Updated at 8:32 p.m. ET on August 2, 2026

A couple of years ago, squinting into the morning sun on a Dulles International Airport people mover after arriving from London, I found myself chatting with a flight attendant. Looking at the tired travelers packed in around her, she said in her British accent that she always dreaded flying through Washington. “I just can’t believe this is the airport at your nation’s capital.” I told her that she was not alone, and, further, that I usually refer to the hulking people mover as the “hell bus.” Everyone around us looked miserable. She laughed.

People in Washington really, really hate Dulles. It consistently ranks among America’s least liked airports. It has become a particular obsession for Donald Trump, who has called it a “terrible airport” and recently unveiled a $22.5 billion modernization plan that entails a number of improvements, including the elimination of the people movers. (It is not clear why Trump is so preoccupied with Dulles—he’s never, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, been a commercial passenger there—though it is fair to speculate that he stands a better-than-average chance of having the airport’s name changed to something more pleasing to him.)

Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t want to see much, if anything, changed at Dulles. The truth is, I love it. It’s a great airport, even a miraculous one. And while I’ll grant that the sardine-can quality of the people movers is undignified, a little part of me loves them too.

Let’s start with the obvious: The main terminal at Dulles is a thing of wonder, a sparkling monument to the human triumph of aviation. Consider the gorgeous swoop of its Eero Saarinen–designed roof, with a curve that calls to mind the moment of lift at takeoff when you can finally feel Bernoulli’s principle kick in.

Saarinen once described his creation as a “huge continuous hammock suspended between two concrete trees.” I love to walk through it in the very early morning, when the whole place has a sunbeams-through-the-windows-at-Grand-Central feel, long panels of light forming dramatic golden stripes all along the ceiling. I also love it in the late afternoon, when it’s overcrowded with people preparing to crisscross the globe. I love it when it’s somewhat empty and everything feels improbably easy and fast. I even love the seemingly endless windowless corridors—it’s always nice to stretch your legs before or after a long flight. To walk through Dulles is to conjure a feeling of unmatched possibility. You could be going anywhere—and people are.

I’m aware that you could say that about any major transportation hub—that the convergence of so many people going so many places is both awe-inspiring and the entire point of an airport in the first place. But a flight to and from Dulles is also far more likely to go smoothly than at other airports; 81 percent of both arrivals and departures are on time or early, according to the latest Department of Transportation data, making Dulles the second-most-punctual major airport in the nation. (Salt Lake City International is No. 1.)

Compare Dulles with Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the airport that most locals say they prefer (and many still insist on calling “National,” its 20th-century name). There, only 70 percent of departures leave on time, and a dismal 68 percent arrive on schedule. Roughly 1 percent of Dulles flights end up getting canceled, compared with nearly 4 percent at Reagan. Dulles also gives you more options—some 170 destinations all over the world compared with Reagan’s 100ish.

All of which is why I am unmoved when someone tries to tell me how much more convenient Reagan is. Yes, it is true that it’s a schlep to get to Dulles from downtown D.C.—Reagan is just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol, and easily accessible by bicycle or metro, while Dulles is roughly 30 miles away. But the time you’d save by going to Reagan won’t do you any good if your flight is delayed.

And anyway, must we really optimize every human experience for maximum efficiency? You’re already going to be hurtling through the air at 600 miles an hour, basking in the miracle of human flight. (See also: Louis C.K.’s riff on this subject.) So it takes you a little longer to get to the airport before participating in one of humankind’s most profound achievements—what’s your hurry? We are, as Kurt Vonnegut once said, “here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

I know what you might be thinking. Even the most Vonnegut-ish among us don’t always have the luxury of time to take the scenic route, even if we wish we did. A desire for convenience, especially among frequent travelers, is completely understandable. Yet the hatred of Dulles—so absolute in its consensus—reminds me of other ways in which our culture has hardened. Cynics like to tell one another that they don’t hate the things they hate enough, a notion so pervasive that it has become its own meme, often deployed to shut down a debate and swear loyalty to one’s political in-group. (Canonical examples include: You don’t hate the media enough; You don’t hate Democrats enough; You don’t hate centrists enough; You don’t hate AI enough.) Perhaps it’s just my disposition as a Philadelphian to root for the underdog, but I see reflexive hatred of Dulles as operating the same way: more groupthinky and performative than fair.

Our species is gloriously resilient and adaptable. These are useful qualities, evolutionarily, but also ones that encourage us to take the extraordinary and very quickly denigrate it as mundane. My favorite example of this phenomenon comes from an old cover of The New Yorker—specifically, the October 11, 1930, issue, which features an illustration by the modernist painter and sculptor Theodore Gilbert Haupt. The image depicted is one you’ve seen a million times: a dreamy view of Manhattan at night, as seen from a fixed-wing biplane, all twinkling city lights and skyscraper spires below. But what you may not realize at a glance is just how exhilarating this would have been at the time. A bird’s-eye view was not unusual conceptually—people have used maps since antiquity, the oldest landscape maps dating back at least to the 5th century B.C.E. But most Americans had never seen New York City from the air because most Americans had never flown over the city—or at all.

In 1930, just 6,000 Americans took commercial flights. (An imperfect but useful comparison: Last year, some 906 million travelers moved through TSA checkpoints.) Airplanes hadn’t even yet made the leap from wood-and-fabric to metal. No wonder it was a surrealist who illustrated that particular magazine’s cover—the perspective required someone who could peer into the future, a future in which seeing the city far below the wing of an airplane would feel normal, even clichéd.

