Few celebrities in the aughts embodied the American dream more than the music mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs. He was one of the most powerful men in music; you could argue that he single-handedly pulled hip-hop from the fringes into mainstream pop. Now he has a very different distinction: He has been accused of what sounds like some of the most vicious domestic abuse I have ever encountered in celebrity news. On Thursday, the R&B singer Cassie, Combs’s longtime romantic partner, filed a civil lawsuit against him. Cassie (whose real name is Casandra Ventura) alleged that Combs, who was also her boss, had, over the course of their decade-long relationship, subjected her to repeated instances of domestic violence. In 2018, the lawsuit claims, he raped her.

Combs’s lawyer said in a statement that he “vehemently denies” the allegations. For six months, the lawyer said, Combs had been “subjected to Ms. Ventura’s persistent demand of $30 million, under the threat of writing a damaging book about their relationship, which was unequivocally rejected as blatant blackmail. Despite withdrawing her initial threat, Ms. Ventura has now resorted to filing a lawsuit riddled with baseless and outrageous lies.” Protests aside, Combs settled with Ventura within 24 hours.

The suit was filed in the sunsetting days of New York’s Adult Survivors Act—a law signed by Governor Kathy Hochul that gave survivors of sexual abuse who were over 18 years old a one-year window, from November 2022 to November 2023, to file civil suits, regardless of any criminal statutes of limitations. Ventura’s suit came just in time; the window closes this week.

Reading through the filing, I found myself weeping. Ventura alleged not only that Combs kicked and beat her on frequent occasions, hiding her in hotels while her bruises healed, but that he forced her into sex acts with strangers, and that he recorded them. Further, Ventura claimed that he often kept her drugged and “on multiple occasions” had her “personal medical records sent directly to his email address.” Not long before she finally left him, in 2018, Combs allegedly forced his way into her home and raped her. The allegations were horrific. Yet this was not why I wept.

I wept because, despite Cassie having been in my consciousness for nearly two decades, this was the first time I saw Casandra Ventura. Ventura was only 19 years old when Combs “discovered” her in 2005 and signed her to his label, Bad Boy. When they officially began dating—after rumors of a long pursuit—she was 21, and he was a 38-year-old man.

I wept because no one, including myself, had thought this relationship was weird. I wept because, if anything, we’d probably thought that she was lucky. I wept because I’d never seen her as a person. I wept because she had existed for me solely as a product and an accessory to Combs’s male genius.

I wept because I felt that somehow in all of this, I’d been complicit.

“When did you fall in love with hip-hop?”

This is the provocation that begins one of my favorite rom-coms—Brown Sugar. The 2002 film is a will-they-or-won’t-they about two childhood friends: a boy who grows up to be a disillusioned music executive and a girl who becomes a respected hip-hop journalist. The question is her trademark opening line, and it kicks off a now-classic montage, in which for two minutes, musical legends wax romantic about the song, the verse, the moment that made them fall. Hard.

I never could pinpoint when I fell in love with hip-hop; it had simply always been there. But I remember, distinctly, the moment when I realized it had been a dysfunctional and perhaps even abusive relationship. I’d been working on a playlist for a friend’s birthday, compiled exclusively of rap tracks considered classics of the genre, and was giving it a listen while on a run. I’d heard these songs hundreds of times over the years, but that day—as a woman in her 30s making a playlist for a man who’d recently had a baby girl—I was suddenly hearing them anew. The volume seemed turned up for every mention of “hoes” and “bitches,” like someone had taken a sonic highlighter and run it over every verse about devious, promiscuous, and generally disposable women.

Hip-hop had undoubtedly shaped my worldview, my politics, and my sense of self. I’m sure that, by then, I’d skimmed over countless think pieces about misogyny and sexism in the music. But only that day did it dawn on me that I’d spent my formative years with hip-hop whispering into my headphones that I, as a woman, was worthless—that women were interchangeable accessories, extras in songs and videos, not to be trusted, certainly not to be believed.

I didn’t stop listening to hip-hop. I mean, come on. But I did find myself turning songs off on my walks, avoiding certain artists, gravitating far more toward R&B, old soul, and classic salsa. There is much in hip-hop music and culture that I loved and still love. But after that day, it’s never been the same.

It’s not just that I hear the music in a different way; I look at my past in a different way. All the girlfriends I used to hit the clubs with now look back and wonder: What choices did we make because we’d been listening to that message for years? What judgments did we cast upon other women because of it, because we’d been conditioned to be indifferent to one another? What didn’t we notice?

