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46
SAIGON IS NOT FALLING FIFTY YEARS AFTER VIETNAM, AN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY THRIVES IN THE WEST.
by natalia galicza
56
REWRITING THE SCRIPT
HOW NATIVE STORYTELLERS LIKE ERICA TREMBLAY ARE DISRUPTING HOLLYWOOD.
by ethan bauer
36 WHO OWNS THE LAND?
THE POLITICAL STARS ALIGNED FOR SAGEBRUSH REBELLION 2.0. WILL IT SUCCEED? by
kevin lind
Samoa has the highest rate of rheumatic fever in the world. Our students and faculty partner with local health teams to screen thousands of children each year—saving lives in the spirit of love and service.
Learning by study, by faith, and by experience, we strive to be among the exceptional universities in the world and an essential university for the world.
BYU.EDU/FORTHEWORLD
Wilcox is a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, where he directs the National Marriage Project. A senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and the American Enterprise Institute, his latest book is “When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America.” His commentary about how public policy can foster family formation is on page 15.
A professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, Trueman is a featured contributor to First Things magazine. He is the author of several books, including “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution” and “The Creedal Imperative.” An excerpt from his latest book, “To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse,” is on page 64.
Bettencourt is an award-winning author whose writing has appeared in Psychology Today, Salon, Business Insider, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Miami Herald, Newsday, Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar. She is the author of “Triumph of the Heart: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World,” and her story about America’s relationship with dating is on page 20.
Born in Nepal, Shertok is an assistant professor of creative writing at Hendrix College and the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at Southern Methodist University. A recipient of the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, his forthcoming collection “No Rhododendron” was selected for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Shertok’s poem “Nomad” is on page 81.
Feeney is a writer whose essays on culture and politics have been published in The New Yorker, Slate and other publications. With a Ph.D. in political philosophy, he has taught the subject at Duke, George Washington and Texas A&M universities, and Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany. His essay, based on his book “Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age,” is on page 68.
Hoang is an illustrator whose work has appeared in numerous trade and academic publications, including projects for Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, UCLA and The Norwegian Medical Association. Born in Vietnam, Hoang was one of the original “boat people,” who fled their country on the day Saigon fell 50 years ago. His work illustrates a story on page 46 about the largest Vietnamese American community in the West.
DUNG HOANG
BRAD WILCOX
SAMYAK SHERTOK
MATT FEENEY
CARL R. TRUEMAN
MEGAN FELDMAN BETTENCOURT
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WHO OWNS THE WEST?
When I was in my early 30s, my dad bought a ranch in Nevada’s Big Smoky Valley, so named because a haze often sits above it. My cousins had grown up on a ranch there, where they had attended a K-12 high school with a graduating class that averaged about four students. I went on several 50-mile hikes as a Boy Scout in the Toiyabes, a majestic range that towers over the valley.
I had just moved back to the West after grad school in New York, and I persuaded my dad to let me accompany him and the other real cowboys on the fall cattle drive, where they pushed their herd from the meadows and streams of the Toiyabes down to the ranch for the winter. I was gobsmacked by the size of the ranch — three million acres (the legendary King Ranch in Texas is one third the size) — and wondered how my dad and his partners managed it all. He explained that they didn’t own most of it. Only 14,000 acres were deeded; the rest belonged to the federal government.
Growing up in the West, I knew how most people felt about the feds owning public lands. If my dad had anything to say about the Bureau of Land Management or the U.S. Forest Service controlling most of this ranch, I figured it wouldn’t be positive.
I was wrong. The BLM and the Forest Service were good stewards of the land, he said. On top of that, the arrangement gave him and his partners access to far more land to graze their cattle than they would be able to afford otherwise, and it kept the land open to the public. What if one rancher bought it all and Boy Scouts couldn’t hike the Toiyabes as I had, or ATV enthusiasts couldn’t zoom around on the old mining trails?
My dad did have his complaints, however. Environmentalists didn’t want cattle on the ranges at all, and as a result, agents at the BLM and the Forest Service told him they spent most of the agencies’ funding fighting off lawsuits that never went anywhere. Wouldn’t it make more sense to use that money to do the job Congress had intended: to find a balance between preservation, recreation and business interests?
In the years since, I’ve reported on these tensions from time to
time. I’ve talked to ranchers and farmers in Monticello and Blanding, near the Bears Ears National Monument, who oppose federal control of public lands. And I’ve talked to conservationists and Native American leaders who say the idea of the state managing public lands is simply a path to privatization.
I was just a few years old during the original Sagebrush Rebellion. There weren’t any standoffs, or seizures of federal property; it played out in state legislatures and courtrooms, primarily in Nevada and Utah — a response to the federal government’s tightening grip on public lands.
Now, nearly 50 years later, that seed has taken root again. This month, in our annual State of the West issue, we explore what we at the magazine have dubbed Sagebrush Rebellion 2.0, an effort led by Utah to once again attempt to wrest control of public lands from the federal government. The motivations behind this new push echo the original rebellion — frustration with federal oversight, a belief that local control would mean better stewardship, and an insistence that Washington doesn’t understand the realities of life in the West. But there is one crucial difference, according to an exclusive Deseret Magazine poll by HarrisX: Utahns, by and large, don’t want these lands sold off or developed. They want them to remain public — open for recreation, for hunting, for the wide, unfenced freedom that defines this region. I found one of the findings of the poll particularly striking: Most people support state control of public lands — but not if it means privatization. That distinction is critical. It signals a shift in the way people see this debate, moving away from the old “government vs. industry” framework and toward something more nuanced.
The first Sagebrush Rebellion ultimately faded, but its ideas never really died. What happens in this new chapter will depend on how Utah navigates the complexities of control, conservation and commerce. It will also depend on how we, as residents of this vast and complicated place, define what it means to be stewards of the land we call home.
—JESSE HYDE
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
HAL BOYD
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JESSE HYDE
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ERIC GILLETT
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ETHAN BAUER, NATALIA GALICZA, KEVIN LIND
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OUR READERS RESPOND
Our DECEMBER issue featured two inspiring stories by Ethan Bauer that revealed the unselfish nature of humanity and left readers with a sense of hope and goodwill during the holiday season. Bauer’s account of a group of strangers who helped a man escape his burning vehicle last year near St. Paul, Minnesota, had several readers asking for more stories to lift their spirits (“Trial by Fire”). Cynthia Hallen, a retired linguistics professor, said the story helped her better understand the human impulse and motivations for service and sacrifice. “Your report on the car fire seemed to portray people who were inspired by and protected by a spiritual fire that refined them instead of destroying them. Your article seemed to be shining with the same kind of spiritual fire that you were describing.” Bauer told another story of an American soldier sharing his ration of fudge at Christmas with his fellow prisoners held in a Nazi POW camp during World War II (“A Taste of Home”). Christopher Degn thanked Marcia Plothow for keeping her father’s story alive and Deseret Magazine for publishing it. “I am an old soldier who is touched by a wonderful story of the perseverance of a pilot living the Warrior Ethos to never surrender,” Degn wrote. “His generosity in a time of cruelty and thoughtlessness demonstrated how one puts faith into action.” Contributing writer Eric Schulzke explored the widening political gulf between the men and women of Generation Z compared to past generations of young adults (“Gen Z’s Gender Paradox”). The online discussion veered into a wide range of topics, from the bleak future for young men to transgender rights to partisan finger-pointing for causing the rift and role reversals for young men and women. But reader Holly Hopkins had a different perspective on the problem and the solutions: “The nature of men used to make them better equipped to be the breadwinner, but it’s OK if that changes. Families functioned just fine for decades with one person as the main breadwinner. Maybe the problem is not related to male employment. Maybe the problem is that men are no longer drawn to contributing to a family or to society.”
“Your article seemed to be shining with the same kind of spiritual fire that you were describing.”
FROM THE SERIES: “NO VACANCY: HOTELS OF THE AMERICAN WEST.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BENJAMIN WILLIAMS
SHARON MOTEL SIGN
SHARON MOTEL, WELLS, NEVADA.
WASHING MACHINE PLANTER
THE SHARON MOTEL, WELLS, NEVADA.
CABIN ROOM COUNTRY CABINS INN, MOUNTAIN VIEW, WYOMING.
KARAOKE BAR THE GRIST MILL INN, MONTICELLO, UTAH.
It will get brighter.
FAMILY FRIENDLY
THE
NUCLEAR FAMILY IS UNDER THREAT. DOES THE ANSWER LIE IN OUR POLITICS?
BY BRAD WILCOX
Blue states are better for families.
That is what many academics contend. In their classic book “Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture,” law professors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone argue that blue states have the liberal values and policies they believe make for strong and stable families. Scholars like them point to universal pre-K, free school lunches and paid family leave that lend direct state support to the care of kids. Moreover, blue states’ commitment to higher education, an egalitarian family life and delayed family formation are pluses they believe stabilize family life in America.
But is the blue state family model working outside the halls of academia in the real world?
There are signs the answer is “no.” A recent Institute for Family Studies study found parents are much more likely to move out of blue states and into red ones than vice versa. From 2021-2022, roughly 180,000 more families left blue states for red states than vice versa. Another data point that disregards state boundaries is that a majority of married voters, as well as parents, voted red, for Donald Trump, in the 2024 election.
Beyond these mobility and voting trends, where are Americans most likely to have babies? The answer again is red states. According to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, the highest total fertility rates in 2023 were found in red states like South Dakota (2.01), Texas (1.81) and Utah (1.80). By contrast, blue states such as Vermont (1.30), Oregon (1.35) and California (1.48) lag behind in childbearing. In fact, the top 10 states for fertility in 2023 were red states, and the bottom 10 were blue states.
The red state advantage regarding fertility can be chalked up to several cultural, policy and economic factors. Economically, red states typically offer more affordable housing, hotter job markets and lower taxes, all of which appeal to young and middle-aged men and women aiming to start or grow their families. Culturally, red states are more likely to prioritize marriage and family life and offer parents more educational choices, which are pluses to many family-minded Americans. Many red states, especially ones where religious faith is strong (like Utah), prioritize the value of getting married and focusing on your family rather than putting most of your eggs in the baskets of work and self. The family-friendly culture of these states also seems more likely to turn the hearts and minds of young adults to marriage. These financial and cultural features of red state life end up being more important than the suite of pro-family policies of their blue counterparts.
Despite what the data show, promoting a family-friendly environment is not a partisan contest as even red states are struggling more today than they once did on the family formation front. Most red states have fertility rates below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. Even in conservative states like Utah, both the “Midas mindset” of putting off marriage and family and the falling financial and social fortunes of young men have made the path to marriage less appealing and attainable.
To remedy the falling prospects of family life across the country, state policymakers need to take three steps. First, they should promote marriage (one of the biggest predictors of family formation) in public school curricula and public service announcements aimed at young adults. Second, they need to make their states more male friendly by boosting single-sex education, making public schools more attentive to boys’ educational needs and increasing support for vocational education. This will make young men in their states more marriageable and attractive as potential family men. Third, policymakers should devote at least 10 percent of the billions of dollars they receive for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families to help lower-income families get and stay married by addressing the marriage penalties they face in today’s welfare system.
The bottom line is that policymakers, educators and civic leaders in both blue and red states have work to do to create a culture and a family-friendly economy for their young adults, one that would steer more states to a sustainable rate of family formation — about 2.1 babies per woman. But if current fertility trends are any indication, Democratic states will have to work much harder to revive the fortunes of family life in their borders. That’s because trends in family migration, voting and fertility suggest the blue state family model is perceived as more family unfriendly, today, to Americans interested in starting, growing or raising a family.
BIG DANCE MOVES
THE SHIFTING BUSINESS OF COLLEGE BASKETBALL
THE NCAA MEN’S basketball tournament may be the most beloved tradition in the evolving landscape of college sports. Each spring, 68 teams from Division I schools get a fair shot at the national title — though fans debate just how fair. Such talk is itself a national pastime, like bracket predictions and watch parties. For three weeks, Americans of all stripes come together to cheer on their teams or adopt some long-shot darling in a series of games often decided by teamwork and luck over sheer athleticism. Business is still booming, but changing as it goes. Here’s the Breakdown:
8 TEAMS AND A DREAM IN 1939
Coaches ran the first NCAA tournament at Northwestern 86 years ago, the brainchild of Ohio State skipper Harold Olsen. That came a year after the first NIT, managed by New York-area sports writers, and two years after basketball creator James Naismith launched the NAIA, focused on smaller programs. Oregon beat Olsen’s Buckeyes for the national title, and that first event operated at a loss.
—ETHAN BAUER
$1.1 BILLION PER YEAR
That’s what CBS and Turner Sports will pay the NCAA for the rights to broadcast the tournament through 2032. That doesn’t account for revenue from streaming (which is how most of us watch now), attendance at 14 major venues (including an indoor football stadium) or merchandising, fueled by brands like “The Final Four.”
86 YEARS
CAITLIN CLARK ELECTRIFIED WOMEN’S BASKETBALL FANS IN 2024.
GIRL POWER
Nearly 19 million people watched the women’s final in 2024, buoyed by Iowa phenom Caitlin Clark, besting the men’s game by almost four million. The NCAA has since secured a $65 million media rights deal for the women’s tournament, a tenfold increase — though it’s still just 5.9 percent of the men’s deal.
18.7 million
14.82 million
IOWA’S
“A
LITTLE MARCH MADNESS MAY COMPLEMENT AND CONTRIBUTE TO SANITY AND HELP KEEP SOCIETY ON AN EVEN KEEL. THE WRITER’S TEMPERATURE IS RISING. THE THING IS CATCHING. IT’S GOT ME! GIMME THAT PLAYING SCHEDULE!”
HENRY V. PORTER, ILLINOIS HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL ADMINISTRATOR, WHO COINED THE TERM “MARCH MADNESS” IN 1939
THE $7 MILLION MAN
The rumored name, image and likeness payout to BYU’s AJ Dybantsa, the nation’s top recruit in 2025, exceeds rookie salaries of all but the top four NBA draft picks. Packages like this could slow one-and-done departures to the pros and help even a playing field long dominated by power conferences and hoops dynasties. The Cougars have become an NIL innovator, hiring a “chief of staff” to acquire talent so coaches can focus on developing players.
3 TRANSFERS, 1 TITLE
UConn won the 2024 tournament with two starters and one key backup acquired through the transfer portal, a personnel tool that has boomed in college football since 2018. Basketball transfers increased just 7 percent between 2021 and 2023, but more change is expected as stars chase rich new NIL deals.
$2 million
CINDERELLA BUMPS
Freshman enrollment increases by 2.1 to 4.5 percent at small schools two years after they notch at least two upset victories in the men’s tournament, per a 2020 study. Conferences earn about $2 million for each qualifying program and $2 million more for each game the teams win. When Florida Atlantic reached the Final Four in 2023, cash-strapped Conference USA snagged a $10 million windfall. The NCAA will send conferences about $264 million this year.
$2 million + FOR EACH QUALIFYING PROGRAM FOR EACH GAME THE TEAMS WIN
A $1.7 BILLION MONEY PIT
The estimated value of work lost to March Madness accounts for game time in conference rooms and workers filling out between 60 and 100 million brackets each year, many for company-sponsored contests. A 2023 survey found that a quarter of fans would gladly skip work to watch the tourney. Side note: The odds of a perfect bracket are 1 in 9 quintillion. The best-ever correctly predicted 49 games but faltered in the Sweet 16.
CHRISTIAN PETERSEN / GETTY IMAGES
GAME-TIME DECISION
SHOULD TAXPAYERS KEEP FUNDING SPORTS STADIUMS?
PRO SPORTS TEAMS are on a stadium-building binge, with help from state and local governments. Cities and counties from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Clark County, Nevada, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to keep teams like baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays at home, or lure wayward franchises like the Las Vegas Raiders. In the past three years, 14 other cities and states have considered $15 billion in taxpayer-funded arena projects. Is it time for taxpayers to stop subsidizing corporate real estate deals that don’t justify the price tag? Or can new stadiums breathe life into cities and bolster local economies?
—KEVIN LIND
BILLIONAIRES DON’T NEED SUBSIDIES BUT COMMUNITIES DO
TAXPAYERS SHOULD NOT be footing the bill for what amounts to a prestige project. “Since the funding comes from across the state or city and only a narrow subset of that population receives any benefit, stadium subsidies often impose an invisible tax burden on consumers,” writes Adam Hoffer, director of excise tax policy for the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to tax reform. There are simply more pressing priorities where city and state governments should be spending tax dollars. Governments are losing money on the deals, too, as financial returns almost never offset their investment. In one project published by the Journal of Economic Surveys, the authors reviewed 130 studies on the economic impact of professional sports arenas over a 30-year period. They concluded that “nearly all empirical studies find little to no tangible impacts of sports teams and facilities on local economic activity, and the level of venue subsidies typically provided far exceeds any observed economic benefits.”
Stadium projects don’t create new local economies, nor do they bolster job growth. The idea that “new” cash is being spent at or around a stadium is a fallacy; that money is just reshuffled from other places, where it can no longer be spent. While arenas do create jobs, reality often falls short of projections. In Nevada, the construction of Allegiant Stadium ultimately employed a fraction of the projected number of people expected. And most of those jobs disappear when the facility is completed, leaving only part-time and low-wage positions.
Rather than financially benefiting communities, stadium funding and tax breaks subsidize valuable sports teams and wealthy stadium owners, placing optics above the everyday needs of constituents. “The harsh reality for even the biggest sports fan is that arena subsidies are a terrible use of finite government resources,” writes Scott Lincicome, the vice president of economics and trade at the Cato Institute. “And a ridiculously egregious redistribution of wealth from regular Americans — fans and haters alike — to some of the wealthiest people and organizations on the planet.” Worse yet, these beneficiaries shop various locations against each other to spark bidding wars and get the most advantageous deal. Owners walk away with shiny new stadiums while communities are stuck paying the bill for decades to come.
COMMUNITY MEANS MORE than dollars and cents.
Local and state governments need to invest in development, regardless of sector, and stadium packages — often involving tax breaks, loans and cash subsidies — are one great way to do that. Such incentives can attract new businesses, which become generators in local economies. No wonder the Council for Community and Economic Research has identified 2,402 different tax incentive programs offered to private entities around the country.
Stadium deals often look better when seen through a wider scope, accounting for the totality of their impact. Beyond construction, new arenas employ thousands in concessions, outlets, security and operations. Each transaction in and around the venue, as well as in transit, generates tax revenue. Some funding packages go beyond the stadium. In Atlanta and Salt Lake City, owners of arenas in redevelopment are spending millions on nearby amenities, like art projects, plazas and new parks, as part of their respective deals.
New and improved arenas can revitalize entire neighborhoods, drawing millions of visitors to local businesses and encouraging redevelopment of neglected communities. Since the city of Sacramento built the Golden 1 Center in 2016, foot traffic around the arena is up 200 percent, property value has increased 29 percent, $7 billion has been invested in the surrounding district, and 3.6 million square feet of office and retail space have been redeveloped. As the World Bank argued in 2023, new infrastructure fosters growth: “The right investments by the state can strengthen the incentives for firms to form, invest, and hire, thereby generating self-sustaining economic growth as well as providing a source of tax revenues to recoup the cost of the investments.”
Stadiums and the games played inside them raise community spirit, providing an intangible, positive benefit to a city’s culture, vibrancy and civic pride. “Fans of a team may gain value from being able to root for their team and talk about their team’s successes and failures with friends and colleagues even if they don’t directly spend any money,” writes Victor Matheson, economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross. In a single deal, local governments are investing in the infrastructure, economy and quality of life of their constituents.