By the time Dulles came along, about 30 years later, the jet age had fully arrived. The federal government spent $100 million, promising that Dulles would be the airport of the future when it opened in 1962, a model for every airport built thereafter. And for a while, it actually was. The hell bus in those days was known as the “mobile lounge,” intended to be a waiting room on wheels where chic travelers could sip cocktails and ride, rather than trudge a mile across the tarmac. In christening the new airport, President John F. Kennedy joined his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower—the latter named the airport John Foster Dulles, after his secretary of state—for a ride on the mobile lounge, which newspapers had praised as moving “smoothly and steadily, with dignity befitting their size.” Kennedy then addressed an assembled crowd of 60,000 people, acknowledging Saarinen for having created a most “distinguished ornament of a great country.” (Saarinen, who died the previous year, had called Dulles “the best thing I have done.”) And for a few decades, public sentiment was rather rosy about Dulles and the easygoing, elegant travel experience it provided. Though people always complained about the distance from the city, early passengers delighted in the “beauty and convenience” of the 90-person mobile lounges, and pilots raved about its “huge runways,” according to news reports at the time. In 1982, on the occasion of the airport’s 20th anniversary, The New York Times declared it “certainly the loveliest major airport in America.”

I have a special fondness for ancient structures, aging hotels, old magazines, out-of-print books, and other objects and places that tether us to time soon to be forgotten, but I am not someone who thinks preservation should always stand in the way of progress. And I’m not so sentimental that I’d argue that an airport built in 1962 is just fine the way it is thankyouverymuch. Those who are dissatisfied with the way things are are catalysts in the making of a better world. So I cannot fault the Dulles haters—certainly not those who are, rather than merely complaining, actually trying to do something about it. But I also cannot bring myself to hate Dulles, especially now that it is, to borrow an expression from the novelist and playwright Alasdair Gray, being quickly “hustled into the past.”

Impatience with the status quo can drive the thinking that enriches humanity, and inventions that bring new vantage points from which we see where we once were. But Dulles already does exactly what it always promised, and does so miraculously—it connects you to people from everywhere, to anywhere, including those who are no longer here to see what it has become.

This article has been updated to remove the term “red-eye” to describe the flight from London to Washington.

Sometime after Jack Black hollered “chicken jockey” in 2025’s A Minecraft Movie, and before The Odyssey drove the masses mad with aspect-ratio anxiety, Hollywood finally felt seen—and saved—by Gen Z. Over the past year, trade publications and mainstream outlets alike celebrated the news: Zoomers were coming of age and coming to the rescue of American cinema. Their theater attendance purportedly outstripped that of their elders; their tastes in video-game franchises and low-budget horror undeniably carried the day.

These cheery headlines largely traced back to a single report by Fandango conducted in January. In a survey of 7,000 adults in the United States, the Gen Z responses were eye-popping: 87 percent had watched at least one film in theaters in the previous 12 months; the average Zoomer had seen seven movies in that period. Compare this with Gen X at 70 percent and 6.1 movies, respectively. (It should be noted, though, that Fandango’s survey pool drew disproportionately from movie enthusiasts: 5,091 of the respondents had gone out to see at least one film in the previous year.)

It might seem predictable that Gen Z now drives the box office. The youngest Zoomers are entering high school (and thus making their first independent purchases), and the eldest are rounding out their 20s (and thus reaching for the next rungs on the career ladder). Many of them are in the season of life when discretionary income rises to meet peak discretionary time. But the seemingly outsize fanfare around these numbers makes more sense in light of the turmoil of the past few years. After the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic, followed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes that snarled the production pipeline, many industry observers feared that Zoomers were a lost demographic. This cohort of young adults, historically a core part of Hollywood’s customer base, had come of age at a moment when there were fewer new things to watch and more reasons—such as streaming—to stay inside.

[Read: The fear of missing The Odyssey]

Theatrical films “don’t have a future if you can’t capture the younger audiences of today, who are going to be the older audiences of tomorrow,” Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst for Rentrak, a box-office-research firm, told me. Fandango’s study, which was released ahead of CinemaCon, the annual convention of theater owners, told the industry what it wanted to hear: that people would continue going to the movies.

But the big picture is murkier. “I think that there’s a lot to be optimistic about, but I would not put the return of theatrical back at the feet of Gen Z,” Kevin Goetz, the CEO and founder of Screen Engine, a research and analytics firm, told me. “I wouldn’t proclaim victory quite yet.” Although other surveys also observe strong youth turnout, the proportions are far less dramatic. Pew, for example, found in a survey last summer that 67 percent of people ages 18 to 29 had seen a movie in the theater in the past 12 months.

This year brought real evidence of cinema’s appeal to the youth: The runaway success of Backrooms and Obsession marked the coronation of YouTube auteurs as bankable directors and drew notably fresh-faced crowds. Even with such turnout, this year’s box office is unlikely to return to the heights it regularly reached in the past. More people are staying at home: In 2019, the share of the non-moviegoing population was 24 percent, according to Vista Group, which provides analytics and software for the film industry; in 2024, that number hit 30 percent. People who still go to the cinema do so less often: In 2025, theaters in the U.S. and Canada sold approximately two tickets per capita, less than half of what they sold in 2002.

Other surveys, from more disinterested sources than Fandango, indicate that although theater attendance has somewhat recovered from its pandemic lows, Gen Z sees fewer movies than past generations of youth. In fact, the drop-off is starkest among young people: In 2007, according to data provided to me by Gallup, 18-to-29-year-olds went out to see an average of nine films. In 2025, the same demographic saw 4.3 movies. As their moviegoing frequency has fallen, Gen Zers’ habits have started to converge with those of the general moviegoing population, Matthew Liebmann, Vista Group’s chief product, innovation, and marketing officer, told me. In other words: Kids today don’t behave that differently from older people.

The numbers point to a broader behavioral shift. Moviegoing used to be a matter of habit meeting spontaneity. Teens loitering at the mall, couples on a date, friends gathering for a night out—these groups reliably showed up at the multiplex and would pick a showtime once they were already in the door. Today, patrons generally plan their cinema visits in advance, and the question of what to see has collapsed into the question of whether to go at all.

Once moviegoing went from routine hangout to major outing, theaters had to adapt. Many have, over time, diversified their offerings. In a phone call, Bob Bagby, the CEO of B&B Theatres, rattled off a cruise line’s worth of activities now offered at his various locations, including mah-jongg, trivia, and bingo. Some locations have bocce and pickleball courts; other chains have added ropes courses and axe-throwing. “I’ve seen it,” Bagby told me, of the latter. “Our insurance people said No, no, don’t do that.”

