After two rounds of US–Israeli attacks in the space of a year, pressure is mounting on Iran’s leadership to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Advocates say the treaty has failed to protect Iran’s civilian nuclear program or its scientists. Their opponents warn that withdrawal could provide Washington and Tel Aviv with a pretext for another assault. The argument now reaches well beyond the Majlis.
“A big decision in the offing” is one way to describe a motion that has sat with the Iranian parliament’s presidium for months. A group of lawmakers has now issued an open statement demanding that the Supreme National Security Council and Foreign Ministry begin the formal process of withdrawal from the NPT. They also want Tehran to end voluntary nuclear commitments beyond its treaty obligations.
The lawmakers argue that the NPT and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have failed to safeguard Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology. They accuse the agency of allowing information obtained through inspections to reach Iran’s enemies, exposing nuclear facilities and scientists to attack.
Their statement follows years of dispute over the agency’s access to Iranian sites and the use of its findings by western governments. They invoke Article X of the treaty, which permits withdrawal when a state decides that extraordinary events have jeopardized its supreme interests. A withdrawal would require three months’ notice to other parties and the UN Security Council.
A motion awaiting debate
In the wake of that open statement, Isfahan lawmaker Hussein-Ali Haji-Deligani revealed he and his colleagues submitted legislation on Iran’s withdrawal from the NPT months ago, and it is up to parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf to put it to debate on the parliament floor. Heji-Delogani reiterated:
“Considering enemies’ wars against Iran on two occasions, the continuation of Iran’s membership in the NPT has no use, especially after the IAEA’s Board of Governors sent Iran’s dossier to the UN Security Council. Therefore, Iran should exit from the treaty to prevent further damage.”
Other lawmakers have turned their criticism on the parliamentary leadership. Tehran representative Kamran Ghazanfari blamed the presidium for keeping the motion off the floor, an accusation aimed principally at Ghalibaf.
Ghalibaf has aligned himself with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on several questions of state policy, drawing fire from former allies among the Principlists. The NPT dispute has become another point of contention between them.
Another parliamentarian, Mohammad-Reza Sabaghian, stated:
“We must use the courage that was shown and the right strategy to close the Strait of Hormuz in the discussion of withdrawing from the NPT. This is the second step that will lead to the failure of America’s plans.”
Mohsen Sani, a member of parliament’s national security commission, went further:
“In our opinion, the NPT no longer has any meaning or significance, whether we want to stay in it or leave it. When one of the NPT member states attacks another member (Iran), it means withdrawing from all these commitments and treaties that have existed in this regard. Recent pressures suggest that we should reconsider enrichment.”
The case for staying
The call for withdrawal has met resistance within Iran’s political establishment. Tehran lawmaker Mohammad Seraj sees no benefit in leaving. Unless Iran intends to build a bomb, he argues, the step would only damage its relations with friendly states.
Khorasan, a newspaper close to Ghalibaf, has criticized lawmakers for “radicalizing the political ambiance of the country and forcing the Islamic Republic to make such a sensitive decision,” describing it as “a gift to Trump.”
The outlet maintains that “any moves towards leaving the NPT give enough justification to Trump and Netanyahu for their future strikes against Iran while it alienates friends such as China and Russia who have always supported Iran’s legitimate right to a non-military nuclear program.”
Rouydad24, a news site with strong ties with the Reformist camp, lambasted lawmakers as “radicals” who “have returned with a controversial and costly prescription.”
The Reformist news site charges that “Pezeshkian’s critics have turned withdrawing from the NPT into a political slogan without considering it is a complicated matter economically, militarily and internationally.”
Where the decision rests
The debate has become a challenge for Pezeshkian, whose government has defended Iran’s continued place in the treaty. But the president is not the only voice in the room. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has openly raised the possibility of withdrawal.
Rezaei said, “After the United States abandoned the post-war Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, we reached the conclusion that we must change course. We have yet to take a decision on withdrawing from the treaty, because our withdrawal totally depends on Washington’s behavior.”
The senior general admits that the Islamic Republic is still committed to the late supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s religious prohibition on the use of nuclear weapons and has not changed its nuclear doctrine; however, “nobody can guarantee the future,” he elaborates.
Is Iran seeking a nuclear weapon?
In an exclusive interview with the Republican Party’s mouthpiece, Fox News, Pezeshkian flatly denied Iran is seeking an atomic bomb, adding that his country is even willing to dilute the 440-kilogram uranium stockpile purified at 60 percent and allow the IAEA’s nuclear inspectors to supervise Iran’s nuclear program.
Pezeshkian made those claims while the Islamic Republic does not allow international inspectors to visit its nuclear facilities, which were destroyed by the US and Israel during two wars in June 2025 and February-March 2026.
Pezeshkian’s assurance contrasts with Rezaei’s warning that the country’s future course cannot be guaranteed. Reports in Tehran that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has ruled out nuclear talks with Washington remain unconfirmed; they offer no basis for treating such a ban as settled policy.
A decision above the Majlis
Iran’s NPT membership has moved from a technical and legal question into a wider argument over deterrence after the attacks on its nuclear facilities. The parliamentary bill gives that argument a public stage, but lawmakers alone will not settle it.
The final decision would be made at the highest levels of the Islamic Republic’s political and security establishment. A vote in the Majlis could put a formal stamp on a course set elsewhere, as earlier nuclear legislation did.
The 2020 Strategic Action Law to Lift Sanctions, for example, obliged the government to expand nuclear activity and restrict inspections if sanctions relief did not materialize. It sharply constrained the Rouhani administration’s room for maneuver over the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement. The precedent is relevant because a bill presented as a parliamentary initiative can become a lever for policy agreed across the state’s security institutions.
For now, proposals to leave the NPT and calls to build a bomb circulate side by side. That does not establish that either has been adopted. It does show how far positions once kept at the edges of public debate have entered the argument over Iran’s security.
Lawmaker Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani has advocated building a nuclear weapon first and withdrawing from the NPT afterward, “because only in that case, it can guarantee deterrence against a renewed US-Israeli aggression.”
Even Khorasan, which warns against leaving the NPT now, does not rule out an exit. Its argument is that Iran should first build and test a nuclear weapon. Until then, it says, Tehran would bear the costs of a nuclear-armed state without possessing a nuclear deterrent.
The disagreement in Iran is no longer confined to whether the country should leave the treaty. It is also about when.
Éric Sadin gets up and paces around the living room of his Paris apartment when an argument excites him. His own voice urges him to do so. He has developed a critical body of thought, brimming with striking headlines and elegant analyses of the future, riding the philosophical and social thinking of the last century to arrive at a scathing conclusion across some 10 books: we have become idiots, and we are on our way to becoming even bigger idiots.
Of all the animals shown in the tombs and art of ancient Egypt, very few have a name. Almost all of those that do are dogs. A handful of horses are named too, though far fewer survive. Cats, the animal most of us now associate with Egypt, are a different story. The literature offers only […]
Picture ancient Egypt’s funerary cult and the mind jumps to the dead themselves: the offerings, the gods, the pageantry. Easy to forget are the people who actually carried the bread, beer, and incense to the tomb, day after day, for generations. A team from the University of Seville wants to put them back in the […]
Sandra Martinez Roe, a mother in Los Angeles, hopes that her son will never use artificial intelligence (AI) in school. “I’m not going to let my children be guinea pigs,” she tells EL PAÍS over the phone. The city’s school board granted her wish, at least temporarily, a couple of weeks ago: the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has banned AI from public classrooms this school year.
In 2024 I sketched a map to situate what experts and commentators expected from artificial intelligence. It had two axes: how much will it advance? and will it be beneficial or dangerous? People fell into every quadrant, even the inconsistent one —“it’s nothing special and it’s extremely dangerous.” I was clearly on the “wow” side of the power axis and moderately optimistic. Two years later, the consensus has shifted in one direction: more power and more fear.
