Gone, mostly, are the days of asking your neighbor to borrow a cup of sugar. When I was growing up, my mother viewed our neighbors with irritation — their principal crimes were overdoing their Christmas decorations, and on one occasion, drunk-driving through our fence. I can count on one hand the pleasant neighborly interactions I’ve had as an adult. Once, in my upscale urban neighborhood in Atlanta, my fiancé asked another neighbor for an egg — he eyed us with suspicion, as if blueberry muffins were a pretext for some sort of political scam or a multi-level marketing scheme. Now, irritation generally characterizes my relationship with my neighbors. Why would you wear heels when you have hardwood floors and a downstairs neighbor? Who still listens to the Barenaked Ladies, much less on repeat? But I also have intense curiosity, and in the absence of peeking through my neighbors’ windows as I walk by, which is hard to do in a high-rise, I have Nextdoor.

Nextdoor, for the sane and detached among you, is a social media platform that’s locality-driven, an alternative to meetings you actually have to show up for, neighborhood Facebook groups that might give away a little too much information about you, or listservs that clog your inbox. When you sign up, you give your address, which the company verifies by credit card billing address, phone billing address, or postcard. You have access only to your neighborhood and a few surrounding hoods. It’s a place to post about a lost dog or found kittens, advertise an estate sale, or ask for recommendations for a handyman from fellow residents.

My neighborhood’s Nextdoor includes a space for officials to communicate with residents, like the Atlanta Police Department and the Department of Watershed Management. The categories for posts from residents include classifieds, crime and safety, documents (almost never used), free items, general, lost and found, pet directory, recommendations, events calendar, real estate. More than 150,000 neighborhoods in the U.S., U.K., and Netherlands are on Nextdoor, according to Fortune. It was valued at about $1 billion in 2015.

“Community building” is usually more of a buzzword or phrase on social media, but in this case, it’s quite literal. The idea is that Nextdoor promotes community engagement with the people in your actual, geographic community, and that it would build social capital and better citizens. Instead, it’s been heavily criticized for contributing to fear, distrust, and racist behavior. There are also coyote sightings, warnings about the Starbucks Unicorn drink, and requests to borrow someone’s kombucha scoby.

The Crime category is where the ugliness of Nextdoor is most obvious. The coded language of “hip-hop types” and “thugs” (translation: black or brown), “suspicious” people and the homeless. In 2016, due largely to the efforts of advocacy groups in Oakland, California, the company changed how crimes and suspicious activity are reported in an attempt to crack down on racist language and incidents, forcing residents to describe a person’s clothing, for example, rather than just being able to say “a black man.”

It didn’t used to be like this, neighbors say; “this” being break-ins and rude language and panhandling and litter. Back in my day, we left our doors unlocked, they say. But they also say, be smart. See something, say something. You have second amendment rights. Take no chances.

“I wish we had a death penalty for stealing,” wrote my young, white, female neighbor. “Go to the range and hone in on your shooting ability and drop someone that shows total lack of regard for your personal property,” said a young white man, who explained that “castle doctrine” would protect you from prosecution if you killed someone for breaking your car windows. (No, it wouldn’t, commented a lawyer.)

My former neighbor Heather* exemplifies the worst of Nextdoor. She saw a Dodge Charger with tinted windows and rims parked on her street and posted several times over the course of a few days, with photos and video. “Suspicious Dodge Charger is here around again!!!” “I am getting angry because I don’t see a patrol neighbor drive around to check all of neighbors for their safety plus cop NEED to go his place to take him to jail for stalker often. (I gave him a tag number) there is nothing cop can do bc this suspicious didn’t break a law!”

Someone’s brother ran the plates. Other neighbors posted surveillance photos. Then, Daniel*, another neighbor, chimed in about “this suspicious.” Daniel, whose nanny has never been late, not once in 2 years. In fact, she arrives early every day, so she parks around the corner from the house before her shift.

She didn’t pull into the driveway to get away from you, she pulled into the driveway to bring our kids home. She drives by your house frequently, well, because you are my neighbor. If you want to know, she has a clean driving and criminal record, and the respect of a lot people in our neighborhood. I trust her with the safety of my family and we love her like a member of our family. It breaks my heart to see her arrive in tears, which was the case this morning. I understand why you might approach someone outside your house if you do not recognize the car. Three separate people approached her this morning, each interaction was a bit different, but thematically there was clear message sent “that she didn’t belong”. How can I say that you might ask? Well, one person told her explicitly that she need to go even after she tried to explain who she is, and another approach her with a gun holstered on his hip. You can’t tell me, that as a woman sitting in a car alone you wouldn’t find that scary. Hell, I know I would be scared in that situation.

