The house that Abdulla’s family left behind had three rooms. The walls were painted in warm colors and decorated with drawings by his father. The kitchen was blue, and everything in it was exactly as Abdulla’s mother, Majd, wanted it to be. From the balcony, she could see across Daraa, Syria, to her husband’s office, where he worked at a university teaching drawing to aspiring architects. It was every woman’s dream, she joked, to be able to watch her husband while he was at work. Abdulla, who was six when his family left their home, remembers the big windows in the children’s room.

In March 2011, a group of teenagers in Daraa were arrested for spray-painting graffiti with Arab Spring slogans. The locals protested, and soon, the Syrian army began a ten-day siege of the city as the rest of the country hit the streets. That earned Daraa a new title: “the cradle of the revolution.” Abdulla, his parents, and his sisters went to stay with relatives in Ammann, Jordan. But they could sense that a bright future in their conflict-ridden home was unlikely.

They applied for asylum in Germany, and in 2016, Abdulla’s father traveled alone to Rudolstadt, a small city in the state of Thuringia in the former East, to handle their paperwork. When the rest of the family arrived – along with over 700,000 Syrians who came to Germany that year – they settled in a town called Saalfeld.

By then, Thuringia was becoming an epicenter of Germany’s growing far-right movement, catalyzed by the arrival of families like Abdulla’s. Marches organized by a local branch of the Dresden-based movement “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident” began appearing in Rudolstadt and Saalfeld as early as March 2015. In 2019, hundreds of torch-bearing demonstrators descended upon Rudolstadt, rallying in anticipation of “the battle to save our fatherland.” In 2024 state elections, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has advocated for the forced deportation of “non-assimilated” German citizens of different heritages, won 32.8% of the vote — nearly ten points more than the second closest party. In 2017, Björn Höcke, a 53-year-old former teacher who leads the Thuringia branch of the AfD, was found guilty of knowingly using an illegal Nazi sturmabteilung slogan in the classroom. (“Alles für Deutschland” / “Everything for Germany”.) Just last year, a local domestic intelligence agency officially considered the AfD to be a right-wing extremist group.

A recent survey puts the AfD at 37% in Thuringia. Families like Abdulla’s, who arrived among a wave of goodwill — at least in liberal cities — now find themselves targeted by rising populist tides. “We are running to make our country what it was before 2015,” reads a recent AfD Thuringia newsletter. “Our home, in which we feel safe.” In other words, a place without Abdulla.

The broad assumption that “German” refers to a nationality and an ethnicity ignores the country’s rich history of immigration after World War II. Between 1955 and 1973, 14 million “guest workers” from places like Italy, Turkey and Portugal helped rebuild the bomb-ravaged West, often toiling in harrowing conditions. In the 1970s and 1980s, Vietnamese immigrants from Communist North Vietnam and workers from Mozambique came to work in East Germany, while Boat People fled to West Germany at the end of the Vietnam War. In the 1990s and early 2000s, refugees arrived from the Balkans. An East German professor of mine used to joke that without immigrants and their flavorful dishes, the city of Berlin would have long died out, wasted by grim Prussian food.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany faced a wave of violent racism. The era is now known as the Baseballschlägerjahre, or “years of the baseball bat.” In 1992, a mob of extremists threw rocks, bottles and Molotov cocktails at Vietnamese immigrants living in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, trapping them. The pogrom completely overwhelmed the unprepared police.

After a period of relative calm, the arrival of families like Abdulla’s in 2015 and 2016 resurfaced old grievances. There were anti-Muslim demonstrations, attacks on refugee housing, and the rapid rise of the AfD, a formerly fringe party grounded in opposition to the euro. A man who murdered nine non-ethnic Germans in cold blood in Hanau in 2020 was found to have watched speeches by Björne Höcke online the day before the crime.

In recent years, Germans have become more sensitized to the subtleties of immigration and identity. Yet progress is halting. In October, Chancellor Friedrich Merz — who leads the CDU, Germany’s leading centre-right party — said, in vague reference to immigrants, “We still have this problem in the way the cities look.” Even in liberal circles, the term of art for non-ethnic Germans is Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund. “Person with a history of migration.” That’s a lot of letters for “German.”

By now, of course, Saalfeld is Abdulla’s home too. He’s lived there longer than he lived in both Daraa and Ammann. He’s a German citizen, and he speaks the language with a light Thuringian accent. Yet still, he gets looked at like an alien when he’s out with his mom, who wears a hijab.

Now 19, Abdulla is coming of age in a country that seems increasingly unsure whether it wants him there. His adolescence has paralleled Germany’s fraught transition, from being rendered homogeneous by the Holocaust to becoming a modern, multiethnic state—a process accelerated, in large part, by the German government accepting far more Syrian refugees than other large European states. Now, it seems that many of Abdulla’s neighbors want to turn back the clock.

I first met Abdulla in April. It was a sunny day, and brass band music wafted around Saalfeld’s market square. The pretty, historic town of 30,000 people defies the stereotypes of post-Soviet decay that often cling to the former East Germany: fields of sunflowers and wheat, cobblestone streets, quaint shops decorated in pale greens, yellows, purples and reds, and well-preserved early Renaissance architecture, including a town hall building that dates back to 1537. We sat down for a lunch of the blandest Indian food I’ve ever tasted, a meal clearly adapted to the local tastes. He presented himself as a confident and outgoing kid; he wore a necklace with an Egyptian symbol and spoke with the practiced eloquence of the second-generation immigrant.

Abdulla started his German schooling in fourth grade. Almost immediately, he was met with flashes of rejection. He remembers one girl who always gave him a wide berth in the hallway. He found out later that she was afraid she might touch his skin. In fifth grade, when he spoke more German and had more friends, he became somewhat of a bully. “At some point, I turned the tables,” he said. It was like an instinct: He was making sure he didn’t become a perpetual victim. As a result, he was in the principal’s office once per week.

In sixth grade, a boy whom Abdulla didn’t like was talking to himself out loud in the classroom. Abdulla went over to his desk and told him to shut up. The boy gave Abdulla a dirty look. Abdulla raised both hands and hit the other boy on the head with them. In response, the boy grabbed a pair of scissors and stabbed wildly. He punctured Abdulla and one other. In the uproar, nobody noticed that Abdulla had a pair of scissors stuck in his shoulder. He took them out and went home from school with an open wound. Abdulla was suspended for a week.

German schools are separated into three tiers; only those who graduate from the highest, called gymnasium, can progress to university-level studies. Abdulla had been placed in a lower track. It was becoming a matter of urgency for him to go to gymnasium. “My parents told me, if I stayed at the regular school, I’d become a criminal.” Majd felt powerless to help her son, but she went to the principal’s office anyway, urging him to help Abdulla get into a better school.

Her efforts paid off, and in seventh grade, when Abdulla started gymnasium, things improved quickly. He continued to have moments of minor adolescent rebellion, like smoking cigarettes in the school building. (“I’m telling you that reluctantly,” he said. “It’s really embarrassing.”) He also quickly accumulated the marks of a thriving high school student. He got better grades, developed a wide circle of friends, and even got a car. He became popular. But he could not remain unaffected by the rise of the far right in his home. It had a way of getting into everything, of polluting the atmosphere like sooty air.

I got to know Abdulla through Bert Carlsen, a tall, charismatic geography teacher who had him as a student in tenth grade. Carlsen grew up in East Germany and trained to become a teacher under the auspices of the Socialist Unity Party. He was always an independent thinker, though, the kind of person who appreciated Marx but loathed the turgid ideology of his “scientific Communism” courses. He taught in Saalfeld from 1988, when Thuringia was still part of the GDR, up until his retirement last year. Since 2010, he has observed the slow but steady rise of the far right in the region with concern.

Carlsen lives in Pößneck, a smaller town about 12 miles from Saalfeld, and a place where Abdulla feels yet more conspicuous than at home. On a recent evening, I drove past streets named for Pushkin and Engels to meet Carlsen at his house. The AfD’s rise there has been accompanied by a sense, familiar from GDR times, that one must watch what one says. “It’s a kind of latent feeling,” he told me, “that developed over time.” He added, “It is a burden in a region like this one, and it’s becoming more of a burden all the time.”

He recalled planning a project to repair his roof with a local construction company. Carlsen and the roofer spent hours discussing specifics. But as their conversation drifted to other topics, Carlsen politely pushed back against some AfD talking points the roofer brought up. The roofer abandoned the project and ghosted Carlsen — until the day of Trump’s reelection, when he sent the teacher an AI-generated video of Trump bashing members of the German Green Party with a hammer.

Driving around Saalfeld, I saw half-hidden allusions to far-right sympathies. In Pößneck, a man wore a hoodie bearing Ruhm und Ehre (glory and honor), a phrase loosely associated with the Waffen-SS — the Nazi paramilitary organization. Other times, the references have an American twist. Near Saalfeld I saw a rear windshield sticker with the unwieldy QAnon slogan “WWG1WGA” (“where we go one, we go all”). In a quaint mountain town of Saxony, which borders Thuringia to the east, a parked truck in military green displayed a plush toy of a Klu Klux Klan knight on the dashboard.

While Abdulla has faced some severe incidents of racism, mostly, he deals with profiling and nagging reminders of difference, experiences that, beneath his easygoing demeanor, have festered like an infected splinter.

There was the time he was at a friend’s 18th birthday party and a relative came by to say hello. All his friends introduced themselves. He said his name was Abdulla. “Yeah, I can tell,” the uncle told him, and walked away.

There was the time his neighbors were having a garden party, drinking outside his apartment. He introduced himself to one of his neighbors’ friends, who told him, “No, no. I’m too tipsy for a foreigner,” and ended the conversation.

There was the time he was hanging out with a friend who was dating somebody in Pößneck. Abdulla calls peers “brother” a lot — it’s a well-established part of German youth slang, especially among kids of Turkish and Arabic heritage — and said it to one of the Pößneck teenagers. “I am not your brother,” he replied.

Abdulla is certain that of the 23 kids in his class, six would vote for the AfD. When he was having a rough day at school, some kids joked, “When are you coming by with a truck?” — a reference to a 2016 terror attack by a Tunisian citizen who drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 11 and injuring over 50, or perhaps a 2024 attack by a Saudi Arabian citizen who drove a car into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing six and injuring almost 300. (Abdulla could laugh at the black humor of that.)

Abdulla got to know a friend’s family. “Her mom loves me,” he said. “We always had the best conversations. Sometimes I’d go to her place and talk more with her mother than with her.” Nevertheless, Abdulla learned through his friend that her mom votes for the AfD. He has begun to take such paradoxes in stride. “I wasn’t even angry at her,” he said, “because I think, ‘Man, if I’d get angry about that, then I wouldn’t have any friends left in the end.”

The next time I visited Abdulla, he had just passed his Abitur, a nationwide exam that determines a student’s university future. He did well. Majd was proud. She cried, as she did when I asked her to describe the home they left in Daraa.

Abdulla’s senior class hoodies read “Abikropolous: The Gods Leave Olympus.” He helped organize bake sales to pay for the Abiball, the German version of prom. After the official portion of the celebration, with parents present, the kids went to a bar called the Johannes-Klause. They thickened the air with their cigarette smoke. “It was like a fog,” Abdulla said. “You could hardly see anything.”

In the spring, he got a job as a street canvasser representing the World Wildlife Foundation, leaving the cozy claustrophobia of Saalfeld for Göttingen, a university town in the center of Germany. In long training sessions, he learned how to make the coldest of sales: accosting passersby and convincing them to donate money regularly. It was tough work, with long shifts and strict sales targets. He had two bad days on which he didn’t secure enough signatures. That was too many. He got fired. It was first experience working out in the real world, and he’d lasted a week.

Yet he returned home with some positives. He met a girl and worked on a diverse team: one of his colleagues was a Black German, and his boss had a Vietnamese background. “It wasn’t a topic among them at all,” he said. “They really didn’t care.” He had experienced a modern, multiethnic Germany, where having family from elsewhere was completely banal. At work, a man walking by told him, in Syrian Arabic, that men shouldn’t color their hair and Abdulla felt a pang of thankfulness that he was German now.

He spent that summer at home, looking for work. He applied to 37 jobs and didn’t get any. He wondered whether that was because of his name or his lack of connections: His peers were getting gigs through their parents. Instead, he spent his time going out with friends. I asked Abdulla what “going out” meant in Saalfeld, a place that is usually deserted by 8:30 p.m. on any given Saturday night. “It’s a good question,” he answered. “Going out means freezing your ass off because there’s nowhere you can go. Going out means not finding a place to go and then driving around a bit and walking around a bit, because there’s nothing here. Or,” he concluded, “chilling in somebody’s basement.” At that moment, he wasn’t a Syrian refugee caught in a rising tide of hatred and ethnic tension. He was every teenager ever.

In November, Abdulla got a job at the checkout counter of Aldi, and Majd had Carlsen and I over for an elaborate dinner including kibbeh, kofta and fatteh. The former student and teacher, now relieved of professional distance, spent most of the dinner reminiscing about school. They talked shit about mutually disliked classmates and colleagues. They recalled the time Carlsen spent an entire class debunking COVID-19 misinformation and lamented that there was no one left to maintain a climate change website he’d built.

Abdulla asked for advice about what to study in college. He is interested in international business management, pharmacy and maybe psychology. Carlsen gently prodded him to think about his major in terms of the things that interest him about it, rather than its career prospects. Addressing Carlsen, Abdulla kept switching between the formal Sie and the informal du. They were no longer teacher and student, but not quite friends either. They were also in similar places of flux: Abdulla, a youth poised to leave his home yet again, this time for university; Carlsen, a retiree ready to move on. They both loved this place in their own ways, but they weren’t sure it loved them back. Their country – and mine – was poised between its future and its past.

Both have strong spines and little patience for the arbitrary exercise of authority. Carlsen was telling Abdulla that when he started teaching at the school in Saalfeld, in the early 2000s, the principal was a strict Catholic woman.

“I always got in her hair,” Carlsen said.

“I didn’t even exist yet back then,” Abdulla answered.

“I always said they were the Catholic Taliban.”

Abdulla laughed long and hard at that. It was a bright and soothing noise.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Special thanks to Raazi Tea on this one. I was able to try their Indian Breakfast (now called English Breakfast) and it features a boldness and aroma my usual Lipton Black lacks. The founder, , also publishes a tea zine called “Leaves.”

Location: Chicago, IL

Temperature: 28° and snowy.

Morale: Working on it.

I wish the feeling of moving halfway across the country after quitting one’s job could be bought and sold. It’s liberating and invigorating, sparking a static sense of change which beckons a glorious (yet diminishing) vision of greener pastures. During my period of voluntary unemployment, ideas were given space to live and breathe, but, as I’ve found through multiple stints of chasing the spaces in between routine life, necessity trumps idealism. Which is why I must confess that over the past two months, since moving, I have not been able to focus on anything other than getting a job. It is true—cash rules everything. Back in New York, it fell from the sky and I saved it like a squirrel stashing nuts for winter. The bad news: winter has come. The good: I have found a job. So I’ll be working on getting this project back on track, starting off with this here column.

Blame it on the snow storms here in Chicago, but any optimism I expressed towards the media world has pretty much fizzled. I don’t want to play the game, nor do I think I’m internet savvy enough either way. But what I can do is write and publish stories from other writers, which will continue to be the main objective; anything beyond that is butter. Recently, we did this with Will Gendron’s piece about boxing in Reading, PA; Cam Crowell’s experience hooping at a festival in Oaxaca, Mexico; Mariel Ferragamo’s look at peacetime vs wartime Ukraine; and the two weeks I spent in SF poking around the AI boom.

Anyways, it was a great year for music. Rock is cool again; the UK is leading the way in rap; a cohort of cool kids are rising in Scandinavia; Justin Bieber made an amazing album; a growing polarization in country music between bros and troubadours has led to some impassioned projects. Here are my favorites from a year of lofty change.

Favorite Albums of 2025

1. Playboi Carti - MUSIC

2. Sword II - Electric Hour

3. Jim Legxacy - black british music

4. Bashfortheworld - Migo In America

5. Snuggle - Goodbyehouse

6. BabyDrill - Cry For Help

7. 2hollis - star

8. Rex Laurent - Seller’s Remorse

9. Nine Vicious - Studio Addict

10. Justin Bieber - SWAG

11. YFN Lucci - ALREADY LEGEND.

12. Charley Crockett - Lonesome Drifter

13. Hunxho - For Us

14. Geese - Getting Killed

15. Tyler Childers - Snipe Hunter

16. Corbin - Crisis Kid

17. Morgan Wallen - I’m The Problem

18. Treety - Trick or Treat

19. Bickle - Gut Feeling

20. Curren$y - 7/30

Favorite Books I Read in 2025

• All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry

• Willie, Waylon, and the Boys by Brian Fairbanks

• Typee by Herman Melville

• Just Kids by Patti Smith

• The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller

Favorite Songs of 2025 (excluding anything from the albums list)

1. J4H$SiR - “TYPE STUFF”

2. feeble little horse - “This Is Real”

3. MexikoDro - “No Date”

4. YoungBoy Never Broke Again - “Finest”

5. Lola Young - “Messy”

6. Bay Swag & 42 Dugg - “Drank”

7. Kashus Culpepper feat. Marcus King - “Southern Man”

8. Lana Del Rey - “Henry, come on”

9. Pradabagshawty - “P wit Ha”

10. Erika de Casier - “December”

11. Kodak Black - “No Flaggin”

12. 1300SAINT - “SOUTHSIDE FOREVER”

13. The Hellp - “Hot Fun”

14. fakemink - “Face to Face”

15. RobOlu - “100ONCANDLER”

16. Fimiguerrero & Reekz MB - “Tartan”

17. dexter in the newsagent - “Special”

18. Tony Shhnow - “Think Again”

19. Young Nudy - “BTA”

20. Whirr - “Days I Wanna Fade Away”

21. Wiley From Atlanta - “Don’t Look Up”

22. Neno Calvin - “Hush Mode”

23. Ella Langley - “Choosin’ Texas”

24. Kenny Mason - “A1”

25. Derby - “Jenny”

Playlist: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/favorite-songs-of-2025/pl.u-MDAWoj9tGXkPZD

~~~

My year began in bed, as did the previous year, and probably the year before that. I was working on a senior thesis about Goth music, covered in the cotton entrails of my beloved Yankees pillow-pet, which remains, as I type this, splayed across my lap, withered and bleeding out. On my Twitter feed, in another tab, Cam Newton is admonishing Keon Coleman, a 22 year-old NFL player who enjoys cookies. “That was all cool,” he is saying, referencing his sideline antics. “But we give that grace to young players.” The first time I saw the clip, I remembered a moment, earlier this summer, when a gruff LIRR conductor looked at my “dependent” pass—Thanks, Dad—and told me that it was 2025: You are no longer in school, and so, we are no longer accepting that. (“We give that grace to young players.”) A month or so after that, I was wearing a spike-laden leather hat in Central Park, when my friend, who is very wise, glanced at my feet and asked me: “Have you considered buying new socks instead of Cyberpunk hats?” I really wanted to cry at my graduation ceremony. At the end, our evil chancellor, who is also very succinct, granted adulthood with the grace of a falling piano: “The ceremony is now over,” he said, and no tears came.

“Pats on the back are over with,” Newton is declaring on my Twitter feed, which is now playing the full video—not the 30-second TikTok clip, but the unedited, much funnier monologue. “You’re not a rookie anymore, brother.” If 2025 has meant anything to me, it is that I am no longer a rookie, and so the associated privileges—of dawdling, of dancing, of eating cookies—have expired. What have I done with this information? A few things: I now exclusively consume raw fish and pre-workout. When I do listen to music, which is rarely, it is dissonant and arrhythmic, which instills in my developing prefrontal cortex a disposition of eternal struggle. I do not “dance,” but when my body moves in accord with pleasurable frequencies, it is involuntary, and I flog myself before tearfully repenting, on my knees, under a freezing shower. There is no sugar in my home, as it is a distraction from the bitter truths I diligently seek.

I am kidding. Here are ten songs I listened to a lot this year.

• Chemical - “Subliminal Arrow”

• Rita P - “RRP”

• Halloween - “Crown”

• TOBACCO - “The Black Album”

• Shiner - “Giant’s Chair”

• Peace de Résistance - “You Are Absurd”

• The Third Eye Foundation - “Sleep”

• quannnic - “Prunesnail”

• Phreshboyswag - “skinny jeans w the platform boots”

  • ed note: read Sammy on phreshboyswag here: https://sammysworld.org/the-wrong-underground/

• Double Virgo - “Nuggit Step Down”

~~~

This Fall, I spent most of my spare brain power being humbled by marathon training and the graduate school admissions cycle. But now that my MFA apps are done (we’ll hear back in March) and the Philadelphia Marathon has been run (the first 20 miles went well, at least) I’m looking forward to a winter of sleeping in, cheap beer, and reading for fun.

I’m not really an end-of-year list guy, though that’s not really a statement about evaluating art but a consequence of how disorganized I am.

