The sounds came out of my mouth with an unexpected urgency. The cadence was deliberate—more befitting of an incantation than an order: one large strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade. The words hung in the air for a moment, giving way to a stillness punctuated only by the soft whir of distant fluorescent lights and the gentle hum of a Muzak cover of Bruce Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain.”

The time was 9:03 a.m.; the sun had been up for only one hour. I watched the kind woman behind the counter stifle an eye roll, a small mercy for which I will be eternally grateful. Her look indicated that she’d been through this before, enough times to see through my bravado. I was just another man standing in front of a Panera Bread employee, asking her to hand me 30 fluid ounces of allegedly deadly lemonade. (I would have procured it myself, but it was kept behind the counter, like a controlled substance.)

I came to Panera to touch the face of God or, at the very least, experience the low-grade anxiety and body sweats one can expect from consuming 237 milligrams of caffeine in 15 minutes. Really, the internet sent me. Since its release last year, Panera’s highly caffeinated Charged Lemonade has become a popular meme—most notably on TikTok, where people vlog from the front seat of their car about how hopped up they are after chugging the neon beverage. Last December, a tongue-in-cheek Slate headline asked, “Is Panera Bread Trying to Kill Us?”

In the following months, two wrongful-death lawsuits were indeed filed against the restaurant chain, arguing that Panera was responsible for not adequately advertising the caffeine content of the drink. The suits allege that Charged Lemonade contributed to the fatal cardiac arrests of a 21-year-old college student and a 46-year-old man. Panera did not respond to my request for comment but has argued that both lawsuits are without merit and that it “stands firmly by the safety of our products.” In October, Panera changed the labeling of its Charged Lemonade to warn people who may be “sensitive to caffeine.”

The allegations seem to have done the impossible: They’ve made a suburban chain best known for its bread bowls feel exciting, even dangerous. The memes have escalated. Search death lemonade on any platform, and you’ll see a cascade of grimly ironic posts about everything from lemonade-assisted suicide to being able to peer into alternate dimensions after sipping the juice. Much like its late-aughts boozy predecessor Four Loko, Charged Lemonade is riding a wave of popularity because of the implication that consuming it is possibly unsafe. One viral post from October put it best: “Panera has apparently discovered the fifth loko.”

Like many internet-poisoned men and women before me, I possess both a classic Freudian death drive and an embarrassing desire to experience memes in the physical world—an effort, perhaps, to situate my human form among the algorithms and timelines that dominate my life. But there is another reason I was in a strip mall on the shortest day of the year, allowing the recommended daily allowance of caffeine to Evil Knievel its way across my blood-brain barrier. I came to make sense of a year that was defined by existential threats—and by a strange, pervasive celebration of them.

In 2023, I spent a lot of time listening to smart people talk about the end of the world. This was the year that AI supposedly “ate the internet”: The arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022 shifted something in the public consciousness. After decades of promise, the contours of an AI-powered world felt to some as if they were taking shape. Will these tools come for our jobs, our culture, even our humanity? Are they truly revolutionary or just showy—like spicier versions of autocorrect?

Some of the biggest players in tech—along with a flood of start-ups—are racing to develop their own generative-AI products. The technology has developed swiftly, lending a frenzied, disorienting feeling to the past several months. “I don’t think we’re ready for what we’re creating,” one AI entrepreneur told me ominously and unbidden when we spoke earlier this year. Civilizational extinction has moved from pure science fiction to immediate concern. Geoffrey Hinton, a well-known AI researcher who quit Google this year to warn against the dangers of the technology, suggested that there was as high as a 10 percent chance of extinction in the next 30 years. “I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5 percent or 50 percent, we should still take it seriously,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, told my colleague Ross Andersen this past spring.