[Read: The great Gen Z dividing line]

But even the core elements of the cinema experience have changed. If you’re going to get people to look up from the screen in their palm, you have to offer the biggest one possible. If seating is reserved, it needs to be  sumptuous. (One theater-chain president told me that its recliners had heating and cooling settings.) If there’s going to be dining, you might consider rolling out a multicourse prix fixe menu—or at least an array of hot options.

If your lobby is being treated like a special destination, it should also look the part. “The Gen Z crowd wants to come in and be somewhere cool,” says Penn Ketchum, the managing partner of the theater chain Penn Cinema, describing the 24-tap self-serve beer wall he installed in one location as part of a $2 million renovation. “They don’t want to come through a dingy, dusty, aged lobby. They want to come in from the parking lot and be somewhere that’s worthy of being in the background of their picture.”

Over time, “people have been trained to spend more at the theater when they go,” Alicia Reese, a senior vice president of equity research for media and entertainment at the financial firm Wedbush Securities, told me. This is a boon for theaters, because concessions have much higher margins than the films themselves. Moviegoing now comes with an air of occasion. In an era of screen abundance, Hollywood has tried to differentiate the theatrical release by creating an artificial sense of scarcity and transience. The industry has borrowed the tactics of touring artists and fashion drops, promoting limited premium-format screenings and slinging special-edition popcorn buckets. But encouraging audiences to associate moviegoing with “all the trimmings and treats,” Liebmann said, also has drawbacks: It creates an “affordability misperception,” which may dampen their appetite for regular visits.

Gen Z may be filing into more auditoriums than expected these days. And even if they’re doing so less often than their predecessors, and even if their seats are bigger and squishier and spaced less densely than before, their presence certainly ensures some kind of future for the theatrical model. But when you consider the experience that’s been retooled around them, one that depends on so many things beyond sitting in a dark room together as a projector rattles, it’s hard to shake the sense that the pictures have gotten small.

When you approach the freshly gilded twin statues near the Lincoln Memorial, there is no mistaking that they are gold. Very, very gold. Distractingly gold—or, more precisely, covered in 23.75-karat gold leaf costing $5.1 million. The 19-foot statues, called The Arts of War, were once easy to miss but now look a bit like oversized children’s trophies, especially next to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial. Seeing them is as if, on the walk between Arlington National Cemetery and the National Mall, you’d suddenly stumbled upon a P. F. Chang’s.

This is how President Trump is approaching his redecoration of Washington: glitzy and gaudy, even if out of place. He has already splashed gold all around the White House, but these statues are the most prominent symbols of Washington’s new gilded age. As the scaffolding around the statues came down this week, marking one of the few completions of a Trump-ordered renovation project, the president giddily posted photos on social media—and tourists, commuters, cyclists, and runners paused to take photos of their own of the capital’s latest can-you-believe-it attraction.

Trump has worn his love of gold like a blinging billboard. Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom is inspired by Versailles, and he has proudly bragged of golden bathrooms, golden airplane-seatbelt buckles, and a gold-infused penthouse suite. The Oval Office now looks like a Middle Eastern bazaar crossed with an opulent Cracker Barrel. Thick, gold frames line the walls; gold vases and ice buckets adorn the fireplace mantel; gold stars form a circle on the ceiling; and gold appliqués fill any gaps. (Trump insists that these are real gold, and not painted flourishes from Home Depot.) Last year, he exempted gold bullion from his reciprocal tariffs, and he named his special visa program for wealthy foreigners the Trump Gold Card. He has taken his personally designed presidential challenge coin (which is golden) and glued it to the center of the Oval Office door, at about eye level. The coasters are gold, the curtains are gold, and guests know to come bearing gifts of gold.

When FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Trump the first FIFA Peace Prize, it was a golden orb of a trophy. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook presented the president with a 24-karat-gold base to hold a glass sculpture. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year gave him a golden pager to commemorate an operation in which members of Hezbollah were killed when their pagers detonated. “See,” he said during a meeting with his Cabinet in March while riffing about all of the projects he’d launched in Washington, “I’m a gold person.”

It’s one thing for Trump to have a personal fascination with one of the world’s most expensive metals. It’s another for the president to flaunt it at a time when many Americans are struggling to pay rent, losing their health insurance, and seeing high prices at the gas pump. It may not quite be a “Let them eat cake” moment, but it is one when he seems to be saying: Let them see that I just spent $5 million in taxpayer funds on golden statues.

Trump for decades has loved gold and marble, liberally sprinkling them about his development projects and his personal spaces. Ivana Trump, his first wife, who was the Trump Organization’s vice president of interior design, encouraged Trump’s gold obsession, according to Regime Change, the recent book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that has a golden cover. (Ivana’s love of the color proved lasting: She was buried in a gold casket.) In the 1980s, Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in South Florida and went on to put $7 million worth of gold leaf on the walls, plus gold-plated sinks near the ballroom. He hired the designer Henry Conversano, known for infusing golden flourishes in the Golden Nugget casinos, to remodel his Trump Tower penthouse apartment and work at his Atlantic City casino. In 1988, he purchased from the sultan of Brunei a yacht that was bathed in gold—couches, sinks, ceilings—and named it the Trump Princess.  

[Read: A decade of golden-escalator politics]

“It was so gaudy. Almost shockingly gaudy. And he loved it. He thought it was the most beautiful thing out there,” Jack O’Donnell, one of Trump’s former casino executives who helped him host parties on the boat, told me. He speculated that Trump may have been inspired by the yacht when he remade the Lincoln Bathroom almost entirely in gold and marble.

Years later, in 2008, when Trump built a hotel in Las Vegas, the 406,000-square-foot facade was coated in a layer of gold-infused glass. More recently, when a group of Trump supporters erected a 22-foot statue of him at his golf course in Doral, Florida, they opted for a gold finish.

