The Social World

Tag: Society

  • 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.

  • Beautiful interiors can’t guarantee a beautiful marriage

    Beautiful interiors can’t guarantee a beautiful marriage

    I remember poring over the photos when they first appeared in Architectural Digest in early 2023. Even back then, before Lily Allen wrote what Rolling Stone called “the most brutal album of the year,” I knew in my gut that her marriage to that actor guy she met on Raya – whatshisface? David Strangerbeard? – wouldn’t last. Because looking at the pictures of their house made me feel queasy. There was something off about it. It just wasn’t right. It didn’t bode well.

    It’s not that the house wasn’t gorgeous. It was – and still is – spectacular. A double-width brownstone in the slouchiest artisanal urban village on Earth: Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. A house which was put back on the market for just under $8 million the same week as Allen’s new album West End Girl’s release in October.

    Those vast double-aspect Georgian-paned windows. And that’s all before we even get to the inside. There’s a green velvet-tufted-gay-hairdresser-orgy-sofa, a pick ‘n’ mix clash of patterns, the patterned wallpaper, the floors. Carpet in the bathroom! Wall-to-wall plush! The absolute cheek of it.

    The house is an exercise in trans-Atlantic retro-maximalism at the aesthetic’s peak-bling phase. It’s Edith Wharton meets Claus Von Bülow’s dead wife with insouciant accents of Disney-princess bordello. It’s an object of beauty specific to its time and place, which was 2023. But no one who saw that house in print ever forgot it. Seriously, I’ve done a vast survey using a sample group of six women at a dinner party.

    But let me get to the heart of the matter. There was always something wrong about the house. Something dead behind the eyes. I felt queasy looking at the pictures. Didn’t you? I thought, “Eeeesh.” Human suffering radiated from the pictures on the page. The writing was on the wallpaper.

    The Lily Allen/David Harbour saga is not about a break-up, nonmonogamy, the state of marriage, female outrage or male selfishness. It’s not even really about the songs on Allen’s album, which are catchy but only in the way that an entertaining musical is. Once the story – that Harbour sought an open marriage Allen didn’t really want – ceases to matter, the songs won’t seem so brilliant. The real story is that brownstone: the unhappy marital home that became a haunting piece of art and an object lesson for the (desperate?) housewives of America.

    What the story of that house reveals about the rise of interiors porn is fascinating in a broader cultural sense. In London, the city where I live, just as much as in New York City, the house-beautiful cult is like a virus. It seems to grow in inverse proportion to the eternally dismal economic forecast. The house obsession never stops. For example, it has become commonplace for people where I live to regard their homes as set pieces and brand extensions rather than places where they live with their families. In my neighborhood, middle-class professionals think nothing of spending several years searching out, buying, gutting and meticulously doing up houses at enormous expense, not just to their bank balances but to their sanity and happiness. I have known not just one but several intelligent, educated women (always, always women, invariably mothers) who have abandoned and/or put on hold hard-won careers in order to “project manage” epic back-to-the-studs renovations that stretch on like Russian novels.

    These women suffer and starve for periods of four to six years, sometimes more, because during these gut-jobs they lose their minds and become boring to everyone around them – including themselves. They cannot think or talk about anything of substance: it’s all weighted drawers, cornices, granite grain and light fixtures. They begin to believe these things are, genuinely, a matter of life or death. Renovation brain is like baby brain but so much worse, for the obvious reason there’s no baby involved. I have seen the best minds of my generation lost to kitchen extensions. Truly! Did we all actually go to university to become volunteer construction project mangers in middle age? It’s insane.

    But surely no one actually believes that doing up a house is a substitute for meaningful work? Or that a perfect house makes for a perfect and harmonious family life? And yet, we do. Every generation falls for the same trick. Why?

    There’s something else driving the perfect-house obsession. It’s the same pernicious fallacy that made women of previous generations obsessed with cleanliness and germ-killing, and before that flower arranging and needlepoint. It’s the delusion that if you can just focus on the details, fuss and fuss and fuss, eventually you make everything perfectly perfect and shiny on the outside. The inside will naturally follow suit. But life and human relationships don’t work like that. As Allen found out.

