PULITZER SCHMULITZER!

The Definitive Ranking of Pulitzer Prize Winning Novels

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  • Rabbit at Rest (1991): What Sad Teenage Girl Music Taught Me About Getting Older

    Last week, I took Macy to see Phoebe Bridgers and had two realizations that initially seemed unrelated. The first concerned Phoebe Bridgers herself. I consider myself reasonably attuned to popular culture, particularly music. I go to a lot of concerts. I still seek out new bands.

    That said, I do recognize that I can’t keep track of every new artist Macy is listening to at every given moment, and she has introduced me to artists I didn’t know before. Usually, though, they have been relatively new performers with relatively small followings, such as Girl in Red or Cavetown. So when she suggested we go see Phoebe Bridgers, I wasn’t especially surprised that I had never heard of her.

    Then I went to buy tickets.

    Phoebe Bridgers was not playing some charming little club or smaller venue. She was playing the Chase Center, an arena that holds over 19,000 people. Even more surprising, she had sold it out for two nights. Somehow, an artist could attract nearly 40,000 people in my own city and remain entirely outside my field of vision.

    When I mentioned this to Macy, she wasn’t particularly concerned because, as she explained, Phoebe Bridgers makes “sad teenage girl music.” In fairness, Macy believes there is a sad teenage girl living somewhere inside me, a diagnosis supported by my enduring affection for Dawson’s Creek, the original Beverly Hills, 90210, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and any television drama in which attractive young people stare meaningfully at one another while an indie song plays in the background. By that logic, Phoebe Bridgers should have found me years ago.

    Still, the experience was unsettling. I had assumed that while I might not know every new artist, I at least understood the general boundaries of the culture. Phoebe Bridgers had apparently built an enormous musical world just beyond them.

    When I was younger, keeping up with new music felt possible. I knew which albums had been released, which bands mattered, and which songs everyone was listening to. Now the culture is too large and moves too quickly. Thousands of new songs appear every day, delivered by algorithms that know precisely which parts of the world to show us and, perhaps more importantly, which parts to conceal. The fact that I had never heard of Phoebe was one sign that new music no longer reaches me automatically.

    There is a related change that is harder to explain: new music no longer speaks to me in quite the same way. I still love music, but I miss those young adult years when the lyrics of a song could feel as though they had been written specifically for me. I see that experience now in Macy. She can tear up listening to a song because the words capture exactly what she is feeling. Somehow, she also seems to know those words almost immediately.

    I rarely know the lyrics to new songs anymore, although I can still sing every word to every song on Led Zeppelin III. I would like to blame the singers for mumbling. A less comforting possibility is that my hearing is getting worse. The words I learned when I was young remain permanently embedded in my brain, while new lyrics reach me as sounds I can hear but words I can’t retain. The music is still out there, but it now takes more effort for me to find it and, once found, more effort to understand what anyone is saying.

    The second realization came at the concert itself.

    Phoebe Bridgers has a no-phone policy. When we entered the arena, everyone had to place their phone, smartwatch, and other electronic devices into a pouch that was magnetically locked. You carried the pouch with you, but you could not open it until the concert was over.

    The idea had seemed mildly alarming ahead of time. We have very little unoccupied time anymore because we fill nearly every pause by looking at our phones. Standing in line, waiting for someone to return from the restroom, or sitting through the gap between an opening act and the main performer all become opportunities to scroll. Macy is no different, so the prospect of both of us spending several hours with no way to fill the dead space seemed strangely daunting.

    Once the show began, however, the absence of phones was wonderful. No one was filming. No one was checking Instagram. No one was staring at a screen while the person they had paid to see performed directly in front of them. We were all forced to pay attention to the same thing at the same time. I also discovered that a concert arena is surprisingly dark when 19,000 people are not holding glowing rectangles in front of their faces.

    It felt strange at first, and then peaceful. For a few hours, I had no idea what was happening anywhere else in the world. I couldn’t monitor the news, check Arsenal’s injury list, or respond to an email whose sender had almost certainly survived the previous two hours without me. All I could do was stand beside Macy and listen.

    Only later, reflecting on the evening, did the two realizations begin to seem connected. First, I had discovered that an enormous part of the world had been proceeding without my knowledge. Then I had discovered that, for a few hours, I didn’t need to know what the rest of the world was doing.

    John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom would have understood the first realization.

    He might have benefited from the second.

    “The end is here”

    – Phoebe Bridgers, “I Know the End” (2020)

    Rabbit at Rest, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1991, is the fourth and final full-length novel in John Updike’s series about Harry Angstrom. Updike first introduced Harry in Rabbit, Run in 1960. Harry was twenty-six, married, the father of a young son, and still clinging to his brief high school glory as a basketball star. Unable to tolerate the constraints of adulthood, he did what would become his defining act: he ran away.

    Updike returned to him once every decade. In Rabbit Redux, Harry confronted the upheavals of the late 1960s. In Rabbit Is Rich, which also won the Pulitzer Prize, he became a prosperous Toyota dealer navigating the end of the 1970s. By Rabbit at Rest, Harry is fifty-five, overweight, semi-retired, and suffering from heart disease. He divides his time between his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania, and a condominium in Florida.

    Updike wrote Harry across more than thirty years, allowing him to age alongside the country. Through Harry, we see postwar optimism, racial conflict, sexual liberation, oil shortages, consumer abundance, the Reagan years, AIDS, debt, drugs, television, fast food, and the growing suspicion that America’s most confident years might be behind it.

    By the time we get to Rabbit at Rest, Harry has benefited enormously from that America. He has money, a Florida condo, a golf club, a comfortable car, and enough leisure time to complain about all of them. But he no longer feels central to the world around him. His son, Nelson, runs the family dealership. His wife, Janice, begins taking classes and building a life that does not revolve around him. The culture is changing, and Harry increasingly experiences it from the sidelines.

    And he watches a great deal of television. Television gives Harry the sensation of remaining connected to everything. He follows sports, news, commercials, disasters, politics, and the endless stream of images passing through American life. He possesses a remarkable quantity of information, but very little of it helps him understand his family or himself.

    Harry’s body is sending information too, and he is equally determined to ignore that. Early in the novel, he experiences chest pains while boating with his granddaughter. Doctors tell him that his arteries are blocked and warn him to change his diet. Harry responds in the manner of many people who receive clear medical instructions: he treats them as the opening position in a negotiation. He continues eating salty snacks and fatty foods. He resents the limitations imposed upon him. He understands that his body is deteriorating but cannot quite accept that the rules should apply to him.

    At the same time, the family business is collapsing. Nelson has developed a cocaine addiction and has been stealing money from the dealership. Harry has always regarded Nelson as weak and disappointing, yet much of Nelson’s anger can be traced to growing up beneath Harry’s judgment. Harry sees his son’s failures clearly. His own role in creating them remains harder to detect.

    Nelson enters treatment, but the damage is already substantial. The Toyota franchise is lost, taking with it the business that funded Harry’s comfortable life and gave the Angstrom family its place in the community. As his family and finances unravel, Harry falls back on the strategy he has relied upon throughout the series: he looks elsewhere for excitement and reassurance rather than confronting his own role in the destruction around him.

    Eventually, Harry runs again. He drives alone to Florida, where, despite his damaged heart and his doctor’s warnings, he joins a group of young men playing basketball. For a moment, he becomes the person he once was and makes one final shot. Then his heart gives out.

    “I hate you for what you did”

    – Phoebe Bridgers, “Motion Sickness (2017)

    Harry Angstrom is not a particularly admirable man. He is selfish, prejudiced, lustful, dismissive of his wife, cruel to his son, and astonishingly skilled at explaining why his own appetites are someone else’s fault. At times, spending more than five hundred pages inside his head can be exhausting.

    Yet Updike makes Harry difficult to dismiss because his weaknesses are exaggerated versions of familiar ones. Harry wants the world to remain recognizable. He wants his body to keep working as it did when he was eighteen. He wants his wife and son to remain in the roles he has assigned them. He wants America to feel like the country in which he once knew his place. When reality refuses to cooperate, he experiences change as a personal betrayal.

    What I felt when I discovered Phoebe Bridgers was a much smaller and less dramatic version of Harry’s realization. I had not consciously believed that I knew every musician in America. But some part of me apparently believed that anyone capable of selling out the Chase Center twice would at least have crossed my radar. The size of her audience became evidence not simply of her popularity, but of my own diminishing cultural jurisdiction.

    The realization was not exactly that I had become old, although the evidence supporting that conclusion was becoming harder to dismiss. It was that I was no longer standing at the point where the culture naturally passed in front of me.

    When you are young, popular culture comes looking for you. Music, movies, fashion, slang, and technology all compete for your attention because you are the audience everyone wants. As you get older, you can still participate, but participation requires more effort. Eventually, entire cultural movements can unfold without ever entering your particular line of sight.

    Harry feels something similar throughout Rabbit at Rest. America is still everywhere around him, but it is no longer necessarily his America. The Japanese company Toyota controls the fate of the family dealership. His wife is developing ambitions that do not include serving him lunch. His son’s addictions belong to a world Harry does not understand. Even basketball, the one arena in which Harry once felt entirely at home, now belongs to younger bodies.

    The world has not disappeared. It has simply stopped consulting him.

    “And when I grow up, I’m going to look up / From my phone and see my life”

    – Phoebe Bridgers, “Garden Song” (2020)

    Harry responds to this loss of centrality by consuming more. He eats. He shops. He watches television. He absorbs news and sports and advertising. He keeps taking in information because information creates the feeling of involvement. If he knows what is happening, perhaps he still matters.

    Updike draws a connection between Harry’s physical diet and his mental one. His heart is clogged by decades of overconsumption, while his mind is crowded with television images, commercials, headlines, statistics, and half-formed opinions. He is overfed in every possible sense and nourished by almost none of it. That may be the most contemporary aspect of a novel published before smartphones existed.

    Our phones promise to connect us to everything. At any moment, we can know the score of a game being played three thousand miles away, the latest political outrage, the temperature in London, the relationship status of someone we have not spoken to since college, and which actor from a television show in 1987 has recently died. This information is not useless. Some of it is important. But the ability to know what is happening everywhere can make it surprisingly difficult to notice what is happening directly in front of us.

    At the concert, I initially experienced the locked phone pouch as deprivation. The device was still physically in my possession, but I could not reach it. For the first few minutes, I was acutely aware of all the things I might be missing. Then that feeling passed.

    Without the option of looking elsewhere, I looked at the stage. I listened more carefully. I watched Macy watching Phoebe. I noticed the crowd and the lighting and the unusual darkness of the arena. The world became smaller, but the smaller world became more vivid.

    Harry spends much of Rabbit at Rest watching life. He watches television, watches his family, watches the country change, and watches his own body fail. But watching is not the same as paying attention. He receives endless information without acquiring much understanding.

    That is why his final basketball game matters. For once, there is no mediation. Harry is not watching basketball on television or remembering his high school career. He is on the court. His body is failing, but he is fully present inside it. The moment destroys him, yet it also briefly restores him.

    I am not suggesting that putting my phone in a locked pouch was the equivalent of Harry Angstrom’s fatal return to the basketball court. For one thing, I survived the encore. But both experiences raise the same uncomfortable question: How much of life do we spend monitoring instead of living?

    Harry’s problem is not merely that he has spent too much of his life watching. He is also beginning to understand that the world is gradually turning its attention elsewhere. His children and grandchildren will inherit it, although they will not experience it as an inheritance. To them, it will simply be the world.

    That is part of what children eventually teach their parents. When they are young, we introduce them to music, movies, sports, cities, food, books, and everything else we have decided matters. For years, we serve as their guides. Then, almost imperceptibly, the direction reverses.

    Macy introduces me to artists I have never heard of. She knows the language of a culture I encounter mostly as a visitor and can learn the words to a new song while I am still trying to determine what the singer said in the first verse. Harry experiences the rising generation as evidence of his own decline. I am trying to see it as a gift. The world may be moving beyond the boundaries of what I know, but Macy can still invite me into it.

    That is what happened at the Chase Center. I entered knowing almost nothing about Phoebe Bridgers. I left understanding why 19,000 people wanted to be there, even if I still couldn’t repeat most of the lyrics.

    More importantly, I got to experience it beside Macy.

    “Don’t be a stranger”

    – Phoebe Bridgers, “Scott Street (2017)

    At the end of Rabbit at Rest, Harry lies in a hospital bed after his final heart attack. Nelson comes to see him. Their relationship has been filled with disappointment, resentment, competition, and cruelty, much of it created by Harry himself. Yet Harry manages one final expression of approval. It cannot undo the years that came before it, but it gives father and son a small moment of connection after a lifetime of failing to understand one another.

    Harry’s tragedy is not simply that he grows old or dies. It is that he spends so much of his life looking for evidence that he still matters that he repeatedly overlooks the people to whom he actually matters.

    The world is getting too large for me to know all of it. New artists will become famous without my noticing. New words will enter the language without asking my permission. I can respond by watching more, scrolling more, and trying frantically to keep up. Or I can occasionally allow the world to grow smaller.

    For a few hours at the Chase Center, the world consisted of a dark arena, a singer I had only recently heard of, and my daughter standing beside me. I did not know the score. I did not know who had emailed. I didn’t even know most of the words.

