Watching Carrie Bradshaw—erstwhile sex columnist, intrepid singleton, striver—float down the majestic staircase of her new Gramercy townhouse on a recent episode of And Just Like That while wearing a transparent tulle gown, on an errand to mail a letter, is one of the most cognitively dissonant television experiences I’ve had recently. And Just Like That has never been a particularly imaginative show with regard to women in midlife, but there’s still something fundamentally off about seeing one of the canonical female characters of our era transformed into a Gilded Age archetype, worrying about a garden renovation and choosing back-ordered fabric for a chaise. Carrie, suddenly, has many hats. She communicates with a lover via handwritten notes while she waits for his liberation from the home front in Virginia.

What’s happened to Carrie, truly, is money. Two decades after Sex and the City rolled to a televised close, acknowledging that its own cultural relevance was waning, its characters continue in zombified form on And Just Like That, pickled in a state of extreme privilege where nothing can touch them. The drama is lifeless, involving rehashed old storylines about beeping alarm systems and “a woman’s right to shoes” that serve mostly as a backdrop for clothes. Charlotte, in a questionable lace workout jacket, worries that her dog has been unfairly canceled. Miranda, in one of a series of patterned blouses, gets really into a Love Island–style reality show. (Remember Jules and Mimi?) Lisa wears feathers to a fundraiser for her husband’s political campaign. Seema, in lingerie, nearly burns her apartment down when she falls asleep with a lit cigarette, but in the end, all she loses is an inch or so of hair.

The point of the show is no longer what happens, because nothing does. The point is to set up a series of visual tableaus showcasing all the things money can buy, as though the show were an animated special issue of Vogue or Architectural Digest. What’s stranger still is that a series that once celebrated women in the workplace has succumbed to financial ideals right out of Edith Wharton: The women who earned their money themselves (Miranda and Seema) somehow don’t have enough of it (spoiler—they still seem to have a lot), while the ones who married money (Carrie, Charlotte, Lisa) breeze through life as an array of lunches, fundraisers, and glamping trips, with some creative work dotted into the mix for variety. The banal details of exorbitant wealth—well, it’s all quite boring.

[Read: We need to talk about Miranda]

Lately, most of television seems stuck in the same mode. Virtually everything I’ve watched recently has been some variation of rich people pottering around in “aspirational” compounds. On Sirens and The Better Sister, glossy scenes of sleek couture and property porn upstage the intrigue of the plot. On Mountainhead, tech billionaires tussle in a Utah mountain retreat featuring 21,000 square feet of customized bowling alleys and basketball courts. On Your Friends & Neighbors, a disgraced hedge-fund manager sneers at the vacuous wealth of his gated community (where houses cost seven to eight figures), but also goes to criminal lengths to maintain his own living standards rather than lower them by even a smidge. And on With Love, Meghan, the humble cooking show has gotten a Montecito-money glow-up.

“I miss TV without rich people,” the writer Emily J. Smith noted last month on Substack, observing that even supposedly normie shows such as Tina Fey’s marital comedy The Four Seasons and Erin Foster’s unconventional rom-com Nobody Wants This seem to be playing out in worlds where money is just not an issue for anyone. This is a new development: As Smith points out, sitcoms including Roseanne and Married … With Children have historically featured families with recognizable financial constraints, and the more recent dramedies of the 2010s were riddled with economic anxiety. Reality television, it’s worth noting, has been fixated on the lifestyles of the rich and bored virtually since its inception, but as its biggest stars have grown their own fortunes exponentially, the genre has mostly stopped documenting anything other than wealth, which it fetishizes via the gaudy enclaves and private jets of Selling Sunset and Bling Empire.

Serialized shows, too, no longer seem interested in considering the stakes and subtleties of most people’s lives. Television is preoccupied with literary adaptations about troubled rich white women, barbed satires about absurdly wealthy people on vacation, thrillers about billionaire enclaves at the end of the world. Even our contemporary workplace series (Severance, Shrinking) play out in fictional realms where people work not for the humble paychecks that sustain their lives, but to escape the grief that might otherwise consume them.

