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The Trouble with Friends

On a daily basis, I teach kids. By kids, I mean teens to college-age, sometimes mid-twenties. When I started teaching, I was still a kid myself, so I was careful to refer to my students as students, but now I feel a distinct gap. Kids talk a lot about their friends. For any length of time that you allow them, they will bring up this friend and that friend and a birthday party they went to, a concert, a sleepover, a study sesh, another party, the mall, a Starbucks run, the movies, a two-week trip across Asia which they’re planning to take or have taken with friends. Kids don’t usually talk about their families. Sometimes I’m taken completely by surprise when, months into our knowing each other, a student mentions having a twin. I suppose hearing the constant chatter about friends has made me consider my own, and how hard it can be to maintain these bonds as an adult. Mostly, what I notice is attrition: I lose more friends than I make.

An obvious reason for that attrition is marriage. Friends get married and their spouses become their closest friends. My husband is now the person I spend the most time with. Face to face and over text. I tell him everything and anything, because I’m a chronic oversharer and I trust him with my thoughts, however stupid they may be. I used to be the same way with friends, but more and more I check myself. My ten-second rule: write the text but wait ten seconds before sending it; evaluate whether it’s truly vital to pass on this piece of information. When I tell friends something now, I must accept the possibility that they will tell their spouses, with whom I’m friendly but not friends. A friendship is truly strained when you don’t like the spouse. Here is my person, your friend proclaims, flag in the sand, and you must tread carefully. Sometimes this new person is so far removed from what you imagined for your friend that you wonder if you knew your friend at all.

After marriage, any walls that already existed between two friends invariably thicken. A friend who used to discuss things with you simply to work through them stops doing so, and updates you only on definitive good news, never the bad, the ugly, or the in-progress. All of that, you suspect, she saves for her partner. In other words, you’re no longer included in the problem-solving. Of course, some matters belong first to the marriage: the stuff of intimacy, finance, family. To have or not have children. To want children but not be able to have them. Increasingly, my friends leave me out of these big conversations, and vice versa, but when an outcome is certain or a plan set, we do update one another, which reminds us that we’re still, in fact, friends, but also boils the friendship down to a PowerPoint.

If I don’t have kids, I will lose more friends. This is not a hypothesis. It has already started to happen. Friends, during pregnancy, assure you that nothing will change. You contribute to the diaper fund, attend the baby shower, and, once the child arrives, you try to see them, plan for dinner at 2 p.m. , between nap times, but, somehow, something always comes up. Next time, yeah, next time, let’s hang out soon, yeah, soon—but no one proposes a new time, and months go by, years. You never see them again, you never meet the child, and that begs the question of how close you really were. You consider the possibilities. Perhaps you said or did something irrevocably wrong. To avoid ever saying anything about a child that could be misconstrued, I overcompensate. I never bring up the child or ask after it, or, if I do, I make the mistake I just made, and refer to the child as an “it.” A likely scenario is that my friends, as new parents, went down their friend list and crossed people out. Having friends without kids is harder for them to justify. What is our baby going to do at their non-baby-proofed place? And remember that time they referred to our child as an it? An it! But I could be overthinking. Doing what writers do, adding nuances to interactions that aren’t there. A simpler reality is that my former friends just don’t have time for me. Parenting is hard enough without their having to worry about my feelings.

I do greatly appreciate the rare friends who stay with me after kids. We meet, as we used to, at restaurants, bars, shows, or, when child care gets hard to schedule, we meet at their apartment, the office now a nursery, now a toddlers’ room, now a girls’ room, and, throughout dinner, the girls (twins), who are supposed to be in bed, come out, one at a time, sometimes together, to tell us that they would like to be read to, they would like to drink an entire glass of water, they would like to go to the bathroom, they would like new pajamas, they would like chicken nuggets, they would like to have their hair combed, they would like a specific teddy, they would like a hug, a better hug, they would like to see a rainbow, they would like to go to the bathroom again, they would like more water, they would like to know if it’s tomorrow. For the short duration of an evening, I greatly appreciate being part of this.

There’s a Grace Paley story that I think of when I think about how friendships end. A woman named Cassie asks her friend Faith, a writer, why she has written about their other friends but never about her: “You let them in all the time; it’s really strange, why have you left me out of everybody’s life?” Faith doesn’t have a good answer and asks to be forgiven.

Forgive you? [Cassie] laughed. . . . With her hand she turned my face to her so my eyes would look into her eyes. You are my friend, I know that, Faith, but I promise you, I won’t forgive you, she said. From now on, I’ll watch you like a hawk. I do not forgive you.

That final line, which is also the last line of Paley’s “Collected Stories,” strikes me as brutally honest and true. When I have trouble forgiving a friend, my husband says it’s because I go all in. I pour everything into a new friendship, the honeymoon period, the getting to know each other. I have an incurable habit of sending pop-up holiday cards. I’m a big fan of digressive group chats. Here are my deepest, most authentic feelings, friend. Please kindly tell me yours . But when that gesture is not reciprocated, when I sense the wall coming up, I’m so mad at myself for having revealed so much that I withdraw.

Sometimes I ask my students to write about a time when they were blindsided, or an incident that made them take stock. More often than not, they turn in stories about a friend betrayal. In one class, a student mentioned that their parents didn’t have any friends. Around the table, everyone nodded. It seemed that no one’s parents had friends, and my students couldn’t fathom this, couldn’t fathom it when I admitted (foolishly) to having fewer friends in my thirties than I’d had in my twenties. Horror. Pity. I tried to defend myself. More horror. More pity. How could this happen to a person? How could a person let it happen? No, it would not happen to them.