But here’s a list of some books I loved this year that I didn’t get a chance to write about elsewhere:

1. Audition by Katie Kitamura

2. Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian

3. Information Age by Cora Lewis

4. Amateurs! by Johanna Walsh

And some shoutouts to some really smart essays I’ve read recently:

1. Gabriel Winslow Yost on Disco Elysium for the Baffler

2. n+1’s recent pair of pieces (by Brandon Harris and Mack Basham and Joshua Judd Porter) on baseball, a potential MLB salary cap, and the Dodgers

3. Leah Abrams in the Nation about working as a speechwriter for John Fetterman

As for music, just MUSIC by Playboi Carti.

~~~

Navigate to any piece of online journalism on modern generational divides and hit ctrl-f. Type in “experience.” You will find that the defining trait of millennials and their younger cohorts — zillenials, gen-z, gen-alpha, blah blah — is a desire to accumulate this amorphous “experience” rather than establish footholds in say, a career. Many of these pieces posit that people 40 and under would sooner work at a coffee shop than start families. It makes sense to fuck around accepting piecemeal gig work in order to pursue a passion or dream when there were never any jobs to begin with.

Why do I bring all of this up? Because the bulk of 2025, the second year into my 30s, has been defined by an escape from the infinite, humiliation-ritual matrix of the gig-economy. Like a non-insignificant portion of my peers, I spent the most of the last decade avoiding anything that would improve my candidacy for the renowned “email job.” What they don’t tell you about choosing this route is that if you are interested in stability at any point in the future, you will have to debase yourself in increasingly inventive ways later down the road.

I moved to New York in 2018 after getting fired by a law firm in Atlanta within a record-breaking amount of time (1.5 months), which was primarily spent in the office bathroom watching Fortnite vids until my thighs sustained nerve damage. Over a seven-year period, I worked everything from part-time receptionist at the FADER to box truck driver for a moving company during the height of the pandemic to janitor at a shuffle board club. I worked the graveyard shift (3 AM - 9:00 AM) at the UPS factory in Maspeth, Queens. During the holiday season, the speed and volume of the endless packages we had to stuff into trucks induces psychosis.

Relative salvation was offered to me in the form of a unionized position at a tech company that, yes, functions as a digital pain factory courageous enough to provide an answer to the following: what if we could monetize rising paranoia over “urban crime”? So at the beginning of 2025, I was listening to police radio overnight, living in an underworld where work hours take place from 7 PM to 5 AM.

In April, thankfully, a homie who started a social agency gave me a call and asked if I was still looking to “break into advertising.” He needed a full-time writer and comes from an editorial background himself. It is the only reason I no longer have to stay up overnight and listen to thousands of 911 calls, detailing the worst experiences of unnamed strangers’ lives to an audience seeking confirmation bias. In the months since, my primary concern has been maintaining said job and, as a result, my writing — when it doesn’t involve TikTok or IG Reel scripts or social show concepts — has largely fallen by the wayside.

Regardless, here is a mixture of my favorite music, movies, and #realizations in a year where the writing on the wall has never been more clear:

Songs that were aggressively in rotation

• Pradabagshawty - “Tinder Date”

• TDF & Ohsxnta - “Ghetto Symphony”

• Khadija Al Hanafi - “Borders” (!OK! is easily a top 5 album for me)

• ZayALLCAPS - “Friends You Can Kiss”

• Playboi Carti - “Overly”

• Rio Da Yung OG - “Ghetto Love Story” + “OFF-RAP”

• Lil Xelly - “Rewind” (RIP you deserved so much better)

• Future - “Maison Margiela” (2014 release but idc)

• heartstopmiami - “LARRY DAVID”

• Myaap - “Fairy”

• Mark William Lewis - “Still Above”

• Feng - “Left for USA”

Favorite movie that I saw for the first in 2025

• Two-Lane Blacktop: What gripped me more than how the film looked, was Warren Oates’ character… the 21st century man. He’s someone who is a little past his prime, realizing the world he grew up in has been gone for a while and so he is desperately trying to adapt. Identity is the central currency of the future, Oates portends, and you can go as far as people are willing to buy into whatever it is you’re projecting. That’s why he is constantly searching for hitchhikers. Every new person he picks up represents an opportunity to reinvent himself. I think it coalesces nicely with our current era of short-form creator content. The second Obama era hammered home the idea that we could change our lives forever through one moment of virality. You just have to curate the right persona to get plucked out of obscurity.

Largest recession indicator

• Recession indicator as a term is thrown out there too generously. Like anything else, peak saturation has scrambled its meaning. But the biggest recession indicator to me so far this year has been Spencer Jones’ presence on LinkedIn. For the uninitiated, Jones is an NBA player on the Denver Nuggets. He went undrafted in 2024 but signed a two-way contract this past summer, worth over half a million USD per year. And while these contracts aren’t long term and involve playing with the franchise’s development team in the G-League, he can expect to make upwards of $1 M over the next two years. Still, he posts consistently and aggressively on the social media platform meant to find jobs. Whether it’s hawking brand deals or positioning himself as someone who would be a great fit to represent your brand, it’s not that the content itself is that egregious, it’s that even 3-and-D archetypes in the league hardly have job security.

~~~

Crowell

I started out 2025 by quitting my job, going to a Spanish school in Guatemala, working at a hotel in Mexico, playing a lot of pickup basketball, and now I’m ending it with a new job helping wipe preschoolers who haven’t locked down EVERY step of the “taking a shit” process yet. The world’s worse, but life’s better now that I’ve turned 30.

Working at a bilingual preschool of mostly immigrants while the federal administration has made it their goal to kidnap as many of their parents as possible feels surreal. Two weeks ago, a four-year-old girl whispered uneasily to me in Spanish that her mom and older sister cried because “the police came to [her sister’s] school looking to take the daddies, but mommy says that we’re safe as long as we stay inside.” The rest of the week, this girl’s teenage cousins came to pick her up after school. In any given moment, the day-to-day surreality of breaking up fights when one kid decides that another kid’s aunts are actually her cousins and he’s pissed off that she’s lying, like a mini-Maury, causes me equal parts stress in the moment.

It’s not that teaching itself is something worthy of glazing. It’s not “rewarding.” I’ve come home and napped and/or cried more than I have in the past decade combined. But it’s not self-flagellation either: I had that covered by willingly watching every UCLA football game this season for reasons unknown. It just feels like when everything is going to shit I’ve never been one to just turn away. And hopefully we, as artists, teachers, and just people in the world, are able to turn towards the evil being acted all around us and do more than just feel bad. I’m not going to pretend like I know some grand unified theory of what needs to be done, but may 2026 be a year where we try to do stuff anyways.

Favorite films of 2025

1. Simon de la Montaña

2. One Battle After Another

3. Eddington

4. Yo Vi Tres Luces Negras

5. Weapons

6. Sinners

7. Un Cuento de Pescadores

Favorite films I watched for the first time in 2025 (not including films that came out this year)

1. Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)

2. Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

3. Volver (2006)

4. Candyman (1992)

5. The Parallax View (1974)

6. Hard Boiled (1992)

7. Canoa: A Shameful Memory (1976)

8. Amores Perros (2000)

9. Old Joy (2006)

10. La Llorona (2019)

Favorite things I read in 2025

1. The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp

2. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist by Oswaldo Zavala

3. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

4. Bitter Fruit: The untold story of the American coup in Guatemala by Stephen Schlesinger & Stephen Kinzer

5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

6. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

7. The Rider by Tim Krabbe

8. Confía en la Lucha by Krista Dover

9. The Shining by Stephen King

10. Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert

My list of favorite songs this year is decidedly far too “uncool” since I spent so much of it trying to perfect Mexican karaoke songs that would impress the 50 year old couples dancing in the cantina

1. Los Tigres Del Norte - “Ni Parientes Somos”

2. Julieta Venegas - “Lento”

3. Natanael Cano - “O Me Voy O Te Vas”

4. Los Tucanes De Tijuana - “La Chona”

5. Belanova - “Rosa Pastel”

6. Luis Miguel - “Ahora Te Puedes Marchar”

7. La Union - “Lobo-hombre en Paris”

8. Selena - “Como La Flor”

9. Los Tigres Del Norte - “Contrabando Y Traicion”

10. Bad Bunny - “DtMF”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

“Do I look like a comedian?” The question, posed by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is steeped in mischievous irony. He’s speaking to his minister of infrastructure, who’d just asked if Zelenskyy was “serious” about the billion-dollar budget he’s been given to repair Ukraine’s dilapidated roads, hoping to skim some off the top. “Yes,” the minister retorted, before excusing himself to call his next-in-command and report a smaller number, who did the same to his employee, and so on. By the end of it, the construction workers were asked to rebuild roads with no budget, no supplies, and no pay.

Such a moment could have just as easily played out in the Kyiv presidential halls, but this one in particular took place on a television set. The minister of infrastructure is not, in fact, in charge of Ukraine’s bridges and highways, but is an actor pretending to be. Zelenskyy, too, is an actor at this point, and has not yet assumed the presidency. The scene plays out in what became a highly popular political satire show, Servant of the People. In it, the current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, plays an ordinary man who stumbled into the presidency–not unlike the way it played out in real life a few years later.

Zelenskyy’s character was a humble history teacher, Vasily Petrovych Goloborodko. After one of his students secretly filmed and posted a video of him on a colorful tirade to a colleague about the country’s leadership–”Who’s there to vote for?! It’s always the lesser of two assholes!”–it went viral and ushered him to the very office he was criticizing.

Servant is lighter than Scandal, more potent than Parks and Recreation, but not as scathing as Veep. Undergirding its satire is more a pointed commentary on Ukrainian politics than the others offered on the United States, however. What began as a populist critique of corruption evolved into a political reality, taking on an added tone of urgency as it transitioned from satire to real-life dystopia.

November will mark ten years since the show began airing. Servant of the People has since become one of the most significant time capsules on TV. Viewers who now only remember a beleaguered country and its weary president besieged by bloody war can watch a once-vivid land and its spry leader in a comparatively symmetrical world.

Ukraine has faced staunch criticism from its people for its string of corrupt leaders since its independence in 1991. The TV show flipped that script by asking what Ukraine would look like if the person seemingly least after status or wealth in the country took the helm. “Have a simple teacher live like a president, and a president live like a teacher!” Goloborodko exclaimed.

Complete with cold opens of oligarchs playing Monopoly with real Ukrainian landmarks, the show’s tongue-in-cheek humor isn’t roundabout about the government’s problems. Dropped right into the mania, Goloborodko is swimming upstream against officials accustomed to having votes–and money–flow right to their pockets. However, he immediately spurns the perks of presidential life and encourages those around him to do the same.

In 2019, the real-life Zelenskyy began a presidential campaign and a party with the same name as the title sequence, and won with a sweeping 73 percent of the vote. Servant became more than a satire, but a first draft of a new, more hopeful reality.

Zelenskyy’s acted presidency and his real-life one bear uncanny resemblance: Goloborodko opts to take the bus over the troupe of black magisterial sedans and remains living in his parents’ meager flat rather than an executive mansion. Zelenskyy is known to be similarly modest. His character’s first presidential speech has a striking resemblance to what he would say a few years later in real life. Goloborodko’s advisors prodded him into reciting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as his own, but the former history teacher could not bring himself to do so. He sets aside his approved talking points and starts speaking his mind, scorning the country’s inequalities with a brutal exposition of corruption.

“Please explain why I, as an average voter with a history teacher’s salary, can’t afford a fifty-year-old prefab flat when you, my subordinates, live in luxury mansions? Don’t you think that’s weird, or am I the only one who sees the anomaly? You’re public servants indeed!”

Looking out over his students embedded in the crowd, he said, “One should act in a way that doesn’t evoke shame when looking into children’s eyes... This is what I promise you, the people of Ukraine.”

His approach to appealing to the country is much like Zelenskyy’s today, of honest, direct messaging and shirking the pretentiousness of commander-in-chiefdom to appeal to the people’s persona, and similarly, evoking the Ukrainian children’s point of view.

“After my election victory, my six-year-old son said: ‘Dad, they say on TV that Zelenskyy is the President … So, it means that I am the President too?!’ At the time, it sounded funny, but later I realized that it was true,” Zelenskyy said in his 2019 inaugural address. “Because each of us is the President…It hasn’t been only me who has just taken the oath. Each of us has just put his hand on the Constitution and swore allegiance to Ukraine.”

Watching Servant ten years later comes with the disconcerting omnipotence that 2015 Zelenskyy or even 2019 Zelenskyy did not have. Twinges of sadness ring out between the self-deprecating jokes that weren’t there when they were filmed. What began as art imitating life turned into life imitating art, though the real-life events have far outpaced the scripted ones.

The show’s title sequence weaves in B-roll of Ukrainian landscapes as it follows Zelenskyy biking to work, clothespin nipping his pant leg and all. The stretches of forests, skyscrapers dotting the skyline, trains rumbling across the screen, and historical architecture feel strikingly normal. But watching today, with the lens of a horrific war unfolding, feels eerily tragic. Ten years later, Ukraine’s buildings are singed black and crumbling, the skies are gray with ash and smoke, and debris is strewn across the ground.

For Ukrainians today, bombings are a common occurrence. This year alone, Russia averaged 120–185 strikes on Ukraine per day. Many residents, like Anna Borysova, who works as a humanitarian officer in Kyiv, describe the sounds of shelling, air raid sirens, and military action routinely filling the air through the night. “People who live their daily life now understand they live in a war. Every night could be one with shelling, or it could be calm.” When we spoke on the phone last month, it was luckily one of those quiet nights. But in some places where she works, like Zazyphoyizia, shelling happens routinely; her team there sleeps only an hour or two a night.

Even unluckier ones, like Liubov Marchenko, a resident of Mykolaivka in the Donetsk region, have been woken up to strikes shattering the windows and damaging their homes. “There was a scream. I got up, the windows flew out, something flew past me, I thought it was a shell,” she recounted during a strike last September. “I was shaken. The house was full of smoke.”

As Ukraine closes in on four years at war, the country has lost more than 14,000 civilians, and estimates of between 60,000 and 100,000 personnel. CARE International estimates that 14.6 million people need aid in Ukraine, and at least 2.6 million have been displaced, fleeing the conflict. Russian drones and strikes have not discriminated, decimating energy infrastructure, schools, homes, and children’s playgrounds. “Mariupol used to be a beautiful city,” Yevhen Tusov, native of the once-vibrant metropolis, said. “Now, there’s just rubble left of it.” Nationwide, reconstruction efforts are estimated at $524 billion.

Borysova said that life in the small town of Sumy, where she is from, just forty kilometers from the Russian border, has completely changed. “People need hygiene kits, they need food, they need fuel,” she told me. Yuriy Boyechko, CEO of humanitarian nonprofit Hope for Ukraine, also works in communities just shy from the border. Three and a half years later, “nobody was thinking that we would still be doing emergency response,” he added. “Right now, delivering aid is still very dangerous.”

Some of the quips in Servant become harder to endure, knowing they sting more viciously in today’s reality. Jokes about Goloborodko’s safety as leader are agonizing now that Zelenskyy is staring death in the face. A bit in which he gets a call about Ukraine being accepted into the European Union, only to find out it was a mistake, feels cruel to watch today given that ten years later, Ukraine is still desperately vying for the same outcome. Still far from reach, the real Zelenskyy is repeating the same lines about EU accession three years into having applied: “We are fighting for our freedom, for our land. We are fighting to be equal members of Europe.”

Anton Kuchukhidze, cofounder of the Kyiv-based think tank United Ukraine, said that since the war has broken out, he’s seen EU partners “drastically change” their understanding of the threat of Russia to Ukraine and Western allies, and have increased support. To date, EU membership, however, remains elusive.

Kyiv’s aggressor, Russia, is never overtly brought into the TV show, but its presence looms over the entire series. The dialogue is mainly in Russian, and Goloborodko and his colleagues make jabs at Vladimir Putin, from the watch he wears to comparing him to certain body parts. His signature tactic to get the attention of bickering parliamentarians and angry protestors is to yell, “Putin has been deposed!”

The Russian leader, famously not fond of satire, has never commented on the show publicly, but Russian television channels with ties to the state have tellingly pulled the show from the air. He has, however, questioned Zelenskyy’s legitimacy as a leader, calling him a “toxic figure” and saying there was “no chance” he’d win reelection.

Kuchukhidze said that the warning signs of Russia’s invasion were evident long before 2022 or even 2015, coincidentally both when Servant began running and around the same time he entered the policy world.

“I have not only a professional vision, but I also have the personal observer experience of Russian aggression since 1993.” Kuchukhidze was three years old when he could first recall Russia posturing its military aggression toward post-Soviet states, including Ukraine, and where he grew up, in Georgia. Now, he lives in Kyiv, where “all people who live in the circumstances of war have some impact from the war, from shelling, from bombing,” he said.

Today, in Russian-occupied cities in Ukraine, citizens live in fear of Russian surveillance. The entire country is rife with Russian propaganda, but the Ukrainian identity and efforts to combat it persist stronger than ever, Kuchukhidze said. “Ukrainians, even at the level of blood, they have bravery, they have unity, they have power.” Our interview was cut short as Kuchukhidze told me he heard warning sirens of an impending raid and had to take shelter midway through.

In Kherson, which falls in occupied territory, Borysova remembers distributing aid to an apartment complex that once fit 100 families and now has only 10 living there today. “I asked the complex manager, ‘Why do you stay here? It’s dangerous.’ We were distributing aid under shelling. And she answered. ‘If everyone leaves the city, where will Ukraine be? Ukraine is not territory, it’s people.’”

Borysova feels this compulsion herself. “Almost every day, I ask myself the question, is it worth it to stay here and continue my work and let my daughter stay here under shelling and stress?” she told me. “It should be my priority as a mother [to leave]. But also I have my priority as a Ukrainian to all the Ukrainians who live here.”

Zelenskyy, for his part, has hewed to this Ukrainian mythos of unity, sincerity, and anti-elitism, as he governs during Ukraine’s most challenging moment—with all its old problems he once made light of on TV, too. Corruption has been rampant in the Ukrainian presidency. A scene like the one with the minister of infrastructure scheming to embezzle public funds was not drawn up out of thin air.

But Goloborodko did not tolerate the graft–firing the minister and many of his counterparts–and neither did Zelenskyy. The president sacked dozens of his own officials since taking office over corruption allegations, and has struggled to launch effective anti-corruption measures, stating that the country’s agencies need to be stripped of “Russian influence.”

Zelenskyy relies on honest messaging, appealing to the people as one of the people, perfectly in tune with his role in Servant. When the war broke out, the Ukrainian leader rebuffed comforts. Just like his character passed up a luxurious living situation, Zelenskyy was living in a spartan room offshooting his office, so he could be ready to respond to whatever updates came through. Only a bed, sink, and a few simple furnishings, enough to get through the day until the next.

Famously, Zelenskyy’s closet is mostly stocked with military clothes. He took off his suit for good when Russia invaded in a mark of solidarity with those on the frontlines, and hasn’t put one back on since. He keeps a select few suits in his office-turned-bedroom, taking one out of its protective plastic sheath to show journalist Dmytro Komarov in the documentary “Year,” which chronicles the first year of the war. “This is a symbol,” Zelenskyy said. “We will win soon, so we will wear suits again.” By wearing military attire, Zelenskyy is making a statement to his people and the world that life in Ukraine is not normal; dressing otherwise would be a disservice to his country.

In one scene in the show, Goloborodko’s cabinet, unbeknownst to him, fakes a meteor hurtling toward Ukraine to distract from controversial reforms. On the steps outside his office, Goloborodko’s foreign minister swerves up in his car, gets out, and says,” You’re still here?! I thought you’d fled the country!” The president’s reply, aghast, was simply, “Where to?”

Watching this scene ten years later, one can’t help but think of his address to the country on February 24, 2022. A few hours after Russia invaded, Zelenskyy filmed a video on his smartphone from the shadowy streets of Kyiv. His message is simple, but cogent: Ukraine’s leaders are with its people. “The leader of the party is here, the head of the presidential administration is here,” he begins, pointing to the men in the shot behind him. “The president is here,” referring to himself. “We are all here.”

His daily “selfie” videos became a tactic that Zelenskyy employed in a series of his own, by showing the world the real toll on the landscape behind him and demonstrating that he truly was there to stay. No teleprompters, no official government branding, nothing fancier than streetlamps providing light for his phone camera. While the Zelenskyy government wasn’t perfect at the beginning, Boyechko said, his biggest strength is this communication. “He gets every day in front of the people and records a message, religiously for three plus years,” which speaks volumes for Ukrainians. “They understand that he did not abandon them.”

Ukrainians are largely not optimistic about a “happy end” in the coming months, (let alone a twenty-four-hour resolution), Borysova said. At the time of writing, Russia is seemingly reinvigorating its campaign, targeting civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and now sending drones to neighboring European countries like Poland and Romania. Boyechko expects this will be the hardest few months yet, as energy infrastructure continues to be pummeled and drone warfare only ratchets up. “If they survive through this winter, that’s going to be a miracle, as far as I see it.”