LOVE LOST
AMERICA’S RELATIONSHIP WITH DATING? IT’S COMPLICATED
BY MEGAN FELDMAN BETTENCOURT
In my 20s, I met several long-term boyfriends at work and through get-togethers hosted by friends. In my early 30s, I briefly tried online dating and met a string of potential partners at my neighborhood café. None lasted past the first date. Then, in a stroke of once-in-a-lifetime luck, while at a music festival in Denver, I spotted the man who would become my husband. I was struck by his green eyes and kind smile, but I didn’t have the courage to approach him and say anything.
As fate would have it, I found myself sitting next to the same man at a mutual friend’s open mic event a few weeks later, although I didn’t recognize him because I was in a bit of a rush. When I had to leave the venue early, I handed him my raffle ticket — which won him concert tickets. He invited me to the show. We met for tacos beforehand, and the conversation flowed so easily that I felt like I could just be myself. It wasn’t until our third date that I realized he was the man I saw at the music festival. By then, I really liked him. He knew how to listen. He had swagger but wasn’t arrogant. He was thoughtful but didn’t overthink things.
His smile, especially when he laughed, was the world I wanted to live in, and lucky for me, he made me laugh, too — until my ribs hurt. We laughed our way through concert halls, ski gondolas and grocery stores. After our third date, he began bringing me small gifts related to our inside jokes. I was surprised to find the cards filled with cursive penmanship rivaling my grandmother’s
YOUNG PEOPLE LOST A FEW YEARS OF SOCIAL EXPERIENCE AND THAT HAS MADE THEIR INTERACTIONS HARDER.
(and that he learned from his own). Because we had both been through enough breakups to fill a bad novel, we took it slow at first, but within two years were married and expecting our first child.
That was all before 2020. With everything that has happened in the past five years — a pandemic, the rise of new technology,
the shuttering of brick-and-mortar places where couples traditionally might meet — it’s hard to know if there even would have been a music festival or open mic night to meet at, much less if we both would have been there, open and hoping to find love.
In a recent study, Stanford University sociology professor Michael Rosenfeld found that there are an extra 10 million single Americans right now than at any other given time. Most are under 35, and their efforts to find romance have been stymied not only by the pandemic and the resulting isolation, but also by the acceleration of interactions moving online and dwindling third places (the places you go that aren’t home or work, where, historically, you could meet people). Fewer single people are even interested in dating to begin with, according to Pew Research Center. Nearly 60 percent of singles interviewed are not looking for any type of relationship, and another 7 percent said they are only looking for casual dates. Many members of Gen Z say they’d like to meet someone, but think it would be “cringe” to ask someone out in person or be asked out “in real life.” Finding love online is also
THERE ARE AN EXTRA 10 MILLION AMERICANS WHO ARE SINGLE RIGHT NOW. AND HALF OF THOSE SINGLES ARE NOT INTERESTED IN MEETING SOMEONE.
fraught. Complaints about dating apps have risen to a fever pitch, with droves of Americans leaving the apps in the past two years. Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com and others, has reported a decline in its total number of paying users for seven straight quarters. Nearly half of all online daters and more than half of women who date online say their experiences have been negative. On top of all that, widening political and gender divides have become even more daunting.
Americans have developed a complicated relationship with finding relationships. I asked Rosenfeld why that matters. I didn’t want to blithely impose my coupled ideal as the ideal. I didn’t want to assume that it was a bad thing that there are more single people or that many say they’re no longer trying to date because they prefer flying solo, prioritizing other aspects of life or struggling to meet people. Our conversation directed me to research that consistently highlights how companionship and romantic relationships play a crucial role in promoting health and longevity.
Studies have shown that strong social and romantic connections can lower stress levels, reduce the risk of chronic disease and improve mental well-being. Partnered individuals tend to live longer, healthier lives compared to those who are single, while loneliness has been linked to increased risks of heart disease, depression and even early mortality. Our breakup with dating has economic impacts, too, including fewer people buying homes as they put off marrying and having children and an aging population failing to replace itself (and its tax base) through falling birth rates.
THE CENTRAL ROLE of relationship formation in human life has preoccupied Rosenfeld for years. He was not surprised to discover the share of single people in the U.S. rose markedly during the pandemic, from 18.9 to 24.3 percent between 2017 and 2022. It’s hardly shocking that it hampered efforts to find love. But what surprises Rosenfeld is that dating hasn’t bounced
back. Making up for lost time, it seems, is not so easy.
“Young people lost a few years of social experience and that lost experience made all their interactions harder,” he says. “Dating requires a lot of skills. Being in a relationship does too. There are a bunch of skills associated with that that atrophied that people just didn’t pick back up.”
While a few years might not seem like much to a middle-aged married person like me, to a single 21-year-old, it may as well be a developmental eternity.
Kevin Lewis, a sociology professor at the University of California, San Diego, says he sees his students struggling to socialize. “They’re not good at conversation; they’re stuck on devices,” he says. “Approaching someone in person is just not a skill they’re learning.”
This could be why Americans are currently more likely than previous generations to date friends as opposed to starting a romance with a stranger as so many of our forebears did (my parents met in a singles line skiing, and my grandfather spotted my grandmother at a 1930s nightclub as she swam around in a tank dressed as “the mermaid in the fishbowl” after the usual performer failed to show). At a time when meeting strangers is harder than ever and asking someone out in person isn’t likely to lead anywhere, many of today’s young people feel more comfortable dating someone they already know and don’t have to charm with a first impression.
“I think flirting is dying,” a 24-year-old in Los Angeles named Nikki recently told NBC News. “If someone thinks you’re cute, they just ask for your Instagram these days and then DM you or swipe up on your story to show they’re interested.” Shanae, a 23-year-old in New York, recently told The Guardian that she yearns to be asked out in person like Carrie Bradshaw on “Sex and the City.” Yet if she were approached that way, Shanae said she would also be “weirded out.”
So despite the challenges of online dating, some singles are still on the apps.
Thirty percent of adults, and over half of adults under 30, use dating apps, according to the Pew Research survey. Rosenfeld says the online approach — now bolstered with AI-driven algorithms to provide better matches — offers an expanded pool of potential partners and the ability to find someone based on shared values and interests. “If you’re looking for someone who has a passion for mountain climbing or practices the same law as you, the bigger search set has advantages,” he says.
Researchers have also found that online dating leads to more racially diverse partnerships. “These platforms,” says Lewis, “are projecting us out of our own social network — which tends to be very segregated — and they’re untethered to physical space, which is also segregated.”
Yet despite these positives, more people seem to be complaining about dating apps than singing their praises. The reasons to stay off them are plentiful: falsified job histories, “catfishing” and a constant barrage of potential partners and conversations. “Women are flooded with messages — this thing that’s supposed to be fun feels like a chore,” Lewis says. He also pointed out that women, more than men, face safety risks when meeting someone they don’t know.
I nodded along as I listened, thinking of a longtime friend who had recently regaled me with stories of her own dating app travails. She met a seemingly “normal” man for tea, only to discover he was wearing an ankle bracelet. When she asked about it, he admitted that after violating a stay-away order granted to his ex-wife and being charged with a DWI, he had served nine months in prison and was released shortly before their date.
It’s logical that “app fatigue” would set in after that.
IN ADDITION TO atrophied social skills and fickle dating apps, today’s singles face other hurdles, too. People who do manage to find a good local pub or café to meet people at must contend with $7 lattes and $25 meals.
“Dating is expensive,” one user wrote in
an online dating forum. “If you’re heterosexual and old school (like me), the onus is usually on the man to pay for the dates. Prices are already high and now you’re paying double. … Of course, there are free things the two of you can do together, but when you’re first starting out you don’t want to come off as some deadbeat or cheapskate.”
Then, chances are, when you do meet someone over a wallet-bruising latte, you may not like the conversation. Political differences came up in Rosenfeld’s research on the country’s dating recession. While it used to be easier to overlook political differences on a first date, it’s not so much so now. “I talked to people who wouldn’t talk to someone with opposing views,” Rosenfeld says.
A recent report by the American Enterprise Institute called “From Swiping to Sexting: The Enduring Gender Divide
MY FRIENDS JOKE THAT MEN WOULD RATHER DATE “A DOG WALKER” THAN A WOMAN WITH AN ENTERPRISING CAREER.
in American Dating and Relationships” explores this political rift further. Author Daniel Cox found that roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans say they would be less inclined to date someone of the opposite party. Support for Donald Trump was a particularly strong dating liability for men, Cox found. Nearly 75 percent of college-educated women said support for Trump was a deal-breaker.
The gender divide extends beyond politics, too. Today’s pools of single men and single women show some notable mismatches. Women, Cox writes, are far more likely to have been in a relationship with someone who was unfaithful, to have had negative experiences dating online, and to be on the receiving end of unsolicited explicit images. Additionally, while girls and
women have progressed in academics and income, boys and men have fallen behind. Male college attendance and graduation rates, as well as income (when accounting for inflation), have decreased in the past five decades.
Meanwhile, women, especially the college-educated, are seeking partners who have similar or greater education and income levels — something that’s increasingly harder to come by. Cox says that women are more likely than men to say that they’re unable to find someone who meets their expectations.
I noticed this among my own friends a decade ago. While skiing expert terrain with a group of single women who worked as airline pilots, modeled professionally and were as well-read as they were well-traveled, the difficulty of finding a well-matched man was a lynchpin in our conversation. Interestingly, when these women did encounter a man of similar societal stature, they joked that he would rather date “a dog walker” than a woman with an enterprising career. “Fragile male egos,” was my husband’s explanation. Funny enough, research corroborates that.
A study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that while many men say they’re attracted to women who outperform them in areas like intelligence and success, this attraction often diminishes in face-to-face interactions. Men were less likely to pursue a woman as a romantic partner when her achievements were perceived as superior to their own, especially in close proximity. The researchers theorized that this reaction could stem from a blow to men’s self-esteem or perceived threats to traditional gender roles.
So, are we breaking up with dating? Rosenfeld doesn’t think so. Even though he expects the age of first marriage to keep rising, his outlook on Americans’ search for love is optimistic.
“People do need companionship,” he says. That need has persisted throughout ice ages, depressions and wars. “We used to have even tougher dating environments, so I think people will find a way.”
UP, UP AND AWAY
HOW UTAH’S GONDOLA CONTROVERSY MAY SET THE STAGE FOR FUTURE CONSERVATION BATTLES
BY KEVIN LIND
In 1644, a Dutch engineer named Adam Wiebe built a suspension transport system in Gdańsk, Poland, using cable and wicker baskets to move the earth that was needed to fortify the city perimeter. From a nearby hill, it carried tons of soil across the Motława River, using the descending weight of the baskets and pulleys to power their cycle. Welcome, a humble contraption: the world’s first gondola lift.
It took over 200 years, but Wiebe’s engineering marvel eventually transformed into the gondola we know today, complete with cable cars full of wide-eyed passengers, suspended through mountain terrain steep enough to give you butterflies.
The first passenger gondola opened in the Dolomite mountains of South Tyrol, Italy, in 1908. It was a hit. Reliable, easy to service, safe — and a wonder to behold. In the decades to come, gondolas became a staple mode of transportation in European mountain towns. American ski resorts followed.
To float above the canyons, the rivers, the teetering ridgelines leading to mountain peaks — it’s a magical experience for passengers. And out of harm’s way — for the
most part — when it comes to mountain travel. Gondolas aren’t at risk for avalanches or black ice or backed-up traffic. This is one of several reasons Utah’s Department of Transportation is building a gondola to take passengers up Little Cottonwood Canyon in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains.
THE TENSIONS BETWEEN CONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT — SUCH AS THOSE OCCURRING IN LITTLE COTTONWOOD CANYON — ARE BECOMING INCREASINGLY URGENT AND INTENSE.
But this wouldn’t be any gondola. When constructed, it will be the world’s longest — nearly one-and-a-half times longer than the current title holder in Serbia (which stretches over five miles itself). The official reasoning for constructing this gondola is
to alleviate congested traffic — and the resulting emissions — that pile up nearly every weekend in the winter on the one road leading in and out of the canyon.
However, that’s not the entire picture. From a bird’s-eye view, certain aspects of the gondola project aren’t as simple as they first seem. The roughly $700 million endeavor would be funded by taxpayers, but the gondola will service two private businesses (Alta and Snowbird resorts) during the winter months (aka ski season). No stops will be made for passengers to access trailheads and public lands. Then there’s the threat to the conservation of public lands. The 22 towers (stretching as high as 262 feet) that carry the gondola will forever change the protected public lands of Little Cottonwood Canyon. Those opposing the gondola claim that visible towers will redefine the view of the canyon, recreation areas will be destroyed, and access to public lands will be more limited than before.
Critics of the project say UDOT conducted a questionable National Environmental Protection Act process to get the gondola
BY MICHAEL WARAKSA
construction approved. NEPA is a federal law that mandates all large governmental developments investigate the environmental impacts before a project can break ground. The final environmental impact statements and Record of Decision that Utah’s transportation department produced are now the subject of three separate lawsuits that could halt the project. The suits, which have been combined by the federal court, allege that UDOT pushed the gondola option through without meeting NEPA requirements — failing to thoroughly consider other possible solutions to ease traffic and neglecting to acknowledge all the potential negative environmental impacts should the gondola construction begin.
When UDOT received approval to conduct and oversee its own environmental impact studies from the Federal Highway Administration, it became only one of seven state municipalities in the country ever to be granted the privilege. Should UDOT win in court, the implications could reverberate far beyond Utah. It could set a new standard where states would be allowed to make far-reaching decisions about development in protected federal lands with limited review safeguards. If this happened, the environmental protection that NEPA provides could be curtailed on thousands
of current and future development projects on public lands.
“If this EIS stands, it provides a roadmap for states who want to completely bypass 30 years of NEPA process,” says Bob Douglass, a board member of the advocacy group Friends of Little Cottonwood Canyon, a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits. In other words, this could inspire future developers and agencies to skimp on environmental reviews knowing that a less thorough review will still stand in court.
THE PROBLEM STARTED with a line of traffic. On busy days, cars sit bumper-to-bumper on Little Cottonwood Canyon’s state Route 210. What should be a 30-minute drive from Salt Lake City stretches on for hours during peak winter travel days. For years, a handful of solutions have been discussed: Avalanche tunnels? Widening the road? Tolling? More public bus transportation? But when UDOT completed the multiyear NEPA review in 2023, it recommended a gondola.
According to UDOT, it seems like the most reliable solution. A gondola can float above avalanche paths and wouldn’t be fazed by snowy conditions. It would feasibly have low maintenance costs over 30 years (despite an estimated initial investment of $729 million). And, importantly, it can
TRYING TO FIND A SOLUTION TO BUMPER-TO-BUMPER TRAFFIC IN LITTLE COTTONWOOD CANYON HAS TURNED INTO A FEDERAL COURT BATTLE OVER HOW BEST TO PROTECT THE CANYON WHILE EASING CONGESTION.
accommodate a growing population. The gondola, as planned, will move up to 4,000 people per hour — versus enhanced busing, which would transport 1,000 — and it has the potential to reduce traffic in the canyon by 30 percent, eliminating the need to expand the highway with an additional two lanes. Alongside the reduction in car emissions, once up and running, developers have assured that the gondola will be carbon neutral. That’s a strong environmental claim. But local stakeholders point out that preserving public lands and natural resources should be step one for conserving Little Cottonwood Canyon.
By December 2023, three different federal lawsuits against UDOT hit the courts. Though the details of each plaintiff’s arguments differ, they were similar enough to be combined into a single case last April. The aim is to prevent the gondola from being built until the impacts are more thoroughly reviewed, at the very least.
The first suit was filed by six named individuals and two advocacy groups — Friends of Alta, a local nonprofit, and the International Outdoor Recreation Asset Alliance, a Utah-based nonprofit focused on protecting public land against development. It argues that UDOT stepped outside its delegated authority from the Federal
JEFF ALLRED
Highway Authority by approving a solution to the transportation issue with something that is not technically a highway.
Salt Lake City, the town of Sandy and their shared Metropolitan Water District filed the second suit together, requesting that the environmental impact studies be expanded to include what building a gondola might do to the region’s water supply, the majority of which comes from the Wasatch Mountains. “Given that these canyons and the neighboring canyons provide so much of the public water supply, we wanted the actual purpose and need of the … process to include not only solving the transportation problem, but also protecting the water supply,” says Laura Briefer, the director of Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities. “That did not happen.”
The third suit was filed by the Citizens’ Committee to Save Our Canyons. It not only names UDOT, but also its executive director, Carlos Braceras, and the U.S. Forest Service. The U.S. Forest Service is included as a defendant because, as the administrators of the public land where the gondola would sit, it’s a federal agency with a specific responsibility to consider what the towering structures would do to the “character” of the wilderness. Conflict of interest makes an appearance, too. The suit suggests that the reason the NEPA process was unusually limited and “arbitrary” is because “the private developer who proposed the … gondola alternative … was in fact the former President of the State Senate, who was closely involved with state legislation authorizing and funding this project.”
Wayne Niederhauser, the former state Senate president named in the lawsuit, says those claims are “interesting but inaccurate.”
“My involvement in the NEPA process was no different from that of any other individual or organization, and any information I provided was through the public comment process as a citizen,” he wrote in a statement to Deseret Magazine. “The assertion that I had a preconceived stance on the gondola as an elected official is also
false.” Niederhauser says that during his time as a state senator, his efforts to find solutions for Little Cottonwood Canyon’s traffic problem focused on smaller, practical implementations — like avalanche control and increased busing. These are some of the same solutions that critics of the project are pointing to now as necessary precursors to the gondola.
Catherine Kanter, Salt Lake County’s deputy mayor of regional operations, says that the lawsuits intend to force UDOT to implement “common sense solutions” to the transportation problem first and foremost. These include tolling, or any number of increased busing options, which don’t cost the environment or taxpayers nearly as much. “We believe that (the gondola) is not necessary,” Kanter says. “And it certainly isn’t the most practical or … adaptable.”
“GONDOLAS ARE WORLDWIDE RENOWNED AS THE SOLUTION TO TRANSPORTATION PROBLEMS. ONLY HERE IN UTAH ARE WE CONDEMNING THEM.”
Developers and supporters of the gondola suggest the same common sense applies to the proven, efficient method of moving people up mountains across the world. Aside from UDOT itself — which only responded to requests for comment on this article with publicly available documents — these supporters are represented by a group of entities calling itself Gondola Works. The coalition includes the ski resorts Snowbird and Alta, two PR companies and CW Management, founded by two former Utah politicians, including Niederhauser. Snowbird — the resort — bought several acres of property at the base of the canyon. Snowbird’s president and general manager, Dave Fields, says it’s just enough land for the base station and the requisite parking.
This blurring of the lines between public and private interest is raised in the lawsuits as a prelude to how future private development projects on public lands may be carried out. For those in support of the project, it’s a small sticking point that obscures the potential for a viable solution to a long-standing issue. “Gondolas are worldwide renowned as the solution to transportation problems,” says Chris McCandless, a former Sandy city councilman and president of CW Management. “Only here in Utah are we condemning them.”
But as the case unfolds, the tensions of private development vs. public lands and conservation vs. urban planning won’t be a matter of public opinion, it will be a decision of the law. Bill Eubanks, owner of Eubanks & Associates — a public interest law firm focused on environmental issues — says that the decision of a court or federal judge hinges on the thoroughness of the NEPA review process.
“As long as they have checked off all their boxes and the agency has done a detailed look at all the things that they should have looked at, then they typically win in court if they’re challenged,” he says. But “if they gave short shrift to something at any of those stages, then they’re vulnerable to having a setback for further review.”
If UDOT loses the case, the court will vacate the gondola decision, meaning “it’s no longer on the books, it’s not operative, no work can be done under it because it’s now unlawful,” says Eubanks. If this happens, UDOT will be at a crossroads. It could start the entire review process over from the beginning, which would mean several more years of administrative processing and the subsequent costs to taxpayers, or it could do nothing and let the traffic problem continue.
