roadkill.”“We always tell ourselves to ‘embrace the cringe’,” said Addy Aycocke, laughing. This, it turned out, was part of the reason Ruckdeschel was considered controversial, along with her decades-long jousting with the National Park Service and the Carnegie family over environmental protection of the island and its sea turtles.It’s this flavor of research – active, firsthand, hands-dirtying – that history professors at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who started NHD in 1974, saw as the antidote to the traditional textbooks and multiple choice repetition that often went hand in hand with learning history. A science-fair-like competition, they hoped, would propel students to both dig into dusty archives and track down primary accounts – to feel history, rather than to memorize it.View image in fullscreenLater on, I heard stray conversation about Trump’s deployment of the national guard and marines in Los Angeles. Less than 10 miles away, tanks were arriving in Washington for a military parade. “You look at the news, and all you see is negativity,” Gorn told a room of volunteer judges. “But spend a couple of days at National History Day and it’ll give you hope.”It was true. There was an attitude of genuine, mutual encouragement that seems difficult to come by these days. The students seem to understand that nothing is a zero-sum game, that striving for excellence and being amiable with competitors are not mutually exclusive.When I spoke to Gorn a week before, we had discussed the critical role of history, and its sometimes precarious place in the school curriculum.“No Child Left Behind left history education behind,” she said of the 2001 congressional act that, in a quest for equality and accountability in schools, shifted focus to standardized testing and left less time for the humanities. Meanwhile, the national emphasis on Stem subjects could be traced to the National Defense Education Act that followed the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957. These subjects are important – she doesn’t argue that – but “not at the expense of history”.“It’s a real disservice to our democracy,” said Colleen Shogan, who works with NHD and was archivist of the United States until February, when she was dismissed by Trump without reason. “We are not teaching kids how the constitution functions and what the principles are that we all agree upon as Americans.”View image in fullscreenThe politicized situations that some history teachers find themselves facing are a marked difference from when Gorn began in education in the 1980s. Disgruntled parents and school boards sometimes seek repercussions if lessons don’t align with their own interpretations of history, often along the lines of race and equity. “I’ve heard many [teachers] say, ‘If I can’t teach complete history, I can’t teach any more,” Gorn said.Not only that, she lamented the attitude that learning the thorny parts of the nation’s past is somehow teaching kids “to hate America”. Not true, she said. “Kids are resilient and they know when you’re pulling it over their eyes.” Young people need to understand that there has been struggle. “That’s how we develop empathy,” she said. “Learning history does that.”It was 6.58pm on Monday, and a crowd had gathered around flat screens throughout the student center. In a few minutes, they would display the list of competition finalists. Students were anxious. Some killed time by doing each other’s hair.At 7pm, several shrieks sounded. A little brother covered his ears and mouthed “Oww!” while student faces split into a telling binary of smiles and frowns. Teachers and parents – quite a respectful bunch when compared with the kind you might find on a suburban soccer field – squinted to read the tiny font. “Maybe that judge wasn’t so bad after all,” said one mother.Three of the smiling students were from Minnesota. Sara Rosenthal and Helen Collins had been selected to move on for their documentary about Radio Free Europe, the American soft-power station begun during the cold war to spread democratic influence to communist countries. Their friend, Jack Grauman, was also advancing. For months, he had researched Frank Kameny for his one-person performance about the astronomer who had been removed from the US army in 1957 for being gay.It was “powerful” to be headed to the finals, Grauman said, and just miles away from Washington, no less, where the current administration is targeting LGBTQ+ rights. Meanwhile, funding for Radio Free Europe is on the Doge chopping block, as are press freedoms around the world. Their teacher told me the girls had to update the ending of their documentary several times to keep up.Even here, students and educators sometimes hesitated before answering my questions. One group of students, from Singapore, was talkative until I asked about their projects’ relevance to today – one was specifically about American borders. In my periphery, I saw their classmates miming the slit-throat gesture, as if to say “don’t answer that one”.Later, I spoke with a group of judges inside the forest of elaborate poster board presentations. One of them kindly declined to go on the record: “I’m a federal worker. I don’t want any attention.”View image in fullscreenBack with the Minnesotans, the outlook was rosy. How would they be celebrating? “We’re going to the dance!”Before leaving campus for the evening, I poked my head into what I’d expected to be an awkward affair. Bass of early 2000s hits – oldies to this crowd – pounded through the walls. I passed two middle-schoolers outside.“It’s weird to talk about your exes to your new boyfriend, you know?”