    But I was there.

  • Gilead (2005): The Journal I Didn’t Keep

    In December 2007, I started keeping a journal. Calling it a journal may be slightly generous. A journal suggests consistency, discipline, and perhaps the purchase of an attractive leather-bound notebook. What I created was a Google document into which I occasionally typed something before forgetting that it existed.

    For the first few weeks, I was surprisingly diligent. I started on Christmas Eve and wrote almost every day through the following January. Then I stopped. Twenty months later, I returned for a handful of entries in 2009, followed by a few more in 2010 and 2011. By the end, the gaps had become the journal’s most consistent feature.

    I recently discovered the journal again. By “discovered,” I mean that I found it sitting exactly where I had left it, safely stored in the cloud and patiently waiting for me to remember that it existed. I began reading and was immediately fascinated.

    Some of the entries recorded events I still remembered. The Giants winning the 2010 World Series. Traveling to London and Paris over the holidays. Seeing Tiger Woods play at Harding Park in the President’s Cup. These were the kinds of occasions that seemed worthy of being written down. But they weren’t the entries I liked best.

    The ones I loved were about things I had completely forgotten.

    “Most of it’s just whining, but every so often there’ll be something I can use later: a joke, a description, a quote.”

    – David Sedaris

    On Christmas Eve in 2007, we checked the NORAD Santa Tracker during dinner. Santa was somewhere in Canada. Seven-year-old Sam studied the route and immediately announced, “We need to go. We need to get to sleep. Now.” I assured him that we still had time because Santa appeared to be traveling north and south and presumably still had to cover Mexico.

    The following morning, Sam woke up before me and carefully measured every present under the tree in an effort to determine what was inside. He correctly concluded that none of the packages was large enough to contain the Nintendo DS he wanted. This concerned him.

    A few days later, Sam offered what I described as “the quote of the year.” He was discussing the 307 foot tall Campanile tower at Berkeley and his fear of looking over the edge.

    “There are just some things you shouldn’t do until you’re twenty,” he said. “And have a parachute.”

    As for Lily, one night, she read me a story about Sammy the Seal. Another night, she asked for “a little lay” when she wanted someone to lie beside her before she went to sleep. When we went sledding, I placed her saucer on top of an inner tube and gave it a push. The inner tube stopped almost immediately. The saucer did not. Lily went flying down the hill and later declared it her favorite part of the day.

    These moments had been gone from my memory. I didn’t recognize them until I read them, and then suddenly I could see everything again: the presents arranged under the tree, the glowing computer screen tracking Santa, Lily bundled up on the sledding hill. The journal did not merely remind me that these things had happened. It briefly returned them to me.

    But the journal’s silences are meaningful too. Macy is absent from these pages for the simple reason that the journal falls silent before she enters the story. That means I have no comparable record of her earliest years, which makes me wish even more that I had kept writing. If the journal returned pieces of Sam and Lily’s childhoods to me, her absence from the journal is itself a measure of what the journal failed to preserve.

    As for me, I was forty years old when I wrote most of those early entries. At the time, I already believed I was ancient. For example, after a yoga class, I made three observations: I was old, I could no longer sit on the floor with the children and get up easily, and therefore I needed to do more yoga. I then wondered what forty-year-olds who didn’t exercise must feel like. From my current vantage point, forty-year-old me seems adorable.

    The journal also reminded me how much of parenting consists of completely ordinary nights. On January 14, 2008, I came home and helped Sam buy his first Pokémon card on eBay. It cost $1.85. He was earning points by reading extra books because 120 points would get him the Nintendo DS that he did not get for Christmas. Not to be left out, Lily began doing extra math problems because she wanted a two-wheel scooter.

    “Tonight was one of those nights where I love my kids,” I wrote. I’m sure I loved them on the other nights too. But on that particular night, I noticed.

    A week later, I worried that I had been too hard on Sam. He had misplaced a book he was writing about a fish named Squeaky and came to me with tears in his eyes. I was busy doing something I’m sure wasn’t that important and became irritated with him for becoming so upset over something small. (And if you’re wondering, the book about Squeaky was successfully recovered.)

    The next evening, two Pokémon cards we had ordered arrived in the mail. Sam was delighted, and the two of us apparently spent the evening making each other laugh.

    “We crack each other up,” he told me.

    I wrote that down too.

    Reading these entries now, I kept wondering why I had stopped. Even then, I understood how quickly the details disappeared. Several entries begin with an admission that I had already forgotten what happened a few days earlier. On January 12, I wrote, “Already forgot what happened on Saturday night.” On January 27, I confessed that six days had gone by since my previous entry. When I returned to the journal in October 2009, after an absence of one year and nine months, I read the earlier pages and wrote that I wished I had kept going.

    Then I failed to keep going.

    This happened repeatedly. Every time I rediscovered the journal, I was grateful for what I had written and disappointed that I hadn’t written more. Then, having learned this valuable lesson, I would stop writing again.

    The final entry from that period was made in March 2011. It preserved an email from a neighbor whose son, Carter, had been friends with Lily since they were little. She had driven the two of them home the previous day and overheard a conversation in the back seat. Lily and Carter were about eight years old.

    Here is their conversation:

    Carter: “What should we talk about?”

    Lily: “I don’t know. What do you want to talk about?”

    Carter: “I don’t know.”

    Lily: “When I was with my friend on a field trip yesterday, we didn’t know what to talk about, so I said we should talk about tacos.”

    Carter: “Oh.”

    Lily: “Let’s talk about our best friends. Who is your best friend?”

    Carter: “In the boy category or the girl category?”

    Lily: “Both.”

    Carter: “Oh. In the girl category, you are at the top. In the boy category, Nick and Sam.”

    Lily: “Oh.”

    Carter: “How about you?”

    Lily: “In the boy category or the girl category?”

    Carter: “Both.”

    Lily: “Oh. In the boy category, you are at the top. In the girl category, it’s Izzie.”

    That was the entire conversation. Nothing happened. There was no great childhood achievement, family milestone, or historical event. Two children briefly struggled to find something to discuss, considered tacos, and then carefully established their respective friendship rankings.

    That is precisely why I am so grateful someone wrote it down.

    “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

    – Anais Nin

    That idea of using writing as a way to preserve what time would otherwise take is at the heart of one of the quietest Pulitzer winners I have read. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. The novel is set in 1956 and takes the form of a long letter written by Reverend John Ames, a seventy-six-year-old Congregationalist minister in the small town of Gilead, Iowa.

    Ames is dying from a heart condition. He has married late in life and has a seven-year-old son whom he knows he will not live long enough to see become a man. He begins writing so his son will someday know who his father was.

    At first, the premise sounds a little like The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch’s 2008 book based on the farewell lecture he gave after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Pausch spent days assembling a PowerPoint presentation of stories and lessons he hoped would eventually reach his three young children. He organizes those lessons around clear ideas about pursuing childhood dreams, overcoming obstacles, and helping others achieve their goals.

    Ames’s version is far less organized. He wanders. He repeats himself, changes subjects, tells family stories, recalls old grievances, discusses theology, describes ordinary moments, and occasionally loses track of what he has already said. His letter feels less like a formal account of a life than like a mind moving through one.

    Much of the novel concerns the generations of Ames men who came before him. His grandfather was a fiery abolitionist preacher who believed God had called him to fight slavery and who lost an eye during the Civil War. His father was a committed pacifist who became increasingly troubled by his own father’s militancy. Ames has spent much of his life positioned between them, trying to understand what faith requires and how two good men could reach such different conclusions. That struggle between conviction and compassion resurfaces when Jack Boughton, the troubled son of Ames’s closest friend, returns to Gilead. Ames distrusts Jack despite considering himself forgiving, but upon learning that Jack has been harboring a secret, Ames is forced to confront Jack’s suffering and the limits of his own generosity.

    Yet the novel’s emotional center is Ames’s love for his young son. He knows his son will grow up largely without him, so he tries to leave behind something useful. He offers stories, warnings, family history, spiritual advice, and explanations for choices his son may someday question. But more than anything, he pays attention.

    Ames watches his son playing in the sprinkler. He notices the light, the rain, an old man walking down the street, and the quiet routines of his home. He understands that these moments will continue after he is gone, but he will no longer be there to witness them. His letter becomes an attempt to remain present in a future he will never see.

    That is what makes Gilead such a beautiful book. Robinson takes a story with very little conventional action and fills it with moral and emotional weight. Her prose is lyrical without losing the sound of Ames’s voice, and the novel treats ordinary existence as something worthy of intense attention. Ames can be wise, but he can also be jealous, stubborn, and wrong. His blind spots keep the novel from becoming a sermon delivered by a saint.

    That same meditative quality can also make Gilead a challenging book. Readers looking for a propulsive plot may find it slow, repetitive, or overly theological. The story moves according to memory rather than chronology, and Ames often circles an idea several times before arriving anywhere. But that structure is also the point. Memory does not proceed neatly, particularly when someone is trying to compress an entire life into a final letter.

    Ames knows exactly why he is writing. He is leaving a record for his son. I had no such plan.

    “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

    – Joan Didion

    When I started my journal, Sam and Lily were seven and five. I wasn’t confronting my mortality. I wasn’t imagining them as adults reading about their childhoods. I certainly wasn’t attempting to explain the moral inheritance of several generations of the Orta family. I was forty years old and apparently preoccupied with yoga, the NFL playoffs, Pokémon cards, and whether Lily would score more soccer goals than another child named Luke.

    But reading the journal now, I realize that I was doing a small and accidental version of what Ames does in Gilead. I was leaving behind a record of what I noticed.

    The journal does not tell Sam and Lily everything about their childhoods. It doesn’t even tell them everything about one month of their childhoods. It cannot explain what it felt like to be their father or capture the thousands of ordinary mornings, dinners, car rides, baths, bedtime stories, soccer games, and conversations that disappeared without being recorded.

    What it can tell them is that Sam once believed twenty was the appropriate age to climb a tower, provided he had a parachute. It can tell him how excited he was when a $1.85 Pokémon card arrived in the mail. It can tell Lily that she was fearless on a sled, confident in goal, and once considered tacos a perfectly reasonable solution to an awkward silence.

    It can also tell them something about me. I worried about missing Lily for several days when work became busy. I worried that I was too hard on Sam. I could be impatient and distracted (still very true). I sometimes recognized a wonderful day while it was happening, and sometimes needed the journal to show it to me years later. Mostly, it can tell them that I was watching.

    I wish I had written more. I wish I had preserved every funny comment, every bedtime ritual, and every uneventful evening that seemed too ordinary to record. I wish I had understood that the things most likely to disappear were the things I would eventually most want back.

    But Gilead is not merely a book about anticipating loss. It is also a book about gratitude. Ames knows he cannot keep his life, his family, or the world he loves. What he can do is give them his attention while they are in front of him, and then leave behind some evidence that he did.

    I did not preserve Sam and Lily’s childhoods. No journal could have done that. I preserved a few days. One involved Santa’s route through Mexico. Another involved a $1.85 Pokémon card. And in one, during an otherwise unremarkable ride home, Lily was at the top of someone’s girl category.

    I’m grateful someone wrote it down.

  • A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1993): Bad News From Huntsville

    My grandparents, Collie and Irene Warden, and baby-me.

    “Communication breakdown / It’s always the same”

    – Led Zeppelin (1968)

    I have a story I call “Bad News From Huntsville.”

    It happened sometime in the late 1990s. How do I know it was the late 1990s? First, the story involves an email, which didn’t really arrive in my life until around 1995. Second, it happened before my grandfather Collie died.

    How do I know it happened before he died? Well, let me tell you the story.

    At the time, I was working as a litigation associate at a big law firm. One afternoon, I was sitting in my office when an email from my father appeared in my inbox. The subject line read:

    Bad News From Huntsville

    I opened it. The entire message said:

    Your grandfather died. I’m going to Huntsville.

    This was, even by my father’s standards, an impressively efficient delivery of devastating news. No greeting. No explanation. No “call me when you get this.” Just a death announcement and a travel itinerary.

    I immediately called him.

    “Dad, you can’t send me an email like that. Why wouldn’t you call me?”

    “I didn’t want to interrupt your day,” he said.

    There are many things that can interrupt a workday. A fire alarm. An unexpected meeting. Someone stopping by your office and asking whether you “have a quick minute,” which you know will not be quick and may consume the remainder of your afternoon. Learning by email that your grandfather has died probably belongs somewhere near the top of the list.

    I asked my father what had happened. He said he didn’t know the details. My grandmother had called him in hysterics and told him that my grandfather had died. He was leaving in a few minutes to fly to Huntsville.

    I told him I would see if I could get there the next day. Then I did what people do after receiving terrible news: I reorganized my life. I spoke to the people at work, cleared my schedule, bought a plane ticket, went home, and packed.

    That evening, the phone rang.

    “Hey, Dad,” I said. “I’m all set.”

    “You don’t need to come.”

    “Of course I do. I figured out my work schedule. I bought a ticket. I’m packed. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

    “You don’t need to come.”

