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Like many upbeat biographical dramas, “I Swear” begins at the end. A culminating moment of triumph is neatly reverse engineered into a prologue: it’s 2019, and the Scottish activist John Davidson (Robert Aramayo) is being honored for his groundbreaking work to raise awareness of Tourette’s syndrome. John is nervous, for good reason. He has severe coprolalia, a symptom of Tourette’s that causes him to blurt out obscenities unpredictably—all in all, not an ideal situation for a man about to meet Queen Elizabeth II. Sure enough, John causes a scene, yelling, “Fuck the Queen!” Once the initial shock in the room has subsided—the Queen herself seems unperturbed—John says, “Sorry, Ma’am,” and quietly finds his seat. The ceremony begins, and the message is clear: if Her Majesty could take such an indignity in stride, what’s the rest of the world’s excuse?

It’s an amusing point of entry, although, as a scene of comic vindication, it arguably renders the movie moot. Here is Davidson in a foul-mouthed nutshell: sincere, self-effacing, and prone to embarrassing exclamations that—even after years of anguished personal struggle and laudable public advocacy—he remains powerless to prevent. The film’s title, an obvious reference to profanity, also alludes to an incident dramatized later on, when John, on trial after inadvertently triggering a pub brawl, must give sworn testimony in court. (He can’t get through the oath without calling the judge a cunt—an assessment as unintentional as it is hilariously spot-on.) What’s a man to do when, in striving to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, his best-faith efforts are mistaken for the opposite?

“I Swear” serves up an ingratiating answer to that question. It was written and directed by the British filmmaker Kirk Jones, a reliable purveyor of uplift; only in comparison with his earlier work, which includes “Waking Ned Devine” (1998), “Nanny McPhee” (2006), and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” (2016), could his new movie be construed as remotely hard-hitting. With its mostly happy ending established, it flashes back to 1983, when the teen-age John (played movingly by Scott Ellis Watson), who lives with his parents and siblings in the Scottish town of Galashiels, begins to experience his first Tourette’s symptoms. His physical tics derail a promising football career, and his verbal eruptions frequently land him in trouble at school, where neither his peers nor his headmaster grasp that he has no control over his offending words and deeds. Even a deeper knowledge of Tourette’s is not a guarantee of understanding. When John begins spitting out his food, his mother, Heather (Shirley Henderson), worn down by exhaustion and anger, banishes him from the dinner table—the first in an unceasing series of maternal rejections. (His father’s rejection is more final; he abandons the family not long after John’s condition worsens.) Years later, only John (now played by Aramayo) remains with Heather at home, medicated into semi-submission, with little hope of a life of independence or fulfillment.

John Davidson’s story has been told in several TV documentaries over the past few decades, starting with a 1988 episode of the BBC series “Q.E.D.,” titled “John’s Not Mad,” which has been credited with doing much to educate the British public about Tourette’s. (Oliver Sacks, one of the episode’s prominent voices, offers a precise, sympathetic analysis of John’s symptoms.) Perhaps because it focussed on John’s teen-age years, when Tourette’s treatments and therapies were fewer and farther between, the documentary took a more downbeat view of its subject and his prospects than the movie does. In “I Swear,” John’s social rehabilitation is set in motion by Dottie Achenbach (Maxine Peake), the mother of an old school friend, who takes John under her wing. In relatively short order, she moves John into her house, gets him off his meds, and encourages him to apply for a job at a local community center, where his boss, Tommy Trotter (Peter Mullan), proves as saintly as Dottie is. It’s Tommy who nudges John toward the realization that the problem lies not with his condition but with society’s ignorance of it. A public-awareness campaign is launched, with John heroically leading the way.

“I Swear,” then, isn’t just an account of Davidson’s life. It’s a direct extension of his activism, and its effectiveness as an educational tool is what renders it frictionless and predictable as a drama. In the course of the narrative, as John is embraced by friends and assaulted by strangers, Jones’s storytelling veers between breakthroughs and setbacks with a rhythm so mechanical as to verge on metronomic. Yet the movie is a slick and expertly calculated piece of work, and it has taken even the most reflexive skepticism into account; you may emerge from the theatre blinking back tears and rolling your eyes. The only remotely complicated figure is his mother, Heather—a would-be villain in the logic of the film, made more complex and tragic by Henderson, who has a gift for gloomy nuance. Strikingly, in “John’s Not Mad,” the real-life Heather came across as entirely devoted and sympathetic. You needn’t be a bio-pic truth fetishist to wonder how close to reality Jones’s treatment gets—and how much may have been artificially sweetened, or embittered, for effect.

Aramayo’s role raises other questions. Some people may have strong feelings about the ethics of an actor who does not have Tourette’s performing the tics and gestures that accompany the condition; as it happens, I was disarmed by the friendly jut of Aramayo’s smile and the gentle clownery of his carriage. He strides through the movie with a startling mix of awkwardness and grace: the light-footed assurance of someone who has learned to anticipate—and perhaps overcorrect for—errant movements.

For me, the possible false note lay not in Aramayo’s performance but in the script. At times, it seems that Jones’s film, far from being strictly diagnostic, might in fact be egging John on, for the sake of our entertainment, toward perverse new heights of verbal invention. After brewing a cup of tea for Tommy, John blurts out, “I use spunk for milk”—and spunk, more in the spiritual than the bodily sense, is what the movie has in spades. Its humor is so insistent that it’s almost unseemly, transforming “I Swear” into a curious kind of misfired-synapses comedy—one that, in tone and intent, seems to fly in the face of the sombre warning issued by the 1988 documentary: “John’s obscenities will always be a verbal time bomb, waiting to go off in public.”

That grim prophecy was fulfilled—and how—on February 22nd, at the BAFTAs, where “I Swear” experienced a one-of-a-kind commingling of glory and disaster. To the shock of many, Aramayo won Best Actor, triumphing over a field that included the Oscar nominees Timothée Chalamet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ethan Hawke, and Michael B. Jordan. Davidson was in the crowd, too, as the audience had been informed, with an announcement that any outbursts they might hear from him were involuntary and not representative of his views or beliefs. The warning proved scant consolation when Davidson shouted a racial slur at two Black actors—Jordan and Delroy Lindo, both from “Sinners”—who were presenting an award onstage. The BBC inexplicably neglected to excise the incident from its tape-delayed broadcast of the ceremony, and, amid the ugly fallout, much was written about the failures of the network and of BAFTA in their duty of care to all involved. More divisive has been the question of who, in the end, was the more aggrieved party: Jordan and Lindo, who were subjected to unconscionable humiliation, or Davidson, who was accused of racism online by countless individuals with no understanding of or empathy for his condition.

What makes the episode worth considering anew, as “I Swear” arrives in American theatres this month, is how it seemed to both destroy and affirm the film in one nightmarish breath—to expose the hollowness of its feel-good machinery while also proving its larger point about the vindictive ignorance of so much of the public. There’s a particularly hideous irony in the fact that “I Swear,” which depicts a fictional Davidson prevailing through some of his gravest anxieties, wound up thrusting the real Davidson into the most public embarrassment of his life. What horror! But also, for sheer educational and entertainment value, what an opportunity. Had the filmmakers been inclined to tweak their work at the last minute, they might have reshot their prologue, guerrilla-style, ahead of the film’s U.S. release. Who needs a mild anti-monarchist outburst, given the far thornier international debacle on the BAFTAs stage? Fuck the Queen, indeed. ♦

The photographer David Armstrong, who was based in Brooklyn and died in 2014, at sixty, has never looked as good as he does right now, in a big, smartly installed retrospective at Artists Space (through May 23). That’s partly because this is the first time we’ve been able to grasp his career as a whole. The exhibition, although it includes landscapes, still-lifes, and nudes, is titled “David Armstrong: Portraits,” because that’s where the emphasis lies. With more than ninety works, the galleries are thronged with beauties, many of whom refuse to be pinned down to a gender. Still, men tend to snag the most attention, if only because they return Armstrong’s tender, probing gaze with affection and plenty of heat. Desire defines the work and is impossible to divorce from our response to it.

“Moritz, Jefferson Avenue, Brooklyn,” from 2009.Photograph by David Armstrong / Courtesy the Estate of David Armstrong

Without overplaying Armstrong’s key role in the Family of Nan (Goldin; they were lifelong friends and collaborators), the curators Kelly Taxter and Jay Sanders are careful to ground the show in his history of books and exhibitions. The soft-focus color landscapes and interiors from his 2002 book, “All Day Every Day,” had looked minor and imitative at the time. Here, ringing the main galleries like establishing shots in old movies, they suggest a world fading into memory—a misty past with little meaning for the present. On the other side of the scale, in a vitrine at one end of the space, are a group of five small scrapbooks. Only a few open pages are visible (more are included in the show’s catalogue), but they’re as tantalizing as a peek into a friend’s diary—and proof that pictures in separate bodies of work were being made simultaneously.