“But I want to know everything!”Inside, hundreds of students were cherishing their success or drowning their relative disappointment with fruit juices and soda. It was a mocktail of hoodies, high heels, recycled homecoming dresses, black-suited vests, and one especially-civic-minded student in a T-shirt that said “Support Local Music”.The trading of pins – each state or country delegation had brought their own – provided much of the necessary social lubrication.And then it was Thursday: results day. Across the hardwood of an indoor arena, delegations marched in like at an Olympic closing ceremony, some carrying flags and inflatable animals and wearing bedazzled top-hats.View image in fullscreenOnce everyone took their seats, Gorn stepped up to the microphone, pumped her hands in the air and roared: “Happy History Day everybody!” Then she teed up a special treat: a congratulatory video from a real-life Thunderbird pilot and NHD alum.Finally, it was time to hear the results. It was a successful day for the Minnesotan contingent. Grauman won a special prize for “equality in history”, climbing the steps to the stage wearing a large smile and a pair of Crocs. Almost two hours of nervous waiting later, Rosenthal and Collins heard their names announced at last – the silver for middle school documentary was theirs. The gold went to a pair of students from Chiang Mai, Thailand, for their look into the UK miners’ strike of 1984.If funding comes through, next year’s NHD theme – “Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History” – will again seem especially relevant. If there was a silver lining to the uncertainty, Gorn said, it was that students felt how a decision made far away in the nation’s capital could directly affect them.As Vritti Udasi, a high schooler from Florida, told me: “The place where we are today didn’t come out of thin air. If we study history, dissect it, then we can progress.” More

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      Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’

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      She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavicist”, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. “It’s kind of baffling,” she says.In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump’s birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task, recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist’s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.View image in fullscreen“It’s all almost too stereotypical,” Shore reflects. “A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,” she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. “As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.”That response captures the double lens through which Shore sees the Trump phenomenon, informed by both the Third Reich and the “neo-totalitarianism” exhibited most clearly in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. We speak as Shore is trying to do her day job, having touched down in Warsaw en route to Kyiv, with Poland and Ukraine long a focus of her studies. Via Zoom from a hotel lobby, she peppers our conversation with terms drawn from a Russian political lexicon that suddenly fits a US president.“The unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology … in Russian, it’s obnazhenie; ‘laying bare’.” It’s an approach to politics “in which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,” not concealed in any way. “And that’s its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.”She fears that the sheer shamelessness of Trump has “really disempowered the opposition, because our impulse is to keep looking for the thing that’s hidden and expose it, and we think that’s going to be what makes the system unravel.” But the problem is not what’s hidden, it’s “what we’ve normalised – because the whole strategy is to throw it all in your face.”None of this has been an overnight realisation for Shore. It had been building for years, with origins that predate Trump. Now 53, she had spent most of her 20s focused on eastern Europe, barely paying attention to US politics, when the deadlocked presidential election of 2000 and the aborted Florida recount fiasco made her realise that “we didn’t really know how to count votes”. Next she was wondering: “Why exactly were we going to war in Iraq?” But the moment her academic work began to shed an uncomfortable light on the American present came in the presidential race of 2008.View image in fullscreen“When John McCain chose Sarah Palin, I felt like she was a character right out of the 1930s.” The Republican vice-presidential candidate lived, Shore thought, “in a totally fictitious world … not constrained by empirical reality.” Someone like that, Shore believed, could really rile up a mob.And then came Trump.Once again, it was the lack of truthfulness that terrified her. “Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil,” she says. Lying is essential to totalitarianism; she understood that from her scholarly research. But while Hitler and Stalin’s lies were in the service of some vast “eschatological vision”, the post-truth dishonesty of a Trump or Putin struck her as different. The only relevant criterion for each man is whether this or that act is “advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment. It’s pure, naked transaction.”When Trump was elected in 2016, Shore found herself “lying on the floor of my office, throwing up into a plastic bag. I felt like this was the end of the world. I felt like something had happened that was just catastrophic on a world historical scale, that was never going to be OK.”Did she consider leaving the US then? She did, not least because both she and her