Photograph by Dustin Faulk.

Last Friday afternoon, the first in a series of downpours began in northern Nevada just as Burning Man was preparing to wrap up. Life in Black Rock City, the temporary settlement created for the event, ground to a halt as the hard-packed desert clay turned into a particularly sticky species of mud. Wheeled vehicles from bedazzled bikes to fire-breathing art cars instantly became useless. For approximately two and a half days, festival organizers forbade travel into and out of the city. Burners were asked to conserve food and water, and to live out their espoused principle of radical self-reliance.

As the lockdown dragged on, news reports from Black Rock City were limited and at times sensational. (Rumors of an ebola outbreak on Saturday were quickly debunked.) Social media commentary on the waterlogged festival was, predictably, infused with heavy doses of Schadenfreude. But one source struck a slightly different tone. 

BMIR 94.5, a radio station which surfaces annually for the festival, quickly adapted its programming to the shifting conditions. The station—located in a DJ booth in the makeshift city—allowed walk-up studio guests to mingle with on-air callers from the “default world,” as attendees dub the universe beyond the Black Rock City gates. Over the long weekend, I periodically tuned in online from New York, listening for the vibes.

Every ten minutes or so, BMIR played a series of prerecorded PSAs. Some were earnest exhortations, if slightly surreal: “Please do not climb on art. There are muddy, unsafe conditions on playa and very limited mobile emergency services,” one message went. “Also, refrain from entering the man.” (This refers to the towering wooden effigy ritualistically set aflame at the conclusion of every festival.) 

But most bulletins were conveyed with a bit more panache. A lisping voice, sounding like a certain Scottish actor, delivered ground transportation updates. “Well hello there, this is Con Seannery with information about the Burner Express: All buses have been postponed until further notice!” 

Another recognizable character provided more general encouragement. “Patient we must be to create safe conditions for the departure,” X-Rated Yoda periodically announced in his swampy accent. 

Sometimes, PSAs were vocalized by a couple of self-described buttholes.

“Dude, it’s Butthole Steve!” Butthole Steve intoned over a shredding guitar riff. “I went wandering around on the playa last night without any gear to keep me warm or dry, and now I got trench foot on my butthole. It’s gotta be amputated! So stay warm, stay dry, don’t wander around without the right gear … or else you’ll end up like me: Butthole Steve without a butthole.” 

Butthole Barb took to the airwaves over the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme music. “Hi, it’s Butthole Barb and I just came down to BMIR to complain,” she whined, “because I have been looking forward to Burning Man all year long and I can’t believe the man burn is canceled for tonight … ugh!” 

Still other announcements were more existential. Accompanied by eerie organ music, a deep voice—could it be Con Seannery?—recited the following verses of William Blake: “The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife / And yet forgives the Butchers knife.” 

Once these bulletins ran their course, DJs looked for ways to pass the time on their live broadcasts. During a Sunday-afternoon set, DJ David Cooper, a professional comedian and radio host in the default world, phoned his mother on air to reassure her that things on the playa weren’t as bad as they were being made out to be in the media. Then he quizzed her about her sex life on live radio. Why, for instance, is the vibrator kept on her husband’s side of the bed? 

“He knows how to operate it,” she replied, chuckling. “I’m challenged when it comes to those mechanical kinds of things.” 

“That’s gatekeeping,” said a cohost, who went by the playa name Red Scare.

After saying goodbye to his mom and thanking her for being a good sport, Cooper returned to the nitty-gritty of life in Black Rock City. “Don’t eat too much fiber because those portapotties are gonna eventually become full,” he advised. One of his cohosts pointed out that sanitation trucks had recently been seen servicing the portapotties. “Okay, good,” Cooper said. “Eat your fiber. No need to take Imodium. We are all clear.” 

“Also, be kind to the porta-potties!” the cohost said. “You can have a dick, but don’t be a dick.” 

Above all, Cooper added, “Don’t be a Diplo,” referring to the electronic musician who, along with the comedian Chris Rock, escaped Black Rock City while the gates were still closed on Saturday. (A “fan” happened to pick them up after they trudged six miles through the mud on foot, according to Diplo’s Instagram.) Other celebrities waited to leave with the hoi polloi. “Channing Tatum stayed put because he’s a frickin’ national treasure,” one guest noted.   

Between studio banter, PSAs, and station identification—“BMIR, the voice of the meow”—DJs spun thematically relevant tunes. Isaiah Rashad rapped “Stuck in the Mud.” The Carpenters sang “Rainy Days and Mondays.” Once the gates to Black Rock City finally opened and cars began queuing up for what would be an hours-long exodus, Iggy Pop droned, “I am a passenger / and I ride and I ride.” 

On Monday morning, one cocksure studio guest gave departing burners a pep talk. “When Woodstock got rainswept, people danced in the mud and helped each other out,” he said. “We got that Woodstock spirit! We don’t want to ruin that story by having people do a kind of Mad Max exodus.” 

“Practice tantric exodus,” he went on. “If you ask the road for consent and it gives you a green light and the road says, ‘Yeah, daddy, hit this shit,’ then you’re going to have a great drive home.”

Ben Schneider is a freelance journalist and erstwhile burner based in New York. 

Kenwood Ladies’ Bathing Pond, Hampstead Heath. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.

It was the full-body ache of our hangovers and the cigarette smoke stagnating in our hair that compelled us toward the pond. We were sat in the debris of a house party, on a sofa that had recently doubled as an ashtray, when Janique said we should go for a swim. I suggested the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, which is free of men and harsh chemicals. 

There are five ponds in a row on the eastern edge of Hampstead Heath. They run (from south to north): the Highgate No. 1 Pond, the Highgate Men’s Pond, the Model Boating Pond, the Bird Sanctuary Pond, and, finally, set slightly apart from the others and sheltered by trees, the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. It is accessed by a long path, behind a gate with a sign that reads WOMEN ONLY / MEN NOT ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT. There are two holding pens off to the side of the path, one for chaining bicycles, the other for chaining dogs. There is no pen for young children, who are not (unlike dogs and bicycles) allowed past even the first gate. As we walked through the park, I regaled my North American companion with the pond’s lore: 

The women’s pond is “a transporting haven” with a “wholesomely escapist quality” (Sharlene Teo). To swim in its “clean, glassy,” (Ava Wong Davies) “velvety water” (Esther Freud) is to “enter a new state” (Lou Stoppard)! (All of this comes from the 2019 essay collection At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, in which every piece contains the verb to glide.)

We arrived at the meadow, which, I assured Janique, is a haven of nakedness. On this particular afternoon, as we sat in the sun to change, I noticed that I was the only person who was actually naked. 

As we made our way to the water in our swimming costumes (the women are forbidden from swimming nude, or in our underwear), we heard the distinct voice of a veteran lifeguard, shouting to a group, changing on the dock: “GIRLS! GIRLS! Don’t change over there! There’s a pervert who hides in the bushes wanking and we don’t want to give him anything else to juice over!” 

I turned to Janique and offered a nervous smile. I had failed to mention the pervert, but she seemed unfazed. On the dock, the girls had wrapped themselves in their towels and were heading sheepishly into the shower block to finish changing. We lowered ourselves into the murky water. 

The Ladies’ Pond is meant to be taken in pairs, in breaststroke, at a leisurely pace. This is not true of the Men’s Pond, which seems always to be filled with companionless swimming caps darting about in a splashy front crawl. Our pond is slower, a place to chat and to listen: 

“It’s eighteen degrees in the pond today … it was twenty last week.” 

“Have you got those special swimming shoes for winter?” “No, not yet.”

“Oh yeah, you just pop one in and shove it over.” “I didn’t think it was that easy.”

“And you know what she was about to fucking do! She was about to leave that beautiful Greek island holiday and fly back to Gatwick, at God knows what hour, to cycle on a FUCKING LIME BIKE to that cunt Simon’s house for a FUCKING HOUSE PARTY and he DOESN’T EVEN FUCKING LIKE HER.”  The outraged woman’s companion made various sympathetic mewing sounds. We pushed on.  

“Have you ever flown somewhere for a man who doesn’t love you?” Janique asked, once we were out of earshot. “Yep,” I replied.

For a while after that, we swam in silence. Two upturned Band-Aids float past. They were followed by an elderly woman swimming quickly. Her hair was kept dry by a plastic bag from Ryman, the popular chain that sells stationery. The bag was rigid, poking high above the water like a pharaoh’s crown. She had fastened it to her scalp with duct tape. 

The girls reemerged as we swam back toward the dock. There were three of them:

“I’ve decided I’m going to get my first ever bikini wax when I go back to uni.”

