My mom was excited and confused when she opened her Apple Watch at Christmas a few years ago. “What a nice gift!” A pause. “What am I supposed to do with this?” We told her the truth: A smartwatch can do all kinds of useful things.
Fitness tracking became the thing my mom latched onto. She loved counting her steps and seeing how many miles she walked in a day. It motivated her to become more active, too. We didn’t tell her until much later that the Apple Watch’s fall detection feature was the real reason we got her the watch. The feature worked, too.
On the coldest day of the year, this past winter, my mom tripped on an uneven sidewalk and broke her wrist. The Apple Watch called 911 almost as soon as she hit the ground, and we took an ambulance to the hospital, where my sister, who was nearly a thousand miles away, texted and asked what was wrong. She’d been watching my mom’s location on Apple’s Find My app, a fact that we revealed to my mom for the first time when she was in the emergency room. We also had to confess that the Nest security cam we’d set up in her living room was indeed useful in spotting intruders but also let us check in on her from time to time.
My mom wasn’t thrilled about any of this. She realized that these handy gadgets doubled as surveillance devices, and we’d essentially be spying on her.
But at the same time, she recognized why we wanted to keep an eye on her. If she’d fallen alone at home alone, for instance, an easy way to call for help could’ve been a lifesaver.
Perhaps grappling with how to spy on your aging parents — ethically! — is something you’re grappling with, too. A growing number of people are weighing the privacy trade-off as boomers get older and their millennial children get moreinvolved. Roughly 59 million Americans now help take care of an adult over 50, up from 34 million a decade ago. A third of those are sandwich-generation caregivers, meaning they’re looking after their parents and their own children at the same time. It can be an overwhelming task. So enlisting a home security system, like Nest, or a wearable, like an Apple Watch, to keep an eye on their parents seems like a time-saving way to gain some peace of mind. It certainly helped my sister and I feel better about our mom aging in place.
It turns out, a growing community of researchers and tech developers has thought a lot about this problem that many of us are now facing. There are labs focused on how technology can make growing older more humane, as well as federally funded research efforts and startup accelerators from groups like AARP working on solutions. All of the experts I spoke to for this story told me the same thing: Good communication is essential.
And there’s a whole cottage industry of tech for older adults, known as age-tech, that includes everything from healthcare gadgets, like the Hero Smart Pill Dispenser, and more futuristic devices, like the social robot ElliQ, that promise to help seniors combat loneliness. Many of these products and services are designed to help keep older adults safe and to help them age in place. Some, like the Haelo smart ring, are designed to do it all, everything from fall detection to health tracking to emergency alerts if something suddenly looks wrong. Others, like Life360, use software designed to track kids to keep an eye on their grandparents.
The big challenge with all of this, however, is finding a way to implement it in a way that respects the aging loved one’s privacy and independence. Boomers and Gen Xers didn’t grow up with as much tech in their lives as younger generations — much less gadgets that could double as monitoring devices — so introducing these tools stands to alienate them. And beyond that, it’s an ongoing challenge to ensure that technology reduces a caregiver’s mental load rather than add to it. After all, too much tech can create new problems rather than solve existing ones. If the overwhelm becomes too much to bear, everyone involved might just abandon the effort.
“Start with: What do they need support for and what is the best solution for that?” Wendy Rogers, director of the Human Factors and Aging Lab at the University of Illinois, told me. “Sometimes it’s technology, sometimes it’s not.”
You might be surprised by what technology can do, when it’s purposefully designed and properly introduced into an aging person’s life.
If you’re a caregiver — Rogers prefers the term “care partners” — you should think of this problem-solving project as a collaboration. Start the conversation with your parents or loved ones early and maintain an open dialogue about how it’s working out. Perhaps most importantly, keep updating the plan as time goes on and lives change. And this might go without saying, but try to avoid any big surprises.
Don’t wait until an emergency
It’s difficult to know when to offer an older adult help, even if that help is as simple as a smartwatch. On one hand, you don’t want to offend or infantilize them. On the other, if you wait too long, you might find yourself trying to set up a monitoring system when it’s no longer optional, like after a fall or other health scare. In these instances, you risk rushing to a solution before you identify the specific problem.
Waiting until an emergency to start thinking about this also necessarily means there’s less time to plan. That sets the younger person up for a situation in which they’re inundated with more information than they can manage. If you set up a smart camera, like a Nest, to notify you every time your parent wakes up and goes into the kitchen, you’re bound to face a huge stack of notifications every time you open your phone and no real strategy for separating the signal from the noise. Good planning helps you to avoid looking at all that raw data and instead look for deviations from the norm. Once I involved my mom in this process, we had the chance to clarify not only the details of her routine but also our goal in keeping tabs on her. In the end, she had no doubt this all came from a place of love.
“In those cases, the technology serves as a safety net, not to check every day what’s going on but to be notified when something doesn’t seem to be happening the way it was supposed to,” said George Demiris, a professor of informatics at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school.
You can imagine the broader implications of this safety net concept. If your goal is to make sure your parent is going about their daily routine, you don’t actually need cameras at all. Motion sensors can do the job just as well, all while maintaining privacy. There are even camera-free systems, like Nomo Smart Care and Silvie, designed to spot worrisome deviations from an older person’s routine. Even still, the benefits of planning — at the very least, identifying a specific problem in need of a solution — will make it more likely that you’ll maximize the technology’s benefit.
Make privacy and empathy central to your approach
The first step in planning to use tech to monitor your parents is simply talking. You should have a conversation with them to find out what worries they have and consider those alongside your own. Ask what level of monitoring they’d be comfortable with. When the time comes, teach them how to use the tech you’re introducing into their life. Give them the agency to make changes and even turn off the tech when they want.
One way to go about this is to try reversing the roles. Consider how you’d feel if someone wanted to install a bunch of surveillance cameras in your home and track your every move. If you’re asking an older loved one to wear a health tracker, think about why a device like that might be useful to you. Heck, you could even buy matching Apple Watches and start sharing your step count in order to show that you’re trying to stay active and healthy together.
“Saying, ‘Okay, let me stop for a second. Let me imagine I’m their age and my kid wants to do this thing — what would that be like?’” said Amanda Lazar, an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information. “I think that can help you approach it more sensitively and in a more understanding way.”
The privacy question deserves extra attention. While motion sensor-based monitoring systems can offer extra privacy, there might be situations where you do want a camera. You should talk to your parent or loved one about where they’re comfortable with having a camera and what level of control they’d like to have over it. If you’re thinking about tracking someone with an AirTag or through an app, tell them you’re doing it and explain how it works. They won’t enjoy being surprised if you pull a Big Brother and start asking about specific whereabouts.
All that said, if the person you’re helping care for has dementia or other cognitive issues, these conversations are more complicated. You should talk to their doctor about their individual needs, potential tech solutions, and the possibility of involving professional caregivers.
Start simple and with tech people actually want to use
There’s a reason my sister and I bought my mom an Apple Watch and not a Life Alert pendant. We knew she’d like it, if not for the fitness tracking, then at least as a fashion accessory. And, as a direct result of liking it, she’d wear it. Indeed, we were nervous about her falling, so the fall detection feature was a selling point. But as someone who’s spent a lot of time thinking and writing about gadgets like these, I knew that some of the health tracking features could help be active and have fun doing so. Now, every other time I call, she tells me how many miles she walked that day.
If you’re considering a monitoring device for your parents or an older loved one, think about what they might actually want to use. For many people, smart speakers are a great way to introduce potentially lifesaving tech into the home. Your dad might like asking Alexa for recipe advice, and you might find comfort in the fact that he can also ask Alexa to call 911 if he falls. “Engaging people with technology tools early on and making it part of their everyday repertoire can be very helpful,” said Rogers, “and then as their needs change you can increase the support.”
Down the line, it’s relatively seamless to connect cameras, motion sensors, smart locks, or smoke alarms to systems like these. And because the older adult has been in the loop from the start, you can teach them how to use these devices, and they can remain aware of what you can see on your end. Again, the empathy-focused approach is more likely to win someone over.
Change your plan when life changes
Like anything related to tech, you’ll need to do some software updates along the way. And I don’t mean making sure your Nest camera firmware is up to date. You’ll want to revisit your conversation about monitoring with your parents or loved ones at least once a year. You might try doing it over the holidays when you’re all together or when there’s a need for some tech support. Regardless, it’s essential to communicate about what’s working and what’s not.
These conversations can also be opportunities to talk about other ways you might help. Beyond monitoring their physical space, some aging parents could benefit from some help in the digital world, especially as they’re being targeted by a growing number of AI-powered scams. Do they need help managing their finances or keeping track of login credentials? Do your parents know what a passcode is? They might not ask you for help with these things, and again, it’s better to get out in front of issues before an emergency happens.
“Everyone’s in denial,” said Amelia Hay, a vice president at AARP Innovation Labs. “Everyone’s thinking their parents are fine, whatever, and then something happens where you’re in a state of emergency.”
So don’t wait. And don’t be in denial. Aging, as much as some tech billionaires would like to deny it, is one of those things in life that’s inevitable. If everything seems fine now, that means it’s a great time to start planning for when things go sideways.
I was in India, performing dentistry on my first animal patient, and it was supposed to be a straightforward operation
I’ve been a dentist for 40 years. I spend most of my time treating patients at my surgery in Chichester, West Sussex. When I studied to become a dentist in the 1980s, I didn’t think I’d be getting my hands anywhere near the teeth of any exotic animals.
Twenty years later, in 2000, that changed. A patient of mine, Alan Knight, the CEO of International Animal Rescue (IAR), showed me photographs of the inside of a bear’s mouth. The bear was called Jojo and his teeth had been broken off by poachers. Some of the teeth were too rotten to be saved – if left untreated, Jojo would become more prone to infection and abscesses.
Children sleep during nap time at Minnesota Child Care in Minneapolis, on December 30, 2025. | Renee Jones Schneider/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images
Affordability is the top political problem of the moment, and lawmakers in both parties have increasingly blamed large investors for buying up housing, hospitals, and other staples families can’t do without, while jacking up prices and degrading quality.
Earlier this year, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who has backedbills on both fronts, turned his attention to childcare. The ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee sent sweeping documentrequests to KinderCare Learning Companies and Learning Care Group, the two largest private-equity-owned childcare companies in the country, seeking information like board minutes, subsidy totals, staffing ratios, dividend records, and the investment memos the firms wrote when they bought in. Private equity, Merkley said in announcing the requests, has increasingly prioritized “investor profits over the well-being of the families and communities that depend on these services.”
The federal inquiry follows severalyears of national childcare advocacy groups warning that private equity, an industry known for acquiring businesses for quick-turnaround sales, should be kept far away from kids.
In 2022, Elliot Haspel, a progressive childcare expert, wrote in the New Republicthat private-equity owned childcare chains “ultimately answer to investors or shareholders first, parents second.” Citing their record in nursing homes, where acquisitions have been associated with declines in quality, Haspel wrote that there’s “little reason to think that early care and education would be magically exempt from these sideways influences.” In 2024 the Open Markets Institute, the National Women’s Law Center, and Community Change put out a report contending that private equity-owned centers would not only seek to soak up public funding, but stall reforms limiting their reach long enough to capture local market share, until they could argue they’d become too embedded to remove without harming families.
Since then, lawmakers in at least five states — Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania — have introduced or passed bills that write ownership structure into childcare policy, cap what large for-profit chains can draw from state grants, or attach strings to public dollars that apply to those providers alone. The coalition of national groups published model state legislation of its own this past February, built partly on those state experiments.
But a forthcoming paper reviewed by Vox from two leading national researchers focused on the economics of childcare — Jessica Brown at the University of South Carolina and Chris Herbst of Arizona State University — complicates the case that has been building against the private-equity owned centers. In the country’s first systematic, descriptive look at how far private equity has actually spread through American childcare, the scholars found no smoking guns.
If anything in the findings gives Herbst pause, it’s the geography.
Private equity is not sweeping the childcare sector, the researchers report. Its share of the childcare workforce stopped growing around 2010 and has hovered near 10 percent ever since. It isn’t everywhere, either — three-quarters of private-equity childcare centers sit in just 5 percent of US counties, clustered around Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Atlanta, and northern Virginia. Nor do the centers look uniformly distressed. They have been operating for 18 years on average, longer than other chains — and between 2021 and 2024, while non-private-equity providers cut staff, these programs added workers.
“Given what we see,” Brown told me, “private equity is notthe reason that childcare is unaffordable.”
Herbst agreed: “You know, we jokingly at one point said we’re gonna call our paper, ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’”
This is not to say the researchers have no further questions. Their work explores the recent past, but their findings are not causal, so they couldn’t say specifically what happened when private equity took the centers over. And their data also couldn’t confirm what the chains pay their teachers, or what benefits they offer. Critics have guessed both ways — that they squeeze wages for profit, or that their size allows them to pay more than a small provider could offer and muscle out competitors.
An important question is what actually separates private equity-owned chains from other large childcare companies. Herbst and Brown found that on price, private-equity chains operate not so differently from large competitors that aren’t investor-owned. They are less likely to take public subsidies (70 percent do) than other large chains (78 percent), but are more likely to hold their state’s top quality rating. Large chains, private-equity-owned or not, tend to locate in wealthier areas with more college-educated families. Private-equity providers, though, seem distinctly drawn to states with looser staffing rules and to counties with the tightest childcare markets in the country.