Everything is contagious, even the way we listen and understand. For humans, consonants usually carry more information than vowels. This pattern appears in many languages: when a sentence is stripped down to its bones, those bones are more recognizable if consonants dominate. That is why Spanish has 23 consonants and five vowels, a ratio that holds in almost every language. It is also why people drop vowels when they want to save characters in a message. Our brains fill in the gaps more effectively.
Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has announced the discovery of a Roman-period tomb whose architecture, according to the country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has no exact parallel elsewhere in the cemetery where it was found. The tomb sits at Bir al-Shaghala, a site in the Dakhla Oasis, about 750 kilometers (roughly 465 miles) southwest […]
In late 2025, conservators from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum brought an unassuming object to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Oxfordshire: a terret, a small bronze loop that Iron Age chariots used to keep a horse’s reins from tangling. It looked modest. It was nearly 2,000 years old. And under X-ray analysis, it turned out to […]
A small piece of clay, not much bigger than a matchbox, took nearly a year for archaeologists to identify. When they finally did, it turned out to belong to one of the most famous documents in the ancient world: the peace treaty that closed out a war between two Bronze Age superpowers, sealed more than […]
Under Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt between 1279 and 1213 BC and is remembered as one of its most powerful pharaohs, the kingdom kept a chain of garrisons along its western frontier, watching for raids by Libyan tribes and, later, the loosely defined coalition of invaders known as the Sea Peoples. One of those tribes, […]
The most recent winner of the National Magazine Award for feature writing describes his turn to payday lending apps when AI gobbled up his livelihood (aka penning promotional web content for business clients). Sharp and darkly funny, the essay chronicles yet another nail in the coffin of the American dream:
Albert founder Yinon Ravid has said that he chose his app’s name for its suggestion of the kind of “smart, unassuming friend” you might come to for financial advice, but today, when I hear the name Albert, I am far more likely to picture an overwhelming force bent on my total destruction, a figure you might spot while being burned alive in a dream—black-robed, pale, teeth bared. When I first joined the app, about eighteen months ago, Albert offered me $25.00. To acquire this loan, I was required to pay an additional fee: A $6.99 instant deposit charge plus the cost of a $19.99-per-month subscription to Albert’s Standard plan, due in one week’s time alongside the full loan repayment. (If I really wanted to make the most of my $25.00, I also had the option of Albert’s $39.99-per-month Genius plan, which, among a very small handful of other talents, can “find restaurants based on your location, or in a specific area.”) On its own, this might’ve been manageable, but, true to the CRL’s findings, Albert’s offerings alone couldn’t keep me afloat, and so I soon signed up for the rest of the payday apps, each one toting its share of instant deposit and subscription fees. (Gallingly, Dave—the only publicly traded company of the bunch, valued at $4.72 billion as of this writing—has the nerve to ask for a tip after each transaction, a move that I suspect even the flintiest strip mall grift artists would dismiss as gauche.)
Watching The Jetsons as a kid in the ’80s, I was obsessed with the food machine, and how it dispensed a full meal at the touch of a button. The show was set in 2062, exactly a hundred years on from its original broadcast. We’ve made it to 2026, but life today resembles nothing like that slick space-age future. We have gadgets, but they’ve arrived as phones, apps, and smart home devices—and I’m not sure they’ve made my life better.
“Accepting modern conveniences too often means accepting lower standards,” writes Gabe Bullard in Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease. Lower standards for material goods, for labor conditions, for socializing, for art and entertainment. “Experiences become transactions.”Bullard isn’t anti-technology. His argument, he writes, “is an argument against how we use and are pushed to use technology.” In his new book, he examines the conveniences that have crept into his life—and likely yours—and offers ideas for living with them more sustainably and equitably.
In this excerpt from chapter seven, Bullard sets this scene: a physical world, the one we’ve moved through for centuries, slowly reshaped by the virtual one we increasingly live in. Cars drive from one dot on a map to another, ferrying takeout to people at home on sofas. Food deliverers make some extra money. Businesses take orders both online and off. It appears easier, efficient. But Bullard examinesthe costs—to the customer, to the driver, and to the restaurant owner, who still has to make sure the fries are crispy once they reach your door.
The artist Jake Longstreth paints landscapes of America, often the West and Southwest, with their distinctive vegetation, deserts, and mountains. In the foreground of many of his paintings are features that evoke a time more than a single place—CubeSmart self-storage, Taco Bell, a sun-bleached facade with shadows where the words Toys ‘R’ Us once hung.
In one series, each painting is a different view from the parking lot of a Walmart in Scottsdale, Arizona. Ferns, trees, and desert grasses obscure the sharp edges of the boxy store. Semitrailers and loading docks peek from behind the brush. In a painting from a different series, a Home Depot abuts a Civil War battlefield.
The work has a loneliness that’s reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s paintings. But unlike Hopper, Longstreth rarely paints people (one exception is a group of soldiers in uniform at the grand opening of a Chili’s). The only signs of humanity are occasional cars and the chains that “make up, basically, an American commons,” as Longstreth described them in an interview promoting an exhibition of his work in 2024. “Most people don’t really have a super-deliberate relationship with these places,” he added.
There’s a certain democracy to the scenes: Anyone, anywhere can eat the same value meal as anyone else. There’s also an intrusion: The chains’ architecture imposes a sameness on once-unique landscapes. The stores and restaurants are dropped into spaces that weren’t made for them. Flat, square plots are pressed into hills, ample parking provided.
The encroachment of a drive-thru on a lush California valley is a good representation of many modern conveniences. The services that claim to make something faster, easier, or cheaper are built on top of physical landscapes, legal frameworks, or social orders that were not made to accommodate them. The systems absorb the change, but they do it awkwardly and end up forever altered. Starbucks becomes a place to pick up app orders; appliances become accessories to connect to your phone; QR codes sit on restaurant tables; analysis replaces news; art becomes Content; machines replace people.
Uncomfortable intrusions and uneven responses are everywhere.
Examples abound: Grocery delivery apps bring an old idea to a new reality. Grocers offered delivery over a century ago, but the stores were set up and staffed for this. Modern grocery stores are built for customers to come in and do their own shopping. Delivery apps now let customers pay someone to do the same physical task the user would do if they went to the store themselves. What seems like a simple process can quickly become inconvenient. Grocery stores evolved to let customers pick out their own fruit, check dates on packages, and otherwise get things for themselves based on what looked good (or what the store suggested they buy). Virtual shoppers do this picking for customers, sometimes in a hurry so they can fulfill more orders. Mistakes can happen even under the best circumstances. Better deals go ignored. There’s confusion when an item is out of stock and the customer hasn’t chosen an alternative. It can lead to a customer essentially steering a shopper through the store on their behalf.
Rentable electric scooters have become a fixture of urban sidewalks in the past decade. The scooters speed up trips that are too far to walk, too short for a car ride, and not covered by public transit. But these are more of a tacked-on convenience than a real solution. City streets aren’t often built to accommodate smaller vehicles, leaving scooter riders to either use car lanes (putting the rider at risk) or sidewalks (putting pedestrians at risk). Poorly parked scooters clutter neighborhoods. And the environmental benefits are questionable, if at times nonexistent: Broken scooters need to be replaced and vans typically pick up scooters for charging. These problems could be solved through a more active response from cities—more adequate public transit, sustainability requirements for the rental companies, limits on where scooters can be ridden and parked. Cities could build better infrastructure, too, to favor bikes, scooters, and pedestrians over cars.
The postal system and most homes were built to accommodate the delivery of mail and packages. But the scale of e-commerce deliveries has forced inconvenient adjustments to physical and social spaces. In the years I lived in a large apartment building, package drop-off was a constant frustration. Every afternoon, the lobby filled with Amazon and Chewy boxes. They sometimes sat there for days (rush delivery wasn’t essential after all). What was built as a place for neighbors to mingle became a warehouse for boxes of dog food where people occasionally waited for rideshares.
