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I’m certainly not alone in saying this, but when I think of the most impactful deaths from throughout the world of fiction, it isn’t generally the people that come to mind first. More often, it’s the non-verbal creatures that pull at my heartstrings and linger in my mind. They spur a raw kind of empathy that audiences can’t always feel toward fellow humans.

Few 90s and 2000s childhoods went unmarred by the memory of Mufasa’s untimely departure in The Lion King. (I know, I know. It’s still too soon.)

Before I ever even had a pet of my own, I remember being driven to tears when our septuagenarian substitute teacher introduced us to Old Yeller.

Again, during a stormy day at summer camp, nearly a hundred of us filed into a large cabin as one of the counselors wheeled out a box-shaped TV from a creaky wooden closet, positioned it at the center of the room, and tasked us with deciding on a movie to watch. As thunder rolled in the background, rain misted in through tattered screen windows, and the woods descended into darkness, we deliberated between Sandlot, The Goonies, and Air Bud using a show of hands. With enough six and seven-year-olds’ sticky fingers on the scale, our democratic process guided us toward “the dog movie” cradled in the all-powerful teenager’s palm.

The sun was high in the sky, but so little light permeated the trees that the TV’s static lit up the room and transfixed the ordered rows of campers. By the time we reached Air Bud’s most traumatic scene, there was hardly a dry eye in the room. Even counselors stifled tears and tried their hardest to retain composure as shattered kids looked fruitlessly toward them for consolation.

Marley and Me was harder still on my friends and I. But of all the imaginary characters that I’ve grieved, I’m not sure any losses have ever gutted me as completely as those of the dragons of Westeros.

As strange as it is to say now, dragons had initially been one of the reasons that I was closed off to Game of Thrones. To my uninitiated eye, they symbolized everything that I would ultimately discover the show isn’t: juvenile, cartoonish, and unserious.

Never an enormous lover of fantasy, I reasoned that the storied universe that George R.R. Martin had created was simply too riddled with mythical creatures for me to be able to suspend my disbelief. It didn’t dawn on me that HBO could do for dragons what Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs.

One of the aspects of the show I’ve ultimately grown to value most is the sense of realism that it manages to imbue into material I unfairly deemed childish. Dragons, sorcerers, and giants don’t automatically make a story kid-friendly.

As with the grizzled father who falls for the new family puppy, I ultimately grew to love the dragons that had previously repelled me from the world. Watching them hatch from their eggs and become graceful, formidable titans, it’s hard not to feel a vicarious sense of ownership toward them as seasons tick on.

When the dragons begin meeting their dire fates, it drives home a level of agony in viewers that movies, in their limited runtimes, rarely manage to relay. But given a whole decade to grow attached to these living relics, it’s all the more nail-biting when we see them in peril, and it cuts all the more deeply when we see them in pain.

One of Westeros’ most convincing features is that the citizens of the world are every bit as in awe of dragons as audiences. The fire-breathing leviathans are hardly an everyday sight; entire generations live and die viewing them as little more than legend. Their return from extinction is greeted with the terrified reverence that such otherworldly beings should naturally elicit. And the destruction they cause in the towns and cities of Westeros is so well-realized and unsanitized that the story naturally eschews the air of fantasy that typically comes paired with such creatures.

Much of that owes to the massive CGI budget that HBO has funneled into Westeros. Few shows or movies have ever put so much money into bringing fictional monsters to life, so it makes sense that viewers can grow so attached to them — and feel so devastated when they die.

With over $20 million funneled into each episode, House of the Dragon plays into this phenomenon as much as the name suggests. The flying colossi come to life even more than in the show that preceded it, and the advances in technology have only added fuel to their fire. It’s both harrowing to watch and impossible to avert your gaze as civil war breaks loose, and dragons begin warring with one another. The elemental clashes are as horrific as they are mesmerizing.

The monsters feel not only rare to the point of endangerment, but so titanic and majestic that their deaths leave colossal voids.

Even the dragons with limited screentime feel like irreplaceable wonders stripped from the earth when they fall victim to the spoils of war. Because there are more dragons in this prequel show, we’re given less time to familiarize ourselves with the individual members of the species and look from a broader lens at the remarkable aberration such beings represent. It’s a testament to the power of special effects that HBO can infuse these creatures with such a depth of personality that the loss of each individual feels so heart-rending.

The dragons can wipe out entire battalions of ships in minutes, yet are portrayed largely as gentle giants whose only atrocities are in direct compliance with human orders. Their participation in the conflict is no more voluntary than horses’. And their primeval abilities would merely be applied toward hunting prey if they weren’t being used as pawns in a war between royals.

A lot of the tragedy in seeing the dragons enter the war is how blameless they are in the chaos they sow, and how the only means they have to communicate their thoughts and fears is non-verbal. They’re capable of expressing a great array of emotions, but when they know their end is near, there’s no exchange of words to be had with their human masters. The only goodbyes are in the form of labored grunts and knowing glances.

It’s that same barrier that makes losing pets in real life so difficult. When my first dog lay dying, it broke my heart that there were no words I could find to make her understand that the only existence she’d ever known was coming to an end. Yet, in her inability to speak, somehow she imparted even more than words alone could manage.

The dragons in House of the Dragon aren’t given a minute of dialogue, but their presence is so realized that, when they die, they feel like colossal souls snuffed from the world all the same. In their dying groans, they convey a far deeper agony than any cliché combination of final words. They serve as a reminder that, more than the magnates and their power struggles, it’s the dragons that take center stage in this story.

There’s a season 2 line I love that succinctly captures the ground soldiers’ growing acceptance of their smallness:

“The dragons dance and men are like dust under their feet. And all our fine thoughts, all our… endeavors are as nothing.”

Maybe one of the things I value most about House of the Dragon is how effectively it mirrors our present moment. In the masses of people humbled and awed by forces beyond themselves, and in the staggering inequalities that define the world, I can’t help but see a reflection of life today.

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There’s an idea I’ve returned to a few times since I first set out on this writing journey. It’s one of those rare thoughts that not only pushes me to the limits of my language ability, but at moments, feels as though it lies beyond the reach of what words can even impart.

It’s about time, technology, and how the very act of living life — in its wildly varied colors — insulates us from the weight of this bewildering future we belong to. Not the future we’ll greet tomorrow or welcome next year, but the future we know today.

Just as we struggle to wrap our minds around the difference between a billion and a trillion, we have a limited vocabulary for expressing what it is to be alive and conscious as our planet undergoes such seismic shifts. We can describe it in its broadest terms— tally all of the world’s absurdities and catastrophes onto a list — but words fall short of conveying the existential oddity of inhabiting a future that, until very recently, could never have been conceived of.

As children, most of us at least had half-formed notions about what tomorrow would bring. We harbored visions of flying cars and an alien assortment of tools, all designed to make our lives easier and more efficient. But as we tried to construct that once-faraway future in our minds, we couldn’t process it for all of its complexities. We envisioned innovation, but not how it would manifest. We didn’t yet know all of the uses and exploits we’d find for each new tool that entered our lives — nor all of the philosophical dilemmas they would raise.

We live in an era of consequences unintended and Pandora’s boxes pried violently open. There was no predicting all of the colors that would comprise this complicated portrait we call “the present.” At least no more than the inventor of the telegraph could have foreseen his invention burgeoning into an intangible network of memes, texts, and emoji reactions. This inflection point is so kaleidoscopically bizarre that no projection could have accounted for it.

When I was a kid, I expected there might come a day when I’d confer with a computer and have it respond humanly back. Growing up with smartphones, it seemed a safe bet that I’d witness the advent of artificial intelligence in my lifetime.

But what I couldn’t foresee was all of the shapes the innovation would take.

I didn’t foresee grandmothers sharing AI-generated photos of Jesus rescuing flood victims on Facebook, nor teens using artificial intelligence to generate breakup texts, nor the chatbots and the AI-powered detectors designed to catch their misuse. I didn’t expect renderings of historical figures on podcasts, comically fluent in Gen Alpha slang. I didn’t foresee the raccoons on trampolines, nor the deepfake YouTube shorts of politicians. I didn’t foresee having to walk my family through how to tell whether the video they’ve just reshared on social media is AI-generated, nor did I anticipate those giveaway artifacts embedded in each counterfeit growing harder and harder to identify with each passing month.

I could conjure the faintest outlines of this revolution before it arrived, but I couldn’t really prepare myself for the depth of its personality. I saw the loose scaffolding, but couldn’t bring myself to picture all the loved ones living inside.

I couldn’t prepare for the existential weight of this watershed moment — family and friends sitting in rooms and soberly discussing the rise of the planet’s first trillionaires. How we can’t trust anything we see online. How our very sense of shared reality is disintegrating. What it would mean for our most uniquely human traits to be mimicked by a machine.

I didn’t know what it would feel like when my father first asked me, “Ben, can you ChatGPT this for me?”

I didn’t know what it would be to explain to my 96-year-old grandpa that, no matter how much I struggled against it, AI was upending my industry. I watched the sweeping arc of his life flash across his face as it dawned on him that he’d lived long enough to cross bridges he never even knew existed. He was a vestige from another place in time, struggling to keep his walker on solid ground as the Earth accelerated beneath his feet.

I didn’t think that the age of AI would still be feathered by the passing bits of humanity that imbue each second with character and make our time here feel so unmistakably alive.

“… The fact that we are here,
on a floating rock with pollen counts,
paying bills,
missing dead people,
loving living people
who say “leaving now”
while still fully naked and looking for socks...”

— Matt Moberg

I couldn’t predict just how much of who we are we’d retain as we braved this new world.

The specter of artificial intelligence has loomed so large for so long that I half-expected we’d be something more by the time we’d construct digital gods to do our bidding. That we’d have crossed new frontiers of morality in order to be a part of this grand new age, transcending all of our ignoble traits and dissolving national borders to fight for common goods.

I didn’t envision our flawed, selfish, idiosyncratic selves facing off against this moment of tectonic uncertainty.

But it’s also that unsavory truth of our circumstances that infuses this epochal crossroads with humanity.

Our conditions are about as dire as some of the most twisted dystopian novels portended. But in greeting each new day beside the loved ones we know — as the meme-trading, binge-watching, tax-avoiding, text-ignoring people we are — the blows of our dizzying world are softened. The strain of staying upright feels less crushing.

It’s the impossible-to-make-up specificity of our ceaselessly weird world that lulls us into complacency. We’re frogs in heating pots. The world looks far too recognizable for 1984 comparisons to ring true. We’re too surrounded by loved ones, too capable of AirDropping fleeting nonsense to friends, and too absorbed in the rhythms of ordinary life to sit with just how dramatically the ground beneath us has shifted.

