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Guidance counselor Jacquelyn Indrisano embraces ninth grader Arianna Troville, 16, outside her office at East Boston High School. | Craig F. Walker/Boston Globe via Getty Images A new book on youth suicide clusters offers perspective on prevention. Between 2000 and 2015 in an affluent, predominately white community in the US, 19 young people died by suicide through what’s known as suicide clusters. These clusters refer to an unusually high rate of suicide for a community over a short period of time, often at least two deaths and one suicide attempt, or three deaths. Suicide clusters are an extreme example of youth mental health struggles — an issue that’s been getting more attention since the pandemic and one that’s at the center of an increasingly charged national conversation around social media and phones. Anna Mueller, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, and Seth Abrutyn, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia, recently published Life Under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them, which explores why these clusters happened and how to prevent more. The researchers embedded themselves within the community (which goes by the pseudonym Poplar Grove) to understand the social conditions that preceded and followed the teenagers’ deaths. Senior policy reporter Rachel Cohen spoke with Mueller and Abrutyn about the youth mental health crisis, the crucial role and responsibility of adults, and how kids take behavioral cues from those around them. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Rachel Cohen There’s been a lot of confusing and often conflicting reports about youth suicide trends, especially since the pandemic. Can you outline for readers what we know? Anna Mueller Since 2007, rates of youth suicide in the United States have been increasing pretty significantly and substantially. Not all countries around the world are experiencing this, though some others are. With the pandemic, I feel like I have to plead the fifth since the suicide data is still sort of inconclusive. For some kids, the pandemic was really hard in terms of mental health. For others, it actually took some pressures away. Rachel Cohen Do we know why youth suicide in the US started going up in 2007? What are the best theories? Seth Abrutyn It’s a complicated question. As you’re probably aware, there’s been some recent very public academics like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge who have been studying the relationship between social media and mental health, especially among adolescent girls. So there’s some argument that that’s part of it. Of course, that wouldn’t explain why it started in 2007, when social media and smartphones were not really ubiquitous in the way they are now, but it probably plays a role in accelerating or amplifying some of the underlying things that were happening prior. Another part of the explanation might be that efforts to destigmatize mental health have given people greater license to talk about their mental health. So things that may have been hiding are now out there more, though that doesn’t necessarily explain why suicide rates have gone up, but it may help understand the context. Kids today are growing up in an extremely destabilized environment, and the economy is extremely precarious. Add that to the fact that since 2007, LGBTQ kids have been able to be more freely out, which also then causes more attention to them and invites more backlash. Anna Mueller Everybody asks us that, and I’ll be honest with you, it’s my least favorite question because we just don’t have great data to assess any of these theories. A lot of this really just remains speculation. Social media is something important to consider, but I take a little bit of an issue with the theory that it’s what we should solely be focused on. It’s sort of an excuse to ignore other social problems, like the fact that over that same period, rates of school shootings have increased substantially, and now make things like lockdown drills a normal part of our children’s lives. There’s also been increasing awareness that climate change is a fundamental threat to everyone’s ability to survive and that the cost of college has wildly increased. So we have a lot of pretty challenging things going on. Rachel Cohen I was going to ask you about phones — since as you note there’s a ton of debate right now about their role contributing to worsening mental health, but they didn’t really come up in your book. What role did you see phones play in your research on teen suicide? Anna Mueller Phones facilitated kids talking privately and in spaces that adults couldn’t access. And they meant kids had access to information that their parents weren’t aware they received, like kids would often find out a friend had died by suicide by text. I think that’s something adults need to be really aware of — it means the burden is on us to have meaningful conversations with kids about mental health, suicide, and how to get help because we may not be aware when our kid gets hit with some information that’s going to be relevant. Rachel Cohen But did it seem like the smartphones were causing the mental health problems? Seth Abrutyn Social media didn’t even really come up in the book. When we were in the field [back in 2013–2016], Instagram was out, but it was really more a photographic, artistic thing. Instagram wasn’t about influencers, and Facebook, Vine, and Snapchat were around but kids didn’t all have smartphones yet. Flip phones were still quite available. I think in our original fieldwork, a lot of the young adults were far more impacted by the internet, like they sat at home on a laptop or something like that. In our new fieldwork, what we see are kids who carry the internet on their phones wherever they go. Quickly we’ve habituated to the ubiquity of smartphones and social media. Rachel Cohen In your research, some of the teenagers who died by suicide had loving parents, friends, romantic partners. They didn’t necessarily have mental illness. Can you talk about what you learned with respect to risk factors and protective factors? Anna Mueller In the community where we were working, it was a lot of popular kids who had seemingly perfect lives who were dying by suicide. Some of them probably did have undiagnosed mental illnesses, you know, there was some evidence that they were struggling with things like deep depression or eating disorders or other things. But it was never visible. And so what the community saw was this perfect kid just gone for no reason. It is tough, because on the one hand, what we learned was that this community had really intense expectations for what a good kid and a good family and a good life looked like. And so for kids who didn’t have a lot of life experience to know that there are a lot of options out there for how else to be in this world — they really struggled. Things that helped were having family or other adult mentors who could put things in perspective. Rachel Cohen Life Under Pressure is about youth suicide clusters, and I wanted to ask if you could talk more about this idea of “social contagion,” which comes up several times in your book. It seems community leaders were really nervous about saying or doing the wrong thing in the wake of a youth suicide for fear of contributing to another teenager deciding to take their own life. What