husband had received offers to teach in Geneva. “We tore our hair out debating it.” Snyder’s instinct was to stay and fight: he’s a “committed patriot”, she says. Besides, their children were younger; there was their schooling to think about. So they stayed at Yale. “These things are so contingent; you can’t do a control study on real life.”But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. “So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court’s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.”View image in fullscreenEvents so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were “abusing” him, an episode, says Shore, “right out of Stalinism” – to say nothing of Trump’s regular attacks on “USA-hating judges” who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. “Dark fantasies are coming true.”She readily admits that her reaction to these events is not wholly or coldly analytical. It’s more personal than that. “I’m a neurotic catastrophist,” she says. “I feel like we could just subtitle [this period] ‘the vindication of the neurotic catastrophist’. I mean, I’ve been anxious and neurotic since birth.” She draws the contrast with her husband: “Tim is not an anxious person by nature, and that is just hardwired.”She’s referring in part to their different backgrounds. Snyder is a child of Quakers; Shore is Jewish, raised in Allentown, eastern Pennsylvania. Her father was a doctor and her mother “a doctor’s wife” who was later a preschool teacher. Shore grew up in a community with Holocaust survivors. “I do think there’s something about having heard stories of the Holocaust at a young age that was formative. If you hear these stories – people narrating what they went through in Auschwitz, even if they’re narrating it for eight, nine or 10-year-olds – it impresses itself on your consciousness. Once you know it’s possible, you just can’t unknow that.”How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: “My fear is we’re headed to civil war.” She restates a basic truth about the US. “There’s a lot of guns. There’s a lot of gun violence. There’s a habituation to violence that’s very American, that Europeans don’t understand.” Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new “permissiveness” that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump’s indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: “You can feel that brewing.”She also worries that instead of fighting back, “people become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.”View image in fullscreenLater she speaks of the beauty of solidarity, those fleeting moments when societies come together, often to expel a tyrant. She recalls the trade union Solidarity in communist-era Poland and the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. By leaving America – and Americans – in their hour of need, is she not betraying the very solidarity she reveres?“I feel incredibly guilty about that,” she sighs. All the more so when she sees the criticism directed at her husband. They were on sabbatical together in Canada when Trump won the 2024 election, but “had he been alone, he would have gone back to fight … That’s his personality. But he wouldn’t have done that to me and the kids.” To those minded to hurl accusations of betrayal and cowardice, she says: “Direct them all to me. I’m the coward. I take full blame for that.” It was she, not Snyder, who decided that “no, I’m not bringing my kids back to this”.I linger on that word “coward”. It goes to one of the fears that led to Shore’s decision. She does not doubt her own intellectual courage, her willingness to say or write what she believes, regardless of the consequences. But, she says, “I’ve never trusted myself to be physically courageous.” She worries that she is, in fact, “a physical coward”.She began to wonder: what would I do if someone came to take my students away? “If you’re in a classroom, you know your job is to look out for your students.” But could she do it? Many of her students are from overseas. “What am I going to do if masked guys in balaclavas come and try to take this person away? Would I be brave? Would I try to pull them away? Would I try to pull the mask off? Would I scream? Would I cry? Would I run away?” She didn’t trust herself to do what would need to be done.So now she is in what she calls “a luxurious position”: at a university across the border, safely out of reach of both Trump’s threats to cut funding and the ICE officials currently striking terror into the hearts of international students and others. As a result, she feels “more obligated to speak out … on behalf of my colleagues and on behalf of other Americans who are at risk”.At one point in our conversation, we talk about those US citizens who put Trump back in the White House, even though, as she puts it, they knew who he was. “Nothing was hidden. People had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose this. And that disgust, I couldn’t shake that. I thought: ‘People wanted this – and I don’t want to have anything to do with this.’”Does that mean she will never return to the US? “I would never say, ‘I would never go back.’ I always feel that what history teaches you is not what will happen, but what can happen. The possibilities are generally much more capacious than anyone is expecting at that moment.”Contained in that remark is, if not optimism, then at least the possibility of it. And, right now, that might be as much as we can ask for. More

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      What Elon Musk wore to the White House foreshadowed his downfall