That everything-at-once approach explodes across a whole wall at the opposite end of the gallery. Here, a collagelike installation of photographs, framed and unframed, color and black-and-white, abut and overlap across twenty-seven feet. The undertow of nostalgia—a tribute to the way we were—is overwhelmed by the celebration of a spirit that has never seemed more alive.—Vince Aletti

At the start of “The Adding Machine,” the narrator (Michael Cyril Creighton) announces what viewers are going to see: “a heartwarming tale about modern life crushing the human spirit,” thereby setting the ironic tone. He is himself an addition, introduced into Elmer Rice’s 1923 drama by Thomas Bradshaw, who has revised the text for this New Group production, directed with flair by Scott Elliott. Thank God for the flair, because the characters are satirically tedious. Mr. Zero (Daphne Rubin-Vega) spends his days crunching numbers and his nights henpecked by his wife (a droll Jennifer Tilly), until he’s unceremoniously replaced by the titular machine. The stylishly designed show conjures a world where capitalism supplants all ideals except its own: ruthless optimization.—Dan Stahl (Theatre at St. Clement’s; through May 17.)

What to call objects that bespeak both the three-dimensionality of sculpture and the surface drama of painting? Leonardo Drew’s uncategorizable works are made from dried and cast paper pulp—leaking with fleshy, organic texture—that the artist reconfigures into jagged, rough-hewn sprays of abstraction which protrude from the frame. Some of these are arranged into more staid compositions of geometric bands of color, while others bend and bulge into shapes evoking the baroque ruination of junk-yard findings. The paper suggests a substrate on which to write but also seems to posit itself as its own kind of language, a haywire syntax made of excess and spillage.—Zoë Hopkins (Pace Prints; through April 25.)

“The Lady of Fashion,” circa 1891-92.Art work by Édouard Vuillard / Courtesy Skarstedt

Édouard Vuillard was one of those painters whose most evocative work—a prime selection of which can be seen in “Édouard Vuillard: Early Interiors”—tends to be small. It’s almost as if the limitations of a scaled-down canvas got the artist going in ways that galvanized his extraordinary use of color, and sense of scale, even further. Looking at such beauties as the extraordinary “The Flowered Dress” (1891) and the mind-blowing “The Lady of Fashion” (circa 1891-92), you marvel not only at the control of Vuillard’s hand but at what made domestic life and female garments so fascinating to the artist: their details say as much about the inner life of the wearer as they do about the cloth.—Hilton Als (Skarstedt; through April 25.)

In 2005, when the singer Niia Bertino was seventeen, she was recognized as one of the top high-school jazz singers in the country. The granddaughter of an Italian opera singer, Bertino, known onstage as Niia, was soon discovered by Wyclef Jean and, in 2007, featured on his hit single “Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill).” What initially felt like a meteoric rise tapered off into a slow burn. She performed “James Bond” themes with an orchestra in 2011 before débuting, in 2014, with the EP “Generation Blue”; her first album arrived three years later. You can hear all of her accrued experience in five albums she has released since, easing through their elegant pop production with jazzy vocals.—Sheldon Pearce (Blue Note; April 28-29.)

Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia in Jerome Robbins’s “Opus 19/The Dreamer.”Photograph by Erin Baiano

For the past two decades, Tiler Peck has been one of New York City Ballet’s most dazzling dancers; more recently, she has revealed herself to be an agile choreographer as well. Her second ballet for her home company uses Édouard Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole,” a sweeping, melodic tour de force that doubles as a showcase for solo violin. (The virtuoso Hilary Hahn will perform on many dates.) The spring season also includes the company première of Christopher Wheeldon’s moody 2002 ballet “Continuum,” set to Ligeti piano pieces, and it closes with a week of performances of the comedic “Coppélia.” On May 24, that work’s plucky heroine will be danced for the last time by the equally plucky Megan Fairchild, who is retiring after twenty-five years with the company.—Marina Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; April 21-May 31.)

David Lowery, who directed “A Ghost Story,” returns with another ghost story, “Mother Mary,” with the feeling of a filmed play, starring Anne Hathaway as the titular pop star, who’s been offstage for a few years, and Michaela Coel as Sam, a fashion designer who used to make the singer’s costumes. Though they’re long estranged, Mary barges in on Sam to ask for a new dress for a concert comeback; their tense dialectical wrangle in Sam’s churchlike studio is the bulk of the film. Brief flashbacks to Mary’s earlier concerts are merely informational; another flashback, to a séance at which Mary yielded to self-harming mysticism, is far more consequential, leading to violence in Sam’s studio. The resulting catharsis—spiritual and sentimental—is both flimsy and fascinating.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

Illustration by Patricia Bolaños

Cocktail bars operate by the “Anna Karenina” principle: great ones are all alike; average ones are average each in its own way. Take 25 Hours, in Long Island City, for example, which is freighted with a depressing ambience that is equal parts chemistry lab and subterranean grotto. On a recent weeknight, two first-timers stopped by with high expectations: 25 Hours, which opened last November, is the brainchild of Ray Zhou, a former head of R. & D. at the hip Lower East Side bar Double Chicken Please. The drinks here correlate with different hours of the day—plus an additional “twenty-fifth hour,” which, according to Zhou, is “more of a mind-set, a futuristic kind of thing.” The depth of thought that went into the menu was not reflected in the space; the visitors found themselves in a small room with exceptionally dark lighting, a wall of haphazardly mounted clocks of various shapes and sizes, and modernist chrome furniture that made the already bleak interior even less inviting. They took seats beside a monstrosity of dark gray plastic, affixed to a wall, designed to look like a sheer rock face. “This must be what Purgatory feels like,” one of the visitors whispered. Thankfully, their cocktails were closer to heavenly. The 17:00—a foamy mixture of mezcal and pineapple, topped with habanero tincture—packed a sweet-and-sour punch, and the 23:00, made of rum and barley-tea-infused whiskey, arrived with biscotti, for a sugary reprieve between sips. Their last order of the night, the 19:00, was also the most experimental: a sharp mix of grape juice, tomato water, gin, and blue-cheese liqueur, with a pungent aftertaste. Drinks downed, the guests’ gazes landed on the horological wall in front of them. It was time, they decided, to head out—after all, the clocks were ticking.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

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My dear friend sighs, slides her phone across the table between us so that it’s just beyond her reach, and insists that she wants to fall in love the old-fashioned way. She has said this many times within the past year—at parties, at group dinners, at a nearly pitch-black dive bar in Brooklyn while a singer performed a serviceable cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which slotted seamlessly into our own feelings of loneliness and longing. My dear friend is saying it again today, over a lunch that neither of us wants to end just yet, because we don’t see each other often enough, because she simply cannot look at the face of another person on a screen and decide, in a split second, whether that person can motivate her to the point of romantic pursuit.

When she insists on falling in love the old-fashioned way, I tell her, every time, that I know what she means. What she’s resisting is not only the dating app as a piece of technology but what the dating app does to the brain, presenting the idea of constant convenience, turning the seeking of an other into an online-shopping excursion. (And yes, of course, for some people that is exactly the dating app’s appeal.) My dear friend wants to fall in love the old-fashioned way because her parents met each other reaching for the same item at a market in the nineteen-seventies, a story she can rarely get through without crying. And I say that I know what she means because she is talking, at least in part, about sacrificing convenience, even at the expense of instant gratification. It is inconvenient to be a person, floating through the grand and impossible world, significant in your own resplendent garden of hours but insignificant as a fleck of dust in the greater arc of the universe. It is, in some ways, inconvenient to believe that your one significant life can collide meaningfully with someone else’s, someone whom you have to put the work into finding, in the outside world, where people still sometimes go to the market, reaching and reaching and reaching.

Recently, I’ve been spending far too much of my time doing cost-benefit analyses of various inconveniences. I want to embrace minor discomforts if doing so can make me feel even slightly more alive and engaged in the world. For example, I wake up early on a Saturday morning in winter to help my best friend move, which inconveniences the part of me that would maybe like to stay in bed for an extra hour (though the word “like” is used loosely here, as that time in bed would probably be spent awake, scrolling through bad news on my phone, and watching the occasional video of a dog as a chaser). In the moment, as my friend and I put together her son’s bed, it feels like simply another task. But almost immediately afterward I am struck by how beautiful it was to get to share in another milestone in the life of my friend, who I have seen in many apartments and homes before this one, who I have watched grow into a loving parent, the kind who organizes her child’s new bedroom on moving day, before almost anything else in the new home is put in proper order. To have that as something that will live in my memory is worth whatever mental or emotional friction exists in rising from the comfort of my bed and putting my feet down on the floor.