All of the Ukrainians I spoke to told me some version of how this war is bigger than Ukraine alone. The best hope for Ukraine, Borysova added, is understanding their fight is a global one in the name of democracy, and to “keep talking” about Ukraine so it doesn’t get forgotten.

Zelenskyy, both as Goloborodko and himself, has never relented in that fight. But whether on the TV set, the UN dais, or the streets of Kyiv, he’s never made it about the spotlight he’s been given, casting it instead toward his country. “I’m not iconic,” he said. “Ukraine is iconic.”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

It’s the semi-finals of the San Antonio de Padua Festival’s basketball tournament in Hidalgo Yalalag, Oaxaca, and Juan Mixe twisted his ankle. The wavy-haired, undersized guard just caught a pass while cutting into the lane. In one full extension, Juan spun a layup high off the corner of the wood backboard. While the ball twirled in the air, Juan’s body met the broad chest of a help-side defender hungry for a highlight block. Juan grated clear across the concrete floor, his eyes never leaving the hoop until he knew the bucket was good.

Mosquitos are unrelenting under the covered ceiling, outdoor basketball court. The festival crowd is growing impatient. The Jaripeo-bull riding of the day is finished, and festival rides are closed for the night. All that’s left to see is a champion for the main event of the town’s biggest yearly cultural festival. Each foul call is met with emphatic whistling, only further incentivizing a more physical game.

The veteran guard takes a second. He winces. He grunts. He reties his shoelaces a little tighter, before hobbling over to the free throw line. While some continue whistling, others begin chanting his name. Juan buries the and-one and limps back to play defense. There are no substitutes on his team. Any extra players would only further split the potential $20,000 peso winnings for the champion. During the work week in Oaxaca City, Juan Arturo Oliveira-Espina, 32, may be an agro-industrial engineer for the federal government, but in the mountains of Oaxaca, “Juan Mixe” is a star.

Juan Mixe’s legend around the festival comes with kids asking to take pictures while he stretches before the game. But Oliveira-Espina laughs at the idea of celebrity. He says his game is a pass first and defensive-oriented play–he doesn’t take over a game like his childhood idol Michael Jordan. Sure, he’s still the leader, but perhaps the best quality of his team, San Juan Juquila Mixe, is their willingness to share the ball.

“We’re pure family. We defend each other, if someone gets hurt, we take care of them,” Oliveira-Espina tells me after his team wins the game and awaits the tournament final. “Almost all of us [on the team] are cousins. Every time there’s a festival in Oaxaca, there’s going to be a basketball tournament. And our team probably plays in about 10 tournaments a month.”

Oliveira-Espina’s nickname, “Juan Mixe,” is a reference to the indigenous Mixe language spoken in the Sierra region of Oaxaca. It’s a name that comes with the honor of representing both his hometown and his indigenous roots. Juan’s name is spoken with hushed reverence or jeers from fantatical haters. While every weekend in Oaxaca brings basketball tournaments with ever increasing prize winnings for the players, the sport is in a long lineage of pride in each community.

“For us it goes back a long way. My grandparents even played,” Oliveira-Espina says. “My parents were Michael Jordan fans. They shaved my head. I wanted my hair long. My mom, who didn’t even know much about basketball, said, ‘no, like Jordan.’ It’s something that sticks with you, but it’s something very beautiful.”

While many Oaxacans identify with the lineage of their town’s indigenous community and language, my teammates from the hometown Yalalag, call me, “Camarón,” the Spanish word for shrimp and approximating my actual name, which is awkward for Spanish speakers to pronounce. Those who don’t know me just call me, “güero,” essentially Spanish for “white boy.” It’s a scrappy team, made up mostly of guys over 40, who also play in the “veterans” division.

As the crow flies, Yalagag is only about 30 miles away from San Juan Juquila. But the Sierra de Juarez mountain range and miles of winding semi-maintained roads stand between them. Yalalag is home to the Zapotec indigenous community, with a different language, giving our team its unofficial name–the Zapotecos.

I arrived three days earlier at the start of the 2025 edition of the festival of San Antonio de Padua held annually in early June. My friend Alex, a Oaxacan I met at a pickup run in Mexico City, insisted I needed to go to a festival in his home state. He texted some of his friends from his village, who connected me with the local tournament organizer, Adelfo. A week later, I was taking the ten hour night bus to Oaxaca City. Luckily, Adelfo also ran a cab business in town and arranged for an affordable ride up the mountain.

Packed two people to a seat in a shared taxi, we rode nearly four hours through the foggy foothills that only seemed to get greener and wetter as we left the valley. Maguey and cactus lined the sides of the highways, at times we’d drive through three towns and the only other traffic were three-wheeled mototaxis struggling to scale a steep graded highway. As the shared cab arrived into town, the last few miles switched from two lanes of traffic to one, as a highway improvement project sought to repave a rough stretch of road.

I met Adelfo outside the Hidalgo Yalalag administrative building, along with two grade school teachers who helped him organize the competitive sports side of the festival. A Catholic church stood as a centerpiece at the end of the main street. Directly outside the church, vendors set up tents in front of homes and store fronts, slinging a range of wares. Various family mezcal distilleries offered samples. A man’s mini-leather goods-emporium sold cowboy hats, cellphone holsters, and belt buckles. The local sneakerhead posted up with a pile of basketball shoe boxes across the street. After browsing, one of the teachers, moonlighting as a cabbie, gave us a ride to the stadium down the road in his mototaxi that had a decal of Bugs Bunny wearing a Michael Jordan jersey.

Club Deportivo Yalalag kicked things off with a futsal tournament on the town’s multiuse basketball court. The crowd was sparse. Children marched the cobblestone streets with brass and woodwind instruments playing Tambora music, often with an adult pacing in front, letting off fireworks. The town offers three free meals a day for all attendees—carnitas tacos with consume, traditional Oaxacan moles, and spicy shrimp soups. With accommodation sold out far in advance in these small towns, tournament players are offered bed rolls and space to sleep in the classrooms of a local elementary school. Adelfo, however, led me up into the hills overlooking the town square where they had a coveted extra bed in his family home.

The festival, and the accompanying basketball tournament, is a full community affair. When the torrential downpour almost entirely flooded the basketball court and put the tournament on pause, Topiles, community police forces made up of unarmed young men in indigenous communities throughout Oaxaca, jumped to the task of digging trenches, diverting rainfall with metal siding and trash cans, and using push brooms to get water off the court. All that remains of the flood are a few slick spots at the corner three, a slight hazard for any spot up shooter. Many hands and some makeshift flood engineering brought the basketball back within a half hour.

Basketball’s history in the mountainous region of the Sierra Norte began in the 1930s during an era of land reforms following the Mexican Revolution (or 3rd Transformation) of the 1920s. This all part of the newly minted Mexican Constitutions attempts at land reform and the creation of communal space after the feudal dominance of mostly European land owners of indigenous peasants pre-revolution. The newly democratized Mexican government made concessions to organized indigenous communities in the form of infrastructural development which came coupled with Spanish literacy programs–an early attempt to foster a new national “Mexican” identity.

“The topography is different in Oaxaca,” says Jesús Pacheco-Reyes, 65, who has coached youth squads in Villa Alta, Oaxaca for more than 30 years. “While kids were learning soccer [in other parts of Mexico], there weren’t enough large spaces to build soccer fields here. Basketball has always been the most important. In the 1930s, a group of [Spanish] teachers arrived, and that was the sport they started practicing there in Villa Alta, and it spread little by little.”

The fledgling democratic state built sports complexes with covered basketball courts that double as town center meeting spaces and dance or concert halls. With a high illiteracy rate in the poorer and underdeveloped states in southern Mexico, the government sent teachers, who in turn brought basketball.

Outside of the cobblestone streets, Michelin Star restaurants, and Mezcalerias of the state’s capital city and coastal resort towns like Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca is still one of the poorest regions in Mexico. A majority of people live below the national poverty line, and nearly a quarter are considered to live in “extreme poverty.” A large portion of the local economy is based on remittances sent from family members working in the United States, and many young adults in their prime basketball years have immigrated to the US.

Even as the US border grows more increasingly militarized, with more families separated for longer periods of time, the basketball tradition in Oaxaca continues. Families send remittance money to help organize the tournament, build bigger prize purses for players, and in some cases send second or third generation Mexican-American descendants back to their family’s hometowns to compete.

Friday is the first day of basketball tournament play. It’s reserved exclusively for the children’s divisions. Hundreds of kids from surrounding towns played games from 9am until long past sundown, breaking for their three complimentary meals. Pacheco-Reyes coaches every level of youth ball for his town of Villa Alta, who are always among the best in tournament play. Games are briefly interrupted for a Catholic procession and full marching band crossing the court towards the Jaripeo ring adjacent to the stadium. Children in their colorful basketball uniforms race each other to climb up the wooden fence structures like a jungle gym, jockeying for a view of the priest blessing the ring for the safety of the bull riders.

“It’s a cultural exchange.The kids play, they learn, they get to know other people’s traditions,” Pacheco-Reyes says. “My philosophy is that children need to have fun. Having fun is what opens us up to learning and becoming good human beings. Basketball is part of the kids’ education, it’s an opportunity for so many to get a chance to continue studying.”

A teenager wearing a Slayer longsleeve tells me he wants to practice before starting university as a computer science student in Guanajuato, Mexico. Earlier in the day, he played for the highest level youth team for Yalalag, but lost to the undefeated future champs. He sees basketball mostly as a pathway for his education, but is frank about some of the unfairness of the competition.

“[That team] won the Benito Juarez Cup,” he says. “They recruit and pay players. But at least they’re all from here. The team they beat flew players in from the United States, their coach was speaking only in English. Some of the kids didn’t speak any Spanish at all.”

Hosted by the community of San Juan Atepec each March, the Copa de Benito Juarez is the largest of the Oaxacan tournaments. Named after Oaxaca-born Benito Juarez, the first indigenous president of Mexico, the Copa attracts the most teams by offering some of the highest payouts to winners, and the most glory to bring back home.

“In some communities it’s like a business,” Hidalgo Yalalag team captain Eddie Cosijopi Jaimez-Aquino, 43, says. “I started playing in tournaments when I was nine and they’ve always been tough and competitive. At first [prizes] were a bull, a pig, a horse. I won a donkey once. And people would buy it back from you right there. Little by little, they started giving out cash prizes. Well, that’s when the party started to fade away a bit. Basketball mercenaries started to appear.”

Broadly, basketball has grown exponentially in Mexico. The country saw an influx of international investment from the NBA in the form of the NBA Global Academy in the central Mexican state San Luis Potosi, and even a G-League franchise in the Mexico City Capitanes. Mexico’s own growing professional league brought teams to the more industry rich northern Mexican cities and financial capitals like Mexico City. Rosters typically are about half domestic born players and half guys you might remember from March Madness’ past. (Ángeles de la Ciudad de México featured Oakland University’s cold-ass-white-boy Jack Gohlke on last year’s roster.)

“There’s always a lack of organization and support from industries and government here,” Pacheco-Reyes says. “There’s talent to make it happen. And of course, there’s lots of basketball fans, just no support.”

The most powerful institutions in the sport don’t seem to be on the horizon either. Last November, the NBA announced that they would close their international development academies in Mexico and Australia in the summer of 2025. Troy Justice, NBA’s head of international basketball operations, called the decision a “strategic move,” adding that the league would be “changing locations and reallocating resources to be in places where we can help provide opportunities to more players in underrepresented countries.”

Speculation from league reporters indicates Abu Dhabi is the most likely destination for the next academy. This October, the New York Knicks and Philadelphia 76ers are set to play two preseason games in Abu Dhabi’s new arena, a move that speaks more towards the increasing international financialization of the NBA, rather than “international player development.” In 2023, Qatar became the first Sovereign Wealth Fund to purchase the current league maximum 5% stake in the Washington Wizards. But while oil money might feel like a safer economic bet for the league, the basketball culture in Oaxaca and the rest of the mostly indigenous southern Mexico seems largely undeterred, mostly because they never benefited from the US development dollars.

“Wealthy people aren’t really interested in training the people who truly serve the community,” says Jaimez-Aquino. “Look at the [Mexican] national team. It’s all players from Mexico City or the north. Oaxaca doesn’t have wealthy investors like in other states.”

Walking around town throughout the week, people stop to ask me how I found my way here and offer me beers that I quickly learn I’m not allowed to turn down. One guy instructs me to join him in a video for his Facebook to say, “Chinga tu madre Trump, Chinga tu madre Cruz Azul, Vamos Club America!” before his former bull riding father hands me a bottle of mezcal and instructs me to take a swig. “It’ll help with your nerves in your next game, güero,” he says.

I can’t help feeling like the level of friendliness towards a gringo stranger feels unwarranted. That same week, Donald Trump had just sent in the National Guard to Los Angeles in an effort to quell anti-deportation protests and bolster the efforts of ICE. Protests were only escalating to combat aggressive ICE raids in early June. The majority Latino community had resisted La Migra, some throwing rocks and physically blocking ICE vehicles while the federal agents beat and even ran over protesters with their SUVs. It’s a city where nearly everyone I speak with currently has family or friends living. Multiple people tell me they have family that usually would attend this festival but are not because they are afraid they can’t return to the States after.

I chat with a handmade huarache shoemaker who sees my basketball shoes and asks if I would be willing to bring back a pair of Nikes to trade for one of his. I tell him I would try to bring some if I can make it back next year, and a guy walking by stops.

“Why are you here, gringo?” the man says.

“I wanted to learn more about your festival,” I say. “I play a lot of basketball back home and my friend wanted to show me how you all play here.”

“Well you can come here all you want, walk on our land, eat our food, and nobody stops you,” he pauses to spit. “But I can’t go to where you’re from. I’m not welcome.”

The man walks off towards the festival center without waiting for a response. The huarache maker tells me that the guy is just a crazy drunk, and apologizes profusely for him. I tell him it feels strange that more people haven’t said anything like that. He may be drunk, but he’s right.

On Saturday, players from the eleven participating teams in the top billed Open-Category get shots up while waiting for sign-ups to begin. I walk with team Yalalag up to the cafeteria for breakfast. Our team is made up mostly with the same guys who play together in the Veteranos (40+) division, plus a 20-something cab driver and myself. Eddie is the undisputed leader, taking on a player-coach role as he calls out defensive assignments and frustrated pleas to get the ball into the high post on offense. They give me a maroon and black jersey that says “Gladiators.” Only one other teammate sports the jersey, with the rest wearing slightly different versions of yellow and black jerseys with the town name or no jersey at all.

At 6’1”, I’m one of the taller players in the tournament, and most of the kids expect me to be able to dunk a basketball. But a year and half post-ACL surgery, I ultimately disappoint. Still, I’m asked to play center on offense and one of the two posts in our 1-2-2 zone, the standard defense for all pickup basketball I’ve played in Mexico.

The ubiquity of the aggressive zone defense in Mexico instills a unique set of principles: fast pace, maintain good three point spacing, make the extra pass, fight for the ball on rebounds. If this isn’t structurally reinforced by defensive strategy, the referees are not forgiving to anybody trying to beat the defense by their dribbling prowess. You will get hacked, and while you throw your hands up looking to the ref for relief, the other team’s already made the outlet pass for a layup on the other end. More than anything, the crowd seems to feed off anyone seen as complaining, whistling at nearly every pause in the action can overtake the student band brass section. The whistling is often in an iconic Mexican cadence, a euphemism for the vulgar phrase “chinga tu madre.” It’s brutal, beautiful basketball.

“The referee isn’t going to call anything on you, he’s happy as long as you’re not hitting anyone,” Oliveira-Espina says. “The fans will let you know what they think. And it’s personal because it’s their family on the court. If people boo and jeer you because you’re playing in a region far away, it’s just part of the fun. It makes the stakes feel bigger, you know?”

Our first two games took some adjusting to fit into the flow of our team’s offense. Eventually, I settled into a role of scoring on baseline cuts and passing the ball out to shooters. However, in our fourth game, we faced tournament favorites from the mining town of Natividad. The team is led by a father, his two sharpshooting sons, and the tallest player in the tournament, a 6’5” (6’7” in shoes) player easily leading in blocks and assists off outlet passes through the first few rounds.

We started out hot. Eddie banked in a three, and we managed to score on a few lucky hustle plays and offensive rebounds. To all of our surprises, we were up by six points at halftime. The hometown crowd, who had been rooting for the out-of-town favorites based on their reputation earlier in the tournament, started to believe in the underdog Yalalag’s chances. The second half started out much the same. I caught a pass around the free throw line, dribbled hard to my left, and drilled a scooping hook layup over their 6’7” guy. I ran down the court holding my hand low, for the first time in my life making the “too small” symbol–time out Natividad. The crowd erupts in whistles and laughs for the güero.

Ultimately, the better team adjusted. Natividad returned from timeout running a man-to-man defense. All our cohesiveness and teamwork was forgotten. Our lead evaporated, while I tried to think of what the Spanish phrase for “pick and roll” is. Trailing by two with ten seconds left, Eddie found a wide open shooter, whose prayer was met by an unforgiving, hard rim. A fourth place finish brought on a chorus of teasing whistles, louder than the buzzer. It’s pure basketball.

We spent the first round of post-game beers dissecting what we could have done differently together. There was no consensus, but nobody seemed too disappointed in our differing stories. By the next round, we’d already moved on. Somebody’s cousin from the crowd wanted to get us a third round as a consolation prize. I only noticed another game had ended when the team from San Antonio joined us on the cement bar patio. Their third place finish warranted Eddie to buy them all a drink.

Compared to my adult rec league games, where there is maybe one uninterested girlfriend sitting on the middle school gym bleachers, the game couldn’t have been bigger. There’s no official count, but it seems like there were more people in attendance at our semifinal match than I saw at the pro league game in Mexico City. Admission is free, the beers are cheap, there’s a live band, street food, and a mountain view on the other side of the bar.

The championship was not particularly close. San Juan Juaquila Mixes dominate, the hobbling ankle of their lead guard remaining intact enough to pull them across the finish line for the $20,000 pesos. The trophy ceremony lasted another twenty minutes, before the town moved on to turn the court over for cumbia dancing. The next day, the team will do it all again in the Veteranos (40+ division). Eddie asked if I would join but I told him I’m not old enough. They wouldn’t need me anyway. Sunday is the last day of the festival to San Antonio Padua and it’s decisively more chill. By that time the next day, Yalalag will have taken home gold. The game may be slower, the manic energy of playing twenty feet away from guys wearing sumo suits getting blasted by a bull may have gone, the payouts may even be less. But for the hoopers continuing the legacy of basketball in the mountains of Oaxaca, there’s always more hoops.

Share

I have a friend who we’ll call Brock. Earlier this year, Brock moved to San Francisco and raised $200,000 for an AI agriculture company that he founded. The “company” was more of a name he came up with, and the “idea” was more of a theoretical concoction he whipped up one day while tweaking on coffee. He was just 23 then, had less than a year of work experience, and virtually zero connections on the west coast. But he certainly knows how to work a room. After bouncing around a few networking events in the city, he met a junior partner at a respected venture capital firm. They were around the same age and hit it off, especially once Brock mentioned that his idea incorporated AI. After a few meetings, the firm wired $200k directly into his bank account. He quit his job at a name-brand tech company that same day. The first thing he was advised to do as a new founder? Raise more money.

One of my first memories of Brock is from the seventh grade. He had the body of a giraffe–long, gangly, aloof–and the face of a baby. Inside, he was mostly rhino: wholly destructive no matter the setting. In the gym locker room, I remember him nude save for whitey-tighties, obnoxiously rapping along to Kendrick Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle” as it blasted from his iPod Touch. The part about the Eiffel Tower stuck out most to me. Is it possible, I thought, for it to really get that big? Another time, during a freestyle rap battle, he spat a verse from Tyler, The Creator’s “Yonkers” as if it was his own, and his opponent took the loss with mouth agape.

He was a nuisance in every classroom, and as much as I’d like to say he was simply a misunderstood genius, that wasn’t the case. He was a wrecking ball on all cylinders. A “problem child” to the max. Before graduating high school, he faced multiple suspensions, a stint in military school, and an arrest. The point is: you, nor I, nor anyone who knew him back then, would have expected him to be at the table for this great big game of AI roulette.

Brock found his purpose through football. In high school, when he filled his lengthy 6’3” frame with muscle, a psychotic work ethic he inherited from his father began to kick in. He became a defensive anchor, setting a hard-edge on off-tackle runs and slinging quarterbacks into the dirt. By his senior year, he was fielding D-1 offers and had (mostly) shed his delinquent reputation. In a community founded on the 3 Fs (Faith, Family, Football), he was something of a golden boy. And still, when he told me that one day he wanted to become an engineer and start his own company, my eyebrows raised. This was the same guy who was nearly crushed to death by stampeding hooves after trying to bareback a horse at two in the morning.

Instead of accepting a scholarship at a D1-FCS school that had offered, he elected to forgo his freshman year of college to work at a hardware store in Mississippi, so he could get in-state tuition while playing on Ole Miss’s football team as a preferred walk-on, fulfilling his childhood dream and making his father, an alum, insurmountably proud. He spent this year living more like a divorced dad than an 18-year-old prodigy. He went to the gym, worked his shift at the hardware store, drank a dozen beers, and repeated. Each time I visited him, he maintained his plan: play football, become an engineer, start a company.