    By this point, I was annoyed. I thought he was trying to spare me the inconvenience, just as he had tried not to “interrupt my day” by calling to tell me my grandfather was dead.

    “Dad, don’t be so annoying. Of course I’m going to—”

    He interrupted me.

    “Your grandfather isn’t dead.”

    “What?”

    “He’s alive.”

    “I don’t understand. You said Nana told you he died.”

    My father explained that my grandmother had been hysterical when she called. He knew that someone had died, and he had assumed it was my grandfather.

    “So who died?”

    “Wallace.”

    The Wallace my dad was referring to was my great-uncle Wallace who was married to one of my grandmother’s youngest sisters. I say “one of” because my grandmother’s youngest sisters, Ortha and Dortha, were identical twins. And to be fair, this was still sad news. Uncle Wallace was really awesome. But it was also, under the circumstances, an enormous improvement.

    “How did you figure out that Granddad was alive?” I asked.

    It turned out that when my father arrived in Huntsville, my very alive grandfather picked him up at the airport.

    For years, I thought of “Bad News From Huntsville” primarily as a story about my father. It captured his unique approach to communication: deliver the most traumatic information imaginable in the fewest possible words, then get surprised when someone suggests that additional context might have been useful.

    But the older I get, the more I think it is a story about something else. It is about how families create their own histories from incomplete information. Someone hears a fragment of a story. Someone else fills in the missing details. An assumption becomes a fact, the fact becomes an email, and before long an entire family is reorganizing its travel plans around something that never happened.

    For a few hours, my grandfather was dead in California and alive in Alabama. And then he showed up at the airport.

    “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”

    – Mark Twain, letter to George Bainton (1888)

    In my family’s version of the story, the confusion was resolved by a man who was supposed to be dead pulling up outside an airport. In Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner, the line between the living and the dead is not always resolved so easily. The past continually intrudes upon the present, ancestors remain part of everyday life, and people try to make sense of incomplete memories that have traveled across generations and oceans.

    The book is not a novel in the traditional sense but a collection of fifteen loosely interconnected short stories about Vietnamese immigrants living in and around New Orleans. Butler, who served in Vietnam and learned the language while working as an Army intelligence specialist and translator, tells each story in the first person. His narrators are refugees, husbands, wives, parents, children, former soldiers, former officials, and people who have carried memories of one country into lives being built in another. Their voices differ, but they share a sense of having been divided in two. They live in Louisiana, but parts of them remain in Vietnam. They inhabit the present, but they are surrounded by the past.

    That premise creates an obvious challenge. Butler is a white American writer speaking through Vietnamese characters, often in intimate and culturally specific voices. It is a bold decision, and readers may reasonably disagree about whether every story succeeds. But at its best, the collection is remarkably empathetic. Butler is less interested in explaining Vietnam than in imagining what it feels like to carry one life inside another.

    The stories are not tightly connected by plot. The characters do not all collide in a single grand finale. Instead, the connections are emotional. Again and again, the characters struggle to reconcile who they were with who they have become, what actually happened with what they remember, and what they intended to say with what the people they loved ultimately heard.

    In “Crickets,” a Vietnamese father attempts to share part of his childhood with his American-born son by teaching him about cricket fighting. To the father, the crickets summon an entire lost world: childhood, ritual, excitement, and the country he left behind. To his son, they are mostly bugs. The father wants to pass down a memory, but memories cannot simply be transferred from one generation to the next. What feels sacred to a parent may feel distant or incomprehensible to a child.

    “Mr. Green” also explores the uneasy inheritance passed between generations. Its narrator remembers her grandfather telling her that, because she is a girl, she will not be able to properly worship the family’s ancestors. After his death, his presence seems to survive in a parrot named Mr. Green. The bird becomes both a connection to her grandfather and a reminder of the beliefs that diminished her. Love and resentment become inseparable. The past has crossed an ocean with her, but that does not mean she must preserve every part of it.

    In the title story, an elderly man named Dao is approaching death while reflecting on his life, his country, and the political and spiritual figures who shaped both. The boundaries between memory, dream, history, and the supernatural begin to dissolve. The dead appear close enough to speak with. The past is not something that happened and ended; it remains in the room, waiting to be acknowledged.

    Throughout the collection, the living converse with the dead, sometimes literally and sometimes through memory. Ancestors remain present. Lost relatives return in dreams. Old lovers, old betrayals, political upheavals, and childhood experiences continue shaping lives decades after the people involved have crossed an ocean and begun again.

    Butler also understands that stories change as they travel. They move from Vietnam to Louisiana, from parent to child, from the dead to the living, and from memory into language. Something is always lost in the transmission, but something new is created as well. A story does not have to be a flawless historical record to reveal an emotional truth about the people telling it.

    That is one of the collection’s greatest strengths. The strongest stories compress entire lifetimes of longing, displacement, guilt, and affection into remarkably little space. He is particularly good at sensory memory: a smell, a sound, an animal, or a familiar ritual can suddenly collapse the distance between Louisiana and Vietnam.

    The dead in Butler’s stories do not disappear. They become stories. And the stories, repeated and reinterpreted, become part of the lives of the people who remain.

    “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

    – Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)

    That may be the connection between A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and my grandfather’s temporary death.

    My father received an emotional and incomplete message from my grandmother. He interpreted it using the information available to him. Then he passed his interpretation along to me, and I immediately began acting as though it were true. Nobody was lying. Nobody intended to exaggerate. Each person simply received a piece of information and did what human beings have always done: turned it into a coherent story.

    We like to imagine that memory works like an archive. An event happens, our brain files it away, and years later we retrieve the original record. But that is not how memory works. We revise our memories each time we revisit them. We emphasize some details, lose others, and add meaning that may not have been present when the event occurred.

    Families do the same thing collectively. They create a shared mythology from stories told at holidays, funerals, weddings, and dinners. Certain details survive because they are important. Others survive because they are funny. Over time, it becomes difficult to know where the event ends and the family’s version of it begins.

    I no longer remember the precise year of “Bad News From Huntsville.” I don’t remember what case I was working on, what airline I booked, or what clothes I packed. But I remember the subject line. I remember my irritation that my father had announced my grandfather’s death by email because he did not want to interrupt my day. And I remember asking how he had discovered the mistake. 

    My grandfather picked him up at the airport. That detail has survived because it completes the story so perfectly that it almost feels invented. But families are full of details that would seem implausible if they had not actually happened.

    The irony is that the false report of my grandfather’s death has now become one of the ways I place him in time. I know this happened before he died because the entire story depends upon him still being alive. His death establishes one boundary of the memory, while the arrival of email establishes the other. Somewhere between those two points, Collie briefly became a dead man who could still pick someone up at the Huntsville airport.

    Butler’s characters understand that the past does not stay where it belongs. It crosses oceans. It enters dreams. It speaks through parents and grandparents, sometimes clearly and sometimes in ways that require interpretation. The people we have lost remain part of our lives because we continue telling stories about them.

    And those stories are rarely perfect records. They are mixtures of fact, memory, assumption, affection, and whatever details happened to survive. Sometimes they contain misunderstandings. Sometimes the misunderstanding becomes the reason the story is remembered at all.

    Uncle Wallace was the person who actually died that day, and he deserves better than to remain merely the answer to a macabre family guessing game. He was wonderful, and the news of his death was genuinely sad. But the story my family kept was the one in which the wrong man died, an airplane ticket was purchased unnecessarily, and the deceased ended the confusion by arriving at baggage claim.

    That is the strange thing about family history. We do not always get to choose which moments become permanent. The solemn occasions sometimes fade, while an absurd misunderstanding remains vivid decades later. The stories that survive are not necessarily the most important ones. They are the ones we cannot resist telling.

    And so I keep telling this one. The email arrives. My grandfather is dead. My father flies to Huntsville. My grandfather picks him up at the airport.

    Bad news becomes good news, although not entirely. The dead and the living trade places. And for just a moment, a story becomes more convincing than reality, until reality pulls up to the curb and tells it to get in.

  • The Way West (1950) – The World’s Longest Paper Chain and Other Impossible Things

    Not an AI generated photo. My paper chain skills remain solid.

    The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.“

    – Lao Tzu

    When I was in the fourth grade, I was obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records. For kids growing up before the internet, the Guinness book wasn’t really a reference book. It was a book of possibilities. Every page contained proof that ordinary people could become extraordinary simply by deciding to do something that no one else had ever done. There were the predictable records for the fastest, strongest, and tallest. There were also records for the longest fingernails, the heaviest twins, largest collection of belly-button lint, or number of spoons you could balance on your face. But there were also records that seemed wonderfully democratic. Anyone, at least in theory, could become a world record holder. You just had to pick the right record.

    And it was that thought that led me to flip through those pages for hours until I found mine: the world’s longest paper chain.

    To ten-year-old me, this was perfect. Unlike the world’s fastest runner or the tallest person, this one didn’t require unusual genetics or years of training. It required construction paper, glue, scissors, and determination. As far as I was concerned, those all seemed readily available.

    Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

    – Albert Einstein

    I can’t recall now exactly how long the existing record was, but I do remember thinking it could absolutely be broken. You see, ten-year-old me was also pretty good at math. So instead of wondering whether we could break the record, I treated it like a word problem.

    I timed myself making ten paper-chain links and connecting them together. Then I measured how long those ten links were. Once I had those data points, the rest was simple. If (a) one person could make X paper links every hour, (b) I recruited Y neighborhood kids, and (c) we all stayed awake for twenty-four straight hours, then (d) we would produce a paper chain longer than the existing world record.

    The math worked perfectly.

    Looking back, it seems obvious that point (c) was going to be the problem. Ten-year-old me, however, wasn’t worried about whether staying awake for twenty-four hours was realistic. I was worried about staffing. Without realizing it, I had created my first project plan.

    Many hands make light work.”

    – John Heywood

    The recruiting campaign began. I went door to door convincing neighborhood kids that together we were about to become world record holders. Somehow, they bought in. Even more remarkably, so did my parents. They could have smiled politely and explained that maybe we should start with something smaller. Instead, they purchased what felt like an endless supply of construction paper and transformed our garage into mission control.

    Soon there were kids everywhere, cutting strips, applying glue, looping one link through another, then another, then another. The pile of colored paper slowly transformed into something tangible. Every new link felt like progress toward history.

    Then we encountered our first logistical problem. Where exactly do you put the world’s longest paper chain?

    Fortunately, my dad had a solution. He installed measuring posts down the block so we could stretch the chain between them and calculate our progress. He never questioned the premise. He simply assumed that if we were attempting a world record, we’d need a reliable measurement system. (I’ve written about my dad a couple of times before, and this story deserves to be added to his growing list of extraordinary acts of parenting.)

    Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.”

    – Bobby Unser

    One of my favorite subplots from Paper-Chain-Making Day concerned my realization that we’d eventually need to validate our achievement. I became so confident we were going to succeed that I called the local newspaper, the Arizona Republic. Mind you, I called them not after we’d broken the record. Not even when we were getting close. Before. Apparently, ten-year-old-me believed newspapers appreciated advance notice for impending world records.

    The details are fuzzy now, but I remember looking up the newspaper’s phone number in the phone book and giving them a call. I’m not sure who answered, but I gave a very detailed explanation of our ambitious undertaking. To their credit, someone actually listened. Somewhere in the newsroom, someone apparently decided that a gang of fourth graders attempting to build the world’s longest paper chain was worth keeping an eye on. They say some stories write themselves. This wasn’t one of them.

    Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

    – Mike Tyson

    In the end, the math had been flawless. Reality was less cooperative.

    Around dinnertime, cracks began to appear in my workforce. One kid had to go home because dinner was ready. Another had family plans. Someone else got tired. Another simply lost interest. One by one, my labor force evaporated. The calculations that had looked so elegant on paper hadn’t included parents. Or boredom. Or pizza. Or the simple reality that asking fourth graders to stay awake for twenty-four consecutive hours is, in retrospect, a terrible management strategy.

    I don’t remember how close we got. I don’t remember how long the existing record actually was. I don’t remember what eventually happened to the enormous paper chain we’d created.

    I do, however, remember the phone ringing sometime after we had called it quits. The reporter was calling back. I had to tell him we hadn’t broken the record after all. To be honest, I don’t remember whether he sounded disappointed, whether I only imagined he did, or whether I was simply hearing my own disappointment reflected back at me. Either way, our world-record attempt quietly became just another neighborhood story.

    (Incidentally, the current Guinness World Record for the longest paper chain created by a team in twenty-four hours is 54.33 miles, set by Paul D. Camp Community College in Virginia in 2005. I remain convinced we were only a few hundred neighborhood kids short.)

    The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail.”

    – Louis L’Amour

    My paper chain may not have gotten very far, but it turns out distance wasn’t really the point. I found the same lesson inside A. B. Guthrie Jr.’s The Way West, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1950, and is often considered the definitive literary novel of the Oregon Trail, capturing westward expansion not as myth, but as a difficult, messy, deeply human undertaking. Set in the 1840s, it follows a wagon train leaving Independence, Missouri, bound for the Oregon Territory. At the center of the story is Dick Summers, an experienced mountain man hired to guide dozens of families across nearly two thousand miles of wilderness. They leave with maps, supplies, livestock, carefully planned routes, and enough optimism to believe they can cross an entire continent.