In May, hundreds of AI executives, researchers, and tech luminaries including Bill Gates signed a one-sentence statement written by the Center for AI Safety. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” it read. Debates once contained to a small subculture of technologists and rationalists on niche online forums such as LessWrong became fodder for the press. Normal people trying to keep up with the news had to hack through a jungle of new terminology: x-risk, e/acc, alignment, p(doom). By mid-year, the AI-doomerism conversation was fully mainstreamed; existential calamity was in the air (and, we joked, in our fast-casual lemonades).

[Read: AI doomerism is a decoy]

Then, as if by cosmic coincidence, this strain of apocalyptic thought fused perfectly with pop culture in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. As the atomic-bomb creator’s biopic took over the box office, AI researchers toted around the Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, suggesting that they too were pushing humanity into an uncertain, possibly apocalyptic future. The parallels between Los Alamos and Silicon Valley, however facile, needled at a question that had been bothering me all year: What would compel a person to build something if they had any reasonable belief that it might end life on Earth?

Richard Rhodes, the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, offered me one explanation, using a concept from the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. At the core of quantum physics is the idea of complementarity, which describes how objects have conflicting properties that cannot be observed at the same time. Complementarity, he argued, was also the same principle that governed innovation: A weapon of mass destruction could also be a tool to avert war.

[Read: Oppenheimer’s cry of despair in The Atlantic]

Rhodes, an 86-year-old who’s spent most of his adult life thinking about our most destructive innovations and speaking with the men who built the bomb, told me that he believes this duality to be at the core of human progress. Pursuing our greatest ambitions may give way to an unthinkable nightmare, or it may allow our dreams to come true. The answer to my question, he offered, was somewhere on that thin line between the excitement and terror of true discovery.

Roughly 10 minutes and 15 ounces into my strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade, I felt a gentle twinge of euphoria—a barely perceptible effervescence taking place at a cellular level. I was alone in the restaurant, ensconced in a booth and checking my Instagram messages. I’d shared a picture of the giant cup sweating modestly on my table, a cheap bid for some online engagement that had paid off. “I hope you live,” one friend had written in response. I glanced down at my smartwatch, where my heart rate measured a pleasant 20 beats per minute higher than usual. The inside of my mouth felt wrong. I ran my tongue over my teeth, noticing a fine dusting of sugar blanketing the enamel.

I did not feel the warm creep of death’s sweet embrace, only a sensation that the lights were very bright. This was accompanied by an edgy feeling that I would characterize as the antithesis of focus. I stood up to ask a Panera employee if they’d been getting a lot of Charged Lemonade tourism around these parts. “I think there’s been a lot, but honestly most of them order it through the drive-through or online order,” they said. “Not many come up here like you did.” I retreated to my booth to let my brain vibrate in my skull.

It is absurd to imagine that lemonade could kill you—no less lemonade from a soda fountain within steps of a Jo-Ann Fabrics store. That absurdity is a large part of what makes Panera lemonade a good meme. But there’s something deeper too, a truth lodged in the banality of a strip-mall drink: Death is everywhere. Today, you might worry about getting shot at school or in a movie theater, or killed by police at a traffic stop; you also understand that you could contract a deadly virus at the grocery store or in the office. Meanwhile, most everyone carries on like everything’s fine. We tolerate what feels like it should be intolerable. This is the mood baked into the meme: Death by lemonade is ridiculous, but in 2023, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched, either.

The same goes for computers and large language models. Our lives already feel influenced beyond our control by the computations of algorithms we don’t understand and cannot see. Maybe it’s ludicrous to imagine a chatbot as the seed of a sentient intelligence that eradicates human life. Then again, it would have been hard in 2006 to imagine Facebook playing a role in the Rohingya genocide, in Myanmar.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat for the next hour next to my now-empty vessel, anticipating some kind of side effect like the recipient of a novel vaccination. Around the time I could sense myself peaking, I grew quite cold. But that was it. No interdimensional vision, no heart palpitations. The room never melted into a Dalí painting. From behind my laptop, I watched a group of three teenagers, all dressed exactly like Kurt Cobain, grab their neon caffeine receptacles from the online-pickup stand and walk away. Each wore an indelible look of boredom incompatible with the respect one ought to have for death lemonade. I began to feel sheepish about my juice expedition and packed up my belongings.