“To him gold was the essence of richness and class,” Barbara Res, who oversaw construction for the Trump Organization and was placed in charge of building Trump Tower, told me. “To him it meant, This is gold. This is mine. It’s the best you can get, and I’m the best. That’s how his mind works. I’m going to show you the best by buying the best.” Sometimes, she said, it wasn’t the best. It was a cheaper alternative that looked like gold but actually wasn’t (although she found that he was willing to spend his money for something that was his idea). He liked the design concept trompe l’oeil, a French word that means “deceive the eye,” where painters could make a column that looked like marble.

“It was tricking the eye of the consumer. He loved it,” Res said. “And he took an interest in the gold finishes. It reflects his taste and his ability to spend endless money on something beautiful. That’s what he wants people to believe.”

Whether it’s in his long, red ties; his swooshed-over hairstyle; or his “Thank you for your attention to this matter” social-media posts, Trump is all about branding. Perhaps nothing is more on-brand for him than his affection for gold. “I love the gold, but if you don’t use 24 karat gold, it doesn’t look good,” he told reporters last August. “It just beams,” he marveled in September. “It’s all real stuff,” he said in March. “You can’t imitate it. Someday they’ll discover a paint that will look like gold, and the guy’s going to be the richest man in the world.”

Peter York, a design and culture columnist, wrote in Politico Magazine in 2017 that Trump’s design style is “aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of.” Although it’s often associated with Italian Renaissance or French Baroque, York says a better  comparison is more recent. “The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style,” he wrote.

[Read: The YOLO presidency ]

Gold has often been used to represent imperial power, whether in 18th-century France or 19th-century Russia. When Trump went to the Middle East for his first foreign trip of his second term, I watched as he marveled at the gold and marble in the palaces of Doha and Abu Dhabi. “Versailles is not a gold leaf,” he said in June ahead of a trip to the palace. “Versailles is the real deal.”

The two Arts of War statues, called Valor and Sacrifice, were sculpted by Leo Friedlander and cast in Italy. They were dedicated in 1951, offered to the United States as a gift from the Italians for helping rebuild their country after World War II. Each statue shows a nude man and a seminude woman. Two other statues, collectively called The Arts of Peace, are nearby but still undergoing their golden glam-ups.

Each of the statues sits on a granite pedestal ringed with 36 stars, representing the states in the Union at the end of the Civil War. The statues, cast in bronze, were last regilded in 1971 and had since faded. Trump added them to the list of eyesores he wanted fixed before the nation’s 250th birthday, on July 4, and federal officials scrambled to meet his demands.

[Read: ‘Rush project at request of POTUS’]

When I reached out to the White House to ask about the project, the president’s role in it, and his choice of gold, the spokesperson Davis Ingle responded with a statement that made no mention of gold and said, in part: “No other president has done more to beautify our Nation’s interior than President Trump.” He said that the president’s “bold vision” was ensuring that the 250th birthday was filled with “glory and pride.” He referred other questions to the Department of Interior, which did not address any of my questions about the project, its delays, the choice to heavily apply gold, or Trump’s involvement. “Residents and visitors are excited to see the city revitalized to the grand destination it was meant to be,” the department offered in a statement.

Federal officials did not seek competitive bids for the work on the statues, bypassing the typical process and awarding a contract in April for $5.1 million. The project was treated as a high priority by the National Park Service, according to The New York Times, which cited internal documents that referred to it as “a visible, high-impact example of how the N.P.S. is responding to presidential directives.” Extensive market research was not done to determine whether $5 million was a fair price, according to documents obtained by NOTUS, and the agency determined that only one company could meet the requirements of the work and the timeline: the Gilders’ Studio in Maryland.

The company, which did not respond to my message, has done a large number of regilding projects around the country, including the dome of the Georgia State House, the cupola of Faneuil Hall in Boston, and—perhaps most similar to the statues in Washington—the Sherman Monument in Central Park. A description of the project had a mandatory competition date of July 1. But for the past few weeks, as it had for the months before, the scaffolding remained up, and tarps read: We are making DC safe and beautiful.

Only now is the project coming into view, and although Trump is clearly pleased, others are less so. “Fit for an oligarch’s ballroom,” a review in ARTNews reads.

As I rode my bike past the new gilded statues Friday morning, I couldn’t help but wonder what would next succumb to Trump’s Midas touch. If a triumphal arch is constructed across the bridge, will it be just as glaringly golden? Will Trump cast the John F. Kennedy statue outside the Kennedy Center in gold? Is Abraham Lincoln, sitting nearby, at risk? Or the pensive Thomas Jefferson standing in the dome across the way? How far will Trump’s new golden age extend?

The videos that Instagram suggests in my never-ending “For You” feed are usually of a constellation of women. They’re strangers, but I call them “my girls.” One of them is remodeling her house; one is always cleaning and “resetting” the van she lives in; one is sampling pasta and sandwiches at various New York establishments. And each has something special that I can’t explain to you—a je ne sais quoi, a curious style of speaking—so I’ve come to look forward to my regular glimpses of their lives, which I get when I scroll in bed before I go to sleep each night.

I regard these strangers as my intimates in a way, even though some of them are not people I think I would like if I actually met them. One morning, I was watching one on my living-room television while sipping my coffee. My husband walked into the room and winced as one of the women changed into a perfect re-creation of an American Girl–doll outfit (very theater kid, not his thing). I felt a flash of defensiveness—she makes everything by hand! She has a real sense of self! Not to mention a seemingly sweet relationship with her father and pet birds. I kept scrolling and was relieved that another one of my girls hadn’t appeared. She often records herself eating a frozen dinner on her couch while watching police body-cam footage on YouTube to unwind. And I mean no disrespect to her, but if she had shown up, I would have lunged for the remote.

You might be wondering: Why was I watching Instagram on my TV? Instagram’s vice president of product, Tessa Lyons-Laing, has referred to TV as the company’s “next frontier.” As it tries to compete with YouTube and Netflix, Instagram is apparently looking for ways to be … both of them. And so it has launched a stand-alone service for various streaming devices, which it recently expanded with new features to help “friends and family watch together.” This caught my attention: I wanted to try taking the “bad” screen (my phone) and putting it onto the “good” screen (my TV) to see how it would make me (and the people around me) feel.