    At first, the journey seems almost mathematical. They know how many miles they hope to cover each day. They know where the rivers are. They know where they’ll camp. On paper, everything works. Then the West has its say.

    Rivers become impassable. Storms destroy carefully laid plans. Tempers flare. Leaders are questioned. Friendships fracture. People become exhausted. Guthrie’s novel slowly reveals that the greatest obstacle to reaching Oregon isn’t the mountains or the rivers. It’s the travelers themselves. Every ambitious undertaking eventually stops being a logistical problem and starts becoming a human one. The maps don’t become wrong. They simply become incomplete because they can’t account for fear, stubbornness, fatigue, ego, or hope.

    The Way West has aged remarkably well. Guthrie doesn’t romanticize the frontier the way many Westerns do. Instead, he treats westward expansion as a profoundly human enterprise, filled with courage, selfishness, resilience, pettiness, generosity, and doubt. The novel is rich in atmosphere and remarkably thoughtful about leadership and group dynamics, which is why it has remained a classic of the genre for more than seventy-five years. If it has a weakness, it’s that modern readers may find its deliberate pace a bit demanding. Like the wagon train itself, the novel doesn’t hurry. There are stretches where the journey feels repetitive, and Guthrie occasionally spends more time describing landscapes than developing individual characters. But that slow rhythm is also part of its power. By the time you reach Oregon, you feel as though you’ve crossed the continent alongside the travelers, one exhausting mile at a time.

    By the time I reached the last page, I couldn’t help but think about my paper chain. My calculations weren’t wrong. If twenty neighborhood kids each produced a certain number of links every hour, we probably would have broken the record. What my spreadsheet failed to account for was exactly what Guthrie understood. Human beings get hungry. They get tired. They lose patience. They decide they’d rather be somewhere else.

    The Oregon Trail had rivers and mountain passes. My expedition had pizza. Different obstacles, perhaps, but exactly the same lesson.

    Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”

    – Vincent van Gogh

    Guthrie understood something that applies just as well to wagon trains as paper chains. Every extraordinary accomplishment is really just an accumulation of ordinary actions repeated far more times than anyone thinks possible.

    Writing a book is mostly writing one page after another. Running a marathon is mostly taking one more step. Learning a language is mostly showing up for one more lesson. Building the world’s longest paper chain is mostly making one more link. The pioneers in The Way West didn’t reach Oregon through one heroic act. They reached it one campsite, one river crossing, one difficult decision, and one exhausting day at a time.

    It’s remarkable how often this lesson reappears. We eat an elephant one bite at a time. We climb mountains one step at a time. Cathedrals are built one stone at a time. James Clear encourages us to become one percent better every day. Jerry Seinfeld famously kept a calendar where the goal wasn’t to write something brilliant each day, only to “not break the chain.” Even writing Pulitzer Schmulitzer has turned out to be little more than reading one chapter, then another, then another. Different metaphors. Same truth.

    The secret isn’t usually brilliance. It’s endurance.

    The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”

    – Teddy Roosevelt

    For years, I thought this story was about failing to break a world record. Now I think it was really about getting the chance to try.

    My parents never laughed. They bought the construction paper. They surrendered the garage. My dad installed measuring posts down the street because if his ten-year-old son was going to chase a world record, he’d need a proper way to measure it. For one glorious Saturday, they treated an impossible dream as though it were completely reasonable. Looking back, that may have been the greatest gift of all.

    The pioneers in The Way West eventually discover that crossing the American frontier isn’t a triumph of maps. It’s a triumph of perseverance. The map can tell you where you’re going, but it can’t tell you whether you’ll keep walking when things get difficult. The same was true of my paper chain. Breaking the record was never going to depend on paper, glue, or multiplication. It was always going to depend on people.

    The funny thing is, after all these years, I still think the math worked. We were simply solving for the wrong variable.

    We never built the world’s longest paper chain. But for one unforgettable day, an entire neighborhood believed we just might. Looking back, I don’t remember how long the paper chain became. I only remember how long we believed it could become.

  • The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1959): What We Bring Home

    Yesterday, Spain won the World Cup. The trophy was lifted. Confetti filled the air. As the tournament ended, the last wave of supporters headed home while millions of others were already back in dozens of countries, carrying whatever souvenirs they’d collected during a month in North America. Somewhere among them was a Norwegian soccer star with a taxidermied raccoon.

    There really isn’t another sporting event like the World Cup. Every four years, for one extraordinary month, national identity becomes the world’s most popular spectator sport. People who spend the rest of their lives arguing about politics, religion, or almost anything else suddenly find themselves united behind the same eleven players wearing the same colors. The tournament doesn’t belong to clubs or leagues. It belongs to countries.

    The Olympics come closest, but they’re fundamentally different. The Olympics celebrate breadth, asking us to marvel at hundreds of events across dozens of sports. The World Cup is almost monastic in its focus. Twenty-two players. One ball. One trophy. For a month, a substantial portion of humanity cares about exactly the same thing. (As an aside, this BBC montage of the tournament is fantastic.)

    But as much as I love the soccer, that wasn’t what made this tournament unforgettable. It was the travelers.

    I was lucky enough to attend several matches myself during this World Cup. The first was Switzerland versus Qatar. If I’m being honest, I didn’t particularly care who won. It didn’t matter. Forty thousand people around me cared enough for all of us.

    For two hours, I borrowed their passion. Fans sang songs I’d never heard. Flags I’d rarely seen outside geography textbooks waved in every direction. Every completed pass, every missed opportunity, every referee’s whistle felt monumental because the people around me treated it that way. Their enthusiasm became my enthusiasm.

    A week later, Parisa and I landed in Mexico City on the night (coincidentally) Mexico was playing at the Azteca. I’ve been fortunate to visit a lot of cities. I’ve never seen one quite like that.

    Every restaurant had its televisions pointed toward the match. Every plaza filled with people hours before kickoff. Cars rolled through intersections with enormous Mexican flags streaming from their windows while complete strangers shouted “¡México!” across traffic and received equally enthusiastic replies. The city wasn’t simply watching soccer. It was participating in it.

    A few days later, we joined a taco tour and met a man from South Africa who may become the person I remember most from this entire World Cup. He had flown from Johannesburg to Mexico City for South Africa’s opening match. Then he flew to New York, rented a car, drove to Atlanta for the second game, and eventually made his way to Monterrey for the final group-stage match. Thousands of miles, two countries, and countless hours on airplanes and highways, all to follow one national team.

    Naturally, we asked him about his trip. What had been his favorite part of North America? The tacos? Times Square? The mountains? The people? He smiled. “Buc-ee’s.”

    We laughed. Not because he was wrong – Buc–ees is undeniably amazing – but because his answer was wonderfully specific. He wasn’t talking about the rows of gas pumps or the oversized beaver mascot. He was talking about the employees shouting, “Fresh brisket on the board!” every time another brisket came out of the smoker. Somehow that joyful little chant had become the story he was most excited to carry home to Johannesburg.

    The more I thought about it, the more perfect his answer seemed. Throughout the tournament I kept seeing visitors fall in love with things most of us stopped noticing years ago. A Brazilian couldn’t believe the size of American pickup trucks. A German was delighted by free refills. An English supporter became inexplicably obsessed with ranch dressing. Another visitor wondered why every drink contained enough ice to preserve a woolly mammoth.

    None of them were discovering hidden treasures. They were discovering ordinary North America. That’s what travel does. It edits our stories.

    Nobody comes home talking about baggage claim or the hotel room. We remember the ordinary things that felt extraordinary because they were unfamiliar: the bartender who insisted we try the local beer, the tiny bakery we found after a wrong turn, the Tokyo 7-Eleven selling fresh meals, or the Nordic hotel that solved blanket stealing with two separate duvets.

    None of those moments would appear in a travel brochure, yet they are often the ones that stay with us. Travel sharpens our attention. It makes us notice the small customs, habits, and encounters that locals stopped seeing long ago. Sometimes it takes going halfway around the world to discover something new. Sometimes it takes a visitor to help us see what was already there.

    That realization brought me back to Robert Lewis Taylor’s The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction in 1959. Like every great travel story, the novel begins with a destination. Twelve-year-old Jaimie McPheeters and his physician father, Sardius, leave Missouri in 1849, joining thousands of Americans heading west after news of gold in California. Like nearly everyone around them, they believe California promises reinvention. Wealth. Adventure. A chance to begin again.

    The farther west they travel, however, the less important California becomes. Instead, Taylor fills the trail with an astonishing parade of humanity: gamblers, prospectors, swindlers, preachers, doctors, merchants, soldiers, entertainers, pioneers, widows, dreamers, and drifters. Some become companions for hundreds of pages. Others disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, continuing down the trail and out of the novel forever. At first, the structure feels almost chaotic. Taylor keeps introducing fascinating people just as you’re settling into the last group. Characters drift into Jaimie’s life, dominate a few chapters, and then quietly move on. If you’re a reader accustomed to tightly engineered plots, you may wonder whether the novel is ever going to settle down.

    Eventually, though, you realize Taylor isn’t losing control of the novel. He’s recreating what travel actually feels like. When we remember a trip, the itinerary fades long before the people do.

    That’s Jaimie’s gift. He’s curious in the way children often are before adulthood convinces us we should already know everything worth knowing. He asks questions. He listens. He notices details everyone else overlooks. His greatest talent isn’t surviving the frontier. It’s paying attention. By the time he finally reaches California, the Gold Rush itself almost feels incidental. The real treasure had been traveling beside him all along.

    In some ways, this World Cup felt like a twenty-first-century version of Jaimie McPheeters’ journey. In 1849, Americans crossed a continent searching for opportunity. In 2026, the world crossed an ocean to visit us. The direction changed, but the lesson didn’t. The journey was never really about the destination. It was about the people encountered along the way.

    Months before the tournament began, newspapers devoted endless coverage to whether North America was ready to host the World Cup. Would the airports work? Would transportation collapse? Would there be enough hotel rooms? Would security hold?

    They were fair questions. By the end of the tournament, though, I found myself asking a different one: Were we good hosts? I think so. Not because every train ran on time or traffic wasn’t terrible. Visitors rarely remember logistics. They remember how a place made them feel. They’ll remember the strangers who made an unfamiliar country feel unexpectedly familiar.

    One of my favorite parts of this World Cup was watching patriotism quietly give way to hospitality. Flags stopped feeling like political statements and became invitations to conversation. Adults who normally avoid eye contact found themselves talking in airport terminals, train stations, breweries, food halls, and stadium concourses. The questions were almost always the same: Where are you from? How long are you here? Where are you headed next? What shouldn’t I miss? For one month, strangers became neighbors. I suspect that’s the souvenir many visitors carried home.

    Like many Pulitzer winners from the middle of the twentieth century, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters won’t be for everyone. Readers looking for a tightly plotted adventure may find its pace frustrating. Taylor is perfectly willing to wander away from the central narrative because another interesting person happens to cross Jaimie’s path. Entire episodes exist simply to let us spend time with someone we’d never have invented ourselves.

    Ironically, that’s exactly what makes the novel memorable. Taylor understands something every experienced traveler eventually learns: the detours aren’t interruptions. They’re the destination.

    I’ve already forgotten who scored Switzerland’s goal against Qatar, and before long I’ll probably have to look up parts of the knockout bracket as well. That’s what happens with sports. Results blur together until only the champion remains. The people don’t.

    I’ll remember the South African who somehow found his favorite memory of North America in a Buc-ee’s brisket chant. I’ll remember Erling Haaland deciding that the souvenir he couldn’t leave behind was a taxidermied raccoon from a western store in Dallas. On the surface, they couldn’t have been more different. And yet they were really the same story.

    Like Jaimie McPheeters, they discovered that travel isn’t measured by the miles you cover or the landmarks you visit. It’s measured by the unexpected moments you never could have planned. Travel has never been about collecting places. It’s about collecting stories.

    Millions of visitors returned home with jerseys, scarves, photographs, and souvenirs. I suspect the things they’ll treasure most, though, are the stories they never expected to collect.

    So did I.

    Mine just never left North America.

  • The Edge of Sadness (1962): The Long Afterlife of Kindness

    As graduation season comes to a close, I’ll admit I have a soft spot for commencement speeches. There is something charming about the whole enterprise. Every spring, universities invite an accomplished person to stand in front of thousands of young people and attempt the impossible task of distilling a lifetime of wisdom into twenty minutes.

    I’ll also admit that I probably won’t miss this year’s crop of speeches that were less inspiring than usual. Instead of memorable advice, many ceremonies generated news because students booed speakers who dared mention artificial intelligence. These might have made for good headlines, but I miss the speeches that aimed a little higher.

    I miss Steve Jobs telling Stanford graduates that “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” I miss Matthew McConaughey advising students that happiness is not the same thing as joy, and that chasing the former often gets in the way of finding the latter. And I miss Jerry Seinfeld, who’s speech at Duke I happened to see in person, giving more lighthearted guidance: “Do not lose your sense of humor. Not enough of life makes sense for you to survive without it.” Whether you agreed with them or not, those speeches were trying to answer the biggest questions: How should we live? What matters? What will we regret?

