It’s January, 2026, and I was thinking it’d be nice to have a place to write some things down where they could exist for people to read them, if they wanted to use their time that way — the what’s new segment, the update, the current.
The other day I was listening to a podcast as I did the dishes for half an hour in the back room of Blank Street Coffee, 120 Causeway, Boston, Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There are roughly seven other Blank Street Coffee locations in Boston (roughly — expansions and renovations are constant, including a recent takeover of a beloved shop in Allston called Twin Donuts), and 90 other locations worldwide. Though there are over 40,000 Starbucks stores across the globe, Blank Street, which was founded in Brooklyn in 2020, still feels like a true corporation, or at least like it’s mid-leap to being one: since I started my job in October, they’ve stopped buying from multiple small flavor syrup businesses to make room for cheap syrups made in-house, and have begun to describe coffee blends using flavor notes rather than bean source locations, which obscures the coffee production process from consumers and puts partnerships with farmers in jeopardy.
I spend my time doing the dishes. In return for that half-hour, I get paid about eight dollars, post-tax and including tips, and I’m afforded the dignity of an occupation. (I was skeptical about that dignity for a while. Now I believe in it, on an individual level, but I wonder sometimes how much it’s rooted in real community and how much in some hazy set of fundamental economic myths.) My dig at the system, then, is to listen to a podcast.
Unfortunately, that podcast was The Ezra Klein Show. I say unfortunately because I fear he’s been riding the crescendo of his ego since correctly calling that Biden should drop out of the presidential race in early 2024, a crescendo which has culminated in that new cover photo for the podcast… but still. Klein’s guest was Henry Farrell, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins. The two analyzed a speech Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made at the World Economic Forum in Davos a few weeks ago, in which Carney describes the US as an economic hegemon, then articulates the way its license to set the terms of global political and economic systems has also given it a free pass from accountability to those systems. He calls for the unspoken but widely understood reality of US power on the global stage to be recognized — in other words, to take a weedwhacker to the thicket of illusions that surrounds the idea and reality of America. I thought, lathering soap onto a plastic matcha container, that it was pretty interesting. But then my manager arrived at the cafe, so I had to take out my headphones and get back to my pursuit of the perfect latte lotus.
I kept thinking about it later that day as I took out the trash bin and spent ten minutes scrubbing the inside clean — a customer had, not unreasonably, discarded a full Strawberry Shortcake Matcha, and its gooey jammy green liquid had leaked through the trash bag. The center of the issue, I thought at first, was a dilemma over what the US is and was; what kind of order it has brought about in the world, what kind of prosperity or suffering, whether it has a right to dictate the terms of anyone’s prosperity or suffering, etc. Frankly, I have no idea what true and measured answers to those questions look like. But then, I thought, my curiosity was actually a little more selfish. I scrubbed the trash, emptied the water into the crusty snow, and picked out the detritus, which I tossed into the dumpster beside me. It had to do with how I was using my time.
What I mean is almost a question of blame. To explain it I’m going to back up.
It’s January, 2026! I didn’t think I had resolutions in me this year, and then it was the new year, and I had that great exorcism feeling of all the unimportant fluff of 2025 falling away, and I underwent the classic new year process of streamlining my attitude toward life into a something shiny, little maxims, little rituals, tidbits to tie moments to the current, moments to mean something, you know, meaningful. I re-read a play called A Man for All Seasons, which has this wonderful line in its preface:
I think the paramount gift our thinkers, artists, and for all I know, our men of science, should labor to get for us is a sense of selfhood without resort to magic.
By “magic,” the author Robert Bolt (who mostly wrote screenplays — Lawrence of Arabia, for one) means religion. But to me, the line is a reminder of what morality looks like in the real world: exceptionally individual for the sake of collective fortitude, something built on concreteness, thought, and stubbornness. It’s a good play to fire up those kinds of living.
But three weeks later, I was waiting for a bus in the cold, thinking in abstract circles about the importance of thinking concretely, and I realized I was completely drained. It had taken three weeks of normal living, making enough money to pay rent and buy food, trying to sleep enough, spending not quite enough time with people who matter to me, spending not quite enough time doing things that matter to me, to become exhausted. I mean it in the way of being unable to live the way I had resolved to live. Which isn’t so drastic, or so terrible — easy to set too high a bar, and anyway there’s always Beacon Hill and a cold Peroni with Jack, or salmon with secret sauce in the South End with Anna and Lucky. But — only three weeks?
