The Social World

Author: Kelly Chapman

  • Why DC loves to hate Partiful

    Why DC loves to hate Partiful

    If you’re under 50, you may have noticed that Partiful has quietly annexed the American social calendar over the past year or two. The event-planning app, founded by former Palantir employees, began as another Silicon Valley toy, but it didn’t stay regional for long. Its loud dashboard aesthetic spread quickly through the Bay Area and then achieved escape velocity in Washington, DC. I wouldn’t be surprised if the strong cultural current between tech and defense is what created near-perfect conditions for a social revival in nerd world.

    While I understand a bit of snobbery over the aesthetics, I’ve been surprised by the constant performative disdain I’ve observed accompanying its rise. Everywhere I go, I hear people say they “hate” Partiful. I watch otherwise socially adept adults roll their eyes at the indignity of being invited to yet another birthday karaoke or themed dinner through an app, of all things, as if the rest of their lives aren’t already dictated by Outlook and Slack.

    Receiving a Partiful link is akin to a minor social injury, a digital affront to imagined analog elegance. This is nothing more than user error, in my view. Partiful’s origins do give it an undeniable tinge of dorkiness, but only the constitutionally weak would let that get in the way of a good time.

    Sure, the format is corny. The animated sparkles, the tie-dye backgrounds, the GIFs. But in a society where birth rates are in a nosedive, no one’s heard of sex before and social skills are degrading by the minute, I am more than happy to turn a blind eye to a few lurid colors and kitschy animations in service of prosocial behavior.

    Infact, I’d go as far as to say that my social diary has never been busier thanks to the efficient plug-in between Partiful and my iPhone calendar. I know exactly when everything is happening and I am rarely at risk of double-booking myself, which is more than I can say for the pre-Partiful days when RSVPs were a veritable archaeological dig through texts, DMs and half-remembered conversations.

    Indeed, it may be the only app that’s as effective at getting people to log off as it is at getting people to use it. For the socially blessed, perhaps the garishness of it all is a true burden – not all of us are well-connected enough to enjoy a constant whisper-network of parties, or handwritten calling cards from a generous host.

    For the rest of us, the mere fact that someone went out of their way to invite you to something, even through a candy-colored interface, is hardly an indignity. If being invited to a party is the worst thing that has happened to you this month, I congratulate you on your charmed life.

    The main complaint I hear beyond the superficial is that the app feels “too public.” The guest list is visible. The RSVPs are visible. People can see you were invited. They can see you RSVP’d “maybe” and then never updated your status. Knowing who is attending an event supposedly ruins the mystery of running into an exciting stranger or, more thrillingly, an unwelcome ex. But this transparency only offends those who relied on ambiguity to maintain their mystique. Some of us know how to withhold, wherever we go.

    Another accusation: the app’s design encourages people to RSVP just to see who else is coming, which allegedly leads to inflated guest lists full of ambiguous spectators. While I’ll admit that this is gauche, it does reflect a fact of human nature. People have always wanted to know who will be at a party before deciding to attend. Partiful simply removed the need for back-channel interrogation and gossip-triangle logistics. Tacky as this may be, millennials have no right to be so snooty about it, given the fact that their long-forgotten Facebook events had the same feature.

    If you read between the lines you’ll notice that DC in particular loves Partiful because it flattens status games while simultaneously revealing them. The everyday social life of the city, the informal gatherings of the civil servants and hard-drinking journalists, becomes a semi-public ledger of who’s hosting, who’s being invited and who’s orbiting which micro-scene.

    In a city where professional life and social life blur, where a dinner can double as a networking event and a house party can function as a quasi-policy salon, this level of transparency is intoxicating. People here love data, for good or ill, and Partiful gives them plenty of it.

    Partiful exploits Washington’s weakness for structure, but in my view, the exploitation is a net positive and benefits all stakeholders. It makes it easier for hosts to gather people, easier for newcomers to break in, and easier for the city’s chronically Type-A residents to remember that fun is a scheduling problem more than a metaphysical one. The app has created a small renaissance in casual hosting: backyard dinners, themed cocktail nights, going-away parties, last-minute potlucks.

    I’ve been to five-person movie nights and 500-person galas because of it. It has lowered the barrier to entry for throwing something together. It has reminded people that to enjoy a party, you have to log off and actually attend it.