The wonder, and the curse, of friendship is choice. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends. For me, common qualities and habits help. Female. About my age. Sense of humor. I would not choose a friend who went out dancing all night on Ecstasy. No offense to dancing or Ecstasy, but in comparison with those things I would be a total bore. I would not choose a friend who had a second home somewhere like the Hamptons or Lake Como or Austria. Of course, it is superficially nice to be invited to garden parties or SoHo lofts, but I don’t want to be the lone Asian woman in that garden wearing a cotton dress and sensible shoes, my only topics of conversation being work, the grind, and not that new art gallery down the street. In other words, the supposed freedom of friend selection goes only so far, and, given how deeply my choices are informed by my background, family, and upbringing, I wonder if they are choices at all.

I’m the only child of immigrants who are not only children but whose siblings and parents stayed in China. I have no cousins here. No aunts, uncles, or grandparents. As a kid, I was distressingly lonely, and, like my students, my younger self placed grave significance on having not just friends but the ability to make them. To befriend was to assimilate and to speak English. To have a friend was to have an ally. I still fear the time when I am alone. Statistics predict that I will outlive my husband, and then what? I get through my last decade texting my friends? Having kids is a solution. I could spend the last decade texting them, or their kids, and getting wrapped up in all that. But I don’t see myself having kids.

I live in a building where the parents are friends because their kids are friends. Hard to say if they would have been friends without the kids, and that makes me wonder if friendship is genuine if the choice to stay connected and on good terms is not entirely a solo one. My husband and I have friends in our building because our dogs are friends. We have a group chat, named after our dogs, with this other couple, and we pet-sit for one another. Our friendship is so rooted in our dogs that, when we ate out together for the first time, dogless, more than a year after we’d started looking after each other’s fur babies, we all felt that it was kind of weird. But then we did it again, and it wasn’t so weird. I used to think that our friendship with this couple was one of convenience, but I don’t think that anymore. Sometimes you have close friends because they are close by and have compatible dogs.

If a friendship is meant to be a give-and-take, an ideal friend should, in theory, give as much as she takes. But this, then, opens the door for the frustratingly fair friend. She weighs every gesture and transaction, splits every bill down to the cent. She remembers every favor, every imbalance of favors. She looks up the price of your birthday gift to her, in order to give you an item of commensurate value. In Chinese, chi kui means “to eat a loss.” This friend will never chi kui , yet is shrewd enough never to seem like she’s taking advantage. Technically, the fair friend is not in the wrong, and if I’m noticing her behavior, then I, too, am guilty of keeping score.

But do I accept the friend who takes more than she gives? The taking is not always tangible. There’s the friend who keeps forgetting her wallet, and then the friend who expects you to be there for her at whatever cost. Inconvenient as it may be for you to step out of class, mute the Zoom screen, get off the subway, this friend is having a crisis and she would like your opinion, even though it’s not an opinion she’ll take; she would still like you to hear and validate her crisis. I’ve never known a crisis friend to have just one crisis, and, before you know it, you’ve read and replied to thousands of texts about her problems, which are all interrelated and endemic, and soon, mired in another emergency that you’re coaching her through, she throws up her hands and announces, “I’ve had it. No one in the world cares about me. I can’t rely on anyone anymore, except myself.” She sighs with profound feeling. You blink, balk. You think, What the fuck have I been doing? What the fuckity fuck has every conversation we’ve ever had been for? Then you realize that what your friend wanted from you is a mother, and, when you couldn’t measure up, you, too, became part of the cold, unfeeling world.

Inverting the dynamic completely is the friend who wants to be your mother. She demands to be relied on, to be your “go-to.” She remembers your birthday, your pets’ birthdays, your wedding anniversary, when you moved to the city, when you plan to go upstate—“about that time, isn’t it?” She knows you. Or thinks she does. She’s the first to like your photos, your tweets, the first to give you the name of a C.P.A., a dentist, a real-estate agent, a doctor (her C.P.A., her dentist, her real-estate agent, her doctor), and for a very long time this feels supportive, until it feels intrusive and like surveillance and not nurturing at all but a show of control. When you seek out your mothering friend in your low moments, you feed her ego. She wants to help, but above all she wants credit for helping you, and she relishes the flex. Whenever you ask after her well-being, she pronounces herself emphatically “great.” You try to poke around more, you sense that she isn’t as well as she claims, and, without fail, she adds, “No, really, I’m great, super, but how about you? You seem stressed. Anything I can do?” How to handle such a question? Do you say, “Yes, please deliver the chicken soup” (which she would gladly do), or do you feel bad for always being the broken one?

I already have a mother, with whom I have a complex, routinely difficult, and uniquely volatile bond that would take over this essay and any story I ever write, should I let it. I don’t need another mother. So I learn to interact with these friends less. I offer up less of my life. I’m great, too, super, never better. I recognize that to question the motives behind a friend’s support is both paranoid and ungrateful. But I worry that if my vulnerability fuels her vanity, then an inherent rivalry exists between us—one that I want no part in—over who is the better friend. I am certainly not the better friend. I can’t remember everyone’s important dates and be there for everything and like every comment within thirty seconds of its existence, and I definitely don’t want to be my friend’s mother. So, if I’m not the better friend, then I’m the worse friend. I’m the one who takes more than I can give.

All this to say that friends grow apart. Commonalities change. Common habits diverge. Qualities that you didn’t much like in a friend amplify, and your own traits, priorities, shift. A friendship is not stagnant, and growing together is usually not the norm. It’s nice to have writer friends, but then all you talk about is writing and how insane you have to be to do it. Nice to have friends with other jobs, but then all you hear about is their work, which you might not understand or care about. Work colleagues can never be true friends, and neither can one’s students. A fake friend is easy to spot, and even easier is the friend or acquaintance who, after a long period of no contact, emerges from literally nowhere with the message Hey! Just saw you published a book! Here’s a picture of that book in a bookstore. Let’s grab coffee and catch up .