does the research on social contagion in this context look like? Anna Mueller Exposure to suicide, either the attempt or death of somebody that a kid cares about — whether they admire them, identify with them, or really love them — can be a pretty painful experience. Suicide is often about escaping pain, and so seeing people role model suicide can increase that vulnerability for kids. Our work suggests that it’s not just pre-existing risk factors, there’s something uniquely painful about exposure to suicide that can introduce suicide as a new way to cope. Seth Abrutyn If we take a step back, suicide is just like almost anything else. Smoking cigarettes, watching television, all the things that we end up doing and liking — a lot of it we’re learning from the people around us. And people are exceptionally vulnerable to influential others. That could be someone that’s very high status that we look up to like a popular kid in school, or it could just be a really close friend that we trust a lot. In the community, where there are these high-status popular kids dying by suicide, if the messaging is not done correctly by adults, if we don’t have adults who can actually help talk through what’s going on and help kids grieve appropriately, the story can easily become, well, for kids who are under pressure and feel distressed, suicide is an option. Rachel Cohen The idea of social contagion has been coming up a lot in debates around youth gender transition too. Some adults say kids are being unduly influenced by their friends and social media regarding things like taking puberty blockers or pursuing gender-affirming surgeries. Other research contests the idea that social contagion is a factor, and some advocates say even the suggestion that gender identity may be susceptible to peer influence is offensive. Does your research in this area offer us any insights here, any more nuanced ways to think about this? Anna Mueller I’m not answering this. We can’t answer this. Sorry. We have ongoing work, and we can’t go there. And I don’t know the literature and we can’t go there. Rachel Cohen Okay, so you don’t think it’s applicable — the social contagion research you’ve studied in the youth suicide context — to other contexts? Seth Abrutyn The only thing I would say is I think the word “contagion” is the word that’s problematic. We’ve tried to actually change that in our own research, and there’s pushback because it’s relatively accepted. It has a sort of folk meaning that everybody can kind of grasp on. The problem is it sounds like how people get the flu in a dormitory, right? But just because everyone shares a heating system and air conditioning system doesn’t mean it will spread like wildfire. Sociologists don’t think of it that way. When behaviors and beliefs spread, it’s usually because people talk about them with each other, or watch people do something and then talk about it. And then they can text that to their friends and talk about it with each other, and in that sense it is contagious, if you want to call it that. I would call it more like diffusion. Rachel Cohen Part of your book is about the need to talk more openly about mental health issues. There’s been this public conversation recently about whether there’s been inadvertent consequences in the push to destigmatize mental illness, with one being that young people may now have become so familiar with the language and frameworks of psychiatric illness that youth can get locked into seeing themselves as unwell. Oxford professor Lucy Foulkes coined the term prevalence inflation to describe the way that some people consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to interpret normal problems of life as signs of decline in mental health, and she warned of self-fulfilling spirals. Psychology professor Darby Saxbe also noted that teenagers, who are still developing their identities, may be particularly susceptible to taking psychological labels to heart. I wanted to invite you to weigh in on these questions and debate. Anna Mueller I’m not sure that I find that idea to be really useful. One of the problems with adults right now is that we’re not listening to the pain that kids are experiencing, or taking it seriously. If I were to advocate for something, I would advocate for seriously listening to kids about their struggles and sources of pain, and working to build a world where kids feel like they matter. Obviously, helping kids build resiliency is incredibly important. We can do a better job at helping our kids navigate challenges, and I’m an advocate of letting kids fail, the road shouldn’t just be perfectly smooth. But I’m pretty fundamentally uncomfortable with not listening to kids’ voices. Rachel Cohen I don’t think anyone’s saying don’t listen to kids, but they’re saying that if you encourage kids to think of themselves as anxious, and if you give kids those certain frameworks to diagnose or understand their problems, and as you noted earlier a lot of this information is coming from social media — Anna Mueller We think of frames as ways for kids to express themselves. As adults, it’s our job to dig deeper into how they’re framing their lives. Can suicide be an idiom of distress? Yes. Research has shown that some kids use the language of suicide as a way to express themselves to the adults in their lives. Similar things with anxiety, but then our job is to unpack that and discover what does that mean. Seth Abrutyn I think what Anna is trying to say, and what our book is trying to say, is that adults are really responsible for the worlds these youth inhabit. And these anxiety frames maybe are something that spreads around on TikTok, but it’s also something that’s being generated by adults, and it’s actually something being generated from real things in their lives, like school shootings. The way that we talk about them, and the way that we don’t listen to them, is maybe not helpful to kids. As a sociologist, we’re sitting there thinking how do we make schools better places? Well, what are adults doing? How are we making schools safer spaces so that this anxiety frame is not something kids are talking about? Rachel Cohen What are the big questions researchers are still grappling with when it comes to youth suicide? Anna Mueller I know one thing that emerged for me and Seth after our book is how can we look at how suicide prevention is enacted in the school building, so that we’re catching kids before they get to that? Since we did the fieldwork for Life Under Pressure, our research has involved working collaboratively with schools to strengthen kids’ ability to get meaningful care. We have begun to see some differences in how schools approach suicide prevention that are actually really salient to whether the school experiences an enduring suicide problem or recurring suicide clusters. Seth Abrutyn Most schools know that trusted adults are a really important part of the school building. And so thinking about how do we get teachers to do little things, like one school building made sure every teacher between classes was outside of their room for five minutes, just standing in the hallway, just saying hi, smiling, and pointing out that you were there. We often think those things don’t make a big impact, but it does. If a kid is not having a good day, maybe they’re not the most popular kid, but if they see that someone remembers them, someone knows them, it makes a real difference.