Not that there isn’t crime, though — there are carjackings, the burglaries, the stolen tires and cold cases. Police departments post about criminals they’ve caught. Neighbors warn each other about rashes of car break-ins.

But it’s the cases of paranoia that are the most fascinating. There’s the mother who saw a car slow down and decided it must be a child sex trafficker out to get her toddler (and the neighbors who backed her up, as a mother’s instinct is never, ever wrong, even when it is). There’s the woman whose neighbor smokes weed, and the commenter who informed her that they probably run a “drug lab.” The man who asked how we should prepare to combat the “Ferguson effect,” or the supposed phenomenon that police officers are now afraid to use force because of the riots over Michael Brown’s death.

Many neighbors have Ring or other home security systems and frequently post videos and photos of criminals (a burglar in the act, for example) and “suspicious people.” The latter is sometimes just people — canvassing for political candidates, making deliveries, trying to find a friend’s house.

There are self-righteous homeowners who ask, “Who’s with me?” to shutting down the strip clubs and sex toy shops that preceded them by decades and will probably outlast them. There was a couple that moved next door to a nightclub and then complained about the noise. And then there are the ones who disdain the “tranny hookers” outside their apartment — people who have lived there for far longer.

“Go live in the suburbs,” sneer the others at the complainers. Occasionally, it flips, and someone argues that the homeless man with the violent criminal record is fine just where he is, living in a woman’s backyard and yelling at her and her dog in the mornings. And sometimes, there is deliberate provocation.

My experiences have never been quite a provocative as those of Josh Fruhlinger, a Bunker Hill-adjacent Echo Park, Los Angeles resident who recently tweeted about neighbors using their Nextdoor for “free adult movies” and dick pics.

It’s not all dicks. There are lots of coyote sightings, too. From sea to shining sea, coyotes stroll America the beautiful, according to the “General” category. Beauty has its place alongside the ugliness. Calls to help a homeless neighbor or celebrate a life, announcements of the first songbird of the season and invitations for new neighbors to get to know each other.

Most of the charm and humor, in fact, is found in the “General” category, along with the animal sightings and concerns of every species, from roof rats to hedgehogs and broken bird wings to snake eggs. Frequently, there is lively debate. “The great horned owl call is one long hoot followed by two short hoots.” “You are mistaken. It is hoooooooooot hoot hoot hoot.”

Recently, an Atlanta neighbor discovered a copperhead right before she stepped on it in her flip flops. She snapped its photo and realized it was swallowing a bird. Her post was followed by 82 replies. No, it is a pygmy rattlesnake. No, it is a harmless brown water snake. No, it is definitely “a C-head.” Beware should you get bitten — there is no antivenom anymore because once someone sued for an allergic reaction. Speaking of allergic reactions, is antivenom still made from horse serum? The original poster should get a cat; they were prized in ancient Egypt for their snake hunting abilities.

“Classifieds” is where the one-sentence stories live. A moving sale with a bolo tie and a painting of two tigers. Hamsters. Cooler doors. Eggs ($5 a dozen). Tickets to Shaky Beats, Neil Diamond, Billy Joel, The Weeknd, Soundgarden, Atlanta United, Hawks, Braves. Patio heater “and chimnea.”

My neighbors mostly live up to the stereotypes about Buckhead, where I live now. It’s where old money, new money, and no money mix. There’s a Ferrari in my parking lot and a Dior store within walking distance; the executives’ power breakfast spot and a country club aren’t far. But many of the people who work here (at the two upscale malls in a quarter-mile, for example) can’t afford to live here; they’re the ones taking advantage of our notoriously lacking public transportation system. But my neighbors are worried about crime levels they think are sky high. They’re outraged the 4th of July fireworks were cancelled. They’re shocked they got a ticket for passing a school bus.

I still don’t know my neighbors in my new building, but the elevators have been broken, which means we all spend a lot of time waiting around. It’s become a big building soap opera, complete with lawsuits. But being forced to spend time together has forced neighborliness. A man I know only from his vociferous Trump support on Facebook told me worriedly about his elderly mother and how the elevator petitions he printed out about our management company were for her — what if something happened and EMTs couldn’t get to her in time? Our concierge told me she’s thinking about leaving to go work at a brewery, and I got unsolicited advice on “working with what I’ve got” from two women who had just taken shots in the hallway.

After all this tech aimed at making us get to know each other, it’s a damn broken elevator that’s brought me my neighbors.

