We are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic: More than half of Americans say they feel isolated, and we’re getting together less and less. In 2023, only about 4 percent of adults said they went to a party on a weekend or holiday.
According to Imogen Willetts, a party historian and author of the book Up All Night: A History of Going Out, this moment is an outlier.
“For most of human history, the experiences that we associate with nightlife — drinking, dancing, music, hedonism — those experiences were simply part of religion because religion was so all-encompassing,” she told Vox.
If parties are so ingrained in humankind, then, what are we missing when we don’t get out the door on a Friday night anymore? And what lessons can we learn from the turnups of yore? We get into all of that and more — including how to throw a great party and how to be a good guest — on the latest episode Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Willetts, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
Can you talk about the role religion played in early nightlife? Because I think we often think of religion and partying as two separate things, but that was not the case for all of history, was it?
[Religion] contained people’s hedonistic instinct. There was nothing really outside of it. And so there’s even evidence, which I love thinking about this, that the churchgoing experience in medieval England was actually quite rowdy and quite raucous.
On feast days there would be drinking, there would be dancing. And there’s one theory that wooden pews were introduced in Wells Cathedral in England to subdue the dancing because it was so raucous. And so in some sense, it takes us a while to get to nightlife because we sort of didn’t need it for a very long time. Religion contained hedonism quite comfortably within it.
Seventeenth-century Japan, I would say, is the beginning of modern nightlife because we have these commercial party scenes, nightlife environments, which have nothing to do with religion,
“Whether it’s at a sports match or a concert stadium, and even within religion — that is collective effervescence.”
Crucially, they’re also separate from court. Another part of party scenes is court spectacle — think Louis XIV and Versailles and all of that stuff that was contained within these monarchical structures. So the first real nightlife destination is Yoshiwara, which was built on the outskirts of Edo, which is now Tokyo.
The idea of church being a place to party is so interesting. I do get the same feeling I get at church when I’m on the dance floor and I hear Kaytranada. I can imagine how these religious experiences allowed people to access that feeling of release through music and through dance.
An expression that I came across when researching the book that I think really wonderfully kind of captures the essence of nightlife and partying is this term coined by the sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1912, which is “collective effervescence.” That’s the feeling that we experience during peak communal experiences.
Whether it’s at a sports match or a concert stadium, and even within religion — that is collective effervescence. That is the same sensation, that surge of euphoria that people feel on dance floors. I think parties and nightlife are such an important way to access this very important human feeling, particularly in societies that are increasingly atheist or increasingly secular.
We need nightlife to have these communal euphoric experiences and feel part of something bigger than ourselves.
You’ve written about how, yes, parties are fun, but they’re also at the epicenter of some pretty important cultural and societal shifts.
I think nightlife is very uniquely poised to allow for experimentation and innovation and transgression. Also, in a very practical way, if you’re part of the abstract expressionist scene of mid-century New York or something, you need somewhere to meet and talk to people and figure out how you’re going to sell your work that’s like nothing people have ever seen before.
These social spaces play a really, really important role in culture. The abstract expressionist artists were hanging out in the Cedar Tavern, and then you have things like the Viennese Secession Movement and Cabaret Fledermaus was part of that meeting space.
Similarly, you get things like dance and music that’s very much created for dance floors, for clubbing, for nightlife: the can-can and then disco and then techno. Nightlife has been so crucial to the propulsion of culture.
A lot of this is happening in the club, but what about parties happening in private homes?
One of the great examples of people opening up their homes in a sense of turning the home into a club was turn-of-the-century New Orleans. On Saturday nights, people would host fish fries: Basically, when you would open up your home to the public, you would charge entry at the door. Once inside, people were treated to this amazing spread of food, drink, and there would be bands that would perform. It was often a way for households who were struggling with rent payments to earn some extra cash.
It happened again in Harlem in the 1920s. Langston Hughes writes about the Saturday night rent parties, where people’s apartments would be opened up in the exact same way. He said they were more interesting than anything that was going on in the cabarets and the clubs. He was going to those as often as he could and collecting the invitations for them.
People would write their address on business cards, leave them in different shops and pubs and hairdressers or whatever, and then you would pick them up and then go to the party. Langston Hughes collected them, and they now are randomly in a Yale archive of all places.
As you think of parties over the centuries, are there elements that all the best parties have in common?
At their very core essence, you need good music, you need good lighting, and I think also you need to create this atmosphere where the sense that anything can happen. What you want is for the people that are at your party to feel like they can behave differently or do something a little bit wild.
I think that there’s something very satisfying in experiencing a domestic world upturned. I think seeing the kitchen become a gloomy cocktail bar, the living room becoming a dance floor — there’s something very satisfying in experiencing that.
It goes back to what the heart of nightlife culture or party culture is all about. We want to shed our daily lives. You want that sense of slight disorder that makes people feel alive.
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In 2024, Donald Trump’s victory was powered in large part by massive gains with Latino voters. He won 48 percent of those voters that year, up from 36 percent in 2020 and 28 percent in 2016. But now, that support is plummeting; Trump’s approval rating among Latinos who voted for him recently fell from 93 percent to 66 percent, where it was at the beginning of his second term.
Why? It has a lot to do, as with everything these days, with the economy.
It was the same in 2024. During that election, voters were experiencing rising costs and stagnant wages — the same trend that has continued until today. In 2024, though, Joe Biden and his administration — which also meant Vice President Kamala Harris — took the blame from all voters, and particularly Latinos. Today, the blame is falling on Trump.
America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Stephanie Valencia, who co-founded Equis Research, a political research firm that specializes in Latino voters, to unpack some of these recent shifts and explain them.
“I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup,” she said on the podcast. “And so what that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more.”