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      In case you missed it, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have fallen out.For some – and in particular anyone looking at the tech billionaire’s White House wardrobe – this will come as little surprise. Long before anyone hit send on those inflammatory tweets, or tensions spilled out over Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB), Musk’s political downfall was written in the stitching.During his time in the White House, Musk shunned the sartorial rulebook of someone at the shoulder of a president, where suits and ties are the common code. He wore dark Maga baseball caps at the Oval Office and told a rally in New York: “I’m not just Maga, I’m dark gothic Maga.” Then there were the T-shirts with slogans such as “Occupy Mars”, “Tech Support” and “Dogefather”. At campaign rallies, commentators noted he looked “more like he belonged at a Magic: The Gathering tournament than a political event”, his dress sense the style equivalent of the k-holes that it is claimed Musk frequently disappeared into.The more casual styles of Musk and his Silicon Valley tech bros – where stiff collars are eschewed in favour or crewnecks, tailored jackets softly pushed out the door by padded gilets – are light years away from those of the suited-and-booted US Capitol.But if Musk’s clobber signalled a new DC power shift, it also spoke to different norms. “Disruption might be a badge of honour in the tech space,” says DC-based image coach and style strategist Lauren A Rothman, “but in politics, chaos has a much shorter runway. The White House has been around for a long time. We’re not going to stop wearing suits … This is the uniform.”View image in fullscreenAll of this dressing down, dressing objectively badly and dressing “inappropriately” has form. Consider, if you can bear to, the case of Dominic Cummings. The former Boris Johnson aide subjected Westminster to dishevelment, Joules gilets, beanies, Billabong T-shirts and tote bags advertising the 1983 gothic-inspired horror novel The Woman in Black. He wasn’t just a Tory, he was a gothic horror Tory.As Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian columnist and host of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast, notes: “Dressing down is usually a power move in politics, just as it is in the boardroom: only the most powerful can get away with it.” That was, he says, the message Cummings sent “when he roamed Number 10 in a gilet: ‘You lot are worker bees who have to wear a uniform, whereas I’m so indispensable to the man at the top, I can wear what I like’.”It was the same with Musk, whose threads were a flipped bird to all those Oval Office stiffs in suits. As Rothman puts it: “His uniform of casual defiance stands in sharp contrast to that traditionally suited corridor of political power.” And that contrast screams out his different, special status.Before him, there was “Sloppy Steve” Bannon, a man never knowingly under-shirted. On this side of the Atlantic, Freedland points to former David Cameron adviser Steve Hilton and his penchant for turning up to meetings barefoot: “ditching the shoes was an instant way of signalling his membership of the inner circle”.It’s that age-old question: who has the privilege to be scruffy? As Freedland puts it: “Musk was happy to stand next to the Resolute desk of the president looking like he was dressed for a gamers’ convention. That was his way of reminding everyone of his superior wealth and unique status, outside conventional politics.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBut what Cummings and Musk share in sartorial disorder, they also share in political trajectories. Scruffy Icaruses who flew too close to the sun; their clothes a foreshadowing of their fall. Trump might talk about draining the swamp, but his Brioni suits are very much swamp-coded – plus, while Johnson might have had strategically unruly hair and ill-fitting suits as crumpled as a chip wrapper, suits they still were.Ultimately, nobody likes a bragger. Because dressing in a way in which your privilege is omnipresent if not outright stated, is a surefire way to piss people off. Not least Trump, who noted that Musk had “some very brilliant young people working for him that dress much worse than him, actually”, in an interview on Fox in February.“The contrast between Musk’s garb and Trump’s cabinet,” according to Freedland, “made them look and seem inferior: servants of the president rather than his equal. It was one more reason why more than a few in Trumpworld are glad to see the (poorly tailored) back of Elon Musk.”To read the complete version of this newsletter – complete with this week’s trending topics in The Measure and your wardrobe dilemmas solved – subscribe to receive Fashion Statement in your inbox every Thursday. More

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      Is ‘chic’ political? In Trump 2.0, the word stands for conservative femininity