For private homes, the doorbell camera offers convenient, instant notification that a package has arrived and security footage if the package is stolen. It’s an inelegant, antisocial solution. The old-style doorbell was already a notification a package had arrived. The new gadget moved the chime and the peephole to the pocket (and gave users another reason to stay glued to their phones). Package theft is a crime of convenience created by constant online shopping and delivery, and it’s not clear the cameras are stopping it. In my old neighborhood, people often posted grainy images of package thieves to local message boards. Sometimes the person said they were giving the information to the police, as if the police would bother tracking down whoever took a box that had most likely already been replaced. Perhaps the footage will go into a database to be scanned by facial recognition software instead. Doorbell cameras might be meant to catch crimes, but more often, they create Content like the videos of accidents I scroll past online. Everyone is eager to share their personal view of the panopticon.
Is the convenience worth the cost of constant surveillance and suspicion of every person who steps on your stoop (not to mention a subscription to the software that runs the camera)? Even if the cameras prevent a package theft, it’s unlikely the increased surveillance is a deterrent for violent crimes, or that it has an effect on overall neighborhood safety. That would take a collective solution. The camera lets the homeowner feel optimized to take on (or hide from) the world’s troubles alone.
The services that claim to make something faster, easier, or cheaper are built on top of physical landscapes, legal frameworks, or social orders that were not made to accommodate them.
Ridesharing’s “disruption” is perhaps the most prominent example of convenience overloading existing systems, and those systems bending to accommodate it. In this case, the systems were municipal regulations, employment standards, and users’ expectations for how to get around a city. In his book Blood in the Machine, tech journalist Brian Merchant notes that the arguments against regulation echo one the mill owners made in the fight against the Luddites in the early 1800s. Existing laws regulated mills and set standards for worker training and for the quality of cloth. As businessmen automated manufacturing, they argued that “the regulations on the books are out of date, should not apply to new technologies, and are stifling innovation; they’re really not that important, and no one plans on violating them anyway,” Merchant writes.
The argument that our existing laws are inadequate in the face of progress is so pervasive in the tech industry, breaking rules is basically a strategy. OpenAI’s CEO has said it’s impossible to create their products without access to copyrighted material, and as I write this, the debate continues over how AI firms should license—or should have licensed—the material they use to train their software.
We are still adjusting to new technology—legally, morally, socially. The adjustment will go deeper than making room for a new way of shopping, computing, or getting around. How we react in these (still) early stages—how we comport ourselves and what we demand of the apps and our governments—will have ramifications for generations to come.
It’s not looking good.
The spread of generative AI is the most worrying sign at the moment, but I hear about new, supposedly convenient, yet ultimately unnecessary, technologies every day. Not long ago, it was facial recognition for buying concessions at sporting events. It’s mind-blowing computing power put to mundane use, and it raises big questions about privacy and security. I wonder if the food tastes any better.
To get a sense of the stakes of all-encompassing adaptation to new technology, go outside: massive parking garages in downtown real estate (somehow still necessary even with rideshares); four-lane streets in residential neighborhoods; houses with no stoop and a garage door as the most prominent feature on the facade; interstates along riverfronts; drive-thru-only restaurants; restaurants with double-wide drive-thrus. Cities and landscapes have been remade to accommodate privately owned personal cars. Shared cars or scooters might offer some relief, but the infrastructure has already been changed—these solutions are technology to solve the problems of technology, built not just on top of a system that wasn’t made for them, but on top of a system that wasn’t made for people at all.
This is the world I see in Longstreth’s paintings. The buildings are in places that are hostile to anyone traveling without their own car—shopping centers between batches of suburbs and man-made deserts of pavement. The paintings remind me of the long drives I’ve taken across the US—every exit has the same few fast-food restaurants and gas stations. The public commons is a place people stop at on their way somewhere else. Everyone eats the same value meal because there’s nothing else to eat.
The encroachments of high-tech convenience create a second reality—one that’s virtual and smooth. To someone using a grocery app, the store looks like a list of products on a screen, not the physical supermarket where a worker will go to pick out an order. To a person in a rideshare or driving by GPS, the world between two destinations looks like a line on a map. It’s a little like the augmented reality game Pokémon Go, which dropped monsters and training gyms onto the grids of city streets. Physical reality is a support structure for a world that exists on an individual’s screen. The virtual world imposes its demands on the physical world, often with results that aren’t better for the user or the real world.
Delivery food, for a long time and in many places, meant pizza or Chinese. This wasn’t by accident. Restaurateurs (and in the case of pizza, chains) refined the business model for delivery and developed containers that kept dishes in the best condition possible for the trip to a customer’s house. Modern food delivery promises to make any food into something you can eat at home. But not every dish, and not every restaurant, is built for this.
Traditionally, restaurant dining was a two-party affair. A customer went to a restaurant to dine in or carry out, or they ordered food over the phone that was delivered by an employee of that restaurant. Modern delivery adds two more parties: a food deliverer who is typically classified as an independent contractor and the app that mediates the relationship between everyone involved. The customer orders in the app. The app dispatches the driver. The customer tips the driver through the app. To the user, all of this is virtual—even the handoff of the food can happen through a smart doorbell.
Delivery apps offer something to each party they work with. To customers, the offer is any meal delivered to their door. To restaurants, the offer is new customers, more orders, e-commerce tools, and delivery without the staff (though some apps offer to let restaurants use their own couriers). To deliverers, the offer is the flexibility of the gig economy—be your own boss, work when you want. (I’m going to use the words “driver” and “deliverer” interchangeably, though in many cities, delivery is done on bike.) Each of these parties makes trade-offs if they accept the offer. Drivers take on the usual hazards of gig work. Claude Bahati lives in the UK and signed up to drive for Deliveroo because he liked the autonomy. But the money has been inconsistent. He sometimes works eighteen hours a day, five to seven days a week. Early on, he cleared about a thousand British pounds per week. He earned occasional bonuses by logging on when orders were heavier, too. Now he’s not seeing as many boosts and the orders have dropped. “You’d be lucky if you hit £700 a week,” he says. In response to questions, Deliveroo said this may be related to a change in which deliverers are paid based on distance traveled. (Bahati and many of his fellow drivers have organized with the GMB labor union in the UK to push for changes to pay and to how the apps treat drivers—and these have led to agreements on minimum pay for time and transportation.)
Paying drivers more would mean either reducing profits, upping the fee on the restaurants, or raising prices for customers. “It is always the drivers who get pinched,” Bahati says. The actual cost of a service is unclear to customers in the virtual world. “As a customer, you’re thinking, ‘which one’s the cheapest?’ ” Bahati says. “I don’t think you think about a driver and how much they’re being paid. I think you’re thinking, ‘How quickly can the driver get here?’”
Restaurants can choose whether to be on the apps, but this wasn’t always the case. When DoorDash, GrubHub, Postmates (since purchased by Uber Eats), and Seamless (it’s odd they’re all compounds of short words) launched, restaurants sometimes found themselves listed on the apps without agreeing to participate. Some restaurants sued. California banned the practice. Most apps changed their policies in response.
Modern food delivery promises to make any food into something you can eat at home. But not every dish, and not every restaurant, is built for this.
Given the thin margins of running a restaurant, opting out isn’t an easy decision, especially as customers come to expect delivery. Liz and Jesse Huot own two hamburger restaurants and a bakery in Louisville, Kentucky. They were hesitant to offer delivery at first. “You don’t have control over your food once it leaves,” Jesse says. “Kind of like handing your kid off to a babysitter you’ve never met,” Liz adds. Besides the loss of control, trade-offs for restaurants include fees from the apps and a potential decline in dine-in customers.
The Huots signed up to have their food delivered by DoorDash in 2023. They realized customers seemed okay with a dip in quality in exchange for the ease of delivery. “It’s normal for you to know that your fries suck when you get them delivered,” Liz says. Customers also didn’t mind paying a 30% extra charge for the food—a price the Huots settled on to cover the 15% app commission, the additional packaging, and to offset the drop in tips for servers.
