Dolly Parton may have had a record 25 US country No 1 singles, released 66 studio albums and earned six Golden Globe nominations, among many other achievements, but the Tennessee-born star also had an incredible number of fashion moments. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”, she famously quipped when asked about her style. As we bid her farewell, six Guardian writers reflect on their favourite Dolly looks.
Paul Greengrass drama The Uprising was supposed to be a historical epic about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – but a strange new campaign has inserted a surprising figure
Nobody likes to have the full plot of a movie spoiled before they’ve even seen it. However, sometimes this can be taken to the extreme. Take the new Paul Greengrass movie, The Uprising, for example. It is two weeks away from its US release and not only does nobody know the plot, but nobody seems to know what it is even about. Seriously, nobody at all. The film’s distributors just spent yesterday squabbling in public about whether Robin Hood was in it or not.
Here’s what we know so far. Initially, all the trailers and promotional materials made The Uprising look like a film about the Peasants’ Revolt that tore through England in 1381. And this was very exciting, since the revolt was a thrilling moment in history that has been bizarrely underserved by Hollywood over the years. Most exciting of all, though, it sounded like it fit exactly into Greengrass’s wheelhouse: full of action and realism and political awareness.
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Asobo Studio The medieval franchise is transplanted to Crete, conjuring action-adventure magic from familiar ingredients
The path in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a familiar one. Amid ancient ruins and sun-dappled gorges, a young woman, Sophia, dutifully treads the same footsteps as a Minoan warrior from millennia ago, one with whom she seems to share a visionary connection. The “resonance” between these two characters is made clear by their echoing actions – a crank pushed in the bronze age that still works in the medieval present, for example. Through these spliced timelines, it becomes clear that Sophia, compelled by her supernatural gift, possesses little agency. Destiny beckons her forwards.
This is a smart meta concept for a game that, at its most basic level, boils down to keeping your left thumb planted firmly on the analogue stick, always pushing Sophia onwards in linear fashion. You jostle her through ornate corridors rendered as higgledy-piggledy pirate camps and cobbled Venetian streets. For the greater part of the game, you propel her through the Minoan remains of Crete, which harbour a dark and terrible secret. It is classic third-person action-adventure fare, building on the template laid down by the likes of Tomb Raider and then refined and complicated by titles such as The Last of Us. Little, from an interactive perspective, surprises: you dash, vault and swing between teetering podiums, squeeze through tiny gaps in rock and crouch behind conveniently placed walls to avoid enemies.
Ahead of the release of her 13th solo album, the fantastically titled Chakzilla, we rank the best of a sublime catalogue of funk, slow jams and tears-on-the-dancefloor disco
Chaka Khan had harsh words for the “assholes” at her then record company, Warner Bros, who she felt under-promoted 1992’s The Woman I Am, her first album in four years. Listening to Love You All My Lifetime’s cocktail of funk and contemporary R&B, you wonder if she didn’t have a point. There’s no obvious reason why it wasn’t huge hit.
The flat routines of a dead end railway job screen out an approaching menace in a quietly intriguing game from the indie developer of Cat Lady and Lorelai
Lonely jobs have provided excellent material for independent video games over the years. From Papers, Please to Firewatch to The Stanley Parable, players have been happy to spend hours dwelling in depressing cubicles or rural hideaways, usually because there is an intriguingly hidden point to it all.
In Trainwatch, a character named Troy has taken a seemingly godforsaken job as a railway worker in an unnamed desolate backwater. His main task over the course of a single month is to manage a level crossing, closing the gate whenever a train comes, while also carrying out daily chores such as cooking and washing. It sounds serene, but Troy is also running away from something. The other stipulations are that he stays sober and calls his wife every night. And there is something lurking in the fog at the edges of the fields – one day he must face it.
The author of The Adversary and Yoga unearths a history that includes the Nazis, Russia, and the Académie Française
When Emmanuel Carrère’s mother, Hélène, died in 2023, at the age of 94, President Macron spoke at her memorial. She had been “perpetual secretary” of the Académie Française, in effect its head, and 200 people gathered at Les Invalides in Paris to pay tribute. Emmanuel’s father, Louis, was there too, in a wheelchair, only half aware of what was going on. This 400-page memoir, translated into English by John Lambert, is a homage to both parents and the unlikely history that brought them together. It’s also an act of reparation towards Hélène, whom Emmanuel worshipped as a child but upset as an adult by publishing a book that she’d forbidden him to write.