I am not the only one thinking about the upsides of inconvenience, it seems; there is even a term, frictionmaxxing, to describe the trend of people resisting the lulling ease of screens. On a Saturday morning when I do not have to help a friend move, I am in bed scrolling Instagram. One video features what appears to be an elder millennial saying that he wants the nineties back. He wants a VCR. He wants old-school arcade machines that you have to feed with quarters. He wants a Walkman and cassette tapes to put in said Walkman. Perhaps because I linger on this reel for too long, as I continue scrolling I am served an ad for a new, revamped version of the Sony Walkman, beneath which, in the comments section, people are declaring that the device is exactly what they’d been needing.

Pining for Walkmans and VCRs is, of course, an offshoot of a larger obsession with the not so distant past. People revel in the nostalgia of ten or twenty or thirty years ago by digging up old photos and posting them—photos from birthday parties or career milestones or from a moment spent sitting under the final sparks of daylight on a beach. For many of us the year 2016 wasn’t exactly ideal, but at least it wasn’t this nonideal time. There is a longing for some previous era, if not actually a desire to return to it. I want my childhood back, even if I don’t necessarily want to be a child again. In some backward way, this reminds me of Sun Ra, who spent a lifetime insisting that Earth was not the place for him, and that he had to get to an unknown elsewhere, an elsewhere that would be better simply by virtue of being somewhere else.

The yearning for the past often lands us on the somewhat hollow nostalgia of ephemera: if we can’t have the nineties back, we can build a life of things that might feel transportative. I have no right to judge, really. I push physical media on anyone who will listen, ranting about the need for hard drives and for ways to store the things you love because, one day, they may not be accessible on streaming anymore. I have a CD player in my home, a VCR in a closet. But I’m also inclined to think about the work that older devices demand of a person compared with the frictionless present day, when we are told that any and all content is at our fingertips (a myth, but a myth that sells.) And I can’t help but think of the reality that there are many significantly larger and more consequential inconveniences that Americans, plainly, do not have the heart or stomach for. One example might be the inconvenience caused by a mass political uprising, one that risks the security, safety, and comfort of its participants. I have seen glimpses of people’s threshold for that level of friction. I think, for instance, of the summer of 2020, when a protest movement collided with the first COVID summer and people’s material needs—at least in my community— weren’t being met. And so, for almost a month, after being on the streets all day, protesters would go and sew masks at night, or make care packages for elders, or do grocery runs to fill pantries, and many of us did that at the cost of our own sleep, or our own time with loved ones at home, or we did it in betrayal of our desire for convenience, ignoring the temptations of the couch and the latest streamable binge.

I return to that time, specifically, because it was the moment in my life that came closest to answering the question “Once this world collapses, how will people build another one?” The solutions were imperfect. They involved figuring things out as we went. And, of course, the energy of the movement proved unsustainable. Eventually, people could not resist returning to their lives, to routines more comfortable than standing in the streets with the sun glaring in your eyes, squinting up to check the position of snipers on a roof, or working with cramping fingers sewing your tenth mask of the night. I understood then that there just weren’t enough people willing to surrender to what needed to be done, which made the burden that much larger for those who were. The utopia was temporary, its beauty and its small victories whittled away by the scythe of inaction.

Convenience and inaction are often bedfellows. Someone online wonders why “Americans still aren’t overthrowing the government.” I scroll past the message and land on a video of some C-list child actor of yore in the present day, participating in an unspectacular trend. A clip, set to the song “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, begins with the actor now, before abruptly shifting to photos of him in the nineties. There is nothing else, no grander messaging to be pulled from the footage. It is another momentary portal: remember that one time that wasn’t this time; remember the one time that, by virtue of not being this time, was better. I admit that I myself am seduced by the idea: the younger self of this now grown actor, and my younger self who watched that actor on television, in a world that asked far less of me than this one.

When I was young, I had a Walkman far longer than most anyone else I knew. This was, in part, because my family didn’t have a lot of money, and updating electronics was a low priority. We had a giant, clunky computer that hardly worked, whereas most of my friends had Segas and Nintendos. My mother wrote on an old typewriter. My two older siblings had grown up in the cassette era, and so every listening device in our home was either a record or a tape player, which meant that not only did I have a Walkman, I had one that had been handed down twice.

There were newer models that stopped automatically whenever the machine sensed dead space, allowing you to skip among songs. But, with the Walkman I had, skipping a song, or going back to the start of a song, was a guessing game. If you listened to the same song enough times you might get good at the timing, but if you listened to as many different tapes as I did that was nearly impossible. And so you’d stop earlier than you wanted to, or go too far back and end up in the middle of the previous song, until eventually you’d get close enough to be satisfied.

I learned early lessons in patience and precision using a hand-me-down dual tape deck that I kept in my childhood bedroom. I would wait, sometimes for hours, to hear a song on the radio that I wanted to record onto cassette. I’d be careful to wait until the end of the d.j. intro before hitting Record, so as not to get it onto tape, and I’d cut out early if the d.j. intruded at the song’s end. I learned that if I wanted to avoid picking up the harsh click sound of the tape stopping, I could hold down the Pause button and then press Stop. In both the Walkman and the bedroom tape deck, the cassette’s inner spool of tape would sometimes get caught up in the gears of the machine; the remedy was to gently remove the cassette and wind the tape back into the casing with a pencil, lest you destroy your coveted archive of songs—some of which, for all you knew, might not come on the radio again.

I remember these moments with some fondness, but when I see people pining for the materials of the eighties and nineties I don’t find myself especially nostalgic for the same. In doing my cost-benefit analysis around inconvenience, I’ve started to think about the difference between what the heart desires and what the brain and body can manage. The world that we live in now has not equipped most people for a return to the small and repeated nuisances of past technologies. Yet, at the same time, relentless convenience (or being sold the idea of relentless convenience) warps the brain in ways that make nostalgic cravings somewhat inevitable. The world feels as if it is moving too fast, sweeping people up in a forward churn that—among other things—aims to make individuality yet another myth. You are told that everything you desire is at your fingertips, and that your life is going to be made easier than ever, but at the cost of blending into a monochromatic background, as forgettable as the view from another hotel room in another city that is not your city. In your city, there are new gray mixed-use condos that look dreamed up by a bored and unimaginative child, but people live there and work there and shop there, and they don’t have to go outside all that much. You outsource your writing to ChatGPT, and it is easy, but it makes you sound like no one and like everyone. Even if—or especially if—you are someone who yearns for stillness, or for the possibility of brushing the hand of a stranger whom you might come to love, this dissonance can prompt a sense of madness, and a desperation for ways to access the slowness you hunger for.

I try all of the tricks myself. I put my phone in a box and read a book. I attach a hard drive to my TV to watch concert footage from before I was born. I think of when my mother died, of all the people who mourned her because they’d worked at the places she’d frequented—the person at the deli, the person who bagged groceries, the person at the cleaners. This is what I most love to tell others about my mother—that she was kind to the people she encountered in the world with some regularity. She had routines, places she went where people knew her name. I’ve resolved to never have my own groceries delivered, even though when I go to the grocery store no one seems especially interested in making eye contact, let alone in speaking. And I don’t blame them, because some days I’m not sure that I am either. What makes the madness increasingly incurable is that I want parts of the past that are increasingly incompatible with this iteration of our world. I walk through the grocery store, half smiling, with my hood up. My friend finds a VHS player but can’t connect it to any television in his house.

In recalling my friend who wants to fall in love the old-fashioned way, and who once sighed in a dark bar while a singer worked through a rendition of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” I’m reminded that that tune takes its melody from a French love song called “Plaisir d’Amour,” which was originally composed in 1784, by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. If the former is about the inevitability of falling in love, a complete surrender beyond the speaker’s control, the latter confronts the pain of romantic love’s aftermath. It is skeptical and somewhat cynical, but also beautiful in its frankness: “The pleasure of love lasts only a moment / The grief of love lasts a lifetime.”

Maybe what my pal who insists on finding love the old-fashioned way is saying is that it shouldn’t be as frictionless as browsing Amazon from your couch. If you believe, as she does, that the next person you fall in love with could be the last partner you ever pursue, and the last who ever pursues you, then that pursuit should find you thrown fully into the world, eager for the beauty and discomfort of spontaneous human interaction. And I tell her that I mostly agree, though I generally just avoid dating apps because the onslaught of visual information overwhelms me. Still, I understand her desire, because so many of my own desires are detached from the reality of the times we live in. I am still inventing inconvenience in order to bolster my desire to feel alive.