Platitudes: A true friend is someone you can be your true self with. A true friend calls you out on your bullshit. A true friend sticks with you through thick and thin. But is any of that really possible or fair? How well do I tolerate being called out on my bullshit, and how comfortable am I now at calling other people out on theirs? Can a true friend stay with you forever, or, a better question, can a friend stay true to you forever? Is Cassie a true friend to Faith?

What my students say: Friendship is a gift, a sacrifice. Friendship is all about timing and who you are at that moment and what you need. My students are always living for the moment, and they have strong opinions about what it means to be a good, true friend. When I was in college, my friend circle was wide and healthy. Thanks to clubs, class, lab, and Harvard’s housing system—“the blocking group,” wherein, at the end of freshman year, you choose up to seven people you are close to, your “block-mates,” and are then sorted into a house with them and live with them for the next three years. To entangle matters even more, your blocking group can link with another group to sort into the same house, and those in the latter group become your “link-mates.” Should you not have a group and have to sort on your own, you’re called a “floater.” These terms were fun to use at the time but are now glaring reminders of how successful my alma mater is at institutionalized friendship. Institutionalized to then build a strong alumni network, which donates large sums back to the nest where the camaraderie began. By the end of senior year, my blocking group, a collection of misfits, had toppled. There was so much politics in my lab, given the constant pressure to publish, and my friends in clubs were already moving on to bigger, better things, like med school, law school, or jobs in the real world. I don’t think my experience was unique. You have friends for the period that you have them for, and that period ends.

I know that a friendship has cooled when I find myself asking, Would we be friends if we met today? I used to think “cooled” meant “over.” In the words of that pop icon my students are obsessed with, we are never, ever getting back together. But “cooled” does not necessarily mean “severed.” Though friends are not family and are not obligated to stay with me, they have accompanied me for part of the journey, and for that I owe them, I owe us, the chance, at some future point, to fortify the bond again.

According to the sociology of group dynamics, a triad is more stable than a dyad because one member can act as a mediator. An example is a doctor, a patient, and a cultural liaison. But I have never found a triad of friends to work as well as, say, a tetrad, and especially a tetrad made up of two couples. In a triad, two people are always closer and risk icing out the third. The exclusion is not usually intentional, but the ousted person always feels that it is, somehow. And what if no one wants to mediate, or the person who mediates also likes power, likes games? I’ve had triads of friends begin, then fail, and, when the final calamity hits, I think of the dumping of water into a nuclear reactor and then of Yeats’s “widening gyre”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” My preference for tetrads makes sense only because of my husband. He has been, for me, an ally, a cheerleader, and my first reader, and we have, thus far, a happy marriage. Along the way, we’ve made couple friends as a couple, and I’ve discovered that the tetrad works only when every possible combination of two members does.

There are only a few couples with whom this holds true for us, and there is only one tetrad that we have tested through long periods together and international travel. I evoke my closest childhood friend here, a girl I’ve known since fifth grade. Let’s call her Diana. We have not always been so close. In middle school, she moved away, then my family moved to the city she had moved to, but although we went to the same high school, our social circles rarely overlapped. Still, from middle school on, Diana and I were part of a triad. I was extremely close with the third girl, as we were both immigrant children, from China, and lived in similarly shabby apartment complexes across the street from each other in the rural Midwestern town where the three of us met. The third girl and I often iced out Diana. Together, we were mean. A few years out of college, that girl and I had a huge fight by text on my birthday. (Lesson learned: when friends decide to burn it all down, they don’t care if it’s your birthday because they’ve stopped caring about you.) A litany of grievances was aired and contested, and no one was generous enough to get on the phone. We haven’t spoken since.

By chance, Diana went to college and grad school in the same city as I did. As the triad imploded—she tried to mediate, negotiations failed—I vented to her about it, and, eventually, I stopped venting and she and I became close. She met my husband when he was still my boyfriend. I saw her through her breakup with her high-school sweetheart, a boy who was also a friend of mine, with whom I have since fallen out of touch. By the end of grad school, Diana had found a new boyfriend, who would later become her husband, in a wedding that was delayed three years by the pandemic. Her husband and I get along. My husband and Diana get along. Our husbands have inside jokes with each other, and we buy them matching backpacks to wear when we go on trips. I think the fact that Diana and I are both married has actually made our friendship stronger. That we make a point of travelling together, as a tetrad, at least once a year has taught me that a long friendship has to be maintained. So does family, but, unlike family, a friendship can be deprioritized. My mother will always be my mother, and I will always have space for her, but that’s not how it works with friends. I can choose to take my heart away.

Diana and I and our husbands have now travelled to Europe a few times. No fights, no drama, except the comedic kind. In Paris, Diana was tricked, by her husband and mine, into knocking back a wineglass that had a dead fly in it. In London, at the Harry Potter Warner Bros. Studios, in the Great Hall decked out for the Yule Ball (Diana is a Harry Potter fanatic), her husband—still her boyfriend then—was set to propose, but we couldn’t figure out how to open the “snitch” ring box and we couldn’t get the ring out. In Europe, trains have four seats facing one another. When Diana and her husband and my husband have fallen asleep, and I’m the only one awake guarding our stuff and checking the stops, I think, Why is it always me who stays awake? I also think, I never want this to change.

I chose the name Diana for my friend in tribute to Diana Barry, the best friend of the “Anne of Green Gables” books, by Lucy Maud Montgomery—a series that had an enormous impact on me. They were the first novels I read from beginning to end in English, and I distinctly remember having to look up the term “kindred spirits.” Anne is an orphan who then finds great friends and thrives. A lot of children’s books have this trajectory. See also: Harry Potter.