If anything in the findings gives Herbst pause, it’s the geography. “It may not be that they are rendering low-quality care,” he said. “They may be rendering very high-quality care, but inaccessible to a large number of families because of where they are doing business.”
How this study came to be
Despite the amount of national attention, very little research has existed on private equity and childcare up to this point.
“People were sort of copying and pasting evidence from these other domains like nursing homes and hospitals, extrapolating results from these other sectors to childcare, and we were skeptical about this,” Herbst said.
While they were gathering information, new international evidence did come out — a working paper on Dutch childcare, which found that private-equity centers charged more and had fewer regulatory violations overall, but more staffing-related violations. The Netherlands sets its childcare rules nationally, though, which makes the findings harder to apply in the US, where staffing ratios and teacher qualifications are set state by state.
Nobody had done a deep US analysis before, largely because it’s expensive. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Brown and Herbst had to stitch together at least seven sources, including two proprietary databases costly enough to be out of reach for most researchers even with a grant — one tracking every business in the country year by year since 1997, the other tracking private equity deals. Then they merged all of it against state licensing records, accreditation files, and an original survey they fielded themselves in three states.
“It took an extraordinary amount of resources — both monetary and labor — to put our datasets together,” Herbst said. The lack of quality national data on childcare providers broadly has been a major barrier for researchers, and leaves the terms of the debate often set by interest groups. No federal survey tracks what providers charge, and most states don’t collect it either. Brown and Herbst could compare prices in only two states, the ones that require providers to report them as a condition of licensing.
Why is private equity interested in childcare?
One of the main questions looming over the conversation is that, broadly speaking, childcare is a low-margin business — so why is private equity involved at all?
“My answer right now is they’re not interested in childcare writ large,” said Herbst. “They’re interested in childcare in very select communities.”
The classic private-equity playbook is to buy a company, raise its value through expansion, consolidation, or cost-cutting, and sell within three to seven years. This is the model that ran through Toys ‘R’ Us, Payless, and a long line of local newspapers, and helped earn the industry a reputation for loading businesses with unmanageable debt they couldn’t carry.
But not every private-equity strategy is a short-term flip. Over the past decade Blackstone, KKR, and Carlyle have all raised long-hold funds designed to keep companies for 15 years or more. It’s a small slice of the industry, but both childcare companies now under Senate scrutiny fit that longer pattern, with Partners Group having held KinderCare since 2015 and still controlling roughly 69 percent of it after an IPO, and American Securities having owned Learning Care Group since 2014.
A representative from KinderCare did not return a request for comment, but in an interview, Brian Gutman, the senior vice president of public policy at Learning Care Group, told me that yes, their investors want to see a profit and “be a sustainable company.” Something like childcare, he said, is “a long-term play, not a short-term play” because the costs that matter most can’t be recovered inside a short window. Refurnishing a single school might run $100,000 to $300,000, and a firm looking to exit in three years would have to push that into tuition, which wouldn’t be feasible. He put the company’s reinvestment at more than $1 billion dollars.
Merkley’s letter tells a different side of that story. In 2018 Learning Care Group borrowed to pay its owners at least $636 million, and now carries roughly $5.50 in debt for every dollar it earns. In other words, the money went out the door to the owners, but the loan stayed on the company’s books, and the interest is serviced out of the same tuition that pays teachers.
Asked how that squared with the long-term picture he described, Gutman did not address the 2018 payout or the debt load. He said that under American Securities’ ownership Learning Care has spent more than $1 billion on capital expenditures and maintenance — building upgrades, safety systems, classroom technology, not counting acquisitions — and that the company’s average wage growth has outpaced its own tuition increases, inflation, and national wage growth in each of the past three fiscal years.
What private capital buys, he says, is scale. The clearest example is cameras: Before the pandemic, Learning Care put livestreaming cameras in classrooms near military bases so deployed parents could watch their kids during the day. When Covid hit and parents couldn’t come inside, the company put one in every classroom across the chain, meaning tens of thousands of cameras. It’s the kind of investment he said families appreciate and an operator with two or three buildings can’t afford. Access to capital, he argued, is what made it possible.
The right target?
I reached out to Merkley’s office to learn more about their federal investigation and a staffer told me that it had been prompted by the number of concerning stories his team had been seeing in the media. KinderCare is also headquartered in Merkley’s home state of Oregon, though they said their inquiry wasn’t driven by complaints from his local constituents specifically.
The staffer said they hope to get their report out by the end of the year, but acknowledged that “a lot of the [companies]’ responses have been lackluster” so far. “Legislation is definitely something my boss is thinking about,” they added, but said they are waiting to hash out details until their probe is finalized.
Gutman said Learning Care responded to Merkley’s request, but sees the focus on private equity as a bit of a scapegoat, or red herring. The company isn’t opposed to new regulation, he said, including more transparency about investors, decision-making, and wages. His objection is to rules that sort providers by who owns them. “Where there’s a need for enhanced regulation,” he said, “that’s a need for the sector, not a need for a couple of actors within the sector.”
He said that plenty of large childcare operators, like family-owned regional chains and big nonprofits, aren’t private-equity backed, and that ownership structure doesn’t reliably predict behavior. He cited a venture-capital-backed Montessori chain in Colorado that closed its five locations abruptly. Because the bills moving through statehouses key on private equity ownership specifically, a company like that one wouldn’t trigger regulation.
Haspel said he’s fine with legislation that targets large for-profit chains more broadly, but emphasized that the focus on institutional investors will only become more important as the conversation around universal childcarepicks up momentum in the United States. “I don’t think the focus is a red herring…[private equity] presents some real threats potentially if you have bad actors that are attracted by the increased public funding,” he said. He pointed to England, where the competition regulator just launched an investigation last month to examine whether private-equity ownership is serving families or driving up childcarecosts. Provisional findings are due early next year.
Gutman said Learning Care Group will fight being cut out of public programs. Some of the state proposals would restrict which providers can access grants or participate in state pre-K, and Gutman argued that in much of the country there isn’t a backup. About 85 percent of the company’s families live within a 10-minute drive of their center, he said. “If we’re the only game in town, and we can’t access a grant program that helps us pay teachers better, I’m not sure who that serves,” Gutman said.
Brown and Herbst’s own immediate recommendation is more public information. More states could collect prices at licensing, they argue, and make wage and staff turnover data easier for researchers to find which in turn would help generate more targeted policy fixes. “I think in some ways people are trying to look for an easy solution,” Brown said, “but the thing is there is no easy solution in childcare.”
This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
Update, August 27, 11 am ET: This article was originally published on August 27 and has been updated to includemore details about the study funders.
Bo French, a candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, speaks at a CPAC panel to discuss the threat of Islam in Texas. | Eleanor Dearman/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The Great American Conflict, a 75-minute documentary produced by a Texas-based organization dedicated to converting Iran to Christianity, declares its goal right at the beginning: “to reveal the true Islam to all people, especially in the West,” Iran Alive Ministries’s founder Hormoz Shariat says. “This film is also meant to be a warning to America. There is a serious threat of Islam in our nation.”
Released at the start of summer and having premiered at a gathering of the Dallas County Republican Party, it’s an obscure film — you’ve probably never heard of it — but it has so far had a surprising political influence. It’s been shown at gatherings of local Republicans and conservative activists in Texas, where Islamophobic rhetoric and policy proposals have played a key role in activating the Republican base, candidates, and party leaders over the course of this year’s elections. The documentary is both a symptom and a cause of a larger trend unfolding in American politics in 2026 that is picking up steam now: the rise of a new iteration of blatant Islamophobia paired with Christian nationalist sentiment on the American right.
Iran Alive Ministries did not respond to requests for comment.
It’s no surprise who some of the backers and voices of this documentary are: Some members of this collection of right-wing, conservative, and evangelical activists are a throwback to early-2000s and 2010s Islamophobia, when some of the same figures spoke out against “radical Islamism” and “radical Islamic terror.” One of them, for instance, is the activist Brigitte Gabriel, the controversial founder of ACT for America, an early-2000s anti-Islamic extremism group. As the film makes clear, this latest version of Islamophobia in America has its roots in this post-9/11 era and borrows heavily from it, while making some modern-day tweaks.
What’s different now is how mainstream this stance is becoming in politics and how it appears to be getting only more mainstream.
“Islamophobia has passed the dinner table test. You can say things about Muslims with basic impunity today,” Nathan Lean, a researcher, assistant teaching professor at North Carolina State University and author of the book The Islamophobia Industry, told me. “And it’s institutionalized in the way that prejudice that targets other marginalized communities is not.” He pointed to the Sharia-Free America Caucus in Congress, which is composed of 68 elected members of Congress representing 25 states. He also pointed to efforts in Texas to make eliminating “sharia” law an official stance of the Texas GOP, and then the subsequent vote to recommend Gov. Greg Abbott “ban” it on the Texas 2026 primary ballot.
Now, politicians, content creators, and politically connected advocacy groups are using films like The Great American Conflict, selectively edited clips spread on social media,and investigative-style pseudo-documentaries to spread this sentiment further and wider, power more wins of right-wing candidates, and take aim in particular at Muslim candidates and politicians.
This is all playing out as antisemitism and Islamophobia are peaking during the 2026 midterm cycle, accelerated by demographic change across America, increased Muslim visibility and engagement in politics, including elections of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and the Senate campaign of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and moreRepublican politicians feeling comfortable using Islam as a scapegoat and cudgel, particularly in Texas. It all paints a worrying picture of what’s to come.
What The Great American Conflict argues is coming
As a cinematic project, The Great American Conflict isn’t much of an accomplishment; it can broadly be described as a collection of testimonials from evangelical Christians and former Muslims who’ve converted to Christianity who each make a case against Islam. Though poorly organized, it starts with some rough accounting of the rise of Islam in world history, lays out the case through interviews that Islam is an ideology and not a religion, then zooms in on specific Texan communities and examples of how Muslim politicians and activists are using democratic processes to achieve “domination.”
There are broadly three core themes that these speakers come back to:
Islam is inherently violent and imperialistic: The documentary’s interview subjects argue that true believers seek to expand the faith and establish a cross-national Islamic state. They rely on some sketchy history of the prophet Muhammed and the contemporary history of Lebanon and Iran as examples of this “violence.”
Islam is incompatible with the American Constitution and Western liberalism: Speakers also argue that, as opposed to other religions, Islam does not tolerate diversity of thought and seeks to enforce its rules and guidelines on nonbelievers. They claim that Islam rejects the separation between church and state, and that mosques can function as political or military centers.
There is an ongoing effort by Muslims to infiltrate American politics and replace “Judeo-Christian” America: The rise of Muslim American politicians in Congress, in New York City, and at the state and local government level are all part of an effort to whittle away religious liberty and replace American values with “Islamic” values. Liberal and progressive allies are enabling this takeover. And they interpret public calls to prayer, halal food, school prayer rooms, Ramadan accommodations, mosque construction, and Muslim residential developments as evidence that American institutions are yielding to Islamic demands.
Interspersed throughout these testimonials are fearmongering compilations of social media clips of Muslim prayers and veiled women, and short selections of purportedly Muslim speakers making inflammatory comments about 9/11, about Jews and Christians, and about Islamic domination in the West, and violent clips of terrorist actions abroad.
And though the film’s main backer, Hormoz Shariat, says at the beginning of the film that his goal is not to inspire fear or hate, that’s precisely what the speakers seem to do for an hour.
For example, the Christian pastor Shahram Hadian, the founder of Truth in Love Ministry in Tennessee, repeatedly argues that America is at a turning point. “Western societies are right now at a critical decision point. Either they’re going to maintain, preserve, [and] fight for their Judeo-Christian values, or they’re succumbing,” he says.
And he takes a natalist turn, arguing that Muslims in the US are happy to continue to raise families as Western birth rates drop. “We continue to see the demise of Christianity, of our Judeo-Christian values, family values, family ethics, marriage — one man, one woman,” he says. “They’re just waiting us out. They’ll just wait us out. They’ll aid us in our own demise and destruction.”
To drill down on this, various speakers point to demographic change in Michigan and Texas as early signs of what they see as the capitulation of the United Kingdom and continental Europe to Islam. They point to self-segregating Muslim communities in Europe being mirrored in the US, particularly focusing on a housing developmentproject in East Plano, Texas, centered around a mosque and Islamic center, that has been a focal point for Republican politicians.
Other speakers argue against accepting Islam as a religion at all, instead casting it as a political ideology that is seeking to take over American institutions. Some, like Gabriel, allege a coordinated strategy to “infiltrate” and “dominate the West and establish an Islamic government,” tracing this back to the Muslim Brotherhood, and a supposed decades-long plan to infiltrate political parties, schools, media, and churches to use democratic institutions to establish Islamic law. She points to Mamdani as an example of this, and ropes in Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan as being loyal to a foreign Islamic identity rather than to the United States.