After two years on the Ole Miss scout team, he transferred to one of the best engineering schools in the country. Realistically, he only got in because he played football there. But after a year of failing nearly every class, he quit the team and locked in on his coursework. He did well enough to pass, and well enough, too, to somehow land one of the most coveted internships in the engineering industry. He spent eight months in the Bay Area working in a factory, headed back to the south for one more year of school, then officially moved to San Francisco with a full-time job waiting for him.

Comparatively, the $200,000 he raised is chump change; a rounding error, really, for any self-respecting tech-VC. It may sound like a life-changing amount to some, but when you don’t have a product, website, team, office, nor customer, it certainly doesn’t feel like one. The reality now is that he’s working twice as hard for less than half the pay of the cushy job he left. (His salary allows only for rent, PBJs, and beer).

After working for a small, unsuccessful AI startup in New York over the past year, I recently quit my job and moved out of the city. I set aside two months to travel and launch Derange before resubmitting to the currents of society. My first stop was a two-week stint in San Francisco. I knew I wanted to write something about the trip, but I didn’t want to spend time or effort with a bunch of randoms. I decided to hang with my friends and family who live out there instead and see where it led me.

Brock picked me up from the airport, and as we drove up from the South Bay to the city, we were bombarded with billboards that might as well be pig latin to the uninitiated.

• “Agents write code. Droids ship software.” [Factory AI]

• “Enterprise AI should get your company’s TLAs.” [PromptAI]

• “AI Agents are human too.” [E2B]

The city itself, Fox News be damned, is breathtaking as ever. Its topography is difficult to conceive for a southerner like myself: rolling mountains, sparkling ocean views, gargantuan hills, the fog (which they call Karl, I learn), and consistently unimpeachable weather. It looks and feels like paradise, and there’s no question why the richest people who have ever lived established their fiefdoms in it.

While walking around, I noticed one company taking up more physical ad space than any other: Cluely. I asked Brock about them: “They’re basically a company that a16z [the blue-chip VC firm run by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz] invested $15M in because they know how to go viral.”

Their ads were black and white with block text:

• “I BUILT THIS TO SLEEP DURING MEETINGS.”

• “NO MORE ‘LET ME LOOP IN MY TECH GUY.’”

• “HI MY NAME IS ROY. I GOT KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL FOR CHEATING. BUY MY CHEATING TOOL.”

The ”tool” in question is an AI assistant native to your device, meaning that from the minute you open your laptop, Cluely is on your screen providing notes for whatever you may be doing. The ideal use, according to the company, is to “cheat” during job interviews. It connects to your microphone and audio, so if an interviewer asks you a question, it can provide instant answers the way an LLM would if you had manually looked it up. By many accounts, it is not a good tool, with one Reddit user calling it a “half-working ChatGPT wrapper.” Ask Cluely’s backers, and they’d probably tell you that functionality is beside the point.

Cluely’s founder, Roy Lee, is the same Roy who was featured in New York Magazine’s bombshell story, “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College.” Throughout that story, he is painted as a firebrand visionary who wants to tear down the bureaucratic processes students are subjected to (like arduous LeetCode assessments) by harnessing generative AI. It quickly becomes clear that the success Cluely has enjoyed thus far is not a product of technical acumen, but rather, as Brock said, a penchant for virality.

On a podcast featuring Lee and two of a16z’s general partners, the VC responsible for funding Airbnb, Facebook, and Roblox, reveals that their reason for investing in Cluely lies heavily in Lee’s ability to game the algorithm. Winning people’s attention (whether good or bad), the VC posits, is more important than having airtight software. Lee has achieved this through shortform content, which, while cringey, are surprisingly high-effort and scripted.

For example, he launched the company with a video that shows him “cheating” during a first date. His date questions his age and interests, and as he stumbles, Cluely provides instant information to help him get back on track with her.

cluely

A post shared by @cluely

daniel_mints

A post shared by @daniel_mints

cluely

A post shared by @cluely

Brock tells me that he needs to start making “day in the life” videos if he ever wants to raise another round of funding. He’s only half-joking. More interestingly, as we admire the Catholic church and its surrounding junkies in SF’s Washington Square Park, he likens AI to electricity: “In its current state, AI is basically a new element. The power of the technology is revolutionary, but as a society, we’re currently figuring out how to use it, and what to use it for.”

This could explain why Cluely, and Brock, even, have had boatloads of money thrown at them. VCs are willing and able to make bad investments, so long as AI is in the tagline. If 9/10 of the companies they back fail, the one that works will more than make up for it. Like the Googles and Amazons of the dot com boom, whatever survives past the AI hype has endless potential. It’s why Softbank led a 40 billion dollar investment round for OpenAI, a company whose own projections indicate they’ll lose 14 billion in 2026 alone. Whoever comes out on top of the AI race will play a large part in determining what society looks like 50 years from now.

My understanding of San Francisco is as follows: there was the gold rush, so a bunch of people moved there and were given pairs of Levi jeans. Then Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg started talkin’ crazy and Kerouac and Burroughs got famous and all of a sudden everyone was smokin’ weed and poppin’ tabs and goin’ camping. Then Hendrix blew up Monterey and the Grateful Dead had even more people poppin’ tabs and Bob Dylan changed the world. Then the internet was invented and Apple bought the city and sold a third to Google and a third to Facebook. Then the consequences of social media and overstimulation were revealed and the fabric of society began to decay–oh, and a global pandemic hit, so a bunch of people moved out and it became a haven for junkies and thieves (professionally known as “bippers”).

As a response, everyone said “Ooohhh SF has gone to shit, the liberal mayor ruined the city, it’s over,” so the far-right sympathizing technocrats moved to Texas. But these technocrats quickly realized that it’s only fun to cosplay as Yosemite Sam when there aren’t actual Yosemite Sams around, so a bunch doubled back on that Texas move. Then boom, AI comes and SF is hot again. The city is poppin’, the money is flowin’, college students are flockin’, but the spirit is…different. The nerds’ infiltration of the most objectively beautiful city in America has been finalized. Everyone cool has been priced out. It’s swagless finessers with half of a Cal-Poly computer science degree elbowing for a view of the golden throne that Sam Altman and Elon Musk are playing musical chairs with while Jensen Huang pisses into both of their mouths from a cloud.

Brock lives in Haight-Ashbury. Locals call it the Haight (phonetically: the hate). It was the Summer of Love’s nucleus, but these days, it’s mostly a tourist attraction for people who unironically wear peace sign plastic sunglasses.. The streets are full of hippie-themed vintage stores and expensive lunch spots. Walking around, especially through Golden Gate Park–as astonishing a city park I’ve seen–it’s fun to imagine people practicing peace, love, and happiness. This isn’t the case. It’s more so “How do we increase user retention among our subscriber base” (same) and “I pay $700 a year for The Information even though the writing is boring.” Also: matcha drinkers, Chase Bank, Whole Foods, Airpods and dogs.

Brock, knowing that I love greasy spoon diners, dilapidated dive bars, and f r e a k s, was keen on showing me the “non-tech” side of the city. It’s not so much a side as it is a sliver, but this one area of North Beach, he assured me, maintains that vintage SF literati energy. So we made a plan: on Friday night, we’ll tie one on.

I had someone to see first. Not my blood brother, who lives in the city as well, but a dear friend from Eastern Asia with whom I have a blood bond. He is not a US citizen, and is currently fighting tooth and nail for a work visa, so the details of him and his company will be distorted, but the events I depict will be fact.

He works at an AI company that is strapped to a rocket ship. I won’t mention them by name, but, according to the press and my Bay Area-native cousin who works in tech, they’re perhaps the best example of a successful AI startup. They’re also one of those 9/9/6 companies–working 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week–and maybe they were featured in the mega-viral WSJ piece on the stringent and boring nature of new AI companies. At 7 PM on Friday, I met my friend, who we’ll call Humbert, at his office. I biked along the Pacific, past the Wharf and Union Station, until I ended up in an industrial area full of gay clubs and bridges.

The office was the size of an artillery ship, and had the feel (and musk) of a shipping container. The grey walls let in little light, and the rows of standing desks held ample monitors and notepads. Only 40 or so people work at the company, but there is enough room in the space for at least 100. While the office wasn’t packed, it was easily the most intense work environment I’ve ever witnessed on a summer Friday.

Downstairs, we passed a ping-pong table and basketball hoop that looked like they hadn’t been touched, and made our way to the cafe. In the kitchen, stale Thai food that had been catered for lunch sat dormant, while on an oblong cafeteria table, our room temperature burgers awaited in a paper box, smushed beneath dozens of other room temperature burgers. It reeked of grease and carpet. Just outside the office, we would’ve had a perfect view of the sun sinking under the Pacific. But in this cafeteria, the golden light beaming outside had been exchanged for the clank of keyboards and cross-collaboration between multi-functional teams whose sole purpose was to inch this company towards a Great Big Exit via acquisition or IPO.

At the table, a few seats away from a group of engineers, Humbert and I caught up in whispers. He was still new to the company, and while clearly well-liked, this job was the only thing keeping him in America, which made him justifiably paranoid. He told me that he eats three meals a day in the office, five days a week. He doesn’t work on Saturdays (though some do), but on the weekdays he gets in at 7 or 8 AM and leaves at 9 or 10 PM. His role is to help bridge the gap between their sales and product teams to ensure updates are streamlined. I didn’t say it out loud, as I didn’t want the engineers–who were having an intense discussion about ChatGPT’s newest large language model–to malfunction, but it all felt terribly depressing to me.

As Humbert and I walked back to his apartment, we calculated how many waking hours per day he spends away from the office: ~ three. Two to work out, one for personal hygiene. The phrase “golden handcuffs” finally made sense to me.

In Humbert’s defense, his salary is 20% above market. He was given a generous equity plan, and he knew exactly what he was signing up for. “It is good,” he says, “because if I am to work, I would prefer to work hard.” Heading to Brock’s to kick off the night, we agreed that we’d both take a load off this weekend.

Months ago, my heart warmed when I learned that Brock and Humbert had become close friends. I was Humbert’s unofficial American liaison some six years ago, picking him up from the airport when he first touched our soil, and living with him in an attic apartment as he studied here. I took him home in November 2019 so he could experience his first Thanksgiving, and on our way to Atlanta, we stopped in Mississippi to visit Brock on a particularly rowdy weekend of SEC football. We had a 48-hour bender that was disorienting by even my standards; since then, Humbert had affectionately referred to Brock as “Seth Rogen.”

We showed up at Brock’s with 12 beers (paid for by Humbert: “Millan, please. I have spent zero dollars this week”) and got busy. Brock’s girlfriend had some friends from Texas visiting, so we headed to North Beach six deep, landing at Vesuvio Cafe. Sharing “Jack Kerouac Alley” with City Lights bookstore, it’s a gorgeous two story building full of wonky paintings and newsclippings of the Beat heyday. More importantly, it was full of people! Right away I was convinced: Yup, San Francisco’s still got it, counterculture is in good hands! We had a great 15 minutes, until the energy shifted.

It became clear that Vesuvio’s enchanting exterior was a siren song. It drew us in with glee, then turned us into versions of ourselves more sick and twisted than we could ever conceive. Smiling faces turned to scowls; the stained-glass windows struck thunder and muck down on our table. Everyone started to argue. Couples were at war, shooting darts dipped in snake venom into each other’s eyes. Humbert said there was no way we could microdose shrooms and drive eight hours later. I said that driving is literally the easiest thing in the world, and that it could be done on much more than a microdose. Brock’s girlfriend, who works as an occupational therapist for people who are disabled from car wrecks, did not take kindly to that suggestion. Gin with a side of Modelo was a terrible decision. My girlfriend called me: it was 3 AM in Chicago and her Uber had crashed. I looked across the bar and saw her opps from New York waving at me. I asked ChatGPT how to escape this hell. It told me to go to the top of the Salesforce Tower and repent loud enough for the data centers to hear me. I climbed all 61 floors but my two-factor authentication failed. I walked back to North Beach with eyes cast down, dreading my fate.

We ended the night at Sam’s Burgers, a late night spot heralded years ago by a belligerently drunk Anthony Bourdain. Here, it became clear that a side effect of the great Tony’s martyrdom is that his inebriated words have given some mediocre spots undeserved ego boosts. The second we ordered $80 worth of greasy food, we were treated like swine. Yes, it was 2 AM, and yes, the girls we were with started twerking and causing a ruckus. But to cement yourself as a haven for hungry drunks and not treat this situation with some sort of leniency is a grave offense.

As the girls danced and sang along to “Who Let the Dogs Out,” the cashier told us to wait outside for our food. I stared at him blankly and didn’t move an inch. Brock stayed with me. Humbert and the girls went outside. 15 minutes passed with no sign of food. Humbert went in and asked the fry cook if our food was ready. The fry cook was a stringy Lebanese-man with shriveled skin and a face that looked like Rango’s. From the corner I was standing in, I watched the beginnings of an altercation. Humbert is a no-nonsense guy, and, with him not being an American, his demeanor can come across as pushy to some. Yet still, the response was unwarranted: the fry cook practically spat at him with his forked tongue. “I don’t fucking like you standing there, get your ass back outside. The food will be ready when I say it’s ready.”

I followed Humbert back outside. He was fuming mad. His anger was contagious. I began to shout curses at Sam’s. I rallied for a group piss session on their entrance. We wanted blood. Brock tried to cool us down, but that led to another argument with his girlfriend, who told him he should be supportive of his friends, even when raging blindly. Humbert began to chant a mantra to justify his anger to the small audience that was forming: “I have been treated unfairly. I have done nothing to deserve this.” I said it too. The crowd joined us. As a dozen of us approached their glass windows with brass knuckles, Brock came out with the food.

We ate our burgers outside. They were fine. Right after we finished up, the same cashier who kicked us out earlier told us we had to get up. He was putting the tables away for the night. Nobody moved. Humbert pursed his lips and shook his head: “No, we will not move. We are perfectly fine right here.” He stood over our table and stared at each and every one of us. Nobody budged. Two minutes of this tension. Our Uber arrived. The minute we got up, the cashier stepped up to Humbert. “What’s your fucking problem, man?” Humbert got in his face and started shouting, I joined in too. They were chest to chest, and I was itching to handle the fry cook while Humbert took the cashier. Brock pulled us into the Uber right before things exploded.

I laid off the chaos for the next few days. A long bike ride from the Golden Gate Bridge to Tiburon, stopping in Sausalito to look at the houseboats and sit on the chair where Otis Redding wrote “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” Another long bike ride to the surf-dive-meets-honky-tonk called The Riptide for some live music.

A short linkup with Atlanta rapper Corporate Lingo, who, having lived in SF for five years now, explained that the “counterculture” in SF exists in the outdoor community, as they’re super hardcore about camping, biking, and climbing. Also, he said that Larry June hangs out in North Beach a lot.

I walked aimlessly, passing fent smokers in the Mission who huddled outside of a $1500 a month co-living space, a few tent cities in the Tenderloin, the hustle of Chinatown, the technotopia of the Marina, and the fog-covered beauty of Pacifica. I launched Derange. I edited Ock’s massive slapper. I had that founder’s energy running through me. I had yet to figure out how to incorporate AI into our business model. My SF exposé, BOOMTOWN, USA™, didn’t have the juicy reporting I was hoping for. I was leaving town in two days. My company’s ARR wasn’t even close to seven figures, and I had secured $0 in funding. I started to feel like I wasn’t cut out for the crazy future that awaits us. Hope was slipping, until Humbert reached out.

He invited me to his company’s Series A launch party. They had just announced $24M in funding led by a16z, and were holding a private rooftop event to celebrate. Game on. Brock knows all about his company, and was keen on attending to network with the investors who were bound to be there in droves. He said we should wear dirty hoodies so everyone knows we’re legit. He said that in San Francisco, the worse you dress, the more money people think you have. I told him we better put on our nice clothes if that’s the case.

So there Brock and I were, sipping gin martinis with a twist, overlooking the city as the sun began to set, pretending, for a moment, that we had finally made it. When the founders who raised 24 million dollars arrived, we were quickly reminded that we hadn’t. Their outfits screamed “Big Lots,” with pants either hanging far above or below their ankles, their shirts all wrinkled, probably from sleeping on the office floor. Brock and I had ironed collars, pants that fit great, and even tied shoelaces. A reminder of our lowly place on the totem pole.

We brushed that scarlet letter off and began to network, and boy, did we ever. Just about everyone I spoke to was either a founder, an investor, or an intern from Harvard or Stanford spending their summer in SF. One woman, a fellow Georgia-native, had founded a company for AI sunglasses and recently gave up her role as CEO to enjoy nature and rest on her laurels. Another was the founder of a particular Hacker House–a shared living space for coders/founders–which everyone around me seemed to be quite familiar with. Another guy, merely 25, was a serial founder whose first two companies had failed. He just moved back to SF from Dubai, and with the AI boom, was gearing up for his third launch and felt more optimistic than ever. A very pedestrian looking guy turned out to be the founder of an AI apartment leasing company that had raised about $11M. He allowed for some sleuthing.

Q: Are most of these startups just ChatGPT wrappers with niche packaging?

A: Kind of, but not really. They’re more-so ChatGPT wrappers with intensive prompt engineering built underneath, and then niche packaging on the outside.

Q: Do you think AI will take everyone’s jobs? Are you worried about that?

A: Eventually, yes, it will take most jobs. But by that time, I hope to be sailing off into the sunset.

He was a seasoned founder, so I introduced him to Brock and they talked shop for a while. I met a sales guy who was new to Humbert’s company. He popped a Zyn and was more than happy to chat. He had just moved to SF from a small midwestern city, and was super hype about the Hinge scene.

“Out here, bro, money talks. The girls back home, man, I’d have to take them on three or four dates before they’d let me crack. But here, if I spend $300-400 on a date, they’ll let me do whatever I want.” He was drinking heavily, and one of the company’s founders came up to remind him that he had 10 demo calls tomorrow. “Literally from 7:30 AM to 2:00 PM I’ll be running customer meetings nonstop.” I asked if he’s worried about a hangover. “Nah man, I’ll just rip a few Celsius’ and lock in.”

About an hour and a half in, Humbert arrived. He had just finished up at the office, and wasn’t drinking because he had to be at work early the next day. He, Brock and I devoured some sushi and skewers, then his founders gave a speech about how far the company had come. They shouted out their investors who came, and I think everyone in attendance, myself included, kept note of who they were so they could make sure to pitch them later. I tried my hand.

The tough part about Derange as a business model, is that our core business–writing–is about a century late to the fold. So at first, I stumbled a bit: “It’s like, really long, immersive cultural journalism. And it’s about everything. We basically aim to capture the world.” Right…

Soon, though, I found the key: Substack. The eyes of the poorly dressed lit up when I mentioned the platform. Yes, Substack is the way to go, they said. I guess this shouldn’t be too surprising: Substack’s latest valuation after a $100M round of funding amounted to $1.1B, effectively making them a unicorn. Also–a16z was an early investor. (The intelligence of a16z’s investment team was recently put into question, as they denied Derange’s application for $1,000,000.)

I had no bites, yet I did have some juicy tidbits for BOOMTOWN, USA™. I was determined to get to the bottom of that well. Around 11 PM, the party thinned out, and the bar signaled last call. Everyone who remained was nice and tight, Humbert had already left, and Brock was on his way out, too. I stuck around.

About 15 people, mainly C-suite and top investors, were making plans for an afterparty. I tagged along. We walked about twenty minutes to a cozy dive bar full of rough-cut locals and taxidermied beasts tacked to the wall. The head of sales walked in and demanded the bar be lined with shots of Casamigos. He ensured that everyone had a drink in their hand, then stood up on a wobbly barstool and made a speech.

“Everyone! Everyone! If you’re in this room, just know that you’re part of something bigger than yourself. Whether you’re a customer, an investor, or an employee, know that you shaping the future every single day with the work you do. This is only the beginning for AI, this is only the beginning for us. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see where it leads us. Cheers to yourselves, cheers to Series A, and cheers to a future paved by AI!”

How could you not drink to that?

Height and weight aside, Jensen James is different from your average eight-year-old. For one, he is meticulous about his diet, preferring “sustenance over candy.” Dinners are high-protein, fiber-rich and low-carb. Once he finishes, he skips dessert. Also, he is obsessed with his hands.

“He wants to try other sports, but then he says he needs to protect his hands because his hands are his money,” his father, Zach James, tells me. Later this evening, Jensen is set to square off against another eight-year-old, Amir Everett, in a three-round match.

We are in Reading, Pennsylvania, standing in the middle of a sprawling, 1.5 acre parking lot. To our left: A rickety abandoned factory, which served as the headquarters for the Reading Hardware Company before closing down in 1950. To our right: Another massive building which happens to house the East Reading Fight Club (ERFC) on its third floor.

