Growing up in the Netherlands, I never thought of gay* people as a “topic.” They were just… there. Like you, me, and everyone else. (*As for "gender labeling," that’s an academic debate best reserved for a rainy day and a very strong coffee.) Childhood memories of my dad's cousin and great grandma...... When Queerness Is Just Background Noise My third-grade teacher was gay. One of my dad’s cousins is gay. My best childhood friend is gay. Gay TV presenters dominated the screens; I could go on and on. At some point, I stopped registering it entirely, the same way you stop noticing that everyone in your country owns a bicycle and complains about the weather. It’s not just ordinary, it’s ingrained as part of Dutch culture, so much so that it’s practically common knowledge, for lack of a better word, at least in my view it is. If anything, the Dutch national identity is built on this quiet familiarity. We don’t so much celebrate diversity as we do mildly acknowledge it while asking if anyone remembered to bring snacks. The thing is, Dutch tolerance is so advanced that we could host a parade just to celebrate how little we care. Which is why it was always slightly surreal, later on, realizing that what felt like background noise at home is treated elsewhere as a political earthquake. Pride in New York vs. Amsterdam: Worlds Apart It also strikes me how radically unlike Pride becomes depending on your vantage point. In New York, Pride still carries a kind of public urgency: part celebration, part testament that visibility was hard-won and remains fiercely debated. In Amsterdam, it often registers as the destination of that journey rather than the beginning: canal boats instead of protest marches, a city temporarily redesigned around revelry rather than a collective pushing its way into public space. If New York’s Pride is a riot (sometimes literally), Amsterdam’s is more of a polite suggestion to wear something sparkly and not fall in the canal. Both are Pride, but they come from different emotional universes: one still demanding to be seen, the other assuming it already is. Every June, New York becomes impossible to ignore. Visibility, Rights, and the Political Spotlight Rainbow flags hang from brownstones in Brooklyn. Fifth Avenue storefronts suddenly discover the color spectrum. Meanwhile, American news networks warn that the LGBTQ community is losing its voice and rights, all while the current administration openly admits to rolling those rights back. Companies spend a month reminding everyone how deeply committed they are to inclusion, only to quietly return to normal programming on July 1. As a Dutch person living in New York, I usually watch Pride Month unfold with a mixture of admiration and skepticism. Admiration because visibility matters. Skepticism because, in contrast, Americans often treat identity like a public performance, expecting authenticity to come from constant disclosure, while Dutch culture approaches this differently. The Dutch, we like to believe, are different. We tell ourselves we are practical. Less obsessed with labels. More comfortable letting people live their lives. After all, we were the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. Tolerance isn’t just part of Dutch history. It’s part of our national brand. Which is why I keep thinking about two men this Pride Month: Mark Rutte and Rob Jetten. For fourteen years, Rutte led the Netherlands. During those same fourteen years, the Dutch public engaged in a peculiar national pastime: speculating about his sexuality. Was he gay? Nobody knew. More importantly, nobody needed to know. Yet the question never disappeared. Rutte kept his private life out of public view: no campaign-trail spouse, no profile pieces, no personal revelations. He simply remained private. And somehow, in one of the world’s most progressive countries, privacy became suspicious. Looking back, the obsession says far more about us than it ever did about him. We Dutch love to describe ourselves as tolerant, but there is a key contrast: accepting people versus accepting uncertainty. One requires openness. The other requires restraint. For years, we seemed incapable of leaving a question unanswered. Now fast forward to today. The Netherlands is led by Prime Minister Rob Jetten, the country’s first openly gay prime minister. On paper, this shouldn’t be a revolutionary moment. The Netherlands legalized same-sex marriage more than two decades ago. LGBTQ+ rights are deeply embedded in Dutch law and public life. So, electing an openly gay prime minister starkly contrasts with societies where this would be unthinkable and should almost feel unremarkable here. Of course, progress is relative. The Netherlands is celebrating its first openly gay prime minister. Across the Atlantic, Americans are still having recurring debates about drag queens reading children’s books. Elsewhere, politicians continue to warn that civilization itself may collapse if exposed to rainbow-colored flags. History advances, just not in a straight line. That is precisely why it matters that Jetten is in office. He changes nothing about the legal status of gay people in the Netherlands. What he changes is the image. For generations, power looked a certain way. Now it looks different. Representation matters because people absorb images long before they absorb policies. A young Dutch kid seeing an openly gay prime minister does not need a lecture about equality. The image itself does the work. Yet if Jetten’s rise is evidence of progress, the reaction to him is evidence that the story is not finished. Spend enough time reading the comments beneath his social media posts, and another Netherlands emerges. A less flattering one. The Netherlands, often congratulating itself on tolerance, has also produced a steady stream of homophobic abuse aimed at its first openly gay prime minister. Even as the country celebrates this historic milestone, some citizens view it as a provocation. That contradiction is uncomfortable. It is also honest. Because Pride Month is often dominated by two equally misleading stories. The first says everything is fixed. The second says nothing has changed. Neither is true. The reality is messier. The Netherlands elected an openly gay prime minister. That is genuine progress. The Netherlands also continues to wrestle with prejudice, resentment, and homophobia. That is also true. Both realities exist at the same time. Living in New York has made me appreciate that every society tells stories about itself. Americans tell themselves they are a nation of freedom. The Dutch tell ourselves we are a nation of tolerance. Sometimes those stories are true. Sometimes they are aspirations. And sometimes they are marketing. This Pride Month, what interests me most is the gap between the story and the reality. The gap between the leader we spent years speculating about and the leader who no longer has to hide. The gap between celebrating representation and actually accepting it. The gap between tolerance as an identity and tolerance as a practice. We often think of progress as certainty. But perhaps the real lesson of the Netherlands is that progress means embracing contradiction: the country is both deeply traditional and strikingly innovative. A country mature enough to elect an openly gay prime minister. And we are still imperfect enough to show why that achievement remains vital, and why the work of real tolerance, beyond self-image or pride, must continue. Radical Acceptance—But Only if Lunch Isn’t Interrupted Maybe that’s the most Dutch thing of all: radical acceptance, but only if it doesn’t interrupt lunch. I only learned this about the Dutch after I left, and apparently, it takes crossing an ocean to realize your country treats queerness with the same enthusiasm as they treat traffic updates. But I suppose that’s still a step up from the global standard, where “tolerance” often means “we let you exist, as long as you don’t do it too loudly. Synthetic image concept generated with Kling AI. Reality edited for editorial purposes.

