I confess: I am really enjoying the vibe shift discourse. "Vibe" is such a delightfully slippery word. This week, most people are using it to describe what's generally on trend—the broader cultural mood, the overall direction of fashion. (Confusingly, "vibe" is also used to describe a micro-mood, the ineffable experience of being in a certain space or among certain people.) Really, though, the vibe-shift conversation is about the comforts and discomforts of aging. It's about how we are all struggling to figure out our self-presentation after two years shut inside. And it's about the way that our fragmented experiences of the internet create wildly different perceptions and desires. In our siloed modern moment, it's fun to pretend we all inhabit the same culture—which is what we're doing when we discuss a coming "shift."

Having lived through a few vibe shifts already, here's my take on the question of To Shift or Not to Shift: There is always something to love about the dominant vibe, always something to reject. Despite the "everyone's doing it" tone of trend reporting, most of us will never wholly embrace any given cultural moment. So it's not about whether to throw oneself headlong into a suite of trendy things or to stay hopelessly locked into the passé. It's about selectively keeping aspects of the previous vibe(s), then adding or subtracting a little bit of the new, all the while maintaining a sort of personal baseline. That's called style. 

Ruth Chizuko Murai's family was forced from their farm during the Japanese incarceration more than 80 years ago. She went searching for what remains. And amid a modern rise in crimes targeting Asian Americans, "there’s so many people who have just told me: They’re so afraid. They’re afraid for their sisters, they’re afraid for their grandparents, they’re afraid for their daughters."

What do we do with men who abused their power? How do the women who came forward find peace? Katie J.M. Baker with a fascinating and complex story about how #MeToo was the beginning—not the end—of a reckoning.

The particular challenges of thru-hiking the Appalachian trail while trans.

Antwaun Sargent on Virgil Abloh's life and legacy: "We had known V was working hard to get his ideas into the world. But his greatest ideas were the ones he had cultivated in the procession of artists taking the lectern—the youth who had seen what he made and decided that they, too, could create art of their own."

Where does flour really come from? Dayna Evans on what it means to bake at a time when nobody is growing their own food. Plus, a Middle Easterner’s undying love for Midwestern cuisine. And a cookbook author asks herself: "What if there were a cookbook for other miserable people, for whom preparing food had become a chore?"

"My body so badly wants to forget that above all else, I am water. How badly I want to believe that I have access to no moment except the present. How do you remind a spirit that it does not belong to time? I ask because I do not know." -Gwendolyn Wallace

 

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Paying for the things you enjoy ~is a vibe~. Just ask the people who support this newsletter! Join them for just $15/year. 

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A comic about dealing with COVID as an immune-suppressed person. And I'm just starting to get into The Trojan Horse Affair.

The cracks are starting to show. I raise my glass—and my waistband—to those of you unabashedly inhabiting this vibe.

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This is the sixth in a series of micro-essays on the meeting of culture and climate by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei. Shanti is one of two inaugural AF WKLY writing fellows whose work is supported by paying members of this newsletter. -AF

By Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

It didn’t occur to me that I was doing anything wrong until we passed the protestors shouting outside the arena. Only a few hours before, my aunt had invited me to see los toros, which she adored and had been attending since she was a little girl. So I decided to go. Why miss this typically Mexican spectacle?

In the shadow of Plaza Mexico amphitheater, the biggest bullfighting ring in the world, crowds were eating tacos, puffing cigars, strolling through the smoky air, anticipating this special fight: All 40,000 seats were sold out to see Julián López, or El Juli, who began training as a bullfighter at 9 years old and became the youngest professional in the history of the sport at 15. 

When the first bull entered the ring, I woke up to the reality of what I was about to see. Men in tights ready to be flipped into the air and gored, drugged horses in armored costumes, and the bull, which would be lanced, pricked, and then fatally wounded with a saber through the first knuckles of his vertebrae. As I watched those first bulls fight, my nerve endings lit up with horror, pity, and fear—something I perversely enjoyed. But by the time the third bull died, I felt wrung out. It was all already familiar.

And then bull #4 entered the ring. It was clear he was especially strong. He charged the lancer on horseback and managed to flip the stallion over, pressing the horse’s armored underbelly again and again with the curve of his horns. This only stopped with the minor bullfighters descended to save the lancer who was still pinned under his steed. Then the banderilleros faced him in their scorpion pose with barbed sticks held high, but missed their chance to “pinch” him. And then it was time for El Juli to face this bull who had been hardly damaged by the four other men. El Juli planted the saber shallowly and the bull bucked it out. The crowd was stunned. Then Juli missed six more times. 

I thought #4 had some slim chance of survival. But in this circus of shame and honor, cowardice and bravery, a bull that refuses to die is not an acceptable end to the story. The crowd jeered and hissed and threw beer cans and seat cushions. And #4 finally met his fatal blow from El Juli. The minor matadors moved in, flashing their magenta and yellow capes like a flock of mating birds, getting #4 to twist the sword further in. He fell to his knees. Somebody came to deliver him, stabbing him in the neck again and again until he finally died. I asked why El Juli was given so many chances, and I was told, “It is the greatest insult that the bull leaves the ring alive.”

The shame of El Juli’s failure did not last long. The crowd demanded with their white handkerchiefs that he be gifted a bull, a chance at redemption. This one he killed easily. 

When we left Plaza Mexico, my aunt said it wasn’t such a good fight. “The bulls weren’t good,” she explained. And I remembered those first bulls, how they became disoriented at the first pricks at their backs, ignored the seductive drag of the cape, looked askance for the door that had closed forever behind them—in short, nearly ruined the story. Man versus ferocious beast, the dumb beast, who charges the cape and misses the enemy weiding it. 

The pain of the game isn’t just the death of the bulls, but rather the heartbreaking human folly. It reminded me of so many other rigged victories where the challenger struts away, stupid enough to believe he won something. The bullfight is a condensed echo to the whole parade of human conquest over the Earth, a story that has been told with pride and honor when it is so clearly a tale of fools who didn’t know how to live so they killed and raped and took what they could instead. Savages.
 

Find more of Shanti's work here, and follow her on Twitter.

March 26 & April 2: The Midwives of Invention—aka me and my friend Jade Chang—are offering a workshop about how to develop your creative ideas and translate them into actionable projects. Details here.