“Do they wax your ass?”

“That’s not a bikini wax, that’s an ass wax, they’re different.”

“I have such bad body hair.”

“You can’t have bad body hair.” 

“Yeah you can, I do. I told my mum and she said, ‘I’ve never had that problem!’ Like, thanks, woman.” 

“Well, I’m getting my mustache lasered off.” 

“Do you wax your pits?”

One craned her neck to sniff her right armpit. “God, I stink.”

Janique and I added ours to the queue of joggling heads trying to exit the pond—treading water, inching forward, waiting patiently for the woman ahead to disengage completely from the steps before grabbing on to the rope-covered railings. A perfect round bottom whooshed out of the water in front of me. Attached to it was a graying HRT patch, which was just about hanging on.

We padded to the shower block to rinse the algae off of our bodies. Tiny dots of it collect in intricate constellations across your breasts; bikini tops catch the stuff like a net. In the showers, postswim conversation was gentle.

“Ooh, I’ve got a ticket to see that lovely Mark Rylance in a play tonight.” 

“Beth, did you pack that thermos full of tea?”

“We were thinking of going away once Ben’s settled into his new school.”

A voice interrupted from outside. “Mary, did I leave my swimming leg in there?” The showering women hushed. Sure enough, there was a prosthetic leg leaning against the wall, underneath the towel hook.  “Got it! It’s right here!” Mary grabbed the leg and the chatter resumed. 

As we left, the woman at the kiosk called up the path to a group of new arrivals.  “ALL RIGHT LADIES, JUST TO WARN YOU, WE’VE GOT MAINTENANCE GOING ON—THERE’LL BE SOME MEN COMING IN. THAT’S RIGHT, THERE’LL BE MEN IN OUR POND.”

Molly Pepper Steemson is a writer, editor and occasional sommelier from London.

Photograph by Jacqueline Feldman.

“With a diving suit and helmet,” said Yannick Poirier, the owner of Tschann bookstore on the boulevard Montparnasse, where he has worked for thirty-five years, “and with dark glasses, earplugs, and a plan for survival and retreat to the countryside. I hate sport. That’s personal, but I hate sport, and I have a horror of circus games, and, how to put this. You are American? So you know Jean Baudrillard. For us he was a friend, Jean Baudrillard. So he has The Consumer Society, like Debord has The Society of the Spectacle, and all that sticks to us like shit. No, frankly, the Olympic Games—for me they leave me neither hot nor cold. They leave me totally indifferent.”

“There are books about sport,” offered a bookseller at Le Genre urbain, “but they are very distant disciplines, all the same.”

“If there are any,” they said at Le Monte-en-l’air, “and if they are good, we have them.” This clerk, like their counterpart at Le Genre urbain, was “against” the Olympics (“in a personal capacity,” they added at Le Genre urbain). Both bookstores, singled out for questioning out of the city’s hundreds, are in the twentieth arrondissement.

“We’ll of course have a few books,” they said at Les Traversées, “but in a corner.”

“We are not going to decorate the bookstore,” said Anne-Sophie Hanich, managing Les Nouveautés.

“The Olympic Games,” said Gildas, his first name, at Les Traversées, which is half-buried in the hill of the rue Mouffetard (“I detest my family name”), “are not the most important thing.”

“We have other things to think about,” they said at Le Merle moqueur, on the rue de Bagnolet. “We have other problems right now.”

“Literature, first of all,” Gildas went on. “And then, well. Thought, imagination, reflection, beauty, love.”

“The problem of getting clients to come in. Social problems.” At Le Merle moqueur, the clerk wrapped a book for gifting.

“You think an independent bookstore isn’t a business like any other?” Olivier Delautre at La Cartouche, where his own trade has been, for sixteen years, in antique and used books, was leaning back in a low chair, letting it tilt. As a bouquiniste, Delautre sets himself apart from peddlers of new books, whom he sees as profit-minded. “These are small people,” he said, “who are there to carry boxes.” His colleagues who sell out of iconic boxes along the Seine have mobilized against a prefectural injunction to remove themselves ahead of next year’s opening ceremony (for the reason, the prefecture told them, of “terrorism” risk). “I sell principally old books,” Delautre said, “published at a time when sports did not exist.”

At the Librairie des Abbesses, Marie-Rose Guarniéri, who had been described to me at Les Traversées as the grand dame of the Parisian bookstore, told me to come back in fifteen minutes and, by the time I did, was in a fury. I had been expecting her to speak to me of her own métier without making an appointment, she accused. “You must make an appointment,” she repeated. “I am not some button you can just push,” she said.

“At the moment it’s still a little early,” said Chafik Bakiri, the owner of Equinoxe, where “eighty percent” of stock is secondhand books. “Currently I don’t have any ideas.”

“I know that during the Olympic Games we will do strictly nothing other than what we’ve been doing for ninety years,” said Poirier.

“Nothing,” Gildas said. “And so it’s simple.”

“Old posters,” Bakiri mused. “Objects, medals, I don’t know.”

“Maybe we’ll do one window about sports,” said Hanich. “Maybe some French flags.”

“I live in Saint-Denis,” they said at Le Monte-en-l’air, “and we’ll be particularly affected.” The suburb just north of Paris, its name—like the name of the poorest department in mainland France, the 93, where it is situated—is in wide use as a metonym for institutional neglect and the suffering of whole communities; the national stadium, located there, will be one of the principal sites for the 2024 Summer Olympics (“the biggest event ever organised in France,” according to official messaging). Leaving Le Monte-en-l’air, I saw the window was lined by copies of On ne dissout pas un soulèvement, Seuil’s new release by forty authors writing in support of Soulèvements de la Terre, a collection of groups in France organized around local environmental causes. In the 93 in Aubervilliers, local activists have been partially successful in defending community gardens against their demolition to make way for, among other things, the Paris Olympics Aquatics Centre.

“Now we know,” said Xavier Capodano, after making me a coffee, espresso, in an office at Le Genre urbain, which he founded. (“Relax,” he said as we went back there. “I’m not nice, but I’m not going to eat you.”) “Thirty or forty years ago, we didn’t know where we were going.”

Capodano was referring explicitly to the link between runaway construction and “the planet’s quality of life.” It was a summer of, once again, high temperatures everywhere (with the notable exception of Paris, where it has rained almost every day); of service outages along the Paris metro for planned work (“The Line 5 is closed,” I complained to a friend, “between Gare du Nord and the rest of the world”); and of, in this city definingly, the death of Nahel Merzouk, seventeen, shot in the chest by a Paris-region policeman during a traffic stop. “I’m not convinced,” I heard, “of the book’s role in the revolution.” This was from a worker at a bookstore in the east of Paris who asked me to identify it in that way only. They had the sense, they said, that their “role in society,” their part in its duties of care, had been greater when they were on unemployment. They had time then to participate in a neighborhood group like a soup kitchen, which was organized horizontally (so that “there wasn’t any distinction” between volunteer and beneficiary). Not anymore. “We’re a business,” they said of the bookstore, “before anything else.” And so the store retained a certain “expressive space” in being able to, say, “do a bit of publicity for Soulèvements de la Terre,” but to the worker this did not seem, at all times, adequate. We spoke in a courtyard of modern, unfancy construction, unplanted. “The moments of radical transformation of society I’ve had the chance to see have been more in its insurrectional phases,” they said, “and I haven’t necessarily seen insurrectional phases opened up immediately from reading books…”

“In the abstract,” said Anne, “literature can do anything it likes.” A retired sociology professor, she was volunteering at Quilombo, a “bookstore of the extreme left, anarchist in fact.”

“It’s not my place to judge what literature should or shouldn’t do,” said Capodano. “Literature does what it wants. It lives its life.”

“For me,” said Poirier, as if demonstrating a last, important capacity of literature, “it’s as if the Olympic Games did not exist.”

Jacqueline Feldman is a writer living in Massachusetts. Precarious Lease, her book about Paris, is forthcoming from Rescue Press. 

Photograph by Meg Bernhard.

It was 115 degrees outside when I left my house, around 5 P.M. My steering wheel was hot to the touch. So hot, in fact, that I had to steer with the bottom of my palms; some people store gloves in their car during the summer, but I keep forgetting. This was the second Friday of Las Vegas’s heat wave, our seventh consecutive day over 110 degrees. The National Weather Service had issued an excessive heat warning: “Dangerously hot afternoons with little overnight relief expected.” Emergency room doctors treated heat illness patients. At the airport, several passengers and crew members fainted after a plane sat without air conditioning on the tarmac for hours. A man was found dead on the sidewalk outside a homeless shelter.