Hélène grew up in stateless poverty in Paris, the daughter of Georges Zourabichvili, whose parents had fled Georgia in 1921, and Nathalie von Pelken, who as a child had six governesses, one for each day excluding Sunday. Though “the magical world of the fallen Russian aristocracy” was the backdrop, conditions were tough, not least after Georges disappeared in 1944, murdered by partisans for alleged Nazi collaboration. Hélène was 15 at the time and unsuccessfully tried to hide the truth about George’s death from her younger brother, Nicolas.
Dolly Parton proved that helping others is not only easy to do, but can be a lot of fun. | Katherine Bomboy/NBC
Dolly Parton was on her way to the studio to polish off “Blue Smoke” when the SUV she was riding in collided with a sedan in a Nashville intersection in 2013. At the hospital, she struck an unlikely friendship with her physician, Naji Abumrad, who, like Parton, was raised in a misty mountain village, hers in East Tennessee and his in Lebanon.
“It’s just like how you meet people in your life. You just click, you just feel like you know them,” Parton once told his son, Jad Abumrad, a public radio host who interviewed Parton for a nine-part series on her life. “There are just some things that, you know, you just can’t explain it. You just be it, you just live it, you just know it, and you just feel it.”
The whole world, it seems, felt it — that inexplicably swift, sweet connection — with Dolly Parton herself, a light-filled, lifelong philanthropist in the truest, most etymological sense of the word: a lover of humankind.
Some seven years after their friendship began, Abumrad told Parton that his fellow researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center were looking into a possible vaccine for Covid-19, which had just begun to rage across the country. Without missing a beat, Parton wrote a check for $1 million, an early contribution toward what would eventually become the Moderna vaccine against Covid-19.
Her donation “made the research towards the vaccine go 10 times faster than it would be without it,” Abumrad later told the Washington Post, calling his friend “the kindest and most philanthropic human being” he’d ever known.
Parton, who died at the age of 80 yesterday, was raised with her 11 siblings amid poverty in the Smoky Mountains of Eastern Tennessee. She often credited her upbringing as a muse for both her music and her generosity. Just as integral to her persona as her kitschy high-femme glamour, her poofy hair and rhinestones, was Parton’s capacity for helping others.
With an infectious sense of joy and optimism, she proved that helping others is not only easy to do, but can be a lot of fun.
Parton’s most famous foray into philanthropy by far was her Imagination Library, which she founded in 1995 in honor of her father, who never learned to read or write. Since then, the initiative has doled out a jaw-dropping over 300 million free children’s books to young kids around the country and the world.
“I just give from my heart,” she remarked while accepting the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, a kind of Nobel Prize for giving, in 2022. “I never know what I’m going to do or why I’m gonna do it. I just see a need, and if I can fill it, then I will.”
After wildfires tore through her native Tennessee in 2016, she raised millions of dollars that she used to give thousands of dollars in direct cash payments to hundreds of families who’d lost their homes. In recent years, she’s given millions of dollars to families affected by Hurricane Helene, to pediatric infectious-disease research, and to children’s charities across Tennessee. Back in 1990, Parton helped open a sanctuary for injured eagles in partnership with conservationists at Dollywood, the Eagle Mountain Sanctuary, which was forced to close after a brutal storm earlier this year. (You can donate to the American Eagle Foundation, which is rehoming Dollywood’s eagles here.)
Parton, who had a net worth of about $450 million according to Forbes, may have given away many other donations privately. In 2006, when asked about the full scope of her donations, she told my former colleagues at The Chronicle of Philanthropy with her characteristic sass that “it’s none of your business. I have often said that I count my blessings a whole lot more than I count my money,” she said, “the same is true for the contributions I make.”
The world may have gotten a peek into her private giving a few years ago, when some savvy social media users helped break the news that Parton had been casually paying for band uniforms at high schools across Tennessee, and had been quietly doing so for decades. She also received $100 million as a recipient of Jeff Bezos’s Courage and Civility Award to give away as she saw fit. It’s unclear where she chose to spend that money, but it could certainly buy a lot of school band uniforms, children’s books, or pediatric hospital wings.
There was always something otherworldly about Parton’s kindness. It was as if the nicest person you’ve ever met found herself in possession of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash. But as serious as her contributions were — to the music industry, and to millions of children around the country — she never took herself too seriously, and maybe that’s what made it feel so enthralling to watch.
“I’m kind of addicted to the feeling of giving,” she told People in 2021, “knowing that I’m doing something good for someone else.”