Katie Lambert is a freelance writer, editor, and content strategist.

The Strangers Nextdoor was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My entire last week was derailed by Charli XCX’s new music video for her song “Boys.” The “Boys” video is fun about a few different levels because you can ask yourself:

• Which boy do I self-identify as?
• Which boy is my idealized self?
• Who would be in my own personal “Boys” video and what would they be doing?

Approximately three and a half questions. Nice. Amidst the brainstorming of my own “Boys” video (Steven Yeun eating an iced donut, Peter Capaldi buttoning up a cardigan, etc.), I was vaguely reminded of my high school crush who definitely would have been one of my “Boys” Boys if this were a decade ago, who at one point in time played Edward Elgar’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E Minor, a piece of music I’ll think of as romantic for the rest of my life. This happens to everyone, I know. Not the falling in love with a cellist when you’re 17, but the association of something not particularly romantic with someone particularly romantic, and then it’s stuck that way until you die.

First and foremost, who was my crush? Just kidding. Fuck. I meant to write: who is Edward Elgar? Elgar was an English Romantic-era composer who lived from 1857 until 1934. If you know him, it’s possible you know him for his most famous works, the Pomp & Circumstance Marches. Yes, those marches. The graduation one, among others. The other week I heard it played out of context of a graduation and thought to myself, “hm, does Pomp & Circumstance actually… kind of bang?” To be determined.

My introduction to Elgar was, in fact, high school, and it was from the myriad rehearsals I sat through listening to my crush play the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E Minor during which I played timpani. Playing timpani was often arduous albeit wonderful, because it’s an instrument that requires a lot of listening to everything around you. In the early days of learning a timpani part, you’ll count measures meticulously while you have extended rests; as you inch closer to a concert it feels more instinctive. You learn everyone’s cues. When there’s a soloist in a concerto, that experience, for me, was always heightened. Not only was I in touch with the body of the orchestra itself, but also one main person. Okay, and I was 17.

The Adagio — Moderato begins with a heavy chord. You can hear in the recording (Daniel Barenboim with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1974) as the bow hits the cello’s strings. Its opening refrain is heavy and intense, full of turmoil. It’s instantly tragic and therefore romantic as well. The woodwinds don’t enter until about 30 seconds in, a desperate whisper of the cello’s initial melody. From there, this first movement hesitantly inches towards its central melody around the 1:12 mark. It’s relatively simple in nature, but when echoed by the cello, there’s such an immense emotional depth to it barely matched by a full violin section. This is one of my favorite opening movements of any piece of all time. Can you see how a high school senior would lie on the floor of her bedroom and try to embed this piece into her nervous system? No? Well, that’s fine. I was a little weirdo. That’s not to say, however, the movement only consists of teenage angst. There’s a bit of lightness around the 3:44 mark that drifts in with a particular coolness.

Its second movement, the Lento — Allegro molto begins not dissimilarly in its opening phrase but quickly builds to a false start. The solo that begins this movement feels much more abstract. Elgar, despite my wildest dreams, was not writing his concerto as a grand romantic gesture. This was his last notable piece of music, composer in 1919 following the end of the First World War. While Elgar was perhaps considered a Romantic-era composer, there is a strictly Modernist feel to a movement like this. Noticeably disorienting, however beautiful it remains, grappling with itself and the world in which it lives. There’s almost a frantic nature to the cello here, a scrambling to say something, anything.

Now, the Adagio, to me, regardless of the context in which Elgar wrote the piece, is absolute pinnacle of romance. As a piece of music, there’s such a fullness to it. It’s simultaneously wistful and joyful; nostalgic and new. I have always loved the sound of the cello and the texture it provides within an orchestra, but this is the piece of music I think of when I think of the cello. It defines it. When I revisited Elgar’s concerto recently, this was the movement in which I got up to turn off my air conditioning and restarted the track to get every inch out of it. Does it not just encapsulate how it felt to be 17? I don’t mean that in a condescending way either. I mean it in the way where every feeling seems like it is the most important and only feeling you’ve ever felt. An earnest drama.

Its fourth and final movement, the Allegro — Moderato — Allegro ma non troppo grasps for a similar tonality to its second, more disconcerting movement. It’s also the longest movement within the concerto, and like any fitting finale, covers a wider range of emotions. For example, I love the formal cheeriness at the 1:30 and the melody that follows. Whereas past movements of this concerto have felt more demure, subtle, aching, this is the one that goes really big. It’s unafraid now to be loud and wholeheartedly complex. Admittedly, there are times I lose myself in this movement — it darts all around, and if I’m not keeping it, it’ll leave me by the side of the road.