A final anecdote: the building that I live in houses both faculty and students. Often, I smell weed in the stairwells. Every weekend of the school year, students, never dressed for the weather, are just leaving to go out as my husband and I are coming back in. Sometimes I can’t even move through the lobby, because, when there’s a party in the building, every student is trying to sign in three others. Faculty and students share the common spaces, the laundry room, the elevators. It is very awkward to bump into familiar students while you are removing your underwear from the dryer or while they are removing theirs. A terrible arrangement, I tell people. Mixing students and teachers. But here is something that happened the other day while I was writing this essay. From the lobby, I entered the elevator with my dog. A pair of summer students came in, too, with their suitcases and totes, and my dog and I were pushed into a corner. I was annoyed that summer students were already moving in, less than two weeks after the regular ones had left. I imagined more weed, more parties, full washers and dryers, rank trash drips in the hallways for workers to clean up. Then the two students started talking about their afternoon plans. Today, they were going to go to Central Park, sit on a blanket, make friendship bracelets, and braid each other’s hair. They were earnest. I heard no sarcasm. An interloper to this casual, wholesome moment, I was reminded that, though most friendships are temporary, they are very beautiful in bloom. The friends left the elevator laughing, tote bag to tote bag. All my annoyance went away. ♦

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As a Teenager in Europe, I Went to Nudist Beaches All the Time. 30 Years Later, Would the Experience Be the Same?

In July 2017, I wrote an article about toplessness for Vogue Italia. The director, actor, and political activist Lina Esco had emerged from the world of show business to question public nudity laws in the United States with 2014’s Free the Nipple . Her film took on a life of its own and, thanks to the endorsement from the likes of Miley Cyrus, Cara Delevingne, and Willow Smith, eventually developed into a whole political movement, particularly on social media where the hashtag #FreeTheNipple spread at lightning speed. The same year as that piece, actor Alyssa Milano tweeted “me too” and encouraged others who had been sexually assaulted to do the same, building on the movement activist Tarana Burke had created more than a decade earlier. The rest is history.

In that Vogue article, I chatted with designer Alessandro Michele about a shared memory of our favorite topless beaches of our youth. Anywhere in Italy where water appeared—be it the hard-partying Riviera Romagnola, the traditionally chic Amalfi coast and Sorrento peninsula, the vertiginous cliffs and inlets of Italy’s continuation of the French Côte d’Azur or the towering volcanic rocks of Sicily’s mythological Riviera dei Ciclopi—one was bound to find bodies of all shapes and forms, naturally topless.

In the ’90s, growing up in Italy, naked breasts were everywhere and nobody thought anything about it. “When we look at our childhood photos we recognize those imperfect breasts and those bodies, each with their own story. I think of the ‘un-beauty’ of that time and feel it is actually the ultimate beauty,” Michele told me.

Indeed, I felt the same way. My relationship with toplessness was part of a very democratic cultural status quo. If every woman on the beaches of the Mediterranean—from the sexy girls tanning on the shoreline to the grandmothers eating spaghetti al pomodoro out of Tupperware containers under sun umbrellas—bore equally naked body parts, then somehow we were all on the same team. No hierarchies were established. In general, there was very little naked breast censorship. Free nipples appeared on magazine covers at newsstands, whether tabloids or art and fashion magazines. Breasts were so naturally part of the national conversation and aesthetic that Ilona Staller (also known as Cicciolina) and Moana Pozzi, two porn stars, cofounded a political party called the Love Party. I have a clear memory of my neighbor hanging their party’s banner out his window, featuring a topless Cicciolina winking.

A lot has changed since those days, but also since that initial 2017 piece. There’s been a feminist revolution, a transformation of women’s fashion and gender politics, the absurd overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction in New York, the intensely disturbing overturning of Roe v Wade and the current political battle over reproductive rights radiating from America and far beyond. One way or another, the female body is very much the site of political battles as much as it is of style and fashion tastes. And maybe for this reason naked breasts seem to populate runways and street style a lot more than they do beaches—it’s likely that being naked at a dinner party leaves more of a permanent mark than being naked on a glamorous shore. Naked “dressing” seems to be much more popular than naked “being.” It’s no coincidence that this year Saint Laurent, Chloé, Ferragamo, Tom Ford, Gucci, Ludovic de Saint Sernin, and Valentino all paid homage to sheer dressing in their collections, with lacy dresses, see-through tops, sheer silk hosiery fabric, and close-fitting silk dresses. The majority of Anthony Vaccarello’s fall 2024 collection was mostly transparent. And even off the runway, guests at the Saint Laurent show matched the mood. Olivia Wilde appeared in a stunning see-through dark bodysuit, Georgia May Jagger wore a sheer black halter top, Ebony Riley wore a breathtaking V-neck, and Elsa Hosk went for translucent polka dots.

In some strange way, it feels as if the trends of the ’90s have swapped seats with those of today. When, in 1993, a 19-year-old Kate Moss wore her (now iconic) transparent, bronze-hued Liza Bruce lamé slip dress to Elite Model Agency’s Look of the Year Awards in London, I remember seeing her picture everywhere and feeling in awe of her daring and grace. I loved her simple sexy style, with her otherworldly smile, the hair tied back in a bun. That very slip has remained in the collective unconscious for decades, populating thousands of internet pages, but in remembering that night Moss admitted that the nude look was totally unintentional: “I had no idea why everyone was so excited—in the darkness of Corinne [Day’s] Soho flat, the dress was not see-through!” That’s to say that nude dressing was usually mostly casual and not intellectualized in the context of a larger movement.