What does it mean that our predominant fictional landscapes are all so undeniably “elevated,” to use a word cribbed from the Duchess of Sussex? And Just Like That is evidence of how hard it is for shows that take wealth for granted to have narrative stakes, and how stultifying they become as a result. But we also lose something vital when we no longer see 99 percent of American lives reflected on the small screen. Money isn’t just making TV boring. It’s also reshaping our collective psyche—building a shared sense of wealth as the only marker of a significant life, and rich people as the only people worthy of our gaze. We’re not supposed to be able to empathize with the characters on-screen, these strutting zoo animals in $1,200 shoes and $30,000-a-night villas. But we’re not being encouraged to empathize with any other kinds of characters, either—to see the full humanity and complexity of so many average people whose lives feel ever more precarious in this moment, and ever more in need of our awareness.

On an episode in the final season of Sex and the City, a socialite named Lexi Featherston cracks a floor-to-ceiling window, lights a cigarette, and declares that New York is over, O-V-E-R. “When did everybody stop smoking?” she sneers. “When did everybody pair off?” As the hostess glares at her, she continues: “No one’s fun anymore. Whatever happened to fun? God, I’m so bored I could die.”

Famous last words: Lexi, of course, promptly trips on her stiletto, falls out the absurdly dangerous glass panel, and plummets to her death. Her arc—from exalted ’80s It Girl to coked-up aging party girl—was supposed to represent finality, the termination of the city’s relevance as a cultural nexus. “It’s the end of an era,” Carrie says at Lexi’s funeral, where Stanford is elated to have scored VIP seats next to Hugh Jackman. “The party’s officially over,” Samantha agrees. After six seasons of transforming how a generation of women dated, dressed, even drank, Sex and the City seemed to be acknowledging that its own moment had come to an end. The characters were undeniably older, no longer seeking anthropological meaning in a SoHo nightclub at 3 a.m. But the city that the show documented—and popular culture more broadly—had shifted, too: toward less spontaneity, less rebellion, and infinitely higher incomes.

[Read: The ghost of a once era-defining show]

The year that final season aired, 2004, is possibly when television’s prurient obsession with rich people really kicked off, with the launch of shows including Desperate Housewives, Entourage, and, notably, The Apprentice. A year earlier, Fox had premiered a soapy drama called The O.C., which charted the rags–to–Range Rover adventures of a teen from Chino who ended up ensconced in the affluent coastal town of Newport Beach. Until then, it had never occurred to me that teenagers could wear Chanel or drive SUVs that cost six figures, although watching them rattle around in McMansions the size of the Met provided much of The O.C.’s visual thrill. In direct response to the show’s success, MTV debuted the reality show Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County a year later, and in 2006, Bravo countered with its own voyeuristic peek into the lives of the rich and fabulous—The Real Housewives of Orange County.

Documenting wealth enticingly on television is a difficult balancing act: You want to stoke enough envy that people are inspired to buy things (gratifying advertisers along the way), but not so much that you risk alienating the viewer. Reality TV pulled it off by starting small. The women on the first season of Real Housewives were well off, but not unimaginably so. They lived in high-end family homes, not sprawling temples of megawealth. Similarly, when Keeping Up With the Kardashians debuted in 2007, the family lived in a generous but chintzy bungalow, having not yet generated the billions of dollars that would later pay for their minimalist compounds in Calabasas and Hidden Hills.

During the 2008 financial crisis, a critic for The New York Times wondered whether the tanking global economy might doom the prospects of shows such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta, which had just premiered, and turn them into “a time capsule of the Bling Decade.” But the fragility of viewers’ own finances, oddly, seemed to make them more eager to watch. Shows about money gratified both people’s escapist impulses and the desire to critique those who didn’t seem worthy of their blessings. As Jennifer O’Connell, a producer for The Real Housewives of New York City, put it to the Times a year later: “Everyone likes to judge.”

The toxic, unhappy, rich-people shows that have more recently proliferated on prestige TV—the Succession and White Lotus and Big Little Lies variation—cover their backs with cynicism. Money doesn’t make you happy, they assert over and over, even though studies suggest otherwise. The documentation of extreme wealth on television with such clarifying bitterness, they imply, surely inoculates audiences from pernicious aspiration. Except it doesn’t: The Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in Sicily was fully booked for a good six months following the second season of The White Lotus, despite the fictional bodies floating in the water. And a study conducted at the London School of Economics in 2018 found that a person’s increased exposure to shows that regularly “glamourize fame, luxury, and the accumulation of wealth” made them more inclined to support welfare cuts; it also noted other studies that found that the more people watched materialistic media, the more anxious and unhappy they were likely to be in their own lives.