This movement also fully cements the entire concerto as one of the hallmark pieces for the cello. It’s undeniably incredible in every sense, and soloist Jacqueline du Pré puts such weight in it. Like the opening notes of the first movement, you can hear the smack of her bow on the strings. The power. One of the reasons I love this recording of it is because the conductor, Barenboim, was her husband.

Though this piece was not intended to be romantic, the performance is inherently so. It’s a collaborative action, a dance, a partnership. Though my reality of a high school crush fizzled out, lost touch, grew up, changed, unfriended in one of several needless Facebook purges, this recording can bring it all back once again.

Fran Hoepfner is a writer from Chicago. You can find a corresponding playlist for all of the pieces discussed in this column here.

I’ve Been Busy Thinkin’ About Elgar was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Who sheared the fog from the mountains?
They’re bleating, nearly bald,
huddled together at the horizon.
Or I’m reading too much
into the landscape again. Projecting,
as if playing a recorded image of myself
on the screen of terrain. I am transparent
and quiet. You can’t quite see me
for the trees, my wet eyes gone
greener than pines. I don’t belong here
with these poor sheep. My skin,
all forest and manifestation
of the interior. You can see the mountains
through me. That’s how projection works.

Maggie Smith is the author of Good Bones (Tupelo Press, fall 2017), The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body. Smith has received fellowships from the NEA, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She lives and writes in Bexley, Ohio.

The Poetry Section is edited by Mark Bibbins.

A Poem by Maggie Smith was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

★★★ The freshly washed sidewalks were reeking. A man plucked at his t-shirt to flap air into it on the subway platform. Each leg of the crosstown slog had its own new particular stench: sweat and possibly vomit in the long corridor to the Eighth Avenue trains at Times Square; sweat and battling colognes on the long escalator out in the East 50s; breakfast exhaust on the cross street. The light was clearer and the sky bluer than they could have been. A bicyclist did a wheelie up onto Union Square and across it. The sun pressed down hard on the chest. At day’s end it gathered into a swelling, formless purple glow, while the high scraps of cloud stayed white.

New York City, August 1, 2017 was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Meh. There’s always Death to look forward to,” my dad would say whenever I would air my frustrations with a world that was at odds with the one I had conjured in my mind. Though I found his blatant disregard for my artful misery frustrating in my youth, I later found myself boomeranging the exact same words back at him when he would speak to me of his own problems. Those words served as a beacon for us both in an otherwise dark, cruel, and shitty world. The upshot to everything is not “happiness.” Or a career. Or a house. Or a partner. It’s the sweet encroaching hand of blackness. Nothingness. Death.

There is no better way to comment on the futility and transience of existence than through the vehicle of social media, which employs a user interface that perfectly lends itself to pith and humor, whether it be a meme, a gif, or a tweet. Take, for instance, the “lol nothing matters” gif: succinct, droll, and forever relevant. “It is literally the gif to end all gifs,” wrote Adrian Chen for Gawker. He deduced that, by the rebuttal power of this one gif, all social media accounts would be disabled and we would move to remote mountaintops. Until then, however, we resort to the power of believing in nothing and compulsively commenting on it.

When I reentered the social media world last year, after a five-year hiatus, my friend introduced me to Nihilist Arby’s. While everyone else was inhabiting the respective blue-and-red echo chambers of social media, I had found The Black Bubble. Nihilist Arby’s was my gateway drug to social media-packaged Nihilism (Cheerful Nihilism, We Believe in Nihilism, Existential Nihilist, Nihilist Memes etc.). I suppose, in a way, this social media-packaged Nihilism was helping to propagate philosophical knowledge, dredging it out of the sea of stuffy academia and plating it up for those who otherwise couldn’t be bothered. But the very act of writing about (and glamorizing) Nihilism goes against its very grain.

Nihilist Arby's on Twitter

The best part of this new healthcare plan is that here at arbys, we were all ready to die anyway. Eat arbys

Though there were many Nihilist-focused Twitter and Facebook accounts from which to choose, I wanted to know what the creator of Nihilist Arby’s would say about this particular brand of Nihilism because of the uniquely dark quality of the content (“The best part of this new healthcare plan is that here at arbys, we were all ready to die anyway. Eat arbys,” and “Tonight as half the nation cries and the other half enthusiastically fucks members of their immediate family, remember: Arbys exists for now.”). What could be more nihilistic than a mountain of red meat? Nihilist Arby’s also has an outrageous engagement rate: One of its most recent tweets, which read “Life hack: die” received 23,000 likes and 12,000 retweets with only 290,000 followers, which is impressive. So I tracked down the person behind it and was afforded a glimpse into the weird and wonderful mind of Brendan Kelly.