    Having been through the wringer of divorce as both a child and an adult, I have moved house countless times and also been trapped in the marital home. I’ve done my fair share of renovating and agonizing over cabinet knobs, and here is what I have learned: beyond a modicum of comfort and space, the state of the family home is basically irrelevant to the state of the relationships that exist within it. Aesthetics are accessories to life, they are not love or art. They are not even water or food.

    What divorce forces you to acknowledge is that your perfect house won’t save you. It didn’t save me as a child any more than it did as a middle-aged woman who made the same mistake my mother did. Allen’s album is a hit because it’s a reckoning with this universal thought-trap. The cautionary tale of the perfect house. New furnishings, same blunder. Having said that, I’m all for wall-to-wall patterned carpet in the bathroom.

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

  • Against flakes

    Against flakes

    A new drinks-party-shirking method has taken hold in society. I call it “Lastminute.non.”

    Previously, the way of not going to someone’s party was to write a polite message of refusal at least a week in advance, giving the host or hostess ample time to absorb the sad but inevitable fact that various friends would not be able to attend – usually for copper-bottomed reasons, such as that they had other plans for the evening or would be away on holiday.

    The new trend seems to be to accept an invitation, and then, mere hours before, to duck out of it. This means that from breakfast time onward throughout the day of the party, the host will receive a steady stream of apologetic messages.

    It happened to me last month, on the day of the launch of my debut novella at a bookshop. I awoke hoping for a golden day, during which I’d bask in anticipation of seeing all my friends gathered in one place – at least, the ones who had a tick rather than a cross beside their name on the invitation list.

    From 10 a.m., the Lastminute.non messages started trickling in from people who’d accepted the invitation a few weeks ago “with great pleasure,” “much looking forward to it.” One had a cold, one a cough. Another had Covid symptoms. One poor friend had a fractured ankle and another a leaking bedroom ceiling. By 5 p.m., after the messages had pinged in at about the rate of two per hour, I was under the illusion that half the country must be at death’s door, such a litany had I received of “feeling decidedly unwell,” “the dreaded lurgy has hit our household,” “weird symptoms,” “sneezing, so going straight home” and “far, far below the weather.”

    A few said they were “heartbroken.” Another began with “alas and alack.” These piteous messages always make you feel compelled to reply with lashings of sympathy rather than mild annoyance. On receipt of each, I wrote something along the lines of: “Oh, poor you. I totally understand. You’ll be much missed. Hope you feel better soon.” It was time-consuming and emotionally wearing. Some changed their story on the day. One had pleaded the theater in his original refusal – perfectly legitimate – but said he hoped to drop in for the first 15 minutes. He didn’t turn up – and the next day explained that he’d met up with a very old friend. Was that instead of or as well as the theater?

    My feelings of disappointment turned to amusement as I waited for the next brazen excuse. Within an hour of the party starting, one messaged to say she couldn’t come after all, “for dog-related reasons.” Her pet was about to be dropped home by the dog–walker, who was running late due to “van issues,” and she needed to be at home for the drop-off.

    What is going on here? Are we becoming less able to face the reality of our intentions? It seems so. I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt to the majority of the hacking coughers and sneezers and the ones with temperatures – with the proviso that if the party had been a Champagne reception, I don’t think they would have felt quite so ill at the last minute. But some of the cancelers, I feel, never had a fixed intention of coming in the first place. They’d said “yes” to seem upbeat, wanting to keep their options open, and then needed to find a way of wriggling out at the last minute, maybe because they couldn’t face the journey (or “schlep,” as they might put it). They’d said “yes” to an event safely in the non-immediate future that they would never have agreed to attend if it was happening that very evening.

    That should be the test for one’s acceptances: “If I had to do it today, would I want to do it?” Perhaps invitations should allow three possible answers: accept, refuse or “I’ll come if I feel like it on the day.” One accepter emailed on the day to say he was “stuck in Oxford.” Couldn’t he have foreseen that a few days in advance? It made me salute the intrepid few who managed to unstick themselves from Oxford and make it to the venue.