    If some find this embarrassing, so be it. But it’s hard not to admire an app that has done more for community-building than a decade of think-tank happy hours. DC may scoff at Partiful, but it also cannot stop using it. And maybe that’s the clearest sign of all that the app is here to stay.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

    The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

    I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse – and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types:

    Dr. Strangelove (The theorist)

    The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors. There might be room in the bunker.

    Commander Mandrake (The visiting British correspondent)

    Efficient. Relatively polite. A cultural anthropologist. Always calling the Uber, assembling the troops for the next pub – I mean, bar – and ordering a round of Guinness for the table. He’s here on duty to report on DC’s pomp and circumstance, endlessly teasing Americans about their earnestness while secretly searching for the nearest Waffle House. Washington isn’t that different from Westminster. It’s just a little more self-serious.

    Jack D. Ripper (MAHA’s strongest soldier)

    Walk into any bar on Capitol Hill and you’ll find a handful of these guys talking about what estrogenized water is doing to testosterone levels. What the great feminization is doing to the workplace. How the male essence must be preserved. Most likely to be a 40-year-old bachelor with the Red Scare podcast in his Hinge profile as an in-group signal to the based women of Washington. In fact, there may be more Jack D. Rippers in DC right now than at any other time in history. It’s a marvel Kubrick predicted their arrival back in the 1960s.

    President Muffley (The earnest liberal)

    Still believes in democracy and – bless his heart – due process. Reads the Atlantic like a moral instruction manual. Wants to be good. Wringing his hands at the degradation of decency, biding his time until the inevitable turning of the tides. In the meantime, he tends to his ficus plant and carefully curated coffee bar while stating “cautious optimism” over things that are already engulfed in flames. May have swung closer to the center since the last election, but still can’t quite stomach the rest of it. You’re faintly fond of him, in spite of the cloud of doom trailing his every word.

    Major Kong (Defense tech enthusiast)

    He works for Palantir or Anduril or something even more secret adjacent to the Department of War. Bicoastal (SF/DC) and proud of it. Certain that the average IQ is higher in the Bay, but Washington is where the decisions get made, so he begrudgingly keeps a Dupont apartment to schmooze with the shot-callers. You get a sense that he’d ride the drones he’s developing into the sunset if the job asked for it.

    Colonel Bat Guano (The staffer)

    Overworked. Pale. Nervous. Vibrating on Celsius and Zyn. He books the flights, he writes the speeches, he quietly holds the republic together with duct tape and WD-40 while everyone else is tweeting about it. Chain smokes like a ghost who died at inbox zero. When he says it’s been a “busy week,” he means he’s been sleeping on the floor of a congressional office for four days. The midnight oil never seems to run out. By the time he finally crashes, the other party might be in charge.

    The War Room (The groupchat)

    Where all decisions are made – or at least endlessly litigated. Less geopolitical influence than NATO, more emotional instability than a freshman dorm. All gossip, vice-signaling and purity-testing. Here you’ll find the middle managers of MAGA: men so high on their small-pond power they excommunicate anyone who threatens their crumb of relevance. If you ever find yourself added to one of their threads, don’t panic. Mute, pour yourself a drink and remember that empires fall, but receipts last forever.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • The cruel, cold intellect of DC and San Francisco

    The cruel, cold intellect of DC and San Francisco

    New York vs Los Angeles is done to death. Those cities have already captured the American heart on stage and screen. The next great rivalry (or is it an alliance?) is unfolding between the bastions of the nerds: Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Each prizes a different facet of intellect – DC the operator, San Francisco the inventor, functioning as co-architects of a new American order.

    We tell ourselves SF and DC represent different values: disruption and order, innovation and stability. And yet the cities are locked in a symbiotic embrace. San Francisco builds new worlds in the image of its algorithms; Washington manages those worlds through policy and process. But this is a cold comfort. While both claim to act in the public interest, each sees the human as a problem to be solved.

    The Bay Area’s age of AI and relentless innovation has revived the old romantic ideal of progress. The pioneer spirit of the West survives there in its purest form, fueling faith in optimization and rationality as solutions to every human problem. However, as much as San Francisco believes itself to be the city of the future, its techno-optimism is curdling into a kind of moral craft – a conviction that intelligence can solve even the problems of the soul; algorithms so attuned to latent desire they acquire a mystic shroud and supplant the idea of God.

    SF’s technocrats are superb builders, optimizers and brilliant problem-solvers, confident in the power of reason, even in their mimicry of human affect. Yet they forget that the simulacrum of the soul is not the soul itself. San Francisco’s intellectual life risks becoming a cult of cleverness, believing in nothing beyond the material. The city gamifies moral life, reducing virtue to interface and empathy to design. With success comes arrogance. Cults have always thrived in the American West, and the Bay is no exception.