And they contrast this all with an idealized “Judeo-Christian” America defined by constitutional government, traditional marriage, Christianity, and cultural assimilation. The final call to arms is to preserve and promote this Christian vision of America, on top of defending the Constitution, religious liberty, and “American” culture against what is a coming ideological and demographic conflict.
The danger of rising Islamophobia
Iran Alive Ministries itself doesn’t seem primarily dedicated to anti-Muslim American advocacy and activism. Most of its YouTube and internet presence is focused on digital Christian evangelism, particularly in Iran. It’s not entirely hard to see how a group focused on conversions would drift into Islamophobic preaching, but it does seem like a peculiar move, Lean told me.
“There is a group of people who form a faction of this sort of anti-Muslim movement in the United States who are, by their own description, evangelical Christians,” Lean said. “And it’s no surprise that a group like Iran Alive Ministries, that is formed on the basis of, as they say, transforming Iran into a Christian nation, one soul at a time, would go there.”
Emphasizing that Christian proselytism and evangelism are not inherently Islamophobic, Lean told me that there has been a more overt merging of religious convictions with Republican politics in recent years.
“The…driving mission of the group leads to a marriage of, we want a Christian world on the one hand, versus there are active agents in the world that are potentially preventing that. And who represents that biggest threat to that right now? Well, in the eyes of these people, Muslims do,” Lean said.
Lean told me that he expects to see this momentum build as midterms approach. At the local level, it’s most visible in Texas, where the New York Times recently reported on the stunning rise in Islamophobia and fearmongering across the state, and in Michigan, where cities like Dearborn and Hamtramck have seen white nationalist and anti-Islam demonstrations.
Lean said many of these lines of Islamophobic thinking sound like familiar tropes, smears, and lies of the last couple of waves of fearmongering around Muslims. Still, as opposed to the post-9/11 era, he noteda worrying difference: the scale of Islamophobia, given its increasing presence on both social and traditional media.
Much of the growth of these sentiments is happening online, too. Since Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor, and especially since El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, these kinds of views have surged online and in conservative media, while conservative activists and influencers have been pushing similar narratives of infiltration and under-the-radar Muslim “encroachment.”
A recent survey of internet discourse and activity by the research group Magnitude Media found something similar, centered on Dearborn: “Since the beginning of the month, there have been 690 posts mentioning Dearborn, generating 5.1 million engagements. Right-leaning accounts drove 88% of that engagement, compared to just 7% from left-leaning accounts,” the authors write. “The broader anti-Muslim conversation online has been substantial for months. Over the past six months, 68% of posts that either mentioned Islamophobia or contained common Islamophobic language came from right-leaning accounts. Dearborn appears less like the cause of a new Islamophobia conversation than the right’s newest focal point.”
So the documentary certainly isn’t the only cause for concern — but the fact that Texas Republicans have used it in official events, on top of strategists saying they are pivoting to “sharia” and fearmongering, suggests just how politically useful the party thinks these messages can be.
Which all suggests more ugliness to come. And as Lean told me, talking about a coming conflict and a threat to survival indicates an existential threat that should be fought by any means.
“Where does the logic of all of this take us? What’s the solution?” he said. “You can’t help but wonder when they’re issuing statements about fertility rates and these overtures are being kind of taken over, that this could very easily go to a dark place.”
Update, August 28, 11:45 amET: This piece was updated to reflect Nathan Lean’sfull job title.
The Marches, Shropshire: For this hoverfly, pretending to be far more dangerous than it actually is has been a useful evolutionary technique
Back in the analogue world – where “analogue” means signals transmitted by continuous waves of sound or light, but also means something that looks like something else – intelligence is more poetic and weirder than its shambling digital doppelganger.
In a bend of the heatwave, a remarkable fly lands on a rose leaf in full sun. The hornet mimic hoverfly, Volucella zonaria, is a stonking great (for a hoverfly) 2cm-long creature with a peachy-yellow and black striped abdomen. It has no sting, a chestnut thorax and a big-eyed head with a pad for nectar, not jaws for chomping insects, two rather than four cellophane wings folded at rest, and an aura to unnerve the uninitiated.
Bird eggs intercepted in homemade incubators at Johannesburg airport as officials try to halt wildlife trafficking
South African police have arrested two Thai nationals in separate incidents for allegedly attempting to smuggle endangered parrot eggs out of the country as authorities try to stem the tide of wildlife trafficking.
A 50-year-old Thai national was arrested at OR Tambo international airport in Johannesburg on 20 August, carrying 50 bird eggs in a homemade incubator in a hand-luggage bag, South Africa’s environment ministry said in a statement.
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.
Editor’s note, August 23, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in February.
This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.
I’m a woman in my 30s and I think I want to have a child, but I have a health condition that makes it harder (not impossible) to get pregnant than for most women. It would also make pregnancy more uncomfortable and physically disfiguring than it is for many pregnant people. It wouldn’t be permanently disabling, but the physical effects would be bad enough that I really don’t want to be pregnant.
I’m fortunate enough that I can probably afford to get a surrogate through a reputable agency. But surrogacy is frowned upon and often considered unethical. Long ago, I knew someone who said she loved the idea of being pregnant and providing gestation as a service to other people, so maybe in theory, it is possible for someone to freely choose to be a surrogate without being coerced by financial need? But even if it could be done ethically, there’s such a stigma around it and I fear being judged by friends and family. There seems to be a sense that there’s something wrong, unnatural, selfish, or unwomanly in wanting to have a biological child but not wanting your own body to be the vessel for it.
Plus, it’s not like I’m the only person in the world for whom pregnancy would suck. I think my experience probably would be worse than average, but pregnancy is just an unpleasant thing overall so I don’t think I can claim it would be so uniquely bad for me that I’m justified in wanting to pay to use someone else’s body. I’d love your help with this.
Dear Really Don’t Want To Be Pregnant,
There are some ethical questions about surrogacy that it’s genuinely worth asking, and some that I don’t want you to devote another second to — so let’s start there.
As you said, there’s a cultural stigma around not wanting to turn your body into a vessel for childbearing — it’s deemed “wrong” or “unwomanly.” But that idea is pure garbage. The idea that there’s some “proper” way to be a woman is a patriarchal construct; anyone who tells you you’re “unwomanly” for not wanting to gestate is reflecting sexist expectations that women’s bodies should be available for reproductive labor.
So to the extent that your fear of being judged is about that, please don’t give it another thought. But of course, there are real moral questions that surrogacy brings up.
I’ll tell you right off the bat that I do think surrogacy can be ethically justifiable in some situations. First, it helps that surrogacy is not one monolithic thing. There’s a big distinction between commercial surrogacy (where you pay someone to carry a baby) and altruistic surrogacy (the unpaid version, where the surrogate carries the baby as a literal labor of love). It’s not easy to find an altruistic surrogate — after all, pregnancy is dangerous business — but I agree with your intuition that if you’re lucky enough to know someone willing to volunteer for the role, opting for that is a good way to avoid most concerns about commodification or exploitation.
Key takeaways
Unethical surrogacy industries are booming in places like Georgia, Ukraine, and Cyprus. But there’s a moral difference between hiring a surrogate there versus in the US.
When someone can get pregnant but doesn’t want to for psychological reasons, their case is often deemed “elective.” But a mental health need can also be a medical need.
“Epistemic injustice” refers to a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. People who say they know they have a mental health need that makes pregnancy too risky often aren’t taken seriously, but that’s starting to change.
Within commercial surrogacy, a second distinction has to do with where the surrogate lives. There’s a moral difference between hiring a surrogate in a developing country and hiring one in, say, the US. In countries like Georgia, for example, surrogacy agencies have been known to recruit at domestic violence shelters — some women see surrogacy as the only way to win financial freedom from an abusive spouse. Ukraine, Cyprus, and several others are also known to have ethically problematic surrogacy industries.
But American surrogates are typically not low-income; they’re usually middle-classwhite women with husbands and kids of their own, and they have other economic opportunities available to them. The better surrogacy agencies screen out poor women, who are at risk of coercion. That empirical context means there’s less (though not zero) potential for exploitation in the US, compared with international surrogacy.
Another reason I think surrogacy can be ethically justifiable is that for many, many people, the urge to have kids — including ones who are biologically related to them — feels like a need and not just a want.
Many opponents of surrogacy argue that nobody has a “right” to a biological child, so if you can’t or don’t want to be pregnant, too bad. And those opponents are right that nobody has an absolute right to have a baby — otherwise, the state would be obligated to ensure surrogates, egg donors, and sperm donors were made available regardless of their own willingness to participate! But people may still have a qualified right — the kind of right that we generally honor but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others.
When it comes to people who are physically unable to create a biological child — when they have what doctors call a “medical indication” — I think the qualified right to have a kid means that surrogacy can be ethical, provided it meets certain criteria like informed consent.
But your situation is trickier because it’s not impossible for you to get pregnant — it’s more that, for certain reasons, you don’t want to. Typically, your case would be referred to as “elective surrogacy.” Some professionals will refuse to arrange surrogacy if they deem it elective rather than medically indicated.
And yet, doctors are increasingly recognizing that the line between “medically indicated” and “elective” is not so tidy.
While elective surrogacy is often associated with vanity — it brings to mind a celebrity who doesn’t want to be pregnant because she doesn’t want to “mess up” her figure — it’s not like everyone in the elective camp is there for cosmetic reasons.
What about someone who could get pregnant but is deathly afraid of giving birth because she had a traumatic experience — like, say, her best friend dying in childbirth? Or what about someone who’s trans and who physically could carry a pregnancy, but who knows it would cause such gender dysphoria that there’s a risk of serious psychological harm? Shouldn’t a mental health need be considered a type of medical need?
These are not hypothetical experiences — real people have testified to them — but they often haven’t been taken seriously as medical needs. I suspect that these people have endured what the contemporary philosopher Miranda Fricker calls “epistemic injustice.”
Epistemic injustice refers to “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” When society denies someone the credibility to assess their own life experience, or discounts an important part of that experience because of a gap in our collective interpretive resources, that can be an example of epistemic injustice. I think people who fall in between medical categories are too often at risk of being wronged in this way, and I don’t want to see that happen to you.
So I want to acknowledge that I don’t know what health condition you’re referring to when you say you have a condition that would “make pregnancy more uncomfortable and physically disfiguring than it is for many pregnant people.” Since I don’t know the details, I’d encourage you to ask yourself: How much more uncomfortable? How much more disfiguring? And how heavy and lasting a toll would that discomfort or disfigurement take on your overall well-being?
Only you can really try to answer that last question, because the same effects can land differently for different people, depending on how well-resourced we are financially, socially, psychologically, and even spiritually.
Once you’ve thought about how big and enduring the risk of harm is to you, try asking yourself this: Is the risk to you so much greater than the risk to a woman of average health that you feel comfortable transferring the risk of pregnancy and childbirth onto her?
Some people will tell you that question is irrelevant. They will say that the only value that matters here is autonomy — yours and the potential surrogate’s — and if you and she both consent to a surrogacy contract, and she is not coerced into it by financial desperation, then that’s that!
But there may be another important value at stake here: justice.
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As far as I can tell, your case is in a gray area — surrogacy is neither obviously “medically indicated” nor obviously “elective” based on the information you shared. If you ask yourself, “Do I think there’s a significant risk that carrying a child would significantly harm me?” and you answer “Yes!” — then some doctors would say surrogacy is medically indicated. But if the answer you feel bubbling up is, “Well…no, not really,” then you may be closer to the “elective” side of the spectrum. And then I think it becomes reasonable to inquire whether it feels fair to ask another woman to take on the considerable risks of pregnancy and childbirth.
You wrote of pregnancy, “I don’t think I can claim it would be so uniquely bad for me that I’m justified in wanting to pay to use someone else’s body.” That suggests that you currently see yourself as more in the elective camp. I urge you to give yourself the space to really interrogate that with an equal measure of honesty and self-compassion. If honesty compels you to say you don’t feel justified in putting someone else’s body in harm’s way in a situation where she otherwise wouldn’t be, then maybe you’ve got your answer.
But if you’re discounting the risk of psychological harm to yourself because you don’t think that “counts” as real need, please know that mental health is just as medically legitimate as physical health. And if you talk to a medical professional about the option of surrogacy, please talk to more than one so you’re less at risk of getting boxed into a category that doesn’t capture you right.
At the end of the day, perhaps none of us can be a perfect interpreter even of ourselves. But you get to be the interpreter-in-chief — with both the power and responsibility that implies.
Bonus: What I’m reading
This horrifying New York Times Magazine story about the global fertility industry captures why I do think it’s unethical to work with a surrogacy agency in a country like Georgia. These surrogates are not in a position to give informed consent.
“Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?” asked Shayla Love in the New Yorker recently. I now feel cognitive dissonance about all the times I thought I was feeling cognitive dissonance!
Don’t miss “I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.” This essay by Marcus Olang’, explaining why his writing is often mistaken for AI slop, is both surprising and maddening. Turns out it’s really hard to not write in the Queen’s English when an entire colonial legacy has drilled that style into you from birth.
A memorial for former Cambridge professor Jason Arday was set up by students and staff outside the Senate House on August 17, 2026 in Cambridge, England. | Nordin Catic/Getty Images
In March 2023, Jason Arday, a rising star in British academia, became a professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge. At 37, he was the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship in the university’s history.