That’s why, when the economy is bad, this group is primed to be a “swinging giant” in US politics, Valencia explains — and right now, it appears to be swinging hard against Trump.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.
Equis has called Latinos one of the last great wild cards in American politics. Is that because of some of the double-digit swings that we’ve seen among this voting group over the past few elections?
Yes, it absolutely has to do with that. Latinos often get given the title the “sleeping giant,” which I just want to get rid of from everybody’s vocabulary.
We should be called the “swinging giant” based on how much shift we have seen election to election. A third of Latinos consider themselves kind of independent or apolitical, and that swinging middle really is deciding every single election.
Your playbook gets into messengers and particularly how we reach folks where they are. It makes a Spanish-Spanglish distinction talking about the different types of media that Latino voters consume.
I wanted to ask, in that vein, what’s the single biggest mistake campaigns make in terms of not reaching folks where they are?
Oh man, how long do we have so I can tell you how many mistakes? They’re really simple unforced errors. I’m going to give a very concrete and simple example that I think illustrates that.
Look, I’m Latina. I grew up speaking mostly English, but I listen to Spanish-language radio. I watch a lot of YouTube, and on YouTube I’m watching people like Karol G and Carin León. A lot of people — a lot of Latino swing voters — have the same media consumption habits that I do.
The first problem or challenge that a lot of candidates make is they just simply translate their English ad into Spanish. And that is, to me, one of the biggest mistakes because there are a lot of things that people want to be communicating in Spanish that don’t translate word for word. There are sayings in Spanish that don’t translate directly from English or more direct ways you can communicate.
I’m sure it immediately reads Google Translate rather than an original message for said community.
Exactly. So that’s mistake No. 1. Mistake No. 2 is when they’re deploying that ad digitally, as a proxy for talking to people, they’re going to use Spanish-language browser settings. So they say, “We don’t want people who speak English to see the Spanish-language ad.”
So the way they find that set of voters is just by going to people who have Spanish-language browser settings.
Like I said, I don’t have a Spanish-language browser setting. Everything I consume online is set in English on Chrome, but I still watch a lot of content in Spanish on YouTube.
So you’re missing a voter like me who’s going to see a Spanish language ad from a James Talarico or a Manny Rutinel and be turned on by it because I’m going to say, “Hey, that candidate’s speaking to our community. That candidate has enough respect to develop a Spanish-language ad.”
We did some testing a couple of years ago that showed that over 70 percent of Latinos who see an ad in Spanish think that party or candidate cares more about Latinos. It matters that much.
Let’s stay in 2024 for a second longer. Your research found that Project 2025 and Trump’s mass deportation plans were not top of mind for most people, and that they were thinking about the economy. I wanted to ask about that because I remember the RNC signs at the convention saying, “Mass deportations now.” One number says that 62 percent of Latinos now think that Trump wants to deport undocumented immigrants broadly.
Why did it take till post-election to realize those threats of mass deportation were real considering they were so front and center during his campaign?
I think this is really important for us as avid news consumers to understand the kind of news that the average voter, and especially that voter who’s coming in and out of elections, is consuming.
What they were seeing on mainstream media, perhaps even Fox News at the time, was a focus on people or Trump surrogates who said he was going to focus on serious criminals, securing the border, and violent criminals.
And so that’s what people bought. Fast-forward to 2026; the people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there.
They were told he was going to focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was going to focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.
And then add that to the litany of broken promises.
I’m hearing a distinction between a focus on the border, which Republicans did try to prioritize rather than the interior deportations that may have been more attributed to Stephen Miller than Donald Trump. But we have certainly seen that be a focus of the administration once they came back into office.
You mentioned the shift that has happened since 2024, and that’s really important, of course. Trump’s approval rating with Latinos is now worse than with non-Latinos, a stunning reversal in 18 months.
You mentioned the factors that have contributed there, but is this really just the economy?
It’s the economy, it’s the war, and it’s immigration. It’s those three things.
One thing that is really interesting to note about Trump’s approval, other than that it’s at basement levels — and he’s very much pulled down the GOP with him broadly and with Latino voters — is that in Trump 1.0, his approval on the economy and the cost of living was actually better than his everyday approval on his total job.
And he has been underwater with Latinos almost this entire term so far on the cost of living and the economy. It’s almost been a complete and total reversal.
Listen, you tell people you’re going to fix egg prices and gas is going to go down, and then you do the opposite, and we’re hearing that story universally across different electorate groups.
You’re saying that’s still the main story when it comes to Latinos also?
Yes, it’s still the main story. I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup. What that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more.
We have less savings. We have lower rates of home ownership. So the safety nets that other people might have, we just don’t have.
That really has exacerbated the kind of impact that people are feeling right now as they’re trying to make ends meet.
You mentioned the exponential growth in the terms of people who now regret or are disappointed with their vote for Donald Trump. Does that mean a preference for Democrats? How should we think about the binary choice between D and R versus what is a clear story about a backlash to Donald Trump’s actions?
I think it is a huge mistake for Democrats to rest on their laurels and think that because of what people are feeling about Trump and Republicans and the sense of disappointment and promises broken that that is automatically going to translate for them as a party and as a brand.
Right now, the Democratic brand has suffered a repeated set of blows among Latino voters. Twenty years of comprehensive immigration reform hasn’t been delivered. It’s a thing that comes up in almost every focus group.
And part of what the build-up to 2024 was, was not only 20 years of a promise undelivered; it was the chaos at the border, it was feeling like Democrats were focused on everything but Latinos and their families, or everyday Americans and their families, and that they had lost that thread.
For years, he'd been a classroom science teacher in suburban San Diego County. Now he hopes to meaningfully contribute to the regrowth of oaks in burned Altadena.
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