These questions weighed on me when I read about Cassie’s lawsuit. Despite the vehement denials and a lot of defensive bluster from Combs’s camp, the two parties “amicably” settled within a day. Now the only people who can know whether the allegations are true are the people named and identified in the lawsuit. A settlement, Combs’s lawyer said, “is in no way an admission of wrongdoing.” But in my opinion, Cassie won; her version of the truth has seen the light of day.

I can imagine how, in the deeply materialistic and misogynistic world of aughts pop culture, what seemed like a “dream life” could be a nightmare. I can imagine how a teenager, on the wrong side of a power balance, could see a relationship as normal at first, and only over time realize that it was not. Perhaps the revelation came to her suddenly. Or perhaps it was a series of moments. Or perhaps someone who witnessed her suffering brought to her attention the Adult Survivors Act and, as the last grains of sand ran through the glass, she was moved to come forward.

More than 2,500 lawsuits have been filed under the auspices of the Adult Survivors Act. The past year, Mariann Wang, a lawyer who has represented many victims of sexual abuse, told NPR, has been a “remarkable period of time.”

The law acknowledged that many victims needed more time to come to terms with their experience before they were ready to hold a perpetrator to account. Because of the legislation, E. Jean Carroll was able to have her day in court with Donald Trump. Perhaps unsurprisingly, cases have been brought against a number of high-profile men—the flurry increasing as the clock ran out. Just this month, cases were filed against the music executive L.A. Reid; Neil Portnow, the former head of the Grammys; and the comedian Russell Brand. (Portnow denied the charges; Reid and Brand have not publicly responded to the lawsuits, though Brand has denied previous allegations.)

The law also brought to light a massive case against the gynecologist Robert Hadden, who had been abusing patients for decades. Hadden’s former patients and victims also sued Columbia University, New York Presbyterian, and many other institutions and individuals, accusing them of helping to cover up the abuse. (In 2016, Hadden pleaded guilty to abusing 19 women, and he has since been sentenced to 20 years in prison.) Columbia and its affiliated hospitals recently settled two similar lawsuits and this month, the university established a $100 million victims’ compensation fund.

Without this law, the bad behavior of many individuals as well as the institutions that protected them would have gone unaddressed. And yet the law also imposes its own arbitrary timeline.

How many women, when the law expires on Friday, will wake up and wonder if they should have taken action? How many men will wake up and breathe a sigh of relief, grateful that they will never be exposed in court for what they did?

My revelation about the lyrical content of some of my favorite rap music happened about six years ago. But only when writing this piece did I notice that, although Brown Sugar begins with a woman asking a question, all the answers in the famous montage that follows are provided by men. It’s one of my very favorite movies about heterosexual relationships, and I’ve watched it dozens of times over the years, and that had never seemed strange to me until now.

Immediately after news broke about Ventura and Combs settling their suit, the comments sections of hip-hop gossip accounts were flooded with people judging Ventura. They said that it was all a money grab (Ventura’s lawyer has told reporters that the settlement was an eight-figure deal); that she should have helped more women by going to trial; that she’d probably made the allegations up, because otherwise she wouldn’t have settled so quickly.

Or perhaps this was all that Casandra Ventura could manage. Perhaps if she’d had another three months, or another six months or another few years to process and heal, she would have walked into a courtroom and dragged him for filth for all the world to see. Or perhaps no amount of time would have made that kind of inquisition appealing. Perhaps it was simply enough to feel heard and acknowledged.

What we know for certain is that, after this week, if other women have similar complaints about Combs’s alleged past behavior—or about the past behavior of other powerful men and institutions in New York—they will have one less way to come forward. And a lot of bad actors with shady pasts will sleep easier because of that.

Early next year, on January 24, the comedian Mike Birbiglia will perform in Walla Walla, Washington, for the first time since the night in 2005 when he nearly died after sleepwalking—sleep-running—through the second-story window of his hotel room at a La Quinta Inn. He’d been having issues with sleepwalking for years, and on this night, he was dreaming that a missile had been fired on his infantry platoon, so he took drastic evasive measures. He crash-landed on the grass and started running, until he realized he was awake, and in his underwear, and covered in blood and shards of glass, one of which was embedded in his thigh, a centimeter from his femoral artery.

“I know,” he says whenever he recounts this moment onstage, responding to the gasps from the audience. “I’m in the future too.”