“When I was a kid there was a playground with program leaders that you went to everyday in the summer,” Andre Acuna, the founder of the ERFC and a lifelong Reading resident, told me about the shifting landscape of public resources in the area. “There were sports, local field trips, but budgeting issues 16-17 years ago dried funding up.”

This void in extracurricular activity combined with his real estate acumen served as the genesis for the club.

“We had 6,000 sq feet of nice warehouse space and nothing to do with it,” Andre detailed. “I thought, ‘let’s do something for the community,’ because there was really nowhere for kids to go after school…These kids love each other. They’ll spar with each other, go on morning runs together, push each other. They’ll shed tears when one of them loses. It’s truly like they’re brothers.”

Today, July 12th, marks the second annual Reading Rumble, an amateur boxing event broadly servicing eastern Pennsylvania. The event is officially sanctioned by USA Boxing and will take place on the concrete between the two buildings. Amateur competitors ranging from 8 to 23 will duke it out in front of a crowd of about 150. Friends and family fill foldable chairs, but the bulk of attendees huddle near the ring, shifting from foot to foot. Just over half of the participants fight out of the ERFC, but some have travelled as far as Scranton, PA, and even further still, with a lone teenager making the trek from Ireland.

The fights won’t start until around 5 PM, so there’s time to kill. A perimeter has been established around the space, teeming with tented vendors, exclusively Mexican, selling a variety of tacos, aqua frescas and alcoholic beverages. After perusing some of the wares and opting for a watermelon-based juice, I run into a laborer named Oscar who works for Andre.

Standing around 5’6,” anywhere between 49 and 64 years old, moving at once with feline grace and a hobble born from apparent limb problems, Oscar represents a core demographic within the city of Reading: New York City transplants of Latino descent.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Oscar relocated to Reading during the early 90s because “the rent was cheaper.” Reading, like other rust-belt cities, used to boast good factory work. Good enough to own a home and retire at a reasonable age. By the late ‘80s, during the second generation of Latino immigration to the area, this began to change.

“It’s not like it used to be–you could rent a house for about $500 a month. Now it’s up to $1500,” he says. “They [home owners from NYC] are buying the houses and then renting them.”

These figures are astronomical for an area like Reading, which does not have much available work. For those who aren’t in health care, the region’s second most popular industry, their bodies often become the means of exchange.

“It’s hard work, not factory work,” Oscar says of the labor required by Deka, a battery manufacturer slightly outside the city that is one of its primary employers. “I wouldn’t want to work there, all that radiation…They pay decently, if you’re happy with $20/hr. But you’re working hard and you can’t control your destiny or future with that sort of income.”

Oscar is diligent about being helpful. He has been doing odd jobs for Andre over the last few months, thinly preventing a descent into homelessness. At 2 PM, as the late-July heat begins to reach an apex, he is beckoned by a group of Puerto Rican teenagers who need help locking the boxing ring into place.

My mental image of a fight weigh-in is a constellation of what I’ve seen on social media. Shit talkers dressed in garish outfits seated about 40 feet away from one another, surrounded by ambiguous posse members. Deeply personal insults, out-of-sight journalists, interview “questions” that are really just fodder for more deeply personal insults. The game within the game is to appear as unbothered as possible. At an amateur boxing event, things are more cordial, if not divorced entirely from this reality. The two sole similarities are a scale and the need to step on one.

Entering the weigh-in room feels like walking into a pocket dimension. The space is one wide hallway that feeds into a 35 x 55 ft rectangular room with low ceilings. Black linoleum vinyl flooring contrasts against Sherwin-Williams alabaster white walls.

I am the only journalist at the event, and the optics aren’t great—not only because I’m in Reading for the express purpose of helping my girlfriend’s dad rearrange furniture in his apartment, but also because I’m recording some of the activity, including, but not limited to, boys taking off their clothes. The whole thing feels much closer to a dozen kids all getting their annual physicals at the same time than anything I’ve seen on YouTube.

Back outside, the sounds of corrido drown out every other sensation, including the heat. Flanked by two acoustic guitarists, an electric guitarist, and an upright bassist, the frontman of the ensemble is strikingly boyish. Clad in a Tijuana jersey and Nike Blazers, he sports an Edgar cut that borders on Lord Farquaad regency thanks to voluminous locks that curl at the ends. His voice is at once elastic and rigid. Notes begin in his chest are held there for extraordinarily long periods, then travel upwards, where they bend and distort through his windpipe. Hearing him sing is a spiritual experience. When I return to my corporeal form and take stock of the parking lot, two imposing figures are walking towards weigh-ins. The Tinoco brothers have arrived.

Martin Tinoco, the younger of the two, is about 5’9” and 150 lbs. He doesn’t say much when we’re introduced, instead sizing me up and downloading soft spots throughout my person that I’m probably unaware of.

A gruff head nod of acknowledgement, fist bump over dap, and eye contact that only breaks when he occasionally surveys his surroundings. His expression is a permanent half-frown. Everything he’s wearing–a tan Dodgers fitted, high-quality sweats, and black Air Max 95s–is crisp, the mark of a man who irons his clothes.

Boxers emanate a particular aura, made manifest in a lazy but deliberate gait–slow enough to admire the scenery, brisk enough to avoid gawking. Their heads are on a swivel, scanning possible escape routes and surface terrain, instinctually mapping out the vectors of confrontation. Boxers are also the most serious athletes I’ve ever interacted with: A side-effect of a sport that speedruns CTE and is about sixty years removed from its cultural, financial, and spiritual peak.

Julio Tinoco, the older and larger brother, measures out closer to 6’1” and 180 lbs. His temperament is warmer, offering the semblance of a smile as we meet. We soft dap, a gesture that feels intimate as opposed to meeting Martin, whose boundaries regarding physical touch are limited to his knuckles.

Both brothers carry the gravitas of marble statues: Feet fixed, posture perfect, extraneous movement near-zero. I’m convinced that if I had a stethoscope, measuring their heart rates would yield the same BPM as Navy Seal snipers.

Prior to being introduced, their toughness has already been explicated to me by Zach James, ERFC’s head trainer, in several roundabout ways. For example, they both have taken last minute fights against heavier opponents:

“[Martin] wasn’t supposed to fight that day. He was in Scranton to support Julio. They had a guy with no opponent and Martin said ‘Alright, I’ll take it,’” James says. “We had to get him gear. Buy him stuff that day, so he could fight…And Julio did the same thing. He was 180 and fought a guy who was 200 lbs,” he continues. “They are not afraid of anyone…They proved they can be the smaller guy and walk out with wins. They are two very Mexican-blooded brothers.”

When I ask Julio about moving up weight classes to fight heavier opponents he is less severe, as Zach has the tendency to describe anything boxing-related with the same intensity as someone who just escaped a death camp:

“You’re hitting them and it feels like your punches are doing nothing,” the elder Tinoco brother said with a slight grin. “He hits you and you feel it. Even if it’s just a punch to the gloves.”

By day, the Tinoco brothers are landscapers. By night, they train six to seven days a week in hopes of reaching the professional level. Martin is 21 and Julio is 23, which may register as relatively old for the amateur circuit, at least for aspiring professionals, but Andre maintains that your boxing age is measured only by how long you have been seriously training.

The duo carved out reputations as premier brawlers in their hometown of Fresno, California. It started as daily scraps in their household. “Everyday we would find something to fight over,” Martin said.

Living room tussles, unable to be contained, escaped outside onto pavement. Even with friends around, it became nearly certain that Julio and Martin would trade blows at some point during the day. “Friends started bringing gloves out because it would get pretty serious,” Martin explained.

When other kids in the neighborhood caught wind of the show they also tried to jump into the fray, only to become spectators. “We’d take the gloves onto the street and box other kids. It would always end with us [the brothers] fighting each other,” Julio continued. It wasn’t until a cousin told them to go to the gym that the idea of professional fighting began to germinate.

As I go from location to location, Andre and Zach stay by my side, telling the fighters that I am a writer who will be asking them questions, and that they should answer thoughtfully. It is the sort of near-threat you receive before a substitute teacher rolls in.

Approaching people to speak on record is harder at this event than anything I’ve ever reported on. Without the safety net of a “media” pass or some other talisman hanging around my neck justifying my presence, speaking to attendees is like hitting on a stranger at a food truck festival. This isn’t an event journalists cover, nor is it known outside of immediate boxing circles.

I also stick out more than usual. My tattoos are whimsical, whereas the dominant ink choices are rooted in photorealism: Spartans or other gladiatorial figures, apex predators, and homages to Philadelphia in the form of highway signs. There is nothing funny about putting something on your body forever. The most common physical build is that of an upside down trapezoid: Wide necks, lats, and shoulders, with the rest of the body narrowing towards the feet. I’m lanky and wiry: A sophomoric Spongebob trying to gain entry into the Salty Spittoon.

Inside the ERFC, the training room reeks of testosterone. A couple fighters slated to face off on the earlier side of the event, Jensen included, take turns drilling footwork and hitting the heavy bag. The master wall in the gym is adorned with floor to ceiling mirrors, which reflect the same unchanging gaze regardless of who is boxing in front of it. Others sit with their legs up in front of an industrial-grade fan, picking at styrofoam plates of fried chicken, BBQ, collared greens, and mac-and-cheese. Youngboy songs are interrupted only by Kodak Black.

Isias Rios, the third headliner who appears on the fight flyer, is perpetually moving on the balls of his feet. He cannot remain in one position for too long, covering ground like a distance runner even in his social interactions. “I was really small and my mom wanted me to start boxing because I didn’t know how to defend myself,” he tells me. “She was a little scared for me.”

Rios is a 15-year-old who looks even younger than his age, stands about 5’6,” and sports a moppy head of black, ringlet curls. Before meeting him, I had already heard about his high-octane fighting style: always on the offensive, overwhelming opponents with volume to make up for his stature.

His weightless charm is infectious, a stark contrast with the majority of everyone present. If he isn’t play-punching friends, he’s shadowboxing near them, weaving his way around training equipment that bears a resemblance to the same gizmos you’d find in the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. He is one of the top prospects in the ERFC and Andre envisions a spot on Team USA in his near future.

“I got beat up by a girl,” Rios recalls, when I ask him about his first sparring session. “I was kinda scared to hit her, she knew how to box and I didn’t. Then she started beating the shit out of me.”

With an hour to go, Rios learns his opponent is a no-show. Months of training and mental preparation have no release valve. Extended family members two hours away from Reading drove in to watch him, but Rios attempts to play off the disappointment. Fault lines threaten to form across his baby face. Despite already generating the most kinetic energy in the vicinity, Rios’ activity cranks up. Pent-up frustration is repurposed to work the mitts with Jensen.

As golden hour sets in, the crowd congregates around the ring in folding chairs. I’m seated behind the family of Amir, Jensen’s opponent, who all sport black t-shirts bearing images of the eight-year-old boxer in the vein of a No Limit mixtape cover.

It quickly becomes apparent how much pressure there is on Jensen. He is smothered with encouragement not only from his dad, who helms his fight corner, but nearly every fighter in the ERFC, who bombard him with their own separate, motivational speech, spittle flying into his face. These aren’t solely amateurs either. David “Dynamite” Stevens, a professional boxer who came out of the ERFC and is currently signed to Golden Boy Promotions, whispers something in Jensen’s ear, too.

Jensen begins the fight on the offensive, staying close to Amir to hit him with a barrage of jabs. Without panicking, Amir keeps Jensen at bay with his length and manages to land jabs of his own. You can almost see Jensen get taken out of the fight mentally when his primary plan of crowding his adversary fails. The volume also begins to drain his gas tank and taking shots to the face does not help. The crowd is electric for this initial fight and louder than it will be for the rest of the night.

By the final round, Amir is clearly the victor, stalking Jensen around the ring and hitting him with the occasional jab or hook. Cries from Amir’s family and from Zach can be heard above everything else. “Get out of the corner,” Zach yells as time winds down. “Jensen, I need you to keep your head up!”

Both father and son look crestfallen after Amir is pronounced the winner.

The lone Irish boxer exudes a neutral demeanor on his handsome, rosy-cheeked face. While other fighters bear some emotion during their bouts–excitement over landing a punch, surprise at getting punched, anguish at losing–he is unconcerned. Approaching the ring draped in an Irish flag, he stares into the camera of his videographer blankly. It’s as if he has never seen the technology before.

There is an Irish boxing gym in Scranton that has satellite locations in Ireland. Fighters from the motherland are sent stateside to compete in amateur matches across the east coast. Andre highlights the no-nonsense temperament of everyone associated with the operation: “Those guys are training with one thing in mind–to go pro.”

He is the most technical boxer of the night. Every 1-2 is thrown cleanly and on target. Each step he takes toward, away, and around his opponent is intentional, constantly probing for an advantage or positioning himself to capitalize on a mistake. At one point he connects on a body shot that sounds like a metal pan being smacked by a wooden spoon. The match ends in a unanimous decision with him holding the Irish flag high above his head.

By the time the Tinoco brothers are ready to fight, the sun is about to set. Martin is surgical in his exhibition, giving up no ground and often pressuring his opponent. He stays low and keeps his left hand in guard, while his right arm hangs loosely at his side, winding up before every feint or overhand. He earns a decisive win, taking almost no damage.

Martin is the most locked in participant at the day’s event. From the way he regulates his breathing to his upright posture, he projects a willingness to die in the ring if needed. Andre tells me that during Martin’s first amateur fight, which he took after three months of real training, he was knocked out cold. He didn’t take another fight for over a year due to injury but also because he “knew [he] had to get better.”

“I always felt like I was skilled, so it’s crazy to me that I lost. But I learned so much after,” he told me. “I didn't train 100% before because I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t have the experience. But I was humbled after that fight.”

During the main event, Julio gets knocked down in the second round while peppering his opponent with heavy hooks to the obliques. It’s the first time he’s touched earth in his fledgling career. He delivers the fight of the night after bouncing back from getting rocked.

Part of amateur boxing’s appeal is the exhibition of high-level skill: Athleticism, feints, footwork, striking, punching volume, combinations, it’s all there. But blows don’t often do real damage, especially in the younger age brackets. Julio and his competitor–a white boy built like a D1 slot receiver who trains out of a cutthroat Philadelphia gym–are some of the only fighters throwing punches that could break bone and separate skin.

They grunt louder and louder with each punch thrown. After getting knocked down, Julio is aware he has to be aggressive for the rest of the match in order to land enough strikes to tip the fight in his direction. Abandoning defense, he throws a constant string of overhand straights at the expense of getting countered. He manages to land enough big punches to bloody his counterpart, who is leaking red from his nose. Despite getting hit in the head over and over, he refuses to go down.

By the end of three rounds, both fighters have given everything. They are exhausted and flushed, half-holding their gloves in the air to rapturous approval from the crowd. Julio did enough to sway the judges back in his favor and is declared the victor.

Martin stands next to his brother, finally smiling. He seems relieved. The pressures of his work and craft can be discarded, at least for now.

“Sometimes you’re in control and dominating, and you’ll be thinking the whole time,” Julio told me earlier. “Other times it turns into a brawl. Everything goes out the window, you’re swinging and just trying to land. You just want the fight to end.”

Julio’s fight. Video by Felix: IG | YouTube

Share

Location: Atlanta, GA.

Temperature: 84° and humid.

Morale: Not too shabby.

Millan

Alright–we’re one month in. This newsletter is hitting the inboxes of just over 250 people, and I’d like to thank all of you for hopping aboard this early. (Triple thanks to those who have purchased subscriptions.) Things are progressing nicely here at Derange. We have a meager budget for writers (pitch us!), and in addition to our long-form features, we’ll be sending out this newsletter, The Pulpit, every month. It’s free, and will loosely follow the structure you see today: mini-essays, recommendations, and some space for our writers and paying subscribers to take the stand.

In case you’re new, here’s what we published this month:

1. ’s head-rattling odyssey through Power Slap and its adjacent manosphere, featuring some touching portraits of the league’s fiercest slappers. (Paywall removed for a limited time.)

2. ’s sharp analysis of Shane Gillis and a review of his show in Albany, NY, which sparked some controversy on r/ShaneGillis.

3. “The Russian Painter,” by yours truly, which looked at a 1 of 1 artist who was swept up by global rumblings in a Forrest Gump-esque sequence of events (albeit without as much humor).

4. on That One Time he got locked up for using white-out marker (OK, “doing graffiti”) in NYC. He dives into the puzzling way the NYPD persecutes graffiti writers, and takes us through his surreal 24 hours in Queens Central Booking.

Subscribe now

Will

Fakemink, Live in NYC

As Fakemink, the London rapper recently christened by Frank Ocean, was wrapping up his show at the Bowery Ballroom, a seven-foot selfie stick materialized. Wielded by a quad of gangly-looking youths sporting dark denim and RL Big Pony Polos, the act was less aggressive than the blinking red light of a GoPro in the middle of recording would suggest.

For one, the group was standing on the edge of the venue’s second floor, stretching their upper torsos and string bean arms over the railing. It’s as if they were trying to catch errant aura shrapnel cast from the 20-year-old rapper’s person. In this way the selfie stick was far removed from anyone’s sight line, a godly neutral observer like the Skycam used in NFL broadcasts.

The line between performative concert-attendee and exuberant teenager in the age of crowd-sourced-surveillance is thin. Sure, you don’t do yourself any favors when you fake-play chess at a rap show, but I found myself glancing up at the group, waiting for a misstep before forcing myself to course correct: “I’m unc, and these kids are having fun.”

(Here’s Fakemink’s No Bells interview for other uncs out there.)

Maybe it was because they looked like they stepped out of the “Chief Keef really had white boys dressing like this 😂 he the 🐐,” meme. Or maybe it was the nature of the show:

Underground darling receives string of A-list co-signs and rides the ensuing hype train into an NYC performance with murmurs of white AAVE-speaking influencers in attendance and a couple prominent faces of the 2010s streetwear clout-vortex (Luka Sabbat and Asspizza) on stage, all watching the young artist in the same way John Calipari eyes prospects at summer EYBL tournaments.

Here’s a few things that stood out:

• There were at least 17 articles of clothing bearing the Union Jack, vaguely gesturing to the half-Indian and half-Algerian’s Essex roots but more broadly to the percolating UK rap moment™ that has been taking place for a while now.

• The stage blended elements of Neon Geneis Evangelion (thin monoliths beaming different-colored light adjourning the edges) and Eyes Wide Shut (scarlet-red carpet at center).

• Fakemink took his shirt on and off four times despite no visible moisture anywhere on his body.

• The lethargic nature of his stage presence didn't detract from the performance. Fakemink had real command of the crowd.

Sammy

Threshold by Rob Doyle and Eternal Damnation

Last week, I got really into Threshold by Rob Doyle, a meandering book that was recommended to me by someone who told me it was about “being depressed and doing a lot of drugs.” When I started reading it on my train rides, the narrator was blandly rambling about mushrooms, and I was listening to a lot of Julianna Hatfield, for some reason.

These two things felt diametrically opposed: distant, plotless narrative in my hands; sharp, bleeding-heart music in my ears. “Performative reading” discourse was all over my Twitter timeline, which made me extremely conscious of how I looked on the subway, headphones on, holding this big book of acid testimonials, thinking about the people around me, and in doing so, low-key performing. Little did I know, then, that I had committed my final sin. The Julianna Hatfield music turned sour, like a doppler-effected ice cream truck, and I was thrust before a panel of my peers, all dressed in blinding white, glaring at me through META glasses. My actions were dishonorable, they said, pouting. They demanded that I perform for them; I could not find my book, as I had left it on Earth. Too bad. They jeered, spat at my feet, unleashed upon me a series of hurtful, bitingly-witty subtweets. I sobbed and was promptly cast into Hell. It looks a lot like Queens Central Booking.

Ock

United in Flames w/ jamesjamesjames

Malibu, the dreamy French ambient artist, has been going crazy on her NTS residency shows, but this week’s installation in collaboration with jamesjamesjames, the producer with the Avicii back tattoo (real? who’s to say…it feels real to me, which is all that matters) is my new favorite.

Ty Dolla $ign against “Stereo Love,” a crazy trance send-up of the poppy Ethel Cain song from the Obama list…my favorite music is the stuff that shouldn’t work, that your brain forecloses itself against the possibility of, and yet still goes. Malibu is sometimes swept under the rug as a nostalgia merchant, but what she’s doing reminds me of my favorite parts of the still-outstanding Jane Remover NTS show (RIP) or the best of vaporwave (“best of” doing a lot of heavy lifting), wherein poppy detritus is reconstituted into a joyous bit of affirmation. Don’t think of it as ironic or sincere, but as total.

Not Reacting to Graphs You See on the Internet

You don’t know what they mean, and more often than not they’re none of your business. Resist the temptation to predict everything…

Negative Literary Criticism

Everyone was abuzz about the big New Yorker piece about the purported death of negativity in music criticism, which I actually thought was fine…as comprehensive as a two-pager at the end of a bi-weekly could reasonably be, considered, perceptive. The writing world doesn’t have stans or, like, VIP sections to do ketamine in at music festivals, but the scene isn’t much brighter.