Watching shows about wealth does, however, seem to stimulate the desire to shop, which is maybe why this latest season of And Just Like That feels intended for an audience watching with a second screen in their hand—all the better to harvest the aspirational consumption the show’s lifestyles might generate. Streaming services are already tapping into the reams of data they have on viewers by serving them customized ads related to the series they might be watching, and many are also experimenting with e-commerce. You could argue that And Just Like That is honoring the spirit of Sex and the City by putting fashion front and center. But the vacant dullness of the new season feels wholly of its time: This is television for the skin-deep influencer age, not the messy, pioneering drama it once was.

More crucially, Carrie and company take up space that deprives us of more shows like The Pitt, one of a sparse handful of series documenting the workers trying to patch up the holes in an ever more unequal America. No one seems to have anticipated that the Max series would be such a success. As workers today are being squeezed “for all their worth, no more chit-chatting at the water cooler, we’ve gotten to a point where reality for most people is quite unpleasant,” Smith writes on Substack. “And executives are betting that we don’t actually want to watch it.” The reality of the TV business also underscores why shows that sell us something—even if it’s just the illusion of exceptional prosperity as a default—are easier to commission. But audiences will always be drawn to drama, and the stakes of defiantly deglamorized series such as The Bear and Slow Horses feel necessary in this moment, when the state of the future relies so much on the direction and quality of our attention.

On May 12 Donald Trump suddenly reduced the tariff on China from 145 percent to 30 percent. This may seem like a big reduction. But while the higher rate would have completely cut off trade with China, even the lower tariff rate, by my estimates, would cut U.S.-China trade by two-thirds. It wasn’t clear that much had changed.

But many retail investors, engaging in wishful thinking, interpreted the apparent climb-down as proof of concept for TACO — Trump always chickens out. So the stock market began behaving as if Trump would soon find an off-ramp out of his whole tariff obsession. Notably, however, the bond and currency markets, dominated by pros, didn’t let up on the “sell America” trade — the dollar continued to fall while interest rates continued to rise.

So I’m not convinced that the worst is over. In fact, I’m not convinced even though the U.S. Court of International Trade has pronounced Trump’s invocation of IEEPA, the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, to impose tariffs without Congressional approval illegal. (A colleague of mine used to return student papers with the comment YHTMAAAIYP — “you have too many acronyms and abbreviations in your paper.”)

In a conversation I had with Joseph Politano, who has been following the tariff issue very closely, he predicted that tariffs would be going up, not down, from here. His reasoning was that Trump would begin adding tariffs on specific goods to across-the-board tariffs on everything we import from a country. So far it looks as if he’s right: The tariff rate on steel has just jumped from an already very high level of 25 percent to 50 percent.

The court ruling against Trump’s invocation of a nonexistent economic emergency may slow him up, but he’ll probably find a number of workarounds — for example, the steel tariff is legally justified by claims that steel imports in particular threaten national security, rather than a claim that we’re facing a general economic emergency. I still see no sign of a tariff end game. And the legal wrangles over what Trump can and can’t do will only add the the uncertainty and sense of chaos that is strangling business investment.

First, however, a word about those taxes on steel imports, which are almost the Platonic ideal of a tariff that destroys jobs rather than creating them.

Here’s why: Nobody consumes steel directly. It’s an “intermediate good,” used in the production of, well, almost everything. So imposing a tariff that makes steel more expensive raises costs and reduces employment all across the manufacturing sector.

But won’t tariffs create jobs in the steel industry itself? Maybe a few. But the tariffs won’t create many jobs, because steel employs so few workers to begin with — fewer than 90,000 in 2024, out of total U.S. employment of 159 million:

You might think that we have so few steelworkers because we import it all, but we actually only import 27 percent of consumption, with the other 73 percent produced domestically. The point instead is that steel production is highly capital-intensive and just doesn’t employ many people — so steel tariffs can’t possibly create enough jobs to replace those lost elsewhere in manufacturing.