Birbiglia first told this story at the climax of his 2008 breakthrough off-Broadway solo show, Sleepwalk With Me. He’s made five Netflix specials, and with each one, the rooms get bigger, the runs get longer, and the storytelling grows more ambitious. The New One, which premiered on Netflix in 2019, about his uneasy embrace of fatherhood, ran at the James Earl Jones Theatre, on Broadway, for two months. His latest, The Old Man and the Pool, his midlife-crisis comedy, sold out an extended run at Lincoln Center, then moved to London’s West End for another month. The show at Wyndham’s Theatre prior to his was King Lear, directed by Kenneth Branagh, and the show following his was Long Day’s Journey Into Night, so if you’re keeping track, that’s Shakespeare, then Mike Birbiglia, then Eugene O’Neill.

The Old Man and the Pool arrives on Netflix this week, and then Birbiglia will go right back on tour to commence the yearslong process of shaping his next special, tentatively titled Please Stop the Ride. But only in Walla Walla will he find a tiny plaque at the La Quinta Inn commemorating the night Mike Birbiglia sleepwalked through a second-floor window and lived to write a hit stand-up-comedy special about it. “Seriously,” the plaque reads. “Google it.”

This time around, Birbiglia plans to bring along a camera crew in order to document his … what, exactly? Nostalgia? Morbid curiosity? “I really don’t know,” he told me recently. “I don’t know how I feel about it.” The only thing he knows for certain is that he won’t be spending the night at La Quinta: “Definitely seeking more comfortable accommodations.”

Birbiglia grew up in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. He went to a Catholic grade school, a Catholic high school, and a Catholic college. His father was a neurologist who fell asleep reading war novels and urged his son to hold his secrets close. “Don’t tell anyone,” he’d always say, not even about getting cut from the soccer team. (“Dad, I think they’ll know.”) Mike was always more like his mother, who would talk about anything with anyone. He once told a joke about meeting her in front of a bank teller, and as he walked up, he overheard his mother say, “Oh, here he comes now.”

Birbiglia was your classic attention-seeking youngest of four children. His brother, Joe, who is four years older and now works for him, helping to sharpen jokes and tagging along whenever Birbiglia performs somewhere nice, was his earliest comedy mentor. “Our dad was just like, ‘When’s he going to go and get a real job in advertising or something?’” Joe recalls. “And me just having to say to my dad, ‘He’s one of the best comedians in the country at 22, 23, 24 years old—maybe we want to stick with this a little longer?’”

Birbiglia studied theater and screenwriting at Georgetown University, and from the start, he wanted to push his stand-up comedy toward solo theater. One of his professors gave him some advice: Go see every solo show in New York, and whichever one you like the most, track down the person who directed it. That’s what led Birbiglia to the director Seth Barrish, who’d worked on a show called The Tricky Part, by Martin Moran, based on his memoir about being molested at age 12 by a counselor at his Catholic boys’ camp. It’s not a comedy.

“He literally showed up in the hallway where my office was at the time and introduced himself,” Barrish told me. “That’s how it began.” They’ve done every special together since.

Nothing about Birbiglia’s approach to his specials seems, at first, all that revolutionary: half comedy–half theater, or maybe more like 75–25, built on a big-theme central storyline paced out across the hour, with riffs and anecdotes that curlicue around it. Most comics start with five good minutes and stack from there. But Birbiglia’s specials almost always begin with a title. They start as a story. He’s become so synonymous with the form that on a recent episode of his podcast, Working It Out, after he credited the comedian Todd Barry with “inventing crowd work,” Barry replied, “And you invented storytelling.” Birbiglia never repeats a joke, but his stories are living entities, evolving in unforeseeable ways and always sprouting fresh limbs. The jokes change, but the stories are never really finished, and that night at the La Quinta Inn has become one of several career-long leitmotifs in his comedy.

At first, he was reluctant to tell that story. It was too raw, too painful. Barrish talked him into it, and it became an early lesson for Birbiglia in the essential comic art of self-exposure. Comics as a breed tend to be comfortable spilling tea all over themselves, but few dare to go to such Pryor-esque lengths. In My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, Birbiglia tells a long confessional story about receiving flaccid fellatio from a sex worker in the red-light district of Amsterdam. In The New One, he admits that in the early months of his daughter’s life, he once thought to himself, I get why dads leave. There’s a hush in the theater when he says it. This isn’t a joke. “I’m only comfortable saying that because I’m not gonna leave. I love my wife. And where would I go?” Everyone laughs, breaking the silence. “But I get it.”