[Read: The flip-phone cleanse]

Years ago, the “good screen versus bad screen” meme originated as a joke about having an office job. The “bad” screen was a desktop computer at work, whereas the “good” screen was a personal laptop, full of one’s own, delightful, self-chosen digital activities. But in 2022, following the coronavirus-pandemic lockdowns, the writer Kate Lindsay noted a shift. When people referred to the “bad” screen, they now seemed to be talking about their smartphone, which they felt hopelessly dependent on, and when they mentioned the “good” screen, they were referring to the humble television, which now felt wholesome and safe. “We’re so convinced that it’s in our best interest to reverse the effects of social media that even watching a 30-minute TV show uninterrupted seems constructive,” Lindsay observed. But maybe, four years later, the 30-minute-show part is negotiable. Perhaps “good” could come just from giving our thumbs a break, looking up instead of down, and permitting other people to see what we’re doing.

My husband was initially wary of adding his Instagram account to our living-room TV, but he acquiesced, and we had kind of a blast watching his feed together. Most of the videos were of male comedians I didn’t recognize; I sounded like the trope of a Boomer mom as I repeatedly asked, “Do you know him?” whenever a new guy showed up. I didn’t mean “Are you friends?”; I meant “Are they Your Guys?” Sometimes they were, and I was honored to meet them. Sometimes they weren’t; they were just guys. We both laughed to the point of tears at a video that some guy had shared of his dad trying to teach him to bunt a baseball when he was 10 years old. I manually liked it with the remote control and then sent it to myself, from my husband, via direct message. On my TV.

“This intrigues me,” Jonathan Gray, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me when I asked him about the app. Scrolling has always had a social element, he said, and people will often show a funny or interesting video to the person next to them. But he was skeptical of whether they would want to share every bit of their feed with their loved ones. “It’s one thing when I turn my phone to my wife and say, ‘Hey, you’ll like this,’ but 90 percent of what I see, she won’t want to watch,” he said. “It seems kind of painful.” Plus, his wife is learning how to whittle at the moment, and he doesn’t want to watch a bunch of whittling videos.

[Read: The extras are tired]

Gray also noted that the recommendation algorithms sometimes take big swings and throw new things at users to learn whether they’ll be interested. One might worry a little about the big swings that could appear on your TV, which to others in the room might appear to be something you’ve already expressed enthusiasm about. When I asked the Instagram spokesperson Christine Pai whether the TV app would filter out any weird stuff, she told me that both apps are using the same recommendation system. (The only specific difference she cited is that the TV app will give an edge to horizontal videos, because they are better suited for the display.)

The app does allow users to play themed “channels” based on their preestablished interests, so you don’t necessarily have to show off your entire, highly variable and sometimes unpredictable feed. The idea with the channels seems to be that making the secret, private shame of scrolling into a collaborative activity will give it a new place in the home. It can be more like watching America’s Funniest Home Videos together after dinner and less like sitting side by side, staring silently at something in your lap. People feel ambivalent about scrolling feeds, Marika Lüders, a professor of media and communication at the University of Oslo, wrote to me on this point. We find it entertaining at times, but we also feel embarrassed and guilty about it. To her, moving Instagram from a phone to a TV seems like “a strategy to increase the status of short-form videos,” by putting them on a screen that people (currently) feel less anxiety about.

That makes sense to me, though I find it just as easy to imagine how this may backfire for the company. Many people who are attempting to cut back on their Instagram use remove the app from their phone and use only the desktop-computer version, which is clunkier and less comfortable to scroll through for hours. Using it is so nonintuitive and unnatural that it calls attention to the absurdity of one’s habit. Moving Instagram to a bigger screen, then, is usually a route not to normalizing it in that new space but instead to severing ties with it altogether. The differences between a phone and a TV are even more dramatic and may be even more off-putting.

Surely the novelty will wear off. Last week, while visiting my sister-in-law and her boyfriend, my husband and I asked them to show us their feeds on their TV. My sister-in-law’s was funny because it was full of wedding-planning content—she’s currently waiting on the requisite engagement ring—and because she kept getting videos of this one baby who’s obsessed with Bad Bunny. Her boyfriend got a hairless cat, a guy pretending to be Wolverine, and a recipe for butter-chicken macaroni and cheese. Those were a little funny, too, but because you don’t know him, you don’t get why and you don’t care. After 20 minutes or so, we got bored of the experiment and left for a baseball game. Later, in the quiet of my hotel room, I went back to my own, private phone.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, a staff writer who’s covered the fight over who runs elections in Maricopa County, the arc of the Voting Rights Act, and why election deniers are winning.

Yvonne has a nostalgic fondness for state fairs and rodeos, and she’s excited for an upcoming one in her home state. She also recommends watching anything with Billy Bob Thornton in it, reading Chris Whitaker for a good mystery, and putting down the hair crimper in the year 2026.

— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: The Hondo Rodeo Fest in Phoenix, where I’ll watch the Turnpike Troubadours sing and the cowboys compete in everything from bull riding to barrel racing. I grew up going to rodeos and competing in county cooking showcases in small-town Idaho, and even though I’ve lived in Arizona for decades, a big piece of my heart still considers Idaho home. Every now and then, I hit the county rodeos outside of Phoenix because the smells, the riders, the announcers, the food on a stick, and the leather-fringe rodeo chaps all remind me of my childhood. I’ve never been to the Hondo Rodeo Fest before, and my husband—who grew up in a small town near Fort Worth, Texas, and is always looking for an excuse to wear his boots—made plans for us to try the big-city rodeo scene. We can’t wait!

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: My guilty pleasure is watching The Real Housewives, and I am loving the new Rhode Island series. (Rosie is my favorite!) I also can’t get enough of the twists and turns of British crime dramas, and I plan on rewatching Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty (which has been on hiatus) before the next season premieres.  