So steel tariffs don’t make any policy sense. But then neither does anything else in Trump’s trade war — and the nonsensical nature of the whole enterprise is why I don’t think he’ll find an off-ramp. After all, it’s obvious that the increased steel tariff wasn’t a considered policy, it was a temper tantrum after the Court of International Trade ruled against his other tariffs.

When you see Trump officials claiming that they’re in the process of negotiating trade deals with lots of countries — dozens! hundreds! thousands! — always ask, deals about what?

In Trump’s psychodrama version of world trade, other countries are snickering at us while they treat us “very badly,” shutting out our products with high tariffs and whatever. But the reality is that until Trump came in we were living in a world economy shaped by reciprocal trade agreements that brought tariffs down everywhere. The average tariffs the European Union charged on U.S. exports were less than 2 percent.

So if the EU is supposed to make big concessions to the United States, the question has to be, “concede what?” The EU can’t eliminate high tariffs that only exist in Trump’s fevered imagination.

During Trump’s first term China responded to his tariffs by making a never-honored promise to buy $200 billion of U.S. soybeans, allowing Trump to a glorious victory. But that strategem — making impressive-sounding but meaningless promises — isn’t available to either the EU or China this time. Trump’s tariff moves have been so extreme this time, his claims so grandiose, that he probably won’t accept the subterfuge — not least because he fears that everyone will be snickering “Taco, taco” behind his back.

In addition to imagining that foreign countries are engaged in dastardly trade practices nobody else can see, Trump and co. clearly have a distorted view of the balance of power, imagining that they can easily dictate terms (about what?) to the rest of the world.

The truth is that there are three roughly co-equal economic superpowers in the world: the United States, China and the European Union. All three rely significantly on access to the others’ markets, but not as much as you may imagine. China and the European Union each export around 3 percent of their GDP to the United States; losing a significant part of those exports would hurt, but the job losses could be significantly offset with expansionary monetary and fiscal policies.

And in full-scale economic warfare, access to the goods other nations produce becomes a lot more important than access to their markets. China understands this, which is why they are restricting exports of rare earths and certain kinds of batteries — going after our supply chains rather than our markets. And it’s a lot easier to use stimulus policies to offset job losses in export industries than it is to conjure up a domestic manufacturing base from scratch. China wants access to U.S. markets, but America needs Chinese rare earths, batteries and more.

So we’re in a situation where Trump imagines that the world is laughing at us over our open markets, but perceives correctly that everyone is laughing at him over the TACO thing. And at the same time he has delusions of grandeur when it comes to U.S. economic power.

Does this sound to you like a situation in Trump makes big boasts but effectively climbs down? That’s not how I see it. Instead, I think we’re in for a prolonged period of chaotic Trump lashing out through whatever trade weapon he can get his hands on. If you want to know where this is going, keep your eyes on the bond and currency markets, where cool-headed traders realize that U.S. policy is still being dictated by the whims of a mad king.

MUSICAL CODA

A useful one-sentence guide to the second Trump administration might go something like this: A lot happens under Donald Trump, but a lot un-happens, too.

In the past four months, President Trump has announced tariffs on Canada, paused tariffs on Canada, restarted tariffs on Canada, ruled out tariffs on certain Canadian goods, and then ruled in, and even raised, tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.

And that’s just for starters. On April 2, so-called Liberation Day, Trump announced a broader set of tariffs on almost every country in the world. Soon after, the plan was half-suspended. Then Trump announced a new set of elevated tariffs on China, from which he backtracked as well. Next the courts, as often happens, took over the job of erasing the president’s previously announced policies. Last week, a trade court struck down the president’s entire Liberation Day tariff regime as unconstitutional, only for a federal circuit court to reinstate the tariffs shortly thereafter. Now a higher court has the opportunity to do the funniest thing: undo the undoing of the undoing of the tariffs, which have been in a permanent state of being undone ever since they were created.

Got all that? No, you most certainly do not, and neither does anybody else. Economists and corporate executives I’ve interviewed to understand future tariff policy have communicated to me a combination of confusion, fury, and resignation. Commentators have noticed the chaos too, of course. Observing how frequently Trump seems to back out of his own brinkmanship, the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong memorably deemed this trend TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

[David A. Graham: The TACO presidency]

Un-happening doesn’t affect just trade and economic policy. In the realm of foreign policy, the Trump administration paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine after the ignominious on-camera spat between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Vice President J. D. Vance. Trump went further, claiming that Ukraine had started the war and that Zelensky was a dictator—raising the prospect that the administration was on the verge of explicitly aligning with Russia. Days later, the administration reversed course and resumed intelligence sharing and security assistance. Trump has since attacked Russian President Vladimir Putin for being “absolutely CRAZY!”