Delivery orders are strong, and the Huots say they feel pressure to make the menu more accommodating. “Our two sides are fries that get soggy and Brussels sprouts that, ten minutes after they’re made, they get a little funky,” Jesse says. “So I’ve considered changing the sides. But people in-house love them, and if I change that, I think it would hurt us.” The solution to soggy fries is a starchy coating that some restaurants have adopted. It keeps them crispier, but it can cause indigestion. To add these, the Huots would need a larger kitchen with room for another frier.
With orders coming in online, the Huots are essentially running additional restaurants out of the same space they had before (they took their bakery off the app due to the challenge of managing inventory between physical and virtual lines). They favor their in-house customers, who provide the bulk of business and who the Huots have a direct relationship with. Online, their restaurants are among the businesses that pop up if someone searches for burgers. In person, the restaurants are a destination and an experience. That experience is why the Huots started their business in the first place. “I’m not passionate about food that lasts a long time in a car,” Jesse says. “That’s not what I got in this for. And if that’s what it became, I would question if I still want to do this.”
Sometimes the Huots turn off online orders to tend to a packed house, which leads to emails from customers asking why they can’t order. This isn’t the only entitled behavior the pair has encountered since the rise of delivery apps and the isolation of the pandemic. Liz has noticed an impatience and a demanding attitude from in-person patrons that wasn’t as prevalent a few years ago. Customers get angry when something is out of stock. At the bakery, they complain if they can’t get an ornately made cake without ordering ahead. “That kind of convenience, people expect it when they walk in the building, too,” Liz says.
This is the discomfort that comes from the virtual and real worlds overlapping. Most of us exist in both places. Yet the rules of the real world don’t always apply virtually, and the behavior of the virtual world, in real life, is typically weird and antisocial. Online, we shop without assistance, lurk on conversations without taking part, and pay to have whatever we want brought to us. The world is shaped around the user, with targeted ads and algorithmic feeds. Spending so much time in the virtual world shifts expectations for the physical world.
This is the discomfort that comes from the virtual and real worlds overlapping.
Participation in the virtual world is the cost of doing business in the physical one. Besides adopting to delivery, many restaurants have changed their lighting, decor, and menus to be visually friendlier for diners who post to Instagram or TikTok. One trend saw posters raving about dishes with melted cheese that stretched as far as possible. Like viral Starbucks drinks, the taste was secondary—what mattered was documenting the consumption.
The virtual world of platforms and apps has given rise to the ghost kitchen—a restaurant that, for the user, exists only on apps. Some ghost kitchens operate out of shared facilities with no storefront, and can give aspiring chefs a way to test out ideas. Other times, a restaurant owner sets up a second, online-only brand in their kitchen to boost sales. The concept is an outgrowth not only of delivery apps, but of the rise in commercial rents. The crisis of the pandemic made moonlighting via ghost kitchens essential for some restaurants to survive.
Not every virtual eatery is a passion project. Some are chains managed by a corporate parent and are often branded with celebrity endorsements or gimmicky names that appeal to novelty on the apps—examples include Egg the F* Out, OMG BBQ LOL, and B*tch Don’t Grill My Cheese. Virtual chains compete against the small restaurateurs who the concept of ghost kitchens was supposed to save—and sometimes restaurateurs are competing against themselves, if they add a virtual brand to their business. People pursuing their passion are made to pursue it in the same kitchen that turns out pancakes for a virtual chain called Granny Pannies (a real ghost kitchen). The customers may not know the difference between the businesses, since every restaurant looks the same on the app.
As of May 2025, a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich from Egg the F* Out in New York City is $19.09, more than three times what it would be at one of the city’s many bodegas. Food delivery was never about being cheaper, though. It’s not guaranteed to be faster. It’s rarely better. Delivery via app offers users control over their participation in a once-public activity—a virtual alternative to reality. It lets diners get whatever they want and eat it alone, away from the friction of the physical world and away from reminders of what it takes to make and serve food, and the people who do this work. If diners want to be social, they can get a viral dish that looks good on camera.
A few years ago, I went to my hometown in rural Illinois for Christmas. On a walk, I saw a sign advertising MrBeast Burger sticking out of the snow-covered grass at the edge of a park. I wondered who had put it there over the holiday—out in the cold, surrounded by cornfields, hoping someone might pick up their phone and order a burger. I thought about the person who might place the order—curious, looking for novelty, unaware of what it would take to get a meal themed around their favorite YouTube star. I wondered where the food would come from and how far someone would need to drive to drop it off. But these were concerns of the physical world. More and more, that’s not where we live.
Gabe Bullard is a journalist, critic, and broadcaster. He has written for NPR, The New York Times Magazine, Nieman Reports, 99% Invisible, Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine, among other outlets. He was a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard University and is co-founder of Together, Alone, an online magazine of television criticism. He’s from the Midwest and now lives in Switzerland.
Chinese President Xi Jinping underlined the need for stronger international coordination for common security in West Asia and a reaffirmation of the UN Charter and international law.
Xi demanded external powers must respect sovereignty and territorial integrity of the countries in the region and stop interfering in their internal affairs.
China is ready to work with the countries in the region to “safeguard the security of international shipping lanes, advance development cooperation, promote the convergence of interests of regional countries, gradually enhance mutual trust, and eliminate root causes of the conflict,” Xi proposed.
Xi made the statement during his two day state visit to Egypt on Wednesday, September 2. This was his first state visit to the country in 10 years.
Xi’s visit coincided with the 70th anniversary of establishment of bilateral relations between the two countries and took on greater significance in the context of ongoing wars in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
Xi and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi signed a joint declaration which recognized Palestine as the core issue in the region and underlined the importance of “reaching a just and lasting settlement based on the two-state solution” and creation of an “independent and sovereign” Palestinian state as per 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as the capital.
Both the countries also rejected “any plans to displace the Palestinian people from their lands under any pretexts or names” and called for a true ceasefire in Gaza with unrestricted flow of humanitarian aid.
Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza since the ceasefire was announced last year in daily attacks. It has also prevented the flow of humanitarian aid to the region and expanded the war against Palestinians by launching attacks in other occupied territories such as the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Xi’s four point proposal
Xi presented a four-point proposal for enhancing common security in West Asia, which will keep the external forces out and achieve lasting stability and peace in the region.
Guo Jiakun, official spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explained Xi’s four points during a regular press conference on Thursday.
As per Xi’s proposal, increasing dialogue among the countries in the region is the first necessary step in achieving common security. This step must be followed by building comprehensive regional governance of hotspot issues.
Third, Xi claimed, increased possibilities of mutual development would pave the way towards lasting stability and security in the region.
Identifying that lasting peace and stability in the region is “fundamentally dependent on development” Xi also offered Chinese help to the countries in the region in achieving the same.
This regional set up, as the last step, needs international backing by institutions such as the UN for sustenance. The support of the countries in the region to the UN will in turn make it “play a tangible role in regional affairs” as well.
Amplifying the voice of Global South
The China-Egypt joint declaration talks about their efforts to amplify the voice of the Global South by “supporting the right of the developing countries to fair and balanced participation in international economic and political decision making.”
Egypt recently joined BRICS, a 11-member group working for a multipolar world and democratization of the global governing institutions including the UN and international financial institutions.
It also participated in the recently concluded Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek as a Dialogue Partner. The summit adopted a joint declaration talking about the democratization of the global governance mechanisms.
Apart from BRICS and the SCO, Egypt and China are also part of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum and Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. All these organizations have the stated goals of working against unilateralism and acts of bullying in international politics.
Their joint declaration also talked about strengthening political and security coordination on regional and international issues of common interest which may include conflicts in the region.
China is one of Egypt’s largest trading partner with their bilateral trade reaching $20 billion last year.