An actor I would watch in anything: Billy Bob Thornton. He seems to effortlessly channel a variety of complicated, unpredictable, and funny characters. He has a way of making you root for him, even when he’s skirting—or completely breaking—all the rules. I grew up watching him in Westerns with my dad (The Alamo and Tombstone), and he was brilliant in Sling Blade. I’ve loved him in everything since, including Goliath, Landman, and yes, even Bad Santa.

A quiet song that I love: I can’t stop listening to Flatland Cavalry, a country band from Lubbock, Texas, that a friend introduced me to last summer. Their ballad “Mountain Song” takes me back to my childhood in the Mountain West, where I’d spend summer evenings on the back porch of our apple orchard. Our home had a breathtaking view of the area’s towering butte, which resembles a woman’s face, and the song reminds me of my parents, nature, and a simpler time.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Willie Nelson. He’s part of my core childhood memories. My family spent hours trekking in our motor home to Idaho campsites, the beaches of the Pacific Northwest, and the parking lots of Las Vegas casinos (Circus Circus, anyone?). Those road trips almost always featured my dad behind the wheel, the window half down while he sang along to “On the Road Again” and “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” (My mom, on the other hand, preferred “Always on My Mind.”)

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I love a good mystery, and All the Colors of the Dark, by Chris Whitaker, drew me in for days. Beginning in small-town Missouri in the 1970s, it follows a serial killer and a missing-person case. The story is so gripping and well written, I didn’t want it to end. When it did, I bought all of Whitaker’s other books, which are piled up on my nightstand.

As for nonfiction, I just binged Regime Change, a new chronicle of the first year of President Trump’s second term, by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. It’s exceptional—and the reporting is jaw-dropping.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love: I discovered Selena’s Tejano music when I was in middle school, danced to “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” throughout high school, and still listen to her rancheras today. (It was an honor to spend time with her dad and sister back in 2005 for a story I wrote about the 10-year anniversary of her death.)

Something I loved but now dislike: Hair crimpers. Love the look, don’t miss the smell of burning hair. A piece of me dies every time I watch my daughter straighten her natural curls, only to singe zigzag shapes into her hair.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: “The Missing Kayaker,” by Jamie Thompson. It is an irresistible—and infuriating—mystery.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: My 11-year-old daughter is obsessed with the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, the new women’s professional softball league, and I’m obsessed now too. Our favorite player is Bri Ellis, who plays first base for the Utah Talons. She is kind, funny, strong, and an inspiration for young girls and the moms raising them.

The last thing that made me cry: I’m going to go full mom here. A few weeks ago, we were up in Prescott, Arizona, for a softball tournament. The weather was perfect, and the bases were loaded, with two outs in the last inning. My daughter had two strikes on her and then nailed the ball out to left field for the game-winning hit. I bawled as she rounded first base and then was mobbed at second base by a sweaty mess of preteen girls celebrating their win.

A quote that I return to: I often recall this 1944 diary passage by Anne Frank, which perfectly encapsulates hope for humanity: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

The Week Ahead

1. Tony, a biopic that follows Anthony Bourdain as he begins his career in the restaurant world (in select theaters Friday)
2. Etna, a novel by Paul Yoon told through the eyes of an ex-military dog returning home after war (out Tuesday)
3. The Shards, a series adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, set at an elite Los Angeles prep school in 1981 (out Wednesday on Hulu)

Essay

Is This What Comes After AI Slop?

By Will Oremus

Among thousands of self-published Amazon ebooks that they identified as containing “substantial AI text,” none was more popular than Daggermouth.

Until recently, AI fiction has been easy to dismiss as slop. On Amazon, new-book releases nearly tripled from 2022 to 2025. (That’s probably not because humans suddenly dedicated themselves en masse to the written word.) Many are blatant copycats of existing titles, seemingly intended to trick readers into buying them. Their sales figures are generally meager; the reviews, indignant. A suspicious number of them feature protagonists with the same names. Last year, readers of one fantasy novel noticed a line that seemed to be responding to a prompt asking a chatbot to write in the style of another author. But if a book as beloved as Daggermouth were written with a chatbot, it would raise an awkward question: Could AI fiction be getting … good?

Read the full article.

More in Culture

• Why kids can’t quit Roblox
• The girlboss is dead.
• The most interesting part of your life
• Odysseus’s confession
• Tyler Austin Harper: “I love my emotionally stunted friendships.”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

• Jonathan Lemire: Trump crashes into reality.
• A tragedy in Iran might persuade Hegseth to change course.
• What the Fauci diary reveals about Washington

Photo Album

Explore a collection of images from winners of the GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2026.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

Play our daily crossword.

Explore all of our newsletters.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

A few hours after Levi Fishback died last month, at a nursing home in Kentucky, the funeral director called me. She needed to know whether the family wanted an open casket. What songs would Levi have wanted? What color flowers? Who should give the eulogies?

By now I should be used to being asked questions about my father that I don’t know the answers to. I spent the past four years as his medical proxy, the only family member responsible for handling the bills from the nursing home and overseeing his care. But I barely knew the man. I felt uncomfortable deciding whether the nurses should give him a flu shot every fall, let alone choosing what to put in his obituary. I needed to include photos, but I had only one: from my fourth or fifth birthday. I messaged his ex-wife and the stepdaughter he’d raised, along with my half brother’s two children, for more, and they delivered, sending photos of my dad—smiling widely in a suit and tie—alongside them at graduations and family parties. I didn’t know that he’d had that much joy inside of him.

My memories of my dad are like a few scatterplots on the graph of my life. He had lived right across town from me in Lexington, Kentucky, but he would go months without visiting me. From the ages of 10 to 14, I don’t think I saw him a single time. He had his own family—his wife, his stepdaughter, and his son from a previous relationship. When he and his wife got married, his son was the ring bearer and her daughter was the flower girl. I wasn’t a flower girl at the wedding. I didn’t go to the wedding. I didn’t even know about the wedding. They had a piano in their living room that his stepdaughter played. She is a year older than me and went to a rival high school. I would see her sometimes—she was a cheerleader, and she had all the name-brand clothes that the pretty, popular girls wore.