For those of you who are obsessed with Dutch politics—this one’s for you. For everyone else, don’t mind me, I’m just over here trying to make sense of a royal visit, a president, and the world’s most over-analyzed handshake. There’s this weird modern ritual I only notice once everyone starts fighting about it online. Big Vibes, Bigger Politics A state visit. A royal delegation. A night at the White House, an institution so drenched in symbolism that even the choice of pillow could trigger an op-ed. Officially, it's just routine diplomacy: the international version of changing your oil. The machinery of alliance grinding away between the U.S. and the Netherlands: show up, shake hands, remind everyone that history is still technically online, though, like your uncle’s Facebook, maybe it shouldn’t be. If you ask actual governments, it’s all pretty simple. States aren’t RSVP’ing to vibes. Alliances are bigger than any individual busy redecorating the Oval Office with their questionable taste. You deal with the structure, not the personality, picking out new curtains. Let’s get something straight: a visit by the Dutch royal family to meet President Donald Trump doesn’t mean they support everything he says or does. It’s (just) formal diplomatic business, standard practice between the Netherlands and the United States, not a personal endorsement. King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima are there in their ceremonial roles, representing their country, not picking sides. Expecting otherwise is like saying everyone should have deleted “Billie Jean” after the Michael Jackson allegations. Most people kept it on their playlists. And if you did delete it, good for you, but did that change anything except your Spotify history? Symbolic choices might spark conversations or show where you stand, but to get real, they’re the opening credits, not the movie. Nobody is fixing world peace with a playlist swap. And I’ll admit, I’m not exactly a superfan of diplomacy, but that’s the point. Diplomacy isn’t about personal tastes; it’s about keeping relationships between countries running, no matter who’s in charge or what’s trending. But that’s not how it lands anymore. And hey, if anyone out there has a better idea for diplomacy, one that actually gets better results, the floor is yours. Lay it out. Until then, this is the system we’ve got. Diplomacy Is Basically Content Now Because in 2026, diplomacy doesn’t arrive in a suit and tie; it arrives as content. If your official visit isn’t trending, did it even happen? Remember the time #covfefe trended worldwide because of a late-night presidential typo? For a moment, the entire internet treated it like the fate of global democracy hinged on a keyboard slip. It didn’t change policy, but it sure got everyone talking. And content demands interpretation. A routine visit turns into a Rorschach test: Is it continuity or endorsement? Protocol or proximity? Genuine diplomacy or just a really expensive photo op with better lighting? Same event. Different emotional subtitles. Wait, Is This A Summit Or Just A Really Intense Group Chat Switching gears to the U.S. view, things look a little different across the pond. From the American side, the message is stability: we host allies because alliances should outlast our average attention span (or a Kardashian marriage). It’s not about approval. It’s about endurance. It’s about saying, “Yes, the furniture is still here, even if someone occasionally sets it on fire for the cameras.” But elsewhere in the conversation, particularly in Dutch public discourse, the symbolism gets a little sharper around the edges. Not because the alliance is in question, but because symbolism is never neutral when you’re close enough to see the fingerprints on it. Which makes the whole thing even more interesting, because now you have an event that is officially predetermined, publicly interpreted, and emotionally crowdsourced after the fact. Nobody controls the meaning. Everyone participates in assigning it. Watch the World Live-Tweet Your Drama Speaking as a Dutch person in the U.S., the gap in perspective is hard to miss. Sometimes, Dutch outrage over these symbolic acts lands like someone complaining their oat latte is a little too frothy on a global stage; it can sound like luxury-level frustration. Outrage is always relative, but when the world is watching, it’s worth noticing which problems get the most airtime, and whose grievances sound suspiciously like privileges elsewhere. You don’t just see how your home country interprets the gesture; you see how the host country assumes it’s being interpreted. You end up watching diplomacy from the middle of the misunderstanding, where public opinion on both sides is convinced it’s being perfectly clear and just, and if the other side doesn’t get it, they must be auditioning for a reboot of “Lost in Translation.” And that’s the modern upgrade to diplomacy: it no longer ends when the handshake ends. It begins there. So the visit happened. It had to, unless we’d collectively decided that diplomacy should be about making everyone (including the Royals) feel good, racking up likes, and chasing #diplomacygoals instead of actually solving problems. If that’s what we want, we might as well swap summits for Reels and measure alliances in fire emojis. But the reality is, diplomacy isn’t about catering to every audience’s sense of satisfaction. Its real work is often slow, unglamorous, and guaranteed to disappoint someone, sometimes even everyone involved. If it all just becomes a global reality show about who “wins” the selfie, then we’ve truly missed the point. Alliances IRL: Swipe right or Nah? But what it means will not stay still. It will be reinterpreted, reframed, and re-litigated by audiences who were never in the room but are absolutely confident they understand the furniture layout. And in that gap, between what states do and what people decide, they continue to discover the same uncomfortable truth: Diplomacy is no longer just about managing relationships between countries. It’s about managing the afterlife of meaning once those relationships go public. Hey, I love my people, I really do. I get it—some of you are frustrated with how Americans keep putting you in these awkward positions. But let’s be real: if you’re looking for someone to blame for Trump, direct that energy across the Atlantic. The Dutch royals aren’t running U.S. elections! Sometimes, listening to your debates, you sound like you’re trying to win gold for Overthinking at the Olympics. Bless you. You mean well, but every now and then, you sound just a little bit silly on the world stage. To quote Alma Cogan’s 1959 tune, my favorite sign-off: You, me, and us, we are my favorite people. * Synthetic image concept generated with Kling AI. Reality edited for editorial purposes.

This is an argument, and arguments take sides. This one does. Read it as a position, not the position, one voice in the field rather than the magazine's verdict. Nothing here is asked to settle. The reader completes it. Last week I mailed a set of tear sheets to a model I'd shot with. She wrote back pleased, then asked the question everyone asks: why doesn't the magazine post any of this? It doesn't, I told her, because that magazine doesn't post anything unless someone pays it to. The issue she appeared in exists in print only once a copy is ordered into being. Her feature was real. It was also, in every practical sense, invisible. I keep thinking about that gap: the distance between being published and being seen, and how many of us have quietly started confusing the two. I design brands for a living, which is to say I spend my days building the it: the magazine, the object, the thing that has to stand on its own once it leaves my hands. So I notice when the object goes missing. More and more, the thing being branded is not a product at all. It is a person. We like to think we follow people on social media because of what they do. Sometimes we do. But often the pull is more primitive: we follow them for how they make us feel about ourselves, the proximity to their success, their aesthetic, their apparent ease. Personal branding in the age of Instagram has become less about communicating expertise and more about constructing a self others want to be adjacent to. For a growing class of creator the product, the software, the course, the consulting service, is almost incidental. What's actually being sold is identity, and it works, because we are social animals: we track people more readily than abstractions. The psychological cost nobody talks about is what happens to the person inside the persona: the slow drift between who you are and who your audience needs you to be, the validation loop that quietly reorients your decisions from creative instinct toward algorithmic approval. At some point the question stops being what do I want to make and becomes what will they respond to. Most people don't notice the shift until they're already someone else. Maybe there was never a fixed self underneath any of this to begin with. But there was at least one you had not yet outsourced to an audience. The Quiet Edits The mechanism is subtler than vanity. It operates through a set of quiet suppressions. You notice that a certain kind of post, vulnerable, unresolved, genuinely uncertain, performs poorly. Not catastrophically, just quietly badly. So you post it less. You notice that a particular aesthetic tone, a register of confident clarity, a way of framing difficulty as fuel for growth, generates engagement. So you do more of that. I've watched this happen to photographers I admire, and I've caught myself mid-edit doing it too. Someone starts out with a strange, specific eye: the frames that don't resolve, the ones that make you sit with something a little uncomfortable. Then one cleaner, warmer, easier image does numbers, and the next shoot drifts a fraction toward it. A year on, the feed is coherent and competent and perfectly legible, and the exact thing that made you stop scrolling in the first place has quietly gone missing. Nobody decided to remove it. It got edited out one small, reasonable choice at a time. “What gets lost is precisely what made the person interesting to begin with. The original instinct comes from somewhere private, an obsession, a specific way of seeing, and privacy doesn't scale. What scales is a legible narrative, and in the translation the specificity that gave the work its texture disappears.’’ What gets lost is precisely what made the person interesting to begin with. The original instinct comes from somewhere private, an obsession, a specific way of seeing, and privacy doesn't scale. What scales is a legible narrative, and in the translation the specificity that gave the work its texture disappears. We Did This Too The audience is not innocent in this. We participate actively in the construction of the personas we then consume. I'm not innocent here either. I run an independent magazine in a scene that treats authenticity as its entire identity, and I still follow people for the version of themselves I can count on not to change. When someone I've followed for years switches lanes, gets messy, posts the unresolved thing, I feel the small flat disappointment of a service interrupted. The subculture press likes to imagine it operates outside the attention economy. It doesn't. It just uses a more flattering vocabulary for the same trade. We reward consistency over complexity, confidence over doubt, and follow people partly because they offer a stable object, something we can return to and find unchanged. It isn't cruelty. It's the logic of attention: we are drawn to signal, not noise. No Vocabulary For It We have no honest vocabulary for this. The personal branding industry, and it is an industry, complete with coaches, consultants, masterminds, and a certification you can apparently earn over a long weekend, has no incentive to supply one: you cannot sell the cure for a condition you are the carrier of. So the costs get renamed instead, processed privately in therapeutic language rather than structural. Burnout. Imposter syndrome. Lack of boundaries. Every one of these locates the problem inside the person, which is convenient, because the person is the one paying. Nobody says the system might be the thing with the boundary issue. The Reinvention Genre Spend an afternoon in this corner of the internet and a strange sameness sets in. Every studio is a disruptor. Every coach is not another coach. Every agency has reinvented branding, positioning, storytelling, the funnel, the archetype, the self. They cannot all be the reinvention. That is not how reinvention works. If everyone has reinvented the thing, the thing simply has a new normal, and reinventing it again is just agreeing with each other in a louder font. What you are looking at is not a field of originals. It is a single genre with a shared vocabulary, and the loudest word in that vocabulary is the promise of difference. The claim to stand out has become the one thing they all have in common. When every brand promises to make you unlike the others, the promise is the one thing they all share. Look at how the difference gets manufactured and the paradox sharpens. You are told you are singular, unlike anyone who has ever lived, and then handed a form that files your once-in-the-history-of-the-universe soul into a category. Congratulations. You are a Type 7. So is the woman three accounts down, who was also told she was unlike anyone. A taxonomy can be a scaffold you differentiate away from, but in most hands the type becomes the ceiling, not the floor. Singularity, sold by the dozen. And then there is the part missing from nearly all of it. The proof. Every page in the genre is authority in and nothing out: credentials, corporate logos borrowed from a former career, a personality you are meant to want to be near, a method with a fresh name. What you almost never find is a named client whose business measurably changed, a before and an after, a result you could check. It may be the only industry where the before-and-after has no after. When the thing being sold is an identity rather than an outcome, there is nothing to measure. The case study is always upstream of the sale. The proof is deferred forever, because proof was never the product. A personal note, since this is the part that actually gets to me. There are so many people telling you how to brand, all of them with the same reinvention story, that it genuinely makes my head spin. At some point I stopped trying to keep up. I stuck with the old school: you brand the it, not the self. A magazine, a product, a body of work. A thing that exists outside you and can be judged on its own terms. Somewhere along the way the object dropped out of the frame and the person took its place. The self was never supposed to be the deliverable. Enough I want to hold a slightly old-fashioned line here. I trust the work, not the person who made it. I don’t need to know you. I need to see what you made. If the work moves me, that is the whole transaction. Your childhood, your morning routine, your reinvention arc: none of it improves the photograph. The photograph is right there. I can look at it, and I can trust what I am looking at, because a photograph cannot pretend to be something it isn’t. We do not even know who Banksy is. We know the work. That is the whole idea, taken to its end: remove the self, and the work has no choice but to stand on its own. We already know this, if we are honest. People made half the art we love, we would not trust with a house key, and the work is still the work. That is not a loophole in the argument. It is the argument: the object outlasts the character of whoever made it, which is exactly why the object, and not the character, is the thing to judge. This is the kind of trust worth having: earned by the object, not extended to the author on credit. Some things you can judge on sight, a chair holds you or it doesn't, a magazine is good in your hands or it isn't, and the work vouches for itself. Other things you genuinely cannot check, a surgeon's judgement, a consultant's strategy, and there you take the person on faith because the object won't tell you in time. The branding industry's trick is to take people whose work you could simply look at and move your trust off the work and onto them, as though a designer were a surgeon. It relocates trust from the thing that earns it to the person who would rather you didn't check. So the work being good is not naive. It is the correct standard for anything you can actually see. But here is the part that keeps me up. In an economy of infinite supply, being good is no longer the same as being found. Nobody judges the work who never encounters it, and the person, not the work, has become the thing the algorithm surfaces. So we perform the self not because it makes the work better but because it is now the most reliable way to get the work seen at all. The old standard still holds. The work really is enough. The machine has simply stopped letting enough be enough. What You Give up Honesty requires admitting what the old-school position costs, because it does cost something. If you refuse to make yourself the brand, you give up the fastest routes to being found. The person is what the feed rewards, so a body of work with no face attached moves slower, gets surfaced less, turns strangers into followers at a worse rate. You forgo the parasocial warmth that makes people feel they know you and buy accordingly. You will watch people with thinner work and thicker personas move ahead of you, and you will have to make your peace with that, or you will not last. What you keep is less obvious, and I think worth more. A brand built on the work is an asset that exists outside you. It can be handed to someone else, sold, continued, outlived. A magazine can have a hundred editors. A studio can outlast its founder. The work is transferable in a way a self can never be. A brand built on you is only ever leased from your own attention. It collapses the moment you stop performing it, or simply get tired. You are the single point of failure. You can never take a break from being the product. And because the persona has to keep answering to the audience, it slowly rewrites the maker, until the filter that began as strategy becomes the only way you can think. So the choice is not free on either side. Making yourself the brand buys reach and pays in ownership; refusing it keeps the work yours, durable and survivable, and charges you in visibility. Slower to find, but harder to lose. You get to keep making the thing instead of maintaining the self that sells it. For me that has never been a close call, but I want to be honest that it is a trade, not a free virtue. No Curtain There is a particular exhaustion nobody warns you about. A stage performance ends when the curtain falls, but posting the self never reaches a curtain, because the metric resets every morning. Yesterday's engagement does not bank, and the algorithm keeps no memory of your good week. So the pressure is never perform well once. It is perform again, now, and again tomorrow, on a counter that starts at zero every day and speeds up if you rest. The Invoice Always Arrives Come back to that model and her tear sheets. She paid, in time and usually in money, to appear in a magazine that will not, under any circumstances, confirm in public that it exists. Each print copy is produced only when someone orders it, so for most features the physical object never materialises at all. What she walks away with is a PDF and a credit line. What the platform walks away with is the transaction. There is always a free tier, which is how the arrangement gets to call itself open. Submit for nothing. Everything worth having sits on the other side of a payment: the cover, the priority, the guaranteed feature. The free door is the alibi. I know the shape of it because a shoot of mine once landed on a cover, unasked and unbilled, in a place where covers cost money and nothing says so publicly. Make of that what you will. The gap between what is advertised and what is charged for is where the business actually lives. Here is where I admit I am part of the problem. I submit to these magazines myself, not for me but for my models, as a thank-you, because I can't always pay them in money, so I pay them in published. And they like it, because they can advertise that they were published. Consider the machinery of that. The magazine is not read; we have established this. So the model is not being seen. She is acquiring the right to say she was seen. She is not buying exposure. She is buying a sentence. "As seen in." A credential whose only function is to be cited, never read. And it works well enough that I do it too. I am typing an essay about how hollow this is and still logging on to submit my collaborators, because the magazine nobody opens issues the one thing everybody wants: proof. Not of talent. Just of publication. The menu keeps growing, too. These operations stopped selling the magazine and started selling the parts: priority, a webitorial, an interview, a post on their own feed, a story on their own feed, the front cover, the back cover, whatever they invent next quarter. Being seen, itemised, each increment its own line on the till. The self, sold for parts. “It is the most naked version of the model, if not the most common: a magazine of you, by you, and, crucially, for its revenue’’ The credit is real. The reach is theoretical. The invoice is the only part guaranteed to arrive. Reading The Contract None of this is an argument against having a public presence or against earning a living from what you make. It's an argument for clearly naming the transaction. What personal branding asks of you is not just your time or your labor. It asks for yourself, on a long-term lease, with the terms set by whoever controls the platform you built on. Most people sign without reading the contract. Most don't find out what's in it until they try to leave. Which brings me to a question I cannot quite believe I am about to ask in print. Do people not have mirrors at home anymore? Because that is the technology we are describing. A device, roughly the size of a face, that reflects you to yourself in real time. No subscription, no archetype, no discovery call, no waitlist for the Empire State of Mind tier. You can stand in front of it all day and admire yourself from several flattering angles. And here is the miracle of it: you can do all of that without involving the rest of us. Some of the performing, I know, is survival, not vanity: the work will not be found unless the person is, and I said as much a few pages ago. This is not aimed at that. It is aimed at the industry that sells the mirror back to you at a monthly rate, and at the performance we do past the point of being found, the display for its own sake. Because there is already a device for that. The mirror asks for nothing. It does not need to be liked, and it will not send an invoice. It simply shows you the self, privately, for free, forever, without conscripting an audience that never asked to watch. So for that surplus, the looking we do to be seen looking, there is the real one. Look as long as you like. It has always been enough, and it has the decency to keep the results between the two of you.