Eubanks believes there is ample evidence that there wasn’t a thorough environmental review to meet federal law. But how the court rules will be based on what is found in the nearly 200,000 pages of administrative records UDOT provides to the courts. If those documents prove to the court that
UDOT did perform a thorough environmental review, then it would be given the green light to move forward with the project and build the gondola. In that reality, it becomes clear to federal and state agencies — as well as potential developers — that reviews with limited scope and less thorough impact studies for future developments are not only allowable but defensible in court.
TAKE A DRIVE up Little Cottonwood Canyon today, and you probably wouldn’t guess that anything’s afoot. The traffic backs up. The red glow of brake lights stretches on. That’s because the current lawsuit had an unintended consequence: UDOT has halted its mitigation efforts in the canyon. It seems that the efforts to implement tolling, increase busing and any of the other low-cost solutions identified in the original plan for phased implementation are at a standstill. Though UDOT has funding and approval from the state Legislature to spend money on the more “common sense” solutions, they’ve stated publicly that they won’t do any traffic mitigation until the lawsuits are resolved. Maybe that’s an effort to save tax dollars. Maybe it’s a symptom of a bureaucratic zero-sum game that, to some, seems completely out of step with the good intentions of trying to find a solution in the first place.
With growing populations, expanding metropolitan areas and a growing economy, the tensions between conservation and development, such as those occurring in Little Cottonwood Canyon, are becoming increasingly urgent and intense across the nation. These conflicts are crucial as they establish the groundwork for the future of protected lands and the burgeoning economies in the West.
This is why Douglass, from Friends of Little Cottonwood Canyon, is so concerned about the ruling on the lawsuit. If the defense wins, he worries a less thorough approach to environmental review could become common among developers.
On a warm, sunny November day, a small group from UDOT Traffic and Trails
and U.S. Forest Service officials arrived in the canyon. Carrying maps on clipboards with pens at the ready, they passed a few folks chalking up and cheering each other on through climbs at the Secret Garden Boulders, which sit just a stone’s throw off SR-210. One official remarked on how close the boulders were to the road.
Julia Geisler was here to show the UDOT team just that. As the executive director of the Salt Lake Climbers Alliance, Geisler strives for her organization to maintain a good relationship with UDOT because her ultimate goal is to ensure these public lands remain accessible to climbers and other recreationists. Walking from boulder to boulder, she pointed out all the
AS A NEW LAWSUIT UNFOLDS, THE TENSIONS OF PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT VS. PUBLIC LANDS AND CONSERVATION VS. URBAN PLANNING WON’T BE A MATTER OF PUBLIC OPINION, IT WILL BE A DECISION OF THE LAW.
ways that different solutions — a gondola, increased bus service, widening the highway in the canyon — might impact these beloved recreational areas in Little Cottonwood Canyon.
After a short walk, the group arrived at the Alpenbock Loop.
Located near the mouth of the canyon, it’s part of a popular climbing area, where steep, gray granite walls stretch upward and small parking lots are filled with climbers when the weather is right. In August, the Alpenbock Loop became the first group of climbing routes in history to be added to the National Register of Historic Places. The designation means its historical significance for its relevance to the culture and growth of the sport of climbing is officially recognized and protected. But if
the gondola is built, two climbing boulders in the area might be destroyed to house one of the 22 towers. Every 30 seconds, as climbers ascend, a cable car will travel behind them, suspended for miles up the canyon. The entire experience of climbing along the Alpenbock Loop, Geisler says, will be changed.
Geisler says UDOT didn’t consider the gondola’s impact on recreational views as important in its EIS. Yet, when Geiser’s team hired outside consultants to read the thousands of public comments made during the review, she says they found that every comment submitted by climbers mentioned the importance of the view.
To some, it’s a small price to pay. McCandless, of CW Management, says that the gondola will carry more people, more quickly, and be less environmentally damaging to run than the number of cars and buses needed to meet the ever-growing demand on the canyon. He believes that, over time, the impact of building a carbonneutral gondola will be far less damaging than the pollution from increased traffic and wider highways. He’s quick to point out, too, that there are more than 60 avalanche paths along Little Cottonwood Canyon’s highway. No matter how wide the road or how many buses are in transit, when the snow slides, only a gondola would be able to keep running.
McCandless thinks that if nothing significant is done to address the traffic issue, it will persist long after anyone discussing it today is gone. “We have to fix this problem, or the people in the future will look back at those of us who have passed and say mean things about us,” he says. “And rightfully so.”
For those on the other side of the lawsuit, that wisdom works both ways. As Geisler says, there will always be a new condo, a housing project or a new road that’s encroaching, and so someone has to advocate for public lands, for undeveloped natural resources and for the places where nature is our greatest asset. “Because once it’s gone, it’s gone. You can save a place a thousand times, but you can lose it only once.”
UP IN SMOKE
THE RISING ALARM ABOUT THE DANGERS OF LEGALIZED MARIJUANA
BY ERIC SCHULZKE
Miriam was vomiting uncontrollably on a summer morning in 2022 when she arrived at a Utah hospital. She was diagnosed with a condition she had never heard of.
This was her third ER trip with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS) in as many years. The first time she vomited for 12 hours, the second for 36 hours. This time, the worst and last, the intense pain lasted five days, during which, she was later told, she had hallucinatory conversations and threatened to leap from a fourth story window.
Miriam, 45, who asked for professional reasons to use only her first name, had a legal marijuana prescription to treat both PTSD, acquired from years of driving an ambulance, and chronic pain from an auto accident.
This was all true, but the real reason she needed cannabis that summer was that her mother was dying of a rare blood infection, and she had just been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
She needed emotional help. And help was at hand.
Having used marijuana off and on since high school, Miriam had a high tolerance for THC, the drug’s main psychotropic compound. But after a single drag on a 95 percent pure THC vape pen purchased at a local medical dispensary, it felt like her body was in a vice.
AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL, MARIJUANA REMAINS A SCHEDULE 1 ILLEGAL DRUG, ALONGSIDE HEROIN, LSD AND A FEW OTHERS. BUT AT THE STATE LEVEL, THE RACE TO LEGALIZATION IN RECENT YEARS HAS BEEN DIZZYING.
“Every nerve was going off,” Miriam told me. “I hurt physically everywhere. If I had to choose between doing that again and being eaten by a bear, I would choose the bear.”
CHS is rare but becoming less so. The key risk factors are long-term, frequent and heavy marijuana use. Symptoms begin with nausea, followed in later episodes, often separated by a year or more, by cyclical vomiting, dehydration, and emergency room visits.
The New York Times estimated last year that 6 million Americans may have CHS symptoms from using marijuana. The syndrome’s rates have risen as more Americans consume higher-potency cannabis with greater frequency. Over recent decades breeding has dramatically increased THC content in the plant itself, while purified THC products are now ubiquitous.
At the federal level, marijuana remains a Schedule 1 illegal drug, alongside heroin, LSD and a few others. But at the state level, the race to legalization in recent years has been dizzying. Several states and territories have significantly liberalized marijuana access. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, as of January, 39 states allow medical marijuana, with 24 of those having fully legalized weed.
And yet, amid this enthusiasm, prominent health researchers are sounding alarms. And CHS is just one of several emerging concerns. While few experts now advocate a full return to prohibition, many do worry that the accelerating pace of easy access and heightened potency are outstripping scientific evidence on the safety of long-term marijuana use — and, when used as medicine, its efficacy.
In particular, many experts point to the long-term effects on the developing minds and bodies of adolescents and young adults, calling out overlooked risks of regular marijuana use to developing brains and bodies in their 20s.
“We allowed people to vote whether or not cannabis is a medicine,” noted Yasmin Hurd, a neurobiologist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. “Now we’re asking everybody in the country to be their own doctor with cannabis.
“That has never been done with any other medicine.”
RECENT POLLS SHOW that 88 percent of Americans favor legal medical use of cannabis, and 60 percent full legalization.
In 2023, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that nearly 44 million Americans used marijuana in the past month. By comparison, the same report cites 135 million daily alcohol users. “Far more people drink,” noted one study, “but high-frequency drinking is less common. In 2022, the median drinker reported drinking on 4–5 days in the past month, versus 15–16 days in the past month for cannabis.”
Among those daily or nearly-daily users are many who look to cannabis for help with assorted ailments. In 2018, the International Cannabis Policy Study found that 27 percent of North Americans between 16 and 65 had used cannabis to help with pain, sleep, migraines, anxiety, depression and PTSD. Conditions that qualify under Utah’s medical cannabis law include HIV, Alzheimer’s, ALS, cancer, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and PTSD
Whether all these medical hopes could
withstand random controlled trials is the key unanswered question. For now, the evidence is mostly weak or nonexistent. On treating PTSD with cannabis, for example, the American Psychiatric Association actually issued a formal statement opposing the use of cannabis to treat PTSD, emphasizing that “no published evidence of sufficient quality exists in the medical literature to support the practice.”
In 2017, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released an exhaustive report on cannabis science and policy that remains the most widely-cited reference. For medical uses, the National Academies study found “insufficient or no evidence.” But it did support improvements in three areas: “chronic pain,” “chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting,” and “spasticity associated with multiple sclerosis.”
“FOLLOW THE DATA. NO MATTER WHAT THE RESULTS ARE, THE DATA TELLS US.”
But even the study’s chronic pain section concludes that “very little is known about the efficacy, dose, routes of administration, or side effects” and warns that the products being sold to consumers and patients bear “little resemblance to the products that are available for research.”
Utah’s dispensaries are home to a huge variety of THC materials. In addition to raw cannabis flower, there are vapes, liquids, concentrates, tinctures, topicals and edibles. Gummies are available in a multitude of fruit flavors. And vape cartridges come with names like “galactic gas,” “piña gluelada,” “mountain diesel” and “pappy poison.”
Utah medical cannabis law allows up to 113 grams of raw cannabis flower a month.
Depending on the potency, that could be enough for seven joints a day. On top of that, the law allows 20 grams of purified THC in other forms like edibles, tinctures and vapes. That's enough for 66 potent gummies every day. No one really could handle that much. In short, under Utah law there is nothing stopping a willing doctor from giving eager patients all the THC their body could handle and more.
Just contemplating the plethora of delivery devices and variety of formulas and potencies on the dispensary sales floor is nearly as mind-blowing as consuming them. “I’ve been smoking pot since I was 14,” Miriam said, “but I’d never had access to anything that strong.” It was there, in her local Utah dispensary, that Miriam purchased the 95 percent pure THC vape pen that sparked her final cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome incident.
EXACTLY HOW THC affects the body is still a mystery. Not until 1988 did researchers begin to map the delicate system we now call the endocannabinoid system, a network of receptors and internal cannabinoids that are active throughout the body.
The network relies on subtle nudges to modulate stress, appetite, hormones, memory, emotions, sleep, body temperature, pain and the immune system. That sweeping portfolio may in time uncover previously unimaginable treatments for difficult conditions, says UC Irvine’s Daniele Piomelli, who since the early 1990s has been a key player in endocannabinoid system research.
Piomelli is a neuroscientist who argues that the brain cannot be considered separately from the body. “The endocannabinoid system works in all these tissues and all these organs,” Piomelli said. And the daily use of THC in adolescence will permanently affect how the ECS works in organs that regulate health.
A flood of THC appears to slow internal cannabinoid production and attenuate receptor networks, Piomelli said. More THC is then required for a similar effect, a key
marker of addiction. Those system disruptions can also lead to severe inflammation and immune and digestive problems, such as Miriam experienced with CHS.
A 2022 study in Colorado linked cannabis to increased temporary psychosis. A recent article on the Yale School of Medicine website noted that “heavy and early use of cannabis is associated with increased risk of developing schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety.”
NEUROBIOLOGIST YASMIN HURD has done pathbreaking work on the neurological risks of adolescent THC use, but she also studies the therapeutic potential of cannabidiol for opioid addiction.
Now a professor at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center’s Icahn School of Medicine, Hurd has been working since the early 1990s with rats, first studying cocaine, amphetamine and heroin addictions. When she turned to cannabis 20 years ago, her colleagues laughed. “Oh, that’s not a drug, you know,” they said. At the time, most people were still convinced cannabis was not truly biologically addictive.
But she found that rats given THC as adolescents would self-administer heroin at higher rates once they were adults. At least for rats, it was now clear that the cannabis gateway to opiates is biological.
“People aren’t laughing at me that much anymore,” she said.
Hurd also found that brain scans of adult rats exposed to THC as adolescents showed attenuated neural networks. Those scans, she says, look very similar to human schizophrenia. Subsequent human studies, Hurd says, have confirmed that “adolescent exposure to cannabis does indeed change the prefrontal cortical in a manner similar to what we had shown in animals.”
Hurd also notes a Danish epidemiological study that showed a strong correlation between increased cannabis use and potency and rising schizophrenia rates. That study found much lower schizophrenia rates among those who began cannabis use after they turned 26, suggesting a link to
prefrontal cortex maturation. Most experts now see the evidence linking adolescent cannabis use to heightened schizophrenia as compelling.
Hurd makes a point of clarifying “adolescence.” Neurologically, human adolescence does not end until age 25, when the prefrontal cortex matures. Women mature a bit earlier and men a bit later. At 21, legal young adults are still neurological adolescents, and will be for years.
In a finding Hurd fairly describes as scary, her lab also discovered that rats given THC as adolescents can pass epigenetic damage to the second and third generation. Descendants struggled to manage stress and were more prone to self-administer heroin.
But Hurd is not only framing problems; she is also looking for solutions. She began studying cannabidiol (CBD) long before it became popular. Like THC, cannabidiol is an important compound in the cannabis plant, but it has very different effects. The balance of CBD and THC is often considered critical in therapeutic uses.
“We found that CBD actually did the opposite to THC,” she said. “Animals exposed to CBD reduced their heroin seeking.” Hurd is now a co-principal investigator in advanced clinical trials, with results so far confirming that CBD can be used to effectively reduce opiate craving.
When she began researching THC’s impact on adolescent brains, Hurd says the cannabis industry marked her as an enemy. Once she began researching cannabidiol therapies, the industry decided she might be OK. But she has never cared about what they think. “Follow the data,” she tells her research team. “No matter what the results are, the data tells us.”
FOLLOWING DATA IS easier said than done. Everybody is using different kinds of medical cannabis for dozens of different conditions, said Ryan Vandrey, a psychiatry professor at the Johns Hopkins medical school, “but they’re all doing it different, making it very hard to integrate the data.”
“WE ALLOWED PEOPLE TO VOTE WHETHER OR NOT CANNABIS IS A MEDICINE. NOW WE’RE ASKING EVERYBODY IN THE COUNTRY TO BE THEIR OWN DOCTOR WITH CANNABIS. THAT HAS NEVER BEEN DONE WITH ANY OTHER MEDICINE.”
Databases demand consistent inputs. To make that possible, Vandrey and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins recently got a $10 million grant for a five-year project to create a standardized assessment and collect large quantities of observational data that will, they hope, be followed by good clinical trials.
“If you were to ask me which health conditions should be studied with a large clinical trial,” Vandrey told me, “and what the product would be, I couldn’t tell you.”
The stories Vandrey needs are in the files of general practitioners like Dr. Matt McIff. About 100 of McIff’s patients currently use medical cannabis, mostly for chronic pain. However, he opposes recreational legalization — or even casual medical legalization where the difference gets blurred.
McIff illustrates his approach with two cases from his practice. Fittingly, they serve as bookends to Yasmin Hurd’s dual research tracks: CBD for opioid addiction and adolescent THC risks.
The first case is a carpenter with chronic pain from a work injury who disclosed that he had for years struggled with opiate painkiller addiction but was now sober, implying that he white-knuckled his recovery — a rare and difficult feat.
With his curiosity piqued, McIff asked directly if the patient had used cannabis to overcome opiate cravings. Of course, he had. “After I assured him it was OK,” McIff said, “his eyes got really big and he teared up. He was so relieved to have his experience legitimized.”
The patient still uses a moderate cannabis dose for sleep and pain, a careful balance of THC and cannabidiol. But he is opiate-free, married with two children, and runs a business with 10 employees.
On the flip side, McIff tells of a 17-year-old patient who had self-medicated for his anxiety with cannabis obtained from friends. McIff walked the mother and son through the risks of adolescent cannabis — CHS, addiction risks, cognitive dysfunction and harms to the developing brain and body. Finally, he suggested that teens who use cannabis for anxiety may shortchange their
emotional development. The stress and confusion in youth, he said, is sometimes just part of learning life skills under pressure. Early cannabis use that masks stress may not only damage neural networks but also undercut psychological growth.
“If you are 17 and feeling stressed and you haven’t developed emotional skills,” McIff told me, “cannabis becomes a substitute.”
McIff is an outspoken advocate of supervised medical cannabis, but also an outspoken opponent of recreational legalization. In his view, the very respect he has for the drug’s potency pushes back against its unsupervised casual use for entertainment or self-medication.
Rather than going back to a policy of blanket prohibition, most researchers I spoke with, like Andrews, are focused on doing the long-delayed science required to better quantify both the perils and promise of cannabis.
NOT ALL DOCTORS who prescribe cannabis are as careful as McIff. Miriam, for example, got her prescription from a doctor she had never previously met, located in a cannabis medical clinic in the same building as the dispensary. “You sit down at a desk with the doctor. They ask you a few questions, and then they write you a prescription and you walk out the door,” Miriam said.
“PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE USING IT WHEN THEY’RE YOUNG AND THEIR BRAINS ARE STILL DEVELOPING.”
McIff’s reticence on legalization makes him a bit of an outlier. Despite layer upon layer of health concerns, none of the other experts I spoke with favored continued prohibition.
For example, Christopher Andrews, a gastroenterologist in Calgary, Canada, and an expert on cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, was philosophical when I asked about Canada’s permissive 18- to 21-year-old limit for recreational cannabis, given the developmental realities of the human body noted above.
“People should not be using it when they’re young and their brains are still developing,” Andrews said. But he was sympathetic to Canadian policymakers, who feared the black-market realities of trying to enforce prohibition until a later age.
“It was not an easy decision,” Andrews said. “That’s for sure.”
No one probed her underlying needs, checked on current therapies, explored alternatives — or even taught her how to balance THC and cannabidiol. Miriam finds it alarming that neither the doctor nor the dispensary staff warned her of CHS — a foreseeable risk, however rare, that she would have recognized in her own profile if it had been described.
Now with 18 months of recovery behind her, Miriam makes a surprising admission. She’s glad she was forced to quit. Cold turkey recovery, she says, made her realize she had been using not just for pain and PTSD, and not just to grieve her current loss, but also to bury unresolved emotional issues from her youth. “I used pot to avoid dealing with my stuff,” she said. “It was convenient that it was legal.”
After her crisis, Miriam spent three months at home on bed rest. With little else to do, she joined remote group therapy sessions twice a day. At first her engagement was perfunctory, even petulant. Uncovering old hurts and grieving new losses without her chemical crutch was wrenching. But the payoff was worth it.
“Having to grieve my mom and grieve having cancer 100 percent sober was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “I have less pain than I’ve ever had in my life. I have less anxiety. And I’m so glad that I can’t smoke pot.”
who owns
the land?
by kevin lind
the political stars have aligned in the west for sagebrush rebellion 2.0. will it succeed where past attempts to wrest control of federal land have failed?
illustration by ian sullivan
ON A BLUEBIRD spring day a few years back, Boone Taylor gathered his cattle from a grazing parcel he leases from the federal government. He rode his red roan, Navajo, through the “Sandy 3” allotment, which crosses through Bitter Creek in Capitol Reef National Park. From the creek bed, the striations of yellow-beige earth get steadily darker as they rise up the canyon walls. Taylor’s horse, chaps, work coat and cowboy hat were all roughly the same hue as the ombre landscape. His cattle made their way to the east slope of Boulder Mountain, where they spent the summer grazing on U.S. Forest Service land.