And that’s a lesson that all of us, legendary multimillionaire country superstar or not, can use to help carry her legacy forward.
Musicians and performers pay tribute to the country legend who managed to be a generational talent, a formidable entrepreneur, a dedicated philanthropist and a truly kind person
What we eat and where it comes from is a critical part of human health. According to a 2025 survey, 59 percent of Americans think it’s important to know where their food comes from, and 54 percent prioritize food that is consistently available locally. And one of the best places to get that locally sourced food? Farmers markets.
The US has more than 8,700 farmers markets, where roughly 40,000 farmers sell their products. Recently, the markets have been getting a bit more attention thanks to a series of high-profile food recalls. Americans’ confidence in the safety of their food is being tested, and buying direct from your local farm could be the answer.
Some produce travels hundreds or thousands of miles from where it’s grown to where it’s sold, passing through processing, storage, and distribution facilities. One advantage of a small local farm is the direct journey the produce takes from the field to the customer. But how does a small family farm business compete with major grocery stores for customers, and what’s behind their sales pitch for safer and fresher food? We drove out to Camarillo, California, to a small family farm to find out.
This video is presented by Verizon Business. Verizon Business doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they help make videos like this one possible.
The site, called Stud or Dud, helps daters dig up dirt on potential paramours. It’s fueled by the same public data as PeopleFinders.com—and comes with many of the same concerns.
Richie Bell stood at the door of an East Village bar, nervous for a singular reason: he had to hand over his phone to a bouncer to get in. At 23 years old, Bell had hardly ever been without a device — he got his first iPhone in elementary school — but when he saw a video on TikTok advertising a queer, phone-free, funk dance party called Who’s Dancing?, he decided to test his limits. He immediately purchased a ticket and planned to attend alone.
Bell was pleasantly surprised to discover he wouldn’t have to relinquish his phone at all, but simply allow security to place tape on both the back and front-facing cameras. “You can’t scroll Reels because, think about it, on iPhones anyway, if they’re taping the front camera, that’s also the speaker area,” Bell told Vox. Without the temptation of content on his phone, Bell mingled with other attendees, who were similarly unoccupied and also flying solo. Even though event staff kept their eyes peeled for any errant phone usage, no one seemed to reach for them anyway.
Compared to other bars and parties he’s been to, Bell found this one more conducive to unbridled socializing and dancing. It’s easier to approach a stranger when they’re not hunched over their phone. No one is worried about looking like a fool, immortalized in video, because everyone is a little foolish, moving their bodies without fear of judgment.
Across the country, clubs, bars, music venues, and other social spaces are encouraging attendees to lock their phones away — or, at least keep them out of sight — for screen-free gatherings. According to event hosting platform Eventbrite, phone-free experiences have increased more than 500 percent globally between 2024 and 2025. Musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Harry Styles banned phones at their concerts; comedians John Mulaney and Bill Burr have followed suit. Clubs from Los Angeles to Miami are creating camera-free dance floors. Bars and restaurants in cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia that have long prohibited phone and camera use have been joined by newer establishments in Charlotte, North Carolina and Fort Worth, Texas.
The rise of phone-free socializing speaks to a growing exhaustion with an always-connected world. More than half of US adults say they use their smartphone too much, according to a 2022 Gallup survey. Excessive smartphone use has been linked to poor sleep quality and depression, and even the mere presence of a phone lessens cognitive capacity. The ubiquity of devices — and the cameras on them — has instilled a low-grade panic that you might end up going viral for eating a sandwich in the background of an influencer’s video. Even Gen Z, who has always lived under the spectre of technology, is nostalgic for times before everyone was “plugged in” and widely accessible.
Screen-free events are the natural evolution of the cultural desire to break up with tech. By transforming physical spaces, ridding them of distracting devices, event organizers and bar owners aim to foster connection, reclaim attention, and maintain a sense of privacy. Even a short detox from smartphones has the ability to dramatically shape the tenor of a get-together for the better.
“Exploited for content”
Before X&ND (pronounced “zand”), the funk and soul artist who organized the phone-free party Bell attended, first conceived of Who’s Dancing?, they noticed very few people actually cutting loose at clubs. Instead, they were on their phones. “The second that anybody starts dancing in a club where there’s meant to be dancing, people pull out their phone,” X&ND told Vox. “They’re getting surveilled, they’re getting essentially exploited for content and being put in a position where they’re on display for people that they didn’t necessarily want to be on display for.” X&ND wanted to create a space for women, queer, and trans people to dance and express themselves without the fear of ending up on the internet.