I was in Bushwick with a model, scouting for an editorial shoot and searching for a backdrop that captured Brooklyn's energy. We turned a corner and found a wall painted in Knicks blue and orange. Before a champion had even been crowned, the championship was already on the wall. I reached for my camera, drawn in by the mural that had just appeared in the Bushwick Collective. We stopped at 444 Troutman St., where the Knicks murals had just gone up for the team’s playoff run and the Collective’s 15th anniversary. On the west face of the building, CES painted a player mid-stride in #10—Walt 'Clyde' Frazier's number, retired to the MSG rafters since 1979. Nobody wears it now. On Troutman Street, somebody does. The paint was so new its gloss caught the sun, outlines sharp against older layers. Nearby, Katie Owes (Ms. Katie) handed out her well-known chicken wings—part of her usual way of feeding the community. These scenes showed the neighborhood celebrating in its own way. The murals offered something beyond food or fanfare. Around us, cars rolled by and the air buzzed with anticipation. Here, every wall became a canvas and a conversation—Brooklyn’s public feed, painted twenty feet high. NYC graffiti legend @ces4wish paints a player in full stride wearing #10 — Walt "Clyde" Frazier's retired number, hanging in the rafters at MSG since 1979. On this wall, the past and present run together. Knicks blue and orange, freshly layered into the visual grammar of the block. Not commemorative. Not archival. Present tense. I realized the murals, and the neighborhood itself, weren’t simply documenting a moment; they were living it alongside the team. This distinction anchors the entire story. Knicks mural by Menas @menas24711 at The Bushwick Collective, 444 Troutman St., Brooklyn. Even the locals approve — a neighborhood dog holds court, all dressed up for the occasion— Knicks gear and all, beneath the freshly painted Knicks roster as New York braces for Game 3. The Bushwick Collective: Knicks Murals Brooklyn — Art in Process It feels like the Bushwick Collective has never really acted like traditional public art. Founded as a kind of organized street-level exhibition space, it functions as a living system where artists respond quickly to music releases, political moments, local grief, celebrity deaths, cultural surges, anything that briefly becomes “the thing the city is looking at.” It ain't waiting for history to stabilize before reacting to it. It treats instability as the point. Which makes what’s happening with the Knicks feel less like fandom and more like protocol. The Knicks, of course, aren't only a basketball team in New York. They are recurring civic myths: a franchise defined as much by absence as by achievement. The 1973 championship is more than a statistic; it’s an inherited condition. Every playoff run is measured against it, like a city testing whether a long-running spell has finally broken. So when the Knicks enter a Finals run, something predictable happens in New York: the city begins to externalize belief. Not just in tweets or watch parties, but in physical space. Bushwick is where that belief bursts into view fastest, its walls acting as early barometers of citywide mood. This is where the murals become interesting in a way that has nothing to do with basketball analytics. They are not reacting to a result. They are reacting to the possibility of a result as if it is already part of the city’s visual record. That’s not how sports art usually works. Normally, murals are painted after the parade route is finalized. After the trophy is lifted. After the narrative is closed, right? Here, the narrative is still open, and yet the walls behave as if it isn’t. Artist Jay Diggz renders Jalen Brunson — #11, game face on, three fingers raised — on a doorway in the Bushwick Collective. Small canvas, big statement. @jay__diggz One of the artists associated with the block, Jay Diggz, captured its mood in a way that feels almost excessively direct: “LGK!!” A fan signal, yes, but also a kind of shorthand permission slip for collective escalation. The muralist is not outside the moment documenting it. He is inside it participating. That overlap, among creator and believer, is what gives the walls their charge. There is also something distinctly Brooklyn about this, even if the team itself plays in Manhattan. New York sports allegiance has never respected borough borders; it behaves more like weather than geography. If momentum builds, it spreads. If belief intensifies, it leaks. Still, it is strange to watch Brooklyn lay "claim" to a Manhattan team’s potential legacy. Strange in a way that only makes sense in a city where neighborhoods routinely absorb each other’s myths. And perhaps that is the deeper story at play, a city’s identity shaped by how it chooses to record its hopes, not just its victories. Not that the Knicks might win a championship. Not just that, the fans are excited. But that a community founded on real-time cultural production, where murals are allowed to respond immediately to the present, has decided to treat uncertainty as something worth painting at scale. As Game 3 tips off at Madison Square Garden, the series remains unresolved. Nothing has been secured. Nothing has been completed. But in Bushwick, completion is not the requirement for depiction. The walls, of course, don't follow the schedule. Last night, at Madison Square Garden, the Spurs won Game 3, 115-111, pulling within 2-1. The series isn't over. Neither is the story the murals are telling. In Bushwick, the paint is still fresh. Knicks Murals Brooklyn Credits: Knicks by Menas (@menas24711) Walt Frazier #10 by Rob CES Provenzano (@ces4wish) Jalen Brunson #11 by Jay Diggz (@jay__diggz) All murals part of The Bushwick Collective, 444 Troutman St., Brooklyn NY 11237 (@thebushwickcollective) Photography All Photos by Trudy Giordano @trudy,gio

AND IT WOULD BE NICE IF YOU COULD PLEASE RAMAIN CALM WHILE SOMEONE SYSTEMATICALLY DESTROYS YOUR LIFE. June 21st, 2026. By J. Harlan Briggs* After watching the entertaining Netflix documentary Untold: The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill, and following the Michael Barisone and Lauren Kanarek case closely, I felt something interesting was revealed. Michael Barisone loved horses. Olympic dressage alternate. Winner of over a hundred Grand Prix events. By all accounts, he was at the top until a tenant moved onto his New Jersey property. Over about a year, she allegedly used social media, covert recordings, false accusations, and a timely call to child protective services to unravel him. In August 2019, Barisone shot his tenant, Lauren Kanarek, twice in the chest. In April 2022, a jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. Between those two facts lies an essential question the law is unequipped to answer: What happens when destruction occurs in forms the legal system cannot detect? Here’s how the law works, in theory. You have a dispute. You call the police, who check for a crime. If there isn’t one, they leave. You hire a lawyer, who sends letters. They’re ignored. You file a civil complaint; a hearing is set for eight months later. Meanwhile, your opponent posts about you daily, records your conversations, contacts agencies with allegations, and launches a one-person psychological demolition against what you’ve built. And the law looks at all of this and says: technically fine. And then there was this. One of Kanarek’s Facebook posts, entered into evidence at trial, read: “Everyone should be worried. I’m not responsible for anything my other personalities do when they’re threatened.” In a courtroom context, that is not a throwaway phrase. That is a document. Now, I'm not in the business of diagnosing people I've never met. But I will say this: if you opened a textbook on Narcissistic Personality Disorder and flipped to the chapter on covert tactics—the public narrative control, the reputation destruction, the institutional weaponization, the calculated victim positioning—you would find what looks suspiciously like a detailed account of Lauren Kanarek's year at Hawthorne Hill. The sustained social media campaign. The covert recordings, including those of attorney-client conversations. The false accusations filed with public agencies. The methodical dismantling of a person's professional standing in a small, tight-knit world where reputation is everything. I'm not saying she has NPD. I'm saying the playbook was followed with remarkable precision. NPD 101. Full marks. Barisone called 911 four times and told police he feared for his life. He hired a private investigator. He reached out to SafeSport. He did everything the system prescribed. And the system, efficiently, did nothing. Here’s the thing about the law: it measures acts with precision but is blind to accumulation. It cannot weigh the effects of months of psychological warfare. It has no instrument for that. It was not built for that. It was meant to judge discrete events: did you do the specific thing, or not? Everything leading up to it is just background noise. Before anyone argues: yes, Barisone shot someone. That’s not minor. Lauren Kanarek was in a coma for four days and on a ventilator for three weeks. Whatever she did, she didn’t deserve to be shot. That’s not the argument here. Here’s the argument: The law holds everyone to the same standard of self-control, regardless of their experience. It demands rationality from people pushed utterly past rationality. Only when the breaking point produces something visible does the law act with full force. For readers unfamiliar with Barisone, he is an Olympic dressage rider who faced a severe psychological ordeal before the crime occurred. Though, in my view, she crossed ethical lines and arguably even legal ones that were hard to enforce, before he crossed the legal boundary that could be prosecuted. It’s like a referee who watches one team foul the other for forty-five minutes, calls none of it, and then red-cards the player who finally swings back. Technically correct. Completely absurd. This analogy helps describe the invisible accumulation of harm the legal system often misses. This is not just about one man and one farm in New Jersey. Barisone’s story is a lens to examine how the law fails to address psychological abuse in many contexts, not just his. Think about every case