I drove a few minutes downtown to a Deuce bus stop near Fremont Street, and when I parked I saw a woman in a one-piece swimsuit and tube socks posing for photos in a square of shade. My bus pulled up, and I climbed to the second level. We cruised south, down Las Vegas Boulevard, past wedding chapels and personal injury attorney billboards. The Deuce is my favorite way of traveling to the Strip.

At the Treasure Island stop, two women, their faces pink and perspiring, slid into the seats behind me. “I couldn’t stand there for much longer,” the first woman said.

“That woman doesn’t have any shoes on,” the other said. I looked out the window. A tourist had taken her tennis shoes off and was sitting barefoot at the bus stop. I learned on the news recently that the city’s burn centers had seen an influx of patients with pavement burns, often second- and third-degree.

“There’s a bra,” the first woman snickered, pointing to a blue garment lying in the middle of the street. At the faux Trevi Fountain in front of Caesars Palace, a couple stood on top of the ledge, posing for photos.

“Watch them fall in.”

“It’d probably feel good.”

People crowded every inch of shade at bus stops and awnings. A homeless man sprawled out on a strip of grass. A cardboard sign read HOT, HUNGRY. Bachelorette parties moved in packs, most members clutching plastic cups full of beer, or those giant tubes containing boozy slush. Another time I was on the Deuce, a woman on board claimed her slush tube contained fifty shots. She was very drunk, so no one challenged her.

I wanted to know what would compel someone to visit this city during what could be the worst heat wave of its history. I suppose I too wanted to get out of my air-conditioned house. Now that I was outside for the first time in days, I was surprised at how many people were walking down the Strip. I guess people simply like to go on vacation during the summer, especially Europeans, and many of the accents I was hearing did seem to be German, French, Spanish, and British. Likely many of them had been planning these trips for months. They probably didn’t think that extreme heat—unlike a snowstorm or a hurricane—was a dire enough climate event to warrant cancellation. Maybe experiencing history was part of the appeal. I’d read that some tourists were visiting Death Valley, which holds the title of hottest place on Earth, just in case it broke temperature records that week.

“Endurance tourists,” a friend texted me.

I got off the bus at the Bellagio. Two bellhops, clad in black long-sleeved shirts and pants, loaded bags into a cart.

“We do get the hottest part of the day,” said one bellhop to the other.

“But at least we have the shade.”

Inside the Bellagio’s botanical garden, a giant poodle wearing small boots to protect its paws against the hot pavement stood next to a display of fragrant flowers. I took a surreptitious photo. Then I remembered that a photographer friend’s face had been logged in a casino’s registry after she tried reporting a story inside. I put my phone away and drifted onto the casino floor, where the AC was blasting. Five men in Hawaiian shirts were crowding around a roulette table. The dealer turned to one of them and asked what bet he’d like to place next.

“Whatever you want, we don’t know,” the man said.

“We’re fucking idiots,” another chimed in.

“This is debauchery,” said a third.

The dealer spun the roulette wheel. The men urged the wheel to land on red. Presumably, it did, because they erupted into cheers. In my Notes app, I wrote, “claps and hand shakes and one guy slaps another’s breast. Manhood.” Manhood was an autocorrection, but I can’t remember for what.

Outside, at the Bellagio fountain, a thunderous sound erupted. Arcs of water sashayed through the air as onlookers took videos of the show. According to the Bellagio’s website, the resort sources the fountain’s water from wells, not from Lake Mead or the Colorado River, which are in drought. Twelve million of the fountain’s twenty-two million gallons of water evaporate each year.

Elsewhere on the Strip, machines sprayed pedestrian walkways with mist. Air conditioning poured out from restaurants. In the shade I almost forgot I was in the Mojave Desert.

A man with a cardboard sign reading GOD BLESS US looked parched, so I gave him my water bottle. Now I was out, so I went to the Cosmo’s Starbucks and asked if I could grab a cup of tap water, and by grab I meant can I have one for free. The barista told me that, after tax, the water cup came out to $1.08. I wouldn’t be there long, I reasoned, so I left without water.

The temperature had dropped to 114. A Jesus guy held a sign and yelled, “Vegas wants your money. God wants your soul.” Two showgirls wearing booty shorts and feathered wings took a photo with a teenager and asked how he’d like to pay. A man standing next to him forked over a twenty-dollar bill. “You owe me for that,” said the man, presumably the teenager’s father, as they walked away. Two other showgirls dressed in sexy cop outfits fanned themselves in the LINQ Promenade. “Some girls choose to work in the direct sun,” one of them, a Vegas local, told me. “Those girls are fucking brave.” A couple walked by, and a showgirl leaned over. The man’s face warped with surprise. “Did she just pinch my butt?” he muttered to his partner. At the Flamingo’s live flamingo exhibit, a woman whispered to a gaggle of ducks, “You’re just as fabulous as them.”

At the Deuce stop near the Flamingo, some fifteen people had already gathered. They were all together, on some sort of family trip, and were headed to Fremont Street for the night. From them, I overheard that a bus had just left, but that the next should come soon.

We waited. We sweated. We stepped off the curb to peer down Las Vegas Boulevard, willing the bus to arrive. More people gathered. A couple from the Netherlands. A man in a chef’s coat. The heat was making us cranky. Couples bickered. The chef cursed into his phone. A half hour passed, then forty-five minutes. Things were starting to feel desperate. Finally, I decided to ask the question that was nagging at me. “Why did you come here? In this heat?” I asked the first group. A middle-aged woman with square glasses grinned. “We’re Canadians,” she said, as if this explained things. “We’re crazy.”

Meg Bernhard’s essays and reportage have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her book Wine, with Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, was published this year.

Black-and-white Bobby. Photographs by Sophie Haigney.

Let’s start with the dark stuff. On Saturday night in San Francisco, after the second-to-last-ever Dead & Co. show, every single ATM near the ballpark was apparently out of cash, because people couldn’t stop buying balloons filled with nitrous oxide, huffing them on the street for just a few more seconds of feeling high. The bars nearby were overrun, quite literally, long after everyone should have been at home. People go down at shows—it happened right in front of us one night, the medics rushing in and carrying someone out. There are, not infrequently, overdoses. There is too much of everything, sometimes. “I’m at that point in a bender where beer isn’t really doing anything for me anymore,” I heard someone joke on day three of the three-show run.

It is not that easy to drink yourself to death, actually, which I know because I have watched a lot of people try, but I could imagine it happening to many people in the context of the long slide of years or decades spent following the band. I always think “There but for the grace of God go I,” and I really mean it. So many people are dead and gone, among them the Dead’s lead songwriter, guitarist, and singer Jerry Garcia, who was killed by his own addiction to heroin at the age of fifty-three. “Do you think of Jerry as a prophet or a saint?” my friend asked me on Sunday as we got ready for the last show ever. The mood was elegiac, though the fact of finality wasn’t really sinking in, which might be why we kept repeating it over and over. “I can’t believe it’s really the last one,” someone said, not for the first time. “What are we even going to do next summer?” my friend lamented. “Are we going to like … have to get really into Phish?” “We are NOT getting into Phish,” someone else insisted, though we all agreed we would probably go see Phish at Madison Square Garden in August.

We put on our last clean Dead T-shirts—we were all running low and trading with one another—and headed back to the ballpark. A few of us had decided last minute to upgrade our tickets so we could be on the floor. I had never been on the floor for a Dead & Co. show; we always don’t spend the extra money and regret it later, so this time, one last time, we were not going to make that mistake. I said I wanted to hear “Bertha,” and we got it, right away, and right away we knew that every single member of the band was completely on, locked in. Bobby, as my friend observed, was “really cooking.” Jeff Chimenti, Oteil Burbridge, Mickey Hart, also cooking. And Mayer—I have never seen him, perhaps, cook like that, leaning into every moment harder than I have ever seen him lean, and he always leans in hard, given that he is probably among other things one of the greatest living guitarists.

“How can I write about John Mayer’s faces?” I typed in my Notes app on the first night of shows. Unfortunately there is no other way I can describe it but to say that while he is jamming he often more or less appears to be on the verge of having an orgasm for three hours straight, and we are with him the entire time.