Since last summer, X&ND has hosted eight sold-out dance parties (and Bell estimates he’s attended seven). Phone-free events, X&ND said, are a reclamation of culture, of attention, of self-expression. “Influencers aren’t able to post anything. Different companies aren’t posting anything about our parties because we don’t give them the material to,” they said. “I think it’s the culture taking the culture back.”
The bar and nightclub scene has struggled in recent years, with many venues closing due to high rent and fewer patrons spending money on alcohol. But perhaps a less obvious culprit is the pervasive anxiety of being captured on video during a moment of vulnerability. Some might be turned off from entering these spaces altogether due to the high risk of embarrassment if they’re captured and mocked online.
In Washington, DC, 28-year-old Jo Vee had similar concerns about privacy and craved an environment where they could be anonymous. Like Bell, Vee has had access to a camera phone since they were a child and can’t remember a time when they weren’t thinking about what to post on Instagram. But when a friend organized a phone-free dance party, Vee jumped at the opportunity to enjoy themselves, free from the pressures of the algorithm — and the potential of accidentally becoming a meme. “There’s nothing more terrifying than thinking that you’re going to a party just to have fun, and then you wake up the next morning and there’s a video of you that has 10 million views that you had no idea about, and now you’re like a GIF reaction on the internet.” (Vee clarified that they do not speak from personal experience, but said that a version of this has happened to a couple of friends.)
Distraction-free connection
Although many people inherently recognize the downsides of excessive phone use, they also realize they’re fighting an uphill battle. Demanding jobs can tether workers to their emails and algorithms are designed to keep us engaged and scrolling. Our attention is constantly being pulled from the real world to the digital one. But even a brief respite from screens can be beneficial.
In his research, Georgetown associate professor Kostadin Kushlev found that phone usage during a social interaction undermines how much people enjoy spending time with others. “It’s not so much [that] the phone is making us feel unhappy,” Kushlev told Vox, “it’s more like I could be happier if I was not using a phone.” Put another way, people enjoy social gatherings more when they keep their phone out of sight because they can give their full attention to their conversation partner.
Kushlev’s other research has shown that as people curbed their phone usage over a two-week period, their ability to pay attention improved. Even a shorter detox period, like a two-hour phone-free gathering, could minimize overstimulation and encourage greater focus, Kushlev said.
Inside the Charlotte, North Carolina, bar Antagonist, couples on dates engage in heart-to-hearts and neighboring tables of strangers strike up conversations. That’s because the bar has banned phones. Upon entering, visitors are asked to secure their phone in a pouch which they keep with them for the duration of their stay. If they need to use their phone, they can do so outside.
Since Antagonist opened in March, owner Michael Salzarulo has observed patrons clamoring for a Friday night detox after a long week of screen-mediated work. “Normally Saturday is your biggest day,” Salzarulo said, “but Friday nights are our busiest nights of the week.” While anyone can lock their phone in another room for a few hours, Antagonist provides an element of accountability, Salzarulo said: a dedicated space for distraction-free connection.
Alex Becker was yearning for a break from her phone and her “email, Microsoft Excel job” when she co-founded PA Unplugged, a nonprofit championing policies that advocate for more mindful uses of technology, last year. One of the nonprofit’s initiatives, Screen Free Philly, maintains a calendar of screen-free events and organizes its own gatherings at breweries, parks, and other civic institutions, urging attendees to set aside their phones for discussions, art projects, and board games. At the most recent get-together, dozens of attendees handed their phones to Becker while they completed a series of puzzles throughout the city.
Although these gatherings are still fairly niche, Becker sensed a hunger among participants to seek out further opportunities for tech-free connection. While ditching a smartphone completely may be unrealistic, setting it aside for date night or an afternoon of gaming might be a salve for our tech-addled brains. We can implement these best practices at our own gatherings, too, by encouraging friends to leave their phones in a basket by the door or offering disposable cameras at parties.
“People are just done and ready to take their attention back, take their time back, and encourage more real-world connection,” Becker said.
Pet owners, rescue agencies, and wildlife groups are calling for new safeguards as AI makes it harder to tell whether animals, from polar bears to house cats, are real or fake.
A terminally ill woman makes a final trip to Egypt in an exquisitely wrought portrait of end-of-life reckoning
Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch that it is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. In the shallow and infantilising age through which we are living, Colin Thubron dares to assume that his readers are adults. Passage is a very beautiful, very moving, authentic work of art. Hardly more than a novella, it sits lightly in the hand, but its emotional and aesthetic weight overtips the balance.