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The guardian of the special relationship—the historical but possibly mythical bond between the United States and the United Kingdom—is a short woman with discerning blue eyes and a penchant for glittering headbands.The role of an ambassador has always been strange. They’re expected to be fun—to flit around comfortably at galas and cocktail parties, charming guests and making inroads with important people while waiters weave around with platters of deviled eggs. Still, British Ambassador Karen Pierce’s real duty is to lobby for her country and offer advice on delicate matters during heated international moments. And the job of an ambassador—even one representing a close ally—has become far more complex because of the strident partisanship that has taken hold in D.C.Part of Pierce’s mission recently has been to represent the British government’s firmly pro-Ukraine position on providing military aid—even when the Biden administration’s matching desire became mired in Congress because of protests by a Trump-aligned faction of House Republicans.[Elaine Godfrey: Trump’s VP search is different this time]Pierce had not only lobbied hard on Capitol Hill ahead of last week’s long-awaited congressional vote on aid; she’d also traveled with Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, to Mar-a-Lago to try to get buy-in from Donald Trump. (She has been tight-lipped about their meeting, and was certainly claiming no credit, but the former president’s toned-down opposition to the bill probably did help the package pass—even though more Republican lawmakers voted against it than for it.)In an era when populist politics and rising nationalism are challenging the institutions of the international liberal order, diplomacy can seem like a quaint relic of bygone etiquette.The more public side of an ambassador’s job seems much easier. Over the past three years, Pierce has become well known for throwing lively and well-attended Pimms-fueled bashes, especially in the D.C. social season surrounding the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Underneath the surface frippery, though, Pierce is a serious operator. The true art of her diplomacy is the very English thing of working hard to make it all look totally effortless.One evening last week, I watched Pierce at work. During a party two days before the WHCD, she buzzed around the lush green garden of her Washington residence, chatting with various politicos.The 64-year-old Pierce grew up in northwest England and has worked for the U.K.’s Foreign Office for 43 years. She’s held positions in Japan, in Ukraine, and in the Balkans during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia. For a year, she lived in Kabul as Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan, and she represented the U.K. at the United Nations for three years. Although she was made a dame in 2018, Pierce’s working-class background makes her a relative outsider in the foreign service, which is otherwise a bastion of the upper-class elite. Being Britain’s first female ambassador to the U.S. does too. She leans into it.The day I saw her, she was wearing a vivid chartreuse dress and black tights, with her feet tucked daintily into a pair of black-and-white kitten heels. Despite being shorter than everyone else at the party, she still commanded the attention of all the people in her vicinity. Pierce has worn tangerine suits to state events, and baby-pink silk dresses with huge round sunglasses. Once, to attend a UN summit, she wrapped herself in what looked like a maroon feather boa. Such displays aren’t just a sartorial choice; they’re a strategy.“When you’re an ambassador, you want people to remember you,” she told me. So I made note of her leaf-patterned sheath dress, shiny blue blazer, and cheetah-print headband. About that feather boa; it wasn’t one. “It was a fur, but it was fake,” Pierce insisted. “Though the Russians tried to say it was an exotic fur.” She rolled her eyes. “The Russians will go for anything. They really have no scruples whatsoever.”[Read: What a former U.S. ambassador to Russia learned from Condoleezza Rice]The wall behind the desk in Pierce’s office, a cheerful, sunlit room in an otherwise sterile building, is covered in magnets collected from around the world (“The tackier the better,” she told The Washington Post). Orchids decorate the tables.Entertaining is part of the job. But don’t call them parties: “We would call them receptions, because we treat them as work events,” she chided me. In the days surrounding the WHCD on April 27, Pierce hosted an embassy reception that provided not only a selection of assorted British pasties, but a cigar room and Scotch bar as well. She also made appearances at half a dozen events put on by various Washington bigwigs and media outlets, and emceed a Sunday brunch in the embassy garden. Pierce’s drink of choice? “I like lots and lots of cocktails, but the more pink they are, the better, I’m afraid.”Pierce’s first job in D.C. was as private secretary to the then-ambassador. She arrived in 1992 with her husband, former U.K. Treasury Secretary Charles Roxburgh, and her first of two children, an infant at the time. “The fact that politics is in the air is just—and also the fact that you’re in the capital of the leading nation in the world—I get a real buzz out of that,” she said.In 1995, Pierce watched as Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House, and American politics grew more polarized. When she came back to serve as ambassador in March 2020, she saw that trend intensify, culminating in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. “I watch all of these developments, and we spend a lot of time evaluating them and finding historical context for them,” she told me.But Pierce wasn’t particularly eager to discuss current politics—or the ex- and possibly future president who has sent that polarization into overdrive. Her caution made sense: Pierce’s predecessor, Kim Darroch, resigned from his position after leaks revealed that he’d criticized the Trump administration as “inept and insecure.” When I asked her about the former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose time in office famously lasted only about as long as a head of lettuce stayed fresh, and who has recently cozied up to the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Pierce’s expression was steely. “She’s a private individual, and she’s welcome to pursue her politics,” she said. “It’s not where the British government is.”[Read: America’s Trumpiest ambassador]The day after we met in her embassy office, Pierce showed up early at the Hilton Hotel, in a rich-blue gown and a pair of cascading diamond earrings, greeting as many people as possible before the Correspondents’ Dinner officially began. This year’s dinner was probably Pierce’s last spring soirée; a new British ambassador is expected to replace her by the end of 2024.Leaving will be hard, Pierce said during a Politico podcast taping—“I’ll have to be dragged out of [here] by my fingernails”—not least because this is an election year. A return to the Oval Office for the resident of Mar-a-Lago could mean a challenging new dynamic between the U.S. and the U.K. Pierce joked about being reluctant to leave America, but her concern about a possible end of aid to Ukraine seemed obvious.That aside, her domestic assessment was surprisingly rosy—or at least highly diplomatic. “I personally do not worry about America,” she told me. “I have a lot of faith in American democracy and in Americans, and I think you have very strong institutions.” Pierce’s faith in what an ambassador to America can achieve seemed unshaken, even amid the capital’s current dysfunction. She didn’t hesitate to assert that confidence when I asked her advice for her soon-to-be-announced successor: “Make the weather.”