Nihilist Arby's on Twitter

Life hack: die

Kelly, former corporate copywriter and current frontman to punk bands The Lawrence Arms, The Falcon, and the Wandering Birds, generated the idea for Nihilist Arby’s when working in the marketing and advertising department of a prominent ad agency. “Advertising is so removing its own ribs to suck its own dick,” he said when I asked him about his time there. Flabbergasted by the stupidity of a cereal company attempting to make cornmeal ubiquitous by way of social media, Kelly felt compelled to create a Twitter account, right then and there, of a fictitious person who worked in advertising and was so depressed by the futility of having to tweet such inane content every goddamn day that they become increasingly apathetic and unhinged. He googled Arby’s, found a photo of the luscious meat void, googled Nihilism, found the “What if there is no meaning to life?” header, and that was it. Nihilist Arby’s was live.

Nihilist Arby’s is just one of many accounts, on both Facebook and Twitter, dedicated to this trope of Nihilism and disillusion. And though it goes to dark, fucked up places — where Daddy sucks off hobos, abortions are offered as meal deals, and sandwiches are made of Kendall Jenner and Steve Bannon fucking — the malaise that induced its inception is not unique. It’s the same stuff that spread like a virus through humanity (at an especially rapid rate since the 2016 primaries) and rendered many of us totally bewildered, if not a bit demented.

“Is there a sweet escape in not giving a shit about anything?” Kelly asked me. “Of course. I mean, there is probably no more nihilistic tome in the canon of Nihilism than the second N.W.A. album. It’s all about rape and stealing money and fuck everything and all of you.” But what about Nietzsche, I asked (we wasted no time with formalities because there’s only so long and then we die).

“When people talk about Nihilism as Russian political philosophy or Nihilism as a branch of Nietzscheism, it’s like, what’s your point? Fuck you for telling me what not caring is supposed to look like!” he said, trying to suppress his maniacal laughter. “I personally don’t believe in anything. And not believing in anything could take any shape or form. If you think there is some sort of structure to not believing in anything, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

What intrigued me about Kelly was his distinct ability to care about everything: Our current state of defunct affairs, his daughter, the climate. He is thoroughly engaged with the world around him. What I realized after talking to him, and many of my more cynical friends, is that most people who claim to possess nihilistic tendencies actually care a hell of a lot. Their empathy levels are off the charts. Herein lies the paradox: What the hell is Nihilism anyway? And why are there so many social media accounts acting as its purveyors?

Take Cheerful Nihilism, for instance. Cynthia Lan Sears, Doctoral Student and Graduate Research Assistant responsible for its creation, recently posted a video explaining why she felt compelled to do so. “I started Cheerful Nihilism as a way to cope with this free-fall decline of my life,” she explained in perfectly cheerful-nihilistic fashion. “Nihilism is zeitgeist, spirit of the times right now,” she continued, “because there’s been a huge failure of all the institutions that were supposed to provide knowledge and standard of living for the citizenry.” We crave connection and authenticity and it just so happens that Nihilism, in all of its potential for black comedic brilliance, is what we’re turning to.

David Marshall, Research Professor of New Media, Communication and Cultural Studies at Deakin University, posits that “humour and comedy are always ways in which — no matter whether you’re living in a very oppressive regime or a democratic regime–people can connect without committing themselves to a full-on opinion.” It doesn’t take a wild stretch of the imagination to understand why highly empathic people find solace in such humor. Especially when it’s the kind that cuts hard and fast, getting you right in the gut in a way that some thousand-page manuscript on the futility of existence never could.

We use memes as vessels of commiseration and connection in an otherwise strange and unforgiving world. A world that starkly contrasts that of our Baby Boomer parents. As a result, there has been a staggering shift in generational expectations.

“Baby Boomers were given the world,” said Kelly. “They’re the most self-important babies making their own turds into gold of any generation that has ever existed…And Boomers said to their kids ‘Hey check out my mansion. If you go to college, you’ll get this.’ And then 2008 happened and the world collapsed and Millennials were like ‘I thought we were getting stuff.’” No wonder we’re so despairing.