    Washington, my city, deals in hard power. Operators and bureaucrats populate this thin place and attempt to drag nebulous ideas from the bowels of the internet into the real world. Procedural and strategic intelligence dominate. Intellect here, as in the Bay, is used to move things.

    Washington suffers the same sickness as San Francisco: the mechanization of intellect in service of power. The capital systematizes the world beneath the veneer of public interest until – behind closed doors – there is no room left for the human. It abolishes the soul by institutionalizing it, or tabling it until the votes are counted and victory assured. In both cities, inner life is replaced by mechanical operations, whether they are algorithmic optimization or political maneuvering.

    Humanity in both cases becomes a rounding error, nothing more than a variable to train the model or a complication to be managed after the election. Each city serves Power while sacrificing meaning. Between the West Coast’s delirious faith in innovation and the capital’s procedural worship of control lies the same threat of emptiness: the loss of interior life.

    I would be remiss not to mention Boston, which stands apart from this alliance. The third city of nerds, the home of the archetypal elite scholar holds perhaps the purest expression of American brainpower. Yet its fixation on scholarship sets it apart from the other two, making it more of a ceremonial old guard of the brain trust than a boundary-pushing force. Where San Francisco disrupts, Boston preserves. Where Washington dominates, Boston analyzes. For all its excellence, Boston feels more like a museum of thought than a battleground of it, at least in the public imagination.

    America’s brightest minds have turned thinking into machinery. Both believe intellect can redeem us, when in truth it is in danger of replacing us. Perhaps Boston’s sterility is preferable to this impotent brilliance, from a romantic perspective. Though the archetypal scholar may lose himself in theory, at least he knows the human joy of theorizing. We must watch our hearts, lest we forget what the thinking was ever for.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • The devil over Washington

    The devil over Washington

    It is difficult to romanticize the political theater of Washington, DC, when you live so close to it. The absurdity feels routine after a while. You grow desensitized to the Machiavellian scheming, the name-calling, the ceremonial outrage. News outlets blast cinematic plot twists to the American public while quieter forces go unnoticed.

    With September growing late and the humdrum heat and headlines of Washington refusing to break, I turned to film in an attempt to re-enchant myself with the city in which I live. I rewatched two movies which capture its deeper moods. In spite of their tonal differences, both struck me in their portrayal of life just apart from the curtain – Washington not as the center of power, but as a place shadowed by it.

    The Exorcist, released months before the peak of the Watergate scandal in 1973, sees the city as tragic. Burn After Reading, released just before Obama’s first presidential victory in 2008, sees it as farcical. Both movies concern themselves with dramas beyond political life, and together they reveal something essential about the nature of evil and the psyche of Washington today.

    In Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers turn their lens just outside the political core of Washington, looking at the lives of pompous bureaucrats and some gym employees who try to blackmail them. The satire is merciless, holding its characters in no great affection: they’re all too dim-witted to understand the machinery of power, too incompetent to ever truly wield it. The characters barely register meaning or evil at all. Their lives, in effect, are expendable, their frantic attempts to claw their way into power impotent, the evil they mire themselves in banal. The devil over Washington is set loose, free to work under the guise of everyday stupidity, as the authorities shrug and turn a blind eye.

    The devil over Washington is set loose, free to work under the guise of everyday stupidity

    The Exorcist, by contrast, casts Washington not as a city that is too self-serious, but as a city that is not serious enough. In spite of its setting, its backdrop is not political but spiritual – the worldly Jesuits of Georgetown cross paths with actresses and diplomats, while the political class hardly intrudes. Instead, the press of rational, intellectual life in Washington is represented by the medical community as they subject the disturbed young Regan to test after invasive test. Only when every avenue is exhausted do the doctors, almost embarrassed, recommend an exorcism – but even then as a last resort, a kind of placebo treatment dependent on the corresponding irrational belief of the patient.

    For all its blasphemous convulsions, I find The Exorcist strikingly wholesome. Its rejection of cold reason in favor of faith implies a moral order that is weighty enough to withstand even absurd, improbable evil. The doctors – like the bumbling characters in Burn After Reading – are incapable of perceiving great evil and so cannot perceive great love. Their clinical detachment leaves them helpless before Regan’s possession. The Roman rite of exorcism performed by the ailing Father Merrin reaffirms Regan’s identity as a human being made in the image of the divine. Where the doctors offer cold procedure, the exorcism drips with love.