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t feel slightly ripped off; it’s an odd sensation, wanting a glass of lemonade to walk you right up to the edge of oblivion. But a hint of impending danger has always been an excellent marketing tool—one that can obscure reality. A quick glance at the Starbucks website revealed that my go-to order—a barely defensible Venti Pike Place roast with an added espresso shot—contains approximately 560 milligrams of caffeine, which is more than double that of a large Charged Lemonade. But I wanted to believe that the food engineers at Panera had pushed the bounds of the possible.

Some of us are drawn to (allegedly) killer lemonade for the same reason others fixate on potential Skynet scenarios. The world feels like it is becoming more chaotic and unknowable, hostile and exciting. AI and a ridiculous fast-casual death beverage may not be the same thing, but they both tap into this energy. We will always find ways to create new, glorious, terrifying things—some that may ultimately kill us. We may not want to die, but in 2023, it was hard to forget that we will.

Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Color Purple, was a serious-minded prestige drama. The film simplified the story but faithfully rendered the book’s emotional weight through Spielberg’s vibrant direction, Quincy Jones’s sweeping score, and a strong ensemble cast. The movie became a classic that, despite notoriously failing to win any of the 11 Oscars it was nominated for, made more than five times its budget at the box office, inspired a Tony-winning Broadway musical, and made stars of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.

That’s a high bar for the new The Color Purple, in theaters today, to clear. Good thing, then, that the film aims for a slightly different goal: As an adaptation of the stage show, it further streamlines Walker’s prose in favor of illustrating sentimental intensity through spectacle. That may sound counterintuitive; movie musicals have recently been vehicles for pure whimsy or, well, whatever you want to call Cats. With The Color Purple, however, the medium is a good match for the heroine’s interiority, producing a sensual and textured take on the material. This new version—directed by Blitz Bazawule and produced by Spielberg, Jones, and Winfrey—works well as a companion piece to the 1985 drama while, for the most part, standing alone as its own tear-jerking, exultant epic.

[Read: The 10 best films of 2023]

As with the previous take on The Color Purple, the story focuses primarily on the tough coming-of-age of a young woman named Celie (played as a teenager by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi and as an adult by Fantasia Barrino, reprising the role after starring in the musical). Growing up in Georgia, in the 1900s, Celie is repeatedly raped by the man she understands to be her father, delivering children he snatches away shortly after their births. Though she draws strength from her bond with her sister, Nettie (The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey), the two are separated after Celie is married off to an abusive husband she calls “Mister” (Colman Domingo). The film then follows Celie in the decades afterward as she attempts to find Nettie and build an identity of her own. Along the way, she finds inspiration from the women around her, including the vivacious blues singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) and Mister’s headstrong daughter-in-law, Sofia (Danielle Brooks).

Given how passive she appears to be—often hiding from Mister, speaking only when spoken to—Celie can be a tricky protagonist to follow, especially for a musical. But Bazawule makes the clever call to depict what’s going on in Celie’s mind as much as possible, through bold use of color and flamboyant flourishes of magical realism. Her scenes with Nettie tend to be lit with a warm, golden glow. Mirrors and windows serve as the film’s literal portals into her imagination, helping to bring her thoughts to life. In the most exuberant song-and-dance numbers, the camera is rarely static, taking in the spirited choreography as if viewing the dancers through Celie’s eyes: with awe and wonder and a desperate need to absorb every ounce of pleasure their steps bring. Such sequences lend the otherwise grim story a crucial buoyancy and underline why The Color Purple has endured as a cultural sensation. Celie’s tale isn’t merely about overcoming tragedy; it’s also a testament to her sense of joy in spite of enduring grief, as well as to her capacity for envisioning a better future for herself and those she loves.