I couldn’t prepare myself for the numbness I’d feel at this colossal turning point. Sometimes, the emotional gravity of this great reordering subsides and I’m surprised by just how frayed my senses have become. I wouldn’t have thought that blaring alarm bells would so quickly begin to sound like background noise, nor that it would take so little time before something as wildly far beyond my comprehension as AI would begin to feel so banal.

Toying around with the first AI image generator I stumbled onto back in 2022, the transition between “This technology is unbelievable!” and “I wish these images would load a little faster” took only minutes. All of my life, I’ve been assimilating the absurd.

I could have predicted AI playing a larger and larger role in the world. I certainly didn’t envision us coaxing a genie this massive back into its bottle.

When a younger me imagined the future, there was a certain elegance and tidiness to it. I thought we’d veer away from the dystopian fallout that alarmists warned of.

Advancements would arrive, and we’d sort them. Paradigms would shift and we’d always find our footing.

The image I held of the future then was simple. Never fraught. I saw a unified species that found solutions to the problems that ailed it.

I could never have predicted this strange course we’ve taken to get to where we are, nor what this future would look like in all of its dimension once we arrived here. All of the intricacies and oddities that would continue freckling our days once this eerie tomorrow finally thudded at our doors.

One of the heaviest truths of our futuristic present is that our very existence is more consequential than it ever has been. And it’s both humbling and electrifying to mean so much. To be so large before such colossal problems. To be so equipped to take on the greatest challenges that have ever been broached. To leave greater footprints on the earth than all who came before us, and to contend with the possibility we may be the final creatures to leave our mark here. To call this wonderful place home.

We live in the most important time period that has ever occurred. And it’s a privilege to be a small part of this monumental moment. It’s a privilege to be the people standing atop these peaks of innovation, decoding genomes, launching satellites, and looking back in time toward the birth of our very universe. Erecting digital worlds and figuring out laws to govern the Wild Wests we’ve placed into our pockets. Fighting wars as our climate changes and finding ever-inventive and hilarious and loving ways to cope with the great chaotic everything outside our doors.

Asking the grandest questions that have ever been asked as we confront the most massive conundrums that have ever been confronted.

Will we solve the riddle of aging? Will we bridge the gap between brains and computers? Merge with machines? Watch our dreams unfold on TV screens?

End the global starvation crisis as algorithms code cures to our diseases?

Will we ride this parabolic slope upward until we disappear into oblivion? Will we colonize the galaxy in the same way we have our world?

Will the ills that plague us here today all become problems of the past? Distant memories we can reflect on and romanticize?

Can this future still be as bright as we once believed?

No one knows what happens from here, and there’s an enchanting beauty in sharing that uncertainty with 8 billion others. Each of us is forever blinded to what new days will bring, forever our irreducibly odd selves as we confront the future in our front yards.

The Gen Z Report is a reader-supported publication and your subscriptions make it possible to give my work the time and attention it demands.

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It’s been five whole decades now since Rocky first galvanized a generation. And at fifty years old, few films have held as enduring a spot in the hearts of Americans.

As a lifelong Philadelphian, it shames me to say that I only just watched the movie for the first time last week. As a self-appointed outsider of the professional sports domain, I assumed that Rocky’s appeal depended entirely on viewers’ pre-existing love for boxing.

Even as a modernist who struggles to sit through anything pre-1980, I was impressed at how well the movie holds up. Rocky depicts a city different from the one I’ve known throughout my life. Its culture is different, its atmosphere is charmingly askew, and its skyline is completely unrecognizable. Today, most of the buildings that can be seen during Rocky’s iconic run up the Art Museum steps have been razed and replaced. The once-tallest building in the city has been dwarfed by a new generation of skyscrapers. Where City Hall used to loom over the rough-edged metropolis like a monolith, today it looks quaint.

But the most fascinating distinction between the world then and the world now appears during a scene in which Rocky made a sexual advance on his love interest, Adrian. It’s a scene that’s often overlooked when talking about the film’s continued cultural relevance. In it, Rocky invites his reluctant date into his apartment, and she rejects the offer three times over. Adrian expresses continual discomfort once inside, where Rocky implores her to come closer, “make herself comfortable,” and “relax.”

Once she asks to leave, he blocks the door, inviting her to begin undressing. The five-minute scene offers a masterclass in just about everything that men are taught not to do while navigating the world of dating today. It was evidently written before the conversation about the importance of consent had even began.

One of the interesting components of the scene is that, even in spite of Adrian’s repeated rejections, she’s not portrayed as so unwanting that she appears to mind the kiss or relationship that follows. Yet even still, “no means no” is such an unassailable rule in modern romance that it’s easy for contemporary audiences to see coercion in Rocky’s actions all the same.

“She only complied because she was scared,” it’s easy to argue. “She only agreed to a relationship because she feared he might be violent if she rejected his advances.” He was, after all, a professional fighter.

But even if through the modern social lens Rocky’s actions might be considered tantamount to sexual assault, one controversial aspect of the scene worth examining is that not every situation involving consent is as dualistic as modern discourse suggests. Rocky makes room for that nuance. Of course, back then society was so different that the film’s depiction of romance fell within accepted norms. There wasn’t anything particularly brave or contentious about the director’s handling of the scene.

Rocky is forward maybe, but not to be considered a criminal. He doesn’t respect her continued rejections, and yet, he isn’t portrayed as ignoble. I’ve been surprised by how many female fans of the movie, across generations, are able to cleanly separate Rocky’s behavior from the crime of sexual assault. A couple of women that I spoke with about it were outright dismissive when I made the suggestion. “I mean, yeah, that was inappropriate, but you can still obviously tell that Rocky is a good guy,” they more or less explained.

Ironically, I don’t know a lot of women today who would excuse Rocky’s behavior toward Adrian if they encountered it in person. And yet, in the context of his entire hero’s arc, it’s easy for many viewers to simply deem his actions as a misstep — if even deserving of a footnote.

One of my favorite features of entertainment is the ability to see enough of a character’s backstory and internal world that it humanizes their intentions. In real life, we’re never afforded that opportunity. There’s something that’s inherently enticing for audiences in seeing the kernels of good in antagonists and the shades of evil in heroes.

In Game of Thrones, Jaime Lannister pushes a child out of a window and cripples him before the end of the first episode. And yet, by the time we reach season 3, we know enough of who he is that audiences can’t help but root for him. Similarly with Rocky, though his actions with Adrian are enough to get a celebrity cancelled in this day and age, the movie presents them with enough additional context about his personality that simply assigning him the label “rapist” would feel incomplete at best. He proceeds without Adrian’s consent, but the movie doesn’t portray that transgression as canceling out his caring half, or change the fact that he’s also evidently someone who loves and defends her.

In a way, it’s because the scene feels so jarring to modern viewers that it may actually be one of the movie’s most important.

When cancel culture first began taking hold, I felt a reflexive urge to glom onto the movement. Before the term “woke” became derogatory, I was one of the ones holding up pitchforks and calling for every personality accused of sexual deviance to be deplatformed. I certainly won’t be losing sleep over the Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys who lost their careers and credibility over their crimes. But it isn’t every Al Franken, Louie CK, or Aziz Ansari who deserved to have their careers tarnished over allegations or details that should have remained in their private lives.

The biggest fallacy in the progressive shift toward cancel culture is the in-built assumption that all of us, apart from the accused, are above reproach. In the calls to cancel public figures over each demerit we find in their personalities or histories is the belief that we all should be remembered by our very worst days or foulest interpretations of our actions. Unless there’s no moment from our past that we’d prefer be stricken from our records, the obsession with celebrity missteps is rarely righteous.

In the days after watching Rocky, a clip of a standup routine appeared on my feed in which the comedian joked that if “you ask a couple in their 90s how they met each other… they will just describe a crime to you.”

The comic then painted the all-too-common-back-then scenario of a man, years older than the woman he was pursuing, asking her out over and over again until she finally said yes. I couldn’t help but laugh because of how true that rang with my own experience talking to the elderly. The societal conventions of their youth now sound like the features of a bygone world. And what was considered normal back when Rocky came out would often be likened to rape today.

I think the conversation about consent we’re having now is important, and that it’s a reflection of societal growth that the scene rang so discordantly for me on that initial viewing. It’s a sign of progress that the protagonist’s actions register as sufficiently off to inspire Reddit board discussions.

But as I reflected more on it, I found myself appreciating how much more the scene has grown to represent in the years since Rocky was initially released.

The scene offers a case study in the idea that intimate scenarios are often too complicated to be reduced to the black-and-white categories that modern standards seem to dictate. Even to most contemporary viewers, Rocky can do what he does without coming across as a textbook rapist or criminal. One of the big takeaways for me there is that, in all of our social progress, there’s also been an element of overcorrection in our treatment of intimate scenarios. We certainly shouldn’t return to the misogynistic attitudes that prevailed when Rocky first came out, but nor should people dating today expect every romantic situation that arises to yield to a clear “do you agree to this sex?” crossroads.

I wish that in today’s social climate, it didn’t feel so controversial to challenge some of the attitudes we’ve adopted. It’s unfortunate that my raising critical objections here will invariably be construed as anti-consent or pro-sexual assault to some readers.

All throughout middle school and high school, my peers and I were implicitly expected to know when and how to make our moves. My first kiss didn’t need to be preceded by an “Is it okay to kiss you right now?” and my first girlfriend certainly didn’t mind. She didn’t feel violated just because I didn’t explicitly ask before acting.

As dating adults, my friends and I have adapted to an ecosystem where we need to be even more careful than we were in middle school. Now that we’re grown up, we’re more mature, more independent, and more capable of recognizing bad situations as they arise. Still, we’re all less trusted to navigate the haziness that romance inevitably breeds.

As a grown man, I ask a woman now if it’s okay for me to proceed in an intimate scenario. And on numerous occasions, I’ve had women tell me after the fact that they would have preferred me to read the room instead of asking so explicitly. Such direct requests can sap the magic from a moment.

And yet, I don’t know how to reconcile that personal experience with the fact that real harm can sometimes be avoided through those simple questions. If we were to return to our old ways, the losses would outweigh the gains. But that doesn’t mean the issue of consent is as binary as it’s often framed in pop culture today. fifty years after its release, that Rocky scene sheds a light on the moral ambiguities that still crop up in dating today and spurs viewers to reflect on how we regard them.

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It’s a recurrent theme for me while writing that I’ll begin to feel the piece I’m working on tug in multiple directions. New ideas surface, and as I explore them, sometimes one paragraph evolves into three. Pretty soon, I’m working with a tangent that’s far too unwieldy to be housed within the same article as my central thesis. Other times, it’s important for me to commit to my detour for just long enough to demonstrate how two seemingly disparate ideas connect.

Now, before I get to how any of this ties in to Steven Spielberg’s new summer blockbuster, I’ll ask you to bear with me as I ferret into this rabbit hole just a few feet deeper.