My mom, Trina, was addicted to crack for years and had struggled to take care of me and her four younger kids. Levi must have known it. Once, when I was about 7 or 8, he came to my mom’s door. It had been a bad week, or a bad few weeks. My mom had gone out—I’m not sure when or where—and I was alone with my four little brothers and sisters. Our refrigerator was empty. Dirty plates and clothes lay around, broken toys all over the place. We were untamed children who did what we wanted—my brother Colby was always trying to do backflips off the arm of the couch.

[Read: Jenisha from Kentucky]

Maybe my dad had heard on the streets that Trina’s kids needed help. Or maybe it was a random visit. I was jittery when we opened the door to him. He was a short man with thick eyebrows that dominated his face, but in our eyes, he was a hero. We knew he would help us, because drugs didn’t control his life; he wasn’t damaged like Trina; he was a man who took care of a wife and children. He would recognize our fear and desperation. He stepped inside but stayed close to the door. He looked around like one of the social workers the government sometimes sent, and we huddled around him, watching him judge the mess with his eyes. And then he left. He said he’d come back for me, but he didn’t.

Plenty of people my age are beginning to take care of sick or aging parents. It’s the natural way; you take care of the people who once took care of you. You don’t resent it, because now you’re the strong one, and they’re the vulnerable one, and you owe them everything. But for me, it wasn’t like that.

When I was 9, I was sent to stay with my aunts. While I was gone, the state took my siblings away from Trina; my sister went to an aunt and my brothers were put in foster care. I moved back to Lexington for the fifth grade, and my grandmother took me in—I don’t remember anyone ever suggesting that I could stay with my father. I have one memory of him from that year I came back: For some reason, he showed up at my school and found me in the lunch line. He handed me some money and then pulled me toward him for a hug. I was embarrassed by his affection and don’t think I embraced him back.

I lived with my grandmother until I graduated from high school. Levi would call sometimes. “Jenisha, get the phone. It’s yo daddy,” she’d shout. I’d rush to the phone—toddler-excited to hear from him. A call from my father was like Christmas. Sometimes he’d ask if I wanted him to pick me up the next day, and so I’d spend hours waiting for him to drive up the driveway. Occasionally he would actually show, but usually he wouldn’t.

Once, in middle school, I spent a weekend with him and his wife. I made up a lie: I told his wife that I’d skipped a grade in elementary school. I wanted her to like me and think I was smart; I didn’t think it was a big deal. But a few hours after he’d dropped me back off at my grandmother’s, he called me. He’d found out about the lie and gave me a long lecture, and then a punishment: “You can’t come over here no more,” he told me. I was surprised he was angry. After all, he lied to me all the time—about being on his way to pick me up, about how he would drop off spending money for my field trip or take me back-to-school shopping. But this time he stuck to his word: I didn’t hear from him for a few years after that.

A month before I graduated from college, in 2008, I was in an evening class when he called my cellphone. He and his wife had gotten divorced by then. I stepped out to the hallway to answer. He was calling to tell me that he had a condition, and his doctor said there was a test I could take to see whether I had the “same gene.” He didn’t say what it was, and I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, because he swiftly changed the subject. “You graduating?” he asked, although he knew the answer. I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t ask about the details of the ceremony. He just spouted some compliments: “Man, you graduating. You good with that English. You gotta be real smart to do English in school.” He hadn’t come to my high-school graduation, and he didn’t come to this one, either.

I graduated, packed my bags, and left Kentucky to move to New York City. I was building a new life, and I thought about him only when a guy dumped me. If my own father thought I was worthless and didn’t want to stay in my life, how could I expect a romantic partner to want me? I measured my value by his absence.

Sometimes he’d send me a corny text, something that I couldn’t imagine him ever actually saying: “I love you like a fat kid loves cake,” he wrote once. I treated it like spam. I didn’t see him again until 2015.

By then he had moved to an assisted-living place and was using a walker to get around. His speech was slurred, and his hands shook. I took him out to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Golden Corral. Most of the time, he just smiled, showing his chipped and missing teeth. Later, I heard that his illness was getting worse and that my half brother was taking care of him.

I never quite knew why my brother had lived with our dad and I hadn’t. Maybe Levi was just proud to have a son, and what he felt about me was shame—shame that he was connected to a woman like my mom, a crack addict. Lexington is a small town, and Levi never smoked or used drugs. He’d always claimed that my mom was a one-night stand.

But my brother had his own problems. He was involved in selling drugs, and then in 2022, he disappeared. He told me one thing before he left: “Now it’s your turn.”

I had questions about Levi’s bills and care, but no one could reach my brother. I understood why last year, when he was apprehended and sent to Blackburn Correctional Complex. He’d been on the run from the Lexington police—wanted for trafficking cocaine, fleeing or evading police, and possessing a firearm.

As far as I know he was in touch with Levi only once in those years, when he texted my dad’s ex-wife a message for our dad, and she shared the message with me: “Tell him I said I love him and miss him.” I read that message over and over again, wondering what it would be like to love our dad and miss him. Obviously, my brother knew a different side of Levi. I wanted to love him, too, but it was like trying to touch the air. Yet if I didn’t take care of him, who would?

[Read: Dear Therapist: I don’t want to take care of my aging, homophobic parents]

At times, I resented my brother for what he’d had in the past, and for not being around now. Like when the nursing home called to say there had been “a little smoke incident with one of our dryers and the fire department came here to evacuate.” Or when a nurse left me a voicemail: “Just checking in for the care-plan meeting.” I resented him, and I resented Levi. But I called the nurse back. I went to the meetings. Whenever I went back to Kentucky, I made a point to visit my father. But I didn’t do any more than I felt I had to.

I thought of Levi sometimes as a stranger sleeping at a bus stop. The idea of walking away from him felt cruel—but also liberating. I once wasn’t able to care for myself, and walked away from me too.