Taylor’s family has ranched in this region of southern Utah for five generations and is grandfathered into some of the few remaining federal grazing permits within a national park. The government no longer offers such permits and the family will lose
access to those grazing rights when the last child of his grandfather passes away. But for the foreseeable future, Taylor can still graze in federally protected land, which is not the case with all of the state-managed parcels he’s leased.
Four years ago, Taylor was notified that his grazing permit on state land near Glen Canyon National Recreation Area was reclassified. The Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, a state agency commonly called by its acronym SITLA that generates revenue for public schools and hospitals, sold that permit to a developer of a still-unfinished glamping project, Boone said, which left a bad taste in his mouth.
“I might be a little different than some, but I’m not so hung up on the state of Utah managing more public lands,” says Taylor. But the 49-year-old rancher understands the strong feelings that his parents’
It’s a deeply American conflict: individual rights against, what some call, a greater good.
generation, and even his first cousin Redge Johnson, executive director of Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, have about local control of public lands.
“We, locally, have knowledge about these lands that others don’t,” says Johnson. “And, too often — regardless of party — you see decisions being made in Washington, D.C., and then pushed out that don’t make sense. I feel there is a need for more local input and more local control.”
Taylor stands out for not fully embracing Utah’s “Stand for Our Land” campaign. The marketing and PR push corresponds with a lawsuit the state filed against the United States last August with the Supreme Court, arguing that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to hold unappropriated public lands in perpetuity — 18.5 million acres of Utah, specifically, which is an area about the size of South Carolina — and for states not to have the right to manage those public lands within their borders. The state has spent $1.35 million on advertising for the campaign, including a website, and ads in The Wall Street Journal, National Review and The Washington Post, podcasts, videos and scores of billboards along the Wasatch Front.
The campaign resurfaces a long-standing debate over federal versus state land stewardship in the West. But its origins go back to the nation’s founding, and resurfaced with the Sagebrush Rebellion in the late 1970s, when many of today’s politicians from the West were old enough to watch their parents and grandparents chafe under increasing federal land restrictions and national conservation efforts. Today, the U.S. government owns 650 million acres of public land, including national parks, forests, monuments, military bases, and, in large volume, land that has not been designated for a specific use and is largely overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. Certain states — primarily in the West, home to 92 percent of the federal government’s land — have long sought to manage the undesignated land (referred to in legal documents as unappropriated).
State officials in Utah, Nevada and Wyoming, among others, believe they can manage that unappropriated land better than the feds, who are viewed, at best, as an out-of-touch absentee landlord. But, the federal government retains the right, explicitly written into the Constitution, to own and manage its property. On the land it does own, the government has increasingly prioritized conservation over development and resource extraction, and it’s those conflicting uses that are at the heart of the dispute. It’s a deeply American conflict: individual rights against, what some call, a greater good.
A recent poll by HarrisX for Deseret Magazine finds broad agreement with the ideas behind the “Stand for our Land” campaign: 73 percent say that states should manage more land within their boundaries, and a majority of Utahns, specifically, are supportive of the lawsuit itself. As for how public land is managed, 87 percent say conservation should be a medium to high priority.
Does the feDeral government own too much of the lanD in your state, just enough, or shoulD they own more? woulD you prefer public lanD in your state to be owneD by the feDeral government or state government?
650 MILLION
how much of a priority shoulD conservation be for feDeral lanD management?
have you hearD about utah’s lawsuit to turn over feDeral lanD to the state?
Still, it’s a dispute that many legal scholars, who describe Utah’s petition to the high court as a frivolous “hail Mary,” agree is best decided legislatively. And the state’s publicity campaign appears to be less about whipping up support for a court battle — especially since the Supreme Court declined to hear the state’s lawsuit this past January — and more about convincing voters that it’s time to take the cause to Congress.
“These are not either-or,” says Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, referring to addressing the federal land debate in the judicial or the legislative branch. “They both need to happen.” And as the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, he’s in a position to shape and put forward that legislation. In his mind, there is no question that President Donald Trump’s administration is more sympathetic to Western states’ federal land issues than, at least, the previous one.
“There’re plenty of legislative pathways for this to happen,” Lee says. “A lot of which I’m already working on to try to transition at least some federal land to state, local, and — in some cases — even individual control.”
AT THE SECOND Continental Congress in 1776, delegates from the 13 original colonies were charged with forming a new government following their Declaration of Independence. They debated voting and representation but were also locked in battle over whether states or the new federal government should own rights to lands west of the colonies. While the founders deliberated for only two days about breaking away from Britain, the western land debate prevented ratification of a new government for nearly five years.
New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia held rights to land beyond their western borders — along with the potential wealth and associated influence. Delegates from the other six states with fixed western borders felt that if certain states grew much larger and wealthier than others by expanding west, they’d be trading one overlord for another. Resolution came when the states with western land rights agreed to create a “common property” to be held by the newly formed government. Real estate west of the colonies could immediately earn the fledgling nation some much needed cash. The nation was in the midst of an expensive war and could sell land to private interests and foreign nations eager to support the colonists’ cause. The resolution put the collective needs above the individual states by assuring all that the lands would be “disposed of for the common benefit of all the United States.”
Not all of that land was transferred to each state’s individual management as they were formed, and a percentage was retained by the U.S. government. The feds withholding that land from the states is seen by some today as breaking the resolution passed by the Continental Congress. “If you change the nature of that agreement, where the federal government only holds the land in trust, you’re undermining the very principles and patriotism and compact upon which the nation was founded,” says state Rep. Ken Ivory, a Republican and longtime advocate for transfer of public lands to the state.
Even Ronald Reagan referred to himself as a “rebel” in a 1980 campaign speech in Salt Lake City. And the Sagebrush Rebellion remains the ideological and cultural precursor to the current “Stand for Our Land” campaign.
John Leshy, a law professor at University of California, San Francisco, and a former solicitor at the U.S. Department of the Interior from 1993 to 2001, understands that moment in history differently. He opens his book on the history of public lands, “Our Common Ground,” with the same proud American moment of the nation’s founding, but contends the deal was struck for the “common benefit” of “all the United States,” not just those states with greater rights to large allotments of land.
Pursuing the greater good didn’t make the thorny nature of federal stewardship go away. When Congress admitted Utah Territory into the Union as a state in 1894, the statehood Enabling Act had this clarification: “That the people inhabiting said proposed State do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within the boundaries thereof.” The language was copied nearly verbatim into the state’s constitution that was ratified a year later. Statehood came in 1896.
As decades passed, relations with the state’s federal landlords simmered and finally boiled over after Congress passed the Federal Land Policy Management Act, or FLPMA, in 1976, which ended homesteading and redefined the Bureau of Land Management’s mission to prioritize multiple uses of the lands it managed in the West. In addition to natural resource extraction and grazing, the law mandated recreation and conservation as legitimate uses of government land. Nevada and Utah state legislators introduced a number of bills and filed lawsuits
attempting to transfer control of federally owned public lands from Uncle Sam to the states — none of which stuck. It wasn’t just FLPMA, either, but the culmination of years of frustrations felt by Westerners who thought that the government’s presence in the West was heavy-handed — imposing oversight and regulations that ignored the needs of those living closest to the land.
The Western outcry grew into a social movement dubbed the Sagebrush Rebellion. The movement’s heyday in the late ’70s and early ’80s was an identity-driving experience for many Westerners whose livelihood was tied to the land. Even Ronald Reagan referred to himself as a “rebel” in a 1980 campaign speech in Salt Lake City. The remnants of the rebellion, or at least the ideas animating it, turned ugly 10 years ago with an armed standoff between federal officers and Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s family over grazing fees. It culminated in the 2016 occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, led by Bundy’s son, Ammon.
Charges against Cliven and his sons were dismissed following a mistrial in the Nevada case in 2018 after Ammon and his brother Ryan were acquitted in Oregon of firearms and conspiracy charges in 2016. But both events stemmed from the ideological and cultural moorings of the Sagebrush Rebellion shared by the current “Stand for Our Land” campaign.
Johnson references lingering frustrations from the Sagebrush Rebellion in his explanation for Utah’s strategy to take their case to court. “I wish that the federal
government lived up to their agreement under FLPMA,” he says. Instead, there is less and less “multiple use” and more and more conservation. “I don’t think anybody wanted to be here, but this is where we are.”
TAYLOR MAY NOT like what happened to his state lands grazing permit, but he really gets upset over what happens when federal land policy changes every time someone new occupies the White House. He references Bears Ears National Monument, where President Barack Obama, then President Donald Trump, followed by President Joe Biden, have pingponged the monument’s size and status. In early February, Trump’s new Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered a review of all federal land withdrawals, which includes Bears Ears. Reacting to laws and permissions that change every four years, rather than consistent long-term planning, is not the way to operate a viable ranching operation, Taylor says. “It takes years to implement stuff,” he says. “Four years on a resource on the mountain or desert, that’s a drop in time. It doesn’t make one bit of difference as far as getting things done.”
The resentments felt by ranchers, miners, developers and the states against federal management align with how most folks feel about the current public land arrangement.
Conducted in November, following the presidential election, pollsters surveyed 1,512 registered voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Nearly 75 percent of respondents would prefer their state’s public land
to be owned by the state rather than the federal government.
The vast majority of Utahns polled, 86 percent, say that public lands should stay public and not sold to private interests. But that opinion is mitigated with a touch of skepticism. Some 43 percent of respondents believe the state would sell those lands to the highest bidder. To that suggestion, Gov. Spencer Cox is unequivocal: “There’s no intention to sell lands off.” He adds, however, that Lee is working on a bill in which states would take over federal land within city limits to sell to developers for much needed housing. “That has nothing to do with these vast landscapes that we’re talking about” with the lawsuits, says Cox. “‘Public lands’ means nothing if they’re not open to the public. And that’s what we’re trying to do, is to keep public lands public.”
Kate Groetzinger has her doubts. As the communications manager for the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation and advocacy organization, she’s followed Utah’s actions on public lands for years and has no faith that conservation is a priority. “Our main concern is that Utah lawmakers have shown time and time again that they are interested in privatizing federal land and state land,” she says. “They’ve sold hundreds of thousands of acres of the state trust lands that they were given at the time of statehood, and Utah lawmakers have made their intentions clear: They want to drill and develop and sell off national public lands.”
WHILE THE DEBATE over who should own public lands goes back decades, the idea to sue the government came up in a bipartisan committee when Cox was lieutenant governor. Rep. Brian King, a Democrat who would later run unsuccessfully against Cox for governor last year, suggested they stop talking about the legal arguments and just file a lawsuit. While King says the comment was tongue-in-cheek, its resonating logic was “instead of wasting money and talking about it, let’s find out one way or another and move it along the path,” Cox recalls.
The lawsuit asked a very narrow constitutional question: Can the federal government permanently retain the unappropriated lands within the state of Utah?
Requesting a hearing before the Supreme Court was a long shot, and legal observers like Leshy gave it little chance. He explains that the high court has issued “numerous decisions, often unanimous,” confirming Congress’ unlimited constitutional power to manage government land. And the only time the court attempted limiting that power was the 1857 Dred Scott decision — when
how have you useD public lanD, if at all?
Utah’s publicity campaign appears to be less about whipping up support for a court battle and more about convincing voters that it’s time to take the cause to Congress.
it confirmed slaves could never be U.S. citizens — which is considered the worst decision in Supreme Court history.
In a single sentence, the high court stuck to precedent in Utah’s suit: “The motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied.”
Cox, who has clerked for federal courts, gave Utah’s filing a 50/50 chance from the onset and says that even when the court likes an argument, they prefer to see complaints wend their way through the lower courts. “We’re not done with the lawsuit,” he says. “An option that I feel fairly confident that we will take, is just to file it in district court.”
At the same time, the state will pursue other avenues to address its concerns over public lands. “We’ll continue to work closely with the president and specifically with the secretary of the interior (former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum), who’s a dear friend of ours, great guy, wonderful governor, and someone who understands this,” Cox says.
And the state isn’t wasting time on the legislative front. Three days after the Supreme Court ruling, Reps. Celeste Maloy of Utah and Mark Amodei of Nevada introduced a bill that would presumably prevent another Bears Ears controversy by stripping presidential authority “to unilaterally designate national monuments and give that authority to Congress.”
Despite the Trump administration’s review of federal land withdrawals, Maloy won’t back off her proposal. "Congress should be deciding what should be a national monument and what's not,” she says. “That's something I want to fix, no matter who's in the White House."
UTAH IS NOT alone in its campaign to change federal land management in the West. Fourteen other states filed amicus briefs in support of Utah’s case, emphasizing similar arguments for state ownership of federal land.
Those states have no qualms with national parks and forests within their
The vast majority of Utahns polled, 86 percent, say that public lands should stay public. But that opinion is mitigated with a touch of skepticism. Only slightly more than half of respondents believe that this is what the state would do.
borders — rather, their beef is with BLM lands. The Wyoming brief stated that the BLM is “wielding an unconstitutional police power over Wyoming’s lands and resources” by keeping that land outside of the state’s management. Another amicus brief from a coalition of counties in Arizona and New Mexico with large percentages of their territory managed by the BLM stated, “the federal government’s retention and control of these (unappropriated BLM ) lands both negatively impacts the tax revenue in these counties and inhibits state sovereignty.”
Of course, the BLM takes a more conciliatory tone in a statement summarizing its approach to working with Utah: “The BLM’s mission is to provide balanced management and allow for multiple uses and sustainable recreation across the millions of acres of public lands in Utah, and it is important that we have a good working relationship with our state agency partners. These relationships remain strong and center upon shared interests and mutually beneficial outcomes.”
A recent example of that cooperation was Biden signing a bill earlier this year that transferred title to several parcels of BLM and Forest Service land adjacent to three Utah state parks to the state. “Our door is, and has always been, open to their input and collaboration,” the BLM spokesperson says.
Utah officials likely won’t experience
much, if any, political fallout from the state’s “Stand for Our Land” campaign, as 62 percent of Utah voters polled by HarrisX largely support the state spending $14 million of taxpayer dollars in its first step of petitioning the Supreme Court. That is, so long as the end game is to preserve the land for future generations — 68 percent of Utahns and 69 percent of Western folks would like those resources to be preserved for public use, regardless of who manages them.
Taylor shares that view. But the future of his operation and ranching in general, whether under state or federal land management, weighs on him. The average age of the American rancher is pushing 60, and of his three daughters (two in college, and one in high school), he doesn’t know if any of his children will take over the business. As fewer people live and work in these remote places, there is ample reason for concern about who manages the public lands and how, and whether or not they prioritize making opportunities for future ranchers — or recreators — to enjoy them as previous generations have.
In the fields around Capitol Reef National Park, condos and bed-and-breakfasts stand where there were once farms. “The resource is what’s taking the hurt,” Taylor says. “That’s what really matters, and it gets locked up in the political fight back and forth.”
ILLUSTRATION
FIFTY YEARS AFTER THE END OF THE VIETNAM WAR, THE RISE AND FALL — AND RISE AGAIN — OF A REFUGEE TURNED CIVIC LEADER TRACES THE STORY OF ONE OF THE LARGEST IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES IN THE WEST
BY NATALIA GALICZA
BY DUNG HOANG
TTONY LÂM HOLDS his life’s history inside a glass display case. It’s the centerpiece of his home in Westminster, California, and towers over the dining table. Family photos, military badges, awards and portraits exhibit a biography in kaleidoscopic form. And one morning last December, he pointed to one portrait in particular, a framed photo of a smiling, younger Tony Lâm with coiffed black hair and a perfectly pressed suit. A capture of a time when he still felt almost naive; unaware of the mark he’d leave on the world. Its prizes and prices.
It’s been half a century since the fall of Saigon in April 1975, when Lâm and his family left their native Vietnam for a new life in the United States, away from communist rule. He’s lived several different lives during that time. He’s been a gas station attendant, a life insurance salesman and a restaurateur. He made history, experienced political triumphs and political failures, and witnessed the birth of Southern California’s Little Saigon, a cultural and economic hub that’s home to the largest and oldest concentration of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam. Now he’s one of few remaining first wave émigrés to leave Vietnam at the end of the war, confronted with the reality that time will march on without him.
When the war ended, refugees moved to the U.S. by the millions. The nation is now home to the largest Vietnamese diaspora in the world. Almost 40 percent of those immigrants ended up in California, more than any other state. And just like Chinatowns or Little Italys or Little Havanas that have cropped up around the country, Little Saigons gradually appeared to preserve Vietnamese culture. None is more influential or symbolic than Orange County’s.
About 30 miles south of Los Angeles, Little Saigon spans the cities of Fountain Valley, Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Westminster. The ethnic enclave has brought hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Americans to live in Orange County, where they now account for 10 percent of the national Vietnamese American population. There are Vietnamese supermarkets, restaurants and banks; Vietnamese newspapers, television channels and radio stations all in the native language. A rarity for a demographic that makes up less than 3 percent of the country at large.
Despite its prefix, Little Saigon is the only Saigon left. When Northern Vietnam won the war, the new government renamed the original “Hồ Chí Minh City” after the north’s communist leader. That leaves this California counterpart as the world’s last remaining glimpse into a pre-war Vietnam. “It’s drawing Vietnamese people from all over the globe. Little Saigon is a magnet, a hub for the Vietnamese community everywhere. … Going there is like taking a pilgrimage,” says Phuong Nguyen, a professor of U.S. history at California State University, Monterey Bay and author of “Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon” who left Vietnam shortly after the war. “The reason it’s so well known is because it’s pretty much the cultural center of the Vietnamese diaspora, kind of like Hollywood and New York and Washington, D.C., all put into one.”
The events that brought Lâm to this community have never appeared as clearly as they do to him now. Throughout his adolescence and into adulthood, he confronted the greatest of unknowns. Loss, life and death, invention and reinvention. Now, sitting in his dining room, glancing at his own portrait, he appeared adrift in those memories.
ONE JACKET, ONE shirt, one pair of shorts. Lâm couldn’t waste time packing more. It was December 1946, the onset of the First Indochina War, and his family needed to evacuate their home in Hải Phòng, a coastal northeastern city near the border with
China. Power struggles between Nationalist Vietnamese leader Hồ Chí Minh and colonial French forces had turned the metropolis to a pile of ash and rubble. Bombs sent smoke billowing from the port. Bullet shells and casings littered the streets. But it was only when the French placed the city under military occupation that leaving became inevitable.
Lâm was 10 years old, about to seek refuge with his parents and six siblings in a village in the nearby countryside, but somewhere in the shuffle of thousands of people escaping the city, Lâm lost his family. He didn’t know where to go. All he knew was to keep pushing south. He wandered forests outside the city limits, slept in caves for several nights along the way and washed his clothes by hand like his parents taught him to do. He walked through foggy cemeteries strewn with the deserted bodies of alleged spies and realized, all too young, that he had to do whatever he could in order to survive. It took him months to find his brothers, and several years to reunite with the rest of his family. Yet even though he no longer had to confront the cost of war alone, he found himself caught in a mental fog. His
THOUSANDS OF VIETNAMESE REFUGEES WERE EVACUATED, MANY BY HELICOPTER, FROM SAIGON IN APRIL 1975.
mind kept returning to the deserted corpses. They haunted him in a sort of waking nightmare. He thought of their families and their fears, of how the only difference between the living and the dead was some combination of luck and grit.
him decades to build his first fortune. But by the mid-1970s, now with a wife and six kids, Lâm owned a two-story villa in central Saigon’s French quarter and hired a personal chauffeur to get to work each day. He’d carved a life for himself beyond survival.