“There’s this famous phrase, which I didn’t invent,” Birbiglia told me, “which is that we’re only as sick as our secrets. And what I realized from performing these shows is that there’s a lot of truth to that.” When he talks about the things he’s done wrong, his worst impulses, the behavior he most regrets, he said, “instead of people rejecting me and saying shame on you,” they come up after shows to thank him for opening up, for saying what they, too, had done or felt.

As Birbiglia conceives of it, his job onstage “is to take the Venn-diagram circle of what I think is funny, and the Venn diagram of what the audience thinks is funny,” he said, and then explore “that middle area where those two things collide. That’s where I think there’s a potential for the audience to see themselves in the show, and to experience not just laughter, but cathartic laughter. Like, Isn’t it funny that we’re all experiencing this?”

Mike Birbiglia has overcome a surname that sounds more like a diagnosis, and a face that looks like everyface, to become sneaky-famous. And maybe it’s because of how he looks, or how he dresses, or how he presents himself onstage, that no matter how successful he becomes, he’ll probably never seem as famous as he actually is. He’s described himself as having “the body of someone who’s about to start P90X and then doesn’t.” He took a women’s exercise class, because “I’ve given up on having a traditional male physique. I’m now going for ‘strong independent woman.’” He does not dress for success. “This is the shirt I decided to wear tonight,” he joked during one of his specials. “I didn’t spill mustard on the real shirt and this is the backup shirt—this is the A outfit.”

And yet, when I last spoke with him, he was in the middle of trying on fake mustaches for Questlove’s Clue-themed Halloween party later that night. He’s going as Colonel Mustard because he really does get mustard on his shirt a lot, and because his wife and daughter really do call him Colonel Mustard Stains at home. But never mind all that: Questlove! Not a bad flex.

“It’ll be even more of a flex when you see the paparazzi photos tomorrow,” he says, so that he doesn’t have to name-drop Chris Rock, Natasha Lyonne, Jon Batiste, Ronan Farrow, Awkwafina, and Padma Lakshmi. He tries to avoid dropping names, but nowadays they just tumble out when he talks about his life, like the night he was running lines with Tom Hanks for A Man Called Otto, in which Birbiglia plays a douchey condo developer. Or the time he was cast as Taylor Swift’s freeloading future son in her music video for “Anti-Hero.”

If you’ve heard of Mike Birbiglia but never heard him tell a joke, it’s probably because of Taylor Swift. The story of how they met requires yet more name-dropping: It was at a pizza party thrown by a mutual friend, Jack Antonoff, the pop star and songwriter, who is now married to the actor Margaret Qualley, whose mother is Andie MacDowell. Birbiglia and his wife, the poet Jennifer Hope Stein, chatted it up with Swift. The whole time, he was thinking, We’re talking to Taylor Swift, and he later learned that the whole time, Swift was thinking, This man must play my freeloading future son.

A few days after the party, Birbiglia got a text with a script attached from someone claiming to be Swift. “The script was so well written that I was like, ‘Either Taylor Swift is texting me or I’m getting catfished by someone who’s a very good writer,’” he told me. “So either way, good news.”

Birbiglia’s performances are so intimate, and leave such an acute impression that the world is just whooshing him around like a leaf, that it can be a jolt to encounter this self-assured real-world Mike Birbiglia. His comedy, though, is fundamentally about how all the celebrity friends in the world, even Taylor Swift—the Amex Centurion of celebrity friends—won’t stop the indignities of life from flooding his way. That’s the point, in a digressive Birbiglian sort of way, of all this name-dropping: his acute awareness that it’s all a mirage.

In some respects, his normal life is where he gets to live out his fantasies of fame and fortune, and the theater is where he faces the real stuff.

For instance: death. Something we’re all experiencing, or will eventually. And for Mike Birbiglia, the funniest part about death is that he has this weird feeling it might be coming for him sooner rather than later.

In the early minutes of The Old Man and the Pool, Birbiglia says that his father had a heart attack when he was 56, and that his father’s father had a heart attack when he was 56. (His father survived; his grandfather did not.) “So I’ve always thought I should set aside that whole year,” Birbiglia jokes. “Get an Airbnb by the hospital and keep a flexible schedule. I think that might be a big year for me.”

He describes relaying this bit of family medical history to his physician during a routine visit, after he’d flunked a blow-out-the-candles-type test with a performance so feeble that the doctor feared Birbiglia might be having a heart attack right there in his office. This was just before his 45th birthday.