That love comes across most stunningly in Celie’s scenes with Shug, as her crush on the songstress blossoms into a devotion that gives her, well, voice. Having directed Beyoncé’s visual album Black Is King, Bazawule has proved himself adept at creating grand but elegant tableaus, and here, he elevates some of The Color Purple’s most delicate tunes into gorgeous fantasy sequences, lending Celie and Shug’s relationship the kind of substance the 1985 film underplayed. When Celie touches Shug for the first time, the set morphs into a massive gramophone, and Celie sings to her idol as the floor, now a giant vinyl stage, steadily spins. When they share a kiss at the end of a duet, the black-and-white backdrop slowly gives way to full color.

The film does struggle, however, with a familiar movie-musical problem: pacing. Bazawule’s eye for delivering what’s most visually impressive doesn’t make up for the uneven storytelling and somewhat awkward tonal shifts from Celie’s bleak life to her passionate inner thoughts. And with decades’ worth of narrative to pack in, the movie tends to gloss over plot points. Most of Mister’s children, Celie’s stepchildren, disappear as quickly as they’re introduced. Mister’s redemption in the final act feels like an abrupt, convenient shift. And Sofia’s traumatic years in prison—after an incident with a racist white woman—get wrapped up in a handful of brief scenes. Much of this abbreviation may be faithful to the musical, but in the film adaptation, the thin treatment of some characters becomes only more apparent.

Still, The Color Purple’s bumpier moments don’t dampen the cast’s committed performances. Brooks and Domingo are standouts, both actors lending their supporting characters the dazzling depth of feeling the script doesn’t have time to fully address through dialogue. Barrino, meanwhile, never quite reaches the heights Goldberg achieved as Celie in the 1985 film, but then again, Celie is an especially demanding part, a complicated woman whose every smile must seem hard-won. The actor shines instead where she needs to most, in Celie’s solos, with Barrino’s voice capturing the roiling well of emotion in every lyric.

And the truth is, that ability to fuse Celie as a character to music is enough for any take on The Color Purple. She’s an embodiment of the blues as a genre, a Black woman shaped by the Deep South, whose spirituality, pain, and determined pursuit of love inform her eventual sense of freedom and forgiveness. This latest adaptation may not hit every note established by Walker’s text and Spielberg’s drama, but it tells Celie’s story sensitively. It understands, in other words, that she comes with a uniquely imperfect, profound rhythm.

For the past few years, the right has worn itself out decrying “cancel culture”—claiming that left-wing mobs have destroyed the career of artists, writers, and freethinkers—and equating it with censorship. Liberals have typically been the first to point out that this is absurd. If someone says or does something that offends your sensibilities, you are of course free to avoid supporting that person’s professional or creative endeavors with your time and money. That is not censorship—it’s merely a consequence.

But in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict, something has shifted. Compared with the tremendous suffering in the region, the opinions of American makers and consumers of art are a trivial concern. And yet the war has torn apart long-standing alliances in the arts and revealed ways of thinking that are, I believe, fundamentally dangerous to our democracy.

It began with the 92nd Street Y “incident.” The Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen—who has long-endorsed a boycott of Israel—was scheduled to speak at the Jewish cultural institution about his new memoir. However, in the days prior to the event, Nguyen signed an open letter criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians that did not mention the October 7 attacks by Hamas. On the day of the event, 92NY announced that Nguyen’s appearance would be postponed. Controversy, as you might expect, ensued. Writers pulled out of future events and staffers resigned in protest. The organization was accused of suppressing free speech.

I saw it very differently. Perhaps that’s because my worldview was shaped by the 15 years I spent as an entrepreneur running an artistic enterprise—I was a high-end event producer and designer. Or perhaps it’s because I went into the profession with no economic safety net, as a single woman living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Either way, I have always been keenly aware that the creative professional in a capitalist society has a great deal of freedom, but she is not free from the consequences of her choices. Vocally supporting a political candidate or cause can ostracize you from potential clients on the other side of the issue. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stand up for what you believe. The question is simply one of personal values: Is taking this position more important to me than the potential consequences, even if they affect my bottom line?