This hopelessness, and preoccupation with catastrophe, has also invaded the television market. In a recent Forbes piece concerning Millennials’ obsession with the apocalypse as made evident by the clear glut of post-apocalyptic TV, contributor Zara Stone posits that Millennials “have trouble imagining a future where they’ll earn enough to buy a house, raise a family, and even travel without sanctions. Hence, programming that tells them this is the norm — by allowing them to think the lack of a future is acceptable.” And maybe it is. Maybe not giving a shit, or pretending to not give a shit, is our only chance of low-risk survival as it requires minimal amounts of emotional exertion.

Why Millennials Are Obsessed With The Apocalypse

When I asked Eugene Thacker, author and Professor of Media Studies at The New School, about this particular brand of Nihilism that has entered social media culture, he told me what I had long suspected, but couldn’t quite articulate.

The notion of a nihilist meme only makes sense if it puts an end to memes — all memes. But this would never happen, since humanity is itself a meme, having propagated itself across the planet with all the voracious expediency of an alien pandemic — and if human beings are capable of anything, it’s in making everything a ‘thing.’

What he wrote next made me want to just light the whole lot of us on fire.

Is it any accident that at a time when we have become acutely aware of the challenges concerning global climate change, we have also created this bubble of social media? I find social media and media culture generally to be a vapid, desperate, self-aggrandizing circus of species-specific solipsism. And because of this, it is a reflection — ironically, the stupidity of our species might be its only legacy. After all, I am emailing all this to you…

But how the hell are we supposed to get up each morning and eat and piss and work and send emails and talk to humans and just generally derive pleasure (or the illusion of pleasure) from anything if we are to subscribe to this way of thinking at all times? It’s exhausting. And if we truly believed it, we’d have all offed ourselves ages ago. Or maybe we’re just too scared? I simply do not know.

What I do know is this: I scroll through my nihilistic newsfeed daily. I consume it ad nauseam. You know, the way one drinks or has sex to obliterate consciousness and momentarily say goodbye to the cruel, cruel world without ever leaving it. And maybe, just maybe, Haruki Murakami was right when he said that “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.” Or maybe (and this is probably most likely) I’m just trying to ascribe significance to fuckall.

Angela Brussel has written for Brooklyn Magazine, ARTpublika, The Wrong Quarterly, and The Seventh Wave Magazine.

There’s Always Death To Look Forward To was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve been making grand, middle-informed generalizations about Germany since the first day I set foot there in 1995, just out of my freshman year of college and full of serious, incontrovertible ideas about Thomas Mann, Nazis and gaining fluency through “immersion,” by which I definitely did not mean “studying.”

And for at least that long, Germans have also taken great enjoyment in my failure to portray their culture correctly (if only there were a word to convey such an emotion).

For if there’s one thing Germans love, it’s pointing out that other people are wrong. Of course, the fun thing about that particular massive generalization is that it’s the asshole bon-mot equivalent of a self-tightening knot: Any German who dares contradict it is just proving my point.

I will, however, begrudgingly admit that in the half of a year I have been in residence here at The Awl, I may, perhaps, have not been one hundred percent correct in every single thing I’ve said about Germany. And I’m not just talking about my grievous mistranslation of the word Unkraut, or my somewhat creative approach to German Rechtscreibung, which is more often than not Unrechtschreibung.

So, I bit the proverbial Gewehrkugel, and reached out to some Germans and asked them to engage in their national pastime of correcting me. Here goes. Their responses have been edited for length; my questions have been edited to make me look smarter and more articulate.

GERMAN I HAVE OFFENDED: Kersten, 42, translator
CRIME AGAINST THE VATERLAND: Insufficient appreciation of asparagus

What am I missing about Spargel? If it’s really so good, then why are only you people obsessed?
First off, there’s a certain degree of conditioning. Germans grow up with the Spargel-Kult, so it’s ingrained in the national psyche, and it’s been going on for a long time. You (of course) know how Germans have an irrational weakness for homeopathy? Apparently, asparagus was thought to have healing properties, and as late as the 19th century was listed as a medicinal plant in the amtliches Arzneibuch, the official book of medicines, and therefore was supposed to be stocked by the local apothecary. You of all people will also appreciate the fact that asparagus is associated with spring, and spring with procreation, and procreation with penises; white asparagus also has a certain phallic look to it, even if for most men only in an aspirational way.

Is it possible that there’s some German-only Spargel tastebud?
I think Germans generally still consume a significant portion of their fruits and vegetables when they are in season. Now, most produce that we think of as seasonal is fruit, so asparagus is pretty much the only popular vegetable that has fairly limited seasonal availability. In the US, most types of produce are available year-round thanks to the fact that the US has a much more varied climate. In Germany, it’s much less common for produce that can be grown locally to be eaten out of season.