The thing is, the experience of a good jam-band show really does have quite a lot in common with sex. “Is jamming like edging?” I asked my friend on the first night, and we both burst out laughing, but, well, there’s a reason one of my friends is persistently yelling “Jeff Chimenti make me come!” after a really good keyboard section. With a Dead & Co. show, you sort of know how it’s going to go right from the beginning, because there is kind of a familiar script. The band is probably going to open with something upbeat (“Let the Good Times Roll” is a regular option) and then they are going to lead you through some others (a few jams, a set break, at least a couple definitive hits, an interlude for “Drums” and “Space,” the grand finale, and the inevitable return for the encore, usually slow and sweet). And all the time you are just waiting, waiting, waiting, for that climactic moment when maybe they will drop into “Morning Dew,” or make the pitch-perfect switch from “China Cat Sunflower” into “I Know You Rider.” And yet it’s still surprising, because you don’t know what they’re doing to get there or when, and maybe you will end up somewhere else entirely, like in an extended riff during “Eyes of the World,” but then you come back into yourself, called back by some familiar, beautiful line that is etched into your heart: “There comes a redeemer …” Jeff Chimenti make me come!

This is Jeff Chimenti.

That’s what it’s like for me, anyway; I can’t really say what it would be like for you. But I can say with total certainty that this final night was the best show I’ve ever seen, that everything was superlative. “Good Lovin’,” which is not even that good of a song, was somehow amazing. “Hardest ‘Good Lovin’ ’ ever?” asked a friend. Mayer played and sang “Althea” heartrendingly before a pink sunset. “Best ‘Althea’ ever?” As it got dark, drones flew above the stadium in the formation of the Steal Your Face logo and then later morphed into a skeleton that was tipping its hat to all of us, even to the thousands of people who couldn’t get tickets and were listening from outside the stadium. (Two of my friends were among them.) Thank you San Francisco! Thank you Bobby! Thank you John!

I thought about a poem by Mark Strand, the lines “We began to believe // the night would not end.” And we did begin to believe that, hoping a little desperately for a rumored third set, even though logically we knew there would be a hard stadium curfew, and as someone said last summer, sitting on a curb after the last show of that year, out of cash to buy nitrous, “All good things must come to an end.” But must they? That’s what we’re always wondering and testing, and maybe in part why the ends of these nights can tip toward extremes. The band played the ballad “Brokedown Palace”—“Fare you well, fare you well / I love you more than words can tell”—and then in a moment of surprise, something no one saw coming, one last encore, another version of “Not Fade Away.” They had started the first San Francisco show with that song, and they came back to it, and it was both upbeat and tender, all of us pledging, “You know our love will not fade away!” And the perfect thing is that it won’t.

Steal your face above the stadium.

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

A very cool van. Photographs by Sophie Haigney.

We went to the lot. The lot, my younger brother observed—he was a first-time Dead & Co. show attendee—was “literally just a parking lot.” In fact it was a parking lot adjacent to the Port of San Francisco and near the SFPD headquarters, where I used to go for press conferences when I was a crime reporter. It was a vast parking lot, not far from the stadium where the second-to-last Dead & Co. show was going to start in two hours, and it was full of Deadheads.

The lot is the scene outside every show, known colloquially as Shakedown Street. It’s more or less an open-air drug market, that phrase that gets thrown around a lot to describe other parts of San Francisco; it is also the locus of the vestiges of real hippie culture. There is nothing like it anywhere else. There are vans that have been on the road for months, vans painted with psychedelic mushrooms, vans covered in stickers that say “Make America Grateful Again” and “Thank you Bobby.” People sell T-shirts, an endless array of T-shirts in every imaginable version of tie-dye. People sell quesadillas. People sell nitrous oxide—lots of it; in fact, the unmistakable hiss of nitrous and the constant popping of balloons is one of the most disconcerting features of being outside a Dead show. People sell funny hats. People sell, confusingly, a lot of rocks. I saw a sign next to a big box of rocks that said BUY 1 GET 1 FREE.

Being on the lot is basically just about wandering around and looking at stuff, so that’s what we did. One of my friends wanted to get a new Online Ceramics Dead T-shirt; another one wanted to buy a tiny ceramic mushroom to hold during the concert. My brother and I weaved in and out of some stalls, looking at shirts and stickers that said things like “Not like other girls” and “5-8-1977 was an inside job.”

“There was this apple last night that I was eating and I couldn’t stop eating it, I even ground up the seeds and then I think I was worried that I had arsenic in my body, so I got a bit disturbed during ‘Space,’ ” I heard one guy telling his friend, bent over a camping stove where he was frying some onions and nursing a beer.

I waited in line for a porta-potty, but the man in front of me came out and said, “That’s really bad … really not good for women.” So I did not go in. Another guy assured his friend, in a thick Boston accent, “You could piss in there bro.”

“Time to go see my FIRST husband,” yelled a woman in a long tie-dye dress who looked like she was twenty-five.

The lot, which is a parking lot.

Someone nearby was shaking a tambourine.

“You’re so fucking cool, man,” said an older hippie to a young woman he was splitting a watermelon with. “You should keep this.”

“No way,” she said. “You never know when you’re gonna need a watermelon.” They exchanged Facebook information.

“We have enough acid to kill an elephant,” a tall guy in a “Jack Straw” shirt reassured his buddy, who had been worried that they’d need to get more.

I shared my location with my aunt, who was also supposed to be at the show that night; she and I are always trying and failing to meet up at Dead shows, because it is very hard to meet up in a crowd of forty thousand people. It’s often all you can do not to lose your friends. In fact I had lost track of my brother, so I texted him “You good?” and he hearted the message. He was on his own journey now.

I marveled at some T-shirts. “The thing that sucks is I always want to buy a Dead shirt at a show, but then I’m already wearing a Dead shirt, so it’s not a good time to buy a Dead shirt,” someone said, and I agreed.

My friend was not having much luck finding her tiny ceramic mushroom. “You would think this would be the perfect market for tiny ceramic mushrooms,” our other friend lamented with her.

“They’re giving away free hot dogs on wook beach,” another friend texted, referring to the strip of rocks off the lot that extended into the bay. (Wook, if you’re not familiar, is a derogatory term that derives from the Star Wars movies and refers to dirty long-haired guys who follow jam bands around. We love wooks.) I went down to wook beach, though I declined the hot dog.

Wook beach.

It was really the most beautiful place in the world. San Francisco, where I am from, is a breathtakingly beautiful city, and it was at its best that day, cool and sunny down by the water. San Francisco is where it all began—the Dead, of course, in 1965, and also my own life, thirty years later. I thought about this while I sunned myself on the rocks with my friends, and started to get a little sentimental, but then it was time to go to the show.

There was a massive bottleneck on the way into the stadium, people coming from all directions and trying to form a line and squeezing up against each other. “If you walk sideways, you’ll be half your size,” someone observed, and we all tried walking sideways for a bit. All around us people were raising one finger in the air, which is the sign that means “I need a miracle,” or, one ticket to the show tonight. A girl with long armpit hair was holding up a sign that said, “Tired of smelling my stinky pits? Sell me your extra.”

My friends and I lost each other and then found each other again, near the gate. We waited for our last friend, who had texted to say she’d fallen behind. When she caught up with us she was beaming. “I found my tiny mushroom!” She held up a translucent green mushroom about the size of a thimble, and she proceeded to hold it all night long, all through the show.

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

John Mayer looking good.

Walking into a Dead & Company show is more or less how you imagine it would be: there are nearly forty thousand people converging on a baseball stadium wearing some of the worst outfits you have ever seen in your life. “This is really a lot of different types of white people, huh?” a first-time attendee said as we walked into the show at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park, SBC Global Park, and PacBell Park.) On the street, a white guy with dreadlocks offered us mushrooms. Another white guy with dreadlocks held up a sign that said, “Cash, grass, or ass—I’ll take it all.” A friend, stunned by the famous Northern California fog, bought an ugly tie-dye sweatshirt at a makeshift stand outside the stadium for seventy-eight dollars.

It was the first night of a three-night run of the final shows for this iteration of the Grateful Dead—the last tour ever, the last shows ever, though, as everyone knows, the Grateful Dead has been ending for nearly twenty years. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, everyone thought that was the end. In 2015, many of the original band members played a tour that was literally called “Fare Thee Well.” And yet, miraculously, it continued. But this time: Bob Weir is seventy-five, and John Mayer, the unlikely force behind this version of the band, has other things to get on to. At the very least, this is probably the last time they’ll ever sell out huge stadiums. So this was a major event that I had flown out from New York to see with five friends. I had been hearing for days that SFO was “like Bonnaroo for Deadheads.” On another friend’s flight in, the pilot told them they were flying over a wildfire in Colorado. “Wow, it’s literally ‘Fire on the Mountain,’ ” someone behind her said.

In line, everyone checked out the scene, craning their necks to see how good other people’s tie-dyes were. One guy was wearing a cape.

“Is that Andy Cohen?” someone asked.

“That’s Andy Cohen. We literally locked eyes.”