When he was 19, he noticed one day that his urine was red, and his urologist found a malignant tumor in his bladder, which Birbiglia feared he’d caused by masturbating too much. Just a few years later, he was pulling out of his girlfriend’s parents’ house when his car got T-boned by a drunk driver. And now he’s middle-aged, with a wife and an 8-year-old daughter; he’s got type 2 diabetes, and he’s planning on having a heart attack in 11 years.

When he started writing The Old Man and the Pool, in 2018, he feared that he was trying to take his audience to the one place they wouldn’t follow him. Death is the ultimate taboo subject. “What if they have a really bad reaction to it?” he wondered. “What if they’re going through something, and they just can’t hear it?” And then the pandemic happened, and 1 million people died all around us.

During a solemn moment in the show, Birbiglia describes putting his daughter, Oona, to bed one night shortly after his diabetes diagnosis. As he’s leaving her room, he feels his breath get short—a panic attack. The theater is silent. The set behind him is a tall, cresting wave of aqua pool tiles that looms over him the whole show, threatening to crash. Birbiglia lies down onstage to catch his breath, then takes out his journal. Projected onto the wave behind him, we see in his handwriting the first words he writes: “I think I might die soon.”

A thing that happens when you become a parent is you reexperience your own childhood through the eyes of your children, only this time the aperture is much wider and you see everything in the frame more clearly. This is a central theme of Please Stop the Ride, the hour Birbiglia’s about to take on tour to Walla Walla. The title is a callback to a crowd-favorite bit of his from My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend about an amusement-park ride called The Scrambler. But what began in 2013 as a ne plus ultra tale of teenage romantic humiliation and projectile vomit has transformed in Birbiglia’s mind and resurfaced, a decade later, as a metaphor for adulthood, and in particular how getting older is, if anything, the opposite of getting wiser.

“The most significant thing that I feel like we get wrong when we’re kids,” he says, “is that we think that grown-ups know a lot more than we do. And then you get to be 45, like I am, and you go, Oh my God—I don’t really know that much stuff. In some ways, I know less.”

For the time being, sure, yes, Oona thinks he radiates amazingness. Her dad, Colonel Mustard Stains, is friends with Taylor Swift. “But because I’m incapable of living in the present,” he says, “inevitably, she’s going to be 16, and she’s going to be like, ‘My dad is garbage.’ Which is fine. That’s part of the developmental process. I am ready for it.” He goes deep on this topic during his new hour. “But my dad didn’t have to deal with that. We said it, but he just wasn’t listening. It was the ’80s. No one listened to children. We were like, ‘Dad is garbage.’ And he was like, ‘Is someone talking?’”

Someday soon, Oona will be old enough for her dad to tell her the story of the time he sleepwalked through the second-story window of a La Quinta Inn in Walla Walla, Washington, and maybe she’ll laugh and maybe she’ll be horrified, and maybe someday down the road, he’ll tell that story onstage—what it was like telling his daughter about what happened in Walla Walla. It’s the same story, only this time, it’s a father telling his daughter about how he nearly died before she was even a thought in head. He’ll tell it again and again, and each time, it’ll be different, because that’s how life works. Who knows what the stories will mean next?

For Thanksgiving, I will be traveling home to western New York on Amtrak. I don’t think anything will go disastrously awry, though I don’t know. In 2019, during a snowstorm, an Amtrak train was stuck for some 36 hours in the mountains of Oregon because of a fallen tree. Earlier this year, on an Amtrak train from Northern Virginia to Sanford, Florida, passengers repeatedly called the police during the train’s 20-hour delay. “For those of you that are calling the police,” the conductor had to announce, “we are not holding you hostage.”

That debacle was caused by a freight train ahead of them, which had crashed into an empty car parked on the tracks in rural South Carolina. Nothing you can do about that. A train just has to wait until whatever’s in front of it is gone. Or it has to plow through it: Just last week, a train on its way through Michigan inadvertently smashed into an unoccupied parked car and then derailed. “If you can imagine it on Amtrak, it will probably happen,” Richard White, a historian at Stanford and the author of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, told me. He cited another incident from last week, in which certain trains out of New York City were suspended for days because a privately owned parking garage above the tracks had literal holes in it.