    One of my favorites came from author George Saunders at Syracuse University in 2013. Saunders began with a familiar commencement premise: an older person reflecting on a life filled with mistakes. He talked about embarrassing moments, bad jobs, and various youthful misadventures. Then he surprised everyone. The thing he regretted most wasn’t a career decision, a financial mistake, or some missed opportunity.

    It was a girl.

    When Saunders was in seventh grade, a shy new student arrived at his school. She was awkward, frequently teased, and painfully lonely. Saunders wasn’t cruel to her. He never joined in the bullying. Occasionally, he even defended her. But he didn’t do enough. Years later, what haunted him wasn’t anything he had done. It was what he hadn’t done.

    “What I regret most in my life,” he told the graduates, “are failures of kindness.”

    Not acts of cruelty. Failures of kindness. The distinction is important. Most of us can think of moments when we weren’t our best selves. Saunders was talking about something more subtle. He was talking about those times when another person was suffering right in front of us and we responded, in his words, “sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.” We saw the need and chose not to fully engage.

    Then Saunders asked a question that has stuck with me ever since I first heard this speech: “What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?”

    It’s a question that feels especially relevant today. We live in a culture obsessed with achievement. We tell graduates to dream big, work hard, change the world, build companies, make money, find success.  To be clear, I’m not against any of those things and Saunders wasn’t either. His point was simply that, when we look back on our lives, our deepest regrets may not be about ambition at all.

    They may be about people.

    Maybe we can / Find a place to feel good / And we can treat people with kindness “

    – Harry Styles, “Treat People with Kindness”

    Which brings me to The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O’Connor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 1962. At first glance, it seems like an odd companion to a graduation speech. Commencement addresses are usually delivered to people standing at the beginning of their adult lives, full of ambition and possibility. The Edge of Sadness is about people who have already lived most of theirs.

    O’Connor’s novel follows Father Hugh Kennedy, a middle-aged Catholic priest returning to his old Boston parish after years away. Once considered a rising star in the Church, Kennedy has spent time recovering from alcoholism and carries more than his share of disappointments, doubts, and regrets. If graduation speeches ask, “What kind of life should I build?” The Edge of Sadness asks a different question: “What happens when the life you built doesn’t quite turn out the way you imagined?”

    Back in Boston, Kennedy reconnects with the Carmody family, wealthy Irish Catholics he has known for years. On the surface, they seem successful and enviable. But beneath that polished exterior are broken relationships, loneliness, addiction, resentment, and grief. As Kennedy becomes entangled in their lives, he finds himself serving less as a traditional priest and more as a witness to the quiet suffering that people carry behind closed doors.

    What struck me most about the book was how ordinary the sources of suffering are. Nobody sets out to hurt anyone. Instead, the damage comes from smaller failures. People withdraw when they should engage. They protect themselves when they should be vulnerable. They hold back words that should be spoken. They choose pride over understanding. Again and again, people fail to fully show up for one another.

    Which brings us back to George Saunders. When Saunders talks about his regret over the lonely girl in seventh grade, he is careful to point out that he wasn’t mean to her. His regret is that he wasn’t kinder.

    That same idea runs throughout The Edge of Sadness. The characters aren’t suffering because they were surrounded by evil people. They are suffering because they were surrounded by ordinary people. People who were busy, distracted, frightened, proud, wounded, ambitious, or uncertain. In other words, people very much like the rest of us. While Saunders asks his audience, “What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?”, O’Connor spends an entire novel exploring the consequences of that question.

    One of the most hopeful aspects of both the speech and the novel is that neither views kindness as some grand heroic act. Saunders isn’t urging graduates to solve world hunger. Father Kennedy isn’t performing miracles. Both are talking about something smaller and, therefore, more difficult: paying attention to the people directly in front of us. Noticing loneliness. Extending grace. Choosing compassion over judgment. Making the extra phone call. Asking the follow-up question. Staying in the conversation a little longer.

    You’ve got to try a little kindness / Yes, show a little kindness / Just shine your light for everyone to see“

    – Glen Campbell, “Try a Little Kindness”

    As I was thinking about Saunders’s speech, I found myself returning to a story I told a few months ago in my post about The Reivers and a Super 8 movie called The Meat Eater that I had made when I was twelve years old with two friends, Jamie and Dave. The movie itself was ridiculous. Dave played a serial killer. Jamie played a detective. I played the victim. Repeatedly. There was ketchup, hamburger meat, and an alarming lack of adult supervision. But the story ended up being about something else.

    I also mentioned that after my mother died between seventh and eighth grade, Jamie was unusually kind to me. Nothing dramatic. No grand gesture. He simply spent time with me during a period when I needed friends more than I probably understood. Decades later, I still remember it. When Jamie and I reconnected last year and I mentioned it to him, he seemed genuinely surprised. He barely remembered it happening.

    A few months later, on a whim, I tracked down Dave. The last time I had seen him was when we were teenagers. After freshman year of high school, he and his mother moved to San Diego, and like so many friendships in the pre-internet era, ours simply disappeared. Today, if someone moves away, you still see photos of their vacations, their kids, and their lunch choices. Back then, when someone left, they were simply gone. You had no idea what happened to them. They just vanished into the static.

    Somehow, through a remarkably lucky Google search, I discovered that Dave lived less than a mile from me. Last week, we met for dinner and spent the evening laughing about The Meat Eater, filling in gaps in each other’s memories, and marveling at the strange paths our lives had taken.

    And, echoing the conversation I had with Jamie, during our dinner, Dave told me something I had completely forgotten. Toward the end of junior high, his parents divorced and this had been much harder on him than I ever knew. He told me that one of the things that helped him through that difficult period was our group of friends.

    “We had so much fun,” he said.

    He said that giving up that friend group was the hardest thing about the move to San Diego. Then he told me something even more surprising. After moving away, he continued having dreams about us well into his thirties. I was stunned.

    For Dave, our little group of friends wasn’t just a collection of kids riding bikes, making bad horror films and wasting summer afternoons. It was a refuge during one of the most difficult periods of his young life. The memories stayed with him for decades.

    I had no memory of any of that. Just as Jamie didn’t remember being kind to me, I didn’t remember being there for Dave. And that’s the part of George Saunders’s speech that feels truer to me every year.

    Kindness don’t ask for much / But an open mind / Kindness can cure a broken heart / Honey, are you feelin’ kind?”

    – Ryan Adams, “Kindness”

    When Saunders talks about kindness, he’s not describing grand acts of heroism. He’s talking about the small opportunities that present themselves in ordinary life. The lonely kid sitting by herself. The friend whose mother has died. The classmate whose family is falling apart. The person standing quietly at the edge of the group. Most of the time we don’t know which moments matter.

    In my conversation with Jamie, I learned that afternoons spent playing with my dad’s early home computer helped spark an interest that eventually led him into the tech industry. In my conversation with Dave, I learned that friendships I had largely forgotten became some of the most cherished memories of his childhood. And in both cases, the people involved remembered those moments far more clearly than I did. Which is perhaps the most beautiful thing about kindness. The effects can last far longer than our memory of giving it.

    George Saunders told a group of graduates that his greatest regrets were failures of kindness. More than a decade later, I think the inverse may be true as well. Some of the most meaningful things we ever do may be acts of kindness so small that we don’t even remember them.

    The world spends a lot of time telling graduates to think about their future. Their career. Their success. Their ambitions. That’s understandable. But George Saunders and Edwin O’Connor remind us that when we eventually look back on our lives, what we remember most vividly may not be our accomplishments at all.

    It may be the people. The friend who showed up. The person who made us feel less alone. The afternoon that seemed ordinary at the time. The kindness that neither person realized would matter for the next forty years.

    You may be creating one of their favorite memories without even realizing it.

  • Empire Falls (2002): Grace in Stoppage Time

    Arsenal won the Premier League title this week for the first time in twenty-two years. Across North London, people poured into the streets celebrating. Fans climbed statues, lit flares, hugged strangers, sang songs, cried, and generally behaved with the calm restraint one expects after two decades of emotional repression and annual sporting disappointment. I’ve watched the video of the Arsenal team celebrating at least twenty times.

    Meanwhile, I was in my office in San Francisco refreshing social media, texting friends, and feeling both euphoric and strangely homesick for a place that is not remotely my home. Admittedly, my love of Arsenal isn’t completely logical. I have no genetic connection to North London. I became an Arsenal fan in 2014 via a surprisingly methodical decision process. After the World Cup that summer, I realized how much I enjoyed watching soccer and wanted to watch it more often than every four years. But sports without emotional investment has never really worked for me. I’ve never understood how people casually watch games without caring who wins. The emotional attachment is the whole point. So I needed a team.

    The MLS wasn’t (isn’t) good, so I turned to the international leagues, and since I speak English, the Premier League felt more accessible than La Liga or Bundesliga. At the time, I was working for OpenTable and traveling to London fairly often, so I decided I wanted a London club because I figured someday I might actually see them play in person. I also wanted a team unlikely to be relegated because I was new to the sport and emotionally unprepared for immediate catastrophe. Hence, no Queens Park Rangers.

    That left Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, and West Ham. Chelsea was ruled out immediately because rooting for them in 2014 felt like becoming a Yankees fan but with more Russian billionaires and scarves. Some English friends described West Ham as “a little dodgy.” So eventually it came down to Arsenal and Tottenham.

    And the deciding factor, fittingly enough, was a book.Years earlier I had read Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. Most people know the title because it became a movie starring Jimmy Fallon about the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004, but the original book was about Arsenal. More specifically, it was about the exquisite psychological damage that comes from loving Arsenal. Hornby somehow made sports fandom feel literary and meaningful instead of just a highly organized form of public anxiety. The suffering itself became part of the romance. Looking back, this should probably have registered as a warning sign. Instead, I chose Arsenal. Which meant I arrived at almost exactly the wrong time.

    They finished 3rd in the first season I followed them and 2nd a year later. But those were followed by 5th and then 6th, and their long-time manager, Arsene Wenger resigned. He was followed by Unai Emery who lasted only a year and a half. With Arsenal sitting in 8th place in November 2019, Emery was let go.

    I believe the club has lost direction.”

    – Mikel Arteta, December 2019

    By the time Mikel Arteta took over as manager a month later, Arsenal was widely viewed as a mess. They had finished 5th, 6th and 5th the three years prior and had failed to qualify for Champions League. The atmosphere around the club had become toxic. Fans were furious. Ownership was distrusted. The roster was unbalanced. Arsenal had gone from one of Europe’s model clubs to a punchline. There were actual debates about whether they could even get back into the Champions League, much less compete for a title.

    And yet Arteta kept talking about process, standards, culture, patience, and belief. At the beginning, almost nobody wanted to hear it. But slowly, painstakingly, Arsenal improved. Young players developed. The team became more disciplined. Tougher. More coherent. There was a plan now, even if it wasn’t producing trophies yet. After finishing 8th in each of Arteta’s first two seasons at the helm, they finished the 2021-22 campaign in 5th.

    The problem was that once Arsenal finally became good again, they became almost unbearably close. The next three seasons felt increasingly cruel. Arsenal finished second three years in a row, twice to Manchester City and once to Liverpool. Twice they led the league deep into the season before collapsing under the pressure and getting labeled “bottlers,” which is English soccer slang for people who psychologically disintegrate in public.

    This season felt destined to end the same way. Arsenal sat atop the table for most of the year before losing at home to Bournemouth in April, a defeat that felt painfully familiar. After the loss, Arteta said: “Today we have to suffer. It’s painful. It’s a terrible feeling. But tomorrow is a different day.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The following week they lost to Manchester City and fell to second place, and for a moment it seemed like the same script was playing out for the fourth consecutive season.

    This time, however, it turned out tomorrow was a different day. After the defeat at Man City, Declan Rice was caught on camera rallying his teammates and saying “its not done.” Arsenal fans immediately immortalized those three words and created an entire TikTok chant in his honor. And instead of folding, Arsenal steadied themselves. Arsenal won out while City stumbled. And fittingly enough, City’s fatal blow eventually came against the same Bournemouth team that had seemingly shattered Arsenal’s hopes weeks earlier.

    @nbcsports

    The Arsenal fans have a new chant for their star midfielder Declan Rice! #premierleague #arsenal #declanrice

    ♬ original sound – NBC Sports

    Twenty-two years later, Arsenal were champions again.

    Happiness and Suffering are linked to the time you’ve had to wait.”

    – Arsene Wenger, Arsenal Manager 1996-2018

    That long stretch between failure and fulfillment is part of what made me think about Empire Falls, the Pulitzer Prize winner from 2002. Written by Richard Russo, the novel takes place in a declining mill town in Maine where most of the characters are quietly trapped between the lives they imagined for themselves and the lives they actually ended up living.

    The story centers on Miles Roby, the manager of the Empire Grill diner, a fundamentally decent man whose life has gradually narrowed without him fully noticing. He’s divorced, financially stuck, emotionally exhausted, and still psychologically tethered to the powerful local family that has shaped the town for generations. Around him, Russo builds an entire community of people carrying disappointment in different forms: failed ambitions, broken marriages, unrealized potential, old grudges, fading dreams.