I didn’t see him, but we are all grateful for Andy Cohen’s support of the cause. Inside the stadium, the queue for tour merchandise snaked up flights of stairs, because everyone needs a T-shirt that says something like DEAD & CO., THE FINAL TOUR with an emblem of a rose or a dancing bear.

In another line, this one for beer, I stood behind some clean-cut guys in Dead & Company shirts from last summer. These are the kind of guys—nicknamed Co. Bros—that Mayer has brought into the fold. They were complaining about their friend Connor, who had recently gotten a girlfriend.

“He’ll text me, ‘hey wanna hang out, I’m not free for the next four weekends,’ ” one said.

“Connor got out of his MSG jam as soon as he started getting paid what he was worth,” the other lamented. (Presumably Connor is no longer going to Phish shows at Madison Square Garden, which is fair.)

A man selling beer out of an ice bucket was yelling, “Iced cold, ice cold,” in that universal baseball-game voice. “It’s my first Dead & Company show,” he said. “Interesting vibes.”

In our seats, waiting for the show to start—Dead & Co. shows are typically quite punctual, in part because they go on forever and probably also because the oldest band member is seventy-nine and the average age of the crowd is definitely above fifty—everyone was taking the same selfie: themselves and their friends against the backdrop of the stadium, which happens to be the same baseball stadium where I went when I was a kid in early-aughts San Francisco, in the heyday of waiting for Barry Bonds to break the record, before the steroids stuff. They started with “Not Fade Away.”

There can be a little game that happens when the band starts playing a song—everyone starts guessing which one it is. “ ‘Tennessee Jed!’ ” my friend exclaimed.

“No,” I said, “it’s ‘Ramble On Rose.’ ”

“Definitely ‘Tennessee Jed,’ ” another friend insisted, moments before the chorus of “Ramble On Rose” came on. I was right, and I certainly didn’t let anyone forget.

“I want to be a spinner,” my friend said, looking down at the part of the floor near the general admission section where women in long skirts were engaged in their perpetual whirl. “Society doesn’t really make a lot of room for spinners anymore,” our other friend said. We all agreed this was true, and a shame.

In line for the bathroom, three girls and I agreed that John Mayer was looking really good tonight. John Mayer is of course famous for being handsome, and good at guitar.

“Don’t re-dose before set break,” I heard a woman with a crown of roses in her hair warning her friend by the sink.

“Oh. I already did.”

Back in my seat, I looked up at the empty part of the stands, the seats that aren’t for sale, and saw one man who had somehow gotten up there dancing alone. He looked perfect.

“Let him cook!” someone yelled, as Oteil Burbridge—possibly the most talented musician in the band—came on the jumbotron during “Fire on the Mountain.” Oteil, like Mayer, is not an original member of the Grateful Dead but adds something arguably way better. Lo-fi graphics flashed across the screen, Oteil’s face consumed  in a graphic design version of flames. “Need more Oteil time,” the guy next to me said, lighting a joint.

The songs went on and on, as they do. What is anyone doing while all this jamming is happening? They take up an astounding amount of time, some of these songs, and they do especially all added together, plus so much of it is pure instrumental noodling. Everyone is dancing a little bit, bobbing, but really they are having an extended, possibly endless, interior experience. Sometimes after an eighteen-minute version of “Eyes of the World” I find myself wondering (and I quote the Dead): “Where does the time go?”

Then “Drums” started and everyone around me went to pee or get a beer. (“Drums” and “Space,” for the unfamiliar, are a portion of every show that can really only be described as the longest instrumental noodling you have ever heard.)

“It’s so dumb to pee during Space,” a woman in a Boston Red Sox–Dead crossover shirt said, and everyone in the endless bathroom line agreed. But there really is no other time.

A friend and I bought four beers in large cups, and as we headed back to our seats, a woman knocked into me, spilling an entire beer on my shorts. “Oh my God, babe, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ll buy you another beer!” “It’s okay,” I said, even though it wasn’t totally okay, because my Birkenstock was now full of beer that had cost $16.75 and didn’t even come in a souvenir cup. A lot of people were watching this play out. I considered the karmic nature of spills, as I am always spilling on other people and myself, while we headed back to our seats. Two minutes later, the woman rushed down to my seat and handed me a twenty-dollar bill. Everyone around us cheered. I tried to refuse it, telling her it really was okay, but she said, “Use it for something else.”

“That’s what the Dead is all about!” said some of the old guys who had been watching nearby, and gave me a high-five. In my Notes app, I wrote, “the dead is so perfect :(”

The band launched into their dirge “He’s Gone.” The line “He’s gone, he’s gone, and nothing’s gonna bring him back”—is it possible to hear that without getting chills? I thought about my favorite live version of this song, which Weir dedicated to the Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands in 1981. I marveled, as I often do, at the passage of time. I tried to say something about this to one of my friends, but it got lost in the noise. I then watched someone try to fit an entire package of Red Vines into the tiny back pocket of their jeans for what felt like five minutes.

The band made their usual move, from “China Cat Sunflower” into “I Know You Rider.” “Wow, is this the last ‘Rider’ ever?” someone asked. “Shut up,” said someone else, as everyone yelled, “I wish I were a headlight on a northbound train!” Then, even louder, “I’D SHINE MY LIGHT THROUGH THAT COOL COLORADO RAIN!” (Many people at Dead & Co. shows have spent significant time in Colorado, so that line always goes over well.)

Two of my friends, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, were passing back and forth a pair of small pink sunglasses for the majority of the night. Every time one of them put the sunglasses on, she would reexperience the amazing experience of wearing the sunglasses anew, oohing and aaahing. Finally, the man behind them—a gray-haired guy who had been swaying solo all night, sipping a beer—asked if he could “try the sunglasses.” I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone more disappointed. “That’s it?” he asked. You really have to wonder what it was that he expected.

Sophie Haigney is The Paris Review‘s web editor.

Photograph by Jake Nevins.

An early-summer, late-afternoon light was catching a porcelain figurine of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus on the windowsill of Johnnie’s Italian Specialties, the twenty-eight-year-old family-owned restaurant in South Philly where, in May, I dialed up my personal hotspot, hoping to get tickets to the Taylor Swift concert taking place in the city later that night. My cheesesteak sub was dry and insufficiently cheesy and entirely beside the point—it was a formality, if a regionally appropriate one, meant to justify my seat at this funky restaurant as my sister and I refreshed four different ticket resale websites waiting for prices to drop. We were not two of the lucky 2.4 million who had gotten tickets to the Eras Tour when they’d gone on sale several months earlier, in a rollout so vexed and disorderly it caused an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into antitrust violations by Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

At first, this didn’t bother me. I do not have the patience to wait in something called a virtual queue, and also I have a job. So I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would not be attending the Eras Tour, Swift’s 131-show survey of her ten studio albums—which I suppose we now call eras and not albums—and the logical, world-beating end point of her willful evolution from gee-whiz country darling to too-big-to-fail pop supernova. But then, in March, the Eras Tour commenced, and for several weeks thereafter my Twitter feed was overrun with clips from the show, which runs close to three and a half hours, includes forty-four songs, and is structured episodically as a Homeric celebration of Swift’s discography. It looked like the sort of thing I’d regret missing, the premise of a memory I could tell my kids or at least my friends’ kids about. 

Nine days earlier, my sister had texted me to see if I’d be down to drive to Philadelphia from New York the day of the concert on a lark. “Idk how I feel about that,” I wrote back. “Is that a thing?” I am constitutionally risk averse, and the idea of driving there and failing to get tickets was less attractive than not having them at all. But Swift herself once said that nothing safe is worth the drive, and my sister had done her due diligence. On TikTok, she told me, a whisper network of unticketed Swifties were documenting their journeys to whichever city Swift was playing that night, scooping up the remaining tickets at 5 or 6 P.M., when scalpers realized they could not sell them for $2,500 a pop. Not unjustifiably, Swifties get a bad rap. They are defensive and belligerent, boastful about streaming numbers and record sales and tour profits, which is a function of Swift’s own valedictorian disposition. But they are also funny, resourceful, canny creatures of the internet whose parasocial hungers Swift not only treasures but responds to, like a benevolent monarch. 