Un-happening also affects media, immigration, science, and education policy. Judges have ruled that the administration improperly froze grant money, inappropriately blocked the Associated Press from the White House press pool, and illegally sought to place sanctions on law firms that have done work, or employed lawyers, that Trump found unsuitable. On immigration, judges have blocked several of the administration’s measures, including its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to remove migrants and its attempt to bar Harvard’s international students. Federal judges have blocked so much of the Trump agenda that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has described the constitutional balance of power as a form of “judicial tyranny.” “I know this is inflammatory,” Vance said in an interview with The New York Times, “but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people.”

The administration’s claims to monarchical power are a real threat to America’s constitutional order. But its executive orders and policy feints are so haphazard and poorly articulated that they amount to a kind of autocratic takeover written in smudge-able crayon: terrifying, cartoonish, and vulnerable to erasure, all at once.

[J. Michael Luttig: The end of rule of law in America]

This is not to say that Americans should ignore Trump’s efforts to make confetti of the Constitution. Rather, when evaluating any one Trump policy, one has to keep front of mind the possibility that it simply won’t exist by the end of the week. Despite an energetic effort by some right-wing intellectuals to make Trump out to be some kind of 14-dimensional-chess player, his approach doesn’t resemble chess so much as a denial-of-service attack on a functioning government.

All this un-happening shows both the upside and the downside of Trump’s political instincts. The president’s slippery relationship to his own policy agenda can serve as a kind of superpower, as Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times. The TACO reputation is “crucial to Trump’s political resilience,” because “the willingness to swerve and backpedal and contradict himself is a big part of what keeps the president viable.” The constant backtracking gives Trump the ability to both bend the Constitution to its breaking point and always step back to claim that “anything extreme is also provisional,” Douthat wrote. Indeed, Trump’s approval rating for trade has rebounded since its Liberation Day implosion, according to several polls.

Questions of popularity aside, however, businesses tend to prefer certainty over promises and threats that keep disappearing. At some point, Trump’s pledge to reinvigorate American industry and energy will require fat investments in factories and supply chains. Multi-hundred-million-dollar investments require clear expectations of financial return. Those aren’t going to happen in a world where each policy idea boasts a half-life of 48 hours. Steve Bannon coined one of the most famous Trump-world truisms when he revealed MAGA’s media strategy to “flood the zone with shit.” Far stranger, however, is the administration’s insistence on flooding the policy zone with Schrödinger’s cats—executive orders and Truth Social posts that exist in a liminal state among existence, nonexistence, and imminent radioactive decay.

The substantive problem with the MAGA agenda isn’t just that too much is happening for any median voter to follow; it’s that too much is un-happening for employers, investors, and consumers to know what the hell to do about it.

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” This line is usually attributed to Ronald Reagan. Whoever said it definitely had a point, and not just about politics. If you’re trying to explain to people, be they voters or bond investors, that you aren’t really as bad or untrustworthy as you seem, you’re already in deep trouble.

So when I saw Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, declaring Sunday that “The United States of America is never going to default, that is never going to happen,” my reaction was, “Uh-oh.”

And it’s not just me. For generations investors have treated U.S. government debt as the ultimate safe asset. Whenever disaster strikes — even if it’s disaster largely made in America, like the 2008 subprime crisis — bond buyers pile into U.S. Treasuries, because America is a serious country, and the idea that we would fail to honor our debts was unthinkable.

But are we still that country? Markets seem to have doubts.