Every artist must exist in two realms: as the art maker, who thinks and ponders and creates work of radical honesty (an activity that one could argue is inherently political), and as the art mover, who, however reluctantly, must be part showman and part businessperson. Both come together every time a writer walks onstage. Because book talks have cultural value, it can be easy to forget that they are in fact commercial opportunities—performances designed to be entertaining in the hope of moving books.

When I look at it this way, I see that Nguyen, the art maker, has not been censored at all. Nguyen, the art mover, has simply lost one economic opportunity—the chance to sell a large number of books in 92NY’s 900-seat auditorium. The Y invited Nguyen knowing his anti-Israel politics. It postponed the event, presumably, because Nguyen criticized Israel without acknowledging the Hamas attack, which has traumatized many members of the Y’s community and its donors. The event organizers decided it was the wrong moment to offer Nguyen their stage. That is their right. Just as signing the letter was Nguyen’s.

This question of censorship versus consequence was also raised in an open letter published in Artforum, signed by many artists, that called for Palestinian liberation and demanded a cease-fire. (It was later updated with a coda, but the original did not mention the October 7 attack either.) After the letter came out, many of the signatories said they faced retaliation. Nan Goldin, who recently canceled a project with The New York Times in protest of its coverage of the war, said that artists were being “blacklisted” and that it was “chilling.” Others said they’d been pressured by their gallerists to stay silent about their pro-Palestinian views for fear of offending collectors. Some industry insiders have proposed selling off the work of artists who signed the letter—perhaps even at a lower value than they bought it for—as a kind of punishment that would “diminish the artists’ status.”

At first glance, I found this a bit chilling myself. Just because a collector buys a painting for a huge sum of money doesn’t mean she owns the artist. Should selling a sculpture condemn an artist to having her speech policed in perpetuity? You have their art. What more does the artist owe you? This is no longer the patronage system, after all.

Except, in many ways, it is.

All of this was once a lot more straightforward. Artists were craftspeople sustained by the Church, and later by nobility. You knew what you had to do: paint some Pietàs, maybe a fresco or two, a royal portrait. Don’t blaspheme or insult any kings.

But of course, artists have always been human beings with temperaments and opinions. Renaissance painters, says Marie-Louise Lillywhite, an art historian at Oxford, created “these incredible masterpieces within a climate of compromised freedom.” She told me the story of a Venetian painter, Melchiorre Galluzzi, who wanted to depict Christ kneeling at his baptism. His patron did not think it appropriate to show Jesus on his knees. The painter solicited outside opinions and was assured by fellow artists and clergymen that there was no religious issue with a kneeling Christ. But guess whose preference won out? We know the artist made the change, Lillywhite said, “because in the end, Christ is shown standing.”

Alex Taylor, an art historian at the University of Pittsburgh, studies the transformation of the art market from commissioned portraiture to the works of renegade geniuses. Historically, he told me, “artists and patrons were in the messy work of sorting this out together. They were disagreeing; they were coming to compromises.” Put another way, for a long time, the art maker and the art mover not only had to coexist; they had to collaborate with the patrons commissioning their work.

As artists became stars in their own right, more middlemen got involved. Dealers, and then galleries, began to manage the scheduling of shows; marketing, advertising, and publicity; and much of the legal, financial, and logistical work of selling artists’ art. Some also began to act as social directors—getting their artists in front of collectors to help foster relationships and interest in the artists’ work. They served as proxies for the art movers, allowing artists to simply be the art makers that most of us crave to be. And in exchange, they often took 50 percent of the proceeds, making them in effect equal business partners.

“Most artists now are happy to be protected from those pressures,” Taylor told me. Galleries and museums “make it possible for artists to imagine that their work is unhampered by controls or restrictions.” In fact, this whole idea of artistic freedom, he said, is “often somewhat of a myth.”