TENSIONS WERE HIGH, AND THE PEOPLE FEARFUL, AS REFUGEES CROWDED THE U.S. EMBASSY IN SAIGON TO ESCAPE THE WRATH OF NORTH VIETNAMESE FORCES.
“LITTLE SAIGON IS A MAGNET, A HUB FOR THE VIETNAMESE COMMUNITY EVERYWHERE. GOING THERE IS LIKE TAKING A PILGRIMAGE.”
He’d become a refugee for a second time a decade later, in the summer of 1954, when his country split in half to create a communist north supported by the Soviet Union and China and an American-supported south in the leadup to the Second Indochina War — or, as most Americans know it, the Vietnam War. As the Soviet Union and China funneled more weapons and supplies to the north, military personnel and combat units from the United States multiplied in tandem. America became more involved in the war because it functioned as an extension of the Cold War, as a fight against the growth of communism on a global stage.
Lâm, meanwhile, had just embraced capitalism. He fled south to escape the communists with his family, joined the Navy, served for three years and learned enough English to pursue work for a U.S. government contractor after his discharge. It took
Still, the war raged on — and not in a way that benefited the side Lâm had hitched his fate to. The communist forces were prevailing. The U.S. was pulling out. In the spring of 1975, the military began evacuating anyone affiliated with the American government or South Vietnamese Army, the most vulnerable targets for assassination or imprisonment in the event of enemy takeover. Lâm among them. His family was scheduled for the first flight out of Saigon on April 23.
Just like when he fled his home for the first time at 10, he packed a knapsack for each of his six kids with a single set of clothes. They boarded a crowded American military aircraft bound for Guam, 2,400 miles away. “My parents tried to hide that we were not coming back, that there was a war and we were going to lose the country,” says Lâm’s eldest daughter, Cathy, 12 at the time of the escape. “I did not know the details. I just knew it was chaotic.”
Camp Asan in Guam had held a leper colony in the 19th century and German prisoners during World War I. Even through the blur of dusk and exhaustion, Lâm, his wife Hop and six children could see abandoned barracks, overgrown grass, broken toilets and piles of rubble. Most recently, the camp housed B-52 bomber crews tasked with dropping explosives over Vietnam. That spring, it housed refugees of the same war.
The camp functioned as part of Operation New Life, a federal program to temporarily host and eventually resettle Vietnamese escapees. Rather than take the first opportunity to move to America with his family, Lâm chose to stay behind with his wife and kids and run the camp as a volunteer manager for three months. When the tens of thousands of refugees at Camp Asan learned that seven days later, Saigon fell to communist control, Lâm
cried alongside his countrymen. But then he sprung to action.
He brought in priests and monks to offer spiritual counseling. He organized outdoor movie screenings. For the Fourth of July, he hosted a dance party with live music, a beauty pageant and a volleyball competition. Whatever he could to build community. It made a difference; his neighbors reported feeling “comfortable and free,” and U.S. military officers later lauded his leadership as “outstanding.” He learned that even if he could never go home again, he could find a way to carry it with him. He could make a new one.
LÂM COULDN’T RECOGNIZE his wife. It was now the fall of 1975 and he’d driven to the same Southern California shop where he’d dropped her off earlier, but when she walked up to the station wagon, she appeared almost ghostly. Her black hair was covered in ash from sanding down guitars and her face was coated in a thin layer of dust. Lâm burst into tears at the sight of her. He could hardly recognize anything about his life anymore.
After three months of running Camp Asan, Lâm and his family decided to start building their new lives in America. A commanding officer Lâm had formerly worked with offered to sponsor his family in Florida, where they moved for a brief stint in July. They quickly realized they could barely afford the $450 a month in rent, even with Lâm and his wife working full time.
Lâm’s brother invited him to move his family to Huntington Beach, California, and stay in a four-bedroom house crammed with more than 20 people — at least until he could afford to rent a place of his own. So they headed West, to start over again.
Lâm worked as a gas station attendant in the evenings so he could take his kids to school, bring his wife Hop to her day job in the mornings and pick her up before his shift. The refugee camp had at times been bleak, but it could also be fulfilling. Plus it ensured his family’s needs were met. Their first month in California, however, felt demoralizing.
It took two years of saving, scraping and borrowing for Lâm to buy a single-story house on a corner lot in Westminster. Even then, the city mostly consisted of mobile home parks, tire shops, deserted strawberry fields and scrapyards. Just over a dozen Vietnamese businesses existed in the entire county. Lâm drove his family an hour north to an Asian market in Los Angeles to shop for groceries. Options for restaurants with recognizable cuisine were just as scarce, a predictable byproduct of a refugee dispersal policy that dictated how the U.S. government resettled immigrants after the end of the war. The idea was to spread new citizens across the country — in cities and towns across Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and elsewhere — rather than dump large populations in concentrated areas. Avoiding ethnic enclaves was believed to promote more streamlined assimilation and avoid placing undue pressure on existing communities. Though in practice, and certainly for Lâm, it also meant many felt isolated and lost without familiar neighbors or resources.
JUST LIKE CHINATOWNS OR LITTLE ITALYS OR LITTLE HAVANAS AROUND THE COUNTRY, LITTLE SAIGONS GRADUALLY APPEARED TO PRESERVE VIETNAMESE CULTURE. NONE ARE MORE INFLUENTIAL THAN ORANGE COUNTY’S.
Today, it’s more commonly understood that ethnic enclaves actually benefit refugee communities. A Stanford study from 2019 found that refugees are at least 6 percent more likely to become employed within their first three years in a new country if they live in a community that has a large share of others with the same nationality, ethnicity or language. Another study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reported in 2019 that Asian American enclaves had less poverty, less crime and higher rates of health care access than non-enclaves.
Lâm didn’t know the impact his entrepreneurship would have on Little Saigon. All he knew was that if he felt homesick for his native food and culture, others likely did, too. He decided to open a Vietnamese
restaurant in 1984. Viễn Đông in Garden Grove started out serving beef jerky and rice batter crepes before graduating to a larger menu of crab noodles, escargot noodles, sweet potato and shrimp stir-fry — all northern Vietnamese cuisine, the food Lâm grew up with. The 48-year-old greeted guests at every table and poured tea as they sat; his children bused tables or filled out paperwork; his wife simmered massive pots of stock in the evenings after work to serve in soups like phở the next day. “My dad had always wanted to build Little Saigon,” says Cathy Lâm. “He was one of the first few people to open a business.” Though many more quickly followed.
The second wave of immigrants who fled by boat in the late 1970s and the third wave who escaped in the 1980s gave Orange County a population spike of about 1,000 new refugees every month. Vietnamese businesses ballooned from vacant lots to more than 700 in a single decade, and Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican, officially recognized Little Saigon as a cultural and commercial landmark in 1988 by erecting 13 signs along freeway exit ramps declaring the area as such. Though that’s around the same time locals and city council members pushed back. “It was the very first time in the history of the U.S. that the Americans lost a war. So the country
was still questioning itself,” says Tung Bui, co-author of “The Making of Little Saigon: Narratives of Nostalgia, (Dis)enchantments and Aspirations” and a former Vietnamese refugee. “There was an integration issue.”
Longtime residents resented the rapid transformation. A group of more than 100 Westminster residents signed a petition pleading with the city to “deny granting any license to any Indochinese refugee attempting to set up any business in this Viet town area.” A popular bumper sticker began appearing across central Orange County that read “Will the last American to leave Garden Grove bring the flag?” When immigrants tried to create a South Vietnamese Armed Forces Day parade to honor fallen soldiers and veterans, many of whom had fought alongside U.S. troops, politicians shut it down as un-American. “It’s my opinion that you’re all Americans and you’d better be Americans,” City Councilman Frank Fry told the organizers in 1989. “If you want to be South Vietnamese, go back to South Vietnam.” Fry eventually released a public apology for his comment, but those words ate away at Lâm. So much so, they made him run for city council in 1992.
His “Tax Fighter, Crime Fighter” motto appealed to both the majority Republican Vietnamese American community and
county at large. His campaign had the backing of the police department and the mayor, and most of his supporters were non-Vietnamese. He received a winning total of 6,500 votes in a city where only 2,000 Vietnamese Americans were registered to vote. And at 56 years old, Tony Lâm became the first Vietnamese American to hold elected office in the United States.
He spent his free time conducting outreach to register more Vietnamese American voters and help parents register their children for schools. And he advocated for the beautification of the enclave, even when colleagues shot down his efforts as a waste of funds. One of his favorite accomplishments was finding black antique French streetlights to line the streets of Little Saigon, like how they had in the old country. They’re still standing.
Lâm ran two more times, in 1994 and 1998, for a total of three terms and 10 years. Twenty-four Vietnamese Americans have run for political office in Orange County since the start of Lâm’s political career. “I think Tony created a path for us. I wasn’t involved in politics at all in the beginning,” says Hugh Nguyen, Orange County’s clerk-recorder who also arrived in California as a Vietnamese refugee. “Now I look back and see that he created a path for all of us in the new generation to be part of that
IN THE 1980S, AS ORANGE COUNTY’S VIETNAMESE POPULATION WAS GROWING, TONY LÂM OPENED VI N ĐÔNG IN GARDEN GROVE, LATER FOLLOWED BY SEVERAL OTHER SUCCESSFUL RESTAURANTS AND A CAREER AS A WESTMINSTER CITY COUNCIL MEMBER.
TONY LÂM AND HIS WIFE HOP STILL LIVE IN THE WESTMINSTER HOME THEY BOUGHT IN THE LATE 1970S. IN 2023 THEY TOOK A RETURN TRIP TO VIETNAM, NEARLY FIVE DECADES AFTER FLEEING AS REFUGEES.
team.” Lâm’s precedence and impact reverberates on the local, state and national level. In November 2024, Derek Tran became the first Vietnamese American elected to represent Little Saigon in Congress. A new first for a new generation.
Lâm had chosen to enter politics because he believed in the American dream and loved his adopted country. Its complications, its Constitution, its citizens. Even when they sent his new career crashing down.
A SEA OF bright yellow, red, white and blue roiled under a golden glow of streetlamps and spilled across the strip mall. Most protesters wore or waved the flag for South Vietnam or the United States. Some hung, burned and stamped on effigies of Vietnamese Communist Party founder Hồ Chí Minh. Others held signs that read something along the lines of “OUR WOUNDS WILL NEVER HEAL! BE AWARE! COMMUNISTS ARE INVADING AMERICA!” All had gathered to demonstrate against a Westminster business owner’s choice of window decor.
Trường Văn Trần, a former Vietnamese refugee who owned the video store Hi-Tek, had hung a flag of Vietnam’s communist government above a poster of Hồ Chí Minh
in his storefront on January 17, 1999. He claimed to do so out of reverence for the First Amendment. What ensued was 53 days of protests that drew about 15,000 people, made its way onto national news and inspired similar demonstrations in San Jose and Houston. Police in riot gear arrested dozens of protesters in Orange County, including several who jeered from behind barricades outside the video store. Eggs were thrown at him and loudspeakers blasted sounds of machine-gun fire to psych him out. It became a microcosm of the same war that had formed this community in the first place. History had repeated itself. Except this time, the South would win.
Lâm found himself in a challenging position. He was north Vietnamese, originally, and more sensitive to the threat of communism than most. He’d fled it three times just to find the kind of freedom the Constitution enshrines. He saw Trần’s display of the flag and poster a mockery of these freedoms, but the city attorney advised him and his peers on the city council against attending any protests out of fear it would be interpreted as city approval of the event. With the risk of violence and property damage,
that would mean inviting lawsuits against the city. Plus, as controversial as his actions were, the First Amendment protected Trần’s right to display whatever messages he wanted on his property. Lâm avoided attending the two months of protests to prevent any accidental endorsements. It made rational sense to him, but being as visible of a community member as he was, his constituents took notice of his absence and framed him as a communist sympathizer.
The protests moved to Lâm’s restaurant and lingered there for 73 days. Demonstrators picketed his business, harassed his family and deterred his customers. At a city council meeting in late February, he shared that the havoc strained his community standing, career, personal relationships — even his marriage. “My heart has been torn apart,” he said at the meeting. His voice cracked as he fought back tears. “It’s truly tearing me down.” He chose to get ahead of any future recall movements and ended his political career with the close of his third term in 2002. He claims not to regret his decision. He understood the inherent challenges of occupying a position in politics. Yet for years, he found himself lying awake at night, anguished over what he saw as a
public misunderstanding of his character. An unjust downfall.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer,” about, in part, Vietnam and its aftermath, has written that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” For first wave immigrants like Lâm who carry those memories firsthand, the war in many ways rages on.
The honoree ambled up to the podium, cane in hand. An American flag pin on the lapel of his black suit winked in the sunlight. He spoke of his political career, his trajectory as a business owner, his time as a refugee camp volunteer. And he joked. “In my life span, I don’t know why, I always end up as a volunteer with no pay,” he quipped, met by knowing chuckles from the crowd.
TONY LÂM WAS THE FIRST VIETNAMESE AMERICAN TO HOLD ELECTED OFFICE IN THE UNITED STATES.
The division of northern and southern Vietnam that led to it all hasn’t dulled. But younger generations of Vietnamese are more distant from the days of war and less hung up on the demarcations that caused it. As of 2023, the United States and Vietnam are diplomatic partners. Almost 70 percent of Vietnam’s population was born after the war — the first generation to grow up in an independent country without conflict. More than 40 percent of Vietnamese Americans say they’re on the way to achieving the American dream, and nearly 30 percent say they already have it. “In 10 more years, the first generation of incoming refugees will be all gone, and then the future of Orange County is going to be very different,” says Bui, the “The Making of Little Saigon” co-author. “All of this is slowly becoming history.”
On the morning of May 3, 2022, two decades after his political fall, an 85-year-old Lâm experienced that attitude shift for himself. He arrived with his family at Park West Park in Westminster for something like vindication. More than 100 people gathered under cypress and sycamore trees to celebrate the park’s new name and identity. Bordered by brick pillars, a sign chiseled in bold black letters reads: “TONY LAM PARK.” The city dedicated the open space to the former councilman on behalf of his accomplishments as both a politician and fierce advocate of Little Saigon. Community members and politicians delivered speeches in recognition of Lâm, from council members to former state senators. Then they waited for him to speak.
THE MORNING SUN had harshened to an afternoon glare by the time Lâm finished sharing his story. His eyes moved from mine, to the glass case, to the garden and the trees he planted himself. Some have stood since 1977, when he first bought the property. This stucco house on a corner lot in Westminster, California, is Lâm’s first and only American home. He’s lived in it with his family for nearly half a century. Longer now than he lived in Vietnam.
Little Saigon, this independent enclave built by refugees turned business owners, now brings in almost a billion dollars in annual sales. And, even as the area grows and changes over time, it’s still honoring the past that shaped it. Every April, during the week of the 30th, Westminster recognizes Black April Memorial Week to mourn the fall of Saigon. It’s the first city in the world to formally do so. The Tết Festival that Lâm helped start in 1982 — a Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration that includes a parade complete with dragon dances and marching bands — brings in more than 15,000 attendees each year.
Despite having no formal engagements, Lâm, now 88 years old, still wears crisp buttoned shirts and dress pants, still meticulously coifs his hair, but his stature has shrunk, his hair has grayed. “Old age is like a shipwreck,” he joked. His days now are filled with games of mahjong against friends and family. Dinner three times a week with one of his daughters. Working out at the gym. Anything to structure his time as he braces for the future, whatever shape it takes. “The Vietnamese have a tendency not to sit around.”
HOLLYWOOD HAS LONG SHUT OUT NATIVES SEEKING TO TELL AUTHENTIC STORIES OF THEIR AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. ERICA TREMBLAY IS PART OF A NEW GENERATION DISRUPTING THAT NARRATIVE
BY Ethan Bauer
PHOTOGRAPHY BY Wesley Young
EYES NARROWED AS she motioned toward an electric-blue feather headdress sprouting from the wall. “That was a Plains Indian thing,” she said. “Those aren’t from us.” The “us” meant her people, the SenecaCayuga Nation, whose ancestral lands stretched across New York and Canada before their forced relocation to Oklahoma. “But in the ’70s,” she added, “my relatives were rocking those.” Here at Native American World, an eclectic gift shop in Venice Beach, California, she then gestured to a glass counter spattered with turquoise rings and pendants. Turquoise is mostly associated with the Southwest, with spiritual roots in the Navajo and Hopi. But again: “My grandfather had huge turquoise rings,” she said. “So there’s this kind of adoption of the ‘pan-Indian’ version of things that are, in a way, fake — but then at some point, does it become real?”
Tremblay is at her best when probing questions like that. It’s made her an in-demand name in this town. In the first place, she’s in Los Angeles because she’s part of the writers’ room for Season 4 of “Dark Winds,”
an AMC thriller series that takes place on and around the Navajo Nation; Season 3 premieres March 9. A little less recently, she was an executive story editor, writer and director for the hit FX series “Reservation Dogs,” a much-acclaimed coming-of-age story about a group of Native teens in Oklahoma. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts named her a “breakthrough artist” in 2024, while her feature film debut, “Fancy Dance,” starring Oscar-nominated actress Lily Gladstone, was adored by critics. “Simply beautiful,” one reviewer wrote, “and hopefully, there’s much more to come.” Indeed, there is much more to come. But for now, on this foggy December evening in Venice Beach, Erica Tremblay is here instead, thumbing through pairs of tribal-patterned tube socks.
There are shops like this one all over the West. In towns like Moab and Springdale; on the outskirts of Las Vegas; along the California-Nevada border; and most of all, rising from the twisting blacktop between them, these touristy intersections of Native crafts and non-Native cash are so common that Native sketch comedy
troupe The 1491s has a whole four-minute bit about “The Indian Store.” When I’d suggested meeting here, Tremblay agreed right away. Turns out, though it never made it into the script, she and her fellow “Reservation Dogs” writers had toyed with the idea of building a scene inspired by this exact shop when the main characters — spoiler alert — make their way to California. It offered a perfect contrast between worlds old and new. Between the world that has been, and the one Tremblay and other creatives like her are trying to build.
Tremblay, who has blue eyes (often bracketed by the seven pairs of eyeglass frames she rotates daily), blonde hair and a pale complexion, looks more like her white dad’s side of the family than her Native mom’s. Not that that means anything after centuries of cultural mixing. Yet once, in a New York City elevator, she was wearing a pair of beaded earrings of the sort you might find at this gift shop, when a white woman with a yoga mat told her she should “think twice before appropriating other people’s cultures.” Never mind that Tremblay grew
up on reservation land, with a mother who was on the tribal council. Never mind that she spent three years living in Canada, immersed with the last remaining speakers of the nearly extinct Cayuga language. “I get that grief more from non-Native people than I do from my own community,” she said. “And sometimes I just don’t want the grief of it. But I would maybe get down with some shoes,” she added, gesturing toward a pair of woven slip-ons. “I have a pair of those, and they’re really comfortable.”
Native American World and similar gift shops around the West court the gaze of tourists drawn in by something a little different and unexpected. That gaze was long the default assumption for Native stories in Hollywood. “For so long, Native Americans were allowed to be one of two things: the vicious savage or the peace-keeping shaman,” Tremblay said. “We are so many different things in between.” Her stories explore that rich middle terrain in a way that feels authentic to her experiences rather than pandering to that outdated default gaze. Tremblay, in other words, has gotten really comfortable reclaiming her culture in a space that wasn’t built for her.
Her feature film debut, for instance, started with a single word: knohá: ah, the Cayuga word for aunt, which translates more literally as “little mother.” That one term prompted a vision: a “little mother” and her niece, dancing in lockstep. In slow motion. In communion. She knew she wanted to tell a story that ended with that image. She just needed to figure out how to get there. Not only in terms of plot and storyline, characters and dialogue — but in terms of telling the story in a way that was uncompromising.