For instance, I hate to sound like a travel diva, but on airplanes I love a window seat. I have purchased slightly more expensive and significantly more inconvenient flights just so that I can have a window seat. With noise-cancelling headphones and a window seat, you can build your own universe. From high enough in the sky, the clouds look like thick cotton being pulled from a deep-blue couch. From low enough, and at the right hour, descending into the right city, you can see the dark office buildings dappled with occasional lights from windows, and you can imagine who is still there, what is keeping them away from whatever is awaiting them elsewhere. I’m not saying that I’m above streaming a show on a plane, or buying airplane Wi-Fi just to Google home décor or rare vintage shirts. But it’s when tumbling through the sky that I find myself feeling most attached to the vastness of what is below, and pondering the increasing impossibility of connection. On a recent flight, my headphones died while I was listening to music, and I was shocked back to life by an immediate and urgent wave of sound from the airplane cabin rushing in—most notably, a child wailing, and a parent anxiously attempting to provide comfort. It is useful, every now and then, to be dragged from a fantasy and remember that you share a world with other people, some of whom might be confronting the sudden noise of their own discomforts. ♦

Brendan LaFave grew up in a big Catholic family—the second-eldest of eight siblings living in a large house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He’s tall, with shaggy hair and an earnest manner, the kind of preternaturally thoughtful kid that adults love. He excelled at his Catholic high school, navigating calculus with ease, building sets for student theatre productions, and playing a box drum at worship events. But he also felt as if he had been born in the wrong era. His generation’s reliance on screens was making him miserable. After getting an iPhone in middle school, he spent several years “terminally on Snapchat and Instagram,” he said, which made his friendships with other kids feel shallow. “It just did a number on me,” he explained. “It caused a subtle depression.” COVID hit when he was a freshman, and his classes went online. “It was just horrid,” he told me. “I’d be on my computer for, like, eight hours a day.”

He had plenty of options for after graduation; he’d earned a nearly perfect score on the A.C.T. He thought about applying to the University of Michigan, an élite state school in his home town, but was turned off by stories about partying and the larger campus culture. Monastic life seemed appealing; he was drawn to the Rule of St. Benedict, a sixth-century guidebook for monks on building communities and living a life of faith. He also toyed with becoming a construction worker and just doing a lot of reading on the side. “I was very averse to the idea of college debt,” he said. “I had these ideas floating around about the spiritual life and pursuing the life of the intellect, and then working with my hands.”

As LaFave was thinking it over, he heard an episode of “New Polity,” a podcast produced by a magazine of the same name. In it, a group of Catholic intellectuals discussed a new school opening in Steubenville, Ohio. Students would take classes on subjects such as the New Testament, advanced geometry, and rhetoric, and earn a liberal-arts degree in Catholic studies. At the same time, they would specialize in one of four trades—carpentry, HVAC, electrical work, or plumbing—and work toward a certificate that signalled their expertise. The school was called the College of St. Joseph the Worker, named for Joseph, Mary’s husband and the patron saint of laborers.

“We’re totally trying to call the bluff on the great divorce between the head and the hands,” Jacob Imam, the college’s founder, said on the podcast. “We’ve told people that the blue-collar trades are no longer dignified,” he continued, “forgetting that Christ himself—God himself!—spent most of the years of his life at a workbench.” Unlike many other schools, which Imam described as keeping students contained in a “bubble,” the College of St. Joseph the Worker would expose students to the real world by having them work as apprentices, fixing up buildings and using their wages to pay their tuition and living expenses. The goal was for them to graduate debt-free. “I was, like, This just seems to tick all the boxes,” LaFave told me. He joined the first cohort of students, in the fall of 2024.

The college currently has sixty-two students, sixty of them men. Imam’s diagnosis of the generation he is trying to reach could just as easily come from the mouth of a progressive crusader as from a conservative Catholic. “The shape of their bodies is much like the shape of their souls—very much blob-like,” he said, of young men, on another podcast. “Corporate interest wants the guy to be lazy,” he said, “because then that guy needs to spend more money on stuff. . . . He can’t do his plumbing; he has to pay somebody to do that. He can’t grow his food; he has to pay somebody else to do that. He can’t educate his kids.”

For many years, young men were handed clear scripts. Marry, have children, and provide for them; attend church on Sundays, find your moral footing, and give generously to a community that shares your values. Those scripts have been eroded. After growing up online, young men seem to be more anxious and depressed than older generations, and in the worst cases they are incapacitated: nursing porn addictions, failing to launch, flirting with Holocaust denial. The College of St. Joseph the Worker was founded as a proposition that lost young men shouldn’t be condemned or written off. What if, instead of following Groypers, these young men followed God?

“We find them on the internet,” Imam told me. “We bring them here. And we say, ‘How about a life in reality instead?’ ”

“Reality,” in this case, is Steubenville, a small city in the part of Ohio that’s basically West Virginia. It was once a booming steel town, but in recent decades it has followed the trajectory of the rest of the Rust Belt: a mill closing, young adults leaving, a mall drawing shoppers away from downtown and gutting local businesses. Between 1940 and 2020, the city’s population dropped by half, and many houses and businesses fell into disrepair. Rusty Reno, the editor of First Things, a conservative religious magazine, visits regularly and compared it to “a bombed-out German city after World War II.” Mingo Junction, a village a few miles down the highway, was recently used as the backdrop for a low-budget zombie movie. Every so often, Steubenville shows up in national news, but rarely for anything good: a grisly double murder in the late nineties; a brutal case in the twenty-tens in which two high-school football players were convicted of raping a sixteen-year-old girl after a video was posted online.

And yet, Steubenville has also quietly emerged as a paradise for big Catholic families. In the nineteen-seventies, Franciscan University, a small school on a hill above the downtown, became a center for charismatic Catholicism, an expressive, theologically orthodox movement that paralleled the development of the evangelical Jesus People and secular hippie culture. These days, Steubenville attracts a wide range of Catholics. At churches in and around the city, you can find packed Masses of every kind, from the ordinary form to the Byzantine Rite. There’s a large homeschooling population, and, about fifteen miles from downtown, a Catholic organization runs a property affectionately known as Catholic Familyland—a cross between a summer camp and a retreat center. Throughout the summer, Sprinter vans bearing families of ten or twelve pull up for a vacation where their kids can run around on industrial-scale playground equipment before celebrating Mass with hundreds of other people.

The college’s campus is in downtown Steubenville, a handful of blocks around one of the city’s main drags, Fourth Street. Over the years, families have made investments in the downtown. Mark and Gretchen Nelson, a couple in their fifties who met in jail after getting arrested for protesting an abortion clinic, brought some of the production for their printing and tchotchkes business, including an imprint called Catholic to the Max, to the area. They began putting up life-size, hand-painted nutcrackers around Christmastime, attracting tourists, and turned a cavernous abandoned building into several businesses, including a popcorn store and a coffee shop called Leonardo’s. (They recently started hosting an annual Regency ball in the large space upstairs, for which residents dress up in period costume.)

The college aims to give its students an education that is not just about their work but about their lives—instilling in them a sense of purpose, restoring their feeling of competence, teaching them virtue. But it also exists to help revive Steubenville. Marc Barnes, a thirty-two-year-old professor at the college, is the unofficial hype man of the downtown-revitalization effort. He first moved to Steubenville to become a student at Franciscan, in 2010. Then as now, many of the buildings were boarded up downtown. “I still remember the shock of visiting,” he said. Seeing the city’s poverty made him realize that his studies had distracted him from devoting himself to the possibility of a better world. If he died right then, he realized, “I would have faced Jesus, and he would say hello, and I would say, ‘I was preparing for something really great, Lord—I was going to be a saint after this period of preparation.’ ” He added, “I was just so struck by how lame that was, this idea of a waiting room for real life.”

With barely any money, Barnes and roughly a dozen friends set about trying to bring some life back to Steubenville. They launched a music venue, though it closed once the roof started looking like it might cave in. He staged rock operas for kids, which became popular with the homeschooling set. He also co-founded a festival on Fourth Street during the warm-weather months; organizers put a food truck or a tent in front of boarded-up buildings, as if all of the storefronts were full. “You need to see something in which to have your hope,” Barnes said. “You can’t just talk about it.”

In 2017, Barnes temporarily left Steubenville to pursue a graduate degree in theology in England. A friend introduced him to Jacob Imam, who was in Oxford doing his own graduate studies. Imam was different from the scrappy Steubenville types with whom Barnes had spent his twenties. Unlike Barnes, who was born and raised Catholic, Imam had found his way to Catholicism later, after growing up in an interfaith household, with a Palestinian Muslim father and an evangelical mother. He was a consummate high achiever, a collector of mentors who quickly clocked him as a kid destined for great things. When he was in his first month of college, at Baylor University, a professor suggested that he apply for the Marshall and the Rhodes, prestigious scholarships for postgraduate study in the U.K. Imam would go on to win the Marshall, breezily pitching a program of study on how to bring peace in the Middle East.