Is there an equivalent American food, or are our food tastes so abhorrent that we lack this kind of epicurean ability?
The closest thing I can think of in the US is how there’s pumpkin everything in the fall: pumpkin spice latte, pumpkin ale, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, etc. As somebody who didn’t grow up with any food that used pumpkin as an ingredient, I frankly find all that stuff unappealing. So I would maybe say that the pumpkin is America’s asparagus, without the sexual innuendo.

I knew a guy who fucked a pumpkin once, so you’d be surprised.
Oh, Gawd!

GERMAN: May, 46, professor
CRIME: Dismissal of far-right political parties as a joke

So you mentioned that you had a friend who, if not actually an AfD* voter per se, is sympathetic to at least some parts of their platform. (*Note: non-German reader friends, AfD is short for Alternative für Deutschland, and they are basically if Steve Bannon and Sarah Palin had a German baby, and that baby formed a political party, and there I go treating it as a joke again.)
I like to listen to people and consider all sides of an argument, like a “trained academic,” and this may be why over the past 15 years or so, I have heard opinions from people that others have not, or at least not as much. Some of the opinions overlap with those by today’s AfD, or come close: for example,“Muslims generally cannot be integrated into German society because of [some supposedly intrinsic quality].” (This sounds like the AfD’s, “Der Islam gehört nicht zu Deutschland,” or “Islam doesn’t belong in Germany.”) Behind many of these views seems to be some kind of desire for a national identity, that I always thought was very foreign to me (I am, in the view of the New Right, a successfully reeducated postwar child).

So in order to find out just how popular AfD-type views secretly are, one has to take them seriously, more or less?
Well, I feel that it may be more helpful if people with opinions that seem to belong to the Neue Rechte (New Right), including the AfD, did not feel they had to hide them, as this would give them a chance to be convinced otherwise in open discussion. Moral outrage as a response, or breaking off dialogue, would only confirm their view of German social discourse as closed, and people as following some kind of officially prescribed doctrine. It may also make them less radical — though this may be wishful thinking. But right-wingers can present themselves as victims, or as a conservative avant-garde, in the current climate (also in the US!), and that is a problem.

So what did you learn when you really listened?
Some opinions that I heard had reasonable and understandable grounds, but were driven by fear or prejudice, or both. People can express the same concerns about immigration, but draw opposite political conclusions. The belief in change for the better, progress, or improvement of problems seemed often to be lacking. (For example, some predict a civil war in Germany.) This pessimism can be coupled with a critique of the Enlightenment and Modernity in general, with its universal humanism and belief in reason and progress, and so it can be hard, if not impossible, to argue against. The way right-wing opinions are expressed often poses a problem for discussion based on principles or reason.

So what can we do?
Engaging in a conversation without giving credence to what one does not agree with, or even finds appalling — that is the trick. And not an easy one. Discussing actual problems and proposing “alternative” solutions that are not just good “for Germany” but for humanity.

GERMAN: Rica, 36, lecturer
CRIME: Ignoring the cultural context of Schlager music

Now, I want to start this by saying that this isn’t you being a pedantic German. I’ve known you for twelve years, and you’re the least pedantic German I know. This is something I legitimately fucked up. So, basically I was so worked up about schlager’s Pat Boone stylings (aka rock and pop without the pesky influence of people of color) that I didn’t take a whole shit-load about cultural context into consideration. First, that schlager is essentially the country music of Germany, and that taking cheap shots at it problematic in a similar way.
I agree, and it poses the same problems: On the one hand, there are so many issues with country, but on the other, judging country then becomes somewhat of a class issue.

And that was my biggest oversight. Because Germany does not have the vast income inequality that the US does, and the days of the Bürgerliches Trauerspiel are somewhat behind us (long story short: old-school Germans believed the aristocracy and the Regulars were two different species of human, and if they intermarried their offspring would be a monster). I just don’t think about class in Germany as much as I should.
I think in Germany class plays out via education level. Schlager is seen as the music of the uneducated. And I think during this global rise of anti-intellectualism, schlager then got this new hype that isn’t campy and self-ironic, but really serious (in a way that I am pretty conflicted about).