In recently putting together an article on the movie Backrooms, I began to feel as though my draft had mutated away from its original intent and become a broader exploration of liminal spaces and The Shining. There was a personal connection that I’d initially wanted to explore as well, but as it had already begun to suffer from a bit of bloating, I decided that the memoir component of the story would function best with enough room to breathe and as its own piece.

By contrast, there’s a philosophical diatribe that I’ve now spent over a week constructing. It’s about the oddity of life on earth throughout the advent of AI, and moreover, about the relationship that we have with progress. Pieces like this are simultaneously among the most challenging and fulfilling to write. Because they’re so grand in scope, they feel like the very most important work that I have to offer as a writer. But in their sky-high aims, I think that they run the risk of failing most miserably. Because the ideas I’m trying to tackle are so enormous, it’s easy to fall short in my efforts to do them justice.

Before this train of thought careens past its main destination and becomes yet another piece of its own, I’ll get to Spielberg.

The reason for my lengthy opening anecdote is that I can’t help but see the same struggle at play in Disclosure Day. And because I’m sympathetic to what a balancing act it can be for creators to pursue our loftiest ideas through to completion, I’m reluctant to speak too negatively about the film’s shortcomings. What Spielberg attempts to create here is even more colossal in its scale than Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Schindler’s List. He tries to capture humanity from arguably the very broadest lens that he has yet, and deserves real commendation for the effort. (Close Encounters depicts a similarly momentous crossroads for our species, but deals more with the personal side of the event instead of its far-reaching implications.)

As per Disclosure Day’s title, it’s a story about the day that humankind learns that we’re not alone in the universe. It’s such an enormous event to convey that it would have been difficult for any director to do it justice. And I think Spielberg is the rare auteur who may have been up to the challenge. In moments, he drives home the gravity of the day so beautifully that I can’t help but recommend the movie.

But where I think Spielberg went astray was introducing enough of a sci-fi/fantasy element to the movie that it obscured the grounded, human side of his story. In attempting to say too much, he muffles the potency of his vision.

The congestion creates a kind of tonal dissonance. On one hand, among Disclosure Day’s greatest strengths is its presentation of humanity as we discover we’re not alone. There’s a spellbinding realism to the globalized revelation that aliens exist. It’s at once intimate and epochal.

Even as we see footage flood TV screens across the globe of tiny men being pulled from crash sites and prodded, Spielberg effectively sells the illusion that we’re sharing in that monumental, species-wide experience. As we see reporters react live to the news, the mixture of awe, fear, and existential bewilderment on their faces drives home the history-defining moment. (Courtney Grace, in particular, viscerally captures that range of emotions.)

And yet, Spielberg spends a healthy amount of the movie’s runtime effectively undermining the poignancy that such scenes can impart. At times, Disclosure Day leans into the sci-fi enough that it borders on hokey and generic.

Despite our awakening to aliens’ existence being central to the movie, there’s very little about their disclosure itself that calls for anything supernatural. I think the movie would have been most effective if it were simply about our humanity as we approached this seismic new chapter. Ethereal forces didn’t need to be called into action. If it had just been a film about two factions—the protagonists trying to disseminate the information to the public and the nefarious agencies trying to keep it a secret—it would be both more digestible and more poignant. It works far better as a conspiracy thriller than as a metaphysical wonder tale.

I think Disclosure Day’s two halves could have been effectively fleshed out into their own separate movies. But as one project, it can feel disjointed enough to induce mild whiplash in its worst moments. I suspect that there was a draft of this movie (apparently, it went through over 40 iterations) that tied the elements together a bit more cohesively. But it’s hard for me to imagine that version running much shy of 4 hours.

Had Spielberg turned Disclosure Day into a mini-series, I think such a canvas would have been better suited for the high-reaching visions he had for this story. Inversely, if he’d cut out all but what made the movie most emotionally resonant, I think its credits could have rolled in time for the 90-minute marker. But in committing to both sides of this story and a 2-and-a-half-hour runtime, it comes across as both bloated and rushed.

Yet for all of its weaknesses, Disclosure Day gave me plenty to enjoy. The acting is strong, the cinematography is engrossing, the scenery is well-chosen, and the action sequences are nail-biting. It’s also nice to have John Williams return to do the score, though I doubt many will find this one reaches the heights of the melodies that feathered the Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, and Star Wars franchises. (Or maybe I’m just bitter that this article convinced me to stick around after the movie for “something awe-inspiring,” only to discover it was referring, not to an earth-shattering post-credit scene or some sort of cosmic epilogue, but merely a tepid John Williams tune accompanying the credits.)

One of my favorite aspects of the movie is how it pairs with one of my all-time favorites, Don’t Look Up. In Don’t Look Up, in the face of the revelation that Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid, people go on more or less as we always have. It’s a just-exaggerated-enough allegory to humanity’s climate change response that’s hilarious in its scathing accuracy. Where so many disaster movies make the mistake of depicting a species that rises to the challenge of the threats at hand, Don’t Look Up portrays a cavalier sort of indifference that makes for worse storytelling, but also a more accurate portrait of humanity.

In Disclosure Day, the globalized announcement that aliens are real is met with an uncharacteristically unified response that, while beautiful to watch unfold, feels less true to the species I know. I’d like to believe that Spielberg’s portrayal of humankind broaching this new chapter is accurate. As a child, I had similarly idealistic views of what such a day could look like. And there’s a magic in seeing those childhood fantasies realized.

But events of recent years have convinced me that if such a societal rupture were really to occur, if our species were to collectively accept once and for all that aliens are real, it wouldn’t be much harder for us to adapt to than it was when cell phones or smart homes were first introduced.

Recent years have lent more and more credibility to the notion that aliens are real. Yet the mounting footage and testimonies from ex-government officials have done very little to usher in the watershed moment that Disclosure Day presents.

I no longer believe proof will ever accumulate to a point where newscasters of the world will come together to report that aliens are real, no matter how copious or incontrovertible the evidence. Should there come a time when we each accept that extraterrestrial life is real, I think the onset of that understanding will be so gradual that our day-to-day routines never halt for even a moment. It won’t be the grand event that separates all of history into a stark before and after. Far more likely, it will be just yet another oddity we adapt to.

I’ve even heard it theorized that evidence of aliens has been purposefully slow-walked in order to prevent the mass-scale destabilization that Spielberg suggests at. After all, if our belief in extraterrestrial life comes on gradually rather than in one fell swoop, it won’t be so disruptive for the powers that be.

Walking out of the theater, I found myself grateful for Spielberg’s bright-eyed telling of events. And I was thankful that, even in falling short of its earth-shattering ambitions, his story still managed to inspire viewers to congregate outside of the theater in feverish discussion after it had ended. And moreover, I was thankful for a cinematic experience that performed one of the most central functions that movies can: to make me think more critically about the world in which I’m living.

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Despite being the “movie guy” in my friend group, many might be shocked to discover that I’ve still never seen Star Wars. Among the most criminal entries on the list of all-time greats I still had yet to watch, though, was Rocky. At least, until this week it was.

But just in time for the film’s 50th anniversary, and for America’s-250th-birthday-slash-celebratory-UFC-fight-on-the-lawn-of-the-White-House extravaganza, I’ve finally knocked that hallowed boxing movie off of my watch-before-I-die list. (Admittedly, America’s semiquincentennial played no role in the decision to finally confront Rocky, and I’m well aware that boxing and UFC are separate enterprises. But having finished the film, I’m now at least 6% more inclined to grant these modern gladiator duels a few minutes of free viewing.)

Much of the shame over my failure to watch Rocky until now owes to the fact that I’m a native Philadelphian, and there’s likely no movie that’s ever served as a greater source of honor for our city. Each time I pass the art museum, night or day, rain or shine, there are tourists from around the world lined up to take their turn running up its illustrious steps — or, at the very least, snap a picture with the Rocky statue fixed atop it.

Traveling abroad, there’s no guarantee that people will be familiar with the state of Pennsylvania when they ask me where I’m from. Nor is our state capitol likely to trigger any immediate name recognition. Yet, when I say I grew up in Philadelphia, it generally elicits one of four specific reactions: they reference the Eagles and our recent Super Bowl win(s), The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or our unchallengeable reign over the cheesesteak domain. But likely the most common reaction of all is to simply name-drop Rocky Balboa.

“Ahh Philadelphia! Like Rocky!” I’ve heard echoed a hundred different times in a hundred different accents. The enthusiastic mentions have grown into a hilarious staple from my time abroad. More than even the Liberty Bell, it’s that venerated boxing mascot who has become the enduring emblem of Philadelphia pride.

At face value, I wouldn’t think that Rocky would hold the broad appeal that it does. While the cultural popularity of baseball and football explains the success of films like Field of Dreams, The Sandlot, Remember the Titans, and The Blind Side, the allure of boxing has always seemed more circumstantial.

When typical sports seasons would kick into gear, people would wear their jerseys to school, proudly parading their fandom on their sleeves. But it would only be in the immediate days leading up to a fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, or whatever other fighters happened to be headlining, that I’d be reminded of the sport’s persevering intrigue. Fans I never knew existed would rapidly emerge from the woodwork. Chatter about where they’d each be watching the pay-per-view event would overtake the halls.

I didn’t realize it then, but I think much of my district’s enthusiasm owed directly to Rocky. In another city, these sporadic KO contests likely wouldn’t have become such a draw for my peers. But in Philadelphia, we learned to take a rare level of pride in these gruesome feats of human endurance.

Before watching Rocky, I hardly ever stopped to ask myself what made these harrowing fights so enticing. Though boxing often seems sidelined when compared to the MLB or NFL, IMDb lists Rocky as the single greatest sports movie of all time, above even films built around those more traditionally well-liked sports. It’s no wonder that the movie transcends borders and warrants shoutouts every other time I mention where I’m from. Director John G. Avildsen is uniquely effective at bringing the sport to life and humanizing his characters. He establishes a sense of stakes that feels palpable even for viewers who’ve never watched a boxing match in their lives.

I didn’t expect to be captivated by Rocky’s training, or to be so enamored with Syllvester Stallone’s portrayal of him. He’s simple and inarticulate, but still retains wit and a world-weary sense of charm.

As Rocky traded blows with his opponent, I didn’t expect to be so invested in the fight’s outcome. It was hard to watch yet hard to turn away from. Boxing feels simultaneously at odds with civilized society, and one of the most scabrously pure forms of sport that we have. There’s something elemental about a competitor achieving victory on such raw and animalistic terms.

In the same way that football has taken hold of the American psyche for the tectonic clashes between teams of 300-pound men, there’s a primal sort of magnetism to the notion of two trained fighters pushing themselves to the absolute brink of what their bodies can withstand.

It’s fascinating how universal of an icon Rocky has become, not just across borders, but across generations. As a self-proclaimed modernist, much of my resistance to the movie was simply its pre-1980 release date. After all, my lone attempt to watch Star Wars (1977) was cut short at the hands of my tragically limited tastes.