In a way that wouldn’t do more damage to her community by accident than has already been done on purpose.
2007 and 2022, less than one-quarter of 1 percent of speaking roles went to Native American characters. “Hollywood, left to its own devices, doesn’t care,” she says. Real support does exist in pockets — she cites Sundance and Netflix — but it’s still rare overall. And that makes it very difficult for Native storytellers to grab a lasting foothold; for new voices to emerge. Which can have serious consequences.
Every group — racial, ethnic, religious or otherwise — wants to be seen in pop culture as they really are, rather than as a caricature. This desire is especially relevant
storytellers — Tremblay among them. The same halls that welcomed her have also embraced Taika Waititi, who went from directing independent films to the Oscar best picture-nominated “Jojo Rabbit” and blockbusters like “Thor: Ragnarok”; Sydney Freeland, whose credits include massive properties like Marvel and “Star Trek” as well as her recent Netflix feature, “Rez Ball”; and Sterlin Harjo, whose “Reservation Dogs” brought raw Native stories to mainstream television. “I think it’s growing,” Tremblay says, considering the shift. “There’s just more opportunity for us to bring each other up.”
A 2023 STUDY by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, led by professor Stacy Smith, found that in 1,600 top-grossing films between
“FOR SO LONG, NATIVE AMERICANS WERE ALLOWED TO BE ONE OF TWO THINGS: THE VICIOUS SAVAGE, OR THE PEACE-KEEPING SHAMAN. WE ARE SO MANY DIFFERENT THINGS IN BETWEEN.”
for Native Americans, who’ve been the target of systematic, government-sanctioned violence, cleansing and assimilation as recently as the 1980s. “This is a long, complicated, horrific genocide that’s still ongoing,” Tremblay says. It’s less direct than it used to be, but cultural erasure is one of the modern tools that continues to enable it. “I don’t know why any group needs to justify why they need to be seen,” Smith adds.
Bird Runningwater spent 20 years at the Sundance Institute trying to rectify the problem. What began as a program for Native filmmakers grew into an incubator for some of today’s most compelling
Runningwater points to the pandemic as the catalyst for the current movement’s success. With everyone stuck inside, and following 2020’s racial reckoning, the demand for Native stories reached new heights. “Rez Ball,” Freeland’s film about a high school basketball team on the Navajo reservation, marked the first Native feature film backed by a major studio. Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” likewise secured an “unheard-of acquisition price” when Apple bought the distribution rights. Harjo parlayed his “Reservation Dogs” success into a new project starring Ethan Hawke. Yet at the same time, Runningwater adds, the industry’s enthusiasm has noticeably slowed. “Our strides are kind of getting bigger,” he says, “but in a climate where less and less seems to be happening for diverse storytellers. … I think we’re at a pivotal moment right now.”
In an era of audience fragmentation, there’s a strong business argument to be made for funding and promoting stories rooted in particular cultures. “These companies are losing money,” Smith says. “They don’t understand who their audience is.” For Tremblay, the audience she keeps foremost in mind is people from her own culture. But people of all cultures and backgrounds, she believes, crave stories that are authentically told. And if Hollywood disagrees, well, she isn’t too worried. “Hollywood needs us more than we need Hollywood,” she says. “If Hollywood wants to tell stories about Native Americans that are truthful, then they need us.”
SMOKE CURLED TOWARD the ceiling as one member of the Seneca-Cayuga tribal council offered an impassioned rebuttal while the others chain-smoked cigarettes. It was here, growing up on the Missouri side of the Oklahoma-Missouri border and watching her mom during council meetings, that Erica Tremblay learned to tell stories. The Seneca-Cayuga Nation is a “consensus-based community,” which in practice means “a lot of passionate oratory,” she explains. She didn’t much enjoy the meetings back then. She’d have much rather been at home watching Quentin Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson films. Or, more often, the 50-cent bargain rentals from the video store — the old black-and-white stuff, from Shirley Temple to Alfred Hitchcock. Those movies prompted her to ask her mom for a secondhand camcorder, which she used to shoot backyard films she wrote and directed. The cast starred her sister, cousins and friends, with storylines like a meeting of Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan and all the other famous Michaels she could think of. Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, does Tremblay realize how the smoke-filled rooms of her youth reinforced her camcorder instincts.
She sometimes visited her non-Native father, who lived in Idaho, and those trips made her thirst for a big gulp of the wider world. But not if it meant leaving important parts of herself behind. Not without applying the council’s wisdom to her pursuits, like she once did as a teenager during a debate tournament. In a contest against other local schools along the Oklahoma-Missouri border, she won. Her prize? A trophy topped by a man standing at a lectern. “I just won this tournament. I just won this trophy,” she thought. “And I am not a man standing at a lectern.” Part of being a great storyteller, she gathered from the council’s fits of “passionate oratory,” meant standing up for herself. She bought an action figure of Mary Jane Watson — Spider-Man’s love interest — and Scotch taped it over the man.
Not long after, in 2000, she earned a college scholarship to Southwest Missouri State. The closest she could get to a camera and production, she thought, was to study broadcast journalism, so that’s what she did. But as a 20-year-old sophomore, she watched a film called “High Art.” At the very end, when the credits began to roll, the writer and director’s name flashed: Lisa Cholodenko. Tremblay felt a physical reaction. Until that precise moment, she had never considered that women could make movies. “It makes me so angry and so sad that I waited until I was 20 years old to even imagine myself in that role,” she says, “even though I was doing it with the VHS
IT’S DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE WHAT TRIBAL CULTURE MIGHT HAVE LOOKED LIKE BEFORE EUROPEANS ARRIVED. BUT IN THE CAYUGA LANGUAGE, TREMBLAY FOUND ECHOES.
recorder!” She switched her major to media studies, then followed a friend to Omaha after graduation. She worked a few odd jobs until she got hired as a production assistant on a movie that was filming in town, which made her think she might be able to make it in LA. She saved $2,000, packed up her Mitsubishi Mirage and headed West.
She realized — quickly — that she needed health insurance and a livable wage to survive, so she found work in advertising and publishing that eventually took her from LA to New York City, where she had a chic corporate office leading video teams
for some major publications, including Esquire, Marie Claire and Bustle. But in 2018, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d veered off track. “I just remembered those dreams,” she says. She’d known about Sundance’s Indigenous Program for a while, but she’d never applied out of fear. With the application deadline coming up on a Monday, she sat down the prior Thursday and fired off a script for a short film. Runningwater called her when she was seated in her New York City office to tell her she was one of two who’d been accepted. “And it changed everything,” Tremblay says.
Runningwater knew immediately that Tremblay’s voice was something special when he read the script Tremblay submitted, based on her mother’s life as a teacher in Oklahoma. It spoke to an unmistakable, uncompromising feminine sensibility that reflected the Seneca-Cayuga tribe’s matriarchal culture. “I just thought,” Runningwater remembers, “that those were flames that needed to be fanned and supported.” The process of making the short film only encouraged his initial judgment. He remembers a critique of one particular scene that Tremblay herself admitted she didn’t quite understand. “Her willingness to be vulnerable and uncomfortable in that space,” Runningwater remembers, was unique, and spoke to what became a clear pattern of soliciting feedback and guidance to become the best-possible storyteller. Her dedication quickly paid dividends. The short film, titled “Little Chief,” starred a young Lily Gladstone — later nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon” — and was accepted by the Sundance Film Festival in 2020, which led to an agent, which led to an onslaught of opportunities. But not without a small detour. She wouldn’t call it that. She would say it was necessary. Exactly where she needed to be: in Canada, among the last native speakers, immersed in the Cayuga language. “Little Chief” had shown her she didn’t want her corporate job anymore, and her instincts told her what she needed instead was “going back to community.” Her
own community’s last native speaker died in 1989, so the Canadian tribe’s formal immersion was her only chance to learn Cayuga. In her studies, she found the connection to her culture she was looking for. “You can tell a lot about a worldview by how the language is set up,” she explains. The Cayuga language, for example, is very verb-based and very woman-centric. In Cayuga, a tree isn’t just a tree — a noun. A thing. A tree is something in motion and connected with everything around it. And the default pronoun is “she,” while the word for chief translates to “she holds him by the horns.” Because Native culture today is so heavily influenced by mainstream Western/American culture, it’s difficult to imagine what tribal culture might have looked like before Europeans arrived. But in the language, Tremblay found echoes. “I fell in love,” she says, “with the worldview I was seeing.”
From “Reservation Dogs” to “Dark Winds,” that sensibility became a defining feature of all her projects, including some still in the works. She’s developing a family crime drama set on a reservation — a “Native American Sopranos,” she calls it — as well as a horror adaptation and even a short
story for an eager publisher. But the worldview is especially prominent in “Fancy Dance,” her feature-length debut.
It wasn’t just the word “little mother” alone, even though that’s where the idea started; she also decided to use Cayuga as a literary device. The film takes place in Oklahoma, and the main characters all speak spurts of Cayuga throughout. You would not find that in Oklahoma today, but for Tremblay, it’s about creating something aspirational. “It’s what I wish was happening in the present,” she says, “and what I want to see for the future.”
The film’s plotline follows Jax, played by Gladstone, and her teenage niece, Roki. Roki’s mother has disappeared, and Jax is looking after Roki while also leading search efforts. Because of Jax’s prior drug charges, the state comes to take Roki away and place her with Jax’s father, who is white and lives off the reservation. Jax’s father is not malicious, nor is his new wife, Nancy. “We wanted to give those characters empathy,” Tremblay says. “They’re not just one sided, like, ‘Oh, the white people are the bad people.’” What they are is clueless.
In one pivotal scene, Nancy tries to
connect with Roki, who is interested in powwow dancing, by gifting her a pair of old ballet slippers. It’s a well-intentioned gesture, but it places Nancy, rather than Roki, at the center of the interaction. Roki tries to explain that powwow dancing isn’t just a series of steps and performance like ballet; that it’s “a way to be together.” For Tremblay, that moment is all about correcting the record. “It’s a way to live. It’s vibrant. It’s evolving,” she says. “It moves and morphs and shapes.” She hopes non-Native viewers can appreciate that. And if not, well, once again, she isn’t too worried. “I’ve always just been that way,” she says. “Even if it’s with Scotch tape, I’m gonna try and find a way to correct it.”
ERICA TREMBLAY’S GRANDMOTHER used to make dream catchers. Dream catchers didn’t originate with her tribe; they have roots in the Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes region. But in the 1960s and ’70s, they were adopted by the “pan-Indian movement” as a symbol of unity across tribes. Pan-Indianism became a potent organizing
TREMBLAY, RIGHT, WITH THE STARS OF “FANCY DANCE,” INCLUDING OSCAR NOMINATED LILY GLADSTONE, CENTER, AT THE FILM’S NEW YORK PREMIERE IN 2024. JOHN
strategy for Natives, even though it also effectively stripped tribes of cultural differences. Where did her grandmother learn to make dream catchers? At the Indian Center, Tremblay supposes. Or maybe at the community hall. As if the learning occurred by osmosis. “Where,” she wonders, “do you learn any of it?”
This history is precisely what makes the current moment in Native storytelling so interesting, Runningwater says — and so new. You could almost think of Natives on screen as part of three waves: The first was the classic, cliche, warrior-or-peacekeeper dichotomy. Then came 1998’s “Smoke Signals,” which premiered at Sundance and felt like something completely different. “‘Smoke Signals’ definitely kicked off a movement and an era,” Runningwater says. “But ‘Smoke Signals’ was what you would call a broad, generalized, pan-Indian kind of story.” He has encouraged Native storytellers to move beyond pan-Indianism and embrace what makes their specific tribal identities unique, which helped unleash the current, third wave. Tremblay’s work and other projects like it, therefore, walk a tightrope between challenging pan-Indian
ideas without forsaking the movements that have come before.
Consider “Reservation Dogs,” the breakthrough TV hit Tremblay wrote and directed for. Sterlin Harjo’s guiding light for the entire show was to avoid Native cliches. “I think the biggest part about its redefinition came from dismantling the expectation of Indigenous art,” says Mato Wayuhi, a 27-year-old Lakota artist who composed the show’s score. “I think expectation can be a really dehumanizing component to any art form,” he adds, noting that he walks a delicate path between honoring what came before and building something different. “So we’re paying credence to that while also destroying it. It’s like making a new sculpture out of the same clay.” His compositions do incorporate some traditional elements — but they also include unambiguously Western elements, like cellos, with hip-hop and other modern influences, all blended into something familiar and new at once. “Part of the duty of the next generation is to destroy what came before you,” he says, quoting Harjo. “And I think ‘Rez Dogs’ is a demolition derby.”
But how do Native creators draw the line
between honoring what’s come before and building something different and new? What does it mean to be “authentic”? It’s an important question given that authenticity is the North Star of Tremblay’s work. How does she navigate when “fake” things become authentic, like at the gift shop? More precisely, considering her aspirational use of the Cayuga language in “Fancy Dance” — how does she thread the needle when making authentic things fake?
TREMBLAY HAS BECOME A PROMINENT VOICE AMONG THOSE CHALLENGING A DECADES-LONG APPROACH TO STORYTELLING. “HOLLYWOOD NEEDS US MORE THAN WE NEED HOLLYWOOD,” SHE SAYS.
A DAY BEFORE we had met at Native American World, I joined Erica Tremblay at IHOP. She chose IHOP because it was near her office for “Dark Winds” — a space in Santa Monica that also produces “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” But she also chose it because, compared to the many hipster coffee shops and chic cocktail bars nearby, it felt familiar. “I’m more of an IHOP person,” she says. “I grew up at Denny’s, or Shoney’s, or IHOP with my family. When we could scrounge up enough money, my mom would take us to get pancake breakfasts at places like this.”
Her characters in “Fancy Dance” are likewise “IHOP people.” In one scene, Jax and Roki visit a nameless diner. “You can have whatever you want,” Jax says, grinning. Roki orders strawberry pancakes, strawberry waffles, strawberry blintzes and strawberry crepes. That’s one small example of how Tremblay kept the story authentic to her experiences, but bigger ones abound. Namely, the missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis. If you’re Native and have any social media accounts, she explains, you are going to come across someone’s cousin or friend or aunt who has vanished without a trace. She’d spent many nights and weekends working for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, so she knew this crisis well, and she knew she wanted it to be central. She also knew Jax would be loosely based on the protagonist from “Little Chief.” But she also knew, as a first-time feature film writer, that she needed help.
She partnered with Miciana Alise, a fellow Native screenwriter whose script she’d read during her Sundance program. She liked Alise’s romantic comedy sensibilities and wanted her to bring them to the relationship between Jax and Roki. Together, they molded the rest of the story, which begins with Jax and Roki stealing a pickup truck from a white fly fisherman. “I love not feeling alone in the work,” she says. Yet, in some ways, Tremblay is always alone.
“I never feel like what I do is good enough,” she admits. “I have been this person my whole life. If it’s not perfection, it’s not good enough. And perfection is not possible. So that’s the struggle.” It’s such a pervasive feeling that, when “Fancy Dance” premiered at Sundance in 2023, she watched it and decided she would never watch any of her own screenings ever again. With one notable exception.
She did attend a screening of “Fancy Dance” for Seneca-Cayuga tribal elders. She was excited for them to see their language on the silver screen for the first time — but also terrified of how they might react. They reacted by affectionately squeezing her cheeks when it was done.
“Getting that cheek squeeze from them is the best thing ever,” she says with a grin. But she also knows it won’t always be like that. It can’t be.
Her “Native American Sopranos,” for example, is sure to be controversial among Native viewers, because it will portray Native characters doing unsavory things. She knows some people won’t like that. But the way she sees it, non-Native cinema has allowed its characters to explore those gray areas forever — and her characters should be allowed the same privilege. They should be fully formed. She’s already garnered some
Originally, she explained, powwows were roadside attractions for white people. They’d come and watch the Indians do Indian things. But unlike Indian ceremonies, powwows were legal. So over time, they morphed into a way for Natives to come together and celebrate community. They became something new. “It’s kind of like a weird reclamation of a slur,” she said. “The culture takes it over, and accepts it, and subverts it, and uses it in a way that wasn’t intended.”
She didn’t mention her reclamation of an industry that has long shut out voices like hers; she spoke instead about her turquoise jewelry — and her other jewelry that, while Native-made, would not fit in here.
IN THE 1,600 TOP-GROSSING FILMS BETWEEN 2007 AND 2022, LESS THAN ONE QUARTER OF 1 PERCENT OF SPEAKING ROLES WENT TO NATIVE AMERICAN CHARACTERS.
criticism for Jax and Roki stealing the fly fisherman’s car, but usually, those notes come from non-Native viewers. “Aren’t you worried that your portrayal of Jax and Roki being criminals is gonna make your community look bad?” they ask.
“If you are watching this movie, and you’re worried about them stealing some gas at the gas station,” Tremblay answered, taking a sip from her IHOP decaf, “then you’re part of the problem.”
As we headed for the exit and the hazy, mist-filled beach beyond, she had a lot of places to be. She was due in the “Dark Winds” writers’ room to cobble the Season 4 script until April, when she’ll return to her home in central New York, near Ithaca. She chose to live there, with her partner and their two cats, rather than her native Missouri/Oklahoma, because it’s where her people lived before colonization, and she wants to be as close to those ancestors as possible. But before she kept moving toward those things and all the others, she stopped. Something caught her attention near the door.
It was a display of T-shirts facing the street, featuring eight designs. One was a Native warrior in war paint and a feather headdress, staring menacingly beside a bear. Another featured four Native leaders as “The original Mount Rushmore,” while another included howling wolves. The rest, however, felt downright random. A T. rex. A bunch of green skulls. A cat captioned with “I’d spend all 9 lives with you.” “That’s such a snapshot,” Tremblay said, with drumbeats blaring from invisible speakers, “of like — why?” She pulled out her phone, and she snapped some pictures, and she laughed.
THE NEXT DAY, at the Venice Beach gift shop, Tremblay taught me about powwows.
Then she walked away, leaving the shop in the fog behind her.
A MODERN QUESTION
FAITH HAS AN ANSWER TO CRITICAL THEORY
BY CARL R. TRUEMAN
Critical theory has in recent years become a major bone of contention in American culture. The term has taken on a life of its own, such that it functions as a kind of shibboleth for both conservatives and progressives. Are you for it or against it? That is the blunt either-or test of loyal membership on both sides of the political divide, typically played out at levels of sophistication dictated by the character limits for a tweet.
In particular, critical race theory has become a focal point for Americans eager to litigate the country’s racial divides and the long shadow of slavery and segregation. Rather like those other buzzwords or phrases — cultural Marxism, white privilege, heteronormativity — the vocabulary has taken on a life of its own. It is often wielded with utter conviction in the battles that take place online among those on both sides who have mastered the moralizing rhetoric without ever having reflected upon the theoretical background from which it emerged. I am by trade and training an intellectual
historian. That means that my primary interest is in how ideas and schools of thought come into being, what their origins are, what claims they make about the world in which we live, and what their significance — cultural, intellectual, historical, ideological — might be. I am not concerned first
UNDERSTANDING THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THEORY CAN HELP US ENGAGE ON THE ISSUE OF USING IT IN SCHOOLS, COLLEGES, PUBLIC POLICYMAKING AND THE MEDIA.
and foremost with the truth or coherence of the ideas and movements I study so much as with the various aspects of their historical and cultural significance. And so this essay is an attempt to expound the critical theoretical ideas of a few chosen thinkers
associated with the early development of critical theory in order to help us engage with more clarity on some of the most pressing issues of our own age.
And what are those issues? An immediate response might well point to the use of critical theory in schools, colleges, public policymaking and the media. That certainly covers some of them, but I want to suggest that there is a much deeper issue in our modern world that makes some knowledge of critical theory important in ways that go beyond what we might call these broadly political concerns. It is the issue of anthropology, the understanding of what it means to be human.