Taylor’s book Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s recounts the origins of the art collection that David Rockefeller, the chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan, created for the bank. Rockefeller very much wanted a Mark Rothko piece included in the gargantuan office building. Rothko, known for being anti-establishment and leaning socialist, was notoriously prickly about where and how his art was displayed. He famously pulled a series of murals he’d created for the Four Seasons Restaurant after dining there, stating, “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kinds of prices will never look at a painting of mine.” He wasn’t going to like the idea of selling his work to a bank. But the curator serving as the go-between believed that Rothko might sell to Rockefeller himself. “Whether it’s owned privately or by the company,” Taylor told me, “doesn’t really matter. But at some level, there was a sense that that difference really might matter to the artist.” They were right: In 1960, Rockefeller acquired Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) for almost $10,000; it ended up on the wall of his office at Chase Manhattan.  

I write novels—a mass-market art. Although I enjoy seeing a photo of a celebrity with my novel in hand, it does little for the book’s long-term reputation. For artists building a career, however, whom they sell a painting to is almost as important as selling the painting at all. Being held by the right collectors or cultural institutions increases the artists’ value. On the secondary market, the provenance of a work of art can matter as much as, if not more than, its quality.

The Rockefeller Rothko broke auction records, by the way, in 2007. Sotheby’s estimated that it would sell for $40 million, The New York Times reported—“a gamble that the Rockefeller name will make the painting more valuable.” It went for almost twice that.

Between artist and collector runs what the writer and NYU professor Amy Whitaker refers to as “reputational tether.” The tether goes both ways. An artist who got a career boost years ago by having a piece acquired by, say, Harvey Weinstein, might find herself discomfited to be in his collection today. That artist might have even asked their gallerist to quietly arrange a sale to another collector. More and more young artists are exerting a say in whom they would like to own their works and what might happen to them down the line.

Similarly, a collector might feel hurt or offended by a stance an artist takes on social media or in an open letter. This might shift their perception of holding on to or acquiring more of the artists’ work. To go further, it might actually change their perception of how they see the art—enough that they no longer wish to own it.

No one is stopping the artist from making art about anything that they want, or from publicly or privately taking whatever political stance they want about Israel, Palestine, or the United States. But artists who make a living from their work are also entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs can face consequences. This is not censorship; it is, like it or not, capitalism.

Censorship is a fun word. It’s a dramatic word. And as an artist, I love to be dramatic. But by throwing it around, we risk taking for granted our privileges as Americans. The artist Katsu once mounted a New York gallery exhibition featuring portraits of tech billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg, rendered with Katsu’s own feces. No one stopped him. We can post memes or write poems about Biden’s age, or Hunter’s laptop. If we are truly idiotic, we can go on TikTok and wax poetic about the wonders of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” and never give it a second thought.

We also risk dulling ourselves to the true acts of censorship that have been imposed by our government. In the 1920s, Virginia had a board of censors that reviewed films in order to prevent people from encountering depictions of Black and white Americans being treated equally. People are often shocked when I tell them about the Gag Law of Puerto Rico, which in the late 1940s made it a criminal offense to sing songs critical of the United States government or to make art featuring the Puerto Rican flag (let alone to fly the flag itself). Many American citizens were jailed as a result.

Real censorship continues today. El Museo del Barrio in New York, which receives government funds, recently changed its mind about displaying an artwork it commissioned because the artists included a Palestinian flag. Beyond the arts, states are restricting the teaching of African American history and policing speech through Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Legislators across the country have repeatedly attempted to outlaw drag performances. School boards have stripped books from library shelves, and some states are putting into place criminal consequences for librarians and educators accused of violating these book bans. These are the kinds of actions that make me worry about the future of free speech and artistic expression in America—not the cancellation of a book talk or the drop in a painting’s value.

So, artists, let’s enjoy the relatively low-stakes consequences while they last. It’s called “taking a stand,” after all, because sometimes you get knocked down.