Yesterday the Financial Times had a neat chart showing that there used to be a clear relationship between U.S. interest rates and the international value of the dollar. Actually, the chart was a bit too neat: When I set out to reproduce it, I found that the FT chose a time period during which the relationship looked especially clear. Still, it used to be true that when U.S. interest rates rose, so did the dollar, because higher yields pulled in foreign capital. But since Donald Trump returned to power, that relationship has broken down. Instead, we’ve seen a combination of rising interest rates and a falling dollar:

As many have noted, what we’ve been seeing in recent months, with interest rates and the dollar moving in opposite directions, doesn’t look like what we normally see in the United States, or for that matter advanced nations in general. Instead, it’s the kind of thing one sees in emerging markets, where big market moves often reflect crises of confidence: International investors lose faith, pulling their money out, and capital flight causes both a falling currency and rising interest rates.

Here, for example, is what Mexico looked like during the “tequila crisis” of 1994-5, which involved both soaring interest rates and a plunging peso:

Why are markets beginning to treat America as unreliable? It’s not just the debt numbers. Yes, we have large debts, but we’re an immensely wealthy country that, among other things, has lower average taxes than most of our peers. So we certainly have the resources to honor our debts.

But do we have the political will? Maybe even more important, do we have the political seriousness?

Like many economists, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing the substance of Trump’s tariffs — how much they are likely to raise prices and reduce trade volumes. I’ve also written about the impacts of policy uncertainty, about how hard it is for businesses to make plans when they have little idea what tariff rates will be even a few months from now, let alone over the next few years.

But I wonder whether we’ve spent enough time looking at the policy process — how decisions get made in Trump’s America. Consider: On April 2, “Liberation Day,” Trump announced extremely high tariffs on many countries, the biggest tariff hike in U.S. history. The tariff rates — which differed hugely from country to country — were determined by a formula universally panned as stupid and ridiculous. And this tariff announcement was made with so little planning and forethought that it included taxes on imports from remote islands inhabited only by penguins.

Then, a week later, these tariffs were replaced by a completely different set of tariffs. How did that happen? Two of Trump’s cabinet members were able to beard him in the Oval Office while Peter Navarro, responsible for the original tariffs, was in another meeting.

Does this sound like policymaking in a serious country?

Then there’s the budget bill making its way through Congress. It’s a terrible thing, imposing savage cuts on social programs (and decimating U.S. science) while giving such big tax cuts to the wealthy that it will explode the deficit. But content aside, notice that this hugely important piece of legislation is being rushed through with essentially no hearings or analysis.

And when outsiders, including the Congressional Budget Office and a variety of think tanks — conservative and centrist as well as progressive — have put out the analyses the bill’s sponsors won’t, pointing out the likely effects on debt, health coverage, and so on, the G.O.P. response has basically been to accuse all of the independent analysts of being part of a globalist conspiracy.

Wait, it gets worse. The name of the legislation — not its nickname, its official title — is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, because that’s what Trump has been calling it. Are we a mature republic with a normal head of state, or are we being ruled by Kim Jong Un in orange makeup?

Why, next thing you’ll be telling me that key policy decisions, leading to layoffs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and many deaths around the world, have been made by a presidential crony whose erratic behavior may have reflected massive consumption of ketamine, Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. Oh, wait.

Imagine yourself as a foreigner considering investing in the United States. You may well know that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a “revenge” provision that would allow the U.S. government to impose extra taxes on foreign investors whose home countries have policies America doesn’t like. You probably know that one of Trump’s advisers has suggested the forced conversion of short-term debt into century bonds. Once upon a time everyone would have dismissed these things as stuff that couldn’t happen in America. Now? Who knows?

In a way, the amazing thing is that we haven’t seen even more capital flight. Presumably investors still can’t believe that America has changed so much from the responsible, reliable nation it seemed to be just a few months ago.

But I think they’re headed for a rude awakening.

MUSICAL CODA

BRAINERD, MN—Admitting that it was finally time to grow up and start making healthy life choices, local man Russell McGrath told reporters Monday that he was cutting back from drinking six normal beers a day and would now just drink three huge ones. “While it may have been fine back in my 20s, drinking a whole six-pack just isn’t sustainable anymore, and honestly, three stovepipe cans is more than enough,” said McGrath, adding that on nights when he brings home beer from the craft brewery near his home, he has reduced his consumption to a single growler. “It’s about learning some self-control and actually caring about what I put in my body. Pounding a six-pack is fun, but now I enjoy a nice relaxing evening with just a few tall boys, and I feel a whole lot better the next morning. It was actually a real wake-up call when my doctor told me to cut back, and I was nervous, but swapping out all those cans of Miller High Life for a couple bombers of imperial stout has been way easier than I expected. It’s the best decision I could have made for my future. I’ve even convinced some of my buddies who were making fun of me to swap their six-packs for some 1.5-liter Belgian magnums, and they say they feel fucking incredible.” At press time, McGrath had reportedly realized he could be healthy without even having to track his drinking if he just switched from beer to wine.