    Lastminute.non is so easy to do by text or email. It avoids cross-examination. But if everyone sent messages like this, there would be a literal non-event. A party relies on the people who accepted turning up. As the day wore on and the trickle threatened to turn into a flood, I worried that the whole edifice would crumble to nothing but a few potato chips in a bowl. Thankfully, a great many guests did turn up. But I’ve been reminded how shaky an acceptance can be in today’s technologically convenient and commitment-phobic world.

    Would it be better for shirkers not to announce their Lastminute.non intentions, and simply not turn up? Two no-shows thoughtfully emailed me the next morning to say they were very sorry they hadn’t been able to come, but hadn’t wanted to message me on the day, as they knew how dispiriting it was to receive such messages just before a party. I appreciated that. Their non-appearance did cause me mild anxiety, but at least I hadn’t had to write them a sympathetic email during the build-up.

    The best revenge for this alarming phenomenon would be to send all those who ducked out at the last minute an invitation to an expensive treat, such as a tasting menu dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant. You would not, in fact, book a table for this. On the day, you would send each of them a message saying you were feeling “far, far below the weather” and sadly had to call the whole thing off.

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

  • Humans are more than just apes

    Humans are more than just apes

    Revolutions in science happen like Mike’s bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: slowly, then suddenly. For the past two decades, neuroscientists have been interested in the ways that the human brain differs from those of other primates. The prevailing assertion among primatologists was that our genome is only 1 to 2 percent distinct from chimps’. Then in April, a team of more than a hundred of the world’s top geneticists published an article in Nature revealing that it’s actually ten times as different.

    This has enormous implications. After all, if humans aren’t just souped-up chimps – as primatologists have often suggested – then many widely accepted ideas about our nature must be reconsidered. One that seems to be particularly open to rethinking revolves around our predilection for war.

    When primate researchers began their field studies of chimps and gorillas in the 1970s, they supposed that apes were less violent than humans. The fact that apes killed one another was taken as proof that although they were essentially genial and benign, they had some of our savagery within them and their occasional nastiness was seen as evidence of an underlying commonality. Yet the more primatologists observed apes – chimps especially – the more apparent it became that this was not so. Chimps slay one another at rates that exceed those of many human populations by hundreds or even thousands of times.

    Thus, by the early years of this century, anthropologists began to assert that humans were more “prosocial” than apes – in other words, that we are more inclined toward empathy and cooperation. It was a belated admission that what they had been claiming during the 1970s was entirely backwards – and that was ratified by the research of neuroscientists studying the parts of the brain associated with our feelings of compassion and connection to others.

    Neuroscience shows how our brains focus us upon satisfying communal codes of behavior. Social rejection causes stimulation of the same parts of our brain as those activated by bodily discomfort. In humans there is actually a neural link between feelings of isolation and physical pain.

    Nonetheless, presuming that humans should be understood simply as more advanced apes, anthropologists interpreted the phenomenon of war as a demonstration of how innately violent we are. Perhaps, though, there is another explanation. Maybe it is not a bloodlust that pushes us to violence, but rather our docility.

    Desperate as we are for acceptance, we yearn to be part of the in group. Combined with our tameness, this desire for acceptance causes young men who lack a sense of identity to be led into war. It is not so much animalistic impulses toward violence as it is obedience that makes us so dangerous.

    We can see other examples across the animal kingdom. The ant is the most war-like of all creatures – and also one of the most obedient. This would also explain why the animals we use in battle – dogs, pigeons, elephants, horses and camels – are docile. War is the action of a tame, cooperative being. This even explains the real purpose of military training. Shaving off a recruit’s hair, providing him with a uniform, drilling him in marches, teaching him to salute: the instruction is imposed to make him compliant and to offer him an identity. Similarly, a soldier’s attachment to his unit is based not in aggressive impulses but in feelings of devotion.

    He does not go over the top of the trenches because he hates the enemy across no man’s land – he does it because the leader he’s loyal to tells him to. Those emotions are cultivated further as he is taught to venerate fallen comrades and to resign himself to the possibility of his own untimely demise. That passion for a noble death isn’t encountered in apes. Not surprisingly then, there’s no documented case of a primate committing suicide. Yet more humans kill themselves each year than are murdered. What animals appear to end their lives deliberately? Other tractable creatures such as ants – animals that either fight wars or assist in ours.