Arday’s personal story also attracted widespread attention. He claimed that autism left him unable to speak until he was 11 and unable to read or write until he was 18. Nonetheless, Arday eventually received a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University and continued to rise through the ranks of British higher education.
Soon after starting his position at Cambridge, Arday was accused of plagiarizing portions of his 2015 doctoral thesis. And that was just the beginning. The British press began to comb through his personal story and discovered there were more questionable claims.
This all reached a fever pitch earlier this month, when Arday announced that he would be resigning his position, writing that the intense scrutiny and personal attacks had taken a profound toll on him and his family. Nine days later, Arday was found dead in his home.
To understand what to make of a story of alleged academic plagiarism turned media frenzy turned tragedy, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Atlantic staff writer Tyler Austin Harper, whose recent essay, “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday,” examines what we can learn from Arday’s story.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You wrote that everyone following this story would do well to engage in some reflection. I don’t think everyone following this story necessarily feels like they should be engaging in some reflection. So I wanted to ask you why you wanted to convey that thought.
I would say blame is not a finite resource and I think there’s plenty of it to go around in this case in particular. I think blame that belongs to conservatives and that belongs to Republicans and that belongs to various kinds of institutions. And that of course belongs to Jason Arday, the man.
I think this is a person who is clearly a serial fabulist, and I think one could fairly say a con artist, who was able to, through an increasingly implausible array of stories about his background — that he was mute until age 11, that he was illiterate till age 18, that he ran 600 miles in six days, a feat which is just 50 miles shy of a world record — flatter the vanities of people at Cambridge University who were very desperate to get a magical minority in the door. And they were so hell bent on their desire to engage in diversity politics that they overlooked what should have been very obvious flaws.
I think it’s also true simultaneously though, that you cannot just blame Arday or liberal institutions for this, and particularly for how this ended. This was, it’s worth noting, an academic scandal that — on the order of academic scandals — is not one that perhaps should be international news, but that’s very much what it became, in no small part because the British press turbocharged it.
If you look at any major British outlet, there were many, many, many, many articles written, each one chronicling every minute of this entire affair. And I think it’s worth noting that it’s hard to imagine that this degree of scrutiny would be applied to an academic scandal if Jason Arday had been white. It’s also hard to imagine that Jason Arday would’ve been hired if he was white. I think people would’ve asked more questions about his implausible claims if they weren’t so predisposed to just try to get him in the door.
What compelled Jason Arday to make up so much of his backstory?
It’s hard to know what’s inside his mind, but one imagines that he correctly understood that a certain kind of elite liberal would be very willing to overlook quite a lot and that [they] would be willing to swallow a whole lot of implausibilities to get him in the door. And I think he understood how the system works.
One of my frustrations with the way discourse of this story has unfolded, particularly after his tragic death, is he is being treated as somebody with no agency. And I think Arday, if you look at what he did, was clearly relatively savvy. He understood that there was a market, that he was being branded as the youngest Black professor in the 800-year history of Cambridge. And he fabricated a story that told people what they wanted to hear.
Not only was he Black coming from rough circumstances, but he was disabled, he was severely autistic, he had this miraculous recovery, also all sorts of medical ailments. He survived a brain tumor, testicular cancer, epilepsy, et cetera. He clearly knew how the game was played. He knew that he could leverage these various identity claims in service of advancement, which is what happened.
The story was not nearly as big in the United States as it was in the UK, understandably. But a lot of people want to place blame for Arday’s death on the British press. American Ibram X. Kendi said [Arday] was “lynched by the media.” Do you think that’s going too far?
I think that’s going way too far. First of all, there are few things I find more grotesque, at least in terms of everyday discourse, than treating lynching as a metaphor, which is something I think you see quite a lot. I think anyone who has seen a hanging tree knows that throwing the term around — “lynching” — for mere journalistic scrutiny is vile beyond measure.
Was the British press scrutiny far too intense? Yes. Do I think it was racist in the sense that I have a hard time imagining there would be this much scrutiny on a white academic who did the same thing? Yes, I think you can absolutely say that. To me, there is a question about, “Okay, what is the line between appropriate journalistic scrutiny and obsession?”
But I also think it’s worth noting, to be fair to the British press, that they’re responding to the way in which he was marketed to them nationally. He was marketed by Cambridge as the youngest Black professor in the 800-year history of this very venerable institution. To some extent, when you brand someone that way, when you film BBC specials with a closeup on his Black hands nestled in the white ones of the head of the Faculty of Education, I think some degree of scrutiny is warranted.
I think it was excessive. But at the same time, Jason Arday was a public figure. I think that is fair to say. His memoir is poised to make a splash. And he took this position that made him a minor academic celebrity. And again, I think it’s very fair to ask whether the degree of attention on what is ultimately an academic scandal in which no one was hurt was far too much. But the idea that we would place the blame on the media rather than on Simon and Schuster, who clearly overlooked obvious inconsistencies in his story, and on Cambridge — I find that absurd.
I think we need to blame the people who put him on the mountaintop rather than the people who ripped him down, even as I think some of those people putting attention on him were unscrupulous.
In your piece at the Atlantic, I thought you bravely related your own experience to that of Jason Arday. Did that come naturally to you or did you have to hold your breath?
Look, I am a Black guy who has been the beneficiary of various kinds of DEI and affirmative action initiatives. And I certainly have encountered a certain kind of white liberal who is very eager to metaphorically grasp my Black hands in their white ones and stare lovingly into my eyes like the Cambridge Faculty of Education person did. So I had some degree of sympathy with him.
I find those kinds of encounters revolting. But I also can understand from Arday’s point of view, coming from a relatively disadvantaged background, he’s the children of immigrants. Then you have all of these people paying attention to you, showering you in accolades — and I think fetishizing you, but it probably didn’t seem that way to him. And you tell a small lie, and maybe that small lie then becomes a bigger lie and then a bigger lie and a bigger lie and a bigger lie.
What he did was wrong, but I can imagine the kind of incentive structure he saw laid out before him. And it’s not hard to see that he made a decision that could in some sense be understood as yes, self-serving, but also giving people what they wanted.
Do you think we’ll learn anything from it?
No. I think people have retreated into their camps. I think progressives are blaming the media for doing what I’ve seen thrown around as a digital lynching. I think conservatives are blaming academic institutions or Jason Arday or just gleefully basking in the glow of having torn this guy down a peg. I haven’t seen a single lesson really learned.
I’ve seen a lot of blame being apportioned. I don’t think there’s much reflection about whether or not these policies are good or bad — the kind of policies or the kinds of extremist versions of affirmative action that go well beyond the spirit of what most people understand as affirmative action.
Whether those kinds of initiatives are good, whether the press scrutiny was fair. I don’t see a lot of self-reflection. I see a lot of blame. And even as I’m wanting to say that there’s lots of people to blame, I also think we should be a little more self-critical.
My first impulse on learning of the Jason Arday affair was to find it somewhat amusing, I will be honest. Here was this guy who managed to tell all of these obvious lies and these very, very smart people believed them hook, line, and sinker. It was objectively funny, but it became unfunny very quickly. And so I think, like I said in the piece, we could all stand to do some reflection about how we ended up in this situation, how Jason Arday ended up in this situation. But will that reflection happen? I highly doubt it.
Like many people, I have a contentious relationship with the Memories feature on my iPhone, the AI-powered nostalgia machine that serves up photos and slideshows from deep in your camera roll, either reminding you of a beautiful day at the beach or surfacing an old photo of your ex. About once a month, for whatever reason, my iPhone reminds me of the time my phone got stolen.
The Memory is a glitchy, fragmented one — an auto-generated slideshow of my first few years living in New York. But because my phone was stolen, the photos in the slideshow are a random assortment of mislabeled JPEGs and grainy images I’d saved from Facebook, all somehow imported from my hard drive to my camera roll at some point and set to sentimental music.
I used to get mad that I didn’t back up my actual, treasured photos on a hard drive. But now, I just wish I’d printed out the best ones and put them in a box. That kind of thing can survive for generations.
We should all be printing our photos. I’m not just talking about converting your camera roll into a stack of 4×6-inch glossy pieces of paper, either. It’s actually easier than ever to turn the gigabytes of images we carry around in our pockets into physical objects, like albums and books and frames, the kind we can gather around to pore over and one day pass down to our children. Even individual prints that we touch and hold can tell a story in a way that pixel on a screen never could. Real photos are effectively embodied memories that we can casually encounter as we go about our daily lives. And it’s not just because an algorithm decided to send us a push notification to go look at them, either.
“Printing photos in any form, whether it’s to hang on a wall or to hold in our hands, is effortful,” Brianna Marshall, dean of the Steely Library at Northern Kentucky University, told me. “It requires us to take action to experience the memories in more meaningful ways than an occasional passive scroll of our photo roll.”
In a way, I owe a lot to that phone thief. It was only after losing so many photos that I started paying closer attention to how I managed the new ones I’m taking, which are thankfully backed up in multiple places in the cloud. I’ve made some photo books and some albums of big events, like my wedding. I have a box with some prints inside, although there should be more.
I now have a couple of kids who do many cute things every day, and my camera roll is getting more crowded. My walls are looking increasingly bare. I know I should be printing even more photos, and you probably should, too. When we commit to a process around curating and printing our photos, we’re also creating a ritual around preserving our memories and giving ourselves a chance to interact with them for years or even decades to come. This is so much more rewarding than taking thousands of pictures indiscriminately and then just uploading a few to Instagram periodically and hoping for some likes.
Why your camera roll isn’t a family history
There’s something magical about sitting down with a family photo album. My mom has made them obsessively for decades, and any time I’m home, I end up pulling one off the shelf. Each page is carefully curated to tell a story about a moment — a dance recital, a vacation, a holiday — and taken together, the album tells a story about our lives at that time. She’s made albums about her own childhood, and she’s started some for my own children. Collectively, they’re a family history that we can gather around.
As much as Apple, Google, and other tech companies have tried, you can’t replicate that feeling with an app. There are a ton of upsides when it comes to backing up your photos digitally, including the ability to access them from anywhere or quickly share images or entire albums. However, cloud storage platforms tend to compress your photos, harming image quality. They can also change their terms of service or their business model at any time, potentially leaving you to pay a monthly fee or face losing your photos forever.
On a more basic level, though, something is lost when you’re scrolling through pictures on a smartphone, where your inbox or your TikTok feed is just a swipe away. The images “seem a little bit more removed and a little less approachable,” said Debra Norris, professor of photograph conservation at the University of Delaware. “It becomes a point of conversation and enjoyment and accessibility that doesn’t exist when an image is on the phone.”
Your phone is full of distractions, yes, but it’s also probably just overflowing with photos. My camera roll has nearly 30,000 images, which means that finding one specific shot from a certain day on a vacation a few years ago is more of a chore than a point of conversation. Encountering old photos serendipitously would be utterly impossible if not for — I kind of hate to say it — the help of features like iPhone Memories. This software can help resurface some old photos, and that experience can be delightful.
Try taking things into your own hands, though. Rather than leaning back and letting AI decide which memories you’d like to remember, you can curate your photos as you take them, favoriting the good ones within a minute or two to help you separate the wheat from the chaff later. The end goal here might be printing the very best to put in a frame, an album, or even just a dedicated photo storage box. In doing so, you’re actually crafting the first draft of a visual family history. When you do ultimately print those photos (more on this in a moment), you’ll give that history a physical presence and create a sort of legacy.
“We can take so many photographs on these phones and yet a curated box of images that are especially meaningful, it’s magical really,” Norris said. “And it’s something that your children will save and treasure and share with their children, and that will continue.”
How to get the best photos off your phone
Once you get into the habit of curating your photos as you go, the actual printing part of the process is pretty easy. There are plenty of services that let you upload photos directly from your phone and will then print them in various sizes and ship them to your house or pick them up in a store (like CVS or Walgreens). Finding the right one will depend on your budget and your preferences. Nations Photo Lab and Printique are two that get rave reviews for quality prints and easy uploads. I’ve personally used Shutterfly (which offers discounts to Costco and Amazon Prime members) and Mpix, which are popular and affordable enough, but I do think the price is reflected in the quality.
You may also want to print your own photos, which can be limited and liberating at the same time. I have not tested out any dedicated photo printers, but I would trust the reviews of the good gadget bloggers at Wirecutter and Rtings, who have. You can expect to spend a few hundred bucks on the printer alone if you go this route.
Then there are the album makers. Many companies that will print your photos, including the four I just mentioned, will also print albums and photobooks. Because the layout process for making these objects is both essential and time-consuming, you might be better off going with a company that specializes in albums and books. I used Artifact Uprising to make a book of my wedding photos and loved the results, although the price tag was steep. Mixbook is the service I’d like to check out next.
You could also just get an old-fashioned photo album and put the prints directly in it, as my mom does. This is as easy as buying an empty photo album or scrapbook and filling it with your prints. You want something that is, at minimum, acid-free and lignin-free, and should opt for uncoated polyester, polyethylene, or polypropylene sleeves for the sake of longevity. (In the United States, Gaylord Archival and University Products are top suppliers of these kinds of products to museums and hobbyists alike.) You can add newspaper clippings or ticket stubs or any other physical objects to tell a more complete story, something you definitely can’t do with your phone’s camera roll.