Increasingly, the venn diagram of who criticism is for, by, and about is coming to resemble a full circle. Why pan a book if you might run into its author at a bar? When nobody really reads anymore, is it worth putting additional negativity into an endangered space? Isn’t that what we have Andrea Long Chu’s quarterly skewer jobs for? Anyway, The Baffler just ran two pieces of acerbic and ruthless criticism from two of my favorite writers working, Daniel Kolitz and Adrian Nathan West. Each piece is a compelling, unintentional answer to the question Kolitz poses at his conclusion: this shit is why we bother.

Srikar

Corridos Ketamina

This is a duo with a background in the LA rave scene that now make their own southwestern strain of cloud rock. They trade Dean Blunt’s London fog that obscures and reveals black, white, British, and American heritage for their native desert dust. They time-stretch acoustic guitars until digital cracks appear and throw on trap, trip-hop, or intoxicating drum breaks. Sirens and smoke for the clown crashout gueyes give rise to a dark smog. Like many of their forefathers in regional Mexican music, they are most deeply devoted to the love in their life, with whom they share el sexo sin proteccion and botitas de miu miu.

Seeing Oasis

I didn’t expect for my eyes to well up at the sight of 50-year-old Manchester-born brothers holding hands in the air as the beat from “Fuckin in the Bushes” plays. The brotherly love that eluded them for so long mixed with the brotherly love that got me there in the first place did something to me. My friends pooled together to get me a ticket for Saturday’s show in Pasadena.

The blues shuffle of “Cigarettes and Alcohol” is the soundtrack to the crowds’ European Poznan. Sir Paul himself records “Little by Little” from the box seats. Crying fathers hug their crying daughters.

The Gallagher brothers have finally gotten to the ripe age where they can set aside their egos to accept that they need each other (and money, post-divorce). Noel’s ability to weave melodies and progressions that sew themselves into your mind mixed with Liam’s sneer and presence causes the nearly nonsensical lyrics about the desire to escape time and one’s circumstances to take on a genuinely transcendental feeling.

Millan

snuggle

A band out of the growing scene in Copenhagen that just released their second album, Goodbyehouse. It's enchanting, high-brow indie composed by Andrea Thuesen and Vilhelm Strange. Andrea’s vocals put you in quicksand, but the fat bass lines, spastic drum machines, and sprite strings provide just enough spunk to keep you from sinking. Here’s my favorite from the record:

Atlanta Will Be Just Fine

A cleanse from the city’s feuding rap titans.

Derange Subscribers:

Will [Boston]: Bud Light glass bottles. The most crisp taste + optimal consumption vehicle in the entire light beer market. Grab 2 at a time and hold them in the same hand while gesturing over a college football game. A simple pleasure.

Jon [Los Angeles]: David Halberstam - The Best and the Brightest. The classics are sometimes classics for a reason. Dense, long, but almost never dull. Insane detail. A reminder that history repeat itself and powerful men are really silly gooses not so deep down.

Nick [Los Angeles]: Richard Linklater's SubUrbia. This is the older, darker, and more jaded cousin of Dazed & Confused, about what happens after graduation and all the last day of school shenanigans. Though not as iconic as its predecessor, its depiction of lost and aimless youth in the citadels of the American Dream serves as a searing indictment of the great emptiness that all those decades of post-war empire wrought.

Chris [Chicago]: Give "Mapmaker" by Oh Geeez, Not Again a listen! This indie/folk-y/pop-rock album from last year is catchy, polished, sincere, and a great soundtrack for an outdoor adventure on a crisp autumn day.

Alex [NYC]: How The West Stole Democracy From The Arabs by Elizabeth Thompson. The rare nonfiction page-turner that tells the nearly erased history of Greater Syria's fight for a multifaith democracy (including Lebanon and Palestine, which were still part of Syria before European partition) after World War 1, and the 100s of French and British betrayals that destroyed it. You can draw a century-long straight line from the events in the book to better understand the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, the broader Middle East Crisis™️ and the hollow mirage known as 'international law.'

Last summer, I took a nine hour Megabus bus from Montreal to New York City, where my friend Allee had offered me a couch to sleep on. I was subletting a cheap room in Montreal, where I was enjoying a lazy, unemployed summer. In New York, I did much of the same, spending days aimlessly wandering and nights drinking beer in nearby Maria Hernandez Park. On Saturday, I went to a block party hosted by Brigade USA with my friend Lei. An hour or so into the outdoor festivities, I noticed someone painting a throwie—a bubble-lettered spelling of one’s graffiti tag—on a garage door across the street, a little bit away from the crowd. I pointed it out to Lei, and asked if he recognized the tag. He said he was unfamiliar, but added that most graffiti writers wouldn’t hit up like that on a busy street in broad daylight.

I didn’t get it: on a block filled with people drinking and dancing in the street, in a city synonymous with graffiti, how could it not be chill? In the two months I had just spent in Montreal, I saw people doing graffiti quite brazenly on multiple occasions. Though Montreal largely embraces graffiti culture, getting caught can still result in community service, or a ticket upwards of one thousand dollars. Lei explained that the NYPD is notoriously strict on vandalism, and that spending a night, or even a weekend in jail was not uncommon for writers in the city. He stressed that if I planned to do any graffiti while I was here, I needed to avoid getting bagged in Queens. As a Canadian somewhat naïve to the American judicial system, I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by “the tombs,” or what a “district attorney” was, but I certainly wasn’t planning on getting caught in any borough.

Though I wouldn’t claim to participate in graffiti at any sort of high level, the history and culture of the art form has fascinated me since I was young. Through skateboarding in my teenage years, I met a number of graffiti writers in my hometown of Victoria, a small city on Canada’s West Coast, and even began to throw up some toy handstyles of my own—a habit that, at the age of 26, I had still not kicked.

Artistic merits aside, I was always fascinated by the declaration of “I was here” contained within every tag, a bluntly-human impulse to be recognized and remembered. Immersing oneself in the culture transforms the streets into an international easter-egg hunt—every tagged mailbox, wall, and back-alley becomes a guestbook of sorts, intricately signed by a like-minded community. Even walking through New York, I had spotted tags from friends back home etched into the glass of subway station windows, or spray-painted on rolldown gates in the Lower East Side. Perhaps what I like about it is the sense of familiarity it brings, similar to spotting a friend’s face in a crowd of strangers. Or maybe it’s just the beauty of knowing that you and someone you know have both been in the same grimy bathroom stall.

The day before my bus back to Montreal, I spent the evening hours walking around Brooklyn alone, stopping occasionally to buy another tall can, slap up a sticker, or write on a dumpster. I like to imagine that someone I know will one day find one of my tags on their travels, and experience the same thrill that I do. A little past midnight, I made my way back to Allee’s place with Chief Keef’s Almighty So 2 blasting in my headphones.

Minutes away from her front stoop, I stopped in a parking lot where I admired fill-ins from NYC heavy hitters Wombat and ZigZag. I snapped a photo of the wall, eyed a rolldown gate on the sidewalk, and pulled out a Presto whiteout pen to add a small signature of my own. Through my headphones, I heard a shout. Something along the lines of “You’re under arrest.” I turned around and saw three officers hopping out of an unmarked vehicle.

I figured I had to play the innocent tourist card—convince them that I, a Canadian, had no idea it was really that bad. There’s graffiti everywhere in New York, right? I offered them my markers, and assured them that I’d never do it again, lesson learned. I was leaving for Canada the next day, anyway. They told me that I would need to speak to a judge, and that since I was a “flight risk,” I would have to stay in custody until that happened. We stood there, waiting for a transportation vehicle to bring me back to the station for processing.

Since the scene of the crime was just off the corner of Myrtle and Wyckoff, we were technically on the border of Ridgewood and Bushwick. Ridgewood is technically in Queens, and the officers that arrested me were serving the Ridgewood 104th Precinct.

So technically, I had just gotten bagged in Queens. Sorry Lei.

Inside the precinct, I was led to a small holding cell with two other men sitting silently on a small bench. I took the floor. While the rest of the force dicked around and watched TikToks on their phones in the lobby outside, one of the officers that arrested me sat in the room with us. Clearly bored with his assigned task of doing nothing, he eventually broke the silence by asking me the most pressing question of Summer 2024:

“Yo Canadian, Drake or Kendrick?”

I told him that I thought Kendrick won the beef. He seemed shocked that I was not rocking with the 6 God. I told him I don’t really care much about Drake (outside of Take Care) or Toronto, and that I grew up on the West Coast, much closer in proximity to Los Angeles. I asked him what he thought of 6ix9ine. He answered that he doesn’t listen to him anymore, since he snitched. I laughed, and reminded him that he was a police officer speaking on the street politics of snitching. He said that didn’t matter. He also said that there was a Canadian rapper currently locked up that he thinks should be free.

“Man…you’re not talking about Tory Lanez, are you?”

He was talking about Tory Lanez.

He started to tell me how Tory didn’t shoot Meg. I tried to move past this, and switched the topic to his favorite rapper in New York (Cash Cobain). I asked if he liked Xaviersobased. He hadn’t heard of him, but said he’d play a song. I told him to look up “Special.”

The jerk music echoing through the cell from the officer's phone speaker seemed to perk up the middle aged Hawaiian man sitting behind me.. He started telling the officer about some stupid conscious lyrical Australian rap, trying to get him to play a song. Later in the night, I found out that the Hawaiian guy was arrested for a domestic dispute with his wife which occurred in front of their developmentally disabled children. He told me that his wife would likely divorce him after this, and that he would probably have to move back in with his parents in Hawaii.

Around 2 a.m., I was taken out of the precinct cell and handcuffed again, before I was driven to Queens Central Booking. The cops explained that I was lucky it was a Sunday night, and that court would open back up at 7:30. They assured me I would make it out in time to catch my Monday evening bus back to Montreal, which departed from the Port Authority at 9PM.

Once we arrived at Central Booking, I was brought down a long hallway to a large cell with a single toilet in the corner. The A/C was cranked, even though nearly everyone in the room had been picked up in shorts and a T-shirt. There were a few benches, all taken by people lying down in uncomfortable positions, scrounging for sleep. I chose an unoccupied spot on the cell floor that didn’t look too dirty, and followed the lead of everyone else, wrapping my hands around my body inside my shirt for warmth, and pulling my t-shirt over my face to block out the bright fluorescent lights overhead.

In the morning, I found out that the court actually opened at 9:30–not 7:30, like I was told by the police. Since the court was only open on weekdays, there was a backlog of people who had been sitting there all weekend who would need to be processed before I could. Come 9:30, we were moved down the hallway, and sorted into cells based on our charges: misdemeanors in one, felonies in the other. Looking at the felony cell across from us, I was thankful that my charges of “criminal mischief” and “making graffiti” were misdemeanors in the state of New York.

People inside our cell passed the time by socializing, telling stories, and asking each other what they were in for. Aside from myself, most people seemed to be in for something violent.

Notable characters:

• A man who claimed to work as private security, who had beaten someone up during an argument that started over some french fries.

He was the first person I spoke to in the morning—we were both frustrated by the guy who had been screaming the entire night. He spoke up first, politely suggesting that the offender “shut the fuck up.” He continued screaming, and I reminded him that people were trying to sleep. He responded with a vague threat of violence towards me, which caused my new friend in the private security field to stand up. There was a break from screaming after that.

• Jay, a middle aged Spanish guy who claimed he was in for slapping his neighbor who had “falsely” accused him of stealing packages.

He had clearly been to Central Booking a number of times before, and was giving rookies the rundown on how everything was going to go. Through Jay, I learned that the corrections officers (COs) came by every hour on the hour with a list of names, and if your name was called, you would be moved to the “lawyer room” where you could speak to your lawyer or public defender. He said if your name wasn’t called by 10PM, you wouldn’t be making it to court that day.

• A short guy with dreadlocks who was visibly shook.

I could tell he was on the verge of tears when he walked in. I asked him what happened, and he told me that this was the third violation of his probation, meaning that he would have to serve the remaining three years of his sentence in prison. He said that he might have to kill himself. I hope he didn’t.

As it became clear that I might not be making it to the Port Authority for my bus at 9PM, I realized that I had to notify a few people of my upcoming travel delays. The only phone number I know is my dad’s cell phone. After waiting my turn, I reached for the receiver hanging on the wall, when a voice called out from behind me: “Yo Canadian, who you calling?”

A tall guy who I had spoken to earlier explained that the phone could only call New York City area codes. He said that if I needed to contact my dad, he could call his friend, who would then add his number to a three way call before hanging up.

I explained to my dad what happened, instructed him to forward this information to Allee, and told him that I didn’t know when I’d be getting out. I said I would keep him updated and check back in later.

The next hour, on the dot, the tall guy who called his friend for me was called by a CO. At this point, he had been in longer than everyone else, by far. The cell erupted with whoops and hollers. Even though my name hadn’t been called, I was immensely happy for him. He had already been inside for two full days, and had gone out of his way to make sure I could get a line to the outside world that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

The CO grew impatient as all of us took turns dapping him up. After the names of the hour left our line of sight, it sunk in that I had just lost my line to my dad. I started to panic, realizing not only that I wouldn’t be able to make any more phone calls, but that I might not even be leaving central booking tonight if my name wasn’t called soon.

My increasing level of silent anxiety was interrupted when a CO approached the barred gate of our cell.

“Alright, who’s the Canadian white boy?” (I was not just the sole Canadian, but also the sole white boy.)

The CO handed me a strip of paper with a phone number on it.

“This is from your friend that just left. He said you might need it.”

I sat back down on the bench, taking a moment to ensure I didn’t cry in jail.

At this point, most of the people I befriended had gotten called, and I had now been there longer than nearly all of the unfamiliar faces around me. Even a few people that had shown up hours later than I did had already moved on. If my name wasn’t called this time or the next, I would be staying for another night. I had kept it together thus far, but the increasingly real possibility of sleeping on the dirty floor of the misdemeanor cell for a second night had me inching towards a mental breakdown.

The next hour, a CO showed up with a small stack of names–potentially the last of the evening. I began to pray. I had not prayed in years, but if there was ever a time, this was it.

The CO called my name.

I was led into another dirty cell, filled with people whose names had been called hours prior. I spoke to the familiar faces. Jay explained to me that being in this room meant that we would see a judge tonight, and that the court closed at 1 AM. He also explained that a lot of porn stars are also escorts, and that he follows them on Instagram to see when they’re in New York City, so he can pay to have sex with them. He bragged about all the expensive things he owns, and all the pairs of designer shoes he wears. But we were in jail. His shoes didn’t have shoelaces in them, and neither did mine.

As I stood around waiting to get called into the tiny room where a public defendant would speak to you, a CO opened the cell door, and called my name.

“The district attorney dismissed your case. You’re good to go.”

Without needing to speak to the lawyer or judge, I was led through the final hallways of the facility, where a police officer explained that my charges had been dropped, and that I could return to the precinct to collect my belongings. They offered me a ticket for free transit, but without my phone to tell me where I was or how to get to a bus or train, this was useless.

Finally outside and breathing fresh air, I picked a direction and ran, laceless shoes loose on my feet. I flagged down the first taxi I saw, and hopped in. I had $27 USD in my wallet, which was the only item I was allowed to keep with me. I told the driver I needed to get to the 104th Precinct, which he said would cost $25.

Back at the 104th, a shift change had begun. Police officers were socializing, sipping energy drinks, and showing each other more TikToks. An old Italian woman sitting beside me told me that this was the third time she’d been here today, and that nobody had helped her yet.

After an hour and at least five conversations with distracted officers, one of them opened a drawer, handed me a bag containing most of my belongings, and walked away. I tracked him down again, and asked why my watch and gold chain weren’t in the bag. For a moment, he feigned confusion. Then he re-opened the drawer and begrudgingly returned my jewelry.

With my phone, I was finally able to direct myself back to Allee’s place around midnight. After a debriefing of my past 24 hours, I learned that both her and her roommate, Amanda, had similar stories of arrests.

Share

The next month, I returned to NYC from Montreal: a redemption visit of sorts. This would include my first MLB game (Mets vs. A’s) instead of my first visit to jail.

After a devastating Mets loss at Citi Field, Allee and I went back to her place in Ridgewood, where her roommate Amanda had just returned from out of state. I hadn’t seen her the last time I visited, but learned that she was into graffiti, so naturally, the topic came up quickly.

“I heard you got pinched,” she said. “104th Precinct?”

The 104th in particular, I learned, was notorious for going after graffiti writers, and was the same precinct responsible for many of the charges which in 1994, earned legendary graffiti writer Desa MTA the title of the “Million Dollar Vandal”.

As we got into further graffiti talk, I explained to Amanda that I didn’t plan on catching any tags in New York this time around. She asked if I had checked out the nearby train-yard yet. It would probably be chill, she assured me, and said that the chances of running into any rail cops was pretty low.

Walking down the train tracks the next morning, I spotted two figures with backpacks on. Graffiti writers for sure. As I got closer, one of them greeted me with a phrase uttered countless times in train yards worldwide:

“What do you write?”

He introduced himself as Sokem. I told him I was pretty sure I had seen it before.

“I hope so,” he laughed.

Over the past few years, Sokem has been on the forefront of the rappelling graffiti scene in New York City, using rock-climbing gear to hang from the sides of bridges and buildings hundreds of feet in the air to paint spots.

Though rappelling graffiti has been around for decades, it was typically employed by writers with rock-climbing experience, and only performed in a few regional scenes (with notable historic examples such as the KID PK water tower). Recently, though, rappelling graffiti has exploded across social media, with writers like Sokem, Rams, Notice, and Qzar pushing the limits of graffiti, and hitting spots once thought to be untouchable.

In addition to being a well-rounded, active graffiti writer, Sokem has done as much research as he can on the system that has been prosecuting artists for longer than he’s been alive.

Over the phone later, Sokem explained that getting sent to central booking is a common occurrence amongst graffiti writers, but also a good sign that your case will get thrown out.

“I’ve had out of town homies come here and get bagged, I’ve had homies that live here get bagged. It’s like a never-ending cycle, but the city never prosecutes it,” he said. “There’s no reason anyone should be doing 1 to 3 days for graffiti, but if you’re in a borough that’s more residential, they’re just gonna fuck your shit up. Queens is like a whole other thing. They’re not nice out there. It’s not just about getting the arrest.”

He suggested that the police held me until I could see a judge as a way to make my night worse, knowing that my charges would be eventually thrown out.

For enduring graffiti writers like Sokem, run-ins with the law become merely a part of the eternal game of cat and mouse–inevitable as a skateboarder breaking a bone. Before hanging up, I ask him what motivates him to keep going, regardless of legal troubles and the craziness that comes with painting in the city.

“I just love it. It’s just something that I do at this point. I think about graffiti all day. It plays into every relationship I have, every friendship that I have. I can’t go anywhere without drawing, or scratching my name into some bullshit. I don’t know what keeps me motivated–I just like to paint. It makes me happy. Nothing else exists when I’m painting. I’m present, I’m there. It’s therapeutic. I feel like I’m James Bond sometimes.”

In the same way that it took little convincing for me to hop a fence into a train yard in the exact neighborhood I had been arrested in a month prior, there’s something that keeps everyone coming back. In the police cruiser on my way to booking, I had asked the officer if he had any memorable stories of catching graffiti writers. Rather than any exciting chases or high-profile busts, he told me about a story about catching the same guy on multiple occasions–a graffiti writer with a professional career as a dentist.

I guess the thrill is universal. Just keep your head on a swivel when you’re in Queens.

On a strip of 6x6 cloth nailed to a wall, dozens of abstracted bodies congregate on a grey floor. Some lie on cots, others sit together at a table, and someone in the bottom-right corner screams with hands held high. The deranged painting, made with acrylic and charcoal, is called “Common Cell Room.” It depicts living conditions in the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest ICE detention facility in the northeast. Its creator, a Targaryen-looking 28 year-old, makes sure to point out a fallacy in the building’s name: “It is not a processing center. It is a prison.”

The MVPC, per his description, is a shipping container that holds 60-70 men in the same open area. There are no cells; it’s just one big dusty pod. All within it are immigrants without enough documentation to appease the insatiable Trump administration. Some have criminal histories–murderers, drug-dealers, petty thieves–but many are innocent, harmless, asylum-seeking people who have found themselves trapped in the Middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania, because of a nightmarish turn of events, both in their home countries, and the one they sought refuge in.

There have been substantial reports of physical and psychological abuse by guards. Namely chokeslams, spitting in the faces of detainees, the withholding of food and water, and illicit discrimination towards non-English speakers. Last August, three people were stabbed with a shank by a fellow inmate. Just three weeks ago, a Chinese citizen awaiting a hearing was found hanging dead in the shower.

Artemis recently spent 10 months there.

Shortly after his release, we met at an art studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It was a bright Sunday afternoon and we were the only ones in the building. His allotted plot was ripe with coconut water, Pelligrino, fresh fruit, scattered tubes of paint and brushes, a few large-scale canvas’ hanging from the wall, and thick stacks of sketches he drew while in ICE custody. At first, his demeanor was calm, his speech thoughtful. I was surprised to hear him liken MVPC to an involuntary, and far less serene, ashram–a spiritual retreat popular among Buddhists for intense inward reflection.