    The Washington I live in feels caught between the moods of both movies, unable to decide whether it is a place of conviction or performance. The ironic detachment of 2008 still lingers, still pulls the spirit toward a desensitization and the impulse to treat every crisis as theater – but the spiritual dread of the 1970s has returned in new forms. Spiritual warfare is overtly present in the public dialogue. Violence is constantly in the background and evil is openly discussed, even as we strain to take moral language seriously.

    Though we are closer to 2008 than 1973, I suspect that we are spinning closer in spirit to the Washington of the Nixon era; spiritual powers and principalities seem to undergird the spectacle, and both absurdity and rationality are thin veneers to stretch over very real darkness. What The Exorcist understood – and what Burn After Reading refused to entertain – is that evil can only be opposed by people who believe someone is worth saving. Washington in 2025 is still deciding which story it belongs to.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • The pace is quickening in DC

    The pace is quickening in DC

    September in DC is the real new year. The heat hasn’t broken, but the air feels heavier. Congress regroups, summer travelers return to the city and the Hill drones descend on the cafés in their blazers and button-ups, sweating through 80-degree weather. A distinct tension hangs in the air, a carryover from late summer.

    Donald Trump’s declaration of a crime emergency last month transferred control of the local police to federal authorities, and now, as I make my way down 14th Street, I regularly shoulder past protesters and pass clusters of National Guard soldiers milling beside the wine bars and coffee shops where my friends and I still meet. Couples walk past without breaking stride, avoiding eye contact. I, too, avert my gaze. I feel part protected, part watched and more than a little wary. It is a surreal juxtaposition. I tell a friend it reminds me of northern Mexico at the height of the cartel wars. The soldiers are meant to prevent violence, but their very presence signals that violence is the rule of the city, not the exception. Maybe that’s more honest. Even if crime rates are down, violence is salient. As I write, there have been three shootings in the past week.

    This is Washington’s particular joke: violence is never just local, it is staged for the national audience

    In early August I attend a party where I don’t know anyone on the list. Young men in dark suits talk among themselves. I eavesdrop and realize they are mostly DoGE staffers. A few journalists are in attendance as well, to my surprise. A man I don’t recognize politely introduces himself and asks me about my work. He looks young and his manner is earnest. He mentions his clearance; I tease him for talking about it. His name is Edward. I meet two other new hires. One insists he is here to improve on the old model, to revive the previous system with a sharper strategy. He is particularly congenial, a head taller and several degrees more telegenic than the rest of the room. I’ve seen him on a reality show before; he tells me he’s had a career change.

    The next morning the headlines say Edward was beaten trying to stop a carjacking in Dupont Circle. A week later, Trump takes over the Metro.

    The day Charlie Kirk is assassinated I attend a philosophy salon at the Aspen Institute. This year’s word is “virtue” and tonight is the kick-off. We drink wine and discuss MacIntyre and Aristotle on the roof as the planes overhead arc toward Reagan. The night is beautiful – warm air, clear sky – and it presses everyone toward conviviality, however dark the news beneath it.

    The attendees are all smart people. Washington wonks, lawyers and journalists, philosophers and academics. A prominent writer opens by noting that murder rates have declined, suggesting society is less violent, maybe even more virtuous. He argues that nothing has a monopoly on virtue anymore, and that no one can define it with certainty. A lawyer counters that virtue today is monopolized – by statistics, rather than God or the church. He says numbers and material outcomes can’t explain why we ought not to kill; they only chart the rise and fall.

    Later, I ask a newcomer what he thinks of the evening. He shrugs, and says these are very smart people, but Americans are so universal. What world are they referencing when they reference the world? Our values? Our virtue? What about Venezuela? What about anywhere else? His tone isn’t hostile, just bemused, as if he has stumbled into a rehearsal for a very niche play. I tell him he should say all that at the next salon. At the end of the night, we check our phones. The shooter has not yet been caught.

    DC is a thin place; a hinge between ideas and their consequences. It is a place where the rule of the city implies something about the rule of the land. A place where principalities and powers convene to materialize ideas you only read about online and push them past the membrane and into reality. This is Washington’s particular joke, sharpened in the second Trump term: violence is never just local – it is staged for the national audience.

    Lately it feels more unsettled, the hinge straining, the spiral tightening, each event ratcheting more quickly into the next, plunging the city – and maybe the nation – toward a feverish finale that never quite arrives. But the pace is quickening all the same.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.