Of course, extreme train incidents are rare, and that’s why they make news. No form of transportation is infallible, and severe injury and fatal accidents are exponentially more common with car travel than with train travel. And any form of travel can be delayed by weather or by mechanical issues. The fact is that there is no good way to travel in America. Driving is dangerous, renting a car is a nightmare, and I don’t need to tell you about airplanes. Amtrak isn’t ideal, but it’s nonideal in a unique way. The trains don’t go to enough places; they don’t go often enough; they take too long; they can be more expensive than the faster alternatives. And then sometimes there’s something on the tracks.

Many Americans may be put off by the day-to-day reality of the country’s trains. Just 32 million people took Amtrak in 2019, and a tiny fraction of Thanksgiving travelers this year are expected to take the train. But many Americans still find the idea of train travel very romantic. New train routes generally receive popular support, and Amtrak’s shoot-for-the-moon 2035 plan, released in early 2021, caused national buzz about the future of passenger rail. TikTok travel influencers are thrilled by the views from the observation cars; young meme-makers talk about trains as if they were set down on the face of the Earth by God.

Taking Amtrak, to be clear, is often amazing. I travel on it whenever I can, even if it’s slower (such as to Pittsburgh this summer for a Taylor Swift concert, which took about nine hours from New York City). On a train, everything looks like it’s from the ’80s, because it probably is. But on an airplane, you’re squished and miserable, and everything good costs extra or isn’t allowed. (Amtrak itself has latched onto “no middle seat” as a marketing tactic.) All train seats are huge; I can bring my own bottle of wine if I’m in a sleeper car. Forget driving. What can I do in a car? Not read a book. Not pop up and take a little walk to the café for a turkey sandwich.

The experience may soon get better. President Joe Biden is obsessed with Amtrak and has made extending Amtrak service part of his agenda. The passenger cars, which are 36 years old, on average, are finally getting replaced too. Earlier this month, at an Amtrak maintenance facility in Delaware, Biden designated $16.4 billion for infrastructure repairs, part of the biggest investment in passenger rail since the 19th century. “This is the United States of America,” he said. “There’s not a damn thing we can’t do if we set our mind to it.”

Others might say to keep dreaming. Amtrak has never not had problems. Amtrak was built with problems. (It reportedly lost $500,000 a day in its first year.) Some of these problems are existential: The fact is that many American cities evolved after the invention of the airplane and the car, Eric Jessup, the director of the Freight Policy Transportation Institute, at Washington State University, pointed out. We’re too spread out for trains to get people everywhere they want to go. Other problems are more practical but still severe. Trains are frequently delayed, most often because of freight-train traffic on shared tracks. Last year, the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles was on time for just 19 percent of trips. And, again, everything is old. Some of the repairs that Biden referenced this month are for a tunnel that was built in the 1800s. (A spokesperson for Amtrak declined to comment on the service’s delays.)

Passenger trains haven’t been good in America in a very long time, so it’s not clear why people have such a soft spot for them. “Few Americans outside the Northeast are old enough to remember days when train travel was the norm,” White told me. “I don’t know if there are enough movies to produce nostalgia.” He couldn’t explain it, he said, but “I think you are right that there is a constituency for trains that extends beyond those people who actually ride them.” He pointed out that people in his home state of California voted to subsidize high-speed-rail construction, even though most people in California probably won’t take those trains. Maybe it’s just that Americans like to have options, whether or not they take advantage of all of them; maybe we, on principle, think we ought to be competing with Europe. Or maybe, as Amtrak put it in a 1993 advertising campaign, “There’s Something About a Train That’s Magic.”

There is something about trains. It’s the forces of nature. It’s physics. It’s wild. Trains are hulky leviathans, and they move—hulking—through the wilderness and the mountains and everywhere else. The technology feels removed from modern life. When it works, it’s amazing. And yet, trains are sensitive. They can get stuck in those mountains for 36 hours! They can tip off of tracks that have been warped by an exceptionally hot day. They can be derailed because perhaps a teenager threw something or because a random abandoned stolen car is sitting on the tracks. “Amtrak—because it has to cross over roads, go through stations, travel long distances—is a system that is particularly vulnerable to idiots,” White told me. “Weird human actions can bring the whole thing to a halt.” But usually, the whole thing doesn’t come to a halt. Usually, you get from Point A to Point B, and you get to see all of the points in between, even if you don’t do it in the time frame you were sold.

In 1971, when the government took over responsibility for passenger-rail service, forming Amtrak, The New York Times speculated that passenger-rail enthusiasts would be “extinct by 1985.” But I’m about to take Amtrak in 2023, and I’m pretty sure I’ll get home … eventually.