“Dad, this looks old and stupid,” a ten-year-old me lamented as my kindly father fruitlessly coaxed me to continue.

But as an older, maturer man now, I’m proud to say that I’m modestly more open-minded toward the movies of yore. And Rocky went over far more smoothly than I feared. (Some day soon, I’ll grant Star Wars a proper revisit.)

The only real reminder that I was stepping into another era when starting Rocky wasn’t the pacing or the film grain, but that the culture on display was nearly beyond recognition.

Not only is that 1970s version of Philadelphia almost completely different from the one I’ve known throughout my life — with different customs, skyline, and demographics — but the dynamic between men and women was also completely different.

In one scene, Rocky implores his reluctant date to come into his apartment, and when she tries to leave, he blocks the door. He then invites her to begin undressing. In the scene, it’s framed as typical, gentlemanly behavior, even bordering on something chivalrous. It’s hard to believe it was so recently that Rocky’s sexual advances toward his love interest were received by audiences as so innocuous.

Today, in a world where explicit consent has grown to mean so much, the protagonist’s actions would often be likened to rape. They feel especially discordant coming from this character we so often lionize for his bravery and nobility.

Yet, it might be a disservice to judge directors of the past by the standards of today, and if we always fell into that trap, we’d be deprived of some of the greatest stories ever made into movies. That such social conventions feel so antiquated today, more than anything else, stands as a fascinating case study of just how much culture can change and progress in half of a century. Perhaps Rocky’s greatest achievement is that it’s continued to remain such a relevant part of culture even as the world in which it was released has evolved beyond recognition.

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It’s possible that my best decision throughout my entire high school career was dropping pre-calculus in eleventh grade. This was partly because I had lost all interest in math by the time I reached middle school, and partly because the class’s teacher was a chalk-wielding, smiley-faced sadist. But mostly, I’m thankful I dropped it because it meant I could fill that void with something more meaningful instead.

With a schedule full of honors classes and extracurriculars to juggle, I chose study hall. But I knew full well that the period would rarely be used for studying.

One of the greatest privileges of playing saxophone in my school band was that it afforded me an opportunity to get my hands on the hallowed “study hall band pass.” Fortunately for me, disobedience was a rare trait among fellow band kids. So when given a pass to the band room to flash at teachers during study hall, we were implicitly trusted to use it properly. Few besides myself had even considered how such a permit could be abused.

Fewer still were good enough climbers.

Rather than simply cordoning myself in a practice room and rehearsing as I was supposed to, I’d remove my baritone saxophone from its case, drape it around my neck, and sneak my way toward the vacant auditorium nearby. Backstage, where performers would queue during band concerts and chorus recitals before the curtains would rise, I’d balance the unwieldy instrument between a couple of loose chairs and look around to guarantee I was alone.

Then, I’d hoist myself atop the lever and pulley system that operated the curtains. Putting my status as the high school pull-up champion to far more practical use, I proceeded to climb almost three vertical stories until I reached a catwalk a few feet wide and nine or ten feet across. There, I found a door that granted access to nearly every part of the school that students were never intended to see.

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For most of my life as a horror lover, The Shining stood as the gold standard. Ever since my dad first introduced me to the movie as a kid, the very definition of horror has come paired with a mental picture of the infamous mountaintop hotel that frames the movie. It’s the rare horror film that’s disturbing enough to cause nightmares, yet, like a siren song, still regularly beckon me to revisit. For all of its creepiness, the Overlook Hotel has always held a strangely alluring quality. Being haunted doesn’t completely remove its warmth.

There have been times when I’ve watched The Shining through to its closing credits just to immediately start the movie over again from scratch. You’d think it’s weird for the horror genre to ever elicit such a reaction. (Admittedly, it probably is a little odd.) But even among all-time genre greats, few films are capable of balancing terror with intrigue so beautifully.

As time has gone on, I’ve grown to realize that it isn’t the characters that define The Shining for me. Nor is it the plot or writing that makes the movie. Something I think that most people miss when discussing its place on the all-time great list is the magnetism that the hotel holds for so many viewers. At the same time that it’s inherently creepy, there’s also a seductive, last-man-on-earth attraction to the idea of three characters sharing that colossal resort all to themselves.

Every room is unoccupied (sparing a few loose spirits). And if the protagonists want to, they can take up residence in a different room each night, walk to the kitchen in bathrobes, or navigate its cavernous halls via bicycle. It’s both terrifying and mesmerizing in its barren enormity, simultaneously pulling from both nightmares and dreams.

Each time I rewatch The Shining, it taps into the kid in me that used to fashion forts from blankets and chairs, inflating my makeshift home into what felt like entire palaces with corridors between rooms. Those scenes shot from a child’s perspective poignantly capture what it is to be small in a sprawling world.

The snowed-in Overlook Hotel feels removed from time, worries, and obligations. When the movie ends, there’s this feeling of near-envy that I have toward Jack in his ability to remain there forever. It’s an odd sensation, and much of what makes the movie so appealing is that it’s able to activate that part of me that feels drawn to something that, by all appearances, shouldn’t be desirable. It’s chilling largely because I relate to Jack, not in his marital troubles or his madness, but in succumbing to the desolate hotel’s seduction. There’s something strangely comforting about its timeless halls, and an odd romanticism to the notion of an eternity caught in Jack’s unique limbo, forever insulated from the hectic world we know outside.

In making The Shining, I think Stanley Kubrick tapped into a psychological phenomenon that wasn’t yet widely understood. Though the concept of liminality dates back to the early 20th century, the role that “liminal spaces” have begun to play in media today is something few could have anticipated.

According to the Wikipedia page for the concept, liminal spaces are “empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, uncanny, and often surreal.” Hundreds of accounts have cropped up across social media that play into the growing obsession, the most famous of which belongs to Kane Parsons, who made a name for himself with a YouTube series called “The Backrooms.” Released when he was only a teenager, the videos are direct predecessors to the Backrooms movie currently in theaters and are what first caught the attention of the A24 studio that produced it. Now at only 20, he’s the second figure to recently sell out theaters after honing his movie-making craft online.

Viewers couldn’t put their fingers on what exactly made The Shining impactful when it was initially released. But if you find either of the “liminal spaces” depicted below to be evocative, then there’s a chance you see what made the film so darkly enchanting. And more specifically, why so many people right now are suddenly talking about Backrooms.

More than The Overlook’s ghosts and evil entities and more than Jack’s descent into insanity, what most distinguishes The Shining is the appeal of inhabiting a place that feels both soothing and profoundly wrong. The liminal spaces depicted above exude enough familiarity that they give the mind something to latch onto and contextualize. But it’s that sense of familiarity that makes the uncanniness feel all the more pronounced. Rather than a totally alien environment, objects are arranged just logically enough to trigger recognition, but just strangely enough to create a visceral sense of wrongness.

In many ways, liminal spaces operate like an uncanny valley for architecture. In the renderings above, we see balloons and colored slides and bright wallpapers that conjure childhood, but in the absence of people, activity, or even windows, there’s an unmistakably off-putting aspect to the imagery. They resemble places that most of us have been or seen portrayed, yet each is stripped of the details that would anchor them to any specific experience. Backrooms takes place almost entirely within this strange terrain.

Another aspect of Backrooms that’s so resonant for viewers is its allegory to artificial intelligence. The source of the film’s horror and attraction is essentially a building misremembering reality, growing more and more inhuman as it stretches endlessly onward. Much like the images generated by AI, the rooms in Backrooms feel assembled by something that grasps the loose outline of the world without truly understanding its rules, physics, or culture. Or as the protagonist tries to explain to his therapist, “It’s like describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog, and then asking them to draw it. They might get some things right, but there’s no way they’d get everything right.”

In the same way that AI-generated pictures and videos often have a disconcerting quality to them, it’s the likeness to the world we know that haunts more than something totally foreign would. At the same time that the artificial output unnerves audiences, they’re also perplexingly drawn to it. In the same way that people are leery of AI, yet grow more attached to it with each passing day, viewers are unsettled by Parsons’ distorted labyrinth, yet strangely lulled by it.

Backrooms is one of the first movies since The Shining to effectively couple the terrible with the hypnotic. But more than that hallowed predecessor, Backrooms plays directly into the innate unease and lock-eyed fascination that liminal spaces often induce. There are few films that have transfixed me so fully.

The set design is one of the most nightmarishly bizarre that I’ve ever seen brought to life, but in its nightmarishness, it can’t help but remind viewers at the same time of that most wonderfully loose and boundless quality of dreams. The fantastical rooms and environments depicted are each products of reason in suspension.

Objects are sunken into expansive dingy rugs, stop signs mark the entries to specific halls, doors have multiple knobs and are found on both ceilings and floors. Some passageways are so small that they need to be crawled through, and others can only be accessed by climbing steep, carpeted mounds at the corners of rooms. And through the entire maze are humming fluorescents and monotone yellow walls. The net result is both maddening and bizarrely intoxicating. It’s homey and nostalgic but also twisted and malevolent. It’s dread-inducing, yet strangely pacifying.

Where The Shining takes place in an isolated resort that can’t be accessed by cars through its winter months, Backrooms doesn’t just entomb its protagonists in snow, but thrusts them into a world where nothing is quite right. And as in The Shining, none of the madness seems to matter. The world is indifferent to their plight.

The rooms are sprawling and largely devoid of windows. The windows that can be found only compound the sense of isolation, looking out on walls, other rooms, and model townhomes that are all contained within the expansive, otherworldly complex.

I’m not sure if Backrooms will stand the test of time in quite the same way that The Shining has. The script was a significant shortcoming for the film. But Backrooms’ few flaws are easily forgiven when we remember that Parsons is only twenty. The film’s acting, cinematography, and set design were outstanding enough to cement it as one of the greatest, most memorable horrors I’ve ever seen.

Whatever criticisms can be leveled against him, Parsons has paved a road that future creators will be all but forced to expand on and has proven once again that YouTubers may be some of the most innovative directors of our generation.

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The hostel sat on the outskirts of La Fortuna and was guarded by a spindly teenager with a guitar in his lap and a kitten at his side, absentmindedly pawing at the humid air. Despite the scooters that whizzed sporadically by and the bar that bustled just across the one-lane street from our bedrooms, the property’s pulse was impressively tranquil.

To its left was an overgrown field with grazing cows, and to its right was a roadside waterpark that remained vacant throughout my entire stay there, a couple of modest townhomes nestled in towering green, and a tall, rusted billboard suspiciously devoid of advertisement. Framing the touristic enclave was the Arenal Volcano, whose monolithic peak hung shrouded in clouds and only peered out from its hiding place on those rare open-skied days when the tropical climate would permit.