Thubron began his career as a travel writer and a large part of the action of Passage is set in a vividly but economically evoked Egypt. This is not the teeming Egypt of Cairo or Alexandria, but of the countryside, the villages, and the great immemorial tombs and ancient monuments. The best travel writers know that “abroad” is most convincingly evoked not by awed exclamations at the world’s wonders, but by an attitude of relaxed familiarity. Thubron is obviously an old Egypt hand, or at least has the skill to convince us that he is.
Michael Coats Jr. of the Cleveland Browns tackles Ray Davis of the Buffalo Bills during a preseason game on August 22, 2026. | Nick Cammett/Getty Images
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Football season kicks off soon, and there’s an elephant on the field. Not the University of Alabama’s pachydermal mascot, alas — but a new study on the incidence of brain injury in football players.
The startling paper, published this morning in the journal BMJ, examined the brains of 235 of the 878 former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. It found that at least one in four of those players — and, in all likelihood, many more than that — had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) at their time of death.
CTE is an ugly disease. It’s a progressive, degenerative brain disorder caused by repeated blows to the head. It can be debilitating in its advanced stages, with symptoms including memory loss, confusion, depression, erratic behavior, and personality changes.
Researchers have long linked CTE to the recurrent head trauma common in football and other contact sports. But this study offers one of the clearest estimates yet of just how widespreadthe disease is. It’s not a freak occurrence confined to an unlucky few — it’s a significant occupational hazard, akin to black lung disease in coal miners.
Federal regulators have intervened to protect coal miners and other people in hazardous jobs, of course — but they’ve stayed on the sidelines when it comes to sports. Football is an American institution, after all. And regulators have few obvious ways to make the game safer.
Last year, the Trump administration also advanced a claim that, in my mind, gets straight to the heart of the moral dilemma of being a football fan. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed formally excluding from standards enforcement hazards that are “inherent and inseparable from the core nature of a professional activity.” (That proposal has not been finalized yet.)
Is danger inherent to the “core nature” of football? And, if it is, how do fans reconcile their love of the sport with the substantial harm that it inflicts?
“Part of what makes football interesting is that it refuses to resolve itself morally,” the cultural critic Chuck Klosterman told Vox earlier this year. “It doesn’t let you land comfortably on one side or the other.”
Klosterman, who recently published a book about football, is one of these people who believes that danger is inherent to the sport: Remove it, he said, and the stakes diminish — the whole game gets less meaningful.
At the same time, football arguably does a lot of good, too: It creates shared rituals and civic pride; it gives millions of people a sense of belonging in an otherwise atomized world.
So where does that leave fans? Somewhere uncomfortable, I suppose. But we can draw a couple practical conclusions: Kids should not play tackle football. And both the NFL and college football programs should keep working to improve helmets and cut down on contact, especially in practices.
One link for later
➨ Treat yourself to a PSL. Yep: It’s (somehow, already) that time again. Since Starbucks debuted the divisive seasonal beverage in 2003, it’s become “a straw man for discussions about capitalism, seasonal creep, and the meaning of ‘basic.’”
Before you go…
Did you know…that humans’ closest invertebrate relative is the lowly sea squirt? As one biologist put it to Vox: “They just decided to take a different route on evolution.”
Today’s trivia: What is the state bird of Minnesota, recently embraced by anti-ICE protesters as a popular symbol of their movement? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the traditional, three-letter nickname for students and graduates of Yale. That would be “Eli,” as in “Elihu Yale” — the wealthy 18th-century merchant whose donations helped found the school.
When the NFL season kicks off next month, millions of Americans will gather around their televisions to watch athletes of comic book proportions crash into each other at breathtaking speeds. Inevitably, those players’ heads will smash into each other, leaving them dazed on the field. And according to a major new study, these repeated head-on collisions may eventually lead to a degenerative brain disease for many — if not most — of the players long after they’ve left the field.
For years now, America has been reckoning with the tension between its love for football and the growing evidence of its dangers. Those concerns can be boiled down to three letters: CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is the progressive brain disease that can lead to dementia, depression, suicide, and other serious mental health problems.
One major question over the past 20 years has been: Exactly how often does playing football lead to CTE? What are the risks for peewee players versus pros? How quickly does the brain deteriorate once the disease takes hold? And new research, published this week in BMJ, has provided us with some staggering answers. After analyzing the death records for hundreds of former NFL players, the co-authors concluded that at least 25 percent of the former players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE at the time of their death.