But today nudity feels loaded in different ways. In April, actor and author Julia Fox appeared in Los Angeles in a flesh-colored bra that featured hairy hyper-realist prints of breasts and nipples, and matching panties with a print of a sewn-up vagina and the words “closed” on it, as a form of feminist performance art. Breasts , an exhibition curated by Carolina Pasti, recently opened as part of the 60th Venice Biennale at Palazzo Franchetti and showcases works that span from painting and sculpture to photography and film, reflecting on themes of motherhood, empowerment, sexuality, body image, and illness. The show features work by Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois, and an incredible painting by Bernardino Del Signoraccio of Madonna dell’Umiltà, circa 1460-1540. “It was fundamental for me to include a Madonna Lactans from a historical perspective. In this intimate representation, the Virgin reveals one breast while nurturing the child, the organic gesture emphasizing the profound bond between mother and child,” Pasti said when we spoke.

Through her portrayal of breasts, she delves into the delicate balance of strength and vulnerability within the female form. I spoke to Pasti about my recent musings on naked breasts, which she shared in a deep way. I asked her whether she too noticed a disparity between nudity on beaches as opposed to the one on streets and runways, and she agreed. Her main concern today is around censorship. To Pasti, social media is still far too rigid around breast exposure and she plans to discuss this issue through a podcast that she will be launching in September, together with other topics such as motherhood, breastfeeding, sexuality, and breast cancer awareness.

With summer at the door, it was my turn to see just how much of the new reread on transparency would apply to beach life. In the last few years, I noticed those beaches Michele and I reminisced about have grown more conservative and, despite being the daughter of unrepentant nudists and having a long track record of militant topless bathing, I myself have felt a bit more shy lately. Perhaps a woman in her 40s with two children is simply less prone to taking her top off, but my memories of youth are populated by visions of bare-chested mothers surveilling the coasts and shouting after their kids in the water. So when did we stop? And why? When did Michele’s era of “un-beauty” end?

In order to get back in touch with my own naked breasts I decided to revisit the nudist beaches of my youth to see what had changed. On a warm day in May, I researched some local topless beaches around Rome and asked a friend to come with me. Two moms, plus our four children, two girls and two boys of the same ages. “Let’s make an experiment of this and see what happens,” I proposed.

The kids all yawned, but my friend was up for it. These days to go topless, especially on urban beaches, you must visit properties that have an unspoken nudist tradition. One of these in Rome is the natural reserve beach at Capocotta, south of Ostia, but I felt a bit unsure revisiting those sands. In my memory, the Roman nudist beaches often equated to encounters with promiscuous strangers behind the dunes. I didn’t want to expose the kids, so, being that I am now a wise adult, I went ahead and picked a compromise. I found a nude-friendly beach on the banks of the Farfa River, in the rolling Sabina hills.

We piled into my friend’s car and drove out. The kids were all whining about the experiment. “We don’t want to see naked mums!” they complained. “Can’t you just lie and say you went to a nudist beach?”

We parked the car and walked across the medieval fairy-tale woods until we reached the path that ran along the river. All around us were huge trees and gigantic leaves. It had rained a lot recently and the vegetation had grown incredibly. We walked past the remains of a Roman road. The colors all around were bright green, the sky almost fluorescent blue. The kids got sidetracked by the presence of frogs. According to the indications, the beach was about a mile up the river. Halfway down the path, we bumped into a couple of young guys in fanny packs. I scanned them for signs of quintessential nudist attitude, but realized I actually had no idea what that was. I asked if we were headed in the right direction to go to “the beach”. They nodded and gave us a sly smile, which I immediately interpreted as a judgment about us as mothers, and more generally about our age, but I was ready to vindicate bare breasts against ageism.

We reached a small pebbled beach, secluded and bordered by a huge trunk that separated it from the path. A group of girls was there, sharing headphones and listening to music. To my dismay they were all wearing the tops and bottoms of their bikinis. One of them was in a full-piece bathing suit and shorts. “See, they are all wearing bathing suits. Please don’t be the weird mums who don’t.”

At this point, it was a matter of principle. My friend and I decided to take our bathing suits off completely, if only for a moment, and jumped into the river. The boys stayed on the beach with full clothes and shoes on, horrified. The girls went in behind us with their bathing suits. “Are you happy now? my son asked. “Did you prove your point?”

I didn’t really know what my point actually was. I think a part of me wanted to feel entitled to those long-gone decades of naturalism. Whether this was an instinct, or as Pasti said, “an act that was simply tied to the individual freedom of each woman”, it was hard to tell. At this point in history, the two things didn’t seem to cancel each other out—in fact, the opposite. Taking off a bathing suit, at least for my generation who never had to fight for it, had unexpectedly turned into a radical move and maybe I wanted to be part of the new discourse. Also, the chances of me going out in a fully sheer top were slim these days, but on the beach it was different. I would always fight for an authentic topless experience.

After our picnic on the river, we left determined to make our way—and without children—to the beaches of Capocotta. In truth, no part of me actually felt very subversive doing something I had been doing my whole life, but it still felt good. Once a free breast, always a free breast.

This article was originally published on British Vogue .

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Kipper ai: the breakthrough essay rewriter for flawless, undetectable academic writing .

• August 27, 2024

Every tool that shakes up a market has been met with fears of a reduction in individual skill, the value of the finished product, or even total human obsolescence as a result of technological innovation. Computers and calculators are still avoided even in the modern academic setting, amid fears that students will not be able to write, research, or perform mathematical equations without the assistance of a machine.  

Innovations designed to ease the workflow and improve efficiency have always been met with such skepticism, and now AI is the next scrutinized advancement. 

Fear of the Calculator and an AI Essay Writer  

Much like computers and calculators before it, Kipper AI is a tool designed to assist students in their essay-writing coursework. It is a tool for improving efficiency and achieving better results from one’s work; after all, the human mind remains the guiding force behind the AI’s output. Kipper is meant to provide students with a means of completing tasks in a quick, but driven manner, taking a principled approach to an AI generator for essays. 