As a part of the larger agenda of the countries in the Global South to reduce their dependence on the US dollar, both the countries signed an agreement to pay for all their bilateral trade in their local currencies.
When the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette surveyed the necropolis at Saqqara in the mid-19th century, he catalogued hundreds of mastaba tombs and marked one more on his map that he never got around to excavating. It stayed there, noted but untouched, for more than 160 years. A joint Spanish-Egyptian mission has now finished what Mariette […]
Xi’s Cairo visit marks a strategic shift in the geopolitics of the Middle East. By strengthening its partnership with Cairo and promoting the concept of “regional autonomy,” China seeks to replace Western influence with a new architecture of security and economic cooperation. A Meeting That Means More Than Diplomacy It’s often said that the devil […]
When I was little I had a ritual with my parents where, as they tucked me into bed, they’d tell me a few reasons why they loved me (yes, I know how lucky I am to have been raised in an environment like this). As part of their list, I always asked them to say I was careful, and dutifully they’d repeat, “Yes, of course, we love you because you’re so careful.” I needed my parents’ words to ward against a recurring-day-mare-type vision I had in those years, in which I climbed onto our roof and then, while recklessly peering over the edge, toppled off the eave and cracked open my skull. I would never have put myself in that situation in waking life; I was so cautious that even an imagined scenario in which I endangered myself was enough to terrify me. But being reassured of my carefulness night after night made me feel safer.
My prudent youth did involve a handful of responsibly chaperoned birthday parties at Northern California climbing gyms, and a handful of climbing excursions in the Sierras with my grandfather, but ironically the flatland of Minnesota is where I got serious about the sport. During those unrelentingly brutal winters I seized upon climbing for exercise and entertainment—in the gym, since it was colder than the dark side of Mars outside—as a way to stave off cabin fever in the long months of permafrost. On a recent visit back to the Twin Cities at the close of one such winter, right after a session at the gym where I first cut my teeth, I posted up on the patio of an organic café to bask in the abrupt warmth of springtime. A guy sitting at the table next to me asked if I was a climber—our veiny forearms signal us to one another like Harley-Davidson jackets do for bikers—and I said yes. We started chatting.
This guy had just moved to town to save his own life. He was a paraglider, parachutist, kite-surfer, and wingsuiter, and he said that in the last year a dozen members of his inner circle “went in,” including his best friend and his brother, all in accidents related to their gravity-skirting pursuits. At first I couldn’t figure out what he meant by “went in,” but as I listened to him enumerate their various methods of “going in,” I eventually realized he was telling me they had all died. I could hardly comprehend the reality he described: being at the heart of a community where loved ones blink out in droves, like candles in a gale. He knew if he stayed in the game as a professional extreme athlete, pressured by peers and sponsors alike to remain at the cutting edge, he himself wouldn’t be around much longer. So, sight-unseen, he moved to the flattest and boringest place he’d ever heard of: Minnesota. He came specifically because there weren’t any cliffs for him to throw himself off. Only a few months into his new life as a Minnesotan, he was still in the jittery, cold turkey phase of his thrill detox.
“You done much free soloing?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. A truer answer would have been HELL NO I’M A WIMP, MY PARENTS LOVE ME BECAUSE I’M CAREFUL.
“Amazing feeling,” he said. “Being certain if you fuck up you’ll die, and being equally certain you won’t fuck up.”
We listened to the birds, sipped our coffees. I picked at the remains of my huevos rancheros. The juncos twittering around us sounded gladder than usual to be alive. I asked, “Is it really that much less fun to have a rope on? Like, clip a few draws? Place some cams along the way?”
He shook his head. “Once you been hucking yourself off the high dive, it’s no fun jumping off the edge of the pool.”
This at least rang true. Even I find it boring to jump off the edge of the pool.
“Glad you got out when you did,” I said.
He nodded grimly, seeming less glad than I was. Then I asked what he was getting up to instead. Of course, it was the most extreme thing you can do on flat ground.
“Ultramarathons,” he said.
He didn’t seem interested in probing his own psychology or rationales. He unapologetically liked the feeling of being adrenalized, and he wanted to feel that feeling as much as possible without killing himself. Why turn it into some elaborate trolley problem? For those living on the outer edges of risk, I suspect confidence is the key to survival: the confidence in one’s ability to assess a risk and then the confidence to execute the necessary action once a risk is deemed acceptable. Extreme athletes don’t seem to think too hard, at least on an abstract philosophical level, about the dangers they face. Their engagement is logistical, methodical. Far more productive to test the snowpack, visualize the beta, read the weather report, double-check the way the parachute is folded, determine what direction the wind blows down the talus field.
Rather than focusing on what we stand to lose, what riches does risk put us in position to gain?
But risk has been on my mind of late, because, much to my own surprise, my relationship to it has been changing. Recently I was on a very tall boulder called the Kraken, and it felt like I spent a hundred years with the sand in its penultimate pocket rolling grittily under my fingertips while I searched the rounded top of the block for a hold I could trust. A part of me is there still, suspended in that epoch of hold hunting, gearing up for the final move. This is one of risk’s most obvious gifts, the chance to experience that rare, thin-slicing acuity where each separate millisecond stands out like an image etched in stone. The present dilates to activate the past and future, too, as though we’re living our whole life all at once. With a cognitive rapacity available only during a fight-or-flight response, we cast our gaze forward, asking what grim future will bloom if we fall. And simultaneously cast it back, asking what errors in our past have brought us to this crossroads. Have I survived a situation like this before? Will I get lucky and survive again?
In a film, that’s where the music would come up, dissonant strings, ringing ears, the drums increasing tempo. It’s odd that the times of our deepest dumbstruck not-knowingness should be called “moments of truth.” I found a shallow, sandy divot for my right hand, threw my left heel high over the lip, and rolled onto the top of the boulder. A friend took photos, but it makes me uncomfortable to look at them.
From the back seat of a lifted pickup, deep house oozing out of a handmade portable stereo that Owen built into an antique suitcase, I look over the truck bed at the contrail of dust we send into the Eastern Sierra evening. Our pilot expertly navigates a kaleidoscope of dirt roads to deliver us at the Crab Cooker. Tumbling out of the truck we grab towels, water bottles, and puffy jackets, and walk a raised wooden path to the area’s hottest hot spring. An eggy, algal cloud envelops us before the spring itself comes into view. Then we see the rock-rimmed pool, a steam plume ascending from a dark crater. The water here, when it first comes to the surface, hovers around 150 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to cook crabs, no exaggeration in the name—so people cut it with cold water from a surface stream until it comes down to around 110. The pool is still hotter than any man-made tub I’ve ever sunk myself into, and its scalding sting feels spectacular on the aches we’ve accrued from several consecutive climbing days at the Buttermilks and in Owens River Gorge. We keep our hands lifted above the surface of the water so our hard-earned calluses don’t melt off.
Parallel to us climbers, there runs an entire subculture of hot springs enthusiasts who travel the country to find the loveliest, toastiest, unlikeliest geothermal pools that tectonics has to offer. Connecting with this odd population of wanderers is one of the surprise pleasures of our annual Bishop trip. The Crab Cooker must rank high on their list. Wild sage and scrubby junipers riddle the sand, boulders punctuate the foothills and draws, and the impressive ridgelines of the Sierra Eastside tower over it all, seemingly close enough to splash with the flick of a finger. At sunset the land gets saturated with glory and import and impeccable desert light, and we in our good fortune get to gaze at this panorama while the guts of the planet warm us to temperatures well in excess of our own hearts’ heat.