And the actual prevalence could be much higher, but more players’ brains would have to be given over to scientists for a CTE assessment for us to know for sure. Because among the 338 players whose brains were donated and studied, the CTE rate was an astonishing 93 percent. The question is, according to the researchers: Is that percentage skewed because the players exhibiting CTE symptoms were more likely to offer up their brain for research? Or, as the authors suggest is possible, is the real CTE rate closer to 90 percent? Only further research will be able to tell us, but even the latest estimate — one in four — is cause for concern.
It’s a stark reminder of football’s risks, delivered right on the cusp of a new season for pro, college, and high school teams around the country. And according to the Aspen Institute’s annual State of Play report, there are signs that the game’s future may actually be at risk.
More and more American parents are steering their kids away from tackle football. How long can an elite league like the NFL last when the pool of players is getting smaller and smaller — at the same time the scientific evidence of its dangers is becoming clearer and clearer?
The youth football pipeline is drying up
Despite the latest research, the NFL is going to be fine in the short term. Professional football is the biggest TV show in the country: Last year, 83 of the top 100 rated TV shows were NFL games, up from 72 in 2024. The next Super Bowl will almost certainly attract more than 100 million viewers and end up the single most-watched TV program in the US for the whole year. Football is one thing that transcends politics in an increasingly polarized America.
But with each new piece of evidence about the physical and mental costs of playing football, football’s long-term dominance looks less and less certain. Already, if you dig into the trend lines for youth participation, they reveal a real threat to the sport’s future.
Let’s start with the good news for football enthusiasts: Flag football has become more and more popular among kids, supported by investments and promotion by the NFL itself and expert consensus that it’s much safer than tackle, especially when it comes to head injuries. According to the Aspen Institute’s State of Play survey, flag football participation among kids ages 6 to 12 grew by 13.6 percent from 2019 to 2024, while tackle football play dropped 7 percent among the same age group over that time.
But it’s participation among the next age group that may be most revealing. According to the Aspen Institute, tackle football participation rates among Americans ages 13 to 17 — the prime age for middle school and high school teams — decreased 9 percent from 2019 to 2024. It has even fallen behind tennis among the teenage cohort. Many of the tweens who play flag football may never strap on a helmet to play tackle.
Even if fewer kids play tackle football year over year, the sport may still subsist on its promises of upward mobility for people who come from poorer backgrounds. With the recent introduction of compensation for college players, elite athletes can make millions of dollars in income before they even reach the NFL. It may be no surprise, then, that the young people still playing tackle football are more likely to be lower-income and live in conservative states.
Another study found that Black and Hispanic parents, who on average earn less money than their white counterparts, are more likely to see football as a path to college scholarship or even a professional career; the Washington Post reported in 2023 that the proportion of white players at the college level is falling while the percentage of Black players is rising. Football players are often thought of as modern gladiators: participants disproportionately from lower classes aspiring to riches and glory in a violent game for the viewing pleasure of the general public. That’s becoming more and more true as we learn more about its dangers.
As the annual hoopla around the NFL kickoff makes clear, football’s cultural dominance remains unrivaled among professional sports. But this new study has left even me, a lifelong football fan, wondering how much longer it can, and should, last.
An anthropomorphized Pumpkin Spice Latte with a spooky black cat. | @TheRealPSL/Twitter
Editor’s note, August 25, 10:15 am ET: This article was originally published in 2018 and has been updated for the start of the new PSL season.
August 25is not a day that is particularly known for feeling especially crisp or autumnal in most parts of North America. And yet it’s the day this year — the earliest release date ever — that Starbucks, contending with a slowdown in sales, will unleash its annual run of pumpkin spice lattes upon its customers.
You’d be forgiven for mistaking this tone for one of disdain. Since its inception in 2003, the pumpkin spice latte has become something of a straw man for discussions about capitalism, seasonal creep, and the meaning of “basic,” resulting in widespread hatred for an otherwise innocuous beverage.
For example, back in 2014, at the height of pumpkin spice mania, this very website described the PSL as “an unctuous, pungent, saccharine brown liquid, equal parts dairy and diabetes, served in paper cups and guzzled down by the liter” — even though clearly the pumpkin spice latte is a highly delicious treat that pairs well with wearing vests and making dorky comments about how crisp the air feels today. Yes, it contains 380 calories; yes, it will make your coffee a rather unappetizing orange color; no, you should not “guzzle it down by the liter.”