you have ever heard where someone finally snapped after years of workplace harassment that HR kept finding “insufficient to act on.” Every domestic situation where one person waged a quiet war of control, leaving no visible bruises. Every online campaign that destroyed someone’s reputation one post at a time, each one defensible in isolation, catastrophic in aggregate. The law intervenes only at the visible breaking point. It claims no jurisdiction over the slow, psychological toll that precedes it, highlighting a significant gap in legal protection for those subjected to prolonged emotional harm. Some countries have started quietly admitting this. The Dutch show Zeeman Confronteert, now in its tenth season on RTL 5, exists for exactly this reason. Host Thijs Zeeman mediates stalking, harassment, and psychological conflict cases that law enforcement admits it cannot resolve. The police, whose job is to intervene where people are harmed, sometimes look at a harassment case, shrug, and say: "We can’t do anything yet. Go talk to the TV guy." Not because they don’t care, but because the law has no tools for what is happening. The threat must become visible and prosecutable before anyone with a badge can act. Until then, you're on your own or on Dutch reality television, which is essentially the same thing. People who understand this legal gap, who operate up to the legal line knowing they’re unlikely to face consequences, will always have the advantage. Certain personalities use systems as weapons, hiding behind the same protections those systems offer. You can terrorize someone, procedurally and legally, with receipts. Until you can’t. Until the person on the other end stops calculating and starts feeling. And then the law finally notices, but only the feeling, not the calculation that produced it. The jury in the Barisone case saw something that the law, on its own, could not process. They looked at 19,000 pages of social media posts. They heard about the bugged office. They heard about the child welfare call. They watched a disheveled, broken man who had once stood in Olympic arenas, and they made a human judgment that the system was not designed to make. Now, was Barisone performing? Possibly. The prosecution thought so. His prosecutor noted on the record that Barisone looked dramatically different in court than he had at any prior time. Lauren Kanarek’s father called it: “They had him ready for the insanity defense.” (Well, shouldn’t they, if that’s the plea? Duh.) Still, the transformation was remarkable. Olympic champion to courtroom wraith in three years: composed, decorated, regal to tearful, unwashed, barely together. If that was acting, get him an Emmy. A Daytime Emmy, specifically, since the whole thing aired on Court TV and the production values were outstanding. He rode horses at the Olympics. He did not come to play. "If that was acting, get him an Emmy. A Daytime Emmy, specifically, since the whole thing aired on Court TV and the production values were outstanding." They also heard from the defense psychiatrist, Dr. Steven Simring, who testified that Kanarek had been gaslighting Barisone, that she had placed him “under direct and personal threat” until “he came to feel delusional, that Lauren Kanarek was capable of anything; poisoning the horses, doing some kind of harm to the tenants and students.” (Horse Sport, September 2022.) The word gaslighting had made it into a courtroom. Under oath. From an expert witness. And the jury went back to replay that testimony on the third day of deliberations, which tells you everything about where their questions were anchored. They decided that what happened to Michael Barisone mattered. That the months of invisible destruction had to count for something in the accounting. The law didn’t provide adequate tools for this situation. The only available option was a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. This verdict indicates that something happened to this man that the law cannot define, yet it was recognized by those present. We keep building systems that are very good at punishing the visible and very bad at accounting for the invisible. And then we act surprised when people stop trusting those systems to protect them. When people start wondering whether the rules are actually neutral or just favor whoever is most comfortable operating in the gray. Michael Barisone found out the hard way that the law is not about what you can handle as a human being. It is not about what pushes you to the edge. It is about what you do when you get there. Which is a fine legal principle. It just has absolutely nothing to do with being human. The law’s definition of justice is not aligned with the lived experience of those it is supposed to protect. Readers should reflect on whether our legal systems need reform to recognize psychological harm. That disconnect—between what it means to be human and what the law can see—is the underlying problem.

I want to walk you through something, because I don't think the rest of the world quite caught what just happened here, and honestly, neither did most of the people it happened to. I should say where I'm standing, because it matters here. I spent my early years watching this country from the outside, and most of my adult life living inside it. This leaves me in an odd position: too far in to still be a tourist, too far out to fully buy the show. From a distance, American confidence used to feel like a flaw. It was a country that announced things were great before checking. Up close, I came to another theory: it's not confidence, it's entertainment. It might be the best in the world at this. I still don't know how seriously I'm supposed to take any of it. I still don't. This weekend, the United States is turning 250 years old. Not turned. Turning. As of this writing, on the actual Fourth evening, the country still has a few hours of programming left before anyone can call this thing finished. Two hundred and fifty. It’s been a quarter of a millennium since men in wool coats decided the King of England was being a bit much. They wrote a strongly worded letter about it. By any measure, this is a big anniversary. The kind that deserves a party. So, naturally, the country planned two of them. People argued about which one was real. In an unrelated but perfectly timed coincidence, a pop star also got married three miles away. Let's take these one at a time, because the layering here is the whole point. First: America couldn’t even RSVP to its own birthday. On one side, America 250, a commission planned with the risk tolerance of a church bake sale, quietly operated under the fantasy that no one in power would notice. Enter Freedom 250—a fever dream of merch tables and ‘rebranding’ by an administration convinced ‘America’ needed a wardrobe change. Two committees, two logos, one country, zero chance of coordination. Cue the parade of dueling party planners. Freedom 250 promised the largest fireworks in the known universe—a suspense-free spoiler, since they proclaimed victory before a fuse was lit. This is America’s specialist subject: labeling things ‘historic’ then praying the facts can keep up. Optimism? No, just a press release with pyrotechnics. Then there's the reflecting pool. The one at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, which someone decided needed a fourteen-million-dollar renovation ahead of the big weekend, was repainted a deep patriotic blue. Within weeks, the paint started peeling off in sheets. Officials blamed vandals. I don't know which vandals these were, but they apparently have very specific and widespread opinions about marine-grade epoxy. When asked whether anyone was tracking the environmental impact of setting off the largest fireworks display in recorded history, a few hundred feet from a peeling, algae-adjacent pool, an EPA spokesperson offered the kind of answer that should be bronzed and installed in a museum: fireworks, she said, "are awesome." That's the whole quote. That's the full extent of federal oversight on the matter. Nothing at this party was actually load-bearing. It was set dressing, all the way down to the parts that were supposed to hold weight. And then, mid-week, the stage itself started shedding parts. During a rehearsal for the fair's Independence Day finale, a large section of overhead structure worked loose and crashed down onto the stage, missing a group of young dancers by what looked, in the video, like a few unlucky feet. The performers scattered. The music stopped. Freedom 250's official response was reassuring and, in the same breath, unintentionally poetic, confirming that everyone was safe and noting that the collapsed piece belonged to "the backside of the stage." As if the backside of a quarter-billion-dollar production for the world's oldest surviving democracy were somehow allowed to be structurally optional. Around the same fairgrounds, a ceremonial arch built for the same celebration had already begun to separate at its seams, revealing what looked a lot like ordinary construction foam beneath the ornamental columns. Nothing at this party, it turned out, was actually load-bearing. It was set dressing, all the way down to the parts that were supposed to hold weight. Days earlier, the president, poised atop Mount Rushmore, warned the nation about an ideological threat last seen at disco parties in the early Sixties. All this surrounded by icons literally carved to commemorate men who faced—and survived—actual existential threats. And tonight, he’s set to deliver an address only slightly shorter than the nation’s entire history, braving oven-like heat to demonstrate true leadership, apparently defined as mere human roasting. That's the state of the nation's birthday party: two competing hosts, a peeling pool, a faltering stage, and a headline act about to sweat through a speech—all hours before the fireworks. And then, the night before all of it, at Madison Square Garden, Taylor Swift got married. I want to be careful here, because this is a wedding, and weddings are personal, and I have no notes on the vows. But I do have notes on the infrastructure. Streets are closed for two days. A security operation to match a head-of-state visit. A charity donation large enough to be its own press release. And, humming underneath all of it, the same word Freedom 250 kept reaching for: historic. Declared, again, ahead of time. Before a single vow was exchanged, this was already being covered as the wedding of the century, in the same week as the party of the century, in the same eight square miles of Manhattan and Washington. Here's what I think an outside observer is supposed to take from all this, watching from anywhere that isn't here: America didn't actually celebrate two distinct things this weekend; it used the same routine for both. On one hand, there's the quarter-millennium of self-governance; on the other, a tight end getting married. The contrast in occasion disappears. The playbook remains: announce it's historic, let the facts follow later if ever, close the streets, promise something for the record book, and never worry about the paint job.r. Post-fireworks, because nothing says reflection like the faint smell of gunpowder and hot dogs still lingering in the air. Back in New York, where the wedding had already happened the night before, the city held its own fireworks, and I watched this one live. By the time the display actually launched over the East River, a severe thunderstorm watch had settled over the five boroughs on top of one of the hottest Fourth of Julys on record, and organizers moved the start up from 9:25 to 9:02, racing the weather instead of waiting for the hour they'd spent weeks promoting. The twenty-seven-minute score, composed by Jason Howland and sung live by The Voice's Alexia Jayy, worked its way through fifty years of American summer classics, and at some point, watching it myself, I heard Springsteen’s "Born in the USA," which NBC's own press materials described only as "the patriotic classic." It is not a patriotic song. It's about a man sent to fight a war his country asked of him and left him with nothing when he came home, and it has been played at rallies from every direction by people who know the chorus and have never once sat with the verses. The current president knows this history better than most. His own rallies booed this exact song back in 2016 after “The Boss” publicly objected to its use, and as recently as this spring, he was calling the man who wrote it a "total loser" on social media and urging supporters to boycott his concerts. The two of them have been fighting about this song, on and off, for the better part of a decade. None of that stopped it from playing tonight anyway, over a barge on the East River, introduced as a patriotic classic, to a crowd that mostly just likes the chorus. If a single needle-drop could close out a weekend built on calling things historic before anyone checked what they meant, that's the one. Even the soundtrack didn't do its own reading. Two hundred and fifty years in, and what America may have perfected is not independence, but the art of the press release, a striking contrast to its founding ideals. If satire were currency, this article would pay off the national debt. Declaring everything historic before it even happens? Hooray, America’s true pastime exposed, confetti cannon and all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to press release this review before history gets ahead of me. Image generated using Kling AI

June 6th 2026 By Trudy Giordano This is one of sixteen fragments. None of the sixteen studios who painted them saw what we're about to show you. Full reveal at aircocaravan.com. In 2013, frequent magazine contributor and friend, Dutch conceptual artist Airco Caravan, began her project "Made in China" by sending sixteen fragments of a Dalai Lama portrait to sixteen painting studios across China. Each studio received a small, cropped, unrecognizable piece: an eye, an earlobe, a fold of yellow cloth, or a curve that might have been a hill. She requested oil paintings in an abstract style, never revealing the true subject. Because images of the Dalai Lama are banned in China, the only way to have his portrait painted there was to ensure that no single painter ever saw the whole image. When a studio called to ask why she wanted just one eye, she told them it had belonged to her recently passed grandfather and that she wanted his eye on her wall. The ear, she said, was a gift for a boyfriend who loved music. The yellow fold of the robe became a mango. A curved line became a hill, then a curtain; she rotated fragments ninety degrees so the geometry wouldn't give her away. Sixteen studios, sixteen honest, unrelated paintings, each one true to the small story she'd given them. None of them was lying; each executed an accurate reading of an inaccurate premise. Together, the Chinese painters created an illegal, iconic portrait, symbolizing peace and unity in many different ways She reassembled the sixteen canvases in Amsterdam that summer. Each was oil on canvas, cut and sent as innocuous decor, and all were returned as something else entirely. Fragments, a grandfather's eye, a mango, a hillside, resolved into the image each painter had been prevented from seeing: the Dalai Lama's face, whole, completed by people working in good faith and in total ignorance. Together, the Chinese painters created an illegal, iconic portrait, symbolizing peace and unity in many different ways. Two years later, a version of the portrait reached him during a European tour by a Tibet advocacy group. He is said to have joked about the artist's red hair, then simply said thank you, the same two words anyone might offer for a gift, now carrying sixteen studios' worth of unknowing labor. That's the core mechanism this issue returns to: misinterpretation isn't usually a failure of the signal. The photograph was clear; the instructions, clear. What varied was the frame each painter received, and a frame determines what the eye can see, even before it's studied. Grandpa's eye and the Dalai Lama's eye are, pixel for pixel, the same eye; the difference is the story that arrives with it. He turned 91 this week, still in the same maroon and saffron he's worn since before most of Airco Caravan's painters were born, still banned in the country he can't return to. Portraits of him remain illegal there. The robe itself, reassembled in its entirety in a photograph, would still fail to clear customs. But cut into sixteen unlabeled pieces and called a mango, an ear, a grandfather, it traveled through the same country freely, painted by hands that never knew what they were completing. Nothing about the face changed between the fragment and the whole. Only the permission changed—and 'permission' was never about the literal image. It was about the caption beside it, the story or label that tells the viewer what they're allowed to recognize, shaping perception before the eye even sees. Happy 91st birthday to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. For the full reveal of the artwork, visit https://www.aircocaravan.com/work/madeinchina.

Editor's Note: Beneath the chant and the celebration, this piece is really asking who the World Cup actually belongs to. The author's adopted loyalty to Norway is genuine, but it becomes a lens for a sharper argument: that FIFA's officiating and Argentina's dominance feel less like merit and more like money finding its preferred outcome. What sharpens that critique is the near silence from USA players themselves, hosting this tournament on their own soil, yet saying nothing about the questionable calls, the political noise surrounding it, or the deeper unfairness some fans sense in the game. That silence reads less like neutrality and more like quiet complicity. And maybe that's its own kind of karma: a host nation that stays quiet while the sport bends unfairly around it shouldn't expect the moment, or the credit, to fully belong to it either. The piece ultimately argues that people, not institutions, are what make moments like this meaningful, and that when the institutions running the game go silent or crooked, it's the crowd's honesty that still tells the real story. Who else, like me, supports another country if your own left the World Cup Football? The orange Dutch are out, and I do like the Scandinavian countries, their languages, countryside, history, and metal music. I even have 2 Norwegian tattoos on my arm for my kids when they were born... I'm rooting for the Scandinavians because there's no other way than Norway... Amid all the fun, nations are enjoying themselves in the US, genuinely connecting and celebrating together. To understand this energy, it's helpful to see how these stories interact. The article shifts quickly between celebration and critique, so grouping related ideas clarifies the message: first, the personal joy and unity football brings, like watching 22 players give their all. Then, there's the idea that major events like the World Cup can distract from political controversies. For example, as a TikTok user pointed out, public focus moved from ICE incidents to Greenland tensions, then to the Epstein files, and finally to the Middle East conflict, with each new headline shifting attention. The World Cup often arrives just when people need relief from anxiety, offering honest, unifying joy. Yet, it's worth asking: does this celebration let powerful institutions escape scrutiny? FIFA's corruption scandals and questionable officiating have sparked widespread suspicion among fans. These moments deserve attention, not just as frustrations, but as evidence of how the sport's integrity can be threatened by larger forces. Exploring these questions more directly helps us understand the double-edged nature of global events: they unite us, but can distract or even conceal what needs to be seen. Back to the FIFA World Cup: FIFA and Argentina seem determined to buy their way to another championship. The Swiss, Belgians, and Norwegians played their hearts out, but many fans feel that questionable officiating and repeated controversies undermine the integrity of the tournament. Red cards should be handed out fairly, and goals celebrated when deserved, not disallowed as fouls. I'm not saying all the games are rigged, but I suspect that at least a few are. So, back to where it started: Ro, Ro, Ro, Norge! And let's remove those FifaStein files from these "games." Let people be themselves, have fun together rather than compete, and show the world's governments who is really in charge. It's not just Ro Norge; it's Row Row Row World. Sometimes, we channel our inner Viking to unite and ignite.