So, a Classic Unanswerable Conundrum: is it me or the system?? I make money at a normal job and don’t quite succeed at having enough time to do enough other important things. When I get home from work, I don’t really want to write or even read; I want to watch an episode of The Pitt and eat a full bag of Trader Joe’s takis. It’s nice to do that. And then the next day I think, I have to be reading and writing more; or, I have to call my family; or, I have to be more disciplined. Then I think: but people live their whole lives this way. And then I think: am I an asshole for feeling slight pity, or for not feeling satisfied? And then: but I don’t feel pity — I feel consternation about the way the economy is organized. And then: but that’s naive; the world requires labor, and anyway I’m a barista, for crying out loud, and didn’t I just decide there’s dignity in an occupation? And then: but is it naive? Is it me or the system??
So, wiping out the trash and throwing the detritus into the dumpster and thinking about Mark Carney’s speech, I came to a couple hypotheses.
One, it’s easy and unhelpful to jump to buzzwords I disagree with — too many critiques of “late-stage capitalism,” for instance, are purely an aesthetic and function as an imprecise catch-all. But I am distinctly interested in the feeling of participating in a system that exerts power over your life sneakily but irresistibly. It’s a sleepy feeling; a feeling that something is being obscured from view; a feeling of constantly trying to catch up with who you are and what you want; a feeling that intellect and reflection and community and creativity and moral stubbornness require slightly more swimming against the tide than they should. It makes me wonder what is being lost.
Two, it has something to do with the United States of America. In my ear, the podcasters discuss how the US has by now abandoned the flawed but at least principled stance of classical liberalism; how, by unshackling the market, the Raegan administration both caused it to skyrocket and allowed it to discard any moral architecture; how the Trump administration unabashedly uncouples power from even the appearance of integrity. Though US authority structuring the global economy may once, arguably, have been beneficial, at least in the sense of providing financial predictability, it’s now incontrovertibly a source of self-interested leverage. At the micro and macro scale, this kind of power is an American phenomenon, an American set of incentives and parameters, an American structure of feeling snuck on people worldwide.
I thought again of Robert Bolt and my own three-week arc. Maybe three weeks to an individual is like three generations to history (or six years to Blank Street Coffee): enough time for a little breakdown of resolve. There’s a version of the USA I think I believe in — something based on concreteness, intellect, and stubbornness — but we have hit a moment of letting the ball drop. Or, really, of recognizing it's already on the ground.
Does that mean liberalism has run into the incentive structure of capitalism and is losing the cage match? Way above my pay grade, literally, and way too many words in there you could debate forever twice. But I do know that now is a time when it’s vitally important to be in touch with — to interrogate, adapt, fortify — the foundational principles of what it means to be American. Liberal media these days is full of lines about the divide between those who conceive of the US as a nation built on ideas and those who consider it built on a people (too often with undertones of racial homogeneity) and a heritage (always glossed of its destructiveness). It’s a dangerous split, and one whose danger is dwarfed by real violence in cities, by federal agents tear gassing six-month-olds and killing mothers. But that violence is entangled with the fact that the USA needs a renewed sense of self.
So Robert Bolt was right. We need selfhood without magic — without the “magic” of religion, nationalism, bigotry, illusion, hegemony, violence, or money. In a way, that principle has always been the undelivered promise and project of the US; but today, I don’t think it can be rooted in nostalgia. It has to face forward.
January, 2026. The year’s new. The regulars come rolling into Blank Street on Causeway. Sometimes the regulars include a golden retriever puppy named Pita who is literally the archetypal perfect dog. I appreciate that there’s a Trident cafe-bookstore in Boston, like in Boulder; though vibe-wise the two are polar opposites (hippie shambalic co-op of constant chatter and creativity in Boulder, diner-style “book spot for liberals” in Boston, according to Jack), the one here has grown on me enough to be the go-to place. Meanwhile the Charles is frozen over, and as Anna and I went for a run the other day we saw a juvenile bald eagle sitting on the ice. Messy mottled plumage, big yellow talons, sharp eyes. It poked around for ages — just checking things out.