Here in Ukraine, we often react very emotionally when we hear people in the West calling for peace with Russia. According to some commentators, this would be achieved by means of a “compromise,” entailing Ukrainian “concessions” that would somehow satisfy the Kremlin and stop the war: major territorial giveaways, armed forces reduced to insignificance, no further integration with the West—you name it.Most of us see such views as extremely naive, given the totalitarian and militaristic nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Having built his rule on war hysteria, land grabs, imperial chauvinism, and global confrontation, Putin is hardly likely to stop even at a deal that most Ukrainians would find entirely unacceptable.But that leads us to another problem that much of the Western media fail to fully appreciate: Ten years of confrontation with the Kremlin, and especially the past two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, have fundamentally changed Ukraine. These changes are not superficial or easily swept away.[Read: The one element keeping Ukraine from total defeat]A little more than a decade ago, many young Ukrainians—including those, like myself, from Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east—were angry and restless, itching for something we saw just over the horizon. In high schools and universities, we read Montesquieu and soaked up such tantalizing concepts as the rule of law, democracy, and human rights. Western values felt native to our generation; we were open to the world in a way that our parents had never imagined. Most of them had ventured no farther than Central Asia for their Soviet military service, or maybe Moscow for the 1980 Olympics. This essay is adapted from I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv. My peers and I wanted our country to have clean streets, polite police, and government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals. We wanted to be able to start businesses without passing money under the table, and to trust that courts of law would render justice. What we did not want were irremovable, lifetime dictators who packed the government with cronies on the take and sent goons to beat us up in the streets.In Kyiv’s Maidan Square, starting in November 2013 and lasting into February 2014, demonstrators showed their fervor for such a future in what became known as the Revolution of Dignity. Some gave their lives to unseat Viktor Yanukovych, the kleptocratic ruler Moscow supported, and orient Ukraine unequivocally toward the West. At the site of desolation, armloads of flowers commemorated these dead. Yanukovych fled a country that despised him and had spiraled out of his control.A new Ukraine began—and with it, a decade-long war of independence, as the Kremlin marked our revolution by seizing Crimea and infiltrating the Donbas region in the country’s east. For nearly a decade, Ukraine was fighting on two fronts: a military war against Russia, and an internal struggle for its revolution’s ideals, which meant stamping out corruption, obsolescence, unfreedom—everything that might drag the country back into the past.Ukraine is still far from achieving all that my generation once dreamed of. But we do live in a country that is radically different from the Russian-influenced Ukraine of 2013—politically, mentally, and culturally. And we are starkly different from Putin’s Russia.Ukrainians have tasted freedom and experienced a competitive, vibrant political life. We elected a comedian to be our leader after he faced down an old-school political heavyweight in a debate that was held in a giant stadium in downtown Kyiv and aired live to the nation. We’ve reinvented Ukrainian culture, generating new music, poetry, and stand-up comedy. Starting in 2014, we had to build our country’s armed forces almost from scratch; we are insanely proud of them, as they have fought heroically against one of the largest and most brutal war machines in existence.A few weeks ago, I brought my dog to a veterinarian in Bucha, the town outside Kyiv where Russian forces committed a well-documented massacre in 2022. As the young doctor handled my dog, I noticed a large Ukrainian trident entwined with blue and yellow ribbons tattooed on her wrist under her white sleeve. For my generation of Ukrainians, such national symbols are an expression of pride in all we’ve made and defended.I was with one of the first groups of journalists to enter Bucha after the Russian retreat in 2022. To describe the atmosphere is very difficult: I remember rot, stillness, a miasma of grief. The Russians had graffitied the letter V everywhere. On a fence along the main street: Those entering the no-go zone shall be executed. V. We followed the Ukrainian police as they broke through doors into premises inhabited only by the dead. Some of the bodies were charred and mutilated. I saw two males and two females lying on the ground, incompletely burned, their mouths open and hands twisted. One looked to be a teenage girl.Outside the Church of Andrew the Apostle—a white temple that rises high over Bucha—Ukrainian coroners in white hazmat suits carefully removed layers of wet, clayish soil from a mass grave and placed 67 bodies on simple wooden doors under the cold drizzle. A tow truck hoisted the cadavers out one by one, hour by hour. Now and again, the rain would pick up, and the coroners would hastily cover the grave with plastic sheeting stained with dried gore.