It was Swiftie plaintiffs who, in righteous indignation at price gouging and incompetence more generally, forced Ticketmaster executives to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year. (It was also Swifties who forced me to witness Amy Klobuchar interpolating the lyrics to “All Too Well” in a pandering screed against the ills of corporate consolidation.) Swifties make Twitter accounts, like @ErasTourResell, to sell available tickets at face value to real fans, thereby keeping them out of the hands of scalpers. “LA SWIFTIES ,” goes one tweet, which is best read in the voice of an auctioneer. “We have a seller …” When Swifties demanded additional tour dates in neglected cities, Swift, who had initially overlooked Singapore, responded with six of them. And on TikTok and other sites, they document and live stream the Eras Tour rigorously for absent fans, so much that I could find out, from an account called @ErasTourUpdates, that Swift changed her costume for the 1989 portion of the concert in Cincinnati—from a beaded lime green top and skirt to an identical set, but in fuchsia—thirty seconds after she appeared on stage.

Things get especially interesting every weekend night about two and a half hours into the show, when Swift diverges from her otherwise precisely orchestrated set to perform two “surprise songs” from her catalog acoustically, never to be repeated at a later show, or so she says. The number of viewers in the live streams increase threefold, and fans on TikTok broadcast their feral reactions to Swift’s choices, which become ripe for close reading. “If I hear ‘friends break up’ I’m gonna kill myself,” one user watching the Cincinnati show declares, referencing the first line of the song “right where you left me.” Swift plays the opening chords of “Call It What You Want” instead. “Shut the fuck up,” our Swiftie replies, vaulting herself off the couch like an eel out of water. “Not ‘Call It What You Want’!”

Before the Philadelphia show, fans had been speculating that Swift might play “gold rush,” a song that mentions an Eagles T-shirt, or “seven,” which invokes her Pennsylvania childhood. Meanwhile, I’d just won $629 on FanDuel placing a four-leg parlay on a New York Knicks game, and the idea of siphoning my winnings away from rent or clothes or utilities and into an Eras Tour fund seemed both fiscally and sentimentally appealing, an exchange between two of my principal enthusiasms: sports and Taylor Swift. $600 would not yet get me a ticket to the Eras Tour, but come evening, once the wheat had separated from the chaff, it might.

This, in short, is how I found myself at Johnnie’s Italian Specialties, hunched over my laptop, wondering if the grapevines on either side of the Virgin Mary were real or merely decorative. But prices had not yet dropped and the lunch shift was ending. “Have fun at the concert,” said the server. As we stood up to leave, an elderly couple one table over remarked on the pink glitter dappled around my sister’s eyes, its premature application an amusing testament to her conviction.

So we got back in the car and drove closer to Lincoln Financial Field. Eventually, we came across the Stella Maris Catholic Church, whose parking lot was reserved for concertgoers willing to pay forty dollars, which we were—a down payment on our luck, we figured. Once again, we connected our computers to the personal hotspots on our phones and proceeded with our frantic and by now time-sensitive pursuit. Only this time, as the first of Swift’s two opening acts took the stage less than a mile away, prices did begin to drop.

The cost of seats with obstructed views nosedived from $1,200 to $300, and floor seats even more steeply, from $4,000 to $600. We went ahead with any seats from which we’d be able to see more than just Swift’s ankle. Several times we entered our payment information only to be ejected from the system by buyers with faster fingers (we were, of course, in competition with the very TikTokers who inspired our efforts in the first place). As I clicked on a pair of tickets on SeatGeek—the same pair, it would turn out, that had just abruptly sold on StubHub—I saw a gaggle of fans in the rearview mirror passing around a bottle of tequila on the steps of the church, taking rushed swigs. I wanted to be doing that, but I set my eyes back to the computer screen, where certain tickets were lit up with labels like “Going fast! (fire emoji)” and “Good deal! (money bag emoji)” and “Sold two minutes ago.” Each time we advanced to the checkout page, where hidden service fees revealed themselves, a countdown clock told us how long we had to complete the purchase. Eight minutes and forty-seven seconds, eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Eventually, my sister told me to close my laptop. “We’re probably canceling out each other’s efforts,” she said. “Just let me handle it.” So I observed her from the passenger seat in silence, like a pet, gauging the width of her eyes and the pace of her clicks to see if we were getting any closer.

Then she went slack. “Wait wait wait,” she said. The confirmation page was loading. “We got them, we’re going, we’re … going.” I didn’t allow myself to believe it until the tickets, a pair in section six of the floor, were securely transferred to my Apple Wallet. Then I dug my phone deep into the back pocket of my shorts, securing them further. And for several minutes we sat in the car together smiling, gathering our water bottles and portable phone chargers, acquitting ourselves to this sudden change in our fortunes. 

Between Lincoln Financial Field and Citizens Bank Park was a garish, supersize sports bar where Swifties of drinking age (mostly white and mostly women, many wearing sequins, pastels, or cowboy boots, and some all three) gathered before the show. Around the grounds one could feel a kind of centripetal force that lent the occasion the cultish tension of a political rally. As I waited in line at the bar for a margarita, a woman in a fedora informed me unprompted that she’d attended at least one show on all of Swift’s tours so far, from Fearless all the way through Reputation. “But I couldn’t get one for Eras,” she explained, without a trace of resentment. “So I’m just here to listen from the parking lot.”

Jake Nevins is a writer and reporter from Baltimore, living in Brooklyn. He is the digital editor of Interview magazine.

Photograph by Krithika Varagur.

Hangovers announced themselves on the wan faces on the District line to SW19 on the first Sunday of Wimbledon. Maybe I was projecting. It was a shame, people noted in low tones, that all the British players were now out. A pair of men splitting a salmon-colored broadsheet wondered which BBC presenter was at the center of a recent grooming scandal. “Last night was a proper, proper … if you saw the amount of tequila we were putting away,” said one handsome man, sitting between two heavily made-up girls. All of us filed out, in no particular rush, at Southfields. I went into Costa for an iced Americano before my friend arrived. 

“Careful, dear,” tutted an elderly woman, gesturing to my wide-open tote, the only bag I had in London. “I have no spatial awareness at all,” I admitted, surveying some almonds, a packable quilted jacket, and a copy of Persuasion, all ripe for the picking. “It’s not a rough crowd, of course,” she said, adjusting a georgette shawl, that was the same pearl color as her fluffy hair. “These days, you just never know …” She trailed off. We’d realized, I think simultaneously, that we were in our first queue of the day at Wimbledon, which isn’t just the world’s oldest tennis tournament but a pageant of exuberant restraint, where orderly lines and enclosures have the quality of rites. 

Louis arrived, wearing a gray wool suit, and we submitted ourselves to the flow of the crowd. A specter was haunting the weekend outfits—the specter of the Italian player Jannik Sinner’s huge Gucci duffel bag. Logomania was back, all around us: Goyard and Chanel bags, giant plastic Prada sunglasses, even several pairs of those Obama-era Tory Burch medallion flats. I complimented the sturdy unmarked sweater of a teacher from Somerset, who had, in recent years, become both a Wimbledon regular and a self-published author of over two dozen books on the pedagogy of drama. “I was actually going to wear my jumper printed with strawberries,” she said, “but we had a mishap with the dog this morning.”

At the corporate suite that housed our tickets, I asked a three-time seasonal employee if he’d ever encountered misbehavior at Wimbledon. Not really, he said. Had anyone ever, like, passed out? No. Had he ever heard an ambulance called? He jogged his memory for a moment, but also no. “I think,” he conjectured, “that people just sip on their drinks all day, but it’s a long day, so they end up absolutely fine.”  

There was time to kill before the first match, which is why I found myself at the IBM Experience booth, contemplating its invitation to “raise the game with AI.” “Do you want to try it?” a ponytailed employee asked me. “Sure,” I said. She told me I could press a numbered button to replay clips from last year’s matches and commentate on a headset, just like they do on TV. 

“Why?” I asked her. She smiled brightly. 

“Who’s going to hear this?” I asked.

“It goes … into the system,” she said. 

I asked her how AI improves tennis commentary.

“It helps us pick out the best parts of a match,” she said. “Really, it’s all on the website. Wimbledon dot com.”  

I selected a clip from last year’s Kyrgios-Djokovic matchup. “Well,” I ventured, toward the end of my allotted thirty seconds, “it’s anyone’s game.” I later learned that I had done my part for their large language model. 

The first Centre Court matchup that day was between the Russian Andrey Rublev (the world number seven) and the Kazakh Alexander Bublik (number twenty-six). “… like the most famous painter in Russia,” explained a man walking behind us, presumably about the Tarkovsky biopic indelibly evoked, in some quarters, by Rublev’s name. “Medieval Russia.” Our seats were halfway up the stands, facing the umpire. The court is smaller than you’d think; you can see puffs of white dust come loose when a ball hits a line with force. We watched the game mostly in pin-drop silence, but after exceptional shots or rallies, the crowd indulged in light cheering for “Sasha” and/or Andrey. (Wimbledon spectators’ sympathies lie less with underdogs than with whoever’s up at any given moment.) Last year, Russian and Belarussian players were banned from Wimbledon, but this year, only Russian and Belarussian flags and paraphernalia were. 