The post Man Cuts Back From 6 Normal Beers Per Day To 3 Huge Ones appeared first on The Onion.

Mitch Sutton has always been into airplanes, but things really took off five years ago when he bought a house in Burien, Wash., with a great view of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and Mount Rainier.

The house to the northwest of the airport runway provides a unique vantage point, where Sutton can see planes taxiing as well as taking off and landing all day and night.

“I love airplanes, but it’s different when you live under them,” Sutton said, recounting his reservations about buying the house. “But the airport with the mountain behind it? I was just like, ‘I can’t pass up this view.'”

A month into the East Coast native’s move, he didn’t even hear the planes anymore. And now he’s so soothed by flyovers that he leaves a bedroom sliding glass door open so he can hear them at night.

To bring that joy to others in some form, Sutton is running a new project called Rainier Aviation which includes a 24/7 YouTube livestream so that other aviation geeks and plane spotters can marvel at aircraft and the mountain that provides Sea-Tac’s quintessential Northwest backdrop. He pairs the video with real-time flight traffic control audio.

“Being an enthusiast, I do look for plane-spotting channels, and Sea-Tac just didn’t have one,” Sutton said. “It’s something I see every day and appreciate every day, so I just felt like it was time to share that view with everybody else.”

Sutton runs the livestream from equipment mounted on a 10-foot rooftop mast that’s stabilized with guy wires. He uses two pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras with 600mm zoom, complete with night vision. He’s also a budding aviation still photographer, using a Sony DC-10 Mark IV for close-ups of planes taking off against Rainier, which he shares on his website and Instagram.

In just a few weeks, Sutton’s YouTube channel has attracted a little over 900 subscribers and 23,000 watch hours. The livestream audience peaked on one recent Saturday with about 1,300 people watching at one time.

It has attracted some diehards to a live chat where they comment on types of planes, where they’re headed, the view of the mountain and the weather. Sutton said people treat him like a forecaster, asking him when the sun is coming out.

“I’m learning a lot about lineups and the different runways, which I didn’t know before I started the stream,” he said. “Obviously, I see it every day, but I didn’t know, 16 left, 16 right, 16 center. And if they’re coming in from the south, it’s 34.”

Sutton has a day job as a human resources manager for a non-profit. Launching his livestream has been a heavy lift — waking up at 3:30 in the morning to work on equipment set-up and learn how everything works. He said it’s been a ton of research.

The payoff could be worth it. Other plane-spotting channels on YouTube have attracted sizable audiences, including Airline Videos, a channel that has more than 800,000 subscribers and includes a livestream from LAX. Creator Kevin Ray — and the worldwide fascination around such content — are the subject of a profile this week in The Hollywood Reporter. A 2024 list in Frommers rounded up 15 of the best airplane livestreams.

Isaac Alexander, a chief content officer at Hype Aviation and editor of Jet City Star, said it’s amazing to see the growth of plane-spotting channels, and that they’re a great way to turn non-aviation people into enthusiasts. Along with passenger planes, people can watch cargo jets come and go and get a sense for how much commerce is operating out of the region.

Alexander said there is a decent-sized plane-spotting community in the Seattle area, and multiple Facebook groups devoted to the hobby, with hundreds of members each.

“A great feature with this new livestream is that it’s angled to have Mount Rainier center screen,” Alexander said. “Not many airports globally have a mountain/volcano nearby. Something peaceful about seeing airplanes flying with a large mountain in the background.”

Sutton didn’t grow up in Seattle, but like a lot of transplants he fell in love with the beauty of the place, and the proximity of Mount Rainier. And he appreciates the “Jet City” history with Boeing, the Museum of Flight and more.

“I don’t think any of us see Rainier and aren’t just inspired every time we see it, and feel incredibly lucky to have something like that,” he said. “And I think it’s cool that Seattle really is an aviation city. It’s a great place to have a livestream that really represents that.”