    All this offers hints that our wars primarily arise from our willingness to obey the orders of psychopathic overlords, not from a chimp-like savagery. That would also explain why democracies in which women possess the right to vote have been far less likely to go to war with each other. That might be because of a part of the brain that functions differently in humans and chimps, the anterior cingulate gyrus. Studies have revealed that there is a correlation between its size and the capacity for empathy, and it’s been found that this area tends to be larger in women than it is in men.

    More remarkably, whether it’s working properly has been shown to be an indicator of whether a prison inmate is capable of avoid repeating mistakes. Criminals with poor function in the rear of the cingulate gyrus are more prone to recidivism.

    Without autocrats guiding us we don’t easily incline toward collective violence. This point was well understood by Stanley Milgram, the famous (or infamous) figure whose experiments demonstrated that ordinary people could be persuaded to place high-voltage shocks on one another when they were instructed to do so by an authority figure. Milgram noted that if the figure was absent then test subjects wouldn’t engage in acts of torture.

    So how were the rest of us persuaded that a creature who frets about whether he is choosing the right shade of drapes and worries about what his neighbors think of his lawn ornaments is as instinctively brutal and rapacious as a chimp? Maybe this is a further proof of how docile and obedient we are. We simply believed what we were told.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition. It is adapted from the author’s new book, The Primate Myth.

  • Robin Westman and the unstoppable tide of ‘slop violence’

    Robin Westman and the unstoppable tide of ‘slop violence’

    On Wednesday, doing my laundry, I decided to turn on the TV for the first time in decades. Breaking news: a school shooting in Minnesota. It’s been years since a story like this made me cry. How could you cry at every mention of gun violence when you live in a place like the Midwest? I have been aware of gun violence in schools since I was a child myself.

    I remember first hearing about a school shooting when I was six years old. A little boy had shot his sister. I cried and cried and cried – I cried for the child that died, and I cried for the child who’d killed her. It remains one of my most traumatizing memories. The last shooting that made me cry was Sandy Hook. I was at dinner when a friend showed me Adam Lanza’s photo on his phone. Twenty first-graders dead. 

    I can still feel the way my stomach dropped to this day. I couldn’t imagine something so depraved, so impossibly evil. I have written many times before that I was certain Sandy Hook would be an inflection point. The whole country was. And yet, it wasn’t. The violence escalated, became more frequent, more perverse.

    Inevitably, I grew numb to it.

    But on Wednesday – on the first crisp fall day in Chicago – something in me broke. I cried until I threw up, the washing machine shaking.

    Robin Westman, a 23-year-old, opened fire through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Children as young as six and parishioners in their eighties were injured. It was a Mass celebrating the first day of the school year. An eight-year-old and a ten-year-old died where they sat in the pews. I would later learn that in long, rambling journals – written in English but transliterated into Cyrillic alphabet – Westman had quoted Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer. 

    “I’m scared and I don’t want to be here,” a child is heard saying on one of the Sandy Hook recordings.

    “Well, you’re here,” Lanza answers, before the sound of gunfire.

    On one of Westman’s guns, the same quotes appears: Well, you’re here. 

    This will be the last piece about school shootings I write. I don’t want to be part of this news cycle anymore. There is nothing left to learn. In 2022, I wrote that our violence problem is a nihilism problem – not only do I still believe this, I believe it’s accelerated, it’s warping under its own weight.

    Shooters such as Eric Harris and Adam Lanza straightforwardly opposed civilization, life, the very concept of values itself. Yet murderers like Robert Crimo III, Natalie Rupnow, Solomon Henderson and now Robin Westman commit acts of what I can only call “slop violence.” It remains directed against life – against meaning – but it’s unfocused, chaotic, incoherent. They leave behind a pastiche of contradictory symbols and ideologies. They are radicalized, but in no particular direction. Their identities fragment across cyberspace. They worship school shooters and harbor deep existential fears about being forgotten. Westman’s manifesto was littered with this existential worry. There are teachers whose names I can’t remember, he wrote, but everyone remembers Adam Lanza.