Hammocks were suspended between every pair of wooden pillars that could support the weight, and they swayed like pendulums in the careless, Costa Rican breeze. Ambient lights lined our hostel’s deck. And each night as the sun set, they would flicker on and ignite a conversation between whatever travelers and nomads were residing there that specific night.

One evening, I found myself talking to two new guests who’d traveled through most of Central America together before arriving. The first to introduce himself was a Canadian by the name of Gordon, and the second was a soft-spoken Swede who called himself Sebastian. Gordon was brown-haired, brusque, and as well-traveled as he was poorly-kept. Sebastian, by contrast, was gentle, good-natured, and wore blonde locks that hung just above a warm smile.

More than laziness, Gordon’s unseemly appearance seemed to owe to life on the road and the rugged efficiency that it required. He was caked by a layer of dirt that darkened his skin a few shades and suffocated the odor his body should surely emit. His beard was scraggly, and his hair had marinated for so long in its natural greases that it looked more like a product of style choice than lack of shower access. And where his griminess made him look grizzled and wayward, Sebastian wore his filth like a shepherd, affectionately roaming the land and taking no more from this earth than needed. And bathing no more than necessary.

There was an indisputable yin and yang component to the pair. The two drifters were palpably different people from disparate corners of the globe, but their shared stomach for travel made sense of their improbable companionship.

Merely thirty minutes after arriving and setting down his bags beside his assigned bunk, Gordon raised the idea of making a hike toward the rain forest that bordered town. He stood next to the table as his foot tapped out a restless rhythm beneath it, his antsy posture pulling the atmosphere out of repose.

Part of his daring suggestion seemed to simply stem from a desire to absorb as much of the country as he could, and as swiftly as he could manage. But he also seemed to want to make his fearlessness known to the table of travelers seated before him.

One of the best aspects of traveling is being surrounded by other people exploring the world, and being flooded with recommendations of sights to see and new cultures to experience. But sometimes the line blurs between a good-natured exchange of stories and a contest where each country visited and world wonder seen becomes a kind of bid for high ground. At worst, these conversations practically write themselves:

“That’s so cool you’ve been to Peru! That reminds me of the time I traveled through South America on a motorbike,” one backpacker will humbly brag as a well-meaning trade of notes turns into a one-up contest.

“Biking through South America was a lot of fun, but it was nothing compared to doing the Ha Giang Loop in Vietnam,” the following vagabond will counter, smugly assuming the title of most seasoned traveler.

Sebastian and Gordon seemed to fall on opposite sides of this spectrum. When Gordon listened to others share their stories, his next would already be written across his face in plain letters. Sebastian, though he’d covered 10 times more terrain while traveling than myself, listened with a rare attentiveness as I relayed those few kernels of experience I’d accumulated from my limited time abroad.

A few minutes went by and Gordon once again gauged interest from the group about his proposed nighttime trek toward the jungle. “I’m probably just gonna start walking that way until I get to the trees and see if I can spot any wildlife or something,” he outlined his plan of attack with a blasé tone and a casual shrug as he pointed toward the canopy flanking our town.

Sebastian, too curious about the creatures to say no, and too supportive to reject his friend’s proposal even if he wanted to, was quick to acquiesce. His nods arrived promptly, but with the unhurried tenderness of a man who was constitutionally incapable of rushing anything. There was neither doubt nor haste in his near-immediate concession. He carried himself with a subtle buoyancy, as though the world was automatically deserving of his trust.

“I don’t have a whole lot else I’m doing. Sure!” I said after a moment of mental debate, aware that our planned operation was something shy of airtight, but hopeful that the spontaneous venture might at least prove memorable. I still hadn’t seen the forest up close myself, and it wasn’t exactly the Amazon that we were facing off against, after all.

Another American staying at the hostel sauntered tentatively closer as we spoke, his attention apparently piqued by the trajectory of our talk. He sized up the exchange with the faintly imploring look of someone searching for an invitation — or at least a logical point to announce his presence.

“I might tag along too if that’s cool,” the bystander coyly chimed in. “I’m Ryan by the way,” he awkwardly salted on top before holding out a friendly hand for the three of us to shake. He had curly hair, a clean shave, and strong arms poking free from a tank top that was unusually pristine for a transient.

15 minutes later, the four of us were trekking across town at the mercy of Gordon’s impromptu whim.

Though Ryan had booked a stay at the same Costa Rican budget hostel that I had, it was rare for me to meet fellow States citizens so untraveled. As our ragtag ensemble ambled toward the greenery — past bars, businesses, and a hundred different breeds of passersby — he confessed that it was his very first trip abroad. He only planned to be at the hostel for a night before meeting up with his friends from back home who’d booked stays at a retreat a couple of hours away. He tried to will his mind open, but this was uncharted territory for him. His agreement to come along was even further outside of his comfort zone than my own.

Eventually, we made our way to the outer edges of a wall of plants and trees so massive that they wholly enveloped the sounds of civilization. We began scoping out entry points, fielding a few distrustful stares from locals as we meandered along the perimeter. After a few minutes of internal deliberation, one of the town’s residents approached us.

For a decorated globetrotter who’d spent the past few months traveling through Central America, Gordon had offensively poor Spanish skills. He asserted himself, attempting to explain our intentions with unearned confidence. But that piecemeal attempt came out little better than, “Donde esta el Jungle?” He made no effort to properly accentuate his words.

The man who approached us, however, was hardly better in English than Gordon was in Spanish. Ryan and I exchanged leery glances as our companion and the local spun their wheels in place, trading hand gestures and loose bits of vocabulary until they’d seemingly established a course of action. Sebastian knew he couldn’t rely on his Spanish skills enough to be of any aid, so he stood there with loose shoulders and a serene grin.

Rather than simply trying to tell Gordon to get lost or politely inform him that our plan was unwise, to my dismay, the stranger beckoned for us to follow him.

We forged ahead along the forest’s edge, down a rickety wooden walkway, and paused briefly as we arrived at what looked like an overgrown trailhead. It was Sebastian and Gordon’s unwavering confidence that had gotten me this far. But as the rainforest chittered, warbled, drummed, and hissed, I gulped before its wild enormity.

Watching the first two step unhesitatingly into the darkness, I repressed my fear and trudged onward. A few inches behind me, Ryan brushed and snapped through the leaves and twigs, his tan skin gently reflecting the half-mooned night.

We walked further and further into the forest until the only guiding light we had was our cellphones. They meekly beamed through the oppressive darkness.

After a few minutes, we heard the disembodied sounds of a new figure’s footsteps making its way toward us from another angle. His outline was taller and more forbidding than the first, and he made little effort to conceal his footsteps as they squelched through the mud.

I couldn’t tell where he’d come from. But his sudden arrival sent a primal fear down my spine. We were walking into a trap. We were being ambushed.

Somehow, Gordon and Sebastian seemed completely unperturbed by the arrival of the new silhouette. But Ryan and I had reached our breaking point and could no longer let our doubts go unspoken.

“This — this doesn’t feel good,” I muttered through the blackness as alien creatures slithered and croaked. The rush of a nearby stream began to crescendo and muted the chatter from the front of the group.

“Yeah… I’m not feeling good about this at all. Do you want to turn back?” Ryan asked, clearly anxious about making the return trip alone.

“Guys, we’re heading back,” I shouted. But the sounds of the forest drowned out the announcement. Neither Gordon nor Sebastian offered a reply.

With our minds firmly made up, Ryan and I retreated from the woods and ran back to the hostel. He followed my lead, looking nervously behind us every few seconds as I desperately tried to recall the route. Whether the survival scenario elicited superhuman navigation abilities or my three days in the town had given me a greater sense of geography than I’d thought, it was tough to say.

Ryan and I hoped that Gordon and Sebastian would arrive back at the hostel shortly after we did. Neither of them seemed concerned about the situation, and we both tried to convince ourselves that they were justified in their wide-eyed optimism. But having separately spent time in some of the States’ most dangerous cities, there was something about the situation that we both agreed felt off.

As minutes turned to an hour, and an hour into nearly two, a sense of panic began to set in. Time slowed to a crawl. “Maybe they just can’t find their way back to the hostel,” we reasoned. But as seconds ticked by, we decided we had to inform our hostelkeeper about what had happened.

He rightly scolded us over the brazen stupidity of our excursion before helping us to strategize. As worries arose, we tried our best to downplay and deflate them. But grim new speculations inevitably ballooned as time continued to dilate.

Finally, after an unreasonably long amount of time to be hiking through the tropics at night without a water bottle, a slightly panting Gordon and Sebastian entered into frame.

“Where’d you guys go?” Gordon said with a mixture of curiosity and confrontation.

“You’re — you’re okay?”

“Ev — Everything is all good?” Ryan and I spoke over one another in stammering disbelief.

“What do you mean??” shot back Gordon, baffled why we’d ask something so absurd. Sebastian joined at his side after grabbing a wet paper towel from the kitchen and draping it around his forehead. Their skin was latticed with thin red welts from vegetation lashing against their arms, legs, and necks, but neither seemed at all bothered by the battle scars. “They literally just showed us some insects and frogs.”

“Yes, they were really nice,” Sebastian added in his cheerful Swedish accent.

Ryan and I looked blinkingly toward one another, all but certain that the duo had gotten their phones and wallets stolen at best, and been kidnapped and held for ransom at worst.

“They’re taking us on a morning hike at 6 AM tomorrow if you want to join,” Gordon held out the olive branch with a level of nonchalance that arrived as a slap in the face after our hour of spiraling speculation.

A recurrent frustration in writing memoirs is the expectation that each story needs to come paired with a moral. But life rarely unfolds so tidily that it lends itself to clean takeaways. I want to say that the lesson learned that night is that the world is a safer place than I so often fear. In reality, it is. But it’s hard for me to square the notion that my paranoia is often unfounded with the fact that, in life, real dangers do exist.

Were I to approach a similar crossroads to the one that I confronted in Costa Rica, I’m not sure that I’d greet it differently. I don’t regret that I ultimately followed my intuition. Yet, I’d hate to go through life as someone who’s so reflexively risk-averse that I didn’t at least find myself in precarious situations from time to time.

Very often, the best experiences come not from recklessness, but from those moments in life when curiosity only narrowly outweighs fear.

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When I read that The Boys’ final act would initially air in theaters before making its way to streaming, I quickly began searching for tickets. But two full weeks out from the final episode’s air date, I was discouraged to learn that its limited screen times were already sold out. With only two theaters in a hundred-mile radius that had agreed to house the finale, and a mere two time windows to choose between at each location, all of the interest that the 5-season show had generated within my tri-state area was seemingly funneled into just 4 packed-theater showings.