If you don’t want to go the album route, or you already have prints waiting to be transferred over, you should keep them in an acid-free archival storage box. Your finished photo books and albums also benefit from this treatment. (If you’re dealing with old photos or want to take extra measures, check out the Library of Congress’s guide to photo preservation.) You may also want to frame them, an old custom that has also never been easier in the digital age. I have a few things hanging on my wall that I framed through Framebridge, which will let you upload an image and receive a framed print. I’ve also heard good things about Level Frames, and one of my colleagues swears by Frame It Easy. Your local frame shop works too, of course, or you could grab frames at flea markets, garage sales, and thrift stores.
Regardless of who actually prints or frames the prints, the most important thing when it comes to building a habit of curating and printing your photos is to find a process that works for you. If AI-powered tools like Apple Memories do a good enough job of finding the needles in the veritable haystack of pictures on your iPhone, that’s fantastic. Print those photos. Make a book with them. If you prefer favoriting good photos as soon as you take them or putting your best shots in a digital album at the end of every month, keep it up. Just set aside time to print some of those.
“My advice is always just to start somewhere, and not to let any guilt over what you did or didn’t do in the past stall you from moving forward,” Marshall said. “Save the photos that you treasure.”
Reading decline happens during the big transition all middle-grade readers go through: moving from short illustrated chapter books to fully fledged novels. | Ryan McVay/Getty Images
Something happens to kids when they’re about 9 years old. Before then, they’re voracious little bookworms, with most of them saying they read for fun at least five days a week. After their ninth birthday, only 35 percent still do.
Experts call this phenomenon “the decline by 9,” and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to stop it. They talk up and cherish the books that break through: the Harry Potters and the Percy Jacksons, which got so many kids to keep reading through those danger years and which sold so well through millennial and Gen Z childhoods. Publishers keep looking for new books compelling enough to keep kids away from their screens and glued to the page.
But for the past 10 years, books for kids ages 8 to 12 (known as middle grade) have been selling less and less.
“It had been happening for maybe a decade, very very slowly,” said Joanne O’Sullivan, a children’s book author and reporter for Publishers Weekly. What had been a gradual slope got dramatically worse in 2020. And in the years since the pandemic, publishers have shut downmultiple middle-grade imprints, culminating in it happening twicethis year.
No one in publishing is entirely sure why kids books stopped selling, but there are two major theories. One says that children are no longer reading as much as they used to, because they are worse readers than previous generations were. The age group that used to happily devour Harry Potter is now distracted by iPads and YouTube shorts, so they never developed the ability to sit down and focus on a printed page. Their reading scores, which started falling in 2014, tell the tale.
The other theory says that the kids aren’t the ones who changed — publishers are. Starting in the 2000s, middle-grade books began getting long, with the average going from 174.5 pages in 2006 to 290 in 2016. According to this narrative, publishers flooded the market with books too difficult for their target audience. Kids responded by tuning out.
Whichever theory is true, the fact remains that all those ravenous 8-year-old bookworms depend on middle-grade publishers to keep on reading after they turn 9. The publishers who sell these books have built massive businesses on their ability to supply kids with exciting, addictive stories. If they’re failing, what will kids turn to for entertainment instead?
Key takeaways
Sales of middle-grade books have been declining for over a decade, but the decline worsened during and after the pandemic.
Some industry insiders argue that, under the influence of Harry Potter, publishers started putting out books too long for their young readers.
Others argue that today’s overscheduled kids no longer have the free time to devote to reading for pleasure and that the pandemic broke the middle-grade book discovery chain.
Looking forward, publishers are focusing on short and funny books heavily loaded with graphics.
The middle-grade novel of the future looks like the Dog Man books.
Why did tweens lose interest in books?
Reading decline happens during the big transition all middle-grade readers go through: moving from short illustrated chapter books to fully fledged novels. It’s a pain point.
“They’ve been doing short chapter books; they’ve been doing those leveled readers in the classroom; and, then, all of a sudden, what’s available to them is a lot chunkier, more challenging,” O’Sullivan said. She described the transition as “abrupt,” adding, “that’s not necessarily just for kids who are struggling with reading. That’s also for kids who like reading and are capable.”
“If you have a kid who’s not a very confident reader, a long book is very intimidating,” Kelly Dickinson, a middle school librarian in Bethesda, Maryland, told Vox. “They just stall out before they can even pick one, because they look at it and they think, ‘I can’t read that.’”
The shadow of Harry Potter, with its doorstopper volumes approaching a thousand pages, looms large here. Before Harry, a standard middle-grade novel might look like The Baby-Sitters Club volume The Truth About Stacey, which clocks in around 35,000 words. In a Substack post in April, Vicky Weber, an author, literary agent, and author coach for middle-grade books, pointed out that Sorcerer’s Stone was 76,944 words long, already pushing the limits of a middle-grade reader’s attention. After the books became phenomenons, they got much longer; Order of the Phoenix was 257,045 words, which is heftier than most adult novels. As publishers raced to catch up, their books began to expand, as well.
“When something becomes really popular, other publishers try to replicate that success,” Weber told Vox. “I think one of the things we didn’t take into account is how many Harry Potter readers were adults.”
While middle-grade books really did get longer, everyone I spoke to also acknowledges that kids’ reading scores really did drop, too. Kids have lost a lot of their unstructured play time to the grind of organized sports and music lessons, which means the empty childhood hours that are such perfect reading opportunities have vanished. “That time to just sit down and read is so truncated for a lot of kids, probably a lot of the kids who would have chosen to read a 400-page book if they had the time,” O’Sullivan said.
Then, there was the trauma of Covid, which smashed right into kids’ reading habits. “There were factors like schools and libraries closing, not much time with peers, and plenty of screen time during the pandemic,” said Kristen McLean, who runs the thought leadership collective Circana Entertainment Knowledge Group. All these bad effects, McLean said, that essentially “broke the discovery chain” for middle-grade fiction, in what she describes as “a perfect storm for lower literacy.”
The graphic novel pivot
The good news is that kids didn’t stop reading entirely during the pandemic. A few categories spiked: illustrated books, graphic novels, and manga. Jackie De Leo, now the chief merchant and publisher at Scholastic, was a vice president at Barnes & Noble during the pandemic, and she describes seeing kids with an unquenchable thirst for manga all through 2020.
“If you sat in a store and watched the manga section, you’d see little kids at lunch; you’d see them through the day; and, then, it would move into being adults,” De Leo said. “The only real constraint was actual inventory.”
Now, O’Sullivan says she keeps hearing middle-grade publishers say, “Let’s meet them where they are.” In practice, that appears to mean they’re focusing on books like the wildly popular Dog Man, a graphic novel series featuring a hero with the head of a dog and the body of a police officer.
“Dog Man is full color — so immersive,” De Leo said. “There’s these fun parts about the physical book, too, where you actually have to flap the pages and it makes an animation reel.” More importantly, she said, the books are funny. “Kids like things that are funny, and we were giving them some pretty serious things for a while — books for adults packaged as middle-grade books.”
The new ideal middle-grade book is short, punchy, and comedic and comes with a hefty dose of graphics. “Maybe it’s comics, maybe it’s illustrated novels,” O’Sullivan said. “Maybe, instead of just running text, they’ll have a panel with some text messages in it or something, just to break up the text to make the entire experience of reading less intimidating.”
This focus on breaking up the text means that publishing isn’t going back to what middle-grade books looked like before Harry Potter: short, simple chapter books à la The Baby-Sitters Club and Encyclopedia Brown. Those series weren’t hefty or overly serious, but they were massive bestsellers on the strength of their words, not their images. (It’s also worth noting that Scholastic adapted a few of the BSC books into graphic novels in 2006 and, then, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, picked up the project again in 2021.)
I asked De Leo if she thought the industry’s shift to including more illustrations suggests that kids have lost an ability to handle pure text, even when it is short and sweet.
But De Leo said that reading graphic novels represents a “different type of literacy” from that required to read Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, not a lesser one. She said that when she reads a graphic novel, she has trouble forcing herself to look at the images, not just the words. When she sees kids focusing on the pictures with ease, she takes it as evidence of “a real visual literacy that they have that I am jealous of.”
Dickinson, the librarian, said she wishes that publishers would put out comedic fiction in more formats. “A lot of kids want funny books, and a lot of the funny books are the illustrated hybrid stuff,” she said. “There’s not enough other funny books, in my opinion.”
Reenvisioning middle grade books
Experts are hopeful that publishers’ new direction will be enough to get kids reading again — and to get their parents to buy books. “This is probably the first year where I’ve heard people being optimistic and feeling excited about the new ideas that are coming,” O’Sullivan said. “People are beginning to be able to re-envision middle grade.”
The publishing shutdowns reflect the industry’s new direction. One of the three people to survive the March closure of Dial Books for Young Readers was an editor specializing in picture books and graphic novels. Macmillan is replacing the now-defunct Roaring Brook Press imprint, which also closed in March, with a new imprint specializing in nonfiction and illustrated books for kids, although it’s not yet clear what age group the new imprint will cater to.
With kids becoming stronger readers and books getting shorter, the hope is that they’ll meet in the middle.
“Kids in the middle-grade age are extremely self-centered and view everything through how it impacts them. Developmentally, that’s very normal,” Dickinson said. “But also, they’re incredibly empathetic at this age.” Reading fiction, which allows us to imagine how other people’s minds work, can be deeply impactful for this malleable age if kids can hold onto their love of reading long enough to reap the benefits.
“This is a time when reading habits and interest in reading can really die,” Dickinson said. “The hope is to help kids discover what kinds of books or what formats they like — and to show that there are ways in.”
Some professors might recoil at the idea of looking at their students’ dating app profiles. Not Gurit Birnbaum, a professor of psychology at Reichman University. She saw it as an opportunity.
Some of the young people in Birnbaum’s classes, as well as close friends, asked for her advice and turned their phones over to her. After poring over their bios and photos, she had some opinions.
What stood out were a few commonalities in how they presented themselves to potential partners: “Some profiles revealed almost nothing, others revealed too much. Some relied heavily on sexualized images, while many simply blended into a sea of interchangeable, generic profiles,” Birnbaum told Vox in an email. Many people seemed unsure of how to uniquely introduce themselves, instead offering a laundry list of qualities. She wondered which profiles sparked genuine interest and what characteristics these singles successfully transmitted. So she decided to research what more dating app users choose to reveal about themselves and how they go about it.
The results of thosestudies allowed Birnbaum and her collaborators to zero in on a few concrete strategies for crafting a dating profile that is not only authentic, but would get people to swipe right. Her findings, along with those from other researchers, can help everyday singles put their best foot forward.
“The goal shouldn’t be to turn yourself into a product,” Birnbaum said. “The real challenge is getting the right kind of attention without losing yourself in the process.”
Get creative — but don’t exaggerate
One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to online dating is that you must impress people and sell yourself, Liesel Sharabi, an associate professor in human communication at Arizona State University, told Vox. That mindset can lead you to present a slightly exaggerated or more idealized version of yourself. “That can be effective for getting a date or starting a conversation, but then by the time you actually end up meeting, it can lead to a lot of disappointment and even feelings that someone’s been misled, even if that’s not actually the case,” Sharabi said.
Instead of embellishing the details of your life, use your creative skills to package reality in an attention-grabbing way. Research shows daters value originality in dating app profiles — it signals intelligence and sense of humor. The profiles that were perceived as original contained vivid descriptions and imagery, metaphors, and frequent uses of adjectives and adverbs. Think: “I’m a star in the kitchen.” (They also contained elements of self-disclosure — more on that later.)
These specifics give daters an opening to start a conversation with you. Instead of simply saying you like running, you can express that same information with a cheeky call to action: “Tell me about your favorite running trails.”
When in doubt, Sharabi said, ask a friend to look over your profile to see if you’re being authentic or bending the truth — and take their feedback seriously.
Tell a story
Birnbaum’s research has shown that narrative presentations — in other words, short stories — are more effective at garnering empathy and interest than a list of likes and dislikes. Storytelling helps people see you as a person rather than a bunch of traits, which encourages perspective-taking and can foster empathy. “Empathy may be less the initial spark of attraction than the bridge from noticing someone to feeling that you might actually connect with them,” she said.
So consider reframing your best qualities in a way where you’re actively doing, experiencing, or reacting to something. In lieu of describing yourself as simply “funny,” Birnbaum suggests something more illustrative like, “I laugh at my own jokes first. It’s a character flaw.” Or instead of “outdoorsy,” try, “Most weekends I disappear into a trail, come back sunburned, and swear I’ll bring more water next time.”
“Those tiny stories bring a person to life in a way that generic descriptions simply don’t,” she said. And avoid using ChatGPT to craft these bios; people can spot AI-generated writing, and no one knows your life better than you do.
Be selective with how much you share
How much you choose to reveal about yourself is an art. Birnbaum found that sharing too little can be a signal you’re not serious about finding a relationship, while exposing too much may be overwhelming to potential dates. “Moderate disclosure seems to strike the right balance: enough information to create trust and a sense of connection, but not so much that curiosity disappears before the first date,” she said.