Levi was a professional gambler who shot dice and bet on horses. He spent most of his time at the Red Mile Racetrack wagering on standardbreds galloping around the track, or on the simulcast of races around the country that played inside. He took me a few times when I was little, and I remember him staring at the screen, like an airline traveler scanning for their final destination.

But most of what I know about Levi I know from other people. When people learned that he was my father, they always had a story to tell. His nickname was Sonny, and he earned real money at the track, sometimes leaving with bundles of cash. I’ve heard stories of him handing out crisp $100 bills like Monopoly money, or treating a group to breakfast after winning. He was also known to cheat at dice sometimes, by playing with altered dice.

He was estranged from his brother and sister. Their youngest brother had killed himself when he was 18. He’d used Levi’s pistol to do it, and my surviving uncle, Kenny, never forgave him for it. Kenny has told me a little more over the years. Levi ran track even though he was “a short motherfucker,” he told me—which interested me, because I was a runner too, and I was fast. I always wondered where I’d got it from. The truth is Kenny couldn’t stand him. “Your daddy ain’t shit,” he’d say. “It seems like a man would look out for his daughter.”

More recently, I learned about Levi from his nurses. His favorite soda was Pepsi. He loved soft sweets, such as an oatmeal pie. And last year, during a meeting with his care team, I finally learned what his diagnosis was: a form of cerebellar ataxia, a degenerative neurological condition that can be inherited. I thought back to that call from so many years ago, when he had told me I could take a genetic test to find out whether I was at risk. But I didn’t take the test. I still haven’t. I’m afraid. And the last thing I want to think about is whether we share the same gene.

I saw him in April, when I had to fly back to Kentucky for the funeral of another family member. The drive to the nursing home was long, and I was glad—it gave me time to prepare to see this man who was almost a stranger to me. I passed old gas stations, homes with acres of grass, a fresh eggs for sale sign hanging on a residential mailbox. I thought about how I didn’t know the sound of his laugh, how I wouldn’t have been able to describe his voice.

The woman at the front desk greeted me: “Hi, Jenisha.” The other nurses just called me “Levi’s daughter.” They probably assumed we had a normal relationship, that he was a normal parent, and here I was, their patient’s “loved one,” doing my normal duty.

“You’re the only person who comes to see him,” a nurse told me. Maybe she was trying to make me feel proud. But I just felt sad. His ex-wife and stepdaughter visited now and then, but not regularly. Where were all of the people he’d been close with in Kentucky? How was I the only one there, when he was notorious for breaking my heart?

I walked to his room, which he shared with another man, a curtain dividing the space. The television was on—an old black-and-white cowboy movie—but there was no sound. The person in the bed was nothing like the Levi from my childhood, slick-talking and arrogant. He was fragile and could barely lift his head up. He struggled to drink from a straw, and I watched as his mouth kept missing the hole.

Sitting beside him, I dug for emotion, wanting to feel what another kind of daughter would feel. I felt like I was in a movie myself, an actress in a father-daughter scene. Kisses on my forehead. Talks about my first boyfriend. My daddy—who saw me as the most beautiful girl in the world—always wanted his darling daughter close to him. “Don’t leave,” he’d say. “Stay as long as you want.”

But all I really felt was nervous. Even though my father couldn’t speak or stand, even though he had shrunk to 77 pounds and was smaller than I was, being near him still turned me back into that scared little girl hoping for scraps. At one point I asked: “Do you love me? Nod your head if you do.” He responded by moving his head up and down. Watching him use up all of his strength to answer me filled me with a childlike high. At last, he wasn’t going to reject me anymore.

But only a few minutes later, he lifted his hand and flapped it at me. He made the gesture again. I realized he was shooing me away. I couldn’t believe it. “Are you ready for me to leave?” I asked. He nodded yes.

Even at his most vulnerable, even when he was utterly alone in the world, he was still turning me away.

Last month, the nursing home called at 4:39 a.m. “He died peacefully,” the nurse told me.

The day before, I’d talked to Levi on FaceTime and I saw how sunken he looked. Even as he was transitioning, I had little to say to him. “I love you. Are you ready to see your mom?” He nodded.

[Read: Americans are in denial about elder care]

I arranged for other family members to FaceTime, too, and the prison helped set up a call for my brother. The nurse told me that they both were crying. I kept asking her: “Did you tell him that I made it happen? What did my brother say?” My ego wanted them to know that I had made the call possible. I pictured both of them crying. All I could think was: Damn, I wish I could feel what my brother was feeling.

We scheduled the funeral for July 3, two days after my brother would be released from prison. I decided against the open casket. Levi’s body was twisted into the fetal position. To get him into an open casket, the funeral director told me, she’d have to break his legs, arms, and fingers. “I don’t want to do that to Levi,” she said. For weeks, I couldn’t decide whether or not to go to the funeral. My mom said I shouldn’t feel like I had to: “Levi didn’t show up for a lot of things for you,” she reminded me. Paying my respects seemed like the right thing to do. But more than that, a part of me wanted to prove that I was the bigger person. I wanted others—his family, his stepdaughter—to lay eyes on me, and to see that I’d made something of myself in spite of his absence. I wanted them to know that I’d been his emergency contact, the one who took care of him in the end. But the day before, I stayed home. I decided that I would watch it on Facebook Live.

The truth is that I wasn’t mourning my father; I was grieving the loss of what I’d never had. I didn’t cry when he died. But when I heard the speech that his stepdaughter gave at the funeral, the feelings hit me. Like me, she was a runner, and they used to go on jogs together. Someday, she said, she believed she would see Levi in heaven. “Come on,” he’d tell her, “let’s race,” and off they would go again. She said that Levi left her with many happy moments. And that’s when I cried.

I’ll never understand why he didn’t show up in my life, but I have to stop asking. There was a brief chapter of his life when he needed me, a period when he might have recognized me as someone who was important to him. I still wanted to please him, wanted him to see for himself that he’d made a terrible mistake by not being my father. And now that chapter is over.