One day in late November, I cradled a red Samsung flip phone in my hands as if it was a ruby gemstone. To me, it was just as precious. Deep inside an overstuffed dresser in my childhood bedroom, I had spotted the glint of my first-ever cellphone, a Samsung SGH-A707 purchased in the waning days of the George W. Bush presidency. The device, no bigger than a credit card, had long ago succumbed to the spider web of cracks on its screen. For a moment, I was brought back to life before the smartphone, clicking the phone’s plastic keys for the first time in more than a decade.

This device, and every other phone like it, of course, was made obsolete by the touchscreen slabs now in all of our pockets. Perhaps you have heard that we are now on the cusp of another iPhone moment—the rise of a new technology that changes the world. No, not that one. Despite the post-ChatGPT frenzy, artificial intelligence has so far been defined more by speculative hype than actual substance. Does anyone really want “AI-powered” smoothies, sports commentary, or roller skates? Assuming the bots don’t wipe out humanity, maybe AI will take the jobs of high-school teachers, coders, lawyers, fast-food workers, customer-service agents, writers, and graphic designers—but right now, ChatGPT is telling me that Cybertruck has 11 letters. There’s a long way to go.

Meanwhile, electric cars are already upending America. In 2023, our battery-powered future became so much more real—a boom in sales and new models is finally starting to push us into the post-gas age. Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. “This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles,” Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me. They are beginning to transform not just the automotive industry, but also the very meaning of a car itself.

If the story of American EVs has long hinged on one company—Tesla—then this was the year that these cars became untethered from Elon Musk’s brand. “We’re at a point where EVs aren’t necessarily exclusively for the upper, upper, upper class,” Robby DeGraff, an analyst at the market-research firm AutoPacific, told me. If you wanted an electric car five years ago, you could choose from among various Tesla models, the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf—and that was really it. Now EVs come in more makes and models than Baskin-Robbins ice-cream flavors. We have more luxury sedans to vie with Tesla, but also cheaper five-seaters, SUVs, Hummers, pickup trucks, and … however you might categorize the Cybertruck. Nearly 40 new EVs have debuted since the start of 2022, and they are far more advanced than their ancestors. For $40,000, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, released this year, can get you 360 miles on a single charge; in 2018, for only a slightly lower cost, a Nissan Leaf couldn’t go half that distance.

[Read: Admit it, the Cybertruck is awesome]

All of these EVs are genuinely great for the planet, spewing zero carbon from their tailpipes, but that’s only a small part of what makes them different. In the EV age, cars are no longer just cars. They are computers. Stripping out a gas engine, transmission, and 100-plus moving parts turns a vehicle into something more digital than analog—sort of like how typing on an iPhone keyboard is different than on my clackety old Samsung flip phone. “It’s the software that is really the heart of an EV,” DeGraff said—it runs the motors, calculates how many miles are left on a charge, optimizes the brakes, and much more.

Just like with other gadgets that bug you about software updates, all of this firmware can be updated over Wi-Fi while a car charges overnight. Rivian has updated its software to add a “Sand Mode” that can enhance its cars’ driving ability on dusty terrain. Many new cars are getting stuffed with technology—a new gas-powered Mercedes-Benz E-Class comes with TikTok integration and a selfie stick—but EVs are capable of more significant updates. A gas car is never going to meaningfully get more miles per gallon, but one such update from Tesla in 2020 increased the range on its Model X car from 328 to 351 miles after the company found ways to wring more efficiency out of its internal parts. And because EVs all drive basically the same, tech is a bigger part of the sell. Instead of idly passing the time while an EV recharges, you can now use a car’s infotainment system to Zoom into a meeting, play Grand Theft Auto, and stream Amazon Prime.

The million-plus new EVs on the road are ushering in a fundamental, maybe existential, change in how to even think about cars—no longer as machines, but as gadgets that plug in and charge like all the others in our life. The wonderful things about computers are coming to cars, and so are the terrible ones: apps that crash. Subscription hell. Cyberattacks. There are new problems to contend with too: In Tesla’s case, its “Autopilot” software has been implicated in fatal crashes. (It was the subject of a massive recall earlier this month that required an over-the-air update.) You now might scroll on your phone in bed, commute in your EV, and log into your work laptop, all of which are powered by processors that are constantly bugging you to update them.

[Read: The end of manual transmission]

If cars are gadgets now, then carmakers are also now tech companies. An industry that has spent a century perfecting the internal combustion engine must now manufacture lithium-ion batteries and write the code to govern them. Imagine if a dentist had to pivot from filling cavities to performing open-heart surgery, and that’s roughly what’s going on here. “The transition to EVs is completely changing everything,” Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. “It’s changing the people that automotive companies have to hire and their skills. It’s changing their suppliers, their factories, how they assemble and build them. And lots of automakers are struggling with that.”

Take the batteries. To manufacture battery cells powerful enough for a car is so phenomenally expensive and arduous that Toyota is pumping nearly $14 billion into a single battery plant in North Carolina. To create software-enabled cars, you need software engineers, and car companies cannot get enough of them. (Perhaps no other industry has benefited the most from Silicon Valley’s year of layoffs.) At the very low end, estimates Sam Abuelsamid, a transportation analyst at Guidehouse Insights, upwards of 10,000 “software engineers, interface designers, networking engineers, data center experts and silicon engineers have been hired by automakers and suppliers in