Adding travesty to tragedy, the only way to (sort of) watch the finale the night it premiered was to wait until it was available to stream on Prime — at a less-than-ideal 3 AM EST. This not only encouraged some less-than-advisable sleep decisions among loyalists, but ensured that, for those more rationally restrained viewers, their social media feeds would be awash with spoilers from the previous night’s episode. Fortunately, as a lifelong insomniac who can stave off slumber until sunrise when the right article, movie, or video game demands it, staying up into the wee-ish hours of the night to watch a lean 60-minute finale is anything but onerous.

While I may have only discovered the show a modest 14 months prior, putting off bedtime till’ dawn was the very least I could do to repay its generous writers for giving me enough value to stay aboard this subversive train until its final stop. (Or maybe I’ll just make whatever excuses I can find to ensure my rhythms remain as uncircadian as possible.)

But as fate would have it, last Tuesday may have proven one of the rare nights where I would have been better served by a good night’s sleep than staying up until the sound of morning birds contributed backup vocals to my coveted conclusion. The finished product was so abominably tepid that I was both incensed with its producers for building up consumers’ collective hopes, and grateful to all of the glorified Boys aficionados who bought tickets before me and spared me from driving an hour to watch the Titanic sink in person.

Okay, the ending wasn’t that bad. But it was underwhelming enough to plummet to the very lowest IMDB ranking for any episode to date and inspire an army of disillusioned fans to turn to artificial intelligence in hopes it might craft them a better one. I’ll get back to that second part in a bit.

The Boys is a unique creation in the world of superheroes, and its success is what largely guaranteed that its ending would be so poorly received. It arrived into the world as an antidote to the bloated DC and Marvel Cinematic Universes. Immediately, it made a name for itself by depicting superheroes, not as the one-liner trading demigods in tights that so many have grown weary of in recent years, but as undeserving people emboldened by inhuman powers. They’re as flawed, self-serving, and unaccountable as any billionaire— hardly driven by the noble desire to make the world a safer place. And in cynical keeping with reality, governments and corporate entities try their best to politicize the situation, branding bad guys as “super terrorists,” and trying to maximize profits off of their cycling palette of payrolled mascots.

In many regards, The Boys is a satire of the superhero stories that predate it. It was engineered not to simply devolve into a bloated special effects extravaganza as so many other comparable franchises have. And yet, in stretching on for five whole seasons, it ended up succumbing to more than a few of the tired tropes that plagued DC and MCU. With entire seasons of hour-long episodes to fill, there are lamentable character arcs that needed to be devised and significant concessions that had to be made. As the show wore on, it didn’t always feel like the same animal that it started out as.

It became such a central attraction for the Prime streaming platform that it was renewed for season after season. Yet by sheer virtue of its repeated renewals, it started to resemble the shows and movies that it was so busy satirizing. It was an almost inescapable problem in continuing. When one of the primary aspects of its predecessors that The Boys poked fun at was the convolution of other superhero IP, how could it go on — introducing new plots, new characters and new histories— without becoming like them?

To The Boys’ credit, its humorous undercurrent never faded, and the parallels that the show presents to the United States’ political turmoil have buoyed it from season to season. In fact, this recent chapter mirrored our current chaos so completely that its writers seemed to have foresight into certain current events before they came to pass. Creator Eric Kripke even expressed grief over how closely The Boys’ plot portended reality.

But despite The Boys serving as an allegory to our culture since the show first aired, that political undertone of the plot never received any real payoff in the end. It establishes a problem that’s perfectly analogous to our own — a cult-like political movement that’s consumed the American public. But as the snake’s head is removed, we’re left out on the ensuing fallout.

There’s a poignant lesson in that omission, in that none of our own political woes will be solved overnight simply by electing new leaders; the conditions that caused our strife won’t disintegrate overnight. But for fans seeking finality, the failure to even cursorily address the aftermath comes across as a bit of a cop-out. (This aspect of the world will allegedly be explored in a spin-off show helmed by a different creative team, but it would be nice not to be roped into another series just to get answers this final season should likely have delivered.)

While the scope of The Boys is unfair to compare to Game of Thrones, the issues that befell them are more similar than they might appear at face value. Both had too many problems to address within a single, concluding chapter. As a result, the last episodes of each feel like lazy attempts to dispatch the characters left standing and tie off the threads still hanging.

As The Boys burgeoned out into this broader analogy to our political moment, it bit off more than it could chew. And as in Game of Thrones, the way the writers dealt with the single biggest threat in the series was to more or less throw up their hands and just give fans something.

The Boys’ series-long arc that led toward the antagonist attaining god-like strength amounted to a fireworks display that petered out before it even began. Why they decided on a theatrical release for that last episode — and in gut-rattling 4DX of all formats —I can’t begin to fathom. But I’m grateful not to have driven the entire episode’s length just to walk out of theaters with a three-quarters-full bucket of popcorn, mild whiplash, and a welling sense I’d been betrayed.

One of the most interesting aspects of this finale’s reception is that it appears to signal a watershed moment in the relationship between entertainment and AI. In months past, I’d seen this trend beginning to take hold: people prompting AI to depict famous scenes in pop culture playing out differently. Fallen heroes would put up better fights, and antagonists would meet more satisfyingly righteous ends. (We saw another similar use of AI recently, when Iran used it to reimagine a scene President Trump had posted to his social media page depicting himself as Jesus; in Iran’s version, the real Jesus comes down from heaven and casts the falsely halo’d WWIII instigator into a fiery abyss.)

In the past, these AI renderings were often comical in their overt crappiness. But occasionally when I stumbled onto them in my social media feed, I was amused if nothing else.

Yet, unlike only a few months ago, some of the AI-prompted creations made in response to this latest finale — while still checkered by the oddities and artifacts I’m used to in AI-generated content — at their best, are both more captivating and more intellectually intriguing than what the series’ visual effects team produced. They deliver on the seismic showdowns that the promotional material for the final season promised.

Watching the alternate, AI-rendered finales that the fanbase has concocted — or directed computer programs to concoct for them — has also marked a personal turning point for me. I didn’t think it would be so soon that I’d earnestly argue on behalf of a few devotees with Sora memberships over a VFX team with a 100-million-dollar-per-season budget. But if the show had allocated even a tenth of that revenue toward a team of tech-savvy teenagers playing trial and error with video generators, I trust that the completed product would likely have been a more gratifying experience for fans. The show would have been seemingly more equipped to deliver the bombastic ending it spent five whole seasons foreshadowing.

Had The Boys concluded after only a season or two, I think this pared-down conclusion would have felt like an appropriate punchline. But its identity had changed so much since the show’s humble beginnings that it started to call for something different. In creating such an elaborate network of characters and lore, the series’ trajectory shifted and began to point toward a more and more momentous close. The conclusion we got may have worked, but as the head of a different horse.

When The Boys was intent on being a humorous counterpart to more deep-pocketed superhero franchises, anti-climax would have felt like the perfect way to spite them. But as the show continued to balloon in intensity and popularity, it grew increasingly certain that this kind of controlled letdown would never be well-received. Spectators are too far removed from the series’ starting point for this extinguished-fireworks ending to feel like something other than a misstep.

While The Boys finale may not go down in history as one of the worst denouements of all time, it represented a dramatic departure from the lightning-in-a-bottle sensation I felt as I first began the saga. I’m convinced the show just had far greater ambitions than its conclusion was able to meaningfully deliver on.

Ironically, the most fascinating component of The Boys’ ending may not be the finale itself, but what followed it. That disappointed viewers immediately turned to AI to imagine something grander feels like an early glimpse into the future of entertainment. It’s not a future I’m sure I’ll ever fully embrace. But it’s more of an incrimination of humans in this case that I do believe the robots — endowed by the clever prompting of sufficiently frustrated fans — cumulatively generated something more sweeping, fitting, creative, and cinematic than what actually aired.

I heard someone recently make an argument for autonomous vehicles that I was ashamed I never stopped to consider. The rationale for handing over the wheel to a robot isn’t the hope that it would somehow achieve automotive perfection; it’s that human drivers are so radically imperfect that it only requires meeting that low bar for boarding a driverless car to make sense.

The argument for AI in Hollywood isn’t that it’s going to suddenly replace Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan. It’s that, in an entertainment landscape increasingly defined by bloat, creative stagnation, and endings that fail to justify their buildup, audiences may grow more comfortable with technology that merely clears the bar continually set by human imperfection.

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The sun intimately hugged the horizon as my drone hovered in the skies above Huacachina. I watched on my controller screen as I directed the camera lens between dunes and clouds, gliding horizontally across the sky in a tender panorama.

The U-shaped tourist hub consisted of only a couple of streets that orbited an oasis at the town’s gravitational center. Though the scenic waterhole was naturally formed, nearby drilling has threatened its reserves. For the past decade, water has been pumped into Huacachina in order to preserve its aquifer. Though it isn’t wrong when locals and visitors announce the lagoon’s technical status as a “natural oasis,” in truth, each passing year further dilutes its claim to geological purity.

The Eden’s placid waters were periodically criss-crossed by sunscreen-slathered passengers in paddle boats. They were primarily children and seniors, and appeared to be overly prepared for the modest lagoon crossing ahead — each equipped with shades, water bottles, and visors. A few held out selfie sticks as they coasted along the tranquil waters like stereotypes at sea. Meanwhile, the town’s more intrepid guests carved, snaked, skimmed, swept, and slalomed across the giant dunes that flanked the picturesque enclave on all sides. Some stuck to sleds while others tried their luck with skis and snowboards, careening far faster down the sheer slopes than their sluggish sands suggested possible. Others crammed into buggies with strangers or friends and went on rail-free rollercoaster rides over the restless hills.

Some rented vehicles, braving the martian landscape on their own as they weaved haphazard trails toward the setting sun. No matter how erratically they drove, nor how precariously close they came to toppling their dune buggies, there was a swan-like grace to the silky patterns they traced.

They etched figure eights like skaters on a frozen pond, and the higher I directed my camera, the more intentional seemed each of the drivers’ micro-movements. The more deliberate became the automotive bedlam. Racy and frenetic gave way to something that looked coordinated. High enough, the patterns carved into the desert appeared like knife scores in butter or elegant brush strokes across a canvas too wide for words. Travelers of a hundred different nationalities teemed through the sun-battered streets in slow-motion as I directed my drone higher and higher into the sky. Even the dime-turning tuk-tuks that darted around the glitzy settlement like dragonflies became fluid as my lens gained height.

The town’s cadence was so consistent — so melodic and multi-faceted — that it seemed more the product of a puppetmaster than simply an accumulation of disordered sightseers and daredevils. How could such a diversity of differently-intentioned people coalesce into something so harmonious?

The rest of the one-horse, twenty-bar town’s temporary transplants were either lying poolside, recovering in beds, downing shots, showering off sand, or completing the trying ascent toward one of the idyllic outpost’s sun-burnished peaks.

From atop a powder mountain of my own, I guided my flying camera and continued watching the milieu from a bird’s eye view. I swooped through the windless, arid sky over boats, trees, resorts, and the town’s most towering dunes.