This is where critical theory becomes important. Once we step back from pressing political concerns, it is clear that the critical theorists, from an early figure such as Theodor Adorno to later figures such as Gail Rubin, are all wrestling with the question of what, if anything, it means to be human. Critical theory is, of course, an umbrella term for a variety of different
and even incompatible approaches. The Marxism of an Adorno is not the queer theory of a Rubin. But all share this in common: a basic preoccupation with anthropological questions.
This is not to defuse the contemporary political significance of critical theories. All truly critical theories are revolutionary. But it is to set them in the context of our times and to see them as one set of responses to that age-old question: What is man? Is he defined by making and producing or by consuming? Are biological relationships important or not? How has technology changed our understanding of human nature? Is sexual desire part of our core identity? Does the universe have a moral shape? Are we free agents or merely functions of broader cultural forces? And, of course, the pointed question so succinctly expressed by Pilate: What is truth?
If the challenge facing Western society today comes down to basic questions such as these, questions that all touch on the deeper issue of how we define human nature, then it behooves us to be aware of the manner in which the discussion is being pursued.
MY OWN INTEREST in critical theory dates to the 1980s when I was first introduced to aspects of Marxist theory with reference to ancient, and then Reformation, history. At the time, the ideas fascinated me but they seemed to be fading in significance, replaced by the new forms of critical theory emerging under the influence of French thought, specifically that of Michel Foucault, who eschewed the grand schemes that underlay the Hegelian Marxism of earlier critical theorists. And so for some decades critical theory, as I understood it, seemed to be something of historical interest and part of a bygone, late modernist age. And then 2020 happened, Black Lives Matter hit the prime-time headlines, critical race theory gripped the popular imagination and every virtue-signaling Twitter warrior felt the need to opine (in 280 characters or less) in support or opposition to critical theory.
In February 2021 I published an essay, “Evangelicals and Race Theory,” in First Things, a journal of religion and public life, reflecting on the appropriation of critical theory, specifically critical race theory, by elements within the evangelical Protestant world. I connected the contemporary debates taking place in America to the earlier work of a group of European thinkers who were connected to what is known as the Frankfurt School — the name given to those involved with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt in the late 1920s.
The early members of the Frankfurt School were entrenched in the Western philosophical tradition. They were familiar with the work of the German idealists Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte, Friedrich
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT A GIVEN CULTURE OR SOCIETY, YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE PHILOSOPHY THAT IT EMBODIES.
Schelling and Georg Hegel. They understood Marxism against this background and had a grasp of the various problems and questions the tradition raised. There is a real irony to advocates of postcolonialism or critical race theory, who criticized my essay, not being aware of this. The notions of historical change, for example, or of political revolution to which they are both beholden are products of this Western thinking. Intellectual expressions of anti-Westernism in the West are deeply indebted to Western patterns of thought and political tastes. Yes, Hegel was by today’s standards a racist and Western chauvinist, but that very critique of Hegel rests upon Hegelian foundations of critical philosophy.
His emphasis upon the historical contingency of thought gave a solid philosophical grounding to the distinction between nature and culture and to the fact that societies
change over time. One might describe him as offering a philosophical account of historical consciousness. That has become a commonplace in modern discourse. We are today familiar with the idea that things change over time, that one cannot simply compare the fourth, the 18th and the 19th centuries without taking account of the wider historical contextual differences between them.
The early critical theorists were not simply more self-conscious (and often more sophisticated) in defining themselves with reference to the broader philosophical tradition; they were also addressing a far more substantial question than many of their heirs and successors today. Marx once cited Hegel as saying that all great historical events occur twice, to which he added the sardonic comment that he failed to realize the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. There is a sense in which I believe the same can be said about critical theory. Its origins lie in attempting to explain the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust and the self-inflicted horror which Europe endured in the 20th century. The big questions continued in the years after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when critical race theory was used to make arguments about the long-standing effects of slavery and Jim Crow in the broader cultural mindset of the United States.
Today, however, critical theorists deploy their skills in defending drag queen story hour, the use of preferred pronouns, and pressing for a more inclusive Oscar ceremony. One might be forgiven for thinking that a school of thought that began as a serious attempt to think through issues of life and death, of what it meant to be human and to be free, and which produced dense articles and thick tomes that drew deeply on profound philosophy has degenerated into an idiom that rather neatly expresses the therapeutic concerns of Western capitalism — often via X — and is frequently put to the service of self-indulgence and manufactured victimhood.
The early categories and claims of critical
theory are to a large extent the intuitions and instincts of the political and cultural discourse of our age. Social relationships are reduced to matters of power and manipulation. Traditional morality is seen as a smoke screen for one group subordinating another. Stereotypes are understood as turning others into objects. And claims to truth are treated with suspicion. We instinctively ask not what is true, but who is making the truth claim and what ulterior motive they have for so doing.
This is why having some grasp of those theoretical foundations is important. To echo Hegel, if you want to know about a given culture or society, you need to understand the philosophy that it embodies. When you do that, you can also come to see the broader significance and deeper implications of patterns of thought and behavior that might otherwise be hidden from view.
WE LIVE IN a world where politics is polarized. We live in a world where powerful personalities on the right and the left have emerged as messianic figures. We live in a world where it is increasingly clear that arguments purporting to be based on science and reason can be used to curtail personal freedom. The entertainment industry is more and more obviously engaged in shaping cultural values and expectations. Consumption of goods has become the purpose of life. And behind all of these lurks that question of what it means to be human, if indeed it means anything at all.
On all these questions and more, the early Frankfurt School has something to say, and in a typically deeper way than their contemporary successors. The relevance of these questions is thus not in doubt. The pressing issue is the extent to which critical theory can be a useful source for answers. Even though the Frankfurt School has insightfully framed questions about the human condition and has legitimate concerns about objectifying persons, it does not offer compelling answers to the anthropological problems that it raises. It is clear on what humanity is not — the alienated individuals
that capitalism has produced. But what humanity is is not so clear. Indeed, at the end what emerges is something akin to Mephistopheles in Goethe’s great drama, “Faust.” Here is how the demon describes himself to Faust:
“I am the spirit that always negates, and rightly so, since everything that comes into existence is only fit to go out of existence and it would be better if nothing ever got started.”
Sadly, this is the impression that critical theory leaves in our minds. It is clear on what is wrong with society — pretty much everything — but it lacks the ability to articulate in clear terms what should replace it. It ultimately offers no vision of what it
ONCE WE STEP BACK FROM PRESSING POLITICAL CONCERNS, IT IS CLEAR THAT THE CRITICAL THEORISTS ARE ALL WRESTLING WITH THE QUESTION OF WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN?
means to be human, whether because (as with the Hegelian Marxists) human nature has yet to be realized or, with the more postmodern critical theorists, it is ultimately a meaningless question.
Therein lies its tragedy.
IF THE APPROACH of critical theory is always to probe behind the constructions of any system of truth to allegedly manipulative cultural structures that naturalize or legitimate such, how can people of faith like myself respond in a manner that is compelling to those tempted by the spirit that negates?
Take the Marxist notion that humanity is something to be realized in the future, where the terms of being a free individual and belonging to a community will be overcome. We can respond by making the claim
that that is already realized in the here and now in how we forgive each other, give ourselves in service and love to each other, and realize here on Earth what a nonalienated human community should look like. When I ask God for forgiveness, when I forgive others, I drop my own claims to power. When I love and serve others regardless of the cultural categories of the world around us, I treat them as persons, as subjects, even as I act as a free subject myself. My actions defy the reifications that the world demands. I respond to the claims of critical theory in ways that far surpass in plausibility and power any book I might care to write in their refutation.
Yes, the critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School saw something important, that humanity was not what it should be. They recognized how the forces of modernity, with its industrialization, its bureaucracies, its exaltation of efficiency, productivity, and profit margins, and its addiction to the cheap products of the culture industry ultimately prevented human beings from being truly free. And religious people surely have no quarrel with the central claims of such analysis.
But they see these things as the result not of bourgeois culture created by capitalism but of human fallenness. Thus, they paradoxically see real hope, not in making Earth into heaven, as the Marxists wished, nor in an endless dethroning of the powerful, but in embodying a little bit of heaven on Earth in their congregations and communities. The challenge to which critical theory therefore summons the faithful is to show, not merely to argue, that they have the answers. Critical theory does not so much provide people of faith with a useful tool to think about the world as clarify a set of questions to which we have the answers already, if only we open our eyes to see them. CARL R.
PARENT TRAP
INSIDE THE RAT RACE RESHAPING FAMILY LIFE
BY MATT FEENEY
In 2013, the admissions department of New York University offered acceptance to 35 percent of its applicants. Eleven years later, the school’s acceptance rate had dropped to 8 percent. Yale’s acceptance rate has hovered on both sides of 4 percent in recent years. Stanford’s acceptance rate has dipped below 4 percent. Harvard’s is right at about 3 percent. Other elite schools boast acceptance rates far down in the single digits. Duke, for example, has offered acceptance to about 5 percent of its most recent batch of applicants.
These numbers signify something not just stressful but ironic, if not absurd, for those applicants and their families. Students applying to these top schools have likely been inside the college admissions process for years. Maybe, on top of summers of math camp and language tutoring, their parents have paid tuition to demanding prep schools. Or maybe, knowing the top schools try not to accept too many prep school kids these days, they’ve strategically sent their child to the public school in their
urban neighborhood, even though they’re kind of rich, and their public school’s kind of a mess. Maybe they’ve hired a private college consultant to tell them what extracurriculars the colleges like. At the very least, they’ve brainstormed about the best,
IN STRIVING TO CONTROL THE FUTURE FOR THEIR CHILDREN, AMERICA’S EAGER, ANXIOUS, SELFEMPOWERED FAMILIES HAVE GIVEN CERTAIN GATE-KEEPING INSTITUTIONS THE POWER TO CONTROL THEM.
most dramatic topics for their admissions essays, and then written and edited and rewritten those essays until they sounded just right — perhaps, again, with the help of a paid consultant.
And then, after all this strategic scheming, all the academic effort and careful curating of a personal profile that will impress admissions departments, they confront odds of admissions success at their preferred school that resemble pure randomness. For families this is both hard to grasp and a little cruel. They’ve worked so hard and rationally to master the elements of a successful life, only to find that the key moment in this process, the crucible everyone’s focused on, is governed by what looks from the outside like college functionaries flipping coins.
This isn’t the only irony, or the deepest one. That colleges, especially elite colleges, govern the fates of American families so arbitrarily, inspire and direct such frantic striving, is a signal and measure of their immense power. The deeper and perhaps darker irony, for today’s ambitious parents, is that this power has been given to these institutions by yesterday’s ambitious parents. In striving to control the future for their children, America’s eager, anxious,
self-empowered families have given certain gate-keeping institutions the power to control them.
This happens at several points during the parenting years. In more affluent ZIP codes, for example, families compete over the scarce openings in prestigious preschools. I document this partly grim, partly comical preschool competition in my book “Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age.” In Manhattan, ambitious, often wealthy and powerful parents find themselves bossed and belittled by the heads of fancy preschools, who — these anxious parents wrongly believe — hold the key to a better life for the few lucky toddlers granted admission to these elite day care centers. Media accounts of such competition tend to blame individual families. We’re accustomed to rolling our eyes at overscheduled kids and, especially, their overcompetitive parents, but the real story is more complicated than this. Over the last 35 years, as parents have become more intentional and vigorous in arming their children to succeed, the institutions they interact with — sensing their own importance to those desperate and pliable parents — have grown more demanding. After all, like families, those institutions are competing with each other. They’re angling for a leg up in their own struggles. Indeed, competition among families fuels the competition among institutions, and vice versa. It’s a fierce dynamic, parallel arms races making each other more costly and exhausting.
PERHAPS THE BEST area of family striving with which to illustrate this dilemma is the stressful system of youth sports, especially sports played through private, competitive clubs. As with other areas of family competition, reporters and analysts resort to lazy tropes and stock villains to diagnose the larger problems. When youth sports appear in your Facebook feed or on the evening news, it’s usually because a bunch of parents started fighting on the sidelines, or a coach has punched a referee. Scholars and writers who set out to explain the
excesses in American youth sports — the expense, the exhausting schedules, the injuries — in broader terms typically settle on a familiar culprit: capitalism. Magazine articles often use the phrase “youth sports industrial complex” to refer to those who run and profit from and supposedly control this system. Sociologist Rick Eckstein, author of “How College Athletics are Hurting Girls’ Sports,” recurs to the broad Marxist assumptions familiar in his discipline. For him, parents “who place too much emphasis on youth sports” are working within the ideological blinders of capitalist society. They’re lost in false consciousness thanks to the beguiling forces of “corporatization, commercialization, and commodification.”
WE’RE ACCUSTOMED TO ROLLING OUR EYES AT OVERSCHEDULED KIDS AND, ESPECIALLY, THEIR OVERCOMPETITIVE PARENTS, BUT THE REAL STORY IS MORE COMPLICATED THAN THIS.
Capitalism probably aggravates things, but it simply doesn’t explain why America’s youth sports are distinctly hard on families, compared to sports in other capitalist countries. In fact, high-level youth sports in Europe are more capitalist, more closely linked to much more powerful forces of “corporatization, commercialization, and commodification” than are American youth sports. The European system is dominated by giant, profit-driven businesses — the clubs that run professional sports teams, such as famous soccer clubs like FC Barcelona and Manchester United FC, which essentially own the sporting futures of the young kids they recruit and sign.
And the central money-making figures in American youth sports do not form, or even resemble, any kind of “industrial complex.”
Instead, the main figures are a decidedly humble lot — towns that build tournament complexes to bring in customers for their struggling businesses, ex-college players who run skill clinics, and the thousands of clubs themselves, which are generally small, independent, nonprofit bodies. The money that families spend on the pricey wares of Nike and Adidas (the main “industrial” actors in this system) is a tiny fraction of what they spend on club fees, tournament travel, and ad hoc skill training through private clinics.
Parents aren’t going overboard with sports involvement because of corporatization or commercialization or whatever. They’re going overboard because of other parents. As a group, sports parents are caught in what political scientists call a “collective action problem.” A family’s involvement in the entangling system of youth sports typically starts with a common, indeed wholesome challenge. Your son is a good athlete who likes soccer, and so he probably wants to play the sport in a serious way. He wants to test himself against real competition. This is entirely natural. It’s an elemental aspect of sports. But once you agree to put him into “competitive” rather than “recreational” soccer, say, you’ll find yourself operating in a sort of arms race. If he really wants to compete, you’ll have to consider not just the several practices a week and those weekend games and distant tournaments, but the extra skill training on nights when he doesn’t have practice. The alternative is him losing playing time, being demoted to a lower team, perhaps being cut altogether. Why choose the “competitive” route only to watch your son go backwards? So, to keep up, you do what you imagine other parents are doing, who are doing what they imagine you’re doing. You might want to blame the competitive clubs at this point, since they’re the ones who set that exhausting pace of practice and travel. But the clubs are in a parallel situation to parents. They’re in an arms race too, competing with each other not just for success on the pitch or court but for players
AS PARENTS HAVE BECOME MORE INTENTIONAL IN ARMING THEIR CHILDREN TO SUCCEED, THE INSTITUTIONS THEY INTERACT WITH — SENSING THEIR OWN IMPORTANCE — HAVE GROWN MORE DEMANDING.
and their paying families. If a competitive club decides to make things a little mellower and less demanding for families, with fewer practices and less travel, they risk losing their most committed players to clubs that are keeping things intense. As with players and their parents, then, the clubs are caught in an arms race, a more-is-more dynamic they can’t opt out of without paying a steep, perhaps fatal price. Sports have always been competitive, of course, but something has changed this competition, so that it matters for larger things, the very life prospects of those who play the games.
That something is college. The valuable sport-related benefits that colleges offer change the meaning and functioning of club sports for both families and the clubs themselves. With scholarships and admissions preferences for their “recruited athletes,” colleges dangle a shiny object for the main figures to compete over — club against club and, especially, family against family. This is not to say that every sports parent is grinding to win a scholarship for their child, or angling to get her into a prestigious college as a recruited athlete. Most parents just want to watch their athletic kids play a sport they’re good at. But it takes only a few high-strung, college-focused parents to set a frantic tempo that everyone else has to dance to, if they want to dance at all.
INDEED, THE IDEA of college drives most forms of over-competitive parenting. Even those Manhattan preschool parents are scheming to get their toddlers into the fanciest day care because they think it means a better shot of admissions to a top college 15 years down the road. But it hasn’t always been this way. It’s only in the last few decades that the idea of college has fueled this exhausting culture of overwrought parenting. In an often-cited 2010 article titled “The Rug Rat Race,” economists Garey and Valerie Ramey document an increase in the intensity of parenting methods starting in the early 1990s. They argue, persuasively, that this increase owes largely to concerns about college. The Rameys cite time-use
surveys showing that the time American parents (especially college-educated parents) spend actively involved with their children began a steady increase in the early 1990s. This increase coincided with a heightened emphasis on college education in the burgeoning “knowledge economy” (and with collapsing industrial employment), and an increased competition for admissions slots in American colleges and universities.
But the economic factor on its own does not explain the increase. Canadian parents were subject to the same economic forces, and the same worries about their children’s futures, as their American counterparts, but their parenting time did not increase. This, the Rameys argue, is because American parents grew focused on and worried about college in ways that Canadian parents did not. They point out that much of the increased parenting time was devoted to helping teenage kids with college-related activities. College had, with apparent suddenness, become an intense and widespread fixation among American parents.
One reason this happened is that, beginning in the 1980s when U.S. News & World Report published its first edition of America’s Best Colleges and the college guide industry took off, knowledge about attractive colleges throughout the nation began to circulate more widely. Status competition over entry to the “best” colleges escaped its traditional habitats, tony prep schools and the public high schools of old-money suburbs, and the competitive market for college placement went national. An increasing number of middle-class, middle-American kids began looking beyond their good-enough state universities and started aiming for the best school they could get into, anywhere in the country. This is borne out by college application numbers, which began their steep ascent in the early ’90s, as more kids, much better informed about America’s many lovely and storied colleges than were earlier generations, began submitting more applications to more schools in more states than ever before.
WHO YOUR CHILD IS MATTERS MORE TO HER FUTURE INCOME THAN WHERE SHE GOES TO COLLEGE.
But still, why America and not Canada? One reason is that, in Canada, students generally don’t compete to get into the “best college.” They compete to get into the most desirable programs within individual colleges and universities. So the most direct competition among Canadian students happens in college. In the U.S., it happens in high school, if not earlier, when anxious parents can devote their greater resources and wherewithal to making their children’s chances better, and, inadvertently, to making the culture of American parenting worse.
Another reason is that the highest-profile universities in Canada are simply much larger than America’s most prestigious schools. Where America’s iconic Harvard and Yale each have fewer than 7,000 undergraduates, the University of Toronto had nearly 80,000 and the University of British Columbia nearly 60,000. America’s elite liberal arts colleges are even tinier. Swarthmore, for example, is fairly typical with its 1,600 students. The perception of exclusivity, arising from both their small size and their extremely low acceptance rates, gives these American colleges inflated meaning as status signifiers. There’s not so much to brag about in having your kid join the army of 15,000 freshmen marching into the University of British Columbia, but if he’s one of the 400 kids who slipped through the magic keyhole that leads to Swarthmore, that new college bumper sticker that just went on your Tesla is going to win some wonderful double-takes from your jealous neighbors. America’s abundance of college choices (we have about 2,800 four-year colleges in this country) might seem to offer some relief, a nice menu of distinctive choices to ease the competitive stress. But the public rankings, and the competitive focus of decades of teenagers, have turned this array of colleges into a single hierarchy that everyone recognizes. For teenagers seeking the best college placement, it functions as one big sorting mechanism. America’s sheer number of precisely ranked colleges makes the ones at the top seem that much more desirable, and so,
ironically, this numerical abundance actually intensifies the competition.