Barnes met Imam in a moment of soul-searching. Imam was headed toward a career in academia, but he felt queasy about participating in a debt-driven higher-ed system that can sometimes be more of a prison than a launching pad. “I really, really like high culture,” Imam told me. “But I’m not inclined toward élite culture.” Barnes persuaded Imam and his new wife, Alice, to join the project in Steubenville, and the couple bought a house there in 2019. Barnes and Imam had been trading ideas with a scholar named Andrew Willard Jones, whose work focussed on the model of Christendom found in, say, High Middle Ages France, where society was organized around its relationship with the Church. The three called themselves “post-liberals,” taking a stand against the idea that it’s possible to separate Christianity from any aspect of public life. This would be the basis for their new magazine, New Polity.

The trio, and others in their intellectual circle, share a few radical views. The first is that the élite obsession with shaping national politics, and with getting candidates elected, is a distraction. “It’s not actually possible to seize control of the levers of global economic order,” Michael Hanby, one of New Polity’s contributors, told me, “but it is possible to do something about the place that you live.” In 2022, J. D. Vance visited Steubenville while he was running for the Senate; he ran into Imam, and they chatted over beers. Jones told me that he finds Vance compelling. Still, Jones said, “I’m not very optimistic about significant change happening within systems of power and governance.”

Barnes and Imam also used New Polity to promote a sweeping vision of economic reform. They have argued that all Christians should take their money out of the stock market and invest in their communities—not as a form of philanthropy but to create fully Christian economies. They don’t believe in putting money into 401(k)s, for example, even for retirement. “You invest in Google, Amazon, all the rest, and then you get it at the end, when you’re, like, sixty,” Barnes told me. “It takes people who are in their youth, who are very full of civic desire, to build a city.”

For years, Imam had been nursing the idea that he might develop some of these ideas into something more concrete—a new kind of college. For a time, he had stayed with a retired F.B.I. agent named Tim Clemente, who had gained minor fame in Hollywood for working on police and terrorist dramas. One Saturday, while Clemente was doing some home repairs, Imam offered to help. Clemente tasked him with fixing some footings on a structure behind the house, and rattled off brisk instructions: “Take your hole, mix your concrete, put some rebar in it, and you’re done!” Imam had no idea what he was talking about. (“I was, like, ‘O.K., what’s rebar?’ ”) “I just felt so emasculated and impotent,” Imam told me. “I thought, it doesn’t matter how many papers I pile up, or the credentials that I have. I can’t do that.”

Imam got initial donations from a few friends at Oxford, and eventually raised enough money to purchase the building that would become the Workshop—a vast, open warehouse with timber-filled bays, many named for obscure saints. He made his first hires and began working on state approval. “I genuinely do believe that this really is St. Joseph’s college, and I’ve been just working for him,” Imam told me. “It’s not quite normal, what’s happening. I think that there’s a lot of divine help.”

The model of the college is work, study, prayer. Every morning, the students are encouraged to attend the eight o’clock Mass at the Catholic parish downtown. They have a full academic load, taking around three classes per quarter. Students in Imam’s classes on the Old and New Testaments do tutorials in his office, reading essays aloud while Imam wears full academic regalia. “It’s terrifying,” Imam said. “That’s the goal.”

On top of this, the students practice their respective trades. The standards are high: students may get nearly twice as many instructional hours as what’s required by the state of Ohio. Students also spend a significant amount of time on worksites. Often, in traditional apprenticeships, “you’re cleaning up piles of debris along the sides,” James Heal, the college’s trades dean, told me. “We put them in a more challenging situation so that their learning curve is steeper.”

Last year, the college formed its own construction company, on the logic that it could give students apprenticeship opportunities and make money from gigs. Heal took me out in his Toyota Tundra to visit a couple of jobsites. He wore dark jeans and flannel, with a newsboy cap over his bald head; Latin hymns played as we drove. Heal, who is fifty, only became a serious Catholic in his late thirties, and had spent the first part of his career as a firefighter in Arizona. Before the college had fully launched, it hosted summer sessions on subjects such as timber framing, which Heal had attended with his teen-age son. They were both struck by the unusual culture in Steubenville. “There’s an extraordinary focus on Christ here,” Heal told me. After spending time there, his son asked him, “Do you think there’s any way we could ever live somewhere like that?” Heal and his family moved to Steubenville about a year and a half ago. That son applied to the college, and will begin this fall.

We pulled up to a worksite, next to the home of a college staffer who had hired the college’s construction company to build a home for his parents. The house was partially framed, with Eastern white pine outlining the shape of the rooms. One student was up on a ladder wrapping a Tyvek moisture barrier around the exterior. Sawdust floated over our heads as another student used a chop saw to cut stick framing for doors and windows. On the side of the house, another group of students was digging the ditch where the electrical lines would lie. The Allman Brothers played on a speaker nearby.

The college has so far bought up and started renovating more than a dozen buildings downtown; the college’s students will be the ones doing this work. Just by being there, they have changed the town. Several people told me how refreshing it was to see groups of young people on the sidewalks, going to class.

Imam has attracted some powerful patrons, such as Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and Republican Presidential candidate, who has introduced him to donors in the Catholic world. Santorum said that he sees Imam’s project as part of the fight to revive small-town America. “There are thousands of Steubenvilles, small towns that were once bustling industrial hubs, that are now really struggling,” Santorum told me. “The very thing that made all these towns across America so successful, and knitted the communities together, was that combination of family and faith and industry—the village, if you will.”

The idea to have a college where students get a liberal-arts education, do physical labor, and pay their way is not new. Congress has awarded special funding to a handful of so-called Work Colleges for more than thirty years, and some small liberal-arts schools had work programs long before that. Berea College, in Kentucky, is probably the most well known of these institutions. Founded by a Christian abolitionist in 1855, Berea charges no tuition, and every student works a minimum of ten hours per week on campus, doing jobs such as tending the school’s farm, repairing bicycles at the bike shop, or making brooms in the college’s historic craft workshop. This is “work as a finding of yourself, and a finding of your place in the world—what we might say is a calling,” Cheryl L. Nixon, Berea’s president, told me. But that calling isn’t necessarily physical labor, which is treated like more of a learning experience: Nixon estimated that most graduates end up joining the professional class after graduation.

The College of St. Joseph the Worker is distinct from colleges like Berea. It does not accept federal funding, including student financial aid; like many other conservatives, Imam believes that the federal government is too involved with education, and he wants the college to retain full control over its policies and curricula. The college also views skilled labor not just as an enriching experience on the way to a white-collar job but as a vocation. A core goal is to cultivate leaders on worksites, to be “the Harvard of this sort of thing,” Imam said.

In the world of higher ed, there’s long been an insistence that college is for everyone, but this has resulted in many graduates unable to find suitable jobs; the employment prospects of English majors—or even computer-science grads—are looking increasingly grim. Meanwhile, there’s an acute shortage of skilled tradesmen around the country. Young people with these skills will likely be able to find well-paid work anywhere they want, long after many laptop jobs are made obsolete by A.I.

Still, the College of St. Joseph the Worker’s focus on physical labor isn’t just about employment prospects. “Building has this instrumental good about it,” Imam said. A slogan on the back of a popular piece of college merch reads “The Word became flesh and picked up a hammer.” Imam believes that students should get a liberal-arts education, less for the job it will bring them than for the gift of a life of the mind. It’s an idealistic vision of education—great texts and big ideas shouldn’t just belong to professionals and élites but to everyone. As Hanby, the New Polity adviser, put it, “I love the idea that my plumber might have insights into the neoclassicism of the American founding.”

These days, intellectuals of all kinds have embraced this ethos of making things—not just building houses but tending the land, baking bread, and slaughtering their own meat. This is also true in the Christian world, where the impulse to use your hands has a distinct theological flavor to it. Joshua Klein, a Reformed Protestant who edits Mortise & Tenon, a magazine dedicated to traditional woodworking, told me that “there is a palpable movement” of Christians “hungering for real, sweaty involvement in the stuff of life. They’re so tired of consumerism, and being passive. We are not only spirit. We are also body.” For parents, that also means imagining a different life for their kids. “I think there would be a lot of pride that parents of my generation would feel in seeing their son or daughter become excellent at a craft,” Brandon McGinley, a Catholic writer who serves as the editorial-page editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, told me. “There’s a sense that the bourgeois expectations of modern America haven’t really worked out well for Catholics, and a more grounded existence, specifically in the work of the hands, is good and needed.” The college’s gift shop displays copies of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” a 2009 book by the writer Matthew B. Crawford, which argues that the skilled trades require a level of mental and intellectual sophistication that often goes underacknowledged. “Because the work is dirty, people tend to assume it’s stupid,” Crawford told me. Trade school is often talked about as an alternative to a four-year degree, but the discourse can be patronizing, with jobs in construction framed as an off-ramp for the kids who can’t cut it in real college. Crawford thinks that narrative is precisely backward: “There’s a burnout, and a sense of worthlessness, that hovers in the background of the laptop class—a kind of spiritual malaise.”