When, to our surprise, two bodies coalesce out of the steam, we apologize for our loudness and promptly shut down the stereo. The strangers don’t mind, they say, they’ve been enjoying the ruckus. The new arrivals are a pair of Germans, a father and his grown son, who have been touring America together. Before long our separate conversations become enmeshed in the small pool. We learn that the younger soaker, the son, used to be an accomplished extreme athlete. He somberly explains that he found himself a lonelier and lonelier survivor as his BASE-jumping and wingsuiting friends went in. Hearing the phrase now for the second time, I’m struck by the gentleness of the euphemism, far softer than the verb to crater, as in “their parachute didn’t deploy and they cratered,” which I’d heard in gruffer conversations with BASE jumpers. I picture these lost friends “going in” to a collective reserve of matter and spirit, the heavenly welter where all unmade is remade. Although, with the image of a crater in mind, I suppose “going in” could refer not to the eternally cyclical return to one’s mysterious origin but rather to a body “going in” to the ground at terminal velocity. Needless to say, I don’t ask the German.
He explains to a rapt audience that last year, upon successfully landing a jump, his still-open parachute caught a fierce gust of wind that slammed him into a cliff and dragged him across a talus field. Multiple impacts against the rocks shattered innumerable bones, including several in his back. By coincidence, the guy’s best friend was flying the emergency helicopter that came to collect his ragdoll body. To those on board it looked like a hopeless case, a certain fatality, but in the end the guy survived. Hearing the story, I look to my own best friend soaking by my side. We make eye contact and discreetly drop our jaws a fraction of a centimeter, a silent exchange of Jesus fucking Christ.
“Jesus Christ,” I say aloud to the German.
“It’s no problem,” the guy says, gesturing grandly at the mountain-rimmed basin that surrounds us. “Happy I am living.”
He’s still in the middle of a years-long rehabilitation process, he explains. He points to a neck brace he’d removed before his soak, whose plastic struts I now see glowing in the moonlight, a safe distance back from the water where it won’t get splashed. “It’s no problem to wear that sometimes.”
“Just like when he was a baby,” the dad says cheerfully. “I help him eat, then I help him shit!”
We typically view risk in relation to death—inviting its possibility, skirting its tentacles—but I’ve lately been exploring a philosophy that views risk, instead, in relation to life. Rather than focusing on what we stand to lose, what riches does risk put us in position to gain? This question came by way of a book called Éloge du risque by French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle. It hadn’t yet been translated into English, but with undergrad French memories and a Larousse dictionary in hand, I bought a copy and dove in. I worked on my translations of Éloge du risque while riding the Flatiron Flyer bus between Boulder and Denver. During this commute the Flatirons themselves rise to the west like a fleet of ships tacking in formation, their huge reddish triangular faces making a tidy row of sails afloat on a choppy sea of pine.
A route called Freeway ascends the Second Flatiron (they’re numbered sequentially from north to south), and locals tell me it’s a fun, dead-easy romp for the entire thousand feet of the eastern face. Nobody bothers to use the melodramatic phrase free solo; they just call it a scramble. The route has seen barefoot ascents, no-hands ascents, and, the clearest indicator of its difficulty, an ascent by a climber wearing roller skates. For some reason I never wonder whether I’m going to climb it, I just know, innately, that I’m going to. It’s an indicator that my relationship to risk is changing. Even still, as I prepare to solo—sorry, scramble—the Second, I approach it with a solemnity bordering on gloom. I warm up at home, stretch, fuel and hydrate, tidy the basement so that if I die I won’t leave an unsightly mess for my landlady to deal with. Ridiculous. The short drive across town feels haunted, with the Flatirons leering in the windshield as I pilot my way westward. I park and take a deep breath before exiting the vehicle. Walk up the trail, a well-beaten one that sees countless tourists and toddlers safely along the base of the range, taking every rock-hopping step with exaggerated care, testing the infallibility of my balance. And then I sit at the base of the Second for ages, meditative and serious, while a string of a half-dozen stoned teenagers fire the route, unroped, not even pausing their giggling conversation as they step off the trail and onto the rock.
Supposedly there’s a crux around fifty feet off the ground, but for me it turned out the crux was just deciding to do it. When I finally put on my climbing shoes, tuck my sneakers into my backpack, and lay my hands on the crystalline stone, hard moves are absolutely nowhere to be found. The climbing feels easier than walking, in fact, since I get to use my hands in addition to my feet. From a hundred feet up, and again at three hundred and again at five hundred, I glance down at the sandstone ramp the foot of the mountain makes, observe how the trail gets thinner and the trees get smaller as I rise, and experience a wave of giddiness. I sip that sensation like champagne, peering, bubbling, then I turn my face to the wall and continue the scramble. At the summit I sit a long time and look east at a flat expanse of town and plain that appears to extend all the way to the Atlantic. I’ve wagered my life, and have been repaid tenfold.
A week later, I take an incremental step up in difficulty and try the Third Flatiron. Locals, I notice, do tend to refer to this one as a solo, not a scramble. I’m exiting the kiddie pool. Again I follow the trail through Chautauqua Park with a measure of unease in my gut, hiking through grassy open fields up into the pine sea, and then across a stretch of loose talus to the base of the route. A thousand angling, rippling feet of sandstone thrust westward, the summit hidden from view. I bring my chalk bag this time and coat my palms with a layer of white dust to keep them from slickening with sweat. Unlike the Second, the Third is a legitimate, if moderate, climb. I make careful progress, never moving more than one limb at a time, testing each handhold for soundness, testing each surface for slipperiness, before entrusting my weight to it. Focus, rather than rhapsody, rules the experience. The crux comes at the top. Until that point I’d been hanging on bucket-like holds, generous craters, but the rock comprising the last twenty feet below the peak has been worn smooth by the elements. Though the terrain is low angle, it’s holdless as an asphalt road. This section, I knew from my research beforehand, would require a few moves of open-hand slab climbing. In the absence of tangible features on the cliff, you just paste your hands and feet onto the surface and rely on friction to hold you in place.
Slab is an unnerving, faith-based style of climbing, and those few moves—a thousand feet off the ground, knowing a fall would be fatal—demand a degree of meticulousness I’ve never before needed to summon. To summon it that afternoon is like flexing a new muscle for the very first time. I feel each grain of the gritty matrix as it deforms the skin of my fingertips, fitting the ridges of my fingerprint to match the ridges of the Flatiron’s surface. I attune to the gumminess of my shoe, the pressure of the ball of my foot compressing its rubber sole, filling completely the negative space of the rock’s surface. Death isn’t on my mind. It’s a million miles away. I know I will be perfect, and this perfection will make me invincible. If I fall, my last thought will be I never saw this coming. But I wager; I scurry. I summit. From the top I stare down at the backs of raptors, at the pine and the prairie, and again my spirit prospers.
The next morning from the bus I cast a lingering glance over the Flatirons. I look at the granulated ripples of the cliffs and superimpose my antlike image onto them, watching memories of myself crawl up the faces as if in footage captured by a drone. I’m still up there, forever taking those calm breaths, forever palming those grainy domes. Fellow commuters catch me wearing a moony smile. Now, pen gripped in my teeth, Éloge du risque open in my lap, my gaze drifts a click northward. My newfound muscle twitches. In the notebook for my scraps and outlines I write FOR RISK ESSAY: SOLO THE FIRST? After spending the day on campus I get back on the bus for my evening commute, and that scribbled notion digs into me uncomfortably. The wobble on the highway made my script look manic. It is manic. The idea stands squarely outside of what I consider to be an acceptable level of climbing risk. From the bus window the First dominates the ridgeline as the Flatirons fall into shadow. Morning and evening light seem to fashion two different ranges out of the same rock space. When I try on the idea of soloing the First, it feels like a too-small sweater pulled over my head, grabbing my skull. I know I should rip it off and discard it. But I could also push my way inside. I recall a strong, confident climber-friend whose trip report after soloing the First was simply, “I’m never going to do that again.” I wondered what had happened to turn his face so ashen, but he didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t pry.
These accident reports save lives more directly, more demonstrably, than poetry or scripture.