    Early rumor mill grist said that Westman may have been part of a domestic terrorism network called 764, a decentralized group known for targeting minors online, encouraging self-harm, and creating child sexual abuse material while promoting violence. One person claimed to have found a forum profile page linked to Westman suggesting involvement a loose collective of online trolls that floods comment sections with shock content, often using children’s media characters to spread disturbing material, like gore and CSAM (child sexual abuse material). Within 24 hours, this claim was debunked. But Westman represents the same cultural rot these groups embody: online spaces that operate on escalating transgression, recruiting through irony and memes, slowly desensitizing participants to violence and sexual abuse while encouraging them to document and share increasingly extreme content.

    The response to these shootings has become as ritualized as the shootings themselves. Everyone descends like vultures to mine the tragedy for meaning or clout. On Wednesday at 11:41 a.m. CT, an editor sent me Westman’s YouTube page. By 11:42, it had been taken down. The first to archive the manifesto, to decode the symbols, to place the shooter within their taxonomies of violence – these become proud markers of insider knowledge. Within hours​ of the crime, self-proclaimed “researchers” – there was a time where I was one myself – compete to preserve what the platforms rush to erase. It’s a grotesque dance. The researchers treat each shooting like a new episode to analyze, transforming murder into content while bodies are still being counted.

    “It’s a conspiracy,” some say – it’s the CIA. It’s Mossad. It’s Russian interference. People flood my messages every time something like this has happened, desperate for categories: “What subculture produced this?”

    Did Westman kill because of gender identity issues? Because of exposure to gore? Pornography? Was it SSRIs? Religion or its absence? I don’t know. We are a sick country and I am disgusted. We confront something so fundamentally wrong that language fails. This isn’t random violence; it’s a darkness that stalks joy, that takes deliberate aim at the bonds between student and teacher, parent and child, neighbor and friend. There is a powerful impulse in our culture toward the desecration of innocence.

    It manifests across a disturbing spectrum. On one end, you have the casual cruelty endemic to online spaces – the deliberate spoiling of wholesome media with slurs, violence and pornographic content, the reflexive cynicism greeting any genuine emotion. Move along the spectrum and you encounter the transformation of every space meant for happiness and entertainment into an ideological battlefield, the mockery of sacred traditions, the compulsive sexualization of childhood. 

    These aren’t isolated phenomena but symptoms of a deeper pathology: the inability to let anything remain unexploited. We view innocence not as something to protect but as a provocation to corrupt. At furthest end of this spectrum, where the logic of desecration reaches its ultimate expression, you have the murder of children at prayer.

    I think about those children in the church on Wednesday morning. The first week of school – a time that should be filled with excitement about new teachers, new friends, new possibilities. Instead, they huddled under pews while bullets shattered the windows above them. They learned that there is no ground that violence won’t violate. 

    One student would go on to tell reporters, “We practice [what to do during a school shooting] every month, but not in church, only in the school.” Never at church. 

    The students at Annunciation Church learned what I learned at six, what every American child eventually learns: that they inhabit a world where darkness flourishes, again and again. The monster under your bed, the shadow person in your closet. Not because we lack the means to stop it, but because we lack the will. 

    Robin Westman will be studied, categorized and ultimately forgotten by most – just another entry in the database of American mass shooters. Maybe he’ll persist as a “saint” to online perverts and become anime fan art decorated with hearts and glitter, his crime abstracted into aesthetic objects divorced from the reality of children bleeding out on a church floor on the first day of school.

    Amateur investigators will continue to trace connections, map influences, produce reports about radicalization pathways. Politicians will sound somber. Activists will say it’s the guns, it’s transgenderism, it’s small government, it’s big government. The media will move on within days. Robin Westman wanted to be remembered. He won’t be. He’ll be forgotten, absorbed into the statistical noise of American violence. The children he killed, though – their absence will echo forever in the lives of those who loved them. That’s the only memory that matters, the only truth worth preserving: not the names of killers, but the magnitude of what our culture has stolen from us, again and again, while we stand by and watch, and document, and dissect and post.