In the study on originality in dating app profiles, concrete self-disclosures were rated as more original. Think: “I start every day with waffles and ice cream,” over “I’m a foodie.”
Convey your willingness to get to know someone
Research has shown that feeling known by your partner predicts relationship satisfaction. But often, when singles create their dating app profiles, they can be a little too self-centric. You know what you’re looking for in a partner, after all. But it’s also important to communicate that you’d like to get to know someone else. So, how to signal your openness to understanding someone in your dating app profile?
An expert constructs a dating app profile
Girut Birnbaum, a researcher who has studied successful components of dating app profiles, wrote one for a hypothetical single, a woman in her mid-30s.
The photos: A shot of her laughing with friends over dinner, another of her on a hike, an image that shows her in her professional element, and a final picture from a vacation. They should be attractive/flattering, but they shouldn’t all be glamour shots.
The bio: Instead of the stereotypical, “I love traveling, cooking, nature, and spending time with friends,” Birnbaum says to punch it up: “Last year I decided I was finally going to learn how to make Thai food properly. Three cooking classes later, I can make a respectable curry, but my smoke alarm still participates in dinner more often than I’d like. On weekends, I’m usually somewhere outside with people I love, preferably followed by good food and a conversation about the meaning of life. Looking for someone curious, warm, and willing to occasionally eat my mistakes.”
In one study, Juliana Schroeder, a professor of management of organizations at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and her co-author found that dating app profiles that attracted the most interest were those who expressed an interest in knowing the person on the other end. In practice, that might look like expressing how you’re a good listener or your curiosity. Something as simple as, “I’m the kind of person who loves to ask questions. Be prepared,” gets the point across.
“Even if it’s something vague and just a signal that you’ll be the kind of person who will actually try to get to know them and try to support them,” Schroeder told Vox. “That’s what I would think people are missing in their profiles, and that’s what the research suggests that they could put in there.”
Use photos to accompany your bio
Photos are often the first thing other daters see on apps, so you’ll want to make sure they’re an accurate representation of you today. Not five years ago. Not with a hat or sunglasses on.
“A picture that would tell me if I show up somewhere, will I be able to recognize them based on the pictures they’re posting?” Sharabi, the human communication professor, said.
Beyond that, pictures can be a means of augmenting or contextualizing the words in your profile. In her research on storytelling in dating app profiles, Birnbaum found that photos that presented people’s lives narratively were more effective at garnering empathy than a random assortment of images. “Rather than posting a collection of disconnected flattering shots, choose attractive but authentic photos that show different facets of your life and, ideally, work together as a coherent slice of life,” she said. Put simply: If you like rock climbing, you may want to include an image of you bouldering at the gym.
Dating app profiles, if done correctly, can be a savvy way of presenting yourself to other daters. And, as the science shows, there are ways to be a little more strategic at creating them. Just think of your life as a story a potential partner will want to be a part of.
The Supreme Court decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo fundamentally shifted the Court’s approach to lawsuits seeking religious exemptions from state laws. | Bryan Dozier/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
The Republican Party’s supermajority on the Supreme Court was barely a month old when the justices handed down one of the most consequential religion decisions of the last several decades. It was Amy Coney Barrett’s first significant vote as a justice.
The issue in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020) was whether churches and other houses of worship were exempt from Covid-era restrictions on attendance. At the height of the pandemic, New York imposed strict limits on how many people could attend worship services at the same time — a rule that steered straight into the emerging partisan divide over whether pandemic restrictions had gone too far — although these restrictions were actually less stringent than the rules imposed on similar secular venues like theaters and lecture halls.
But the new majority’s decision in Roman Catholic Diocese rejected this restrained approach, and the decision fundamentally shifted the Court’s approach to lawsuits seeking religious exemptions from state laws. Before Republicans gained their supermajority on the Court, the justices gave states a fair amount of leeway to navigate the fraught political questions that arise when someone exercises their faith in a way that can harm other people, or limit their legal rights.
But now the justices typically make these calls themselves, and they usually do so in favor of religious conservatives. As a result, under the current Supreme Court, one of the Constitution’s most difficult balancing acts — the task of weighing when one person’s religious beliefs should overcome another person’s freedoms — has toppled over on the side of religious individuals and groups, often allowing them to violate the freedoms of others. This is especially true when lawsuits pit religious conservatives against people exercising sexual freedoms such as the right to use birth control or to marry a person of the same sex.
Prior to Roman Catholic Diocese, the rule was that religious institutions must comply with state law, so long as the state does not single people of faith out for inferior treatment. If a state closed all venues where people gather in auditorium-like settings, that was considered constitutional, even though some of those venues are churches. The courts would only get involved if a state tried to, say, close mosques but not movie theaters.
But Roman Catholic Diocese effectively ended that regime. The new majority held that churches may only be subject to the least restrictive rules that apply to any secular business, even if that business bears little resemblance to a house of worship. Indeed, Roman Catholic Diocese indicated that churches must be treated the same as outdoor facilities like “camp grounds” or “garages” where the risk of transmission, compared to a church, was minimal.
It was a clear sign of where the Court’s new majority wanted to take its religion cases. Under this majority, lawsuits brought by plaintiffs seeking religious exemptions from the law have largely been used to resolve cultural disputes between Democratic and Republican constituencies in favor of the latter.
This Court’s religion cases, in other words, fit a pattern that is also found in its decisions on topics as diverse as voting rights, abortion, race, and the question of whether President Donald Trump is subject to US law. The Republican justices seek to advance policy goals that are popular within their political party and unpopular among Democrats, and they aren’t afraid to overrule a wide range of foundational Supreme Court precedents in order to do so.
More broadly, the Court’s new approach to religion threatens to disrupt public schools’ ability to operate, undercut many anti-discrimination laws, and potentially turn every future conflict between cultural liberals and the religious right into a constitutional case that must be resolved by the Supreme Court.
Conflicts between religious and secular visions of America are inevitable under the Constitution
Many of theSupreme Court’s religion cases are driven by two separate clauses in the Constitutionthat often pull in opposing directions. The First Amendment contains two provisions governing religion, the clause protecting “free exercise” of faith, and a clause prohibiting the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” The first provision guarantees everyone the right to practice their faith, while the latter was historically understood to prohibit the government from trying to advance a particular religious belief.
As the Supreme Court said in 1971, there is an “internal tension” between these two provisions — in part because it is inevitable that the government will make decisions that conflict with many people’s sincere religious beliefs. Taxes fund wars that many Americans believe are sinful. Public schools teach values that may be at odds with what their students hear in their temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques. Not long after Congress prohibited racial discrimination by restaurants in 1964, the owner of a South Carolina barbecue joint claimed that he could not comply because serving Black people violated his white supremacist religion (he lost in the Supreme Court).
Before Roberts was crowned as leader of America’s judiciary, the Court often resolved this tension by deferring to democratically elected officials. The Court permitted states to subsidize religious schools, but did not require it. It gave people who object to laws on religious grounds some exemptions from those laws, but did not allow these exemptions to give religious business owners an unfair advantage against their competitors. As the Court said in Locke v. Davey (2004), there must be some “play in the joints” between the competing values espoused by the Constitution’s two religion clauses.
But the current Court, which often seeks to centralize power within itself, has pushed hard to take away states’ ability to resolve some of these tensions, and instead resolves them itself. Under the old regime, blue states would sometimes operate their schools, or otherwise conduct their affairs, in ways that upset religious conservatives. And that was okay because that’s how things work in a multistate democracy.
The Republican justices, in other words, have taken two vague constitutional provisions that espouse sometimes-conflicting values, and that reasonably can be read in many ways, and used them to impose their own values on the entire nation. The primary effects of these decisions are twofold: This Court often elevates religious freedom over other kinds of freedom, and it is rapidly tearing down the wall between church and state.
Religious freedom vs. others’ rights: The tug-of-war over the free exercise clause
The 20th-century Court cases that laid the groundwork for many modern debates over the Constitution’s free exercise clause are a bit of a muddle.
In the 1960s, the Court used expansive language to describe the scope of this clause, and how easy it should be for religious plaintiffs to seek exemptions from complying with the law. Sherbert v. Verner (1963) held that laws that burden someone’s faith must “be justified by a ‘compelling state interest in the regulation of a subject within the State’s constitutional power to regulate.’” As any law student who has passed their first semester of constitutional law will recognize, this “compelling state interest” language is associated with a legal test known as “strict scrutiny,” the most demanding standard that courts apply in constitutional cases. Thus, Sherbert seemed to hold that nearly everyone who seeks a religious exemption from a state or federal law should receive one.
But the Court soon grew uncomfortable with the implications of this broad language — should people who claim that God does not want them to pay taxes, for example, really be exempt from the obligation to do so? — and began to place limits on who could get exemptions.
The Court has ruled at least three times in favor of religious conservatives who sought an exemption from state laws or municipal policies that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people.
The expansive and easily available religious exemptions that Sherbert seemed to call for never actually came about. A 1992 study by legal scholar James Ryan found that federal appeals courts heard 97 free exercise of religion cases that applied Sherbert’s compelling interest test between 1980 and 1990, and they rejected 85 of those cases.
In United States v. Lee (1982), the Supreme Court rejected an employer’s demand for a religious exemption from paying Social Security taxes. And, in Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985), it ruled against a religious cult whose members worked in commercial businesses for no pay — the cult claimed that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws.
Both decisions were animated by a concern that a too-expansive reading of Sherbert would allow businesses that claimed religious exemptions to gain unfair advantages over their competitors. As the Court held in Lee, “when followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”
But then the Supreme Court went too far.
In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the objectors were two Native American men who lost their jobs and were denied employment benefits by the state of Oregon, because they used the drug peyote during a religious ceremony. The Court said that no one was exempt from any law so long as it applied equally to religious and nonreligious people alike.
The decision triggered instant backlash, with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) warning that Smith could lead to the government controlling “the selection of priests and ministers” and barring “the use of wine in communion service.”It’s likely that Smith was so widely disliked because the justices picked the worst possible case to put their foot down against religious objectors. The two men’s participation in a religious ritual did not injure anyone else. And the Court’s suggestion that the government may ban Native American religious practices smacked of colonialism.
RFRA sought to “restore the compelling interest test as set forth in Sherbert … and Wisconsin v. Yoder,” a 1972 case establishing that Amish communities may educate their own teenage children instead of sending them to public high schools.The law, in other words, was intended to be a reset button, returning to the pre-Smith status quo when plaintiffs seeking religious exemptions were more likely to prevail.
But achieving that goal required answering a difficult question: What did the Religious Freedom Restoration Act actually seek to restore? Was it the expansive reading of Sherbert that courts never actually implemented — ie., that nearly everyone who seeks a religious exemption should get one — or the actual practice that existed prior to Smith, which was far more restrained?
By the time Burwell v. Hobby Lobby(2014) reached the justices, the two major political parties both had divergent answers to this question. That case asked whether employers who object to contraception on religious grounds could refuse to provide their employees with health plans that cover birth control — despite a federal regulation establishing that these workers had a right to contraceptive coverage. The central question in Hobby Lobby, in other words, was whether one person’s religion may be invoked to diminish another person’s rights.
Most of the justices, the ones appointed by Republican presidents, answered this question with a resounding “yes.”
Dissenting in Hobby Lobby, DemocraticJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg laid out her political party’s concern that one person’s rights should not be used to diminish another’s. She rejected the view that “RFRA demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners’ religious faith.”
But there were five Republicans and only four Democrats on the Court when Hobby Lobby was decided, so Ginsburg’s view did not prevail. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion says that RFRA imposes an “exceptionally demanding” burden on the government when it wishes to enforce a law against a religious objector, and it ruled that a federal regulation requiring employers to offer contraceptive care in their health plans does not overcome this burden.
Yet even Alito seemed to recoil at the most expansive reading of Sherbert. His opinion concedes that “allowing tax-payers to withhold a portion of their tax obligations on religious grounds would lead to chaos.” So at least some aspects of Lee, the decision holding that private businesses must follow the same laws as their competitors, remain good law.
After Hobby Lobby, the Republican Party’s position appears to be that religious objections trump laws that embrace a more liberal view of sexuality, or that otherwise resolve cultural conflicts between Democratic and Republican constituencies, but people of faith may not claim an exemption from literally every single law. At the very least, everyone still has to pay taxes.
Since Hobby Lobby, this agenda has come to define the Court’s religious liberty cases, including a number of recent ones that limitstate governments’ ability to navigate political conflicts between religious conservatives and gay or trans people.While these cases are technically distinct from Hobby Lobby because RFRA only benefits plaintiffs who object to federal (that is, not state) laws, they also track the result in Hobby Lobby.
The Court has ruled at leastthreetimes, for example, in favor of religious conservatives who sought an exemption from state laws or municipal policies that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people.
The Roberts Court, in other words, inherited a muddled mess of precedents governing when religious objectors may seek exemptions from the law, and much of this area of the law remains fairly muddled. Thus far, for example, this Court has not revealed whether it wishes to overrule cases like Alamo Foundation, that protect the rights of workers — though when it took up a case in 2025 that could have called Alamo Foundation into question, the Court did not do so.