“My theory is that there was a very brutal Russian commander in charge of Bucha,” Andriy Nebytov, the chief of police for Kyiv Oblast, told reporters at the church that day. “And they unleashed hell in this place.”The Continent apartment complex used to be one of the finest in Bucha. I met a guy named Mykola Mosyarevych in a basketball court there. In his 30s and fit, he was a likely target for the Russians—a potential guerrilla fighter or member of the Territorial Defense—and so he’d spent the whole month in a basement. After the Russians left Bucha, on the day of my visit, he sat staring at a pair of ripped Russian fatigues marked with the orange-and-black striped ribbon of Saint George—a symbol of war and love for destruction. He wept. Over and over again, he said: “I just don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why they would want to do all this to us.”We all asked similar questions, and our fragmentary answers could bring little comfort to Mosyarevych or anyone else: lust for power, years of aggressive propaganda, a sense of impunity, a would-be emperor grasping at illusion. Deep down, fear.[Read: Ukraine’s shock will last for generations]Later that day, I walked alone with my camera through what was left of a Russian armored column on Vokzalna Street. Bucha’s defenders recalled that the Russians in this column had been moving carelessly and singing patriotic songs when Ukrainian forces struck their leading and trailing vehicles. The column stopped. The remaining Russian vehicles scrambled like bumper cars to maneuver through the wreckage, find a way out, and save themselves. But Vokzalna Street is narrow: They were trapped. A Ukrainian artillery strike left hardly any vehicle whole. The layer of ash on the ground was so thick that it crunched underfoot like snow.What used to be a leafy green lane, part of my favorite bicycle route to Bucha and Hostomel, had become a cemetery. But within three weeks, Ukrainian workers had cleared away the rubble and repaved the road. Later, Warren Buffett’s son donated funds for Ukrainian authorities to completely renovate the street and construct new, Scandinavian-style, single-family houses with lawns and picket fences. Online, people posted tens of thousands of likes and comments under images comparing Vokzalna Street during the Russian occupation and after.Springtime soon came, too, and with it snaking lines of cars, as thousands of people who had fled poured back into their hometown days after its liberation. Young mothers returned with their strollers. Time would absorb the grief and horrors of this war, as it had of so many that had come before.Even so, I don’t want to think about what will happen to my dog’s veterinarian if the Russians make it back to Bucha. Or what will happen to Ukraine. After everything that’s transpired over the past decade—and especially given what Russia has become—Ukraine must not be made a Russian colony again.Today’s Russia is a neo-Stalinist dictatorship led by an aging chauvinist. In the grip of his messianic delusion, Putin initiated the biggest European war since World War II. He seeks to eliminate Ukraine not only as an independent nation, but also as an idea. No concessions or compromises are possible with such a vision—not given the kind of country Ukrainians have made and fought to defend.This essay is adapted from I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, published on May 7 by Bloomsbury.

On a day that began like any other, the unwitting star of The Truman Show saw something that changed his entire world. For a few, unnerving seconds, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) came face-to-face with his father—a man he believed to be dead. In the 1998 film, this implausible encounter catalyzed Truman’s realization that the small beach town he called home was really a suburb-size production studio designed to confine him. After decades of being secretly surveilled as part of a never-ending reality show, Truman found freedom when his broadcast finally ended.More than 25 years and countless reality-TV franchises later, The Truman Show remains a prescient meditation on the creeping dangers of a ceaseless entertainment cycle that ruthlessly commodifies real people’s lives. “I’m trying to self–Truman Show myself,” the comedian Jerrod Carmichael says early in a new unscripted series about his life around the time of his Emmy win for Rothaniel, the 2022 stand-up special in which he publicly came out as a gay man. Carmichael’s growing pains, as captured on Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, reflect existential and interpersonal turmoil: fractured familial ties, strained friendships, self-destructive behavior that threatens his first real relationship with a man. But his allusion to the Carrey film is one of many explanations he gives for wanting to expose so much of himself to audiences: Early on, he claims that cameras put him at ease, and that their constant presence may help him overcome his damaging tendency to lie in his real life.In this way, Reality Show actually inverts the original Truman Show premise, which hinged on Truman being unaware of the elaborate artifice required to sustain his televised life. Carmichael, by contrast, co-created and co-executive-produced his new series, a level of involvement that makes it fundamentally impossible for the show to exist as an impartial record of his transgressions, which he seems to want to acknowledge and make amends for. The comic does repeatedly acknowledge this key tension: He often addresses the camerapeople during scenes, drawing attention to the literal production of his narrative. Still, pointing out this artifice doesn’t diminish its creative interference. As my colleague Megan Garber wrote in 2020 about the 20th anniversary of Survivor, viewers “understand that reality, a postmodern genre in a post-truth culture, turns the logic of fictional entertainment on its head: It demands a willing suspension of