  • A Greyhound ride through an unsettled America

    There were years when, like many others, I dreamed of crossing America coast to coast, riding the Greyhound bus. It was the thing to do – a rite of passage. For those who never made it, all is not lost: Joanna Pocock has done it for us. Twice. 

    In 2006, fending off depression after her third miscarriage and the death of her sister, Pocock took the Greyhound from Detroit to Los Angeles, “running away from loss”. Seventeen years later she has gone back, looking for the motels, diners, cities, suburbs and truck stops encountered on that first trip, and she is stunned by what she finds – stations closed or pared back, with nowhere to wash, rest or buy food. “Everything is stacked against you unless you have a car, a full tank of gas, an iPhone and a credit card linked to an array of apps.” She fears for the have-nots.

    Greyhound is a road trip like no other, a personal memoir interwoven with history, anthropology and landscape. Looping between past and present, Pocock observes the microcosmic universe of the bus. There is a young woman softly reading the Bible aloud to her daughter; a woman crocheting a bedspread; a man arrested for carrying drugs. Other companions include stressed-out workers, crazies, charmers, bigots, conspiracy theorists and the homeless. Once, cigarettes and food were shared; now, smoking is banned and phones have replaced conversation. She senses increasing desperation.

    Pocock gives us others who have rolled across the land: Simone de Beauvoir, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck – the pages are studded with illustrious names. Beauvoir rode the Greyhound in 1947 and her account of it in America Day by Day reads like a Who’s Who of postwar intellectual celebrities, among them Le Corbusier, Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Weil. A bartender asked how Sartre was getting on. Fast food and juke boxes were an amusing discovery – fame shed a rose-tinted light. At least Beauvoir took the bus; the male writers had their own wheels. 

    In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare Henry Miller made his feelings clear: “We recklessly plunder the Earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress.” Pocock homes in on that plundering. Irish-Canadian, she grew up in a tranquil American suburb. “No one told us that the fuel needed to prop up our lifestyles was destroying the Earth.” She doesn’t hate America; she loves the place. She is just appalled by what has been done to it in the name of progress. An environmentalist campaigner, she repeatedly celebrates the endangered beauty of the landscape and delights in the radiance of light and colour.

    Pocock won a prize for her first book, Surrender, a loving study of Montana, where she and her husband spent two years – “the best place we had ever lived”. How different from what she discovers as she travels now: millions of gallons of waste oil dumped in rivers and canals; chemicals contaminating the land, causing disease and birth defects. Decrepitude co-existing with gentrification.

    She name checks towns romanticized by old songs: St Louis, Tulsa, Amarillo, Albuquerque… then hits us with the contemporary reality. In Phoenix, “the hottest city in the US,” if skin touches the tarmac in summer it can result in third-degree burns; in winter it’s -5° C. It now has a bus kerbside pickup in a six-lane road with no access to water or shelter.

    The relentless desire for progress and growth encompasses intensive cattle farming – calves force-fed growth hormones, surrounded by shit that’s rainbow-colored from chemicals; antibiotic-resistant fecal dust blowing in the wind. During one stretch, as the bus passed a cattle pen the length of a freight train, a mother called to her children: “Hey, look kids, that’s where they make the meat!”, the verb hideously capturing the action. On both trips Las Vegas attracts Pocock’s most caustic condemnation: “A human folly… an environmental catastrophe; the ecological devastation necessary for it to exist.” Occasionally she’s buoyed up by hope, meeting volunteers working in urban farming, planting trees and growing food outside the system, sometimes illegally.

    In the years between the journeys Pocock herself changes. She has a teenage daughter; she calls her husband for a morale boost. And at fiftysomething she is sexually invisible. On her first trip she was propositioned, chatted up. In Albuquerque a conversation in a bar led to a long dinner. There was chemistry. Looking back, she admits: “In another life I most certainly would have said yes.” Instead, they met up for breakfast and he showed her Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch.

    Despite the apocalyptic passages, Greyhound is not a misrerabilist read. Pocock’s rage is infectious and energizing; her prose vivid. In unexpected places she finds kindness and generosity. There is both darkness and brilliance here: affection and laughter brighten the pages of this fierce, accusatory, tender and unforgettable book.