It’s possible to read a certain reverse snobbishness in this kind of advocacy for physical labor above other kinds of work. Michael Sorrell, the president of Paul Quinn College, the only historically Black school among the federally recognized Work Colleges, told me that the school is “unapologetically . . . far more likely to send students to work at JPMorgan Chase than to the trades.” Sorrell was skeptical of sorting jobs into categories of good versus bad, or noble versus corrupt. “Our students are coming from poverty. It would be irresponsible of us to pretend that we shouldn’t steer them to high-paying opportunities,” he told me. “People like to talk about education as the cure for poverty. No, money is the cure for poverty.”

Perhaps it’s more generous to see the College of St. Joseph the Worker—along with the handful of other nascent Catholic trade schools that have recently popped up, in Michigan and Illinois and California—as a manifestation of America’s populist moment. “When you know how things work, how to repair them, how to build them in the first place, I think it gives you a little bit more of an independent ground to stand on against claims of expertise,” Crawford said. Tradesmen don’t earn their status by “passing through the gates of some institution and being conferred with titles and credentials,” he continued. “It’s based on knowing how to do your shit.”

One evening, I visited Jubilee House, one of the men’s dorms on North Fourth Street. Twelve students, including Brendan LaFave, the high-achieving kid from Ann Arbor, live in the three-story brown-brick house, which has white columns along its wide front porch. As I pulled up, one of the students, Anthony Skinner, was climbing a column toward the roof. These guys weren’t scrolling on their phones to kill time. They were just being normal idiots.

The college’s leaders intentionally decided not to open a dining hall, so that the students would learn to cook and host others in their home. Inside the house, the table was already set; there were bottles of sparkling water and Martinelli’s out, alongside candles made by a pair of local Catholic women. Most of the students wore collared shirts and slacks; the one female student who joined, Theresa Boyle, who lives in an apartment building across the street, wore a light-blue dress and a small cross necklace.

The Jubilee guys live a shockingly wholesome life. The house has an Xbox, but it rarely gets used. There is an ambient skepticism toward tech: a handful of the students have traded in their smartphones for flip phones. Four of the students said they smoke cigarettes, but they claimed there was no alcohol in the house, because they’re almost all under twenty-one. LaFave told me that some of the guys like to have herbal tea in the evenings and discuss issues such as the problems with contemporary masculinity. It was all almost too much to believe, except that the students seemed so earnest about their faith. “Everybody here is Catholic,” Skinner said. “This isn’t a Catholic school where it’s parents sending their kids, trying desperately to keep them Catholic.”

Many of the students were homeschooled, and many have a strong musical background. There are guys in Jubilee who play mandolin, piano, banjo, and ukulele, and one of the other men’s houses, Bonaventure, has a folk band in the mold of the Hillbilly Thomists, a Catholic cult favorite. One of the freshmen, named Oliver, planned to start a men’s group in which they’d lift weights, read Scripture, and pray for one another. With their busy schedules, the students don’t always eat together, but they help one another out; one student from Wisconsin, named Phil, said he mostly ate tortillas dipped in Chick-fil-A sauce before Skinner taught him how to cook. The greatest source of division in the house is over the kind of Mass they each prefer. Some gravitate toward the traditional Latin Mass, while others lean toward the Novus Ordo, the format for Mass widely adopted after Vatican II. Skinner referred to this, jokingly, as “the bogus ordo.”

The college appealed to the students for different reasons. Many of them were averse to debt; at least two of them said they wanted to go into business with their dads. “I was tired of not being able to do things,” Boyle told me. She said she didn’t mind being one of only two women at the school. “You get sixty brothers,” she said. “It’s great.”

Several students said they see themselves as countercultural, but less in defiance of the secular left than of ugly manifestations of the right. “Many of my friends, especially those my age, definitely fall more into the alt-right type,” Eli, a sophomore, said. “I find myself consciously having to distinguish myself from that.” He described the attraction to white-identity politics as a sign of being directionless. “Young men in our generation see and feel the deep problems in modern culture,” he said, but they’ve landed on a lazy solution. Students at the college, on the other hand, have a clear orientation toward Christ and family. Many of the students come from large families—five, seven, eleven kids. Among all the students, three are already married; one couple has a baby, and another has one on the way. The rest understand that this is the expectation for them as well: build a skill, raise a family, provide a life.

Greg Ulmer, a freshman from Ohio, told me that “life is about self-sacrifice.” He added, “My entire goal in life is to get myself and those around me to heaven. If it’s not that fun, that’s O.K. with me.”

The story of Steubenville might make some secular-minded people jumpy about theocracy: lots of young, super-religious people moving to a new town and buying up all the real estate in order to build what Imam’s neighbor, a missionary named Braxton Callen, called “a Christian social order.” Last winter, the college had its first major fight with people who were suspicious of its motives. In October, 2024, the West Virginia Water Development Authority awarded the college a five-million-dollar grant. In its initial application, the college said that it would purchase training facilities in Weirton, West Virginia, about a fifteen-minute drive from Steubenville, and explore building a second campus outside of Charleston. The college also proposed creating a think tank that would draft recommendations for the West Virginia legislature. The application noted that faculty have contributed to a “conservative political vision for West Virginia,” including “the abortion restriction” and “solidarity with Texas’ border”—an oblique reference to tougher immigration policy.

The A.C.L.U. of West Virginia sued. West Virginia’s state constitution has an establishment clause guaranteeing freedom of religion; the A.C.L.U. argued that the state had violated that provision by awarding taxpayer dollars to a religious organization for religious purposes. “How can the West Virginia Water Development Authority send cash to a fledgling church-based, seemingly aspirational college in Ohio, especially when the gift has nothing directly to do with water?” one op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail asked. Imam told me he saw the lawsuit as fundamentally anti-Catholic.

In the end, the college was allowed to keep the money. A lot of the case seemed to come down to disorganization and messy paperwork. It turned out that the grant agreement had only ever covered new training facilities; the other ventures weren’t part of the deal, and the college had to amend a document clarifying that. The A.C.L.U. lost the argument that the state couldn’t give money to the College of St. Joseph the Worker because of the college’s commitment to Catholicism. The whole thing was a sign that the college is still finding its footing. As of now, Imam has no plans to create a think tank or a second campus, even though those had seemed like good ideas when applying for the grant. “I’m learning how to narrow our focus,” Imam told me.

It’s easy to preach the virtues of local community-building over partisan political jockeying. But, when you’re trying to build an institution, the temptation to leverage powerful political alliances is strong. Through Santorum, Imam met Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican Presidential candidate who is now running for governor in Ohio. In November, Ramaswamy gave the keynote address at the college’s fall gala, near Cincinnati. It wasn’t clear whether he had fully grasped the philosophical leanings of the room; at one point, he suggested that graduates of the college would make good mechanics for A.I.-driven machines. “Who’s going to be the machine operator, who’s going to be the plumber, the pipe fitter, the electrician?” he said.

“The posture of the college has come across as more political than it is,” Imam told me later. “I’m tremendously grateful for attention from people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Rick Santorum, and yet it is kind of funny how it slots us in a political narrative.” He pointed out that he’s not even a registered Republican, although he and everyone else in leadership are solidly conservative. “Maybe it’s just getting a little bit older, and out of the more radical years of your twenties,” he said. “But I want to create something where everybody can look around, point at it, and say it’s good.”

There are some outside of the Steubenville scene who think that Imam and his allies don’t go far enough in their vision of Catholic politics. Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor who has become a prominent post-liberal thinker, told The Spectator a few years ago that the New Polity guys are “hobbits” who don’t understand power. Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor and ringleader for Catholic integralism, the theory that the administrative state should enforce Catholic teachings and policies, later seemed to suggest that they are nothing more than “liberalism’s good and faithful servants.” Chad Pecknold, a professor at Catholic University, told me in an e-mail that he worries that those in the New Polity crowd “seem to believe that national politics is ‘an intrinsic evil,’ and so corrupting of all who engage in it.” Catholics, he added, “have a sacred duty to elevate (rather than opt-out of) the political common good of our country.”