The Best AI for Writing Essays  

As AI becomes more integrated with modern technology, schools and companies have responded by using AI checkers such as TurnItIn and GPTZero to scrutinize submitted writing. Rather than understanding the tremendous benefit of AI essay writers to enhance productivity, schools are limiting students to traditional methods by using an AI essay detector and AI content checkers to restrict these new problem-solving resources.  

How Kipper Bypasses AI Detectors  

Kipper AI believes AI integration is an innovative step forward for productivity, and students should be familiarizing themselves with its processes rather than being discouraged from using them to their fullest potential. In accordance with this belief, Kipper AI has developed the best AI writing tool, capable of detector bypass and humanization. 

Kipper AI’s solution is to not only provide a high-quality, plagiarism-free essay writer , but to incorporate AI detection tools into its program. Using these tools in conjunction with the AI enables students to identify where their work might be flagged as AI, and rework those sections, avoiding any fears of their work being invalidated by TurnItIn or GPTZero.  

More than an AI Checker  

In addition to automating tedious essay work with zero detectability, Kipper AI offers a range of other tools and services designed to help students keep up with coursework and excel in their studies. Kipper AI features a Chatbot Tutor designed to help students find answers in lengthy PDFs and YouTube videos, or other sources the professor provides. The Chatbot Tutor more than lives up to its title, able to assist and teach on tasks at any time. An AI summarizer built into Kipper AI can take those same resources and create summaries, bringing essential information to the surface from beneath pages of reading or hours of watching videos.  

Why Kipper AI Avoids AI Detectors  

The world is based on innovation, and to deny progress in educational efficiency is to prevent students from embracing a new future. Students now have access to problem-solving skills previously unknown to other generations but are prevented from using them to their full extent. Kipper AI ensures students can make use of the tools available to them, bypassing AI detectors and allowing access to the full potential of AI. 

DISCLAIMER: No part of the story was written by The Signal editorial staff.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-warnings-from-democrats-about-project-2025-and-donald-trump

Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and Donald Trump

This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact .

Project 2025 has a starring role in this week’s Democratic National Convention.

And it was front and center on Night 1.

WATCH: Hauling large copy of Project 2025, Michigan state Sen. McMorrow speaks at 2024 DNC

“This is Project 2025,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, said as she laid a hardbound copy of the 900-page document on the lectern. “Over the next four nights, you are going to hear a lot about what is in this 900-page document. Why? Because this is the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has warned Americans about “Trump’s Project 2025” agenda — even though former President Donald Trump doesn’t claim the conservative presidential transition document.

“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said July 23 in Milwaukee. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously, and can you believe they put that thing in writing?”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, has joined in on the talking point.

“Don’t believe (Trump) when he’s playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Walz said Aug. 9 in Glendale, Arizona.

Trump’s campaign has worked to build distance from the project, which the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, led with contributions from dozens of conservative groups.

Much of the plan calls for extensive executive-branch overhauls and draws on both long-standing conservative principles, such as tax cuts, and more recent culture war issues. It lays out recommendations for disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, eliminating certain climate protections and consolidating more power to the president.

Project 2025 offers a sweeping vision for a Republican-led executive branch, and some of its policies mirror Trump’s 2024 agenda, But Harris and her presidential campaign have at times gone too far in describing what the project calls for and how closely the plans overlap with Trump’s campaign.

PolitiFact researched Harris’ warnings about how the plan would affect reproductive rights, federal entitlement programs and education, just as we did for President Joe Biden’s Project 2025 rhetoric. Here’s what the project does and doesn’t call for, and how it squares with Trump’s positions.

Are Trump and Project 2025 connected?

To distance himself from Project 2025 amid the Democratic attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he “knows nothing” about it and has “no idea” who is in charge of it. (CNN identified at least 140 former advisers from the Trump administration who have been involved.)

The Heritage Foundation sought contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations for its policy vision for the next Republican presidency, which was published in 2023.

Project 2025 is now winding down some of its policy operations, and director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, is stepping down, The Washington Post reported July 30. Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita denounced the document.

WATCH: A look at the Project 2025 plan to reshape government and Trump’s links to its authors

However, Project 2025 contributors include a number of high-ranking officials from Trump’s first administration, including former White House adviser Peter Navarro and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

A recently released recording of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author and the former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, showed Vought saying Trump’s “very supportive of what we do.” He said Trump was only distancing himself because Democrats were making a bogeyman out of the document.

Project 2025 wouldn’t ban abortion outright, but would curtail access

The Harris campaign shared a graphic on X that claimed “Trump’s Project 2025 plan for workers” would “go after birth control and ban abortion nationwide.”

The plan doesn’t call to ban abortion nationwide, though its recommendations could curtail some contraceptives and limit abortion access.

What’s known about Trump’s abortion agenda neither lines up with Harris’ description nor Project 2025’s wish list.

Project 2025 says the Department of Health and Human Services Department should “return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”

It recommends that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its 2000 approval of mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion. Medication is the most common form of abortion in the U.S. — accounting for around 63 percent in 2023.

If mifepristone were to remain approved, Project 2025 recommends new rules, such as cutting its use from 10 weeks into pregnancy to seven. It would have to be provided to patients in person — part of the group’s efforts to limit access to the drug by mail. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to mifepristone’s FDA approval over procedural grounds.

WATCH: Trump’s plans for health care and reproductive rights if he returns to White House The manual also calls for the Justice Department to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act on mifepristone, which bans the mailing of “obscene” materials. Abortion access supporters fear that a strict interpretation of the law could go further to ban mailing the materials used in procedural abortions, such as surgical instruments and equipment.

The plan proposes withholding federal money from states that don’t report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention how many abortions take place within their borders. The plan also would prohibit abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funds. It also calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the training of medical professionals, including doctors and nurses, omits abortion training.