belief.” For the most part, Carmichael’s series presents itself as a refreshing, experimental corrective to such farce. The comedian likens the camera to God; he knowingly inundates viewers with a litany of his sins. But publicly admitting one’s flaws isn’t inherently virtuous, and more often than not, Carmichael’s eagerness to divulge the unpalatable details of his life ends up turning the act of seeking forgiveness into voyeuristic spectacle.The stakes of the show’s storytelling choices are high for the comic’s loved ones, who don’t necessarily stand to profit directly from his HBO deal. (In fact, one friend who appears on the series, a fellow comedian, told Vulture he had to push just to get paid $1,000.) And despite Carmichael’s stated desire to use the cameras as a truth-telling agent, everyone around him is clearly aware that the comic can still manipulate the final product to privilege its creator. Throughout the series, many of those people articulate that power imbalance: “Dude, this is not a neutral eye,” says one of his friends, who only appears on-screen wearing an anonymizing mask, in the first episode. Shortly afterward, the friend implies that Carmichael’s project risks being “masturbatorily public.” It’s an astute observation: If Rothaniel sublimated the agony of keeping secrets, then Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show revels in the fantasy of finding absolution through public confession.Carmichael’s approach to confession differs from the way it appears on most reality TV shows. Generally, producers lead a cast member into an isolated studio, where they’re encouraged to speak candidly—and, ideally, confrontationally—about their peers, in order to sow the kind of chaos that boosts ratings. Carmichael, though, reserves the bulk of his self-taped, lo-fi confessionals for disparaging himself. It’s profoundly uncomfortable to witness. Early in one episode, during a stand-up bit sandwiched in the middle of a scene where he shops for sex toys, Carmichael offers up this blithe assessment of his sexuality: “In gay years, I’m 17,” which he explains means he wants to have sex with “a lot of people, all the time.” Later, after one of the many times he cheats on his boyfriend, Carmichael takes an entirely different tone as he speaks into a camcorder. “I want God. I feel spiritually unclean. I feel dirty,” he says, sitting on the floor in a literal closet. With his head in his hands, he adds, “Sex offers me power and control. It’s an escape.” Such scenes instead underscore how stuck Carmichael is—yes, he’s not actually in the closet anymore, but he’s nowhere close to having a healthy relationship to sex, or to being reliably honest with his partner.[Read: What reality TV reveals about motherhood]These moments also highlight the tremendous emotional toll that unscripted projects can take on participants who aren’t running the show. Carmichael’s quest to become a better person doesn’t happen in a vacuum; a constellation of real people with real feelings are affected when he acts with selfish, reckless abandon. Nowhere is this more unsettling to watch than in how he treats the men he’s drawn to, especially his boyfriend. Whatever hope for accountability might have been seeded during Carmichael’s post-infidelity self-flagellation is undone by a wrenching scene where Carmichael and his boyfriend, Mike, attend relationship counseling. Carmichael tells their therapist that he’s feeling “pretty good monogamy-wise,” and jokes that he doesn’t have the time to cheat. But when the cameramen suddenly move closer to Carmichael’s face, Mike suspects something is off. “I knew then, like, that they know something that I don’t,” he says later—and, of course, Carmichael actually is still being unfaithful. In the short but devastating segment, it’s hard to hear the palpable hurt in Mike’s voice and not wonder whether the audience is somehow implicated in Carmichael’s decision to prioritize a public performance of confession over being honest with his partner in private.And it’s especially curious that Carmichael identifies the camera as God. Seen through that lens, his navel-gazing starts to look similar to the suffocating shame that fear-based religious dogma can stoke beginning in childhood. Of course, most adults who still struggle with that shame don’t do so in front of an HBO audience. Still, Reality Show is most compelling when the comic seriously wrestles with the residual pains of being raised in a conservative Christian household—dynamics that are familiar to many other Black queer people. In the latest episode, titled “Homecoming,” he brings Mike home to meet his family. Carmichael and his devout mother remain on shaky ground, an uneasy détente that affects everyone around them. The episode doesn’t end with a neat ribbon, but by its conclusion, Carmichael and his mother have had multiple frustrating, important conversations about what they need from each other.These vignettes are striking because other people’s feelings aren’t entirely out of focus, and Carmichael’s voice isn’t the only one we hear. After several family members attempt to mediate, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine Carmichael and his mother building toward some kind of off-screen resolution. “Could my mom change?” he asks in a stand-up bit toward the end of the episode. He pauses for a moment, then answers his own question: “It’s reason to keep fighting.” I hope, for Carmichael’s sake, that he invests more time in that journey than in devising ways to make sure the rest of us watch.

The 2024 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival drew half a million people, making it the second-most-highly attended year in the festival's history.