That was the other thing you mentioned to me when you suggested that my schlager coverage was shallow and superficial (which are probably the two adjectives I’d use to describe schlager! Irony!). I am completely ignorant of the camp aspect of schlager, but given that schlager stars perform at Pride, obviously it’s a big thing!
I was a teenager when schlager (but only a certain type) made a comeback in the 1990s, and though I was never a die-hard schlager fan I did dabble, in part because my friends did, and in part because my 1968 mom HATED it. Like, HATED. She’d get so riled up. It was hard to rebel against those student-revolution parents because literally every boundary we could push, they had already excelled at… so reveling in this superspießige 1950s aesthetic was pretty much the worst I could do to her. For her, schlager stood for everything she rebelled against. There are certain [songs and artists] I am still not allowed to even mention around her. This is definitely something I drunkenly did at parties:

That is amazing. So how does the camp aspect play into this?
Right during that time, you then had artists like Dieter Thomas Kuhn, who was doing covers of old schlager, in this weird self-ironic, campy, but also serious way.

And you were already an American citizen by the time the 2010s revival happened. Any thoughts on this final Schlagerwave?
Haha, honestly, I learned about that in your article.

Those are the artists I mostly studied for this piece and I basically found them to be Kellyanne Conway set to music. They really seemed just so aggressively bland and white, and gleefully so, and I was mostly writing from my gut reactions to them.
Honestly, the whole self-ironic 1950s nostalgia was also super white and super problematic (because, 1950s), but I think back then we didn’t think about that yet. Like, “Griechischer Wein” [an Udo Jürgens song about Greek immigrants] is such a weird way of dealing with immigrants. It’s sympathetic in this romanticized, but also really patronizing, simplifying way, that really centers the white person and his feelings. And at the same time, it totally won my grandfather over for the plight of immigrants in Germany when it first came out.

Brief Interviews with Germans I Have Offended was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

…even if nothing about our energy infrastructure or transportation system changed — and even if people kept eating chicken and pork and eggs and cheese — this one dietary change could achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed to meet the target.

“I think there’s genuinely a lack of awareness about how much impact this sort of change can have,” Harwatt told me. There have been analyses in the past about the environmental impacts of veganism and vegetariansim, but this study is novel for the idea that a person’s dedication to the cause doesn’t have to be complete in order to matter. A relatively small, single-food substitution could be the most powerful change a person makes in terms of their lifetime environmental impact — more so than downsizing one’s car, or being vigilant about turning off light bulbs, and certainly more than quitting showering.

A team of scientists calculated what would happen if everyone in America substituted beans for beef and the results are guess what, human farts are a lot less toxic than cow farts! Well, that and cows are a very inefficient food sources—between feed and livestock grazing, they’re using up like a third of the land to produce not all that much meat (some of it “pus-filled”)! If instead we used that land for more crop space to produce a edible plant-things, we’d drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Maybe it really is time for us all to get Instant Pots.

If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef

Beans, Beans, They’re Good For The Planet was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Liana Finck

Views From A Cafe was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Whenever I see some sweet-faced kid walking down the street with a smile on his face for whoever passes by I wonder what he doesn’t know that I do. It’s easy enough to say “everything,” but some days I wonder if there isn’t just one lesson I could unlearn to make myself okay again, one memory I could forget so that I could smile at everyone without thinking about things too much. It should, theoretically, be possible. I mean, I was once a sweet-faced kid myself. None of us start out this way. We learn by living through it. You’d think we could undo it. Anyway, this new single by Yumi Zouma is terrific, and it will make you smile all the way through. Enjoy.

Yumi Zouma, “December” was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

★★★★ The subway station had breathed in fresh atmosphere, but the train car was a rolling hotbox, and the effects of it would not wear off through an aboveground transfer and a second train, with unbroken air conditioning. The sun on the East Side was sharp. Even when the day reached its peak, though, the heat was never cruel. The baked pavement of Union Square was soothing for feet chilled by the office. The sky had lost the depth and purity of its blue in favor of something chalkier. In the still air of gathering evning, the buildings far downtown shimmered in soft colors. Near at hand, the bright parts of the big facades of Midtown buildings were reflected in the big facades of other Midtown buildings. The zigzagging up-and-crosstown path toward home accidentally went by Trump Tower; the brass canopy was dull and shabby behind the barricades, cut off from the exuberant light all around. The five-year-old made it to the southeast corner of the Park before giving himself fully over to whining that his legs would not carry him further. It was one against three, but his legs had in truth been through a long day, and hailing a cab was faster than winning the argument would have been. Somewhere around Columbus Circle, raindrops began peppering the windshield. The sky above was blue, and the west was lemony, and the five-year-old was wrong yet vindicated. The wipers came on. As the taxi pulled up to the building, a figure came into view in the corner of the forecourt, bent over, pointing its pale and completely bare behind out at the world, while the rain kept falling on the bricks.

New York City, July 31, 2017 was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.