“I tried to find the divine in everything,” he said in his thick Russian accent, “and this helped me a lot. I was optimistic all the time. I had no other choice. If you’re there and not optimistic, you are dying.”

When speaking about “Common Cell Room,” his tone flipped. His eyes got twice as big and his voice tensed with frustration while pointing hard at areas of the painting: “One row, two row, three row, four row, 60 people, one big common room. Always phone calls, always fights in the bathroom, people taking shits, fights over the microwave…Listen, see this,” he jabs his finger on a figure in red slouched down, “they use a piece of the dice tube, this one crazy person from El Salvador, a real thug, he was scraping the dice tube on the floor every day to sharpen it. Everyday, day and night, nonstop. He made money from it.”

“The murderers,” he continued, “were the nicest people. The biggest drug dealers, they were such genuine, gentle people. Those people who were doing small crimes were stupid, low intellect, ill-mannered, loud and obnoxious. We were all living in a fucking zoo. It was so intensively bad. It was pure fucking hell, my brother, it was so wicked bad.”

He kept himself occupied by reading Kafka, playing chess, praying, and obsessively sketching. “I was drawing scenes from our life,” he said, “and they [other inmates] were like, ‘Oh, look, look, it’s me, it’s me.’ In the evenings they looked through my drawings. It was entertaining for us.”

Artemis is not a famous painter. He is known by some curators and collectors, but subsists on his entranced work ethic, inordinate style, and occasional modeling gigs. His art blends purity with the abrasiveness of reality; it’s like something out of a demented toddler’s daydream. He uses vibrant colors on tragic figures, hides good and evil in between what may look like unintelligible scribbling, and is wholly absorbent of however his fortunes unfold. He has an intense, at times unnerving presence, punctuated by sea green eyes that burn through you. There’s a persuasion to his mannerisms that I’ve only found among truly possessed artists, who, for whatever reason, often fly too close to the sun.

During our two hours of conversation, Artemis would appear stoic, talking about divinity and the treasured friends he made while locked up, then in the next moment radiate with intoxicating emotion while telling a story, no matter how riveting or insignificant its content actually was. It’s as if an internal pendulum would not stop swinging. Given the sheer insanity of the past five years of his life, solid ground has not only been hard to come by: it’s become nearly impossible to trust.

There is a place in the center of Moscow called the Lanceray House. It is an eight-floor, neo-Gothic building that was utilized during the October Revolution of 1917, where the Bolsheviks’ Red Guards fired countless rounds of artillery from its scaffolding. After its construction, destruction, then reconstruction, it became what we here in America would call a shared living space. A more astute comparison may be a dirtier–and much less publicized–version of the Chelsea Hotel.

In the last decade of his life, painter and sculptor Eugene Lanceray lived in one of the building's apartments. He is now considered a hero in Russian art for both documenting the aftermath of Lenin’s victory and painting an astounding mural in Moscow’s Kazansky train station.

Nearly a century after his passing, the Lanceray House remains a solace for bohemian classes of artists. It’s a place where musicians, architects, playwrights, and painters alike live and breathe their own, and each other’s, work. While attending Gubkin Russian State University in the late 2010s, Artemis Lyiskov visited with some friends, and was struck by how its interior decay was contrasted by the liveliness of the artists who inhabited it. The building cast a spell, causing the promising student to move in and radically redirect his life towards whatever the energy oozing out of that building was.

See, he was supposed to be a chemist. Raised in St. Petersburg, he grew up attending a school for those gifted in science, then headed to his country’s capital city to obtain his degree. He was a dedicated student, winning Science Olympiad contests in high school and working in a research laboratory while in Moscow. He had always doodled in class, but didn’t give much consideration to visual art as a legitimate path.

But upon entering the membrane of the Lanceray House, Artemis was simultaneously introduced to the Moscow creative scene. He befriended artists, hung out in their studios, and tagged along with them to exhibitions around the city. One painter in particular, from Monteparnasse, Paris, took him to an exhibit featuring the work of Amedeo Modigliani, a boundary-pushing traditionalist from Tuscany. The poetry in Modigliani’s work was a flashbulb moment. Artemis decided it was time to take the leap.

He took a trip to Beijing, bought charcoal and oil pastels, and began his first painting. It was of a Chinese girl carrying a goldfish in a plastic bag—no doubt in the vein of Modigliani, whose subjects were often pedestrian. After this, the itch became unscratchable. He devoted himself to art, and within a few years, things had begun to snowball: a move to Istanbul led to the sale of a few paintings, these sales led to trips across Europe, these trips led to handshakes and exhibition invites, and the culmination led Artemis to embark on his nomadic ways. The important thing to note is that this country-hopping only began as voluntary.

In the winter of 2022, after a stint in Spain, Artemis returned to Russia. It was not long until the Putin administration launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, attacking their military strongholds and air defense systems with missiles launched onto multiple fronts. Artemis, like many peers at risk of being drafted, chose to flee. Because of this resistance to fighting, paired with previous troubles he faced with the government1, he escaped by stealthily crossing the Belarus border, eventually making his way back towards Istanbul, where he had some friends. From there, he embarked on what he calls a “war trip” across six countries, culminating in Athens, Greece. As the self-mythologizing Artemis tells it, while standing at the feet of Athena’s statue as the wind blew west, he decided it was time to cross the Atlantic.

His first stop was Bogotá, Colombia, where he stayed for two weeks before heading to Mexico City. There, he took residence in Polanco, a luxurious neighborhood teeming with art galleries. He spent a productive year in CDMX, which he calls a “beautiful city,” but ultimately knew that he wanted to end up in New York. He had a Russian Passport, a Mexican driver’s license, and some money in the bank from years of art sales. The details of his travel are blurry, but what I do know is this: he took a flight to San Diego, a bus to Los Angeles, then another flight to New York City, where he did not know a soul.

The adjustment was disheartening. He was a visa-less war deserter bouncing around from murky-building to murkier-building in a city that American citizens with stable jobs have trouble moving to, all the while haunted by nightmares of being tracked down by the Russian government, or his family paying the price for his disappearance. Overseas, the war raged on, and any hope he might’ve had of returning to his home country diminished with each mortar that fell.

“It was uncomfortable,” he said of his first year in New York. “I changed so many houses.” He likened the environment of one in particular to the Stanford Prison Experiment: “Even good people can become evil. This is what happened to these people.”

I first met Artemis on August 23rd, 2023, at a subterranean nightclub in Lower Manhattan. I was standing by my girlfriend’s side as she smoked on the stairs, and a sinewy man of about 6’3” with long silver hair asked me for a hit. I was not smoking, nor was it my joint, but I arranged an agreement that left all parties happy: a hit of my girlfriend’s joint for a hit of his watermelon Geek Bar. He took a big rip and she warned him: “careful, it’s hash.” He didn’t seem to know what this meant, but he clearly loved the taste. When I asked him what he did, he said in his baritone accent, “I am an artiste.” I asked what type of art: “moderne.” We followed each other on Instagram and parted ways. Later that night, we saw him dancing, his head bobbing above the rest, nearly hitting the low ceiling, and he thanked my girlfriend for the hash. He struck me as goofy, eccentric, and dead serious all the same.

I didn’t think much of him over the next few months, until he began manically posting stories on Instagram in early 2024. These were mainly videos of him smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor while working on his art or walking around Manhattan, usually with Russian or Atlanta rap playing in the background. Then came a trip to Miami, followed by cryptic messages about a possible arrest, silence for a week, a video of him back in New York with an ankle monitor on, and finally, a post on his account made by someone else explaining that Artemis had been taken into ICE custody. The few updates over the next 10 months offered little explanation about the situation. He started posting again when was free and back in New York. That’s when I reached out for an interview.

As he tells it, it all started with a “misunderstanding.”

“It was a car chase in Miami and everything looked like I kidnapped her, but I did not. Lots of girls, lots of people. They were fighting with me. I was driving a convertible car, a red convertible car, a moose-tang. The chick was a hot blonde girl, and it looked like I put her in the car and closed the door. Everybody was yelling. Everybody was like ‘Hey! Hey! Let her go!’ But she ran to my car because I was chasing another car. She came with some dude, and I was angry, and I decided to chase. I was like ‘Beep-Beep-Beep.’ I thought he kidnapped her so I wanted to just protect her.”

My translation of this is that a friend of his, a Ukrainian woman, was in a car with another man. This angered Artemis, so he chased them down, honking until the other man pulled over. The two of them got into a screaming match on a main street, ending with the woman getting into Artemis’ car instead. The details remain cloudy.2

“The cops came to my house when I was peacefully talking to my friend. Somebody from the witnesses called the police. They just said ‘On your knees! Hands above your head!’ There was eight police cars.”

“Were you drunk?” I asked.

“I was sober. My driver’s license was Mexican and it expired. Also, a DUI is a bad charge.”

“I never expected in my life to be arrested,” he continued, “to be handcuffed, sitting in a police car. I called people but nobody answered, nobody answered. I was praying, I was praying, I was asking God to forgive my sins, because I started to think, this is so bad.”

Artemis was transferred from county jail to an immigration detention facility, only to be told that there was no room for him. His brother eventually paid his bond after a week in custody, so he flew back to New York with an ICE-issued ankle monitor, and a third-degree felony charge for kidnapping, formally called false imprisonment.3

When he got back to NYC, Artemis decided to voluntarily check-in at the ICE building. “I thought, I’m going to be super gucci, I’m not a criminal, I didn’t kill anybody, there’s nothing to worry about. When I came to the plaza, 26 Federal Plaza, the big, scary building, I go and say ‘Nothing basically happened, just a small thing, nobody kill each other,’ and they look and see ‘Kidnapping’ as a pending charge, and they arrest me.”

Artemis was detained on March 18th, 2024; he was not released until January 17th, 2025. He did not win asylum, but was instead granted a withholding of removal–a more limited form of protection. It is a type of fear-based relief that allows the United States to remove him from America, but prevents them from sending him back to Russia because his life or freedom would be threatened there. This was on Halloween day, 2024, yet he sat in MVPC for another 78 days, unaware of a release date. According to his lawyer, Michael Leonetti, a public defender in New York, this happened because he was classified by the court as an “arriving alien.”

“Usually with someone in detention,” Leonetti said over the phone earlier this summer, “they can have a bond hearing with a judge. He wasn’t eligible for that, so we made all these requests to ICE to get him out. They were all denied or ignored, so eventually we had to bring a federal litigation case, a habeas case to get him a bond hearing finally, and that’s how he got released.”

“This was after he won his case,” Leonetti continued. “They detain people for months and months, and it’s like they don’t give it a second thought…I mean, they stole 10 months of his life and it’s not uncommon. There are people who are in immigration detention for years.”

Artemis thinks this is a business practice. “They’re making money on me. They make money on each person. It’s a corrupt system.”

He may have a point. As of February, 2025, around 90% of ICE detention centers are privately owned, for-profit institutions, mostly operated by the publicly-traded prison companies CoreCivic and GEO Group. Both organizations have long histories of nuzzling up to politicians, and their collective $3M of donations to the Trump campaign is paying dividends thanks to the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which allocates $45B for “increased capacity in detention facilities” over the next 10 years. (To watch a movie, Artemis had to pay around 30 cents per minute, which comes out to around $30 per film. It’s no wonder that Salvadorian was working so hard to sell those shanks.)

When Artemis got out in January, over 3 months after his case was won in federal court, he was bussed to Pittsburgh with $5 in his pocket. He gave that to a homeless guy in exchange for a pair of gloves. The rest of his money was held in crypto, which is how he accepted payments for his art while in jail. (The price of Bitcoin rose nearly 70% while he was locked up.)

Money certainly helped, but the stability he had scraped for in New York prior to this debacle was destroyed. “Everything was stolen,” he says of his return. “Everything I owned was stolen. And in my apartment on Wall Street, everything got burned. And in another place, wicked people stole my art. They stole it and sold it. There was a hellish fire. It was burned to the ground. I came back to no paintings, no previous artwork.”

By his tone, it is hard to tell how serious he is. He speaks whimsically, so whether or not the fire was indeed full of flames or merely a metaphor for the trials he has undergone, is unclear. All considered, this detail may not matter much.

“I did not want more troubles,” he said solemnly. “I accepted this, and I let it go. At least I got my freedom back.”

The “Uncle Danny” bit wasn’t the first time I heard of Shane Gillis—that honor goes to when, in 2019, he was hired and subsequently fired from SNL before the season even began. But it was what made me a fan. If you don’t belong to my demographic (18-29, male, the sort of person who deleted TikTok just to get hooked on YouTube Shorts), let me try and summarize: “I said ‘retarded’ there a couple times,” Gillis opens, addressing the audience of his 2023 Netflix special Beautiful Dogs. “My bad.” A pause for laughs. “I don’t know if you can tell by looking at me, [but] I do have family members with Down Syndrome.” He gestures at his face, his demeanor. “I dodged it, but it nicked me!” He pantomimes a boxer’s duck.

Read more

Shaking Makini “Big Mak” Manu’s hand, which runs 10.5 inches from thumb to pinky, makes me feel small in the way that a starry night sky does. To the touch, Manu’s right paw resembles a baseball glove filled with sand. I briefly calculate how much money it would take me to let Manu slap me in the face, abandoning the effort once my hypothetical sum surpasses my student loan debt. At Power Slap 14 in New Orleans, Duane “The Iron Giant” Crespo will do it for $5,000.

Manu’s smile is as infectious as his body is imposing. The super heavyweight is a renaissance man: proud father, husband, coach, sumo wrestler, multi-instrumentalist, former college and professional lineman, devout Mormon, aspiring WWE wrestler, and working stunt man. Each gig he cobbles together is in service of a tangible goal. Be it through film, music, or sports, Makini Manu was born to be an entertainer. In pursuit of this, he is relentlessly ambitious, frequently rejected, and devoutly faithful. At the moment, the most consistent presence in his life outside of his immediate family is the girl’s volleyball club he coaches with his wife; a close second, he adds with a laugh, is slapping people in the face.

Like everyone with some level of awareness of Power Slap, I first discovered Dana White’s surrealist combat sports enterprise through a vertical video on my phone. That’s by design. It’s not just that White’s newest race-to-the-bottom sports entertainment venture is precisely engineered to create viral videos—it is, of course—but that the genesis of the entire operation was found in a viral video of its own. In 2021, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO came across a compilation video of a 385-pound Siberian pig farmer named Vasilii “The Dumpling” Kamotskii slapping the shit out of people. Where the average observer might have filed the experience under what we hadn’t yet called “brainrot,” Dana White saw the future. The following year, he founded Power Slap, anointed it the world’s “premier slap fighting organization,” and mobilized the heft of the UFC’s organizational apparatus behind the fledgling venture. Ever the scout, White even signed The Dumpling himself; to sweeten the pot, he sent pigs as a gift to Kamostskii’s Illansky farm. I hear he has invested his slapping proceeds into a dumpling franchise back home.

The general idea of Power Slap is as follows: two consenting adults stand across from each other and take turns slapping each other in the face. The slapper must keep their feet grounded. The slap must be open-handed. The slap must fall between the brow and mouth of the recipient. The person being slapped must not flinch or move in any way. In the event that a fight is not ended by knockout, a panel of judges determines a winner based on “boxing-based scoring,” which, in this context, raises more questions than it answers. As best I can tell, Power Slap pays $5,000 to fight, $5,000 to win, and a discretionary bonus of up to $10,000 for a knockout slap. Despite my best efforts, I genuinely cannot tell whether the $10,000 payout is merely sponsored by Crypto.com or actually made out as cryptocurrency.

If Power Slap’s rulebook seems light on the specifics, it’s because the specifics don’t really matter. Power Slap is technically a sport much the same way that an Uber Eats ghost kitchen is technically a restaurant—a parasitic entity that uses a host physical space in order to occupy virtual space on your cell phone. This observation is not some feat of perceptive media criticism; if you talk to the guys in charge of Power Slap, they’ll more or less just admit it. Ask White or Power Slap CEO Frank Lamicella, consult any Power Slap YouTube broadcast, or just close this piece and look at Instagram Reels: Power Slap is popping on social media, and that’s the point. In its two-and-a-half years of existence, the organization has amassed a self-reported 26 million social media followers and 17 billion views across all of its platform’s videos. The defining business story of twenty-first century sports has been each league’s ability to adapt to a world governed by social media. Power Slap is the first organization trying to build the other way around.

As he sits across from me inside a heavily air-conditioned Bourbon Street hotel conference room a few days before the event, Frank Lamicella looks perfectly in place among the throngs of remote-working bachelor partiers preparing to descend on the French Quarter for another raucous weekend. The biceps poking out of his black v-neck suggest that Lamicella is a Joe Rogan listener, and his CV implies that he and Rogan are on texting terms. Lamicella is the CEO of Power Slap’s holding company, Thrill Sports, a role he entered after stints both at white shoe law firm Paul Weiss and as the UFC’s in-house lawyer, where he oversaw partnerships with DraftKings, Crypto.com, and the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture of Tourism. Speaking with Dana White’s aspiring heir, I hear a man who taxonomizes digital impressions the way your standard suit might treat Nielsen ratings.

In the early 2010s, when established sports leagues scrambled to keep up with looming social media hegemony, they relentlessly guarded content, issuing takedowns and filing complaints. A decade later, as content has ballooned, Power Slap has ferociously pursued it, courting influencers, streamers, and For-You pages with tenacity that would put a low-polling politician to shame. Lamicella tells me that Power Slap 13 saw more than 140 influencers flock to Vegas, who, in total, generated 1,000 posts across platforms to their more than one billion combined followers.

“I don’t know the last time you’ve been to an NBA game,” he asks me, “but they don’t want you taking out your phones to record. Here, creators will stream from the event, and we love that. This is like an organized chaos free-for-all.”

If baseball is best enjoyed on the radio and football on the couch, Power Slap is at home on the sort of short-form vertical video that has become the lingua franca of contemporary life. It’s clear that Dana White & co are parlaying a number of bets about humanity’s future: over on total screen time, under on attention span, sensationalized violence to continue its winning streak, and us to lose.

Makini Manu has dreamed of starring on a screen for his entire life. As it stands, he will have to settle for a supporting role in the most-watched sports-related YouTube Short of all time. A thirty-second clip of Manu slapping a briefly-stunned, triumphantly upright Eviahn Scott has been viewed more than 478 million times.

When I bring up the video during a sit down with him in the Royal Sonesta ballroom, Manu flashes a sheepish grin of his own. It’s not just that he didn’t realize how viral the slap was going to go–it’s that the blow in question was the first professional slap he ever threw. Only after experiencing the thrills of unexpected virality did Manu view Power Slap as anything more than a quick way to make $15,000.

There’s a sort of symmetry in Makini Manu’s nascent career as a super heavyweight slapper. He tells me that he first learned of Power Slap through a YouTube video. Power Slap, in turn, first learned of Manu through a moderately viral video of his sumo wrestling highlights. Manu seems to have intuited that the sports entertainment world he wishes to inhabit is one both made and broken by the whims of the algorithm. For instance, it was the aforementioned sumo compilation that opened the door for his appearing in the 2023 independent film Self Reliance, during the production of which he was able to share a green room with Christopher Lloyd. (As if to impart the importance of this to me, he giddily hands me his custom Back to the Future wallet.) He speaks somewhat ruefully about it all, his perspective humble despite feeling like he’s aboard a runaway train. “Definitely, down this path, there’s been a lot of rejection, because I’ve always wanted to be in entertainment,” Manu shares, “but Power Slap, they kind of helped me get out there, you know? Now, I’m like, denying people.” Like most people with a penchant for virality, Manu benefits both from his dedication and, more recently, his luck with the algorithm. He hopes to parlay this all into a SAG-AFTRA union card—no more indie movies.

I’m here in New Orleans at Xavier University’s basketball arena, which has been temporarily transformed into a sort of UFC minor league stadium. This is Power Slap’s first event in the United States held outside of Las Vegas. (Unsurprisingly, the organization has also graced Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia with its presence.) For the time being, Power Slap tours with the UFC like a deep-pocketed opening act. On Saturday night, roughly 18,000 people will flock to the Smoothie King Center, New Orleans’ NBA arena, to watch the Louisiana-born Dustin Poirier compete in his final fight. The night before, about one in five of those people will head five minutes down the interstate to watch a bunch of guys slap the shit out of each other.

After checking into the media room and extolling the roasted chicken with delegates from Slap News, The Nelk Boys’ subsidiary Full Send, and a Russian rag (who, at the presser, asks when we can expect to see The Dumpling slap again), I spot a cross-section of typical combat sport fans. Middle-aged couples exhibit gendered enthusiasm gaps, pods of dudes in short-sleeved button downs bray in support of the striker they’ve bet on, and divorced dads steer trios of broccoli-haired teens to their seats in what will surely be the high-water mark of this weekend’s visitation. Throughout the concourse, vendor carts hawk cans of Monster Energy’s “The Beast™ Unleashed,” a 6.0% ABV Four Loko retread that, with the limited exception of Monster’s Twisted Tea knock-off “Nasty Beast Hard Tea,” is the only alcohol at the venue being sold to the gen pop. Lines snake tepidly around the watering holes. I catch a mid-fifties man sniff his cup of offputtingly brown malt liquor disconcertedly; his white tee, which depicts a bloodied Donald Trump raising his fist in triumph, warns, “You Come at the King, You Best Not Miss.” Taking my seat, I’m startled by the hum of a drone that nearly grazes my head. It’s the only time all night that I benefit from not sporting the bussin’ haircut.