Climbing culture has a storytelling idiom I call “Close Calls.” They’re an inversion of just-so stories; instead of tales of creation like “How the Zebra Got Its Stripes” or “How the Giraffe’s Neck Got So Long,” Close Calls focus on tales of destruction like “How Rebecca Lost Her Leg” or “How Johnny Lost His Partner.” Years ago at the base of the Incredible Hulk, a gorgeous granite outcrop in the Sierras, Owen and I were preparing to climb the classic Red Dihedral. We’d undertaken the steep approach hike in the evening, stove heated some expired and deeply disappointing beef stew, and established our bivvy beside a picturesque rivulet riffling through a boulder field. Two young women camped at another minimeadow a few hundred feet downstream, and when the stars came up, they invited us down for a sip of whiskey. We splashed a bit of warmish bourbon into our unwashed bowls, resulting in a cocktail like a hot Sazerac with a beef-grease rinse instead of an absinthe one. During that night’s edition of Close Calls, we hear of a time an inexperienced leader led a pitch and built an anchor, and one of the women (now sipping her whiskey between plot points) followed him up, arriving at a worthless nest of protection that, had she fallen, would have sputtered from the wall and killed them both. Next my buddy describes watching a climber follow an outdoor route on top-rope, unclipping each draw along the way, and then, at the top, unclipping the two draws that held the rope, and then, the height of outrageousness, untying his rope and dropping it to the ground, meaning he was now clinging to holds a hundred feet off the deck with nothing else to hold him in place. By some miracle a professional climber was on a route next door and, seeing the disaster unfold, climbed to the stranded kid in minutes with a spare rope to reattach him to the world.
As with any public storytelling genre, there’s a ritual to it. One teller shares the scariest climbing story they’ve heard or experienced, a story of someone’s closest call. The fireside audience takes in the punchline—a survival unscathed, a rescue, an injury, a fatality—in solemn contemplation. After a respectful interval and perhaps another sip of whiskey, the next teller narrates an even closer call. For listeners familiar enough with safety systems to fully appreciate the danger, miscommunication, unpreparedness or negligence in these stories, the tales provide riveting entertainment, in their own grim way. But they serve a deeper purpose, too, in that they circulate these scenarios as a risk-prevention measure. The same could be said of the more formal narratives published by the American Alpine Club. Their style is unadorned, a blow-by-blow sequence of errors that led up to an injury or death on the wall, but safety-oriented climbers read these annual accident reports with biblical devotion. Instead of re-living old traumas, these prudent folks pre-live them, learning to deal with such catastrophes should they arise or, better yet, learning to avoid such catastrophes altogether. These accident reports save lives more directly, more demonstrably, than poetry or scripture.
We could easily swap Close Calls all night, but both teams are planning to start our ascents of the Hulk at dawn, so we force ourselves to break up the party before it gets too late. I brush my teeth, taking a gamble on unfiltered river water, and tuck myself into bed. In the sleeping bag, staring up at the densest panorama of stars I’ve seen in months, I wonder what moment, in my life so far, was the moment I was nearest to death. My own closest call, in a statistical sense, when my odds of survival were lowest. At first I think it would land among the instances when I was most afraid. There was a hike to a ghost town called Lundy when I was dead certain I was being stalked by a mountain lion. Or a time at an outdoor concert in Denver when gunshots broke out and the whole crowd stampeded in panic away from the brutal sound. Then I wonder if my closest call fell among the times I sustained an injury: a spinout on the highway from a blown tire, a fainting spell in the Rockies brought on by dehydration and exhaustion, a split forehead from an ice cave collapse that let me see my own skull through the hole in my skin. But in all likelihood, I bet the moment passed by me altogether unnoticed. One of my countless midnights on a two-lane country road, maybe, when the approaching headlights belonged to a drunk driver, or a trucker on the cusp of sleep, or a heartsick teenager composing a text to an ex. So long as they keep their car on the proper side of the yellow line, I never know the peril I’m in.
This evening in Boulder the sky is not its usual bluebird. From the egress window of my cheap-ass basement rental I see bulbous clouds gathering overhead. A handful of months have passed and by now the Second Flatiron scramble has become my go-to after-work workout. I lap it a couple times a week, not bothering with climbing shoes anymore, just using the same busted sneakers I wear for the approach hike. But when it rains, the rock slickens, the lichen sucks up moisture and magically transforms from a crust to a lubricant. Given the inclement weather, it’s shaping up to be a work night. So instead of soloing—sorry, scrambling—at sunset, I’m at my desk with a mug of mint tea, bringing Dufourmantelle into English word by word. Risk, she writes and I translate, “inaugurates an other time, as though traumatic. But a positive trauma.”
“An other time” makes me think, to my discredit, of the movie Donnie Darko. The premise of that film, as I interpret it, is that one night in a freak accident an airplane engine fell through the roof of the protagonist Donnie’s house, and should have crushed him, except that he was somnambulantly chasing a giant nightmare rabbit onto a golf course at the time, and thereby avoided his fate. This sets in motion an alternate universe—the one where Donnie lives—that runs alongside the one in which he rightfully dies. I think this is what Dufourmantelle means: When we take a risk, knowing we’ll either experience a near-miss like the Donnie who lives or a direct hit like the Donnie who dies, we create a narrative fork in the road. I’ve long wondered what wingsuiters, free soloists, and skydivers gain through their constant navigation of risk, and tonight I start to sense it. When carefully and responsibly considered, these dangerous activities let adventurers inhabit innumerable parallel universes. We get to live infinite lives and die infinite deaths as, in preparation, we imagine the outcomes and contingencies of each climb, each jump, each flight. The potential plotlines proliferate and the density of our life experience increases. Time dilates to accommodate not only the life we’ve lived and the life we will lead, but also all the lives we might have lived, and might yet lead.
I turn my attention to trauma positif. It’s an uncomfortable phrase. The language carries a reminder that many people experience risk and precarity only under duress. As far as I’m concerned, the privilege inherent in elective risk is alpinism’s original sin, and a key reason that, despite the vast increase in diversity and gender parity in climbing in the last decade, the sport has been slow to shake its aura of patriarchy and whiteness. But Dufourmantelle’s claims sound right to me. Just as negative trauma has the power to reshape the stories that people tell themselves about themselves and about the worlds they inhabit, so too can a trauma positif rewrite a person’s history, even as it rewrites their future. As a result of the risks I’ve taken, and the trauma positif of surviving them, I’m phasing out the story that I’m a meek person. Now, with demonstrable evidence, I must tell myself I’m capable of being brave. Maybe every time you risk your life, you lose it: You lose the life you had before taking the risk, and supplant that life with a new one. A solo of the First Flatiron feels this way for me. Ever since moving to town I’ve told myself I couldn’t solo it. So if I solo it, the version of me too frightened to try it will die.
Days later I see the headline in the local paper: “17-Year-Old Falls to His Death While Climbing Boulder’s First Flatiron.” There’s a photograph of the formation I’ve spent my daily commute mulling over, and the article below:
Equipped with camping and outdoor survival gear—but no climbing-specific equipment—a 17-year-old died after climbing alone and falling up to 100 feet or more from Boulder’s First Flatiron on Sunday evening.
Climber rescues, and non-fatal falls, are common every summer across the iconic rock formations above Chautauqua Park. But this appears to be the first accidental climbing death on the Flatirons in nine years.
The teenager—whose identity has not yet been released, and who officials initially said was 18—was found by a hiker near the base of the First Flatiron, above the Blue Bell Shelter in Chautauqua Park, according to Boulder County sheriff’s officials.
Sheriff’s Cmdr. Mike Wagner said the teen was free-soloing—climbing alone, without the use of ropes or gear—on the First Flatiron when he fell possibly more than 100 feet and suffered “massive traumatic injuries.”