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      The idea of “chic” is a fashion-world cliche. At best it is a know-it-when-you-see-it vibe, at worst a lazy adjective chosen by a writer to describe something that reminds her of Jane Birkin. It feels inoffensive enough. But now, “chic” has become something of a lightning rod online – a shorthand for a type of conservative-coded aesthetic.It began last month, when a creator named Tara Langdale posted a video to her TikTok following of just over 30,000 in which she sipped from a long-stemmed wine glass and read off a list of things she finds “incredibly UN-chic”. Wearing stacks of gold bracelets and a ballet-pink manicure, Langdale called out fashion choices like tattoos, Lululemon, visible panty lines, baggy denim and hunting camouflage as unchic, because, to her, these choices seemed “cheap”.“Remember, money talks, wealth whispers,” Langdale said.The not-entirely-serious video racked up views and sparked a conversation about how style preferences can carry political baggage. “This is giving mean girl,” one user wrote in the comments. “Classism isn’t chic, hope this helps,” wrote another. “Voting for Trump is unchic,” went a third. Many took particular issue with Langdale’s anti-tattoo stance, which they saw as stuffy or downright rude.View image in fullscreenSuch comments came with a strong dose of projection: Langdale, a lifestyle influencer, does not post about politics, sticking to fashion, makeup or motherhood. Nevertheless, many in the fashion TikTok community felt her commentary on “chic” aligned with the feminine aesthetic of Trump 2.0, where the rigid and airbrushed beauty standards of Maga officials such as Karoline Leavitt, Kristi Noem and Nancy Mace are celebrated.“Chic is starting to feel like a conservative dogwhistle that polices women’s looks,” said Elysia Berman, a creative director and content creator based in New York who posted a takedown of Langdale’s unchic list. “What chic has come to mean to a lot of people is a very narrow definition of elegance. It’s this thin, white, blonde woman who speaks softly and is basically Grace Kelly.”The ideal vision of womanhood from Donald Trump’s first term was caked foundation and clumpy mascara, as seen on the likes of Kimberly Guilfoyle and Lara Trump. But the facial augmentation and overly sexy aesthetic tied to the president’s inner circle – see “Ice Barbie” Noem, who posts full glam videos while deporting immigrants – does not necessarily match that of the president’s more social media savvy supporters, many of whom are now opting for a sleeker presentation.Momfluencers and tradwives celebrate RFK Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” policies while wearing breezy milkmaid dresses. Evie Magazine, a politically conservative version of Cosmo, appropriates the trending visuals of feminist magazines with headlines that decry body positivity and promote vaccine skepticism. As the New York Magazine writer Brock Colyar described young Republicans at a post-election night party: “Many are hot enough to be extras in the upcoming American Psycho remake.”The word “chic” has always been tied to a French, or francophile, sense of femininity, usually in reference to a woman who subscribes to Vogue and innately understands how to look good. But those turning it into a dirty word on TikTok, taking note of how it aligns with a changing conservative aesthetic, see it as having a more prescriptive, even oppressive, meaning for women’s fashion.Suzanne Lambert, a DC-based comedian whose “conservative girl” mock makeup tutorials went viral earlier this year, described the right’s obsession with all things ultra-feminine as “just this soulless, boring kind of fashion”.“Republicans are more focused on assimilating than we are on the left, so it makes sense that they all end up looking the same,” Lambert said.Ultimately, anyone who’s attempting to look chic – or wealthy – is probably neither of those things. Those TikTok imitators who equate chicness with pearls and a Leavitt-esque tweed shift dress? “They think it’s giving Reagan, but it’s really giving Shein,” said Lambert.(Ironically, some of the unchic pieces on Langdale’s list – Lululemon leggings, Golden Goose sneakers, a Louis Vuitton carryall bag – come with hefty price tags and could connote liberal elitism.)In an email, Langdale said that her definition of chic had nothing to do with politics. “Chic by definition means simplicity and timelessness,” she wrote. “Reading a neutral palette as ‘conservative’ conflates style choice with ideology. Conservatism as a moral or political stance varies widely across cultures and religious communities, so tagging a fitting tank top and trousers as ‘Republican’ is lazy stereotyping.”Langdale called chic “this year’s version” of “old money” dressing, a TikTok trend that prioritized subdued, luxury items over the loud, brash and individualistic. “You can own every item on my unchic list and still be considered chic,” she wrote. “Labeling an item chic or unchic speaks only to its aesthetic, not a person’s style or worth.The conversation around chic is ongoing. Other creators, inspired by Langdale’s video, posted about what they considered chic in their niches. A medical student said it was “incredibly chic” to color coordinate scrubs with personal accessories; an office worker considered not letting colleagues in on their personal lives the height of chicness.Kat Brown, a 25-year-old New Yorker who works in fashion PR, made a video talking about how it’s “not chic” to be overly trendy, with chicness coming from a more sustainable wardrobe. “Smart consumption is chic,” Brown said. “Chicness is more reflective of your resourcefulness and creativity, rather than any sort of socioeconomic element.”For all the angst on chic-Tok, true insiders probably aren’t paying much attention. Fashion editors often make lists of words they consider so dull and unspecific that they prohibit writers from using them in copy; “chic” is usually right at the top. And when a word like chic is so bland to begin with, who cares if its wielded as an insult? As a British couturier played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2017 period drama Phantom Thread bemoaned of “chic”: “That filthy little word. Whoever invented that ought to be spanked in public. I don’t even know what that word means.” More

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      Republicans say they want more American babies – but which kind?