When the clock strikes eight, the slapping podium rises ominously from the center of the densely-branded mat, whose podium itself is emblazoned with ads for the aforementioned Monster Energy concoction du jour, a cryptocurrency asset called “Vet by VeChain” (trading, at the time of this writing, at $0.0274 a coin), and the moneylines of the respective fighters. The arena is bathed in a narcoticizing blue light—even when your physical body is at Power Slap, it still feels like you’re looking at your phone. After a series of commercials on the in-screen arena, including one indicating that you can earn Vet by Vechain any time you take a photograph of a “sustainable coffee mug” on your phone, Duane “The Iron Giant” Crespo walks to start the night’s only super heavyweight event. His challenger, Makini Manu, is a shot in the arm for the crowd. Manu is magnetic, made for professional wrestling if not a unionized movie shoot. By the time he’s completed the pre-fight Haka, he has the unconditional support of roughly 2,500 bloodthirsty spectators behind him; he’s also got 140 pounds on the Iron Giant. If I were a gambling man, I’d put my theoretical child’s college fund on his -130 odds. Manu, who won the coin toss, slaps first. His opening shot is clunky, disjointed, and off the mark, dragging a relatively unharmed Crespo along the base of his wrist. As Manu rests his sizeable stomach against the podium to get his licking, I read that he’s never been knocked down in any of his four fights.

Look: anyone can throw a slap. Strengthen your hand (more than one fighter tells me fractures are not uncommon), tighten up your core with some rotational work, and find your mark. The hardest part about slapping a guy, as far as I’m concerned, is the attendant guilt and shame. What I want to know is: how the fuck do these guys get hit like this? What mantras flit past their mind’s eye as your opponent winds back? Do they absent themselves of all thought? Do they brace themselves, or stay limp? To borrow from Lil Wayne’s ill-fated interviewer: do they ever get nervous?

Every time I attempt to broach the subject with a striker, it marks a break for the worse in our conversation, a point at which the striker is disabused of the notion that we are two dudes talking and made acutely aware that they are a man talking to a boy. They look at me like I am constitutionally incapable of understanding what they do—in fairness, I suspect I am. Call it evolutionary biology or the pussification of the Western man: I live my life in an ambiently-suspended state of avoiding being hit in the face. These men display no such fear. For Dakota McGregor, being hit just affords an opportunity to get back up; in a life structured by struggle, these slaps are a sort of controlled salvation. Ditto the champ, Damien Dibbell, who lets on in a moment of surprising vulnerability that his ability to take hits stems from his aggressive, turbulent childhood. Manu, for his part, rejects the premise I advance entirely. When I ask him whether he harbors any neurological reservations about taking such hard hits at his side gig, he quips that he’s still waiting for his first real smack. “I can feel the people hitting hard,” Manu confesses, “but I want to know how it feels to be knocked out. I don’t know what it’s like. And it sounds cocky, but nobody has given me that rocking. I’m waiting for that.”

Duane Crespo, it becomes evident, will not be the one who gives Manu his sought-after deliverance. On his first slap, Crespo’s hand seems to pass through Manu’s unmoving head. Ever the showman, Manu keeps his eyes closed as he stands perfectly still before peeking his right eye open in faux-surprise: “did he go?” Before his second shift, Manu cakes Crespo’s face in chalk. His hit, far sounder than the first, leaves Crespo momentarily dazed in a cloud of powder. By Crespo’s second slap, it feels as if even he knows he’s forestalling the inevitable. With his final hit, Manu knocks Crespo’s beard to Arkansas. To his credit, the 285-pound man attempts to roll himself off of the floor and onto his feet, but the officials call it. The crowd, treated to its first knockout of the card, smells blood.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

If China initiated a ground war with the United States tomorrow, could America possibly emerge victorious? Should it? Forget that—will God forgive us for how far we have fallen? Is mercy something we deserve? Can I, from where I now stand, even speak of mercy without making a mockery of it?

The main card is a series of executions. The first contest, a middleweight fight between Darren “The Tarantula” Godfrey and Ke’ali’I “The Chief” Kanekoa, initially grabs my attention for its even betting odds. The contestants appear to effortlessly absorb their respective first slaps, but Godfrey insists that Kanekoa flinched. The crowd, upon slo-mo replay confirmation, goes ballistic. At Power Slap, flinching is the gravest possible sin, resulting in both a point deduction and a do-over slap. The arena groans in orgiastic delight as Kanekoa lines up to receive his punishment. Godfrey’s penalty strike sends Kanekoa’s head straight into the podium and his mind to the abyss, and the influencers to my left roar approvingly at justice served.

It's with this knowledge of flinching’s consequences that my heart sinks when, the very next fight, heavyweight Vernon “The Mechanic” Cathey flinches in receipt of a slap from the showman Austin “Turp Daddy Slim” Turpin. Watching Turp Daddy line up his punishment shot activates an ancestral memory within me; I stand in a muddy town square waiting for the sword to fall. It does—or, rather, an already dazed Cathey does. Upon receipt of his second straight strike, the 41-year-old falls head-first into the podium, where he remains in corpselike prayer for about three seconds before the two catchers usher his body down and to the mat. Once horizontal, Cathey lays with his eyes open but obviously lifeless; his right hand fingers stretch out like he is reaching for something just beyond him, a grotesque post-concussion involuntary movement known as the fencing response. The roars around me indicate the crowd’s satisfaction with the prostrate man’s punishment. A triumphant Turpin humps the mat three times before flipping off the arena with both hands.

For all its viewership on social media, Power Slap is yet to establish its own audience. As best I can tell, the only people I can confidently say are here for Power Slap itself and not the UFC match tomorrow are the teeming masses of influencers who appear to have been bussed in like the Soros-funded outside agitators haunting the right wing imagination. After a particularly vicious knockout, I make my way down to the floor’s “influencer section,” where steroidal men with clean fades and surgically-enhanced women walk by with streaming apparatuses not dissimilar to Nathan Fielder’s chest-mounted laptop. When the prelims end, the section transforms into a pigsty within which one mass of bodies leads to the open bar and another lines up for selfies with Theo Von. I tuck a Zyn into my upper lip—when in Rome—and head for the bar.

Idling in line for a drink, I am overpowered with regret about my decision to bring a tote bag to a Power Slap event. Tanned men with cauliflower ears and razor-lines in their eyebrows size me up pityingly; one group remarks disdainfully that I look like a skater. Nearby, a man who looks exactly like Caitlin Clark shares war stories from his time competing both on American Idol and America’s Got Talent. I fortify myself with a gin and tonic, then add a Monster Nasty Beast Hard Tea at the bartender’s encouragement, which was undoubtedly the source of my infernal hangover the next morning. When I ask the bartender to break some cash for a tip, she seems genuinely disarmed. I place $5 into an empty tip bucket and buckle up for the final matches.

As far as his four-year-old twin sons know, Dakota “The Maritime Menace” McGregor is a full-time carpenter on Prince Edward Island. His charming Canadian lilt asserts itself as he shares nightmares of walking in on his two boys taking turns slapping each other in the face. In a sport explicitly intended to go viral, a man is afforded only so much secrecy. The other day, they giddily confronted him: “Dad, you crashed his face!” McGregor somewhat jokingly shares his suspicion that his ex, with whom he coparents, was the leak.

Tonight, McGregor faces off against Robert “The Real Deal” Trujillo for the Power Slap lightweight title. It could be life-changing. A belt, as his boss at the carpentry shop has impressed upon him, means becoming a full-time professional slapper. McGregor is as realistic with himself as he is fearless—he’s too old to fulfill his lifelong dream of competing in the UFC, but he has as fair a shot as anyone at the next best thing. The title fight is a rematch of the inaugural lightweight championship bout three months prior, a dizzying affair during which McGregor was repeatedly battered by the stout, unflinching Trujillo.

McGregor appears to shiver in anticipation of his opponent’s slaps. In their previous match, he was knocked to the ground in the second round and staggered drunkenly in the third. By the final hit, he seemed to have forgotten where he was, responding to the strike by lifting his left fist in a fighting pose. The Canadian lost by unanimous decision, but still raised five fingers in pride, one for each beating he endured. In anticipation for the rematch, he has trained by receiving repeated slaps in the face from a pool noodle. He tells me that he’s working on bracing himself before being hit; in the past, he opted to receive slaps limply.

The first of the night’s two title fights, the McGregor-Trujillo contest is five rounds rather than the standard three. The PA man informs the audience that this fight is presented by Happy Cat—tagline: no more skinny cats—which strikes me as the only sponsor not directly invested in the corrosion of our societal fabric. McGregor emerges from the tunnel to mostly boos; the crowd, for whatever reason, has aligned themselves with the defending champion. The Canadian is noticeably taller and longer than Trujillo, physical measurements that would matter tremendously if these men were fighting rather than exchanging undefended wallops. What McGregor does have going for him is that he won the coin toss, meaning he gets to hit the belt-wearer first.

McGregor bends, takes his measure, and swipes his hand through Trujillo’s unbothered face. In return, he receives a boxy, uneven hit. By the time McGregor’s second slap appears to yet again pass through Trujillo’s hologram of a head, a sense of dread begins to settle on the carpenter’s red face. He braces, his body shakes, Trujillo claps him cleanly, and the carpenter hits the floor. McGregor, exhibiting his characteristic toughness, attempts to rush to his feet before his corner intervenes. There’s a strategic advantage, I learn, to staying down for as many of the ten seconds as you’re afforded before the fight ends in a knockout. McGregor takes a knee as the crowd bellows, waits his nine seconds, and stands back up. For the first time all night, the crowd has been taken by his ineffable charm. We also know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that McGregor has exactly one more shot at his opponent before his battered face gives in.

As McGregor lines up his third slap of the night, I grapple with a cognitive dissonance I’d never anticipated encountering in my life. I am rooting, in the ostensible name of mercy, to see a man with his hands held behind his back get knocked out. The beet-red McGregor lines up his shot with a wobbling hand; his first wind-up misses the mark entirely. He delivers his weakest hit of the night, and I can hardly bear to watch his final defense. McGregor fortifies his body as if to forestall the obvious. When he’s hit, he falls immediately into the arms of the two catchers behind him. For a second straight fight, I watch a man hold his claw-like fingers over an unconscious face. I hope that his sons did not get to watch.

Power Slap’s ascent coincides with a broader push across American organized sports to minimize brain injuries. The organization’s representatives arm themselves with stock responses—when asked about safety concerns, CEO Frank Lamicella listed the organization's medical protocols before laughingly admitting his relief that he has fallen out of practice of reciting them. So, too, did every striker I spoke with wave away concerns of brain trauma and the attendant specter of CTE. As far as everyone’s concerned, these guys are vetted stringently, attended to diligently, and exposed to far less brain trauma than any other combat athlete or football player. It’s not that any of these things are untrue, but where brain trauma is a baked-in component of football, boxing, and mixed martial arts, the spectacle of brain trauma is the main attraction of Power Slap. Power Slap athletes almost certainly endure fewer combined blows to the head than an offensive lineman or regularly-sparring boxer, but they are also the only athletes for whom half of the job description is “defenselessly take a hit to the face and try to stay awake.” Lamicella insists that the organization has “run toward regulation,” but the fact that Power Slap is only sanctioned in California, Nevada, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana suggests that the effort has been closer to a jog. Whether or not Power Slap is safer than other concussive sports feels secondary to what it represents about the role knockouts play in the contemporary cultural libido. Spiritually, Power Slap is the perfect sport for Donald Trump’s second term, a bloody period of rapid decline brought about by a vox populi yearning to say slurs again.

Damien “The Bell” Dibbell, the longest-reigning Power Slap Heavyweight Champion, is saving up for law school. The plan, he tells me, is to defend his belt a few more times, move up to New York to make himself eligible for in-state tuition rates, and eventually become a public defender. His face, which I’ve seen emblazoned upon promotional billboards around New Orleans all week, betrays a tacit awareness of the absurdity of his career path. He is grounded, humble, measured, and ambitious; it just so happens he’s put himself in a position to pursue a legal career and buy his dream car because of a preternatural ability to take and deliver slaps to the face.

Setting aside, for a moment, questions about the morality or desirability of Power Slap’s existence, Damien Dibbell’s story serves as one of the most compelling arguments for its viability as a major sports organization. Dibbell, who used Power Slap to supplement his income as an HVAC professional before his talent put him in a position to make legitimate money on the circuit, is as dominant a slapper as the young sport has ever seen. The 23-year-old is inevitable and immovable; in 2024, he won Power Slap’s “Chin of the Year” award for his unbreakable composure. His understated slaps make 250 pound men crumble like a house of cards. Hearing his future plans, I imagine a world in which Michael Jordan left the NBA not for professional baseball but for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At the risk of armchair psychoanalysis, I am struck by the concept of Dibbell funding a future career defending vulnerable people through being the best at slapping defenseless people.

Ahead of the main event, Dibbell emerges from the tunnel with the swagger of a man at the height of his powers and the showmanship of a DMV clerk. He sizes up his competitor, Wes “Boom” Mena, the way I imagine he'll someday size up the bar exam: an inconvenience that he must get through to end up where he wants to be. Once Mena sets his feet, Dibbell takes his aim and winds his extended arm back like a whip. His first shot is both deafening and easily absorbed, but replays suggest Mena got away with an uncalled flinch. Mena winds up his first strike on the wrong end of two compounding misfortunes, having become an enemy of the crowd and being tasked with knocking Damien Dibbell down. His circular wind-up produces a thunderous smack. While Dibbell does not move, his eyes suggest that Mena has earned his respect. During his one-minute recovery, Dibbell wipes chalk from his powdered face as the in-arena monitor loops footage of his face being flattened. Dibbell’s next slap is a thunderclap, knocking Mena’s protective earplug into the sky and Mena’s body onto the mat. Mena attempts to get to his feet, but for the first time all night, sense prevails. Damien Dibbell, having successfully defended his heavyweight belt, lets out an uncharacteristic shout. For Dibbell, the moment marks one step closer to the freedom to pursue the rest of his life. For the rest of us, it’s time to head to the casino.

From a product standpoint, Power Slap is a gambler’s catnip. Each slap presents a discrete opportunity to toss a live bet; each striker’s odds are prominently displayed throughout the broadcast and in-arena production. Power Slap, then, represents a synthesis of the interlocking and self-reinforcing logics of modern, mediatized society: stylized violence and sensationalist standard-flouting begets vertical video, which begets algorithmic manipulation, which begets the gambling and advertising dollars that keep the machine rolling. It’s only fitting that the logic of this boorishly masculine ouroboros requires that Power Slap give the influencers who keep the show going a venue to gamble at after.

The line to enter Caesar’s Casino feels similar to a bar at the Jersey Shore, instilling within me a sense of placelessness interrupted only by the disproportionate sight of men who bear semicircular welts on their left cheeks. When the friend I’ve enlisted as a photographer and I get in, we’re ushered around by Power Slap’s personable press liaison. She keeps a close eye on us, citing “security reasons.” She escorts us to the high limit room, whose cloistered space has been converted for the evening into the official Power Slap afterparty.

Due to the glaring and regrettable absence of craps tables, the afterparty feels less like a high-roller gambling bonanza than the hour of a prom afterparty where all the dudes’ dates have gone home. I speak to a beautiful young man with manicured eyebrows and an attendant entourage of lackeys who identifies as an influencer—his beat, he reveals, is “talking to females.” I meet a group of young bankers from Mobile, Alabama who quit their stint as high-rollers after learning the hard way why their Caesar’s Player’s Cards got them free rooms in Las Vegas. Elsewhere, a group of brace-faced young men from outside of New Orleans have gotten the drop on the strip club some of the UFC fighters will end up at tomorrow. They tell my friend and I about a casino cruise that disembarks from Kenner, Louisiana and will take you wherever you want to go gratis if you log enough time at the low-limit blackjack table, before giddily inviting us to watch their boy lose hand over fist at the $100 limit table behind them. I catch sight of a sweaty, victorious Makini Manu standing with his mother behind a man wearing a Stake baseball hat. When I go to congratulate him, I see that he is holding seven skewers of meatballs in his right hand.

As the night progresses, my photographer and I adopt a twenty-something man previously standing alone behind a blackjack table. With limited prodding, the life insurance salesman from Corpus Christi explains that he came alone for tomorrow’s fights, enjoyed his solo time at Power Slap, and is mostly at the afterparty to catch a glimpse of Dana White in action. He’s instructive of a class divide within the mass of jersey-wearing dudes elbowing for room at the open bar: there are the guys Dana flew out here, and then there are the guys who drove out here to see Dana. Our companion attributes his ability to afford tickets while his sad sack friends watch at home to the lessons he learned from Andrew Tate’s Hustlers University. For $50 a month (Tate recently raised the price to $200 a month, which the young man tells us is still a bargain), he gets access to courses and individual counseling on all things hustling, from crypto trading to drop-shipping to, as he insists, how to get ahead in the business of selling life insurance. His eagerness to hang out with the guy dressed like a skater and my friend in a pickleball-induced crutch makes him the most ostensibly pluralist dude in the room.

Just as my attempts at bro’ing out begin to stall, the press liaison whisks us into the tightly-guarded back room. Past two off-duty Orleans Parish Deputies and a number of muscular bodyguards, we find a room full of people filming a baccarat table with their cell phones. Above the table looms a professional boom mic. I make my way around to see what the hubbub’s about, only to find Dana White, his son Aidan, SteveWillDoIt (a Nelk Boy famous for chugging entire handles of liquor), and RazzaqLocks (a gambling influencer), all giddily massaging their cards. It’s here, standing around a table packed with hangers-on delightedly watching Dana White gamble, that I can finally make sense of Power Slap as a business proposition. It’s not that Dana White–both the North Star and patron saint of the manosphere–is confident that his Power Slap gamble will hit, but that he understands the ascendant forces in American culture will pay just to watch him gamble. The sense that he’s correct hits me like a slap in the face.

Share

Before I begin to lay out the convoluted line of thought that led to this publication’s creation, allow me to explain this in the simplest way I can. Derange is a place for stories, a place for writing, a place for documentation.

What I have done, and intend to keep doing, is gather a crop of talented writers who have been underserved and underused by the existing media world. The core idea is to build a home where these writers can simply write, while we will provide them with access, agency, and a guiding editorial hand to help crystallize their ideas. No subjects are off limits, and, until proven otherwise, we will not stick to any particular beat or niche. As I state in our About page, we have faith that our writers will naturally gravitate towards the winds that direct us as a society.

For the time being, you can expect weekly features about the unexpected.

While plotting this publication for the better half of a year, I often fell into the trap of over-planning what it would become, over-analyzing which audiences would appreciate it, and thinking I could determine its fate before it was born. I read anything I could find about the “state of media,” picked a dozen brains, and thought about how to best adapt a place for writing into something fit for the times. The only reasonable answer I found was to make short-form videos that trojan horse our articles onto people’s screens. While this is something we will do to grow, it is entirely antithetical to the reason I’m starting Derange.

The merit of short-form content is improving, no doubt, but even so, the large majority of it remains useless and mind-numbing. More importantly, the medium itself lacks the depth, voice, and vantage point into the moment’s psyche that the archaic mode of writing can convey. It’s my naive yet hellbent belief that the written word will persist not only among the intelligentsia but as a form of entertainment and historical canonization.

It is no secret that we are living in absurd and consequential times. There are a plethora of events happening right now that are reshaping our daily lives. Our ambition is to publish pieces that reflect these events in their tragedy and comedy alike.

In these early stages, I see Derange as a launchpad. We have infrastructure in place to help capture a zeitgeist that is at risk of being diluted and distorted by algorithmic slop. Only time will tell if we’re successful, but I’m deliriously optimistic.

The founding of Derange is in no small part indebted to what we accomplished at No Bells. There’s much left to be said about the impact this had on me and everyone involved, but its success—which I am confident in claiming—showed me that people still care. They care about writing, about art, about what’s going on in the world, and about each other. This can be hard to see when looking at the state of the world in its totality, but when zooming in on individuals and communities, it is as clear as ever. While there are obviously no macro-currents entailing that “writing is back!”, I see a future in which individuals take pride in and care of the media they consume. Hopefully Derange will fit that bill for some of you.

Lastly, we will be operating behind a paywall. The plain truth is that any efforts on our part cannot subsist for long without some form of revenue. All contributions will go towards turning this vision into something sustainable, with every dollar dedicated to paying writers and covering necessary expenses. While we will be limited to weekly features in these initial months, as things progress, there is a playbook in place to make Derange’s output more robust and strategic as we continue to grow, build, and learn.

An enormous thank you in advance to any who believe in us this early, and I cannot wait to share our first story on Friday.

Subscribe now