The document says some forms of emergency contraception — particularly Ella, a pill that can be taken within five days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy — should be excluded from no-cost coverage. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services, which involves a range of birth control methods, including emergency contraception.

Trump has recently said states should decide abortion regulations and that he wouldn’t block access to contraceptives. Trump said during his June 27 debate with Biden that he wouldn’t ban mifepristone after the Supreme Court “approved” it. But the court rejected the lawsuit based on standing, not the case’s merits. He has not weighed in on the Comstock Act or said whether he supports it being used to block abortion medication, or other kinds of abortions.

Project 2025 doesn’t call for cutting Social Security, but proposes some changes to Medicare

“When you read (Project 2025),” Harris told a crowd July 23 in Wisconsin, “you will see, Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

The Project 2025 document does not call for Social Security cuts. None of its 10 references to Social Security addresses plans for cutting the program.

Harris also misleads about Trump’s Social Security views.

In his earlier campaigns and before he was a politician, Trump said about a half-dozen times that he’s open to major overhauls of Social Security, including cuts and privatization. More recently, in a March 2024 CNBC interview, Trump said of entitlement programs such as Social Security, “There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.” However, he quickly walked that statement back, and his CNBC comment stands at odds with essentially everything else Trump has said during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump’s campaign website says that not “a single penny” should be cut from Social Security. We rated Harris’ claim that Trump intends to cut Social Security Mostly False.

Project 2025 does propose changes to Medicare, including making Medicare Advantage, the private insurance offering in Medicare, the “default” enrollment option. Unlike Original Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans have provider networks and can also require prior authorization, meaning that the plan can approve or deny certain services. Original Medicare plans don’t have prior authorization requirements.

The manual also calls for repealing health policies enacted under Biden, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. The law enabled Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers for the first time in history, and recently resulted in an agreement with drug companies to lower the prices of 10 expensive prescriptions for Medicare enrollees.

Trump, however, has said repeatedly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he will not cut Medicare.

Project 2025 would eliminate the Education Department, which Trump supports

The Harris campaign said Project 2025 would “eliminate the U.S. Department of Education” — and that’s accurate. Project 2025 says federal education policy “should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” The plan scales back the federal government’s role in education policy and devolves the functions that remain to other agencies.

Aside from eliminating the department, the project also proposes scrapping the Biden administration’s Title IX revision, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also would let states opt out of federal education programs and calls for passing a federal parents’ bill of rights similar to ones passed in some Republican-led state legislatures.

Republicans, including Trump, have pledged to close the department, which gained its status in 1979 within Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s presidential Cabinet.

In one of his Agenda 47 policy videos, Trump promised to close the department and “to send all education work and needs back to the states.” Eliminating the department would have to go through Congress.

What Project 2025, Trump would do on overtime pay

In the graphic, the Harris campaign says Project 2025 allows “employers to stop paying workers for overtime work.”

The plan doesn’t call for banning overtime wages. It recommends changes to some Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulations and to overtime rules. Some changes, if enacted, could result in some people losing overtime protections, experts told us.

The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).” This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In 2019, the Trump’s administration finalized a rule that expanded overtime pay eligibility to most salaried workers earning less than about $35,568, which it said made about 1.3 million more workers eligible for overtime pay. The Trump-era threshold is high enough to cover most line workers in lower-cost regions, Project 2025 said.

The Biden administration raised that threshold to $43,888 beginning July 1, and that will rise to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025. That would grant overtime eligibility to about 4 million workers, the Labor Department said.

It’s unclear how many workers Project 2025’s proposal to return to the Trump-era overtime threshold in some parts of the country would affect, but experts said some would presumably lose the right to overtime wages.

Other overtime proposals in Project 2025’s plan include allowing some workers to choose to accumulate paid time off instead of overtime pay, or to work more hours in one week and fewer in the next, rather than receive overtime.

Trump’s past with overtime pay is complicated. In 2016, the Obama administration said it would raise the overtime to salaried workers earning less than $47,476 a year, about double the exemption level set in 2004 of $23,660 a year.

But when a judge blocked the Obama rule, the Trump administration didn’t challenge the court ruling. Instead it set its own overtime threshold, which raised the amount, but by less than Obama.

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Guest Essay

The Human Cost of Your Breakfast Banana

By Ignacio Gómez G.

Mr. Gómez G. is the director of “Noticias Uno,” a Colombian news program. He has covered drugs, crime and corporate corruption in Colombia for 40 years.

Although several El Espectador journalists were killed in the 1980s and ’90s, many young reporters aspired to being on the staff of the storied Colombian newspaper at the end of the 20th century. I loved working there, despite the risks. After the Medellín Cartel bombed our headquarters, my colleagues and I rescued from the rubble the desk on which Gabriel García Márquez wrote his first stories for the paper.

We dreamed that an invisible Mr. García Márquez, from that empty desk, urged us to pursue stories that would expose injustice in Colombia. In 1998, when The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the American banana company Chiquita Brands had bribed Colombian officials to obtain a license for the use of a port loading facility in Turbo, Urabá, a city on Colombia’s coast, I began investigating the firm as if Mr. García Márquez himself had handed me the assignment.

Chiquita denied the allegations of the 1998 Enquirer story. The paper later publicly apologized and renounced the investigation after it was revealed that a reporter lied about sourcing and illegally obtained voice mail records. But at El Espectador we felt that The Enquirer was on to something. We published the allegations, noting that the paper had retracted the article and the story’s reporter was being investigated by the police in Ohio. And for years — even when I left El Espectador for “Noticias Uno,” a nightly news program — I continued to look into the company. In 2002, after speaking with Nicaraguan police and military officials as well as the police in Panama, I reported that 3,000 weapons for the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary group known as the AUC, had landed in the Urabá port from Nicaragua and that Chiquita appeared to have been aware the militants were using its facilities to receive weapons.