Barnes, the professor, told me, “There’s a love of place here. It is a real place, and that can be hard and humiliating sometimes, because you don’t get to pick what it is. You receive it, it’s a gift, and then you respond to it with all of the virtue that Christ enables in you.” A few years ago, Deneen, Vermeule, and a few of their allies organized a conference about post-liberalism in Steubenville, which served as the perfect backdrop for their argument that the American liberal order has failed once thriving Catholic communities. It felt “a little agonizing,” Barnes said. “The place is not something they know or love or would sacrifice for. It serves as a sort of springboard for a political movement.”

Toward the end of my time in Steubenville, I visited Bookmarx, a bookstore owned by John Kuhner and his wife, Catherine. (The store is named after the former owners, not the Communist.) The couple moved from New York’s Hudson Valley to Steubenville in 2022. Catherine grew up in town, and they wanted to live in a strong Catholic community, especially because they have five kids. Kuhner is a writer, and, a few months after his family arrived, neighbors started prodding him to take over the local bookstore, which was being sold. “The community wanted this to happen,” he told me, with a shrug. “I’m a better reader than I am a businessman.” The store felt like the kind of place that poet types used to move to Brooklyn for before Brooklyn became corporate and expensive: tall, tightly packed shelves crammed with retro editions of beloved literary classics; a kids’ section heavy on Greek mythology and nineteen-seventies picture books; a couple of cats asserting their dominion.

Kuhner appreciates the vision for the College of St. Joseph the Worker. “If downtown becomes a college town, that is a great reinvention for this place,” he said. He’s thinking of hiring students from the college to build a children’s storytime loft in the back of his store. Scott Dressel, a former Steubenville councilman who is restoring the Grand, an old theatre down the street from Bookmarx, told me that he was delighted, and a little bewildered, when the college’s students did a walkthrough. “They were crawling all over the scaffolding,” he said. “Made me a little nervous.” Dressel thinks the college will accelerate the change in downtown Steubenville. “The impact they’ve made in one or two years is significant,” he said. “Someone told me a long time ago, ‘You’re going to work on this forever, and you’re going to think it’s never going to get better. And then all of a sudden, one day, you’re going to wake up and you’ll have turned some corner, and everything is finally going that direction.’ ”

And yet, as much as Kuhner wants to believe in the Steubenville revival, he remains skeptical. “Where do you get the money for the grander things that make up a real, thriving city?” he said. “It’s still a bit of a dream.” He pays twelve hundred dollars a month in rent for the bookstore, but his landlord can’t afford major repairs. The boiler is broken, so Kuhner huddles by a small space heater in his office in the winter.

Bookmarx is on the ground floor of a three-story building, which used to have a ballet school upstairs. Kuhner led me up a wooden staircase, into a dark space littered with debris. The ceiling was noticeably bowed, and the floor was partly rotted. Kuhner walked me over to the majestic, thirty-square-foot windows, many broken, some left uncovered. “A place like this, I find it simultaneously depressing and inspiring,” he said. “You imagine what it could be, and what it was, which is even more haunting.” We looked out over Fourth Street. Off to the left, we could see Seraphic Hall, a formerly dilapidated courthouse and post office that the college is renovating to serve as a new academic building. But it sat across from a mostly empty lot, and on blocks all around it buildings were empty and decaying.

Kuhner believes there will be people living in Steubenville in two hundred years. “Whether or not that means this bookstore will still turn a profit in four years—something like that is a different question,” he said. For now, his parish is lively and full of young families. His kids run up and down their block with friends their age. Sometimes, “you just feel like we’re camping out in the ruins,” Kuhner told me. “But I never feel without purpose here. And I never feel alone.” ♦

In early 1961, nine years after ascending to the throne of the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II made her first visit as monarch to India and Pakistan, among other destinations. The trip had momentous political significance. Both populous nations had formerly been under British colonial rule and were now independent; the British government, led by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, had an interest in maintaining good relations. In India, the Queen showed her appreciation for the country by touring the Taj Mahal and riding an elephant. In Pakistan, she was greeted by President Mohammad Ayub Khan, laid a wreath at the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the nation’s founder, and attended a state dinner in Islamabad, the nation’s capital. For that event, the Queen’s dressmaker, Norman Hartnell, had fashioned a duchesse-satin evening gown which, seen from the front, was unadorned and almost entirely white but for its wide-set, kingfisher-green shoulder straps. Seen from behind, the gown descended into a waterfall drapery with overlapping layers of white and green satin—a tribute to the colors of the Pakistani flag. The design was an unspoken but unmistakable gesture of recognition and esteem: diplomacy in dress form.

There is only so much diplomacy a dress can be asked to do, of course: Queen Elizabeth II did not go to Islamabad with the goal, for example, of concluding a war that her government had ill-advisedly launched against a foe who was inconveniently failing to crumble. (Vice-President J. D. Vance, for his arrival in Islamabad on just such a mission this past weekend, wore the colors of his own flag: a blue suit, a white shirt, and a red tie, the unofficial uniform of the MAGA movement.) But the royal gown that the Queen wore in Pakistan is a vivid example of the kind of soft power that can be exerted by a head of state who is otherwise without executive or legislative potency, especially one who takes a keen interest in international affairs, as Elizabeth II clearly did. The year before her royal tour of South Asia, Charles de Gaulle, the French President, made his own state visit to London, and was impressed by the young Queen’s mind, coming to believe, as he wrote in his memoirs, “that she was well-informed about everything, that her judgments, on people and events, were as clear cut as they were thoughtful, that no one was more preoccupied by the cares and problems of our storm-tossed age.” Even Donald Trump, a democratically elected head of state who continually proves himself erratic and unaccountable on the diplomatic front, seems to be dazzled into docility by his encounters with the British Crown, in the person both of Queen Elizabeth II and of her heir, King Charles III, who will be making his own state visit to the U.S. later this month. The President’s attacks this week on the Pope notwithstanding, it seems safe to say that Charles is the international figure least at risk of being subject to a public berating or humiliation by the President, and is perhaps the one most likely to bring out the limited best in his volatile American counterpart. (No Kings, sure. But on the other hand, maybe Kings?)

Charles’s opportunities for sartorial diplomacy on his forthcoming American visit will be limited by his gender: white tie offers little opportunity for message-bearing customization. His mother, however, had command of a wide-ranging language of clothes. Roughly two hundred items from her wardrobe, many never before publicly displayed, are now on view in “The Queen’s Style,” a blockbuster exhibition that has just opened at the King’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace, in London. Her childhood is represented by a handful of garments, including the royal christening gown, first worn in 1841 for the christening of Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter. (It continued to be used for every royal baby until 2004.) Other important ceremonial garments are also on display, including the Queen’s wedding dress, from 1947, another Hartnell creation that incorporated not just the white rose of the House of York but also featured orange blossoms, a symbol of fertility. Her coronation gown, from 1953, once again designed by the indefatigable Hartnell, bore embroidered emblems of the four nations of the United Kingdom—the English rose, the Scottish thistle, the Welsh leek, and the shamrock of Northern Ireland—as well as of representative plants from various Commonwealth nations, including a lotus flower for India and a jute plant for Pakistan.

For her Coronation ceremony on June 4th, 1953, the Queen wore a gown designed by Norman Hartnell.Photograph by Central Press / Hulton Archive / Getty

Along with these highly codified garments, there are dozens of formal gowns, including many of the full-skirted, narrow-waisted, arm-and-shoulder-exposing style Elizabeth favored in her first decades on the throne. Her longtime attendant, Margaret McKay (Bobo) MacDonald, reported that Elizabeth, accustomed to the demands of formal wear, could accurately settle a tiara on her head while descending a staircase, without needing to look in a mirror. Also included are the elegant columnar gowns of her middle years and the sturdy sheaths of her long-lasting old age, among them the pale-blue, white-trimmed dress, coat, and hat that she wore during the weekend of celebrations for her Platinum Jubilee, in June, 2022, which ended up being her last major public appearance. (She died three months later, aged ninety-six.)