How One Dutchman Congratulated Himself on Live Television and Ended All Discourse Forever. (Update: He Did Not) THE DAILY ENGINE COLUMN A dispatch from Spa-Francorchamps, where Olav Mol delivered thirty-five years of institutional memory, one unhedged verdict, and a media philosophy that hasn’t changed since 2015: if you didn’t sign your name to it, he didn’t hear it. Olav Mol: The Unapologetic Voice of Dutch F1 Friday night, Spa-Francorchamps, eve of the Belgian Grand Prix. Ziggo Sport’s Race Café is doing what Race Café does: several men who already know each other’s opinions, saying them again, on television, for money. And then it happens. Raymond Vermeulen, Max Verstappen’s manager, has used the word “intention.” Verstappen intends to see out his Red Bull contract. And somewhere behind a folding table in Hilversum, Olav Mol, thirty-five years into a career that has outlasted a pandemic and an entire streaming platform’s confidence in somebody else, watches his manager’s quote go up on the studio screen and gives it both thumbs up, arms out wide. That’s the whole gesture. Then he informs the room, and by extension the entire Dutch motorsport public, that everyone should keep their mouths on the subject, because he called this three months ago. MAN CORRECT. MAN WOULD ALSO LIKE A PARADE. The Art of Being Right (and Saying So) Here’s the annoying part: he might not even be wrong. You can’t write the easy version of this piece, a loud old broadcaster doesn’t know the sport, because the tape won’t cooperate. This is a man who called his own ratings driver’s brake lock a real mistake, no spin, on air, mid-championship. Who caught a George Russell error in Monaco while the rest of the broadcast was still deciding how sad to be. Who reached back into 2016, unprompted, and pulled out a specific Hülkenberg spin to explain Verstappen doing the exact same thing eight years later. From memory. Nobody asked. Fan Loyalty vs. The “Pepsi Light” Effect And people love him for it, which every “cranky old man” takes for granted. When Viaplay took the live rights in 2022 and installed a calmer, glossier pair in his seat, the public response wasn’t relief, it was a small uprising. Viaplay’s own staff had to log on and defend the new hires by name. One fan called the replacement “Pepsi Light.” Not bad. Just not the thing, in a can shaped like the thing. That’s not the fan behavior of a man people find irritating. The Critique: Refusal to Hedge So the passion was never the problem. The problem is what it’s welded to: a total refusal to hedge anything, ever. The Myth of the Missed Moment A 2015 profile already had a name for the complaint trailing him, even as fans defended him: he misses things. By 2022, that had calcified into a fan theory, repeated earnestly, that he’s too stubborn to sit next to a co-commentator who might catch what he doesn’t. Fine, lots of broadcasters are stubborn. The interesting part is what happens the second a mistake, or a joke, gets near him. The Social Media Rulebook This January, a former F1 esports champion posted an obviously sarcastic tweet about Mercedes topping an early wintertest laptime sheet nobody takes seriously. Mol didn’t clock the sarcasm. He clocked a target, and replied that he’d expected slightly more Formula 1 knowledge from someone dropping takes that early. The internet informed him he’d become a specific, beloved, faintly embarrassing genre of Dutch broadcaster: the Old Voice Who No Longer Gets The Joke. Somebody compared him to Mart Smeets, which in Dutch media circles is less an insult than a diagnosis. A few weeks later, on a different show, he told a colleague on air, with a wink that didn’t soften anything, that he ought to go listen back to himself from earlier in the season, back when he was cheerfully part of the “F1 is dead” chorus Mol had personally, correctly, and insufferably called wrong the whole time. The colleague didn’t enjoy this. Said so. On the record. To be fair, he can take a real disagreement. There’s a Race Café tape of Robert Doornbos flatly contradicting Mol’s read on a bad Verstappen weekend in Singapore, live, and the segment just continues as an ordinary disagreement. Nobody gets told to be quiet. So this isn’t a man who can’t survive being wrong. It’s more specific than that. A Decade of Deflecting Criticism Here’s the mechanism, and it’s been sitting in his own interviews for a decade, which should’ve been the headline all along. In 2015, when asked about fan criticism, Mol laid out a rule: fans can be harsh; nobody’s owed a hug, but if you didn’t post under your real name, you don’t get an answer. In the same interview, he coined a term for social media generally: “asociale media”. Not a bit. A standing policy. Ten years later, in 2025, a different outlet asked essentially the same question, and he reused the exact pun, unprompted, adding that people will always resent success and the established order. That’s not a man losing his temper at a critic. That’s a man who built a permanent, three-slot filing cabinet for criticism a decade ago and has been running every new complaint through it since. Anonymous: doesn’t count. Compared to a forty-person foreign crew: apples and oranges, his phrase. Just not a fan of his, generally: people always turn on success. Every complaint gets sorted into DOES NOT REQUIRE ENGAGEMENT before he’s finished reading the sentence. The Spa Incident: Declaring the Discourse Over Which brings us back to Spa, where a man with a decade-old filing system for criticism and zero hedges in his vocabulary looked at the screen, declared the story over, and used the word "punt," full stop, twice for emphasis. He then told the table, himself very much included: "vanaf nu gewoon allemaal onze bek houden." In other words: from now on, we should all just shut our mouths about it. (He used a slightly less polite word for mouth.) The Paradox: Shutting Down Conversation Fueling More He did not shut his own. In the next breath, on the exact subject he had just closed, he laid out his personal theory of how Vermeulen negotiates (any real deal gets done before September 1st, he said, with the easy authority of a man who would know), talked the table through why a rumor about a Belgian teenager’s McLaren junior contract meant nothing, and delivered, unprompted, something close to a personal philosophy: a driver isn’t dead until there’s a press release confirming it, and anyone who won’t hold that line is just filling airtime with nothing under it. The wider world did the same thing back to him. “Olav Mol tells everyone to stop talking about Verstappen’s contract” was, within a day, its own headline on more than one outlet, generating exactly the coverage he’d just ordered the room to stop generating. He tried to legislate a story closed and personally filed its liveliest new entry, then watched the rest of the internet file a few more. Is Olav Mol Good at His Job? Buried under all of it was the actual job: a mixed Friday practice, and Mol correctly, calmly noting it didn’t rule out a Sunday podium. Good analysis, delivered in the same segment as the self-congratulation. This is good work. This is also the entire problem. So, is he good at his job? Overwhelmingly, yes. Is he insufferable? Also, yes, ask the room he told to be quiet, or the colleague he needled on television, or the decade-old pun he’s still running. Dutch broadcasting looked at both columns and decided, for the fourth decade running, that it’s a good trade. Conclusion: Vindication and Its Discontent If there’s a moral, it’s this: the people who are right most often are the people least equipped to imagine being wrong, and television keeps handing them the microphone anyway, because the hedged, careful, correct-half-the-time alternative tests worse every single time. His specific talent, on top of all that, is making you feel a little unreasonable for minding. Somewhere in Bloemendaal tonight, a man is refreshing a headline about himself, feeling, once again, extremely vindicated. He earned that one. That’s sort of the whole problem. Hulde en punt, Olav. This time, we mean it.