But contempt for the PSL and other items of the seasonal pumpkin spice variety is often not really about the flavor itself. After all, there are plenty of other flavors we should all be way more furious about. (There is a shop in Scotland that serves mayonnaise ice cream, people!) Too frequently, it’s about sexism, class anxiety, and our collective skepticism of savvy marketing. After all, the PSL is doing something right: It’s Starbucks’ most popular seasonal beverage, with about 424 million sold worldwide. In 2019, the chain leaned in further with the introduction of the Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew, finally admitting to the world that late August is still iced coffee weather.
The history of the PSL
The pumpkin spice latte almost didn’t exist. As former Starbucks veteran Tim Kern told Quartz, “A number of us thought it was a beverage so dominated by a flavor other than coffee that it didn’t put Starbucks’ coffee in the best light.”
Fortunately for Starbucks, the Tim Kerns of the company were ultimately overruled, because within a decade of its launch in 2003, the PSL became its top-selling drink, with more than 200 million of them sold. In 2015, Forbes estimated the PSL brought in around $100 million in revenue over a single season.
2015 was also the year that Starbucks changed its decade-old formula to include actual pumpkin for the first time, rather than simply caramel coloring and pumpkin pie spices (like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves). By all accounts, it tasted pretty much the same, just, according to its inventor, “cleaner.”
At that point, the PSL wasn’t just a cash cow — it was a cultural phenomenon. In part, that’s thanks to its marketing: There is nothing inherently seasonal about the spices that go in pumpkin pie, but Starbucks is able to convince us that the drink should only be consumed during the fall months, thereby increasing demand.
But there’s another reason the PSL exploded so much over the past decade. Culinary food trend analyst Suzy Badaracco told Vox in 2014, “Pumpkin became recognized as part of the comfort food trend during the recession in 2008,” due to its association with Thanksgiving and the holidays. In tough times, we’re more likely to crave foods that bring back happy memories.
Surely, though, the reason we all began talking about PSLs to begin with was their prevalence on social media. It’s not that they’re inherently photogenic — a Starbucks cup is a Starbucks cup regardless of what’s inside it, and the PSL doesn’t get its own specially designed cup the way the holiday drinks do.
It’s because when you add a PSL to a photo of, say, your new fall boots standing atop crunchy-looking leaves or a selfie featuring a festive dark lip color, it adds to the autumnal aesthetic. It’s not a coincidence that Instagram — the epicenter of cutesy fall tableaus — happened to blow up in the early 2010s, which is the same time it became cool to claim you despised pumpkin spice.
But maybe that’s not the whole story.
The backlash is about our anxieties around capitalism
The fact that the pumpkin spice latte — which, to many, conjures the scents and imagery of Thanksgiving — is released in increasingly hot weather year after year is often touted as an ominous harbinger of the evil forces of seasonal creep. “It’s agricultural revisionism!” argue some, citing the fact that pumpkins aren’t actually in season until autumn proper.
A viral John Oliver clip from 2014 declares as much, noting that “that bottle of pumpkin-flavored science goo sits behind the counter of Starbucks, never aging, like Ryan Seacrest”:
Perhaps in response to such criticism, in 2019 Starbucks released its second pumpkin spice beverage since the PSL’s introduction, but this time, it’s cold. The Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew is a vanilla cold brew with pumpkin cold foam and topped with pumpkin spice, which CNBC describes as “less sweet and has a stronger coffee taste than a pumpkin spice latte.”
The success of the PSL is also largely responsible for the barrage of pumpkin spice-flavored everything else, including cream cheese, dog treats, Kahlua, and an especially wacky seasonal crossover, Peeps. There have also been air fresheners, deodorant, even Four Loko (okay, that one ended up being a joke), resulting in the expected amount of hand-wringing about a food trend “gone too far.” (Indeed, back in 2010, the spice brand McCormick forecast that pumpkin spice would be a popular flavor for the holiday season, which in turn likely exacerbated the rush.)
When a food trend is as in-your-face as pumpkin spice is — ever been to a Trader Joe’s in October? — it forces us to think about how the free market is essentially designed to create this kind of phenomenon. If a product like the pumpkin spice latte sells, it’s natural under capitalism for other companies to attempt to replicate that success. But it’s uncomfortable when we see it happening on such an exaggerated scale.