They were still neck and neck when my phone vibrated with the alarm I’d set for afternoon tea. Back at the corporate suite, people were crowded around the television playing the Ashes, the Test cricket series between England and Australia. (The first-ever Wimbledon, in 1877, had a two-day break to avoid clashing with the Eton-Harrow cricket match.) England was poised to turn the tide by winning game three of five; they were two runs away, then one, and it was over: “That’ll do it,” “Oh thank God,” “That’s a relief.”  

“I wish we could have been there,” said a dark-haired woman near me. “I mean, of course, this is great too,” she said, noting our current setting. What would she have done if she’d been invited to attend the Ashes and Wimbledon on the exact same day, I asked her. “Oh gosh, well, there’s just something about Headingley,” she said, of the Leeds suburb where that day’s match took place. I later learned that she was a professional cricket player with a Wikipedia page. “Do you think that Test cricket is on its last legs?” I asked Louis, recalling a long disquisition on the subject by my dad. “No chance,” said a short, besuited man with a Pimm’s Cup in each hand. “We don’t give up our traditions that easily, here in England.” 

Two scones later, we were back in our seats to watch Rublev win in the fifth set. “They’re saying it’s one of the best-ever shots at Wimbledon,” said the man in the tall, well-dressed millennial couple next to me. He immediately pulled up a video replaying the penultimate point, which Rublev was describing, in a postgame interview happening below us, as “the most lucky shot ever.” 

I set off to explore the grounds, which were part white-collar office park and part imperial palace gardens. The yellow-tile leaderboards showed that the Canadian player and occasional white rapper Denis Shapovalov had just been knocked out in a major upset. On court eight, two teen girls were duking it out during the hottest part of the day. A local tennis coach, leaning over a purple garbage can, explained that they mow the ryegrass courts to precisely eight millimeters every morning. But their famous “bounce,” he said, was critically endangered. “Used to be you’d see a lot of serve and volley, serve and volley,” when the balls would come fast and low. That “classic Wimbledon” gameplay has been displaced by longer rallies of the modern game. He had helped train some of the ball kids, whom I watched at close range, mesmerized by their identical striped polos, their whole heads turning left and right with each hit, and how they fed fresh balls, elbows unbent and arms extended at forty-five degrees. Like much else here, I felt that the Victorians would have loved these seen and unheard children.   

Though the clouds had burned off and we were all crisping under direct sunlight, Wimbledon’s promise of perfect order seemed to hold: babies weren’t crying, couples weren’t fighting. I never saw anyone reach for sunscreen. I did find myself thinking more and more about one of my favorite videos, a Monty Python sketch where Wimbledon contestants are trounced by an anthropomorphic blancmange. I might, I realized, want another snack.

In yet another line, this one for strawberries and cream, a man from Bristol wearing performance sunglasses told me it had been just about twenty-four hours since he and his friends had set up tents in yesterday’s ticket queue. “Hardly roughing it,” he said, given the Deliveroo coverage, and even, if you were into that sort of thing, day passes to a gym near the campsite. (He wasn’t.) “There’s strawberries and cream, and then there are strawberries in Pimm’s,” a girl was explaining to her sister, by the row of cashiers. I thought about T. S. Eliot’s vaguely right-wing list of characteristic elements of English culture: “Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.”

I stopped by the gift shop, where almost everyone looked like a potential employee, due to all the lanyards and commemorative gear. “Yellow! Yellow?” pleaded one mother, clutching an oversize novelty tennis ball—albeit a hot pink one—to a reedy blond man, until he admitted, finally, “I don’t work here.” I suspected there would be even better AC at the free tennis museum downstairs, where most of the other refugees were the parents of small children. At a “reaction station,” a father coached his two young daughters, in tulle dresses, toward excellence in a game that resembled whac-a-mole: 

“Zoe! Mia. Mia! Come on. Zoe!” 

She missed.

“No it’s fine. It’s fine.”  

I sought out a to-go drink, a gin and tonic in a reusable plastic cup that said “I live at Wimbledon.” “Some people come here and don’t even watch the tennis,” said the bartender, a cherubic art student from the north of England. “They just sit here and make deals all day. But that’s more of a weekday crowd.”  

We watched Iga Świątek play Belinda Bencic on Henman Hill, which had become very pleasant in the pink and orange part of the day. There were hours of tennis left, but the families clustered on blankets (and in one instance on a prayer rug) were already discussing routes home in minute detail. British people, noted Louis, are terrified of getting stuck somewhere. As for dinner, there were three options at the closest food court: BRITISH, GRILL, and WORLD. I chose WORLD.

“When did I last drink water?” a girl with bleached-blond hair asked her friends, around the tables where we all ate nondescript wraps standing up. “I think on the tube this morning. But then I had two espressos. Do you think that cancels it out?”

We took our seats one last time for the headliner, reigning world champion Novak Djokovic. The retractable roof, which was the futuristic white of a Calatrava bridge, shuttered over us. We also had some new rowmates, who were engaged in a conversation so animated that it visibly stressed out my British friend.  

“But you are so American,” said a vivacious blond woman in her thirties, to the shy young man next to her. “No one could be more American than you.” He squirmed. “I learned English fourteen years ago, by watching old Hollywood movies,” she told him, in an implacable accent, as the first set progressed. The young professional nodded. “I used to live in Battersea, but I got a divorce. Now I live in Surrey. Do you know Surrey?” He did not. “But you must be a big deal,” she pressed, unleashing a dazzling smile on the timid young man. “Just a family friend who had tickets …” he offered, staring at the floor. “You are so cute,” she told him. “So charming, so bubbly.” 

Hubert Hurkacz was making Djokovic fight for every point, and the first two sets both ended in tiebreaks. It was spectacular tennis, and then we had to go home. There’s an eleven o’clock curfew at Wimbledon, out of courtesy for neighbors, and it was already 10:35, though the match would keep going in our absence. (I watched Djokovic win the next afternoon, on my laptop.) We were shepherded into the mild night. The chatter converged on two topics: do you play tennis and we must play tennis. A group of four friends were resolving to change their lives. “I bet you’re really good.” “I’m dreadful.” “He’s dreadful.” “But I’ll start a group chat.” “It’s a shame not to. The weather’s been so good.” “We’ve got to play.” “We’ll play.” 

Krithika Varagur is the author of The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project and an editor of The Drift.

Photograph by Tarpley Hitt.

There’s a shortage of good signs en route to the Preakness Stakes, the annual horse race in Baltimore best known as the Kentucky Derby’s older, less attended sibling. By good, I mean the useful types that tell you where to go. There are plenty of other kinds: ads stationed outside delis; DIY posters offering lawns, driveways, and other car-size surfaces as extremely pricey parking options; at least two hotel-related banners on propeller planes; and sandwich boards affixed to roving scalpers, which read, counterintuitively, I NEED TICKETS. The result is a ring of confused, directionless traffic around the track, where it’s easy to forget that everyone has come for a spectacle essentially premised on speed.

The lack of organization at the Preakness is appropriate; horse racing is America’s least centralized sport. There is no MLB or NFL or NBA or NHL for this game. There is a panoply of jockey clubs, trainers groups, state racing boards, owners associations, and veterinarian organizations. The racing rules change from state to state. The racing seasons change from track to track. Even the kind of race a horse runs may fluctuate with the weather. This tradition of casually maintained chaos is almost a point of pride. In 2020, when Congress passed the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA)—a modest attempt to standardize antidoping rules across the industry—it was met with three years of bitter infighting, five federal lawsuits challenging its constitutionality, and most recently, an exquisitely melodramatic public letter from the U.S. Trotting Association that opens with a Thomas Paine quote. That is to say, it’s in the spirit of horse racing that, this past Saturday, as I approached the venue, I had no idea where to go or who was in charge, and neither, seemingly, did anyone there.

The venue was Pimlico Race Course. Of the many contrasts to be drawn between the Derby and the Preakness, most land in the former’s favor. The track is one of them. The Kentucky Derby is run at Churchill Downs—a 147-acre complex in Louisville whose 170,000-person capacity, hexagonal twin spires, and $121 million Bush Jr.–era renovation make it one of the largest, most recognizable, and most opulent race courses in the country; Pimlico isn’t even the nicest option in Maryland. It’s the second oldest racetrack in the U.S. and doesn’t look a day younger, though parts of it technically are. The original clubhouse—a “Steamboat Gothic-era” “rambling wooden Victorian confection,” as one Baltimore Sun article put it—burned to the ground in a 1966 electrical fire, leaving only a horse-and-jockey-shaped weather vane behind. The newer clubhouse, built a few years before the fire, seems to take most of its architectural influence from high school gymnasiums and the DMV. It is also, however, awesome, if you like these things more for the money and big fast animals than for the antebellum theatrics.