    Which may sound bleak, and occasionally it is. But what makes Empire Falls work is Russo’s warmth. He understands that disappointment and humor often occupy the exact same space in adult life. His characters are flawed, frustrated, stubborn, and occasionally ridiculous, but he treats them with extraordinary compassion.

    More importantly, Empire Falls understands the emotional complexity of endurance. The novel is filled with people who continue showing up despite years of evidence suggesting things are unlikely to improve dramatically. They keep going to work. Raising children. Taking care of one another. Trying again. Carrying history forward. Russo understands that resilience rarely looks heroic while you are living it. Most of the time it just looks ordinary.

    Which, as it turns out, is also true of Arsenal fandom.

    Remember who you are, what you are, and who you represent.”

    – David Rocastle

    One of the strange things about Arsenal finally winning the Premier League after twenty-two years is realizing how much life unfolded during the waiting.

    When Arsenal last won the league, Sam was 4, Lily was 2, and Macy wouldn’t be born for another six years. Oddly enough, I wrote my first Pulitzer Schmulitzer post in March 2014, a mere five months before choosing Arsenal as my team. Looking back through those essays now, I can almost track the emotional timeline of the past decade-plus in real time: aging, grief, memory, ambition, parenthood, loss, reinvention, love and the gradual realization that time speeds up when you aren’t paying attention. 

    That’s what long sports droughts eventually become. They stop feeling like gaps between championships and start functioning more like emotional timelines for your own life. Sports seasons repeat themselves, but fans don’t.

    Empire Falls is obsessed with the ways identity, history, and community quietly shape people over time. Miles Roby desperately wants to believe he still has agency over his future, but he slowly realizes how deeply his life has been shaped by the town around him, by family history, loyalty, inertia, and choices made long before he fully understood their consequences.

    Sports fandom works similarly. At first it feels like entertainment, but eventually it becomes part of the architecture of your life. Somewhere along the way Arsenal stopped being a team I watched and became woven into the same emotional timeline as those essays and the years surrounding them.

    Russo’s novel quietly argues that dignity comes not from avoiding disappointment but from continuing despite it. His characters keep moving forward through heartbreak, embarrassment, monotony, regret, and failure because that’s what life actually asks most people to do.

    And maybe that’s why Arsenal finally winning the Premier League felt emotional in a way I wasn’t entirely expecting. Even though I didn’t personally endure the full twenty-two year drought, twelve years is still long enough for a football club to quietly weave itself into the fabric of your life. Somewhere in the middle of all those years and all those Pulitzer Schmulitzer essays, Arsenal finally won the league again.

    And somehow, after all the waiting, it meant even more because of it.

  • The Reivers (1963): The Unexpected Afterlife of The Meat Eater

    After my brother Scott received his initial cancer diagnosis in 2021, I started making more frequent trips to Phoenix to see him. During many of those visits to his house, he began pulling things out of the past like a magician who had decided, late in his career, to specialize in nostalgia. Baseball cards. Old records. Toys I hadn’t thought about in decades. Artifacts from shelves that, in my mind, had long since been cleared, boxed up, or lost to time.

    And then one day, he handed me a Super 8 film.

    “I don’t know what this is,” he said.

    Which, if you think about it, is exactly the kind of sentence that should make you both excited and slightly nervous.

    When I got back home, I took it to a local shop to have it digitized. A few days later, I went back to pick it up, and the guy behind the counter was smiling in a way that suggested I was about to become either very proud or mildly horrified.

    “I don’t know what this is,” he said, echoing my brother almost word for word, “but it’s the best thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

    That felt promising. Or at least memorable.

    I rushed home, opened the link, and hit play. It was a movie I had made when I was twelve years old with my friends Jamie and Dave. A full-blown cinematic production titled The Meat Eater, which is exactly as subtle and nuanced as it sounds.

    The casting was tight. Jamie was the detective. Dave was the serial killer. And I, displaying an early commitment to range, was the victim. Multiple times.

    Jamie, it’s worth noting, was a very popular kid. The kind of kid who didn’t need to spend his afternoons making low-budget horror films. And yet, for a stretch of time—right around the period after my mom passed away between seventh and eighth grade—he did. We weren’t best friends, but he was kind to me during a time when kindness mattered more than I probably knew how to articulate. Looking back, that feels like a bigger part of the story than anything we actually put on film.

    The premise of The Meat Eater was simple. Dave would kill me, and then, in a bold narrative choice that really pushed the boundaries of suburban storytelling, he would eat me. To achieve this effect, we purchased hamburger meat, placed it on my stomach, and covered it in ketchup. This was our special effects department. It was meant to be funny. And it was. Just not in the ways we’d eventually come to appreciate.

    What makes the whole thing remarkable, watching it now, is not just the plot—which holds up about as well as you’d expect—but the complete absence of supervision. No parents. An alarming number of BB guns. At one point, we were jumping off the roof of Jamie’s house into the swimming pool, which felt like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time and, in retrospect, like something that probably should have required at least one adult in the general vicinity. And through all of it, an unwavering confidence that what we were making was not just a movie, but important.

    And honestly, it kind of works. Not because it’s good, exactly, but because it’s so fully committed to being whatever it is. There’s plenty of humor in it, and we were very much in on the joke. But there’s no distance. No sense that we were making something disposable or temporary. Just three kids, a camera, and the firm belief that a hamburger and some ketchup could carry an entire narrative.

    No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

    – Pink Floyd, “Time”

    Which, in a strange way, is exactly what The Reivers is about.

    Published just a month before two time Pulitzer winner William Faulkner died, The Reivers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. It’s often described as a lighter, more accessible Faulkner, which is a bit like saying a roller coaster is a more accessible form of flying. Or that a bar fight is a more accessible form of conflict resolution. Or that a road trip with questionable decision-makers is a more accessible version of growing up. Technically true, but still not something you approach casually.

    The novel tells the story of Lucius Priest, an eleven-year-old boy in Mississippi, who embarks on an impulsive road trip with two companions: Boon Hogganbeck, a charming and reckless family friend, and Ned McCaslin, a resourceful and morally flexible man who may or may not be the most competent adult in the group. What begins as a simple joyride quickly turns into something else entirely, involving stolen cars, questionable decisions, a detour through a brothel, and a series of escalating consequences that none of the participants are fully equipped to handle. It is, in other words, a perfect childhood adventure disguised as a very bad idea.

    What elevates The Reivers beyond mischief is the way it’s told. The entire novel is narrated by an older Lucius, looking back on the events of his youth with a mix of affection, embarrassment, and hard-earned clarity. The story hasn’t changed, exactly, but the meaning of it has. At the time, it felt like freedom. Later, it looks a lot like chaos. At the time, it felt like courage. Later, it edges closer to recklessness. At the time, it was just something that happened. Later, it becomes a story worth telling.

    For me, The Reivers sits somewhere in the lower middle of the Pulitzer rankings. It’s undeniably enjoyable, occasionally chaotic, and filled with moments that linger, but it doesn’t quite reach the emotional or stylistic heights of Faulkner at his best. What it does offer, though, is something a little different. It reminds us that not every meaningful story needs to be heavy. Sometimes it’s enough to capture a moment in time, let it unfold with all its messiness intact, and trust that meaning will reveal itself later.

    These are the days you’ll remember.”

    – 10,000 Maniacs, “These Are Days”

    Watching The Meat Eater, I had the same feeling. The same sense that what once felt immediate and important now reads as something slightly different—messier, funnier, and, in its own way, more meaningful.

    At twelve, we weren’t making something ironic or self-aware. We were absolutely trying to be funny, and at least to us, we were succeeding. But we were also making something we believed in, with the full force of our limited resources and unlimited confidence. We thought we were telling a funny story. We didn’t realize we were becoming one.

    And like Lucius, I’m now the one looking back, trying to make sense of it. Trying to reconcile the seriousness of the experience then with the absurdity of it now. Trying to understand how something so small—a few minutes of film, a hamburger, a bad idea—could carry so much weight decades later. Because it’s not really about the movie. It’s about the people in it.

    I lost track of Dave after elementary school. Somewhere along the way, the thread just snapped, the way those threads tend to do. One day you’re making a film together in a backyard, and the next you’re living entirely separate lives without even realizing when the transition happened.

    Jamie, though, stayed in orbit a little longer. Although he started high school at a boarding school, he came back to Phoenix and we ended up at the same high school for senior year. Then, like most people, we drifted.

    But when I found the video, I sent it to him. No context. No warning. Just a digital time capsule dropped into his phone.

    And recently, when I was in Phoenix, we met up for a drink. It had been decades. And yet within minutes, we were right back there, talking about The Meat Eater, laughing about scenes we hadn’t thought about in years, filling in gaps in each other’s memories like two slightly unreliable historians reconstructing a very low-budget crime.

    At some point in the conversation, I also told him I still remembered how he had treated me during that time after my mom died, and that it had meant a lot to me. And then, a few minutes later, Jamie told me something I didn’t know. He said that one of the reasons he ended up going into the tech field was because of my dad. Back then, my dad had brought one of the early home computers into school, and when Jamie would come over, we’d spend hours playing games on it.

    I had no memory of that meaning anything beyond what it was at the time. Just something to do. Another way to pass an afternoon. But for Jamie, it stuck. It mattered. It shaped something.

    Which is the part of all of this that I can’t quite get over. The idea that these small, seemingly insignificant moments—a Super 8 film, a shared afternoon, an early computer—don’t just disappear. They ripple outward in ways you don’t see, connecting people and decisions and lives long after the moment itself has passed.

    It’s strange what survives. Not the things you expect. Not the moments that feel important while you’re living them. But a shared memory that refuses to fade completely, even as everything around it changes.

    In The Reivers, Faulkner suggests that we don’t really understand our lives while we’re living them. We understand them later, in the telling. In that sense, The Meat Eater wasn’t just a movie. It was the beginning of a story that took forty-five years to understand.

    And somehow, improbably, it’s still doing what it was always meant to do.

    Not bringing people back, exactly. But reminding you they were never entirely gone in the first place.

    P.S.

    On a whim, after finishing this essay, I tried to find Dave. Facebook came up empty, which felt about right. But a quick Google search turned up a psychologist who lives less than a mile from me with the same name.

    So I emailed him. Just a short note asking if he had grown up in Phoenix and if he happened to remember me.

    Unbelievably, it was him.

    I sent him the video.

    This was his response:

    “Oh my god that’s insane! I had no memory of that, but after watching it, now have a faint recollection of it. What a solid production. Sorry I had to kill you so many times and eat your organs. I guess that’s why I always had this feeling of having a part of you with me all this time!”

    Which, all things considered, feels like about as good an explanation as any.

  • The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968): How Woo Are You?

    A few months ago, I wrote an essay where I told the story about how I ended up in Puerto Rico giving a talk called “How Woo Are You?” to a group of relative strangers at an event called “fake church.” What I didn’t tell you, somewhat intentionally, was what the talk was about. Since then, more than a few people have asked me the obvious follow-up: what was the sermon actually about? I’ve been waiting for the right moment to tell that story, and two recent events have convinced me that the time might be now.

    First, Parisa and I were recently back in Puerto Rico for a visit. Same streets, same humidity, same slightly disorienting feeling that life had looped back on itself. And second, Friday night was Nowruz—the Persian New Year—and it hit me that I had given that fake church talk on Nowruz in 2023. So, between the return trip and the calendar, it felt like a nudge. Or at least enough of one to finally answer the question.

    There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

    — Leonard Cohen

    If you read that original essay, you know the setup. I’ve always been a pretty firm believer that we’re in charge of our own destinies. Not in a grand, manifest-your-future kind of way, but in a more practical sense: say yes to things, show up, lean in, and over time those small decisions compound into something that starts to look a lot like luck.

    So I began my talk the same way I began that essay—by telling the story of how I got to Puerto Rico in the first place. The sticker, the café, Andrea, a trip to Israel, Gillian, the co-living house. A chain of yeses that, in retrospect, feels improbably linear, but at the time was anything but.

    Then I read a poem. It was Charles Bukowski’s The Laughing Heart. If you know it, you know it’s not subtle. It’s a kind of gravel-voiced insistence that your life is yours, that even in a world that feels indifferent or chaotic, there’s something inside you worth protecting. It’s a call to stay awake, to resist sleepwalking through your own existence. It’s also, not coincidentally, a pretty good manifesto for the way I’ve generally tried to move through life.

    The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski:

    your life is your life

    don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

    be on the watch.

    there are ways out.

    there is light somewhere.

    it may not be much light but

    it beats the darkness.

    be on the watch.

    the gods will offer you chances.

    know them.

    take them.

    you can’t beat death but

    you can beat death in life, sometimes.

    and the more often you learn to do it,

    the more light there will be.

    your life is your life.

    know it while you have it.

    you are marvelous

    the gods wait to delight

    in you.

    (And speaking of gravelly voices, if you’ve never heard Tom Waits read this poem, it’s worth a listen.)

    Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

    — Semisonic

    But because it was Nowruz—a holiday about renewal, reflection, and the passage of time—I wanted to balance that idea with something else. So I told the group I was going to read a second poem, this one from the Persian poet Rudaki called “All is as it is supposed to be.” And it goes like this:

    There is happiness now, be happy.
    Why are you sad? Why do you worry?
    Destiny does what it must for you.
    The viziers’ ways won’t work for you,
    Fate will decide what is best for you.
    Life’s wheel won’t create another like you.
    Your mother won’t bear another like you.
    God will never close a door on you,
    Before opening a hundred better doors.

    If Bukowski is about agency—about grabbing the wheel—Rudaki is about something closer to surrender. Trust. The idea that maybe the wheel doesn’t entirely belong to you in the first place.

    At that point, I told a second story.

    Jesus, take the wheel…”

    — Carrie Underwood

    In 2005, I was living in San Francisco and working at Wells Fargo—really my only stint at a big company. My team had a small suite of offices in a downtown high-rise. There were maybe eight of us total, so when the doorbell rang, whoever happened to be around would grab it.

    One day, I was alone when the bell rang. It was a DHL delivery guy holding a package for someone named Stacey Larsen (name changed to protect the innocent).

    I told him there wasn’t a Stacey Larsen in our office. He showed me the label—definitely Wells Fargo, definitely Stacey Larsen. So I invited him in and said we could try to track her down on the intranet. We found a Stacey Larsen who still worked at Wells Fargo, just in a different building. We called, got voicemail, left a message. The DHL guy left.

    End of story. Or so I thought.

    About six weeks later I attended my 20-year high school reunion back in Phoenix. On Friday night of reunion weekend, there was a house party—classic backyard kegger, exactly what you’d expect. At some point, I’m standing outside, smoking a clove cigarette, when up walks my junior-year prom date.

    Stacey Larsen.

    “Hey Stacey,” I said.

    “You’re an idiot,” she said, in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t actually upset. Which, to be fair, is a label I’ve earned in a variety of contexts, but I was still completely unclear on the specific one here. My face must have reflected that.

    “That package you got…” she said. I just stared at her.

    “At Wells Fargo. That was for me.”

    It turns out that, unbeknownst to me, Stacey also worked at Wells Fargo and had actually occupied the exact same office in the exact same suite before my team moved in. She had connected the dots before I did. I was still staring at the dots.

    What are the odds?

    It’s a strange world we live in…

    — Depeche Mode

    So those were my two stories. And if there was a point to the talk, it was this: I’ve always believed that we create our own destinies. I still do. I believe in saying yes. I believe in showing up. I believe that most of what looks like luck is really just the accumulation of small decisions made over time.

    But.

    There are moments that don’t quite fit that model. Things that feel too coincidental, too specific, too… authored. Moments where you didn’t cause anything to happen, but happen it did.

    So in my head, I’ve started to imagine what I call a Woo-O-Meter. On one end: pure free will. We are in complete control. Every outcome is the product of our choices. On the other: pure fatalism. Everything is pre-ordained. We’re just along for the ride.

    When I was younger, I would have been pinned all the way to the free will side. These days, I’m not so sure. At that point, I looked around the room and asked, “How Woo Are You?”

    You don’t have to serve somebody…

    — Bob Dylan

    Which brings me to The Confessions of Nat Turner. William Styron’s 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a fictionalized first-person account of Nat Turner, the enslaved man who led a violent rebellion in Virginia in 1831. The book unfolds as a kind of retrospective confession, with Turner awaiting execution and recounting the events and, more importantly, the internal convictions that led him there.

    Styron doesn’t present Turner as a simple revolutionary or a one-dimensional symbol. Instead, he’s deeply introspective, conflicted, and intensely religious. From a young age, Turner believes he has been marked, chosen for something larger. He experiences visions, reads meaning into natural events, and becomes increasingly convinced that he is an instrument of divine will.

    As the story progresses, that belief hardens. Turner wrestles with doubt, hesitates at key moments, and questions whether he is misreading the signs. But each time, something happens, a coincidence, a vision, a moment of clarity, that he interprets as confirmation. Not suggestion. Confirmation.

    Styron’s prose matches that interior intensity. It is dense, lyrical, and often beautiful, more concerned with psychological depth than narrative momentum. When it works, it pulls you deep inside Turner’s mind in a way that feels immersive and unsettling at the same time. You don’t just observe his thinking. You inhabit it.

    Which is also why the book can be a demanding read. The pacing is deliberate, the language occasionally heavy, and the focus so inward that it sometimes sacrifices narrative propulsion. Compared to some other Pulitzer winners, it is less interested in story as story and more interested in the philosophical and moral architecture underneath it. That emphasis on interiority shapes how the story unfolds.

    And so when the rebellion finally comes, it doesn’t feel impulsive. It feels inevitable. That’s what makes the novel so unsettling. It’s not just about what Turner does. It’s about how he understands why he’s doing it. He isn’t surrendering to fate in a passive sense. He’s acting, deliberately and forcefully, with the conviction that the outcome has already been decided.

    Which raises a question the book never fully answers, and maybe can’t: Is Turner exercising free will? Or is he carrying out a destiny he believes he has no right to ignore?

    Reading it, I couldn’t help but think back to that room in Puerto Rico. Not because my stories carry anything close to the weight of Turner’s, but because the underlying tension felt familiar. The idea that you can move through life making choices, saying yes, creating momentum, and yet still occasionally encounter moments that feel less like decisions and more like instructions.

    Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

    — Grateful Dead

    I still believe in saying yes. I still believe that showing up matters, that motion creates opportunity, that most of what we call luck is just the residue of effort and openness over time. But I also think there are moments—small ones, usually—where something else seems to be at work. Not enough to rewrite the rules. Just enough to make you wonder who else might be holding the pen.

    Maybe we choose more than we think. Maybe we control less than we’d like. And maybe the truth lives somewhere in between— in the space where a sticker turns into a trip, a trip turns into a story, and a misdelivered package somehow finds its way back to a name you hadn’t said out loud in twenty years.

    That night in Puerto Rico, after I finished, we went around the room and everyone shared where they landed on the Woo-O-Meter. Some people were firmly on the free will side. No hesitation. Others leaned toward fate, convinced that more was being written for them than by them. Most people, like me, hovered somewhere in the middle—unsure, but curious.

    What struck me wasn’t where people landed. It was how easily everyone had a story. A moment. A decision or a coincidence they couldn’t quite explain but also couldn’t ignore. Which, I think, is the point.

    Not that we have to choose a side. But that if you pay attention long enough, life will give you enough evidence to question whichever side you thought you were on.

  • The 15 Greatest Super Bowl Halftime Shows

    Collage of iconic music artists performing on stage, featuring diverse styles and outfits.

    When I first published this list in 2023, I assumed I’d revisit it annually, tweaking the rankings as new halftime shows entered the conversation. Instead, three Super Bowls passed without an update (Rihanna, Usher, and Kendrick Lamar) and the list stayed put more out of inertia than intention. Rihanna’s performance, for all its cultural significance and quiet power, ultimately didn’t quite crack the top tier for me. Usher’s show, meanwhile, was polished and enjoyable — smooth vocals, deep catalog, even a few minutes on roller skates — but felt more like a legacy affirmation than a performance that demanded a reshuffling of the list.

    Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show changed that. It didn’t just invite comparison; it forced it. Watching that performance made it clear that the list hadn’t simply gone untouched, it had fallen slightly out of date. That felt like long enough to justify a proper rewatch, a rethink, and a small but meaningful structural change. The original list ranked 13 halftime shows. Honestly, I can’t recall why I picked 13. Thirteen is a strange number. It implies either superstition or procrastination, neither of which I’m prepared to defend. So this is no longer a Top 13. This is a Top 15, updated to account for the most recent halftime shows and to give a little more room to performances that deserve it.

    Before we go there, however, it is important to understand how we got here. Suffice it to say, the Super Bowl halftime show wasn’t always the cultural referendum it has since become. During halftime of the first Super Bowl in 1967, the University of Arizona Symphonic Marching band performed “The Sound of Music” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” in the shape of the Liberty Bell. To be fair, the show, titled “Super Sounds from the Super Bowl,” also involved two guys flying around with jetpacks (how do we not all have these by now?) and a weirdly large number of pigeons. In subsequent years the halftime shows expanded, but were more quirky than star studded. One year, for example, had an Elvis Presley-impersonating magician named – obviously – Elvis Presto. 

    That all changed in 1993, when Michael Jackson showed up, stood perfectly still for nearly a minute, and turned halftime into something you couldn’t look away from. From that moment on, the show was no longer an intermission. It was the event.

    Since then, the halftime show has become its own cultural phenomenon. A referendum. A Rorschach test. And, inevitably, a ranking exercise.

    So, without further ado, here are the 15 greatest Super Bowl halftime shows in history.

    15. The Weeknd (Super Bowl LV 2021)

    The Weeknd’s 2021 performance is the first real beneficiary of the expanded list. At the time, it was easy to dismiss the show as oddly constrained — a stylish performance unfolding under the strange limitations of a pandemic-era Super Bowl. But with some distance, it’s clear that this was one of the more thoughtfully constructed halftime shows of the modern era. The extended sequence inside the mirrored hallway, surrounded by identically dressed, face-bandaged dancers, was disorienting by design. The spinning camera work, the claustrophobic framing, the deliberate sense of imbalance, all felt closer to a short film than a traditional stadium spectacle.

    That choice paid off in unexpected ways. The performance immediately launched a wave of memes, reaction clips, and internet parodies, which is often a sign that a halftime show has actually broken through. When the show finally spilled out onto the field, the scale arrived, but it was the earlier, stranger moments that lingered. The stadium never fully became a character, and the pacing still dips in the middle, but the ambition is undeniable. In a format that usually rewards familiarity and maximalism, The Weeknd committed to a visual concept, trusted it, and let the internet do the rest. That combination of artistic intention and cultural afterlife earns this performance its place on the list.

    14. Jennifer Lopez and Shakira (Super Bowl LIV 2020)

    In hindsight, this show now plays like a time capsule from a simpler moment. When Jennifer Lopez and Shakira took the stage in February 2020, we were mostly unaware (or at least unconcerned) that a virus was already spreading and would soon turn daily life upside down. We were still relatively carefree, and the performance reflected that mood completely. This was Miami doing Miami: global pop, relentless movement, Latin rhythms, and unapologetic heat. Shakira played the guitar. J.Lo rode in on a stripper pole. There was dancing, crowd surfing, a Led Zeppelin sample, a blast of horns, Bad Bunny, and a vibe that felt perfectly calibrated to the city hosting the game.

    The main critique at the time was that the show was “too sexual” even though Adam Levine from Maroon 5 pretty much took off all of his clothes the year before. More than anything, the performance was exuberant. Seen now, especially when contrasted with the stripped-down, socially distanced halftime show that followed the next year, it feels like the last gasp of a certain kind of pre-pandemic spectacle. It didn’t redefine the halftime show, but it captured a moment and a place with absolute commitment.

    13. Janet Jackson & Justin Timberlake (Super Bowl XXXVIII 2004) 

    Without a doubt, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s performance at Super Bowl XXXVIII remains one of the most memorable halftime shows in history — though far less for the performance itself than for the so-called “wardrobe malfunction” at the very end. Which is unfortunate, because the show was genuinely great. Janet and Justin were both excellent, and what’s often forgotten is how stacked the rest of the lineup was. Diddy emerged from a cloud of smoke, Nelly popped out of a tiny red car to perform “Hot in Here,” and most unexpectedly, Kid Rock absolutely tore through “Bawitdaba” and “Cowboy.” If you measure by time on stage alone, Kid Rock may have had the longest set of the night.

    And yet, almost none of that is what people remember. Instead, the performance has been reduced to the final moments, when Timberlake “accidentally” ripped away part of Jackson’s costume as they closed the show. Whether it was truly accidental has been debated for years. FCC fines were levied and litigated endlessly, but the more lasting and uncomfortable conversation has been about why Janet bore the overwhelming share of the backlash while Justin’s career emerged largely unscathed. That imbalance has come to define the legacy of the performance. Which is a shame, because it deserves to be remembered as one of the strongest, most ambitious halftime shows of its era — not just for its final two seconds.

    12. Gloria Estefan, Stevie Wonder and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (Super Bowl XXXIII 1999)

    I’ve always known the 1999 halftime show would be one of my more controversial picks, and in this updated version it has slid down a couple of spots. That movement isn’t a repudiation so much as a recalibration. When viewed alongside shows that followed just a few years later — particularly the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake performance — the production here looks unmistakably dated. Even the broadcast itself feels closer to the 1970s than the 2000s. Expanding the list to fifteen also created more competition near the middle, and this one, fairly or not, feels more tethered to its moment than some of the performances now ranked above it.

    And yet, I still love it precisely because it is so 1999. What could be more of that moment than opening with a ska-and-swing set from Big Bad Voodoo Daddy? From there we got a joyful medley of Stevie Wonder classics, capped by an athletic tap-dance showcase from Savion Glover, who even managed to pull Stevie into the fun. And because the Super Bowl was in Miami, Gloria Estefan emerged singing in Spanish, reminding everyone exactly where we were. This was a show that reflected its time — a moment when the country wasn’t at war, hadn’t yet been reshaped by 9/11, social media, or a global pandemic, and still felt free to be loud, playful, and uncomplicated. You really could have fun in 1999, and this halftime show captured that spirit perfectly.