Actually, the backlash is about our contempt for women
Well, maybe, but maybe what pumpkin spice backlash is really about is our dismissal of trends that are coded as feminine. As Jaya Saxena wrote in Taste in 2017, in a piece titled “Women Aren’t Ruining Food,” “When men enjoy something, they elevate it. But when women enjoy something, they ruin it.”
She continues, on the topic of “girly” food crazes like açai bowls, rosé, and pumpkin spice versus “manly” ones like barbecue, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and IPAs:
When those foods blow up, we judge women for falling for the marketing or trying to jump on the bandwagon, and we assume that because they like something other women like, they don’t have minds of their own. And on top of that, women are asked to reckon with, consciously or unconsciously, the perceived psycho-sexual symbolism attached to seemingly innocuous foods.
Plus, “masculine” foods are almost never chastised for being “basic,” the ever-nebulous term used to describe someone with average, predictable taste that’s usually reserved for women.
In the most stereotypical (and by now probably outdated) terms, a “basic bitch” wears North Face, leggings, and Uggs, and absolutely adores hashtag-PSLs, marking her as a woman with “a girlish interest in seasonal changes and an unsophisticated penchant for sweet,” as The Cut noted back in 2014.
There are often classist implications, too. In a 2014 BuzzFeed piece about “basic” and class anxiety, Anne Helen Peterson wrote:
Unique taste — and the capacity to avoid the basic — is a privilege. A privilege of location (usually urban), of education (exposure to other cultures and locales), and of parentage (who would introduce and exalt other tastes). To summarize the groundbreaking work of theorist Pierre Bourdieu: We don’t choose our tastes so much as the micro-specifics of our class determine them. To consume and perform online in a basic way is thus to reflect a highly American, capitalist upbringing. Basic girls love the things they do because nearly every part of American commercial media has told them that they should.
Essentially, hating pumpkin spice lattes is our way of othering those who drink them, and in the process, marking ourselves as decidedly un-basic.
Of course, this notion of what “basic” means is not the same way black people have been using it for decades, which, as Kara Brown explained in 2014 in Jezebel, pretty much just translates to “I think that the stuff you like is lame and I don’t really like you.”
“Rihanna could become the official spokesperson for Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes and nobody would think of her as basic,” she wrote. “You know why? Because Rihanna does what she wants and what she thinks is cool and doesn’t give a damn about anybody else.”
Or maybe nobody cares anymore
Even if Rihanna suddenly became the official spokesperson of PSLs, however, there is also the possibility that, quite frankly, nobody really cares that much anymore. We seemed to have hit peak “pumpkin spice hot take” in the year 2014, with searches for “pumpkin spice latte” peaking in 2015.
Maybe that’s because we’ve all been stricken with a case of seasonal beverage fatigue in general. Starbucks is constantly coming out with random gimmicky drinks, from the Unicorn Frappuccino to the so-called secret menu.
We also aren’t seeing the same kind of anger directed at what is arguably replacing pumpkin spice as autumn’s de facto flavor. In 2017, both Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts released maple pecan lattes. And according to restaurant menu data from that year, “mentions of maple as a flavor in nonalcoholic beverages on menus are up 86 percent this year over last. … Pumpkin mentions, on the other hand, are down 20 percent.” Yet nobody’s complaining about how stupid maple syrup is.
And these days, tweets about PSLs are way more in the vein of “Screw you and let me enjoy my shitty drink in peace, because everything is terrible.”
Pumpkin Spice Latte comes back tomorrow and I am 100% getting one in 91 degree weather because this world is a shitshow and I take joy where I can get it, like in delicious flavored coffee drinks.
People have also expressed exhaustion about the “actually-ing” over what pumpkin spice even is, as if anyone really wants to talk about it.
"pumpkin spice refers to the spices used in pumpkin pie and doesn't actually taste like pumpkins" is the "Frankenstein was the name of the doctor" of this decade
There are even ironic tweets poking fun at the automation of feminist responses to the anti-pumpkin spice brigade:
Women's unabashed enjoyment of a thing has always led to wholesale dismissal of said thing as frivolous and/or bad. From early examples like needlework to more current cases like pumpkin spice and romance novels, we can track this trend throughout history. In this paper I will –
Anyway, this is all to say that maybe by now pumpkin spice has finally returned to signifying the autumnal blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves, and nothing more: not basic, not everything wrong with capitalism, and not gross. Because it’s not! It’s delicious.
Update, August 26, 2026, 10 am ET: This story was originally published in 2018 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with the 2026 PSL return date.
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