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      Some of the children were too young to stand on their own. Instead, they sat on their parents’ knees or in their parents’ arms, waving American flags. Many of them seemed confused about what, exactly, was even happening.But these kids were in the midst of making history: their families were among the first to take advantage of Donald Trump’s February executive order granting white South Africans refugee status in the United States, on the grounds that Afrikaner landowners – who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population yet, decades after the end of apartheid, control about half of its land – are facing persecution. While the doors to the US refugee program have been slammed shut to virtually everyone else, these Afrikaners showed up in the US earlier this week, their refugee status promising a path to US citizenship.Days later, the Trump administration took a far narrower view of who deserves access to the American polity. On Thursday morning, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued in front of the US supreme court that the 14th amendment does not guarantee citizenship to the American-born children of “illegal aliens” – a view contradicted by more than a century of legal precedent.This split screen raises a vital question: is the Trump administration really interested in helping children and families flourish – or only the “right” families?Over the last several months, the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, families, and children have been pockmarked by all kinds of contradictions. The administration is reportedly considering numerous policies to convince people to have more children, such as “baby bonuses” of $5,000 or medals for mothers who have six or more kids. The Department of Transportation has issued a memo directing the agency to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And JD Vance has proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”These moves are, in part, fueled by the growing power of the pronatalism movement, which believes that the declining birthrate in the US is an existential threat to its workforce and its future.Why, then, does the government want to exclude an estimated 150,000 babies born every year?“It’s hard to look at any of these policies and not believe that they’re created for the purpose of satisfying a political base that was promised some sort of notions of recreating a nostalgia for a white Christian nationalist nation,” said P Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of immigration law at the University of Colorado Law School.If the fate of the US workforce is really of concern, experts say immigration could help grow it – but the Trump administration has taken a hardline stance against immigrants from the Global South and their children. The administration has not only reportedly turned the refugee agency responsible for caring for children who arrive in the US alone into an arm of Ice, but also slashed funding for legal representation of children in immigration proceedings. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are trying to block parents who lack Social Security Numbers – such as undocumented people – from benefiting from the child tax credit, even in cases where their children are US citizens.The Trump administration has also unveiled new screening protocols that make it far more difficult for undocumented people to “sponsor”, or take custody of, children who enter the US alone. Just last week, the National Center for Youth Law and the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward sued the Trump administration over the changes, which they say have forced kids to languish in government custody. Between December 2024 and March 2025, kids went from spending an average of two months in government custody to spending an average of six.“This administration has compromised the basic health and safety of immigrant children in egregious ways,” Neha Desai, managing director of children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, said in an email.In March, KFF, a charity that conducts health policy research, conducted focus groups of Hispanic adults who are undocumented or likely living with someone who is undocumented. Many spoke of the effect that the Trump administration’s policies are having on their families and kids.“I have a six-year-old child. Honestly, I’m afraid to take him to the park, and he asks me, ‘Mom, why don’t we go to the park?’” one 49-year-old Costa Rican immigrant woman told KFF. “How do I tell him? I’m scared.”“Even the children worry. ‘Mom, did you get home safely?’ They’re already thinking that something is going to happen to us on the street,” added a 54-year-old Colombian immigrant woman. “So that also makes me very nervous, knowing that there might come a time when they could be left here alone.”The supreme court arguments on Thursday centered not on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, but on the legality of lower court orders in the case. Still, some of the justices expressed concerns about what the case could mean for children.Eliminating birthright citizenship, Justice Elena Kagan suggested, could render children stateless. The high court needed a way to act fast, she said.If the justices believe that a court order is wrong, she asked, “why should we permit those countless others to be subject to what we think is an unlawful executive action?”Both the historical and legal record make clear that the 14th Amendment encapsulates birthright citizenship, Gulasekaram said. But, he said, predicting the supreme court’s moves is a “fool’s errand”.“There’s really no way of getting around the the conclusion that this is a call to some form of racial threat and racial solidarity as a way of shoring up support from a particular part of the of the of the Trump base,” Gulasekaram said. “Citizenship and the acquisition of citizenship has always been racially motivated in the United States.” More