    11.     Paul McCartney (Super Bowl XXXIX 2005)

    Paul McCartney’s halftime set the year following Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s performance was equally memorable, but almost the polar opposite in tone and presentation. In the wake of “nipplegate,” McCartney was widely viewed as a safe choice — a steady hand meant to calm the waters rather than push boundaries. And while his show lacked the spectacle and controversy of what came before it, that restraint turned out to be the point. What McCartney delivered instead was a reminder that sometimes the songs really are enough.

    Those songs, in this case, were unimpeachable. On an X-shaped stage, the ex-Beatle kicked things off with “Drive My Car,” rolled seamlessly into “Get Back,” and then traded his guitar for the piano during a fireworks-laced rendition of Wings’ James Bond theme, “Live and Let Die.” He saved the emotional peak for last, closing with “Hey Jude” as the 84,000 fans at Jacksonville’s Alltel Stadium took over the iconic “na-na-na” refrain. It was nostalgic without feeling dusty, energetic without trying too hard, and it quietly signaled a shift — from contemporary pop stars dominating the halftime show to classic rock legends being welcomed as headliners in their own right.

    10.     Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band (Super Bowl XLIII, 2009)

    At its core, Bruce Springsteen’s 2009 halftime show was essentially a Bruce Springsteen concert that happened to interrupt a football game which, to be clear, is a very good thing. One of the great pleasures of watching Springsteen is that no matter how many times he’s performed, he always looks like he’s having the most fun right now. That joy carried straight through the halftime show, even without much in the way of spectacle.

    What the performance lacked in grand production it more than made up for in personality. It opened with Springsteen’s now-famous instructions to “step away from the guac” and “put the chicken fingers down.” He tore through “Born to Run” and “Glory Days,” but the most indelible moment came during “10th Avenue Freeze-Out,” when New Jersey’s favorite son slid crotch-first into a TV camera with reckless commitment. The finale only doubled down on the chaos: Springsteen flung his guitar over his shoulder, bantered with a fake referee, and closed by shouting, “I’m going to Disneyland.” It was loose, joyful, and entirely on brand — a reminder that sometimes the best halftime shows succeed simply by letting a great performer be exactly who they are.

    9. Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar & 50 Cent (Super Bowl LVI 2022)

    SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, hosted Super Bowl LVI, and if you’re going to stage the halftime show in Inglewood, there was never a better or more obvious choice than Dr. Dre and company. This wasn’t just a performance; it was a homecoming. Dre curated the show like a victory lap for West Coast hip-hop, and the friends list was both extensive and impeccably chosen. Alongside announced performances from Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar, and Eminem, the show delivered genuine surprises — most memorably 50 Cent rapping “In Da Club” upside down, and Anderson .Paak casually holding down the drums during “Lose Yourself.”

    What made the performance resonate wasn’t just the star power, but the sequencing and confidence behind it. From Dre’s opening notes of “Still D.R.E.” to Mary J. Blige commanding the stage with “Family Affair,” to Kendrick tearing through a sharp, politically charged rendition of “Alright,” the show never felt rushed or overcrowded. It trusted the music and the legacy it represented. The result was the most universally praised halftime show in years — one that felt both celebratory and overdue. That acclaim was formalized when the performance won the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special (Live), the first time a Super Bowl halftime show had ever taken home the award. More than a nostalgic throwback, this was a statement: hip-hop had not only arrived on the Super Bowl stage, it had earned its place there. If this list were based purely on cultural impact and crowd approval, this performance would rank even higher.

    8.     Michael Jackson (Super Bowl XXVII, 1993) 

    Honestly, I have a hard time ranking Michael Jackson’s Super Bowl performance in 1993. From a historical perspective, it’s nearly untouchable. This was the moment the NFL realized it needed to keep people watching during halftime, and since the league doesn’t do anything halfway, it tapped the King of Pop to officially end the marching band era. The modern halftime show begins here. Every performance that followed exists because of this one.

    And yet, the actual performance is strange. Like most Super Bowl sets, it runs only about twelve minutes, but it takes Jackson a surprisingly long time to get going. He appears on stage and stands perfectly still for nearly forty-five seconds, followed by another long stretch before the music truly kicks in. For an artist with a catalog as deep as his, the song choices are also puzzling. “Billie Jean” is an obvious highlight, but the set opens with “Jam,” moves through “Black or White,” touches on “We Are the World,” and closes with “Heal the World” as a giant globe inflates at midfield. It’s earnest, symbolic, and undeniably influential — and it also feels oddly restrained. Add in the heavy lip-synching, and the result is a performance that changed everything without fully capitalizing on its own potential. It belongs on this list because of what it started, even if it still feels like it could have been so much more.

    7.     Katy Perry (Super Bowl XLIX, 2015) 

    If you like spectacle in your halftime show, Katy Perry’s 2015 performance is hard to beat. She entered riding a giant tiger (or lion — taxonomy felt beside the point) and immediately announced her intentions by shouting, “Super Bowl, are you ready to roar!” Unlike with Michael Jackson’s song selection, Perry understood the assignment. She delivered a greatest-hits sprint that included “Roar,” “Dark Horse,” “I Kissed a Girl” alongside Lenny Kravitz, “Teenage Dream,” and “California Gurls,” never letting the energy dip or the crowd drift.

    And then she kept going. Missy Elliott showed up to tear through “Get Your Freak On” and “Work It,” instantly elevating the middle of the show, before Perry closed things out strapped to a mechanical shooting star for “Firework.” Somewhere along the way, Left Shark happened — a background dancer whose delightfully off-kilter moves launched a thousand memes and briefly threatened to eclipse the rest of the performance. But that’s part of the charm. This was twelve minutes of lights, color, special effects, relentless movement, and pop confidence at full volume. It didn’t try to be subtle. It tried to be fun. And it absolutely succeeded.

    6. Kendrick Lamar (Super Bowl LIX 2025)

    Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show feels like the natural counterpoint to The Weeknd’s — less surreal, more declarative, but driven by the same refusal to default to spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Where many performers treat the Super Bowl as a greatest-hits sprint, Kendrick approached it as a statement, with a clear throughline and a sense of purpose that never wavered. The staging was restrained, the transitions deliberate, and the performance trusted silence, space, and lyrical weight in ways the halftime show rarely allows.

    That trust paid off unevenly across audiences, and that’s part of what makes the performance so interesting. Some viewers wanted more bombast, more cameos, more obvious crowd-pleasing beats. But for a younger generation (particularly anyone under 25) this performance landed as something closer to definitive. It didn’t generate memes in the same way as The Weeknd’s mirrored maze, but it dominated conversation nonetheless, parsed and debated line by line across social feeds in the days that followed. Like The Weeknd’s show, Kendrick’s doesn’t fully conquer the stadium; the halftime show is still, at its core, a translation exercise. But in a format that usually rewards excess and familiarity, Kendrick delivered coherence, restraint, and intent, and in doing so, signaled where the halftime show may be headed next.

    5.     Madonna (Super Bowl XLVI, 2012)

    Once the Super Bowl fully committed to A-list artists, it was only a matter of time before Madonna made her appearance. If you prefer your halftime shows unapologetically over the top, this one was for you. Madonna arrived in Indianapolis dressed as a Greek goddess, seated on a throne carried by Spartan soldiers. From there, the spectacle kept escalating: a graphic-heavy stage, slackline stunts, Roman imagery, and a guest list that included Nicki Minaj, M.I.A., CeeLo Green, and LMFAO. At one point, Madonna even climbed onto one of LMFAO’s shoulders, which felt both completely unnecessary and completely on brand.

    Crucially, the song choices justified the excess. She opened with the perennially perfect “Vogue,” then folded LMFAO into a surprisingly effective mash-up of “Party Rock Anthem,” “Sexy and I Know It,” and her own “Music.” There was brief controversy when M.I.A. flipped the bird during “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” but Madonna never lost control of the moment. She closed with a soaring, gospel-inflected “Like a Prayer,” backed by CeeLo and a massive robed choir, reminding everyone that beneath the costumes and choreography, she still knew exactly how to command a stadium. The result was maximalist without being messy — a halftime show that understood spectacle as both tool and weapon.

    4.     Lady Gaga (Super Bowl LI, 2017) 

    If anyone was going to match the anticipation of Madonna’s performance, it was Lady Gaga. Few artists arrive with as much expectation baked in. Gaga’s career has been defined by reinvention, provocation, and genre-hopping ambition, and the question heading into Super Bowl LI wasn’t whether she would surprise, but how. In the end, she played it more traditionally than expected, but that restraint turned out to be the point. What she delivered was one of the cleanest, most visually striking, and vocally impressive halftime shows in Super Bowl history.

    She opened on the roof of the stadium with a medley of “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land,” then quite literally launched herself from the heavens onto the field below. From there, the show became a perfectly paced sprint through her biggest hits: “Poker Face,” “Born This Way,” “Just Dance,” “Telephone,” and “Bad Romance,” all performed live and without a safety net. And then she ended it exactly right. A mic drop. A caught football. A silent leap off a staircase into nothingness. No bow. No wave. Just gone. In a format where so many performances struggle to stick the landing, Gaga delivered the best exit the halftime show has ever seen — a masterclass in control from start to finish.

    3. Beyoncé & Destiny’s Child (Super Bowl XLVII, 2013)

    I’ve moved Beyoncé’s 2013 halftime show up a few spots in this updated ranking, and on rewatch the reason is simple: it has aged spectacularly well. Beyoncé was already at the top of her game then and, somehow, still is now. The production was massive without being cluttered, precise without feeling cold. There were fireworks. At one point there was literally a guitar shooting fire. But none of it felt like compensation. It felt like amplification. She tore through a run of career-defining hits including “Crazy in Love,” “Love on Top,” and “Baby Boy,” and every moment landed with authority.

    And that was before the floor opened up and Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams emerged for a long-awaited Destiny’s Child reunion. Together, the trio ripped through “Bootylicious,” “Single Ladies,” and “Independent Women” with the kind of ease most performers never reach at any stage of their careers. The show was so powerful, in fact, that it’s still remembered for briefly knocking out the lights at the Superdome, triggering a 33-minute blackout shortly after halftime. That wasn’t part of the plan, but it somehow felt fitting. Beyoncé didn’t just perform at the Super Bowl. She bent it around herself. On rewatch, that dominance is impossible to ignore, and it earns this performance its move up the list.

    2.     U2 (Super Bowl XXXVI, 2002) 

    U2’s Super Bowl XXXVI halftime show earns its place near the very top of this list not just because it was beautifully executed, but because it understood the moment with rare clarity. Less than five months after September 11, the country was still raw, unsettled, and unsure how to gather publicly without pretending everything was fine. The NFL originally had Janet Jackson slated for halftime, but in the aftermath of the attacks, it became clear that the moment called for something different. U2 brought the heart-shaped stage from their Elevation tour to New Orleans and approached the Super Bowl not as spectacle, but as a space for collective acknowledgment.

    The band played just three songs — “Beautiful Day,” “MLK,” and “Where the Streets Have No Name” — and that restraint was the point. As Bono sang, the names of those killed on 9/11 scrolled silently across a massive screen behind the stage, transforming the halftime show into a memorial without ever tipping into melodrama. When Bono opened his jacket at the end of the performance to reveal an American flag sewn into the lining, it felt earned rather than performative. There were no fireworks, no guest appearances, no viral moments — just clarity, respect, and emotional precision. In Super Bowl terms, it was almost radically understated. And in that moment, it was exactly right.

    1.     Prince (Super Bowl XLI, 2007)

    Although “best of” lists like this are inherently subjective, it’s genuinely hard to argue against Prince’s 2007 performance as the greatest Super Bowl halftime show ever staged. It had everything, without ever feeling busy. Prince tore through his own classics — “1999,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” and “Baby I’m a Star” — with total command, then seamlessly folded in covers that somehow sounded even more Prince than the originals. Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and Foo Fighters’ “Best of You” became raw material rather than homage. Backed by a full brass marching band and wielding his purple guitar like an extension of his body, Prince didn’t just perform songs; he bent them to his will.

    And then there was the ending. Prince closed with “Purple Rain,” delivering what is still the definitive live version of his most iconic song. As the rain poured down — rain that, remarkably, had never fallen during a Super Bowl in the previous forty years — Prince leaned into it, stretching the guitar solo, letting the moment expand rather than rush toward a finish. The stadium sang along, the lights glistened off the field, and the weather itself became part of the arrangement. Prince didn’t need to enter on a mechanical animal or drop from the sky. Whether it was divine intervention or dumb luck, he didn’t react to the spectacle — he absorbed it. The Super Bowl didn’t elevate Prince. Prince elevated the Super Bowl. And no one since has quite managed to do it again.

    Lists like this are meant to be argued with, and this one will almost certainly need revisiting again. New artists will come along. Tastes will shift. We’ll see new artists like Bad Bunny, this year’s performer, who reflect where popular music is actually heading, not just where it’s been. That’s the fun of it. But for all the movement, reshuffling, and generational change, one thing feels safely immutable. The top spot remains untouched. The rain still falls. The guitar still screams. Prince will still be Prince.