The clubhouse was white, brick, and not entirely full. Live racing attendance has been on a downward slide since the Reagan administration, and the pandemic and the rise of online betting platforms have only sped up the process. In 2022, Pimlico’s owners—a company formerly known as the Stronach Group, now operating under the dubiously pronounceable name 1/ST—made a play for younger audiences by setting up a music festival just off the track. This sounds like a good idea, and last year, with Megan Thee Stallion headlining alongside Lauryn Hill, it may have succeeded in bringing the median age of attendees down by a decade (in 2021, it was sixty-five). This year’s bill featured Sofi Tukker—a dance music duo comprised of a girl named Sophie and a guy named Tucker, which broke out seven years ago with a single called “Drinkee”—and Bruno Mars, an artist with fifteen Grammys and, based on the turnout, maybe as many fans. Between Friday and Saturday, racetrack and festival, this year’s event drew just 65,000 people—barely a third of the 182,000 who came out in 2019.

As far as I was concerned, fewer people was a plus. I’d come mainly to eavesdrop and maybe make some money. Both goals turned out to be somewhat optimistic. I like to think of myself as a gambler, but it’s one of those semiflattering self-assessments that holds more water in theory than in practice. In theory, I love fast payouts, their stereotypical accessories (casinos, croupiers, the outfits croupiers wear at casinos), and pretty much every movie about those things. In practice, I follow sports and stocks absentmindedly at most and, during various stretches in Vegas, lost more money at the in-house Starbucks than at any card table. I am a sore loser and constitutionally cheap, meaning most of my bets are low in value, long in odds, and cashed out quickly.

Photograph by Tarpley Hitt.

As far as eavesdropping, the acoustics seemed best suited for minding your own business. Even with the lower turnout, the place sounded packed. I’d hoped to hear gossip about the eight horses that had died at Churchill Downs since April, or about the return of the disgraced trainer Bob Baffert, who was suspended from last year’s Triple Crown races after his Derby-winning horse, Medina Spirit, tested positive for pain meds in 2021. It wouldn’t have hurt if guests had thrown in some sad musings about the declining state of the sport. But the audible conversation proved a little more literal. “I’m wearing my big hat,” a woman in a big hat said to her boyfriend, “for good luck.” The food vendors trailed lines of men in identical beige caps; they all read MAGE, for the Kentucky Derby winner who would be running later that night. “I called my investment manager the other day and told him to put everything in money-market funds,” one guy told the MAGE men. “He says to me, ‘Those only yield five percent.’ And I say, ‘Exactly.’ ”

At the ticket windows, would-be winners barked long lists of bets—exactas (on the first- and second-place finishers in a single race), trios (on the first three finishers in a single race), and daily doubles (on first-place finishers in two consecutive races), as an MSNBC presenter gestured at racing stats for TV cameras nearby. “That’s the election guy,” one girl announced to her group. It was. If Steve Kornacki was giving good advice, no one could hear it. But few cared about Preakness stats anyway. The goofiest part of horse racing is how short it is; from starting bell to finish line, a race lasts all of two minutes. If everyone came just for the main event, they’d be headed home as soon as they parked. The Preakness program is stacked instead with undercards boasting smaller purses and cryptic names (the $200,000 “Dinner Party Stakes”). It gives the day a predictable rhythm: twenty minutes of research, betting, and crab-cake buying; ten minutes of finding a clear view of the finish line; one minute of watching; thirty seconds of screaming variations of “COME ON, NUMBER NINE!”

It’s easy to get swept up in this cyclical game to the point where its harsher realities barely register. During the sixth race, for example, a horse was rounding the home stretch when it stumbled. The jockey fell to the dirt. But the bay colt—a Bob Baffert horse named, with unfortunate foresight, Havnameltdown—kept running without a rider. There was something off about his stride; he was lagging from the pack with a visible limp. As he galloped, you could hear the onlookers’ uncertainty from the pitch of the cheers. The upbeat roar became a more somber howl. It passed quickly, though. The front-runner won and the shrieks came back. The crowd streamed out to the betting windows. Havnameltdown, I found out later, had broken his left fetlock so badly he had to be put down.

The lack of clear signage, which characterized the clubhouse as much as it did the parking lot, had some upsides. It was never clear which areas were off-limits. My media pass mostly got me access to the press pit—an enclosed, standing-room-only dirt patch with a sole seat reserved for NBC. But no one stopped me or my boyfriend, whom I’d passed off as a photographer despite his lack of a camera, from wandering into the winner’s paddock, where owners posed for pictures next to overheated horses; or into the member’s clubhouse, where two older men were picking a fight with a group of frat guys for taking too long to place bets.

The downside was that it took us well into the eleventh race to realize that we’d missed out on a whole other half of the grounds. Between sprints, backstretch workers would lower a bridge across the dirt so that guests could cross from the grandstand to a series of tents at the center of the track. This was where you found the music festival, though the combination of electro swing and direct sunlight kept me from staying long. It was also where the VIPs and private parties were set up. The entrance to those tents was unmarked, but also unguarded. Anyone could walk in, grab some broiled salmon, and watch the race mere feet from the starting gate. This was a notable level up. Gayle King was chatting by the simulcast screens. At one point, Odell Beckham Jr., I learned from pictures later, was standing near where I chowed on shrimp cocktail. The tents were equipped with giant ceiling fans, perhaps thanks to one of the event’s sponsors, Big Ass Fans. The hats seemed bigger here, and their wearers, having paid for the open bar, drunker.

Photograph by Tarpley Hitt.

We had been betting all day, picking horses based on a feigned grasp of what racing statistics mean and occasionally on whichever horse’s name seemed to say more about its owner (I’m the Boss of Me, Bipartisanship, Taxed). This, it turned out, was not a good strategy. We had exclusively lost money, but a woman in a plush horse-head hat was having better luck. She was gripping a fresh wad of fives, mimicking club music (“oontz oontz oontz”), and pretending to rain the bills over her friend’s matching hat. I was tired, sober, and down ninety dollars. But the twelfth race, of thirteen, was about to start, and here was a reminder that not only was winning possible, it was very fun. A decision was made; we would give betting one more go and give up any pretense of expertise. We bought a one-dollar Superfecta (a bet on the first four finishers in a race) and played it safe; we picked the program’s recommendations and “boxed” them, meaning that we paid a dollar for every possible place combination of the program’s chosen four—the unremarkably named Nagirroc, Kingfish Stevens, Funtastic Again, and Circle the Drain—for a total of twenty-four dollars.

The starting bell rang and the contenders leapt from their stalls. Horses do not need signs to know where to go; some miracle combination of training and having a heel dug into their side gets them moving right on cue. That does not mean they always go in the way that you’d like. By then, we had seen enough races that the commentator’s unintelligible narration, delivered in the pauseless monologues of an old cattle auctioneer, seemed to reveal itself as a series of recognizable words strung into sentences. Specifically, I could decipher “Not a good beginning for Circle the Drain”—enough to understand that our selection seemed poised to suck. Nagirroc and Funtastic Again were leading the pack, but Circle the Drain and Kingfish Stevens seemed stoned on slow juice. If they didn’t place, neither would we. But at the final quarter-mile mark, Kingfish Stevens broke out from the pack, gaining on the top two by just a few feet. At the half-mile mark, Circle the Drain surged up along the rail, overtaking horse no. 8 (Wonderful Justice) and horse no. 2 (Fadethenoise), squeezing between horse no. 3 (A Western Yarn) and horse no. 6 (Moonstrike), and finally, pushing past horse no. 4 (Top Recruit) until he was tied with Kingfish Stevens. In roughly twenty seconds, our piece of paper with four semirandom picks was worth $264.

We cashed out and ran off to beat the postrace rush. The roads were absolutely carless. We watched the actual Preakness from my phone; a Baffert contender, National Treasure, finished in first place. The day marked Baffert’s eighth Preakness win and, counting Havnameltdown’s collapse earlier, at least his seventy-fifth horse death. “This day was like a roller-coaster,” Baffert told the Los Angeles Times. “Started out great. Then things went bad.” The badness didn’t seem to weigh on him too long. “We get rewarded for how hard everybody in my team works,” he said. “To me, that’s mainly what it’s about.”