With few clouds overhead, a strong reception on my controller, and a line of sight that stretched for miles and miles, I felt emboldened to take my drone further and further. High enough, I could see Huacachina in its true context: a tiny, tourist-facing, leisure-soaked respite beside a sea of urban sprawl that goes by the name of Ica. Next to the patchwork city, my hostel and each of the cafes, bars, and restaurants surrounding it looked more like pieces in a carefully curated diorama — a staged setup beside an impoverished expanse of homes. Only a few massive dunes demarcated the boundary between them.

It was obvious that Ica housed the region’s real culture, but it was the Instagram-ready hideaway that was the draw for the algorithm-driven world around it. As travelers, such tourist magnets can be mixed bags. On one hand, they’re weaker embodiments of the nations that house them than just about any other city, town, or settlement. Yet in the absence of authentic culture, tourist towns like Huacachina are passing reflections of whatever travelers populate them in a given moment. They’re in constant flux, and in their relentless turnover, guests are given more opportunities to interface with more people from more places. Rather than providing immersion in the specific country we’ve traveled to, these liminal towns serve as microcosms of the broader world. With few native dwellers to turn toward, fellow tourists and vagabonds take on the role that locals typically fill.

I perched my drone between cookie-cutter dunes and carefully angled its aperture toward the sunset. I snapped photos as wisps of clouds collaged and pirouetted along the horizon. Patches of plum, indigo, and smoky blue hung lazily in front of ensanguined streaks of orange, amber, and gold.

As soon as the sun set beneath distant folds of sand, the hot, oppressive day came swiftly to an end. A rogue gust of wind swept across the desiccated landscape, a curtain of tiny grains revealing its contours as it insidiously careened. Within seconds, it sent my drone spiraling helplessly toward a divot between an indiscriminate school of dunes. I watched in disbelief on my monitor as the camera above ceaselessly circled, but no matter how feverishly I mashed buttons and fiddled with control sticks to try and regain command, I was powerless to stop its meteoric descent. A wind-carved ridge swallowed the machine as it crash-landed in disconcerting silence.

Half of the device poked free from the desert, its lens partially obscured by sediment. My eyes darted back and forth between the controller monitor and the mute-faced, unblinking desert around me as it descended into dusk. I desperately tried to pull context clues from the sandy sameness as it cruelly mocked my futile efforts.

After ten minutes of searching, a sudden movement on my controller caught my eye. A couple of kids had removed the drone from the sand and begun to curiously inspect the contraption. Their ages seemed to vary between eight and eleven. The device hastily traded hands as the children took turns examining it, some of them miming airplane movements as they sailed and pitched it through the purpling sky, and others a bit more discerning. One of them was so disruptively proactive that he turned off the drone to preserve its remaining battery — thereby severing my connection to its camera and depriving me of my lone clue in this increasingly frantic search. As the sun sank, the ephemeral hills blurred together and succumbed to the elemental night.

I scanned the crowd for signs of the kids, but as people funneled out of the desert and toward their respective dwellings, they congealed into impassable clumps. I let out a few “Has anyone seen my drone?” pleas in both English and Spanish. But as citizens of every nationality rushed past, I was quickly overcome by the sense that I was fighting an ocean with only buckets. Defeat washed over me in crushing waves until my last few appeals were rendered meek and mousy. A cold bead of sweat trickled down my forehead and along my cheek as I trudged up and down the dunes. I made no effort to swat or dry the forming rivulet as the bulbous drop slid its way neckward and began amassing backup.

Each successive shade of blue that cloaked the desert further cemented in the bitter reality that I’d lost my camera — and all of its footage.

Using deep breaths in a fruitless attempt to quell my beating heart, I was unsure whether my hypertension owed more to the fear of all of my lost photos, or the exertion of sauntering directionlessly between dunes. Until I found myself dry-heaving a few meters from a group of bantering buggy drivers, I repressed the signs my body was giving me that I was inching dangerously close to the limits of my stamina and calf strength. Hunched over and looking fully the part of a flustered gringo, one of the workers approached me. “Está bien?” he tried first in Spanish. Seeing I was too encumbered to devise a coherent reply, or too poor a Spanish speaker to make head or tail of his query, he moved on to English.

I sullenly explained my predicament and he nodded along in near complete understanding before returning to his colleagues. What commenced was an exchange that involved 3–4 phone calls, each placed by one of the separate chauffeurs, and a few sparring matches of rapid-fire Spanish that soared so far beyond the bounds of my comprehension that I sat in befuddled silence until a verdict emerged from the chaos. I fought vertigo as my heart returned to a sustainable pace, trying faintly to interpret whatever isolated words slipped free from the impenetrable fog.

Sometimes, it’s more stressful to know a language a little than not at all. When in a room of only Russian or Mandarin speakers, I can rest easy in the knowledge that no amount of listening skills will circumvent my lack of pre-k vocabulary. So long as the situation isn’t too dire, I can turn my brain off and wait for the return of words and speakers I understand.

Yet with languages I know only loosely, I need to actively search for footholds to latch onto and apply far more focus than discourse ordinarily demands. So the passing bits of familiar Spanish that I encounter in conversation that actually compute often create more confusion than clarity. They compel me to search for meaning in strings of ideas that, very often, are just too thick and multi-layered for me to ultimately process.

(Of course, none of this is to say I should stop learning language — only that there are few moments when I’ve felt the harsh sting of assimilation as keenly as I did while marooned beside my backpack, shoddily translating nouns as they whizzed by, and watching the approaching night strip whatever chances I had at recovering some of the most stunning photos I’d ever taken.)

The buggy driver conference continued, but the sparse words I picked up did little to fill me in on whether their prognosis was positive. After a few minutes, I wondered whether they’d determined I was a lost cause and were just waiting to see who drew the short straw and had to tell me. Maybe they’d moved on already to occupational chatter, or some spirited debate about where to get dinner.

“Friend, come with me,” one of them finally spoke up as he signed for me to get into his vehicle. His English was a bit shakier than the previous driver’s, so I tried my best to confirm we were on the same page before complying. But the language barrier proved too immense for a coherent exchange on our battle plan.

When the buggy’s engine kicked into gear, I wasn’t sure whether one of his colleagues had found it, where we were going, or whether it was simply our plan to comb the colossal desert before the final glimmers of sunlight receded. As we began carving violently up the nearest dune, I inched my arm toward the seatbelt with subdued motions. I neither wanted to die nor betray my welling doubt about the nature of this pilgrimage.

It was clear that efficiency was the guiding light behind each of the buggy pilot’s gas-happy maneuvers, and that each towering ridge we surmounted was little more than a trivial speedbump standing between point A and point B. As the ramshackle metropolis of Ica came into frame, it became apparent that he had a specific destination in mind, and that he greeted each sandy precipice we’d cleared as precisely the sorts of waypoints that other drivers search for in buildings and street signs.

The driver stopped on a dirt road in front of a house made largely from plywood and aluminum. Seconds later, out of it sheepishly walked a barefoot ten-year-old with his mother at his side and my drone in his hand. He was wearing a sand-dusted T-shirt and wordlessly handed me the drone with a gentle smile.

As I got back to my hostel and looked at my flying camera in the light, I saw that it had a couple of chipped propellers and one of its four appendages had been fractured. But given the fateful fall from the sky it had completed an hour earlier, it fared surprisingly well. Recovering the device at all seemed unlikely. That I could still turn it on and still get the device’s damaged blades to spin — that all of its footage had survived — seemed like a minor miracle. But more than a miracle, it was a reflection of the kindness of strangers and a reminder that, when traveling, very often it’s the misadventures that make for the most memorable experiences.

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In the wake of an unsettling string of animal-related allegations that have marred his time in office, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is back in the news today after another unprecedented development roiled Washington. In a twist of fate that analysts are calling both “seismic” and “surprisingly predictable,” the controversial Trump cabinet member who had made waves for his anti-vaccine crusade was revealed to be three raccoons in a used Men’s Warehouse trench coat.

Following a verbal spat on the Capitol Hill rotunda that culminated in Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ripping the oversized cloth off of the piled procyonids, little doubt remains as to the identity of the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services.

“It was almost cartoonish,” explained Senator Adam Schiff, impressively unfazed after witnessing the debacle unfold. “As Ms. AOC revealed RFK’s true identity, you could tell he — I mean, the three grimy beasts — knew immediately their gig was up. They looked around at the chamber like —well, like raccoons in the headlights, for lack of a better term… two of them visibly foaming from the mouth. And then they ran free, escaping all due process. Am I upset? You bet I am. Surprised? Not one bit.” Senator Schiff looked away with a weary sigh.

Some were less shocked by the news still. “As soon as I met… uh… the team of omniverous mammals formerly known as RFK Jr., I said to myself, ‘That’s no man. That’s three terrestrial scavengers desperately trying to remain upright. That’s not the voice of a person. That’s the gravelly croak of three cigarette-addled sewer dwellers fighting over a half-eaten Big Mac in the middle of the night.’ I only wish now that I’d voiced my suspicions sooner,” California Governor Gavin Newsom solemnly lamented.

An aide to the raccoons-in-a-coat was equally stoic over the recent revelation about his boss. “I’d like to say this latest development sheds some light on that recent bombshell about RFK harvesting the uh… appendages… of fellow raccoons. But I’m still stumped by that part.” The aide looked as straight-faced as a face could be. “Where my job stands now, I’m not totally sure. But I tell you one thing, I’ve been given the go-ahead to proceed as though it’s business as usual.”

When reached for comment, Representative Ocasio-Cortez said that her suspicions around RFK Jr. began when she caught him “scarfing down garbage out of a Capitol Hill dumpster beside a pile of his clothes during markup.” She continued, “This administration complains about illegal aliens, then literally puts raccoons in charge of public health. It’s time we say enough is enough.” There was a palpable look of annoyance on her face as she appealed to the reporter.

Senator Lindsey Graham also appeared shaken by the incident. “Look, it’s time we address the elephant in the room. I’m as outraged as anybody else to be deceived by three — three nocturnal garbage bandits. But what AOC did was frankly unacceptable. A breach of decorum unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” tepidly thundered the South Carolina senator before pausing briefly to say his daily prayers at the altar of a newly minted golden Trump statue within walking distance of his D.C. office. “That an elected official could defy norms in this way, that she could stoop so low as to disrobe these innocent raccoons as they fight for our democracy, well, it disgusts me, to say the least.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz spoke to a Fox News pundit on the night of the procedural anomaly. “I think in moments like this it’s important that we look past the media frenzy, that we actually consider the job that these three rather committed raccoons are doing,” exclaimed the indignant senator. “Those three coons — and forgive me if the term isn’t ‘politically correct’ — didn’t fund one single gender studies program at the CDC. Frankly, they’ve done more for our nation than Fauci ever did, and they don’t deserve to be victims of yet another liberal witch hunt! I think it’s time we give them the benefit of the doubt.” And with this, Cruz stood his ground on behalf of the purportedly rabid creatures that stalk the streets after dusk in search of sustenance.