Sources report that the climber took a selfie and posted it to Instagram shortly before the fall. There follow, in the next few days, admonishments from the climbing community, the oft-repeated self-assurances that this kid was unprepared but we know better, and more than a few references to a phenomenon known as “Kodak Courage,” where the possibility of taking an impressive photograph pushes a climber past their typical margin of safety. The next time I walk up to the foot of the First Flatiron, a sober memorial sits at the base of a pine tree. Cards, flowers, offerings. A printout of the photo the climber snapped and posted minutes before his death.
Toward the tail end of the same season the paper runs another headline: “Climber Dies After Falling from Boulder’s First Flatiron.” This time there’s a different stock photo of the mountain, now caked with snow. The article reads:
A man climbing on the First Flatiron on Thursday afternoon fell to his death, the second person to die following an accidental plummet off of the iconic Boulder landmark since August but only the second in nearly a decade.
Boulder County Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Kevin Parker said that the man—who has not been publicly identified—did not appear to be using any kind of climbing gear, but rescuers were searching the area for any signs of a backpack or gear on Thursday afternoon.
By the time a Denver Post article comes out about the incident later that night, investigators have located and interviewed an eyewitness, so the article is able to provide a bit of additional detail: “The witness believed the climber fell about 1,000 feet from the top of the First Flatiron.”
With that, this essay gets shelved for a spell. It’s not just because the weather has shifted, although the snow on the Front Range makes the Flatirons unclimbable through the winter, intermittent warm days sending rivers of melt down the faces, cold storms stacking new layers of powder over the slush. But more acutely, I realize I’ve been lulled into thinking a solo of the First Flatiron would be a casual endeavor, one that wouldn’t really bring me into proximity of any grave risk. The two deaths, in rapid succession, on the route I’ve planned to climb in the same style abruptly extinguish this confidence, leave me not only shaken but also self-admonishing for having been so cocksure in the first place. I take winter walks through Chautauqua. The snow crunches under my feet, sifts from trailside pine boughs. The Flatirons stand above, their features outlined in icy white. Below, the town of Boulder enjoys its bubble of dreamy calm, a hush of distant traffic in the air, interrupted by an occasional siren belting down Baseline or Table Mesa. During these walking meditations my notebook starts to feel suspiciously similar to the luckless young climber’s selfie camera. Moleskine Courage.
What do we stand to win when our ante is ourselves? The chance to make our finite time feel infinite? The chance to make our finite self feel infinite?
The crux of the First comes in its first hundred feet, where the climbing is particularly thin, slabby and insecure. I stand in the snow at the base—where a second memorial is now tucked in the pines—and visualize the climb. My counterfactual imagination invents a worst-case scenario: I’m not far up the route, approaching the gnarled tree that marks the top of the first pitch where a roped party would typically belay. Immediately below this point there’s a delicate section of friction-dependent slab; the first time I climbed the pitch on rope, this stretch clarified for me that I’d never, ever attempt the route as a solo. There aren’t proper holds, just shallow dishes for the hands and feet. I imagine extending my left foot and placing it in one such divot. I reach farther left with my left hand, where a small diagonal rail supports my left fingertips, stacked in a row. My right hand is similarly stacked in a higher-up dish, and as I go to move my right foot toward my body’s centerline, the left foot slips off. My knees strike the rock first, my elbows a moment after. The angle is low, so I don’t go into full vertical freefall. I bounce down the face. After twenty feet a heel catches and I invert, delivering a rolling blow to my shoulder and an impact to the back of my skull. In my chest a depth charge, a low moan as I land in the talus beside the twin shrines. After my death, my writer-friends will wonder what I was working on in my last days. I’ve kept my preparations for the solo secret, but now they will look in my notebook and see I’ve been planning it for months, getting ready to sacrifice myself for no greater purpose than a literal thought exercise.
I shift my weight in the snow, shake the spectacle out of my head. I return to the trail, the car, the comforts of home.
The winter months pass, long nights, a bomb cyclone that buries my basement windows in snow and leaves me to lurk in the dark like a slumbering bear, and then spring arrives abrupt and clanging and golden. Overnight the Flatirons slough off their snowy coats. Still ambivalent about soloing the First, I go to Chautauqua with two friends, planning to rope up and climb with them as a party of three. This will give me a chance, I figure, to scope the route once more and make a final call. Reassess those dishes and divots, determine whether I can trust my life to them. We spend a long time at the base, not rushing, just racking up and rearranging our packs, sipping water and snacking, enjoying the gorgeous day. The sun dips behind the ridge and the temperature gets perfect, just on the cooler edge of pleasant. The rock won’t be greasy, there’ll be plenty of friction, but it won’t be so cold I’ll get chilly and misinterpret my shivers as fear. Plenty of daylight, light spirits, and for once in my life, I don’t overthink. I know deep in my soul that I don’t need the rope today. So I don’t tie in. I just climb alongside my friends. It’s easier than walking because I get to use my hands, and everything goes perfectly, which means in the end there’s no story at all.
I won’t solo the First again, but not because I hated it. I won’t solo it again because I loved it too much. Since then, I haven’t exactly become a soloist, but I’ve heard the bell-clear siren song from routes a number of times, Johnny Vegas in Red Rocks, the Capstan on Flagstaff Mountain, a few choice cracks in the Sierra, a handful of highballs like Airwolf and High Plains Drifter in various deserts of the West. I am measured and studious, with my books and dictionaries and writing routine and mint tea. I also, when called, enjoy something categorically deadly. Soloing puts me in touch with the multitudes I contain. On insomniac nights I relive the memories of these ropeless ascents, with every detail of every hold seared in my mind in everlasting high resolution, and the perfection of my movements lulls me to sleep. It must sound counterintuitive, but nothing in this world makes me calmer.
The phrase “to risk one’s life” conjures in my mind’s eye a kind of scale, like the one Anubis uses to weigh a heart against a feather. On one of its golden dishes sits your wager, your life; on the other there must be something of equal or greater value in order for the risk to seem worthwhile. What do we stand to win when our ante is ourselves? The chance to make our finite time feel infinite? The chance to make our finite self feel infinite? The satisfaction of saving our own life? Is that payoff enough?
I discovered Anne Dufourmantelle’s work on the university library search engine, under keywords “philosophy” and “risk.” At the time I didn’t look into her biography, just went straight to the primary text. But I’m curious to see what she’s working on now, so I check the regular internet instead of the university database. The first hit is an article from the New York Times, headlined “Philosopher Who Praised Risk Died Trying to Save Children from Drowning.” It reads:
PARIS—A French philosopher and psychoanalyst, known for her work that praised living a life that embraced risk, died last week as a result of following her own bold philosophy.
The philosopher, Anne Dufourmantelle, 53, drowned on Friday as she tried to save two children who were struggling to swim off the coast of Pampelonne beach, near St.-Tropez, France, according to a report from French public television.
Ms. Dufourmantelle was on the beach when the weather began to change and the previously safe swimming area became treacherous. She saw two children who were in danger and leapt into the sea to help, according to France 3, before being caught in the rough surf.
She was pulled unresponsive from the water by two other swimmers, and attempts to resuscitate her failed.
Both children survived.
I’m stunned by how recent the news is: Dufourmantelle died days before the first soloist fell from the First Flatiron. Another search result, an obituary, quotes an English-language lecture she’d once given: “Being completely alive is a task, it’s not at all a given thing. It’s not just about being present to the world, it’s being present to yourself, reaching an intensity that is in itself a way of being reborn.” Having only experienced her work, up until this point, through the veil of translation, there’s something uncannily intimate about reading her words in my own language for the first time. The clarity of it is painful, the poetry self-evident, breaking out of human time and into the mythic. She saw the children, the danger. She saw the swift water. She went in.
Brian Laidlaw is an author of the two collections of poetry, The Mirrormaker and The Stuntman. A songwriter and musician, he has released several albums, most recently This Aster. He writes for outdoor magazines including Outside, Climbing, Alpinist, and Orion. Based out of Moab, Utah, he moonlights—often by literal moonlight—as a rock climber.
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