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      Abigail Disney: ‘Every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath’

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      My conversation with Abigail Disney opens with the kind of bog-standard line that starts most chats. But because she is a left-leaning American, with a record of righteous criticism of the man now once again in charge of her country, I suspect it might invite a very long answer indeed.Still, out it comes: “How are you?”“It’s a good question,” she says, “because we’re all struggling with it.”A deep breath. “I spend a lot of time trying to think of reasons to be optimistic, because I don’t know how to function without that. And I want to find the energy and the grit for a really long fight. This isn’t just four years … you know, there’s a whole civilisation-level reset to be done. I mean, I heard the other night when Trump spoke, he mentioned that we would get Greenland one way or another. And then there was laughter. Laughter! I just thought, ‘Oh, we have sunk so low.’”The film-maker (and the grand-niece of Walt Disney) is speaking to me on video call from her home in Manhattan. She talks with a mixture of speed, eloquence and certainty – partly because her view of Donald Trump and his allies is all about something with which she is well acquainted: wealth, and what it does to people.“Trump is an inheritor,” Disney tells me. “He never acknowledges it, but he wouldn’t have been able to do any of the things he did without an inheritance. He absorbed the lessons of inheriting money almost unfiltered: ‘You have this money because you’re special.’ If you read about his childhood, it’s like the textbook worst way to raise a person – you know, he was violent, he was a bully and he was rewarded for that, even as a very small child. And the more money he had, the more he exhibited these bad qualities, and the more people told him he was wonderful.”I then mention something she well knows: that Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk is also from a very wealthy background, having started his first business ventures with money provided by his father, and then becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice. This, she tells me, partly explains the frazzled morals of someone who has just imposed all those cuts to overseas aid, with apparently no regard for the consequences.Among the schemes Musk has frozen, Disney points out, was the Pepfar programme, AKA the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which is estimated to have saved 25 million lives by supplying medicine to people with HIV and Aids around the world. “There are people suffering and dying today because of that cut,” she says. “There are children who have HIV who shouldn’t because of Elon Musk. Now. As we sit here and talk.”She exhales. “That natural human proclivity to say, ‘Hmm, that doesn’t feel right’ – he doesn’t have it. Trump doesn’t have it. They’re spending no time in shame, and shame is a righteous emotion. It’s not an emotion you want to live in, but it’s an emotion you want as a motivator sometimes. And where is it? Where’s the shame?”View image in fullscreenWhat makes Abigail Disney fascinating is that she is also an inheritor. To quote from a speech she recently made – at the Vatican, where she took part in an event focused on making wealthy people around the world pay more tax, and the idea that large concentrations of wealth now threaten democracies – she acknowledges that she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.”Now a 65-year-old mother of four, she is the granddaughter of Roy O Disney, who, with his brother Walt, founded the Walt Disney company in 1923. In her early 20s, she resolved to start giving away large chunks of her inheritance. By 2021, she had donated approximately $70m to causes centred on women living with HIV, women in prison and women affected by domestic violence. She has long been a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation focused on changing the system so that people as rich as its members – and those who have even more money – pay more of their income in tax.“I am of the belief that every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath,” she says. “Like, why? You know, over a billion dollars makes money so fast that it’s almost impossible to get rid of. And so by just sitting on your hands, you become more of a billionaire until you’re a double billionaire. It’s a strange way to live when you have objectively more money than a person can spend.”She has also campaigned – successfully – to improve wages and conditions for workers in the theme parks that bear her family name (she still owns shares in Disney, though not, she says, enough to give her substantial clout). As an active Democrat, she was among the big political donors who, in the summer of 2024, said they would withhold money from the party until Joe Biden stepped down as its candidate in the presidential election.View image in fullscreenBut aside from all that work and her advocacy on wealth and tax, Disney is chiefly known as a film producer and director, some of whose work has presciently looked ahead to the polarised, angry country the US seems to have become.In 2015, for example, she made The Armor of Light, an acclaimed and very sobering documentary about Rob Schenck, an evangelical pastor based in Washington DC who was long associated with the American hard right, with views on abortion to match. The film portrays him trying to find the courage to speak out about the scourge of American gun violence and pull his followers out of their love affair with firearms; after it was released, he and Disney began to regularly make their case to gatherings of rightwing Christians.But as Trump began his march towards the White House, they started to get a sharp sense of what his politics were going to do to American society. “When I first started asking about Trump, the people we met were like, ‘Are you kidding? No way – he’s a joker, he’s nothing.’ And then, halfway through the summer of 2016, it was like the iron curtain came down, and we stopped getting invitations. And when Trump was elected, we never got another request to speak.”For Schenck, things were about to get very ugly indeed. Over decades, he had been involved in the campaign to nullify Roe v Wade, the US supreme court judgment that established women’s constitutional right to abortion – which, in 2022, was overturned. But three years before that watershed decision, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times announcing that he had changed his mind. At that point, Disney tells me, former allies who were now staunch Trump supporters turned on him.“Death threats and all kinds of things came in,” she says. “He was told he was going to hell by people he had been friends with for 40 years. It’s horrible what he’s been through.”That kind of belligerent nastiness is arguably the defining feature of the mindset of the president and his followers, but Disney is adamant that the roots of his politics lie in wealth and privilege, and how Americans view those things. As she sees it, Trump and Trumpism are not some sudden bolt from the blue: his rise to power, she says, highlights a cultural shift that began in the 1980s, when the US really started to venerate the wealthy.“Our magazine covers did not used to be littered with CEOs,” she says. “They used to have pictures of Martin Luther King on them, or a war hero, or the woman who founded the Girl Scouts. Just look at the magazine covers and you’ll see the way this country has lost its way.”Soon enough, along came reality TV, the frenzied worship of a new kind of celebrity, and social media. Trump, clearly, has skilfully used them all. “We all laughed and said he was stupid, but obviously he’s not,” she says. “In the 19th century he would have sold a lot of snake oil. He came along right at the correct moment. And he played his role brilliantly. You’ve got to give it to him.”View image in fullscreenOne question hangs over the whole of our conversation: what is to be done?For now, Disney tells me, pursuing political activism via film-making probably isn’t an option. She is understandably worried about what Trump and Musk might have planned for such outlets as the non-profit Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which might once have played a key role in holding them to account. The fact that the TV and movie industries are in crisis – thanks to recent writers’ strikes, and the impossible economics of streaming – makes things even more difficult. “I’m thinking of maybe pivoting to short videos – just talking at the camera, and doing that low-maintenance kind of thing,” she says. “I feel like I’m missing an opportunity if I don’t go on social media and try to be present as a public voice.”As the Trump revolution gathers pace, I tell her, I often wonder when massed opposition will materialise. Put another way, why aren’t millions of people already in the streets?She sighs. “We could all show up on the streets. But what would be the uniting message? The chaos is deliberate: it’s meant to give us too much to handle. Do we go out there about the environment? Do we go out there about DEI [diversity, equality and inclusion policies]? Do we go out there about gay rights, about women’s rights?“You know, the difficulty of being progressive is that it’s difficult to unite everybody around a single issue. So most of the progressives I know are trying to figure that out. And even if we did go out [on the streets], what is our leverage? We have none.”What does she mean by leverage?“Well, we [Democrats] have a minority in the House and the Senate. We have a cabinet that is so radical, and they are lining the government with people who are beyond radical and there is no place where we can exercise visible dissent … We’re being shut out. And the way of communicating has completely changed. An op-ed in the New York Times isn’t going to change things.”View image in fullscreenDisney is at pains to talk about the necessity of slow and arduous work: building opposition from the grassroots up – which will be helped, she says, by the fact that Trump and his cronies will sooner or later hit no end of problems.“I really don’t think it will take very much time for a lot of the people who voted for him to regret it, especially on the economy,” she says. “We’re going to have so much inflation: the tariffs are terrible. I think that there’s going to be some turning, and in the meantime we have to really work on building institutions. Black associations, neighbourhood associations, PTAs – we need to do the work of rebuilding those spaces. We need the basis of a really vibrant progressive society. We let it die.”When I mention the progressive flag-bearers Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have recently been organising Fight Oligarchy events across the US, Disney speaks with an urgency that sounds almost optimistic.“We need Bernie barnstorming,” she says. “We need AOC barnstorming. We need, you know, the people we have that are greeted as authentic in the real world, not focus groups, to go out and be authentic with their passion and their smarts about where to go from here.”She mentions a handful of impressive young Democratic politicians such as Maxwell Frost, the 28-year-old congressman from Florida who had a key role in the pro-gun-control movement March for Our Lives. “There’s a bunch of people,” she says. “And what we need to do is put together a coordinated campaign. But you’ve got to build the infrastructure to do it.”We end as we began, with Donald Trump, and how awful he has made so many Americans feel. “He has a critical mass of 35% to 40% of the American public – which is far too many people – who are completely on board with the cruelty and the derision and the trolling,” Disney says. “But that leaves everybody who’s either too tired, or too alienated or estranged from the process.”She suddenly brightens. “They’re ours,” she says. “But we have to do the work.” More