President Trump, too, came to the defense of the raccoons. “I’ve known RFK for a long time, and there’s no trio of lower mammals that’s ever taught me more about basic human biology. They’re the BEST raccoons. Very smart, very loyal. Know what’s better for this country, believe me, more than any of these RADICAL LEFT lunatics! I will not be searching for a human replacement at this time. THANK YOU for your attention to this matter,” he declared in a Truth Social post that went out at 4:13 in the morning this Thursday.

The teetering tower of sentient raccoons is still at large within the greater D.C. area, and officials are warning citizens to call the police if spotted. Meanwhile, Trump’s top lawyers are reportedly searching for a loophole that will enable presidential pardons to encompass four-legged beings.

It’s unclear whether the industrious deceivers will face accountability for pulling off this decades-long charade or simply be allowed to resume their government position(s). But as politicians start to wonder what other creatures could have infiltrated their swamp, citizens begin to question which of their elected leaders are really just animals stacked atop one another and shoddily stuffed into suits. What’s undeniable is that the chaos consuming our country has crossed species lines, and that the boundary that once separated man from beast in our politics has officially eroded.

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More than ten shirtless men sat atop the semi-truck as it trundled over the craters that pockmarked the streets of Iquitos. Beneath them were sacks of grain, rice, flour, fertilizer, and animal feed that were piled as high as the buckling flatbed would permit. In the most populous city on Earth that can’t be reached by cars or roads, sights like this weren’t so uncommon.

Some of the bare-backed workers watched the evening’s clouds roll by overhead, their gaze as stoic as sentinels. Reflections of street lights and telephone wires swept across the whites of their eyes.

The connective cables were shadeless silhouettes underneath the reddening sky, rising and falling like waves of an ocean or slurred notes on an open-ended staff. They thinned and gathered with no discernible pattern as they snaked between homes, wrapped entire towns in their baby anaconda coils, and circumnavigated the sprawling, isolated city in an operation that was as methodical as it was animalistic.

Wherever there was a break in the powerlines, another series of filaments came into frame and flitted across the tired eyes of the truck’s intrepid passengers. And just as suddenly as the network of wires shuttered out of view, giving way to distant canopies and rust-mottled rooftops, the melody would resume — swelling and receding as the electric symphony’s subsequent movements flared into being. The utility lines skated along the cresting clouds in a way that was at once suave and haphazard, ordered and erratic. Stark black waned and violently waxed while amber, blush, and cerulean blue bled like watercolors through the open sky behind it.

Some of the riders had fashioned mattresses and cushions from the bags of grain, more concerned with getting a few minutes of shut-eye than watching their heat-choked metropolis clunk cloddishly by. Some sat upright, legs swaying back and forth like pendulums in the swampy summer air. Their shiny skin glowed an igneous orange as it refracted the final rays of the setting sun.

Some pointed toward pedestrians like myself, more transfixed by the passersby who were out of their depths in the mosquito-swamped climate than the avant-garde orchestra of moto-taxis weaving frantically in and out of traffic. To them, the outsiders were more striking than the scarcity of seatbelts on their teetering tower of assorted goods-and-grains-repurposed-as-pillows.

As the hulking lorry lumbered down the streets with the earth-rattling immensity of a tank, its passengers were completely unperturbed by silly little things like safety, and its driver was even less perturbed by the looming prospect of a moving violation from the city’s threadbare police force. We were infinitely more out-of-place than the tuk-tuk drivers preparing to careen across the narrow path of the leviathan vessel, the backfiring motorbike to the riders’ immediate right, and the stray dog bolting through the horn-blaring bedlam.

More than the ceaseless drone of insects and more than the entire families crammed onto the backs of rusted e-scooters, for those who’d spent their lives in Iquitos, it was the fumbling gringos like myself who so often stole their attention. More than any of the sights that inspire tourists to take out their phones and snap pictures, it was the tourists who became attractions: temporary transplants struggling to integrate with the restless whole of the sweltering, Amazonian city.

Iquitos fielded its fair share of sightseers, but it didn’t make every Peru visitor’s “must-see” list in the same way as Machu Picchu, so it was often relegated to the sidelines. Unlike in Cusco, where you’re frequently no further than an empanada’s toss from the nearest traveler, interlopers stood out like neon fanny packs in this city carved from rain forest.

Puerto Miguel was a village of roughly a hundred residents and required a two-hour motorboat ride from Iquitos to make landfall on its dolphin-silvered shores. There wasn’t even a golf cart within the jungle-bound villa. A single sidewalk evenly bisected the outpost, and it appeared to have been recently laid.

Half of the enclave’s residents earned income selling groceries or gasoline to the other half. One house provided cellphone service to the entire neighborhood. A building across the street doubled as the patchwork settlement’s court and jail. It was painted in a dull red and green like a Christmas store weathered beyond recognition. Its foundation was stained by the silty streaks of the slowing wet season. As with much of the town, it wore the scars of a building that routinely waged war with the flanking river. Some structures seemed to have been partially swallowed by the annual torrent. A few had been rendered uninhabitable.

Near the town’s center, a rooster, a toddler, a pair of dogs, and an Amazonian cousin of the anteater engaged in a standoff, each fruitlessly attempting to translate body language across species lines. They stared at one another with rapt attention, advancing and retreating as they skittishly tried to pinpoint where play ended and peril began. The ragtag quintet weaved underneath a home that sat on stilts and onto a sandy court as kids ages 5–15 traded a frayed volleyball back and forth.

None of the competitors paid any mind to the farcical band of misfits distractedly darting between them. Far stranger to them were the visitors who’d landed in their town by motorboat and now ambled tentatively along its single walkway. Some set aside their game completely, gawking and pointing at the tourists like children at a lion exhibit. A couple of them approached us and asked our names in Spanish. One offered us a bracelet he’d spent his afternoon working on.

I desperately clenched a makeshift handle screwed into the ceiling of our shuttle as it rattled down the switchbacks that lined the Sacred Valley. Sinking further and further into the crevasse between the seat and sliding door with each stomach-lurching turn, I scanned the other occupants of the vehicle to see how they were faring. There were tradesmen, women preparing to sell crafts, and kids asleep on laps. Mothers looked placidly forward, utterly unfazed by the driver’s breakneck pace around each precipitous bend. Farmers tended to chickens whose aberrant clucks never loosened our gas-happy captain’s grip on the wheel or stole his laser-focused attention from the pothole-latticed byway.

But the most astounding of all to me were the school children who were so accustomed to this commute that the towering vistas outside their windows didn’t even elicit a second glance. They were numb to these daily rollercoasters. And they were so confident in their cowboy chauffeurs that they didn’t stop to question whether they’d arrive at their point Bs on time and in one piece. For them, these rides were every bit as quotidian as my daily routines used to feel for me. The only difference was that the normal I knew growing up was waking up each day, eating toaster waffles as I watched cartoons, and boarding a yellow school bus less than a block from my home.

All through elementary school, I felt as though my little suburbia more or less represented the human condition, and that a magnifying glass pointed toward much of the planet would reveal the same. The circumstances I was born into were all I had to frame my concept of normal.

When I watch my life play out in my mind’s eye, it all feels so obvious. The games of cops and robbers and the entire K-12 school system, our recess times and our units of measurement, our taxes, fashion trends, boisterous football matches, pledges of allegiance, and runaway insurance costs. Our hot showers and abused air conditioners. Our stuffed fridges and overflowing grocery stores. How could it have ever been any other way?

My friend and I walked along a trail only 20 minutes from his Pennsylvania home as we fought off ticks, dangling tree limbs, and overgrown brush. Out of the blue and breaking the silence that punctuated our labored breaths, I asked him what it was like to be a twin.

As an only child, people have often pointed the equivalent question toward me. And in my 20+ years of being confronted with the typical, “So — what’s it like to be an only child?” query, I’ve never really figured out a good response.

My friend, a philosophy major, part-time drummer, and full-time twin, ruminated for a minute before giving me a reply. “I get asked that a lot and, honestly, it’s the only life I really know… what’s it like to not be a twin?” he countered, turning the question on me with a genial smile and a breathy laugh as he wiped a bead of sweat off his face. The frank and efficient response may have owed in part to the August heat, but the brilliantly succinct retort immediately struck me.

It’s impossible for me to put myself inside the shoes of someone who has a sibling. The experience of brotherhood or sisterhood is as foreign to me as, for my friend, the notion of life as anything other than a twin. And I could no more easily understand the twin experience than what it is to be an older brother, younger sister, Chinese teamaker, Tibetan Sherpa, or Amazonian tribesman. I can imagine loose outlines for each of the alien paths. But we can never remove the shells that encase our conscious experiences.

That trite metaphor about “a mile in another’s shoes” that I’ve heard repeated since childhood has only grown more meaningful as the years have flown by. It’s one of the most fundamental truths we have to turn toward when we consider how to be to the people who enter our lives: that we can never, truly, understand what it is to be another.

Growing up, I grasped on an intellectual level that poverty was a pervasive problem across the globe. But I hadn’t had any experiences to ground or calcify that understanding. I hadn’t yet boarded an airplane and flown free from the laws and rails that contextualized my life. I hadn’t ever forced myself to assimilate in another part of the world. I hadn’t seen for myself the reality that life happens wherever you build it, and routine follows suit.

Normal is wherever you plant roots. And the less we’ve seen of the world, the less we understand of all the weird forms that “normal” can take. The less we understand how someone might look at the most mundane and unexamined features of our day-to-day lives and see something remarkable, unbelievable, or outright bizarre.

The more places we go, the more opportunities we have to reflect back on our own fundamental oddity. The more we travel, the more vantage points we find to look toward home with a telescope and see how it fits into our wonderfully grand fixture of weirdos masquerading as normal.

It can be a mind-bending task to look objectively at how we spend our time here on earth. But sometimes, if we’re fortunate, the veils of our internal worlds slip. The scaffolding that keeps us safe inside our own subjective experiences collapses around us, and as we look out from the dust, we see the million other forms that our normal might have taken.

We see the arc of our lives — all of the rules we’ve followed, all of the practices we’ve observed, and all of the ways that we show love for the people in our lives — for exactly as arbitrary as they are. In another nation, or in neighboring regions of the ones in which we already live, there might be entirely different cultures, customs, priorities, and principles that prevail. What we accept as standard is just a spin of the cosmic roulette wheel. We can never fully know what it would be to have lived different lives, been born as different people, or developed different understandings of our world than the ones that our specific lives and paths came paired with.

We’re forever confined to one strange at a time.

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