Franco Zacha for Vox Your neighborhood watering hole is more important than you think. Meng Liu spent years ping-ponging around the world looking for community. It was her dream to live in New York City, but after she found it difficult to make friends, Liu moved to Los Angeles, where she faced similar social roadblocks. Loneliness followed her across the globe to Shanghai, where she again chased a sense of belonging that never came. Thinking back on a comment a friend had made years ago, Liu had an epiphany. “Belonging isn’t some magical place that you can find in your next destination,” she recalled the friend saying. “It is where you feel most connected with the people around you, and that you have people who love you and that you love.” So Liu decided to give New York a second chance. She moved back in 2019 and made a commitment to fostering relationships. Inspired by her own difficulty making friends and the country’s epidemic of loneliness, in 2022 she founded a social club, Wowza Hangout, that brings people together around shared interests and activities. Wowza Hangout has hosted gatherings where people ranging in age from early 20s to late 50s play games, watch movies, sing karaoke, and picnic. All events are free, though Wowza Hangout is experimenting with a subscription model ($14.99 a month for unlimited hangouts, as opposed to monthly organized get-togethers). A crucial component of these hangouts are their settings: board game cafés, bars, museums, parks. They’re venues that populate a vibrant city like New York, but where attendees might feel awkward approaching someone they don’t know. Wowza Hangout not only provides the location but gives people permission to transform each of these physical spaces into a hub for connection — in other words, a third place. First defined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, third places are settings a person frequents beyond their home (the first place) and work (the second place). Third places can include more traditional settings like places of worship, community and recreation centers, parks, and social clubs, but also encompass bars, gyms, malls, makeshift clubhouses in neighborhoods, and even virtual settings like Nextdoor. As Oldenburg described them, third places are great equalizers, spots where regulars of different backgrounds and perspectives can mingle in a location that is comfortable, unpretentious, and low-cost. Even prior to the pandemic, these institutions were shuttering, according to research. As Americans spend more time alone and practice individualized forms of leisure, like marathoning television series on streaming services and passively scrolling on social platforms, they aren’t gathering communally as often as they were in decades past — a shift the political scientist Robert Putnam observed a quarter century ago in his formative book Bowling Alone. You don’t need to take on the herculean task of making new friends to be less lonely. You may just need a third place. High rent and disinvestment in low-income neighborhoods could be drivers in the closure of third place businesses, according to Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor in the Institute of Behavioral Science and the department of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. (Finlay doesn’t yet have data to support this hypothesis, but this summer she hopes to study exactly where third places are closing and how the trends differ by neighborhood.) On a planning level, zoning laws preventing commercial spaces like bars and cafés from building in residential areas further drive the wedge between families and communities. This isn’t to say Americans don’t value third places. “I think that people both wish they had more of them,” says Katherine Giuffre, a professor emerita of sociology at Colorado College, “and at the same time, overlook them or take them for granted.” With some intentionality, experts believe we can recommit to — and reimagine — third places. They may look exactly as we’ve always experienced them. They may not be physical spaces at all. The benefits of third places If one of the many crises that befall our society is loneliness, third places offer a solution. These environments are where the community gathers, where you can be either actively engaged in conversation or passively taking in the bustle around you. At their very best, third places allow people of differing backgrounds to cross paths — to develop what are known as bridging ties. As opposed to our closest connections, bridging social networks encompass people who have varying identities, social and economic resources, and knowledge. “Studies have shown that just having a diversity of folks in your life … more informal and infrequent and unplanned, can be really protective for health and well-being,” Finlay says. “Classically, third places were sites where you could build up these bridging ties.” As a result, third places are trust and relationship builders: You encounter a person frequently enough that you naturally graduate from a polite smile to small talk to perhaps deeper conversation. “You start to get the feeling that maybe I can trust that person if they say hello to me,” Giuffre says. “It’s not the beginning of some scam.” According to a 2007 study, even employees in these places, like bartenders and hairdressers, can provide emotional support to patrons looking for a sympathetic ear. You don’t need to take on the herculean task of making new friends to be less lonely. You may just need a third place. Simply developing acquaintance-like relationships is enough to foster feelings of belonging, studies show. Without third places, “Americans may be losing access to key services, goods, and amenities, in addition to community sites that help buffer against loneliness, stress, and alienation,” Finlay wrote in her 2019 paper detailing the loss of third places. Why we aren’t getting the most out of third places While teaching a master’s level course about building community at Viterbo University, ethics professor Richard Kyte observed students’ piqued interest when discussing third places. Even if they hadn’t heard the term before, Kyte says, they could easily identify these communal relationship breeding grounds. “It would be the kind of place they used to visit, or a place they remembered from their childhood,” says Kyte, the author of Finding Your Third Place: Building Happier Communities (and Making Great Friends Along the Way). “Or a place that they see other people frequenting, and they wish they had in their lives. But not that many people who say, ‘I have a third place and I go to it on a regular basis.’” Aside from the obvious — the pandemic — there are a multitude of reasons why third places aren’t being frequented, supported, or funded. In her study of third place closures, Finlay and colleagues found that between 2008 and 2015, stores selling sporting goods, hobby items, musical instruments, and books decreased by 27 percent, while barbershops, beauty salons, and laundromats dropped by nearly 23 percent. Declining church membership suggests organized religion is no longer the community builder it once was. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, over half of Americans say they would rather live in a larger house where schools, stores, and restaurants are miles away. Despite the fact that most of the country lives near a bar, movie theater, restaurant, or park, the Survey Center on American Life found that 56 percent of Americans in 2021 said they had a third place they frequent, down from 67 percent in 2019. According to Kyte, the separation of residential and commercial real estate means people must rely on cars to access bars and fitness studios. Food- and beverage-focused locations also encourage patrons to purchase their items and leave to make room for the next customer. If you do hope to stay, expect to keep spending. The low-cost luxuriating necessary for healthy third places isn’t considered profitable. Restaurants aren’t the only environments becoming untenable for lingering. Parks with hostile architecture and a lack of bathrooms and water fountains send the signal that they are spaces just for passing through. “They’re meant to be hostile to people who are without homes,” Giuffre says. “But it ends up being hostile to the whole community.” And some third places are increasingly difficult to access at all for certain populations. With fewer hangout options for teens (what spots do exist might require them to be chaperoned), they lack time for unstructured socializing. Older and immunocompromised people are vulnerable to illnesses like Covid-19, flu, and RSV circulating in indoor environments that are not well ventilated. Community- and health-focused efforts implemented during the height of the pandemic, like streeteries, expanded patio areas, and pedestrian-only street closures, have been pared back or abandoned, denying many an opportunity to safely engage with their cities and towns. (On the contrary, some cities, like Los Angeles, have made outdoor dining measures permanent.) When people don’t feel safe in specific contexts, they won’t engage with them. Recently, third places have become a monolith of experience, Finlay says. People are self-segregating based on specific interests, hobbies, or ideologies that tend to skew toward a particular demographic. Interacting with people who look and see the world similarly may deepen our existing connections but don’t facilitate bridging social networks. “We need to facilitate more of these bridging ties and bridging encounters,” Finlay says, “so that we’re not just spending time in an echo chamber, whether it’s online or in person, of people who already think the same way that we do.” However, opting to spend time with people who share similar experiences and backgrounds can be a matter of safety. If you suspect other patrons in a community book club will judge you — or worse, harass you — based on your views or how you present yourself, you’ll avoid those spaces. In her research looking at young people with histories of housing instability and homelessness, Danielle Littman found that this population doesn’t always feel welcomed in modern third places. People who don’t appear as if they “belong” might face questions like “Why is this person here?” or “Are they supposed to be here right now?” says Littman, an assistant professor in the College of Social Work at the University of Utah. The person might be asked to leave. “Even worse,” she says, is “criminalization of just existing in a space. I see some of those practices and policies as inequitable enforcement of third places.” By nature, third places should be diverse, Giuffre says. Everyone has a responsibility to act inclusively so the space is safe and welcome to all. “That can be a lot easier said than done,” she says. “Because the teenagers are loud and the old people don’t want to hear them. But we have to open ourselves up to embracing difference.” How to reimagine third places Experts agree communities are in a collective state of rethinking third places. But how might those places look? In response to the housing affordability crisis, people are moving into smaller homes they can afford, says Jorge González-Hermoso, a research associate at the Urban Institute. In these smaller homes, people might lack leisure amenities, like a backyard or space for a home gym, pushing them into third spaces to seek those services elsewhere. In order to signal that these places are lively and in demand, González-Hermoso says, there must be some form of engagement and activation, whether through exercise classes in a park or kids’ skate nights at a roller rink. This public commitment often comes naturally when the community’s needs are taken into consideration. When the nonprofit Better Block plans public space transformations in cities and towns worldwide, its team first solicits the community’s feedback, says the organization’s executive director, Krista Nightengale. “Valuing the community’s input and not only listening, but watching what they do and how they respond to a space,” she says, “is a huge thing.” In the parking lot outside of Better Block’s offices, for instance, four parking spaces were transformed into a small basketball court where students from a nearby school now organically gather. “Our parking lot has now become a third place for many of those students,” Nightengale says, “where they’ll bring their basketballs, they’ll play after school, or they’ll just simply sit in the patio furniture that we’ve put out there and hang out.” In her research, Littman says people are looking for third places to meet basic needs — amenities like a safe place to nap or free snacks — especially if they are not getting those needs met at home or work or school. To make third places as inclusive as possible, Better Block ensures park signs reflect the diverse languages spoken by members in the community or use images like emojis to convey messages, Nightengale says. The organization also aims to make the spaces ADA accessible. Comfortable seating and shade are also integral to making a space comfortable for all. Despite fears that the furniture may be stolen or vandalized, those incidents almost never transpire, Nightengale says. “When you show a space is loved and taken care of, people tend to treat it the same way.” Perhaps the most accessible third place of all isn’t necessarily a physical one. Online platforms can offer people in rural communities, people with limited mobility, and people with marginalized identities safe and affirming ways to connect. While many potential benefits of online third places haven’t been studied, Finlay has spoken with study participants who say online concerts, for instance, have allowed them to enjoy an event they wouldn’t have experienced otherwise. She has also heard from people who use Nextdoor because, despite it being online, they can still interact with locals. Younger generations may prefer apps like Pokémon Go, she says, another platform that filters reality through the screen — and gets people outside. Chat rooms and social media sites centered around specific interests and hobbies are also popular online third places, Finlay says. However, these online forums come with their own complications, including harassment from other, sometimes anonymous, users and less welcoming attitudes toward people with differing perspectives. When it comes to established environments that serve the needs of as many people as possible, experts agree that public parks are the closest we have to an ideal third place. Parks are preferably welcoming to all members of the community for a variety of activities; they ideally have bathrooms, water fountains, and cooling tree cover; they’re free and open daily. It might be easier for parents of children playing to chat with one another than for a picnicker to approach a jogger, but events — like concerts, art installations, and farmers markets — can help bring more people together, Giuffre says. But funding and support for parks isn’t always a given. “It’s a policy decision to say we’re going to have money put into these public spaces from our tax dollars so that everyone can participate,” Giuffre says. How to find your own third place To get the most out of third places, you’ve got to find one you enjoy frequenting. Mine your interests, Littman says, to discover a location that fulfills your needs. For instance, if you love books but don’t necessarily want to discuss them with others, find a bar or café that offers silent reading nights for people who want to read communally. See what public and commercial spaces are in your community: Do any of them offer classes you’d want to take? Are they spots you’d want to hang out and become a regular? Invite a friend, coworker, or family member to check it out with you. Immersing yourself in the culture of the space requires intentionality, consciously caring for your, and your community’s, social health. This might require some actionable changes, like dedicating time each week to spend an hour or so in a neighborhood hangout, going into a restaurant or coffee shop instead of picking up, leaving your phone in your pocket while waiting in line, engaging with people in small but meaningful ways. Don’t become discouraged if an interaction isn’t as successful as you hoped, says Liu, the founder of meetup group Wowza Hangout. To be a part of something, you must consistently show up. Soon enough you’ll naturally braid into the fabric of the third place; you’ll become a familiar face, a driver of conversation, a person to say hello to. In an age of loneliness, that might be one of the most powerful tools of all.

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