As with club sports, commentators tend to see problems in the college admissions process as if they simply result from parents and kids going crazy on their own. Almost no one turns a suspicious look to the people who actually design the process: the admissions deans of prestigious schools. In their specific behaviors, those overcompetitive parents and kids are largely responding to incentives generated by this process. Indeed, with their exacting and personalized requirements, admissions people actually encourage overwrought college admissions behavior. And when parental scheming gets so bad it hits the evening news, such as the episode of celebrity cheating known as the Varsity Blues scandal, this actually benefits the better schools, because it makes them look even more desirable.
Colleges encourage this pathological competition in other ways. They make a yearly pageant of publicizing their low admissions rates, which sends fresh waves of anxiety through upcoming classes of applicants, driving those applicants to apply to even more schools. And, through a practice known as “Recruit to Deny,” they encourage applications from kids they know they’re going to reject, to pump up their application numbers and drive down their acceptance rates even further.
One crucial aspect of this overheated process that commentators reliably ignore is how much personal, intimate power it gives to those admissions departments. A good way to grasp this power is to look at the evolution of their selection procedures in recent decades, especially on the “character” parts of the application, the essays and extracurriculars. Until the 1990s, colleges typically sought out “well-rounded” applicants, which allowed those colleges to claim their admissions procedures have a moral dimension. “Well-rounded” applicants were the kids who played some sports or did some admirable volunteering, in addition to having high grades and test scores. Along with the propaganda
boost the “character” side of the application gave colleges, it also helped solve an administrative problem. Extracurriculars gave them a way to see their applicants better, to distinguish between otherwise similar kids. That is, they could break a tie between applicants with the same grades and test scores. In other words, by competing to distinguish themselves from each other on things like extracurriculars, applicants were doing the work of admissions departments for them.
But, starting in the early 1990s, admissions competition turned into a sort of self-aware system, with savvy kids knowing what the other savvy kids were doing, and trying to outcompete those other kids by having more extracurriculars, being more well-rounded. This exacerbated the administrative problem it originally solved, because all those grinding kids with their redundant extracurriculars began to look too much alike. At the same time, the obvious résumé-padding started making the moral pretensions of admissions departments look hollow and ridiculous.
Admissions people are under the curious impression that they earned this leverage, that they are some sort of anointed clerisy who deserve their moral influence and are righteous in using it on the malleable selves of their teenage applicants. In fact, it merely accrued to them over time, as college competition among teenagers and their families grew according to its own inner logic of fear and worry.
THIS IS THE hidden price of family competition in America, the power over families it cedes to gate-keeping organizations and institutions that administer this contest. New parents begin the delightful, rewarding process of raising a family and, not long after, aware of what other parents are doing, they start asking themselves what they’ll have to do to keep up. They’ll learn that, if they really want to compete with their most determined peers, they’ll have to conform to the demands of surprisingly bossy coaches, college bureaucrats, and other functionaries
who sit at the margins of the parental arms race and profit from it.
This dynamic is frustrating to observe because it’s the very people whose lives it distorts — parents and families — who keep it going. This is how arms races work. They are hard to stop as systems because they’re hard to escape for individuals. No one caught up in them thinks they can opt out unless everyone else agrees to opt out.
But there are a few ways in which parents can stop thinking in arms race terms and feel OK about it. The main one is to realize that they may be overestimating the importance of college placement. In a famous pair of studies, economists Stacy Dale and the late Alan Krueger showed that the link between college placement and future income
PARENTS
AREN’T GOING OVERBOARD WITH SPORTS INVOLVEMENT BECAUSE OF CORPORATIZATION OR COMMERCIALIZATION. THEY’RE GOING OVERBOARD BECAUSE OF OTHER PARENTS.
is much smaller than is commonly thought. For example, the difference in income between someone who graduates from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, and someone who got into UPenn but attended Penn State, is negligible. I like to put the lesson of these studies in this way: Who your child is matters more to her future income than where she goes. So raise a good kid who’s willing to work and likes to learn, because those are good qualities in themselves, and stop stressing about the different rungs on the ladder of college prestige. And once parents put the matter of college in a mellower light, they might take a more relaxed view of all the earlier moments in their children’s lives that supposedly have grave future importance for college placement.
The institutions are probably a harder case, because, in many cases, their very purposes have been transformed by competition among families for the benefits they dispense. College admissions departments, for example, have so wrapped themselves in their vain moral projects that it’s hard to imagine them becoming less presumptuous and demanding on their own. But there are other things colleges might do to reduce their long unhealthy influence on family life. The most important would be to stop offering scholarships and admissions benefits to their recruited athletes. It is surely too much to ask Ohio State to shut down its highly profitable football “program,” but what about “nonrevenue” sports? Colleges might be persuaded to drop scholarships and admissions benefits for sports like soccer, volleyball, lacrosse and fencing. After all, these programs don’t make money for the schools. Severing them from the admissions process would depressurize the competitive club system for kids and families. And it would have the added benefit of deprofessionalizing the majority of intercollegiate sports, turning them into real student activities rather than staged competitions between squads of paid ringers.
Other changes are already happening. I’ve begun hearing about sports clubs that, in an effort to win over weary parents, are cutting back on the most perverse and burdensome aspect of participation in competitive sports: tournaments. Everyone complains about how they and their kids have to drive or fly hundreds of miles for weekend tournaments, all the time. So some clubs, at least, are getting the message. This might be a sign something’s changing, that enough parents are finally fed up, that we’re ready to exit the arms race of family competition out of sheer exhaustion, and from a simple desire to have our families back. MATT FEENEY IS A WRITER AND THE AUTHOR OF “LITTLE PLATOONS: A DEFENSE OF FAMILY IN A COMPETITIVE AGE,” FROM WHICH THIS ESSAY WAS ADAPTED.
CUCINA CON AMORE
BY JOE MAROTTA
My mother would start her tomato sauce on Saturday night for Sunday dinner. First she would sauté the garlic in olive oil until it was barely golden (low heat, don’t let it burn!). Then she would add plum tomatoes fresh from the garden — or, if it was winter, tomatoes from the garden that she had canned for this purpose — crushed with her own hands. After it had simmered for 30 minutes, she would add fresh cut basil. That’s it. Let it simmer for two hours. Oh, the anticipation!
I still remember the first time I experienced that fragrance of garlic, tomato and basil filling the air in our house when I was a child. After two hours I was allowed to ladle the sauce on a piece of crusty Italian bread and grate some fresh Parmigiano on top. The bread was my grandmother’s, still the best I’ve ever had. The result was absolute heaven at 10 p.m.
The next morning, my mother would
fry meatballs and sausage and add them to the sauce. Another two hours of simmering. That would be the first course at Sunday dinner, served over pasta. The second would be roast chicken, made with
WAS IT WORTH IT, ALL THAT DRIVING, TO SPEND TWO HOURS EATING UNDER THE SHADE OF TREES THAT WERE CENTURIES OLD? ABSOLUTELY!
lemon, oregano, salt and pepper, along with oven-roasted potatoes and a vegetable, usually spinach with lemon and garlic, or sautéed zucchini, all followed by a green salad. That was every Sunday, though each
week would bring different pastas, and different meat or fish dishes. No exceptions. Every Sunday, that is, unless we went on a family outing. This was always an adventure, and always stressful, since there was no actual destination. My father would start driving on an established highway near our home in upstate New York, which would make me think, “Oh, we’re going to Saratoga State Park,” or, “We’re in the Adirondacks, we must be heading to Lake Placid.” That assurance would soon give way to anxiety as he veered off on some poorly maintained, ever-diminishing two-lane road. Ignoring my mother’s protestations, he’d continue until we were on a gravel track that often reached a dead end. And that was where we’d have our picnic, placing the blanket under the shade of red spruce and white pine trees.
When my older brother opened the trunk, and the smell of roast chicken and
LEARNING TO LOVE FOOD AGAIN
FOOD, AND ESPECIALLY SHARED FOOD, HAS A WAY OF RESETTING THE BALANCE OF LIFE, NO MATTER WHAT CAME BEFORE.
ravioli in tomato sauce filled my nostrils, all my anxiety would disappear, for there was Sunday dinner, and all was right with the world! After eating, we would walk — our émigré’s version of Italy’s after-dinner passeggiata — discovering a small part of the world that we didn’t know before. Was it worth it, all that driving, to spend two hours eating under the shade of trees that were centuries old? Maybe having to change a flat tire along the way? Absolutely!
FOOD, AND ESPECIALLY shared food, has a way of resetting the balance of life, no matter what came before, whether it was a bad day at work, an argument, or a loss in an after-school baseball game. A family or group of friends or both, sitting around a common table, or just two people sitting on a blanket in the local park, eating and drinking and engaged in conversation. Whatever the occasion, from an everyday supper to holiday dinner, food helps bind us together, forming a collective memory. If more of us shared a table, maybe we’d learn to understand each other a little better.
Writers and other artists have long understood this human connection with what we eat. We know that ancient Egyptians broke bread and ate roast oxen at large banquets where flower-scented fat was burned to perfume the air and fend off insects, because these events are depicted in their paintings. We know in meticulous detail how ancient Israelites prepared certain meals and avoided other foods because their customs are recorded in the Old Testament. From Greek epic poetry to Renaissance paintings and the studied descriptions of food in the work of Ernest Hemingway or the ecstatic alternatives from Marcel Proust, we have an extensive catalog to help us see how food was experienced in different ages of humanity.
Earlier this year, I saw a movie called “The Taste of Things,” a love story between two people that is also about the love of food, and the part food plays in our lives, romantic and otherwise. The main character is a chef, played by the French
actress Juliet Binoche. To open the film, she spends 38 minutes cooking on screen, amid steam rising from simmering pots, chicken roasting in the oven, with only the sounds of the kitchen and no interfering music soundtrack. You can almost smell those fragrances and taste the dinner as it’s plated.
These experiences feel almost exotic in today’s America. Constantly rushing from one urgent task to the next, we hardly have time to spend hours in a kitchen or sit with a loved one savoring a slow meal. My grandmother would be horrified by the concept of a Hot Pocket, a glob of something like bread stuffed with something like meat and tomato sauce prepared in 90 seconds in the microwave, though this is far more representative of how we eat today. But traditional cultures from Latin America to the Middle East still revolve around shared meals.
SITTING IN AN Italian restaurant with a friend, I am reminded of my mother’s kitchen. The air is filled with familiar fragrances: tomatoes, basil, garlic, mushrooms, roast meats, oregano, baked bread. We order an appetizer and two pasta dishes: bucatini amatriciana and pesto alla Genovese. Though the atmosphere is enjoyable, with friendly service, soft lighting and just the right amount of ambient conversation, I am transported.
The bucatini — a long noodle similar to spaghetti, with a thick coating of tomatoes and pancetta, which is similar to bacon — reminds me of thousands of meals prepared by my mother and both grandmothers. The mingled flavors of the pesto — a dense green sauce that combines Parmigiano and pecorino cheeses, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and fresh basil — activate my senses and carry me back to an intimate trattoria I visited in the town of Ventimiglia, where I was visiting my uncle. This is the way food should be, and used to be, presented.
I commented to my friend, who many years ago owned an excellent restaurant
that served the best pesto alla Genovese in Salt Lake City, that the pesto was good. He tasted it, savored it, smiled and said, “Pesto should taste like spring.”
When you’re Italian in a town where that’s not so common, you tend to know a lot of restaurateurs. Like Valter Nassi, may he rest in peace. The late owner of Valter’s Osteria, he moved in across the hall from my condominium on South Temple Street in 2008. When he opened his restaurant, he would often invite me to have dinner with him later in the evening, when most of the customers had left. Valter would go into the kitchen, speak to the chef and soon multiple courses of dishes not on the menu would arrive at the table.
This would occur a few times a week, but there were other nights when Valter would show up at my apartment late, around midnight, and knock on my door. “Have you eaten?” he would ask. Of course, being the owner of a very successful restaurant, with a well-stocked kitchen, he had nothing at home to cook! So I would prepare a pasta dish, make a plate of cheese, olives and cured meats and we would dine together while watching Vittorio de Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” (Lardi di Biciclette) at 1 o’clock in the morning. This became a weekly event, so I kept my supplies well stocked.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED to our food and dining experiences? My grandparents and parents kept urban gardens of vegetables and fruits that we ate from and preserved to eat in winter. The grocery stores back then carried locally grown, in-season produce. Fruit didn’t come in a plastic container, shipped from Mexico or South America, where it was picked too early to endure a lengthy journey. Because of that process, today’s fruits and vegetables lack flavor and nutrient value. This change became noticeable to me back in the 1970s.
That same decade gave us a massive expansion of fast, cheap, convenient food and drive-thru franchises like McDonald’s and Taco Bell. These developments have altered our relationships with food, though I
held out for quite some time. It wasn’t that many years ago when I first drove through a Wendy’s, ordering a cheeseburger with fries at a brightly lit sign equipped with a microphone and speaker and driving away minutes later, eating the fries at the first stoplight. A very long way from that family picnic of my childhood.
Someone else recognized these shifts and decided to do something about it. Alice Waters pretty much started the slow food, farm-to-table movement. While at UC Berkeley, she spent time in France on study abroad, where she first experienced food that was grown organically, sold at local farmers markets and prepared seasonally.
“MOST PEOPLE HAVE BEEN DEPRIVED OF THAT EXPERIENCE, BUT WHEN YOU GIVE THEM SOMETHING SPECIAL — LIKE A RIPE PEAR OR A WARM LOAF OF WHOLE-GRAIN BREAD FRESH OUT OF THE OVEN — IT CAN BE DEEPLY EMOTIONAL.”
“I learned that our senses are the pathways into our minds — smelling, tasting, looking carefully, listening,” she writes. “Food encompasses all of that.”
She brought this culture back with her and soon opened her restaurant Chez Panisse (1971), a Bay Area landmark that is still recognized as one of the country’s best dining experiences. “Most people have been deprived of that experience, but when you give them something special — like a ripe pear or a warm loaf of whole-grain bread fresh out of the oven — it can be deeply emotional.”
I TRY TO live that way whenever I can. I go to the farmers market in summer and
the winter market in the cold months for fresh produce grown locally in greenhouses. These may not rival the open markets of Paris, or the Mercado do Balhao in Porto, or that market in Ventimiglia where I bought fresh figs with my uncle, but still there is a bounty to be had. Oh, those fresh picked tomatoes in late summer! And the peaches of late August and early September! Attesting to their quality, the lines at the peach stands are long. Get there early. The fragrance, the experience of biting into a juicy, sweet peach fresh off the tree. Take your time. Savor it.
I agree with the writer/chef Marcella Hazan that cooking is a deeply emotional, physical act, from the selection of produce, fish and meat to the preparation in the kitchen and the presentation at the table. What am I having for dinner tonight? Well, I have some fresh arugula from Saturday’s market that I can pair with some thin sliced Prosciutto di Parma. I have picked some basil from my small garden and will make Trofie pasta with pesto. And take a short walk through the neighborhood afterward. The clouds are breaking up and there is a full moon.
As I walk, I often think again of my grandmother. For her, cooking was even more than all that. It was a spiritual experience. She baked bread twice a week until she was 85 years old and taught me how to do it. When I moved to Utah, I decided to make a loaf of her Italian bread. It was OK, but not as good as hers. She drilled me about every step.
“Did you let the dough rise and punch it down twice?”
Yes.
“Did you have the oven temperature at 325 degrees?”
Yes.
“Did you cut diagonal slits in the top just before baking?”
Yes. None of this made a difference. She paused. “Did you say a prayer over the bread before you put it in the oven?”
No, I did not.
“Ah, well now you know.”
AGAINST THE GRIND
BY ETHAN BAUER
You might overlook the paragon of craftsmanship nestled in my kitchen cabinet. This ancient device waits among bottles of cooking oil, canned goods and other products of industry, until I pull it down every other day. Look closer at this ordinary sheet of stainless steel folded into an oblong box, tapered at the top and hollow like a silvery cowbell. Its edges are rounded to protect delicate fingers, while an array of slits and holes on its various faces are meant to slice, grind, grate or otherwise reduce solid objects to smaller shapes.
Graters have existed for millennia. A bronze iteration is even used to shred goat cheese during an ancient Greek ritual in “The Iliad,” Homer’s epic poem about the siege of Troy. The modern form emerged in France in the mid-1500s, designed to show the masses how to enjoy hard cheeses, which were more abundant at the time. Today, my box grater helps me by converting blocks of cheese into forms that are more useful for certain recipes. But using it is also a kind of ritual, a thoughtful respite from the constant hustle of futuristic convenience.
The steel pings against a metal mixing bowl. I snip open a brick of sharp cheddar and the smell cuts across time, from my dad slicing a bar of white Cracker Barrel, to me following my nose and asking for a slice. That’s as far as he usually got, eating the squares or cleaving them finer for a batch of grits, but I’ve got elbow noodles
bubbling on the stove. I turn the grater by its red plastic handle to the largest set of “teeth” — sconced above rows of irritating little spikes meant for zesting oranges or powdering spices — because mac and cheese does not call for precision. I’m an adult now. I cook what I want.
I rub the rubbery orange brick against steel, up and down, side to side, watching it slowly disappear until it’s gone. I repeat with a wheel of Gouda, then another block of cheddar, this one white, dry and flaky. Sometimes I buy whole bags of shredded cheese, little strings of milk and acid and time, powdered with sawdust to prevent clustering — but not if I can help it. I’d rather get closer to what I eat, to feel greasy remnants on my fingers like the Play-Doh of my childhood, back when I molded clay sculptures that didn’t have to look right. It was about the process. About staying present when screens begged for my attention. Big Parma would have you believe that cheese should be one more optimized, accessible, prefabricated product. A box grater says otherwise. And so do I.
Soon I’ll melt the gratings into a smooth roux amid bursts of steam on the stovetop. I’ll stir in the noodles, and add salt, pepper and garlic. I’ll eat one bowl and then another, certain it tastes better for my grating. But for now, I claw for a few wayward strands in the grater’s underbelly, each jagged, wild and perfect, and heap them into my mouth.
ODE TO A CHEESE GRATER
NOMAD
BY SAMYAK SHERTOK
Landlocked one leg, one leg seaborne; halved by double consciousness; native of no man’s land; son of the wild honey hunter who shops syrup at Smith’s; untranslationhaunted; I write of Mother in my not-mother tongue…
On my window, Apa appears alive: “Siddhartha left the palace to be reborn under the bodhi. Lotus is mud moon rain. Breathed lip to lip, every story is nomadic.”
Migrate from migrāre: to pass into a new condition. But what form could release the one born in bondage: Nativus — a native of a foreign land?
A bird of passage, a pilgrim — a peregrine — I will fly, nostalgic for root — nostos: return home, algos: pain.
/
Uprooted route? Algos: pain, nostos: return home. Nostalgic, the pilgrim flies, how, a peregrine home.
Stray bird to sage, illegible to illegal, passage to blank page… What more forms must the monk suffer to form one home?
Migraines, sleepwalking, faints, amnesia, breathless breaths… But no medic arrives to mouth-breathe on his new condition: Home.
Show us, O Awakened One, who picked thorn over throne, how the lotus remains, in mud, in monsoon, in moon, home.
Apa believed in the window, the sun on the other side. I write to my mother in a ghost tongue The haunt is on: Home!
Wild honey hunter who shoplifts bees at Smith’s? Mistranslation of the imagined fatherland: Forgive son, Home.
Home, alive, valley of fireflies, doubled by each half-light — Sea landlocked, land seaborne; reborn, a burning: home.
VALLEY OF THE GODS, UTAH | PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTIN PEDERSEN