Now, I like to think that Mr. García Márquez would have smiled at the outcome of a Florida lawsuit against Chiquita. In June, a jury found Chiquita liable for the deaths of eight men killed by the AUC, which Chiquita helped finance. (Seventeen years earlier, the Department of Justice found that Chiquita paid the group over $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 .) The firm was ordered to pay $38.3 million in damages to the men’s families. It was the first time that Chiquita was found liable for its actions in Latin America. A representative for Chiquita, responding to questions about this essay, said that the company’s payments to the AUC were made under duress and it is appealing the verdict.

The world has known something was amiss in the banana business for a while. In Colombia, “Noticias Uno” had reported on Chiquita’s association with the AUC since the early 2000s. And while that relationship has come under legal scrutiny in the United States, Chiquita has yet to face judgment in Colombia. The Florida case raised long neglected ethical questions in both countries about the real cost of one of the least expensive fruits in American supermarkets. We should all ask ourselves: How much bloodshed is behind the bananas we eat for breakfast?

In the Urabá region, there’s been far too much. Chiquita set up an operation there, where the land to grow bananas was inexpensive, but it was forced to pay the AUC through its subsidiary in Colombia to operate safely, the company has said . In the 20th century, Fusarium wilt, a deadly fungus also known as Panama disease, destroyed banana crops in parts of the Caribbean and Central America but not in Colombia. Then, in 1998, some of Chiquita’s banana operations in Honduras and Guatemala suffered hurricane damage , costing the company $74 million. Chiquita, it seemed, accepted that paying the paramilitaries was the cost of doing business in Colombia.

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Teen Shares Her Harvard Admissions Essay That Will Resonate With Anyone Who Lost a Parent

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Abigail Mack (@abigail_vmack)

When Abigail Mack sat down to write her college admissions essay, she began with a bold assertion: she hates the letter “S.” The essay, which she shared in a series of videos on TikTok , caught the attention of millions of people and earned her admission into Harvard University’s class of 2025 (which has an admission rate of just 3.43%). The reason it resonated with so many was—and remains—that her writing speaks to anyone who has lost a parent.

After declaring that she hates the letter “S,” Mack explains why. “Of the 164,777 words with ‘S,' I only grapple with one,” she writes. “To condemn an entire letter because of its use .0006 percent of the time sounds statistically absurd, but that one case changed 100 percent of my life. I used to have two parents, but now I have one, and the ‘S' in ‘parents' isn't going anywhere.”

“‘S' follows me,” she says. “I can't get through a day without being reminded that while my friends went out to dinner with their parents, I ate with my parent. As I write this essay, there is a blue line under the word ‘parent' telling me to check my grammar; even Grammarly assumes that I should have parents, but cancer doesn't listen to edit suggestions. I won't claim that my situation is as unique as one in 164,777, but it is still an exception to the rule—an outlier. The world isn't meant for this special case.”

The essence of this writing captures the devastation that someone feels when losing their parent and how they push forward through grief. For Mack, that took the form of “distracting herself” from the letter “S.” She threw herself into sports, clubs, and other activities. “I couldn't fill the loss that ‘S' left in my life, but I could at least make sure I didn't have to think about it. There were so many things in my life I couldn't control, so I controlled what I could—my schedule.”

By throwing herself into so many endeavors, Mack eventually realized that of all the ones she tried, she enjoyed theater, academics, and politics the most. There was then a shift; instead of using activities as distractions, she found she was chasing a double “S”—paSSion. “‘S' got me moving, but it hasn't kept me going,” Mack said at the end of her essay. “I don't seek out sadness, so ‘S' must stay on the sidelines, and until I am completely ready, motivation is more than enough for me.”

After sharing her essay in its entirety, Mack filmed herself opening up the email from Harvard telling her that she was accepted. Completely overwhelmed and on the verge of tears, it shows the complexities inherent in life. That even when the worst happens, we continue to move forward and can find joy existing with sadness.

Abigail Mack wrote a touching college admissions essay that will speak to anyone who has lost a parent.  Watch her talk about it here:

@a_vmack The Common App Essay that got me into Harvard ##harvard ##ShadowAndBone ##SkipTheRinse ##college ##loss ##singleparent ##fyp ♬ original sound – Abigail Mack

@a_vmack Reply to @a_vmack My Common App Essay that got me into Harvard part 2 ##harvard ##fyp ##xyzbca ♬ original sound – Abigail Mack

@a_vmack I hate the letter “S” – part 3! ##harvard ##s ##IFeelWeightless ##ChipsGotTalent ##commonapp ##fyp ##college ##writing ##passion ##ihatetheletters ##loss ♬ original sound – Abigail Mack

@a_vmack I hate the letter “S” – part 4 (the final part)! ##harvard ##s ##IFeelWeightless ##ChipsGotTalent ##commonapp ##fyp ##college ##writing ##passion ##xyzbca ♬ original sound – Abigail Mack

The essay helped Mack get accepted to Harvard. Here's her reaction upon learning the news.

@a_vmack I didn’t have a voice for a week after this 🥰 ##harvard ##college ##accepted ##fyp ##foryou ##xyzbca ##MakeMomEpic ♬ original sound – Abigail Mack

Abigail Mack: Instagram | TikTok h/t: [ BuzzFeed ]

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Girl — Girl By Jamaica Kincaid Analysis

Girl by Jamaica Kincaid Analysis

• Categories: Girl

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Words: 535 |

Published: Mar 13, 2024

Words: 535 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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One of the key themes in girl is the portrayal of gender roles and the ways in which they shape the lives of women., furthermore, girl also explores the power dynamics within the mother-daughter relationship., in addition to gender roles and power dynamics, girl also delves into the consequences of societal expectations on individual identity..

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