WASTE NOT: Fifty meters of Nomex. Carbon fiber structured shoulders. A Pirelli compound train that takes four people to carry. Brake disc ceramic jewelry. A collection that could only have been made here, by people who actually looked at what was in the room. That show doesn't get 1,800 views. That show gets talked about for a decade. Louis Vuitton builds twenty-four bespoke trophy trunks a season. The Dutch Grand Prix trophy is hand-painted by Royal Delft artisans. This is just the infrastructure now. Marks & Spencer built a runway inside a working Formula 1 pit lane three weeks ago. I caught the YouTube clips this week, and I haven't quite been able to let them go since. Not near it. Not inspired by it. Inside it. At the British Grand Prix, fifty models walked the actual Silverstone garages, past the actual team cars, in the actual space where mechanics change actual tires in under two seconds, wearing a summer collection called "Dress to Thrill." First fashion show ever staged directly on an F1 pit lane. Won't be the last, either. M&S has already signed a multi-year deal with the circuit and became Williams's official travel-kit partner this year, a sentence that would've made no sense to anyone a decade ago and now barely gets a second look. That's what actually stopped me, honestly. Not the clothes. The fact that none of us blinked. Though the show itself is worth a second look, too, and not an entirely flattering one. M&S called it "a landmark moment," "a really bold step," "delivering something no one has done before." M&S's own official upload of the full four-minute show sits at 1,800 views after two weeks. One comment. Two mechanics in matching black jumpsuits walk right behind the models for a stretch of it, holding up a checkered flag, roughly the image a five-year-old would draw if you asked them to sketch "racing." Somewhere between the press release and the room, something got lost. The Infrastructure Because once I started actually looking, I realized this wasn't one show. The sport's been quietly, systematically dressing itself up for years, and even "dressing up" undersells it. That's not decoration, that's structural. Louis Vuitton hand-crafts twenty-four bespoke trophy trunks a season, one per circuit, each built around the host country's own identity. Monaco's has the track's actual nineteen turns mapped inside it, Saudi Arabia's carries a "V" meant to evoke desert heat and night-race velocity. The Dutch Grand Prix trophy itself, separate from its case, is a ceramic cup hand-painted by Royal Delft's own artisans, which I genuinely did not expect to find and now can't stop bringing up. LVMH is Monaco's title partner. TAG Heuer is the official timekeeper. Richard Mille sponsors two rival teams simultaneously and has built one-of-one watches for specific drivers. Charles Leclerc has his own Richard Mille, engineered and named for him. None of this is a metaphor I'm reaching for. It's just the infrastructure now. The Spectacle And that's before the music even starts. Singapore pioneered trackside concerts back in 2008 and has since grown into four stages and over 100 hours of performances in one weekend, featuring artists such as Lana Del Rey, Janet Jackson, and DJ Snake. Las Vegas just signed the Backstreet Boys for an official afterparty inside Sphere. There's a published, dedicated guide, with its own separate ticketing logic, for attending a Formula 1 Grand Prix specifically to skip the Formula 1. I had to read that one twice. The sport publishes guidance on attending it without watching it. This Happened Before If any of this feels like a recent invasion, fashion photobombing a previously pure sport, I want to correct that, because it isn't new, gently. It's a rerun, and a pretty exact one. In 1986, an Italian knitwear company called Benetton bought a struggling team named Toleman, renamed it after itself, and ran it as a full owner and constructor for fifteen seasons, winning Michael Schumacher's first two World Championships along the way. Small world moment I genuinely didn't see coming while researching this: one of the drivers on that Benetton roster was a young Jos Verstappen, Max's father, which means his son's own fashion deal isn't just an echo of this history, it's a literal family rerun. A clothing brand didn't sponsor a car back then. It built one and won with it. One retrospective I found put the obvious comparison better than I could: twenty years before an energy drink company turned a mediocre team into Red Bull Racing, a fashion label got there first, and did it more completely. Red Bull owning a constructor reads as unremarkable to us now. A knitwear company doing the identical thing in 1986 read as insane, right up until it started winning. What Got Lost Even the suits have a history. I wasn't expecting to find this funny. Juan Manuel Fangio won five championships in the 1950s, racing in a polo shirt and a work jacket. Fire-retardant material only became mandatory in 1963, and even then, it was cotton, which is to say barely retardant at all, until Niki Lauda's near-fatal 1976 crash forced the sport into real, five-layer Nomex protection. By the eighties, tobacco money had turned every suit into a walking billboard, patches thick enough to add real physical weight to a driver's shoulders. The podium moment. Formula E NYC ePrix 2022, Red Hook Brooklyn. Photographed by Trudy Giordano.* And somewhere in there, I found this: the sport's laurel wreath, the actual ancient symbolic honor for winning, quietly disappeared from the podium. Not banned or retired for being old-fashioned or removed, because it kept blocking the sponsor logos on the suits during the photographss I keep coming back to that one. An actual honor, physically edited out of a ceremony, because it was in the way of the branding. If I had to put this whole piece in one sentence, that's probably the sentence. “An actual honor, physically edited out of a ceremony, because it was in the way of the branding.’’ What Actually Is None of this is really an argument against fashion. It's an argument about what happens when something real, old, and human is discovered as a revenue stream. Because the underlying impulse here is real, and I don't want to mock it. What we wear is one of the oldest, most reliable ways any of us find our own people, signaling who we are before we've said a word. Psychologists have a term for the effect it has on the wearer, specifically: "enclothed cognition." The clothes don't just tell other people who you are. They change how you experience being you that day. That's not shallow to me. It's close to the opposite. To me, though, there's something about the way all this is presented that's less "join the party" and more "here's the velvet rope, and by the way, the dress code is whatever we say it is this week." It's fashion as passive-aggressive bouncer, smiling just enough to remind you that, no, you're not really on the list, but isn't it adorable you thought you might be? Inclusivity is the slogan, but exclusivity is the policy, and the undercurrent is about as subtle as a branded champagne shower. António Félix da Costa, Stoffel Vandoorne, and Mitch Evans on the podium at the 2022 Formula E New York City ePrix, Red Hook, Brooklyn. Photographed by Trudy Giordano. The Drivers Know When I look at Lewis Hamilton treating every race weekend like his own fashion week, Saint Laurent, a sequined runway piece from an Italian designer's spring collection, an oversized pastel suit with a cape draped over it at Monaco, I don't read that as vanity so much as someone using the one language he fully controls in a sport where almost everything else is engineered by other people. We all know, of course, that Max Verstappen is one of F1's great fashion obsessives. (He very much isn't, and that's rather the joke.) Verstappen has a well-documented aversion to fashion duties and would much rather skip the branded photo ops altogether.) Max Verstappen, doing the deliberate opposite, three collections deep into MAXRAW, his own line with G-Star built entirely around the words "real" and "raw," is making an equally specific argument, just the other one: that authenticity, not transformation, is his actual brand. Charles Leclerc runs his own apparel label and co-designs his own jewelry with genuine creative input, not a logo slapped on someone else's product. The grid's youngest addition, Kimi Antonelli, became a tourism ambassador for Dozza, the small Italian town near his hometown, leaning into heritage and craft instead of either extreme. The Women in the Frame I don't want the women in this piece to only be partners, though, because that's not actually the whole picture. F1 Academy, the sport's own all-women development series, just landed Sephora as an official partner this year, complete with "Glam Bars" at eighteen race weekends and its own Sephora-liveried car for driver Natalia Granada, following Charlotte Tilbury's turn as partner the two seasons before. At this year's Canadian Grand Prix, Disney launched something called the Minnie Collective for the series, specifically introduced by F1 Academy's own Managing Director, Susie Wolff, explicitly to celebrate "a new generation of women who are natural leaders and unapologetically ambitious and confident." Also on sale that weekend: a hundred-and-fifty-dollar Minnie Mouse hoodie. I genuinely can't decide if that's a contradiction or just this whole piece's argument stated as plainly as it's ever going to get. The women around the men deserve to be named as more than plus-ones, too, because that's not what they are either. Kelly Piquet was a stylist's assistant at Vogue Latinoamérica and a couture buyer at Bergdorf Goodman before any of this, and she's now a Marie Claire columnist with her own Vogue Netherlands cover and a real, ongoing relationship with Louis Vuitton, a career I think would exist with or without the driver attached to it. Alexandra Leclerc released an actual twenty-one-piece collection with Frame, timed deliberately to a Grand Prix weekend, not a red-carpet appearance but a genuine collaboration. What Got Lost So here's where I've landed. Formula 1 didn't stumble into fashion. It rediscovered a relationship it's had since the 1980s, at exactly the moment it needed a new way to sell people something they already wanted: to feel like they belonged to something, dressed as it mattered. None of this is really about clothes, I don't think. It's about the oldest, most human thing there is, finding your people by what they wear, feeling like yourself in the right jacket, and Formula 1 has figured out, with real precision, how to charge admission to that feeling. The pit lane didn't become a runway because racing needed one. It became a runway because someone noticed we'd pay to stand near it. Someone noticed we'd pay to stand near it. AI-generated concept: Trudy Giordano. But with each new partnership and every additional branded moment, it's worth asking whether something essential is being traded away. Is the spectacle enhancing the sport, or is the sport now simply scaffolding for the spectacle? The line grows thinner, and the question more urgent, as the balance tips ever further toward branding. The risk isn't that F1 might one day lose its purity, but that it might already has, quietly, when nobody blinked. Which leaves me with the only question I actually think is worth asking. Not whether F1 should be doing this. It clearly works, and it has always. Just how far it can keep going before the thing it's selling and the thing it's supposedly still about finish trading places entirely. I'd ask the laurel wreath how that tends to end, if anyone could still find one.