For more quotidian looks, the Queen often utilized the visual power of color. From early on, she established a signature style, favoring a striking monotone over patterns or color combinations. In a gallery dedicated to daywear for official engagements, monochrome-hued dresses and coats are arrayed in a long, black-lined case—doubled rows of garments in pink and lavender and peach and a delicate citrine, as enticing as a box of Ladurée macarons. The Queen was not above judging the sartorial efforts, or failures, of others: as one longtime aide told Ben Pimlott, her biographer, “She’ll remember exactly what a lady councillor or mayoress was wearing: ‘a ghastly green dress, and the strap fell off.’ ” Queen Elizabeth relied on a small coterie of designers, including Hardy Amies and Ian Thomas; for the last quarter century of her life, she worked with a personal dresser, Angela Kelly, who stewarded an in-house design team. As a result, her outfits never sent shoppers running to the high street in emulation, as the future Queen Catherine’s off-the-peg choices often do. Numerous designers, including Alessandro Michele and the late Vivienne Westwood, have credited the Queen as an inspiration, not least for the kind of sturdy, tweedy daywear shown in a section devoted to her off-duty garments. (A Burberry rain cape on display, made for horse-riding and abbreviated at elbow level, looks like something Jonathan Anderson might send down the runway.) But Pimlott also remarks that Elizabeth was not especially interested in clothes for their own sake. “Her concerns were practical,” he writes. “She wanted to wear dresses that were comfortable and not too expensive, and which would not cause offence.”

As was the case with the white-and-green dress for her Pakistan tour, Elizabeth, in her fashion choices, sought not only to avoid giving offense but to offer symbolic ingratiation, and among the most fascinating garments on display are those representing diplomatic dressing. During a state visit to Japan in 1975—the first time a reigning British King or Queen had ever visited that other tea-drinking island monarchy—she wore a dress of seafoam-blue silk chiffon, whose skirt and long trumpet sleeves were embellished with appliquéd cherry blossoms. Eleven years later, she repeated the gesture for a state visit to China, wearing a glittering pink gown sewn with peonies, widely considered the national flower. For a 1967 visit to Canada, the Queen wore a stunning sculptural gown, its white satin bodice cinching to a waist embroidered with maple leaves and then descending to a flowing skirt of royal blue, thus honoring Canada’s national identity while signalling her ongoing role as that nation’s head of state. A red-and-white dress would have said something else entirely.

The exhibition shows how, on rare occasions, the royal wardrobe was used to express something beyond respect for another nation. In one important instance, one can detect something closer to regret, or remorse, for the way in which Britain subjugated other countries and peoples during the long period of its imperial domination. In 2011, Queen Elizabeth made a historic visit to Ireland, the first by a reigning British monarch since that country’s hard-won independence. Her appearance at a state banquet in Dublin was notable for her opening greeting, which was delivered in Irish—there were gasps in the room—and her acknowledgment of the “sad and regrettable reality that through history our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence, and loss.” She went on to express her faith in continuing reconciliation. For a British monarch, this amounted to a full-throated declaration of culpability, a message that was underlined by the white evening dress she wore for the occasion: the bodice and sleeves were covered in two thousand silk shamrocks. Saying the loud part quietly—that was the work done by this historic gown. She never could have worn it were it not for the careful efforts of diplomats thirteen years earlier, who, for almost two years, painstakingly stitched together the Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to what had seemed for three bloody decades to be an intractable conflict between loyalists and republicans in Northern Ireland. As Elizabeth II knew, it takes time and patience, skill and good will, to thread that needle. ♦

In her 2023 memoir, “Oath and Honor,” published the year before Donald Trump’s remarkable return from political oblivion, the Republican apostate Liz Cheney describes watching in amazement on January 6, 2021, as her fellow-Republicans in Congress lined up to sign electoral-vote objection sheets. Cheney, who had been No. 3 in the Party leadership throughout Trump’s first term in office, concluded that her colleagues suffered from a “plague of cowardice,” summed up by their willingness to go along with Trump’s false claims about the “rigged” 2020 election despite understanding full well that he had lost fair and square. “The things we do for the Orange Jesus,” Cheney heard one of them, Mark Green, of Tennessee, mutter as he put his name down. (Later, Green denied having made the comment; the following year, Trump praised the congressman for his many “political talents.”)

I immediately thought of Cheney’s Orange Jesus line this week when Trump, amid an escalating public feud with Pope Leo XIV, circulated an A.I.-generated image of himself as the Christian Lord and Saviour, before deleting it and telling reporters the next day, at the White House:

I did post it. And I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with the Red Cross, there’s a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. I had just heard about it, and I said, “How did they come up with that?” It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better. I make people a lot better.

It is not enough to read these words, as silly and mendacious and incoherent as they are. Trump’s remarks, in my view, make for essential viewing, thirty-seven seconds that showcase the precipitousness of our fall as a superpower. Look at how Trump stares straight into the cameras as he lies. A doctor? Seriously? It’s as though he felt no need to come up with a better excuse—or any excuse at all. (To be fair: the fact that, as Trump said this, he was flanked by a fifty-eight-year-old MAGA enthusiast from Fayetteville, Arkansas, who had just delivered to him a bag of takeout McDonald’s in a bright-red “DoorDash Grandma” T-shirt suggests that God does have a pretty good sense of humor.) By Wednesday, Trump had reasserted his claim to divine authority, posting another A.I.-generated image of himself standing alongside Jesus, who has his arm wrapped around Trump’s shoulder; both of them are bathed in the soft glow of a heavenly light. Trump’s caption: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”

The point is simply this: in Trump 1.0, Orange Jesus was a snarky shorthand for the hypocrisy of Republicans who knew better but joined up with the cult of Trump anyway. In Trump 2.0, Trump thinks he has actually become Orange Jesus.

How else to explain the President’s many otherwise inexplicable acts since returning to office? The gilding of the White House to resemble a profane copy of the Vatican, the ever more baroque lies, the slapping his name on everything, and, perhaps most of all, the repeated reminders that our leader recognizes no earthly limits on his power as he wages war in the Middle East and speaks of conquering other lands. “There is one thing,” he told the Times, in January. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” America First-ism is not the ideology of this Presidency; Trump First-ism is. The fact that he serves up his megalomania with such an excess of dark farce only reinforces how shameful it is that this is the man for whom so many Republicans have chosen to sacrifice what remained of their integrity.

On Thursday, a federal commission stacked with Trump appointees voted to approve the President’s plans for a triumphal arch on the National Mall, modelled on those built by Napoleon and the Roman emperors to celebrate their military victories. At two hundred and fifty feet tall, it would be the biggest such structure in the world. Asked last fall by CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe what this modern-day arch was meant to commemorate, Trump pointed to himself and replied, “Me.”

One might conclude from the fact that Trump quickly deleted his Jesus post on Monday morning, some thirteen hours after posting it on Orthodox Easter, that he realized he had gone too far, even for many of his most vocal followers. There’s no doubt that the online backlash was swift and laugh-out-loud funny, the worst kind of insult to a man who sees himself as endowed with otherworldly powers. I particularly loved one from Sarah Palin—an image of Jesus seemingly begging Trump to stop making such an ass of himself: “Alright. That’s enough. Give me the phone.” You literally cannot buy publicity this bad for a politician.

At such a moment, it would seem to be an extreme case of political malpractice for the President to pick a public fight about the extent of God’s imprimatur on his decision to go to war on immigrants at home and Iranians abroad with no less of an authority on God than the Pope himself. Even before the whole I-am-Jesus thing, Trump’s popularity was plummeting to historic lows as his war upended the global economy and sent prices for oil, gas, and a zillion other products skyrocketing.

But the cult lives. On Thursday morning, at a Pentagon press briefing, there was Trump’s self-styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, comparing Trump to the Lord once again, as he likened reporters’ “incredibly unpatriotic” coverage of the President’s conflict in the Middle East to the evil Pharisees tearing down Jesus after he had performed a miracle in front of their very eyes. (That same day, it was revealed that Hegseth, during a Pentagon sermon, had quoted fake Bible verses from the movie “Pulp Fiction”—who knew that Trump 2.0 could turn “Saturday Night Live” into a reality-TV show?)

At almost exactly the same time that Hegseth was going on about the Pharisees, Pope Leo’s latest missive to his flock landed on X. “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, and Patriarch of the West wrote to his tens of millions of followers.

Not long after, Trump was given the opportunity to walk away from his no-win feud. But, no, responding to reporters’ questions on the White House lawn, he suggested that the Pope, in condemning war as the Scriptures demand, was in fact in favor of allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon, whereas he, Trump, would not allow that to happen. “I want him to preach the Gospel, I’m all about the Gospel,” the President added. I am not much of a Bible quoter, but it seems pretty clear which side the Lord would be on in this fight between the Orange Jesus and the real one’s personal emissary on earth.

The folly of the ancient Roman emperors springs to mind here. History has not judged kindly their demand that their subjects not only build great arches in their honor but that they literally worship their rulers as Dominus et Deus, Lord and God. Those imperial cults of personality, and many of their monuments, lasted no longer than the short period of their rule. Trump may scar our beautiful capital with golden memorials to himself, but how long, really, will it last, this tacky reign of a President who styles himself a MAGA god? ♦