But one bit of clarity that the current Court has provided is that, when the interests of religious conservatives conflict with the interests of queer people, queer people lose.
The Roberts Court has used education cases to tear down the wall separating church and state
Many of the Court’s cases involving religion in public schools also empower religious conservatives in cultural fights against LGBTQ Americans. In Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), for example, the Republican majority held that religious parents who object to books with gay or trans characters must be allowed to opt their children out of lessons that use such books. And, in Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), the Republican justices appeared to hold that the Constitution requires public school teachers to out trans students to their parents, even if those students ask the teachers to keep their gender identity a secret.
But this Court has also advanced another project concerning religion, particularly in its cases about religion and education — dismantling the very idea that church and state must be separated.
The First Amendment’s establishment clause — which prohibits the government from making any law establishing a religion — was long understood to require a degree of separation between government and religion. The Roberts Court hasn’t simply abandoned this reading of the establishment clause; it’s indicated that the very idea of separation between church and state is unconstitutional.
For much of the 20th century, the Supreme Court maintained that the wall separating church and state was quite high. In Everson v. Board of Education(1947), for example, the Court declared that “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”
The Court abandoned this approach nearly a quarter century ago, in its 5-4 decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002). But Zelman merely held that states could offer vouchers that can pay for tuition at private religious schools if they want to, not that they were required to do so.
One thing that is emphatically not forbidden by the current Court is government funding of religious institutions that many Americans find offensive.
Similarly, before Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Court in 2005, the Court generally insisted that public schools must remain neutral on religion. When schools promote a religious view, according to Lee v. Weisman (1992), that places “subtle and indirect” pressure on students to conform to that view, and leaves the student with “a reasonable perception that she is being forced by the State to pray in a manner her conscience will not allow.”
Yet, while Lee was consistent with mid-20th-century precedents regarding religion in schools, the consensus favoring government neutrality on religion was already fading by the early 1990s. Lee was a 5-4 decision, and its author, the moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, often argued that his more liberal colleagues read the establishment clause too expansively. Three years before Lee, for example, Kennedy dissented from a decision barring a county from displaying a Nativity scene in its courthouse. This decision, Kennedy wrote, “reflects an unjustified hostility toward religion.”
This idea — that government neutrality toward religion is itself a form of hostility against people of faith — could often be found in conservative critiques of the Court’s establishment clause decisions from this era. In a 1989 essay that foreshadowed many of the Roberts Court’s later decisions, legal scholar (and future federal judge) Michael McConnell made the then-audacious argument that the Constitution requires the government to subsidize religious schools.
The idea is that states typically tax all of their residents to pay for public schooling, but only some children actually attend these schools. Other families choose to pay out of their own pockets for private religious education, while still other families would prefer to send their children to a religious school but cannot afford it. This familiar system, where public schools are available to everyone and private schools are only available to people who can pay the tuition, McConnell claimed, is a form of discrimination against religious people.
“That some parents wish their children to receive education in a religious environment should not deprive them of their fair share of the public resources devoted to education,” McConnell wrote. They pay the same taxes as families who send their kids to public schools. And so, McConnell argued, these religious families should be allowed to use that tax revenue to pay for their child’s private religious education.
Something close to the vision McConnell laid out in this 1989 essay is now the law. The seminal case is Carson v. Makin (2022), which involved a Maine program that provides private school vouchers for students in sparsely populated areas where it is not cost-efficient for the state to operate a public school.
Maine law provides that these vouchers may only be used at “nonsectarian” schools, and not religious ones. But, according to Roberts’s majority opinion inthe decision, a system that “pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious” is “discrimination against religion.” Carson, in other words, turns the old rule from Everson on its head. What was once forbidden is now mandated.
More broadly, the Court’s Republicans have ground the establishment clause down to such a tiny nub that little of it remains. For many years, the Court read that clause to forbid the government from advancing a particular religious view, but the Court overruled the older cases prohibiting government endorsements of religion inKennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), and they replaced them with something much narrower. Under this Court’s new test, the government can only violate the establishment clause by making “a religious observance compulsory” or otherwise coercing nonbelievers to engage in a “formal religious exercise.”
So the government cannot arrest you if you skip church services. Nor can a government official hold a gun to your head and force you to declare that Jesus is your personal lord and savior. But it is not clear that, under this Court’s approach to the establishment clause, anything else is forbidden. One thing that is emphatically not forbidden by the current Court — indeed, under cases like Carson, it is now required in many states — is government funding of religious institutions that many Americans find offensive.
McConnell criticized the old regime for taxing religious parents to pay for secular education they find objectionable, but the converse is also true about the current regime — it taxes secular parents to pay for religious education that many Americans also find objectionable.
One nationwide solution
The unfortunate reality is that, in a pluralistic society, it is impossible to come up with a legal regime that won’t impose obligations on anyone that they object to on religious grounds. If a nation taxes citizens, some of them will object to how that money is spent. If it provides public schools, some families will object to the values taught in those schools. And if it changes which values are taught, some other families will object to the new lessons.
The Roberts Court’s solution to these inevitable conflicts has largely been to resolve them in ways that favor members of the Republican Party’s coalition, such as religious conservatives, that burden members of the Democratic Party’s coalition, such as LGBTQ people, and that advance longtime Republican Party goals such as making private school vouchers widely available.
That’s certainly one way to do constitutional law. The GOP controls the Supreme Court, and to the victor go the spoils.
But it is far from clear why many of these decisions should be made by a handful of unelected lawyers in black robes, especially in a nation that purports to be a democracy — and that also purports to be a federation of many diverse states. There was a lot of wisdom in Zelman’s approach, which allowed Maine to devise an education policy that makes sense for Maine and Alabama to devise an education policy that makes sense for Alabama.
At the very least, cases like Zelman did not claim that the Constitution, with its two vague and often-contradictory approaches to religion, calls for one nationwide solution to the question of how to run a country made up of people of many faiths.
Beyoncé performs onstage during the Renaissance World Tour at Arrowhead Stadium on October 1, 2023, in Kansas City, Missouri. | Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood
From a fan perspective, seeing the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, attending the US Open and sipping on Honey Deuces, and getting a seat to Olivia Rodrigo’s Unraveled Tour and sing-screaming to “Stupid Song” couldn’t be more different. But they do have one thing in common: They’re all expensive.
Attending a live event has become a luxury purchase. Not that long ago in 2019, the average price of a concert ticket was $92. Maybe your seats weren’t great, but you could afford to be in the room. Now the average price has risen to around $133 for face value, and you’re likely spending way more to see the biggest names in music and sports. And thanks to Live Nation’s grip on the music and sports ticketing industry, ever-increasing service fees, and features like dynamic pricing and a ruthless secondary resale market, it certainly feels like we’re not seeing any relief from these sky-high costs anytime soon.
For those who, say, can’t afford a $1,845 nosebleed ticket to see the Nova Knicks or a $2,000 Olivia Rodrigo resale seat, that means watching at home, or, if something isn’t eventually streamed, just missing out entirely.
Looking at a seating map and seeing exactly how much ticket prices are changes your perception of the people lucky enough to attend. Like, what kind of person is spending that much money to sit in the very last row? How do they move through this universe with that much money to spend on bad seats? Is everyone secretly rich? Is this just a matter of fiscal irresponsibility? What is going on????
While Vox cannot speak to how everyone in attendance is paying for their tickets, we did talk to one person who was willing to share.
Enter: Craig, a 44-year-old living in the Bay Area, who makes roughly $180,000 per year. Craig spent more than $15,000 seeing Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour six times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why tickets for live events cost so much
The price of going to see concerts and sporting events in the US is expensive, and it always feels like the next thing you’re going to is going to be even pricier. There are a few reasons for this:
Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment’s tight grip on the industry: Live Nation controls so much when it comes to artists, ticketing, and venues that it’s virtually impossible to field any kind of competition. In April, a federal jury in New York ruled that Live Nation was an illegal monopoly, but the ramifications of this verdict still remain to be seen.
The resale market: An ongoing problem for fans is the resellers and bots that gobble up tickets. This shuts fans out and leaves them with few options other than hopping onto the resale market where prices can skyrocket.
“Service” fees: If you want to buy a ticket to the LA Olympics in 2028, you’ll also have to pay a 24 percent service fee per ticket. These fees are now standard with live events — despite crackdowns — and are an enduring source of frustration for fans.
I want to know, are you a secret heiress? A billionaire oligarch? How does one afford to see Beyoncé six times?
No, I’m not an heiress. I’m not unfortunately a billionaire — well, no, billionaires are bad, so don’t quote me on that. But it’s funny, one of the first things that comes to mind is my fandom for so many artists is expansive, but also I just spend money on certain things and not other things. My mom’s big motto in life was, “We’re making memories.” And so for me, I’m never going to regret going to Beyoncé six times. I’m going to regret only seeing her Renaissance tour twice.
One of my big regrets is not going to the Renaissance World Tour.
I realized a lot of it is — it’s the only place where you can really have this communal experience with people that are in your same delusional mindset. With Cowboy Carter, I was at the very first show in LA, and then I had planned to go to three shows. But then it just became this thing that got into my soul and was like, “I need to keep going.”
I don’t mind putting this into print or whatever, but I’m an addict, an alcoholic who’s been in recovery for decades, and so it’s easy for me to get hooked on things, but this is such a pure, very expensive way to have joy.
What was it about Cowboy Carter that compelled you to keep going? Was it because you knew Renaissancewas amazing? Was it because you saw the movie?
Yeah, I saw the movie four times, but I just kind of knew. And my big three are Björk, Fiona Apple, and Beyoncé. And so Björk is in Iceland most of the time, thank God. Fiona Apple as much as —
Wait, wait, thank God because of your wallet?
Yes.
And Fiona Apple, I’ve seen her many times, but she just doesn’t tour. As much as I’d love her to, she just doesn’t. And I will see Robyn three times this year. I’ve seen Carly Rae Jepsen as many times as I can. But with Beyoncé, it’s like I know there’s a limited amount of how much she’s going to be doing what she’s doing. And with Act III at some point coming up, there’s a real push that I need to get as much as I can. And it sounds greedy, but I don’t feel bad taking up a ticket or space, when I enjoy it as much as I do.
Take me through Cowboy Carter. You said you were going to initially see it three times.
Right.
You ended up seeing it how many times? Six?
I saw it six times.
Take me through that mentality — from three, how’d that balloon six?
I knew that I was going to see the first three shows. I had planned with a boyfriend who’s now an ex that was part of this whole process. I was going to go to the first show, the second show, and the third show, and then I was going to be done. But I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn’t probably done. And it’s so funny because my first outfit was pretty homegrown, a just-barely-put-together cowboy hat that I bought at the show. And then by the time I was at the fifth and the sixth show, I had a custom-made gold outfit.
It became this thing where I can’t quite explain how I ended up going to six shows other than it was this snowball rolling downhill.
What kind of tickets did you have? Were they all the same?
I was in the section right by the catwalk. So it was like, Oh shit, I have to go do this againin the same spot. What I would’ve done differently is I would’ve seen it from way up above. I would’ve seen it from cheaper seats.
What was your more expensive ticket?
I mean, honestly, my most expensive ticket was the last show and I paid $2,200. And at that point, it had built so much that there was no way I wasn’t going to not be where I wanted to be. It just was like, “Nope, this is happening.”
Tell me about that. You have amazing tickets. You’re up close…
The last show, I was alone in Club Ho-Down. The amount of friends that I made and the amount of celebrities that I saw — to be in that environment with people that are on your same level and people are screaming and crying and know exactly what’s going to happen. And then when Shaboozey comes out or Jay-Z comes out or Destiny’s Child comes out — I’m getting chills just thinking about it. I can’t explain how I led myself to going to six, but once you’ve got $8,000 on your credit card, what is $12,000?
I — well, $4000 more?
I know.
Did you buy them all at one time or was it after you saw the first two?
I had planned the first three and then I had a friend who I went to New York with and we talked ourselves into going to New York. And then in the back of my mind I was like, “I have to go to the last two shows.”
I don’t regret it. I honestly probably will go to eight for Act III. But I will also be more strategic and I will get a seat that is a lot cheaper for a couple of shows.
Now I’m going to ask you about the painful stuff. So you said if you’re already $8,000 down, what’s $12,000. But did you plan for it? Can you talk me through the financial planning of this?
There wasn’t really any. The breakup that I had happened after my New York show. And so I think my delusional sort of mania kicked in and I was like, “Fuck it, I’m going to spend $800 on an outfit that’s custom-made.” I’m going to go to both shows at the end and just — it got me through a really tough summer, and it was something that I don’t regret.
How does that work on a credit card? You said that you recently paid it off, right? Is that two years later?
It’s a year later. I live in San Francisco. I have a pretty good job, but also I work in education, and I’ve worked in education my whole life. So it was a lot of my interest, I paid a lot of fees, I’m sure, it takes so long to pay it off, and I was adding to it the whole year. I am not good with money. I wish I were. But again, I don’t have aspirations to own property yet, and I don’t have children.
Beyoncé is your big expense of the last couple years.
Yeah, pretty much.
And again, I feel embarrassed about that a little bit because I have friends where one spouse, their entire salary goes to childcare. And I’m like, oh, that sounds not fun.
But think of it this way: that’s so much Beyoncé that you could be experiencing instead of having a kid.
Yeah.
So Act III is rumored. Would you do it again?
Oh, absolutely. Like I said, I’m going to possibly go to, I think, between five and eight shows depending on. And one of my work friends, we talk about what’s happening in the world and we kind of decided that 2026 is Jay-Z’s year.
He has his shows. He has a show on her birthday. So I’m hoping that means the album doesn’t come out until 2027, which means the tour would be 2028, which means I have enough time to save, enough time to put some money away and be a little bit more strategic.
Do you have a limit of how much you’re willing to spend?
On Beyoncé? I think the gay math, the boy math, that I do in my head is if I see it in chunks, it’s not as bad. The first time I looked at the whole thing was yesterday, and I looked at hotels and flights, merch, and tickets. But if I see it in little bits, I’m like, “Well, that’s not that much.” And I don’t think about how it adds up.
If Beyonce was like, “Oh, here’s my last show.” Is there a limit?
Anything up to $5,000 probably if it was a super important show or last show and I had the opportunity to do that. My parents have seen a lot of shows. That’s something sort of that I had grown up with — going to see artists.
And the real problem is Beyoncé has set this financial bar that now I almost feel like I could spend that kind of money on anyone. The fact that I’m seeing Robin in LA for $300, I’m like, “Oh my God, of course I’m going to go to three shows that week.”
Can I ask you, when was the first time you saw Beyoncé?
I mean, this is embarrassing to admit, but it was Renaissance.
Oh my gosh.
I know. And one of my big regrets is not going to see her earlier.
It was 2016, and I just was like, “I can’t afford $1,000.” It’s ridiculous to say that now. And I’ve always been a fan. I had mix tapes in the ’90s with “Say My Name” and all the Destiny’s Child songs, and I’ve always been a fan of hers, but it really kicked into gear at self-titled or Lemonade. And that makes me sound like a fake fan, but that’s not true. It’s just seeing her live, it really brought it to a new level.
I was going to tell you that I saw her when she was touring that album — the “Love on Top” album…
4.
4. I saw her at Barclays and it was only, I want to say, $200 for the lower bowl right off the floor. It’s obviously a lot more now.
I honestly don’t know how some people afford it. I know some people save and save and save to go to one show and they don’t have a credit card or they don’t want to put things on a credit card. I know how privileged I am to have the ability to put something on a credit card, pay it off eventually — I live in the Bay Area and have a job that’s a pretty good job, blah, blah, blah.
For a normie, what you spend on Beyoncé is mind-blowing, but I’m sure there are people that you met at Cowboy Carterthat may have spent a lot more than you, right?
Oh, yeah. There was some video that popped up, I think it was from Renaissance, but it was like, “This is my 26th show.” And Beyoncé read the sign and stepped back a bit. I don’t remember what the exact number was [it was 35]. When I was in the pit at the very last show, it wasn’t abnormal to be where I was, and be like, “I’ve seen her six times.”
So when it comes to the most serious Beyhivers, some may consider you a casual fan?
Yeah. I mean, I’m in it, but I also feel like I’m a person that always goes to a lot of shows, and this is a little bit of a light year for me just because no one huge is touring for me, but she’s coming.
“The system sets people up for conflict, sets people up for war.” | Eleni Kalorkoti for Vox
Rebecca Feinglos never expected to get divorced. She’d been with her partner for nine years, and married for six, but finally she had to admit to herself that her relationship had taken an abusive turn.
It was 2021 when she decided to end it. But Feinglos was surprised to discover then that the state she was living in, North Carolina, requires couples to reside in separate homes continuously for a full year before they can even file.
“In amicable divorces you could lie, but I did not have an amicable divorce,” she told me. “It took 18 months for my divorce to be signed by a judge, and we did not have children.”
When she was finally out of her marriage she felt angry. She knew that many people could not afford to live in separate places, let alone pay for the attorneys needed to navigate all the fraught legal proceedings. Feinglos, a former state government employee with a master’s degree in public policy, started researching divorce laws nationwide. “It was so confusing even for me,” she said. “This was before ChatGPT, and all the Google search results were from family attorneys saying, ‘Oh this is really complicated, you definitely need to hire us to help you.’” She has spent the years since pushing to change those laws.
North Carolina is one of a handful of states, including South Carolina and Arkansas, that require couples to live separately for a set period before they can file for no-fault divorce. Most states make couples wait after they file, a “cooling-off” period meant to give spouses a chance to change their minds. In Wyoming, it’s 20 days. In Missouri, 30. In California, couples need to wait six months, and having children can stretch the timelines further. In some states the clock only starts when one’s spouse is formally served, which means a husband or wife who’s hard to track down can add weeks to the wait before it even begins.
“The system sets people up for conflict, sets people up for war,” said Erin Levine, a former divorce lawyer who founded a company that helps people navigate divorce outside the traditional law firm model. “In some states it’s called a ‘petition,’ in some states it’s called a ‘complaint,’ the forms say ‘spouse v. spouse’ — you are being sued.”
This issue runs, inevitably, into the culture wars. Today some conservatives are trying to make it even harder to get divorced, part of a broader push to strengthen the traditional nuclear family, built on the argument that children fare better when parents stay together. Over the last few years Republican lawmakers in states like Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas have considered new restrictions on no-fault divorce, which lets a person end a marriage without proving their spouse did something wrong. Others have proposed expanding so-called covenant marriages, which require counseling before the wedding and allow divorce only for specific reasons like adultery or abuse. House Speaker Mike Johnson has long endorsed making divorce harder, and Vice President JD Vance has complained that no-fault divorce allows people to “shift spouses like they change their underwear.” (Faced with criticism, a spokesperson later said that Vance does not support changes to divorce law.)
But as more people come forward with stories of the financial cost, family stress, and even physical danger of extended divorce proceedings, there’s a growing push to address their complaints by making it easier to separate and divorce rather than harder. In 2023, Maryland lawmakers eliminated fault-based divorce entirely, cut Maryland’s separation mandate from a year to six months, and let couples count as separated even while living under the same roof. Washington, DC, has gone further. The same year, the DC Council unanimously scrapped its requirement that couples separate before divorce, and in Virginia, a law that took effect just last month lets people get in front of a judge on the first day they separate, instead of waiting six months or a year to sort out custody, support, and who stays in the house.
The issue has gotten more attention on social media over the last few weeks, as Jen Hamilton and Hadley (Vlahos) Fairley, two bestselling authors with more than 7 million followers across Instagram and TikTok, have started speaking out about how divorce laws in their respective states affect women like them. Hamilton, who is based in North Carolina and separated from her husband in June, has blasted the “asinine, outdated, and paternalistic laws” that keep people trapped in marriages, and has been fundraising on her platforms to help women afford to escape their unsafe relationships.
Fairley, based in Mississippi, has been recounting the many court filings, legal fees, and emotional pain she endured for nearly three years trying to end her marriage. A no-fault divorce in Mississippi requires both spouses to agree to it, and when they don’t, the only way out is to prove in court that your spouse did something wrong, like adultery or desertion. In May, after eleven days in court, a judge finally granted Fairley a divorce, determining that her ex-husband’s conduct met the state’s legal standard for “habitual cruel and inhuman treatment,” citing a DUI he lied about under oath, more than $200,000 in secret trading losses that were mostly her earnings, a cancer diagnosis he faked to get her sympathy, and months of messages the judge called harassing and manipulative. Custody and the division of their assets are still unresolved, and more trial days are set for September.
“I understand burden of proof for a murder trial, but when it’s your personal life it’s very different,” Fairley told me. “I mean, you’re having our friends and our family go on the stand and testify to what they witnessed and it’s incredibly intrusive…even my therapy notes were subpoenaed.”
Feinglos has been watching this all, and feeling cautiously hopeful that a reform bill pending in her state’s legislature might finally gain traction. “I do believe we’re at an inflection point,” she said.
The wait itself is the danger
Until the late 1960s, ending a marriage meant proving in court that your spouse had done something the state recognized as wrong, like cheating or abandonment. The burden fell on whoever wanted out, and meeting it often meant airing intimate details that judges weighed differently depending on whether a husband or a wife was asking. Starting in 1969, when California enacted the first no-fault law, states began letting couples divorce without assigning blame. Most followed within a decade, though holdouts like New York lingered. Divorce rates, already rising, peaked around 1980.
The laws mandating divorce waiting periods carry the logic of that earlier system. States tend to justify them by saying couples might reconcile if they’re given time. States also argue that decisions about custody and property shouldn’t be made quickly in the heat of the moment. Underneath both rationales is a theory that married households are valuable to the public, especially where children are involved, and so the state has a responsibility to slow couples down rather than treating marriages like contracts either side can simply cancel.
Critics have long argued that the first rationale doesn’t hold up, since couples rarely reconcile during the waiting period and few people end a marriage on a whim. The second, they say, ignores what the wait actually does to someone leaving an unhappy or unsafe marriage, which is put them in danger. Separation is one of the most dangerous periods in an abusive relationship, and researchers have found that homicide risk climbs when an abuser senses they are losing control. Some research suggests a court’s intervention can make things worse rather than better if it provokes retaliation without actually getting the victim away from the abuser.
Cerina Fairfax spent nearly two years in the same house as the husband she was trying to divorce, former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax. Up until last month, Virginia required couples with children to be separated a year before they could file, though permitted them to spend that year under one roof, so long as they could show a judge the marriage was genuinely over. When she finally filed for divorce in July 2025, her husband — a lawyer, representing himself — argued she hadn’t specified that she intended their separation to be permanent and in January a judge agreed with the technicality. Cerina Fairfax was told she could amend her complaint and try again. At some point during the proceedings she installed cameras throughout their house.
On March 30 a judge granted her sole physical custody and ordered Justin Fairfax to move out within a month. He was still there when he shot her in the house in the middle of April and then killed himself. Their two teenagers were home, and the cameras were recording.
Virginia’s new divorce law had just been signed days earlier. Tucked into it was an order for a work group to study whether the state should scrap fault-based divorce altogether. Activists pushing officials to take that next step point to the Fairfax episode, arguing it shows the dangers of prolonged divorce proceedings with a spouse who could become unstable or threatening. The report is due to the legislature in December.
Courtenay Schwartz, the legal and policy director for the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance, told me that while the change that just took effect in Virginia is a big one, her state’s laws still make it “very onerous” to get divorced, noting that the requirement to be separated still stands.
“If you have someone interested in dragging out the process which Justin Fairfax was, it can really get drawn out and run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she said. “It’s just prohibitively expensive, especially if you are experiencing domestic violence.”
Schwartz says Virginia Democrats, who control both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office, have grown increasingly interested in “access to justice” issues, meaning reforms that make the legal system navigable for people who can’t afford a lawyer. This has been driven partly by a 2022 Legal Services Corporation study that found 92 percent of the civil legal problems experienced by low-income Americans received inadequate or no legal help.
North Carolina’s governor tells Vox he backs reform
Woodson Bradley, a Democratic state senator in North Carolina, won her first race in 2024 by just 209 votes, in a district the Republican-controlled legislature had redrawn the year before. She holds one of the most competitive seats in the state.
Now Bradley is the lead sponsor of SB 626, which would cut North Carolina’s separation requirement from a year to six months and let survivors of domestic violence file for divorce immediately, with no separation at all. It’s been stalled in committee for nearly a year and a half.
The issue is personal to Bradley, who experienced domestic violence in her 20s while living in another state. “When I left I was tracked down and beaten, and there were no real stalking laws back then in the 1990s,” she told me. She later moved to North Carolina, remarried someone “who I thought was wonderful, had two kids, and then things weren’t wonderful anymore.”
Bradley soon found herself in yet another abusive, coercive relationship, fleeing with her children, an experience she describes as “the most brutal thing I’ve ever been through.” It took her years to finally get a divorce, because her ex-husband continued to contest and extend the proceedings.
Jen Hamilton, the famous labor and delivery nurse and author of the New York Times bestselling book Birth Vibes, has been raising the issue on her platforms and talking with Bradley about changing North Carolina’s laws.
“Jen speaking out is very much changing things,” Bradley told me, adding that although the issue is very partisan in North Carolina, five Republican lawmakers have reached out to her recently about her bill. Past efforts at reform in North Carolina have failed, including in 2015, 2019, and 2021.
North Carolina’s lame-duck Senate leader Phil Berger, who lost his Republican primary in March, did not return requests for comment but a spokesperson for North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Josh Stein told me he supports reform.
“North Carolinians don’t need government making their life harder, especially during some of their darkest times,” they said. “The Governor is willing to work with anyone to ensure our laws are more appropriate for the world we live in today.” Last year Stein signed a bill that made habitual domestic violence a felony.
For Rebecca Feinglos, the proposals moving through Raleigh are still catching up to what she already lived through.
“I remember the line in my divorce decree allowing me to change my last name back to my maiden name, my now late father’s last name,” she said. “Every moment I had to use my married name throughout the proceedings felt like a reminder that I was still stuck in a life I didn’t want.”
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