The Social World

Tag: DC

  • 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 rural reality

    I was never a “real” rider. My parents were serious riders. My sister was too – she showed at national level. But by the time I came along, the youngest child by 20 years, no one had the energy for proper lessons, let alone the time it takes to seriously compete. Yet somehow, I’m the one who wound up with the family horse farm in New York’s Hudson Valley.

    My family’s involvement with horses goes back almost 80 years. My dad, a Bronx boy raised on Bonanza and Lone Ranger, grew up riding on summer vacation at a Borscht Belt resort. His love of horses shifted him from Jewish cowboy to showjumper and he eventually took over the equestrian center he learned to ride at. For more than 30 years, he bought, sold, boarded and trained horses in every discipline. He even met my mom when she came upstate to buy a horse; naturally, he ripped her off.

    The Borscht Belt is long dead and the business shifted and drastically downsized in the 2000s. It was a tough move. As a teenager, I remember rushing to unload dozens of horses as the resort abruptly closed, and we relocated to our 15-horse farm seemingly overnight. Business waned, my parents lost steam, and that would have been that for the family farm – if I hadn’t partied my way through college. I graduated with a low GPA and no job options. I did, however, have a little money saved up and some friends in Belgium with a small farm like ours.

    Belgian warmbloods come in a few variations, but all share similar characteristics. Warmbloods are a selectively bred mix between cold- and hot-blooded horses, the former quiet work horses like Clydesdales, the latter spirited breeds like Thoroughbreds. The mix of explosive speed and strength makes them ideal candidates for show jumping at the highest level. And while a green and unpedigreed foal may be quite common in the Belgian countryside, they’re highly sought-after in the US.

    If you think going through customs is a pain in the ass, just imagine what it’s like for a horse. International transport requires significant documentation, veterinary work and mandatory mosquito-free quarantine.

    Covid, of course, shut most of this down. The political world became my new day job and the business went back to its roots as a small, hands-off boarding operation, with some former clients keeping their horses with me full time. It pays the bills.

    More importantly, however, it keeps me rooted in community in a way that most DC transplants don’t understand. Owning any small business keeps one connected to the “real world” – the concerns that politicos discuss, debate and regulate, but often have little connection to or stake in.

    But having a rural horse farm that caters to largely upscale (but not ultra-wealthy) clients puts me in a unique position.

    On the one hand, I’m embedded in working-class America. The “locals” – staff, neighbors and friends upstate – are at the forefront of a new coalition that’s been the backbone of America First for nearly a decade. On the other hand, my clients – often New Yorkers with successful businesses – root me in a world where the bulk of American wealth still lies. It’s not hedge-fund managers or tech overlords who monopolize American social tastes and spending, but those with unglamorous regional businesses.

    For me, it’s easy to flip between the blue-collar worker and the country-home crowd and relate to either. Despite their stark differences, their fates are intrinsically linked.

    When the left complains about “white privilege,” it suggests a dismantling of these two distinct US social groups: a working-class, dependent and rudderless, and the destruction of bourgeois wealth reserves in order to pay for it. It’s not so much about redistributing wealth but punishing those who resist this new cultural order. But without these very independent, very American classes, America itself ceases to be.

    Many in my generation agree with this sentiment but still have no desire to resist it. It’s not just that they don’t want to go to trade school; no matter the industry, they don’t want anything to do with their parents’ businesses. But is a rootless, rent-poor, corporate life in a luxury Manhattan studio really all that much better? It’s pointless to feel that you’re above your childhood circumstances. While I grew up alienated from the family business, I applied the basic knowledge and familiarity of my upbringing with a little effort and did well. I learned as I went and carved my own path. The great thing about America is that you can, too. You can take over your parents’ farm – or local law firm – and make it your own: reimagine it, tailor it and build a life very much different, even better, than your parents’. And that’s the real spirit of life in the country.

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

  • Can Trump really send troops to Chicago and New York?

    Can Trump really send troops to Chicago and New York?

    President Trump has once again identified a critical national need: this time, it is the desperate plea for backup from overwhelmed local police, particularly in large metropolitan areas. 

    Under the Home Rule Act, the President possesses clear statutory authority to exercise at least temporary law enforcement authority over the nation’s capital city by federalizing the Washington D.C. police force and deploying 800 National Guard troops.

    The city’s own crime statistics depict a municipality raging out of control. Homicide rates have doubled in the last ten years. Washington, D.C. is one of the fifty most dangerous cities in the world and the fourth most dangerous city in the nation.

    Despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual suspects, President Trump possesses both the immediate authority and the responsibility to ensure the capital city does not descend into chaos if city leaders are not up to the job. 

    On Friday, Trump said he was considering deploying guardsmen to Chicago as well. “We’re going to make our cities very, very safe. Chicago is a mess,” he said. “We’ll straighten that one out probably next. That will be our next one after this, and it won’t even be tough.” He later mentioned New York as one of the cities he’d like the National Guard to “help.”

    But can the President take long-term police power of another major city? Methinks not, for all his best intentions in the face of our ordeals.

    Crime rates have risen dramatically in the last five years in the United States. In 2020, murder rates hit their highest single year jump, an astonishing 30 percent, in recorded domestic history. Carjackings in major cities increased 93 percent from 2019 to 2023; over half involved a firearm and nearly 30 percent resulted in injury or death. Last year, a rape occurred every four minutes.

    Metropolitan mayors defy federal law enforcement by declaring themselves sanctuary cities and sheltering criminal illegal aliens. Radical district attorneys disregard the legislative code and decriminalize heinous conduct. In the wake of the George Floyd murder, law enforcement leaders describe police morale, recruitment, and retention as down nationally. 

    All this grim news is top of mind for voters, 60 percent of whom said last year that stemming the rise of crime should be a top priority for the President and Congress to address. 

    However, Congressional power to create a national antidote to our criminal law problems, even with a Presidential blessing, is limited. Under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, “in areas such as criminal law enforcement… States historically have been sovereign.” Moreover, the federal government is a government of specific, enumerated powers. The Supreme Court repeatedly has held there is no “general federal police power.” 

    The President, acting alone to protect a modern American city other than Washington, D.C., would be on a heroic but likely ill-fated quest if the situation were something other than a temporary crisis (consider President Bush’s intervention in Los Angeles following the Rodney King riots in 1992), which could trigger the President’s authority under the Insurrection Act.

    So, for example, the evidently leaked proposal to create a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force“ made up of National Guard troops to quickly quell homegrown disturbances might be feasible under one of the aforementioned federal authorities, provided the unit was temporary, civil and deployed to one state at a time. There is nothing inherently unlawful about a rapid response team. However, under the President’s existing authority, there does not appear to be a mechanism to authorize a multijurisdictional National Guard “strike team” absent coordination with the respective state governors.

    A permanent, longstanding, roving federal police or military force has not yet been a feature of American domestic life. Except for war, insurrection or uncontainable turmoil such as riots, the chief responsibility for domestic public safety falls to local and state officials. For better or worse, outside the capital city, our Constitutional design ties the President’s hands to federalize all local police or deploy longstanding multijurisdictional military contingents. It is high time for local authorities to answer the police call for reserves.

  • A presidential pizza delivery service

    A presidential pizza delivery service

    The excited word went out late Thursday afternoon that President Trump was going to do an evening ridealong with the National Guard. According to Twitter, he was now officially the roughest dude to occupy the White House since Teddy Roosevelt. Bad boys, bad boys, watcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when the Trump gets you?

    Fight fight fight!

    At the height of rush hour, POTUS climbed into “The Beast,” the Presidential limo, in a motorcade that included chief of staff Susie Wiles, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, most-hated-man-in-America Steven Miller, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, among others. This was going to be one hell of a ridealong.

    At 5:32 pm, Trump arrived at U.S. Park Police headquarters, where he was met by 300 warriors from the DEA, ATF, US Marshals, National Guard, Police HSI, the DC Metropolitan Police and the FBI.

    “You are nice healthy looking people,” he said, and the crowd laughed.

    He was about to make them less healthy, as he presented them with bags of hamburgers from the White House kitchen, and stacks of pizzas from “a good place,” which turned out to be Wise Guy Pizza. Then the enforcer-in-chief motivated the troops. “We had a country that was laughed at a year ago,” he said.

    The world thought the U.S. was finished, he added, but “they couldn’t understand what was happening. And it’s about leadership. But we had a country that was a dead country in many ways.”

    Then, because it was Trump, and it was a day of the week, he pivoted to talking trash about windmills. But he also promised these brave men and women that he would fight mightily to improve Washington, D.C., vowing to “regrass” the city’s parks.

    “I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world,” The President said. “And we’re going to be regressing all of your parks, all brand new sprinkler systems, the best that you can buy.”

    After remarks from a few Administration officials, including former Fox News commentator Judge Jeanine Pirro, Trump got back into The Beast, and was home at the White House just a little after 6 p.m. It hadn’t been much of a ridealong. But thanks to the person who knows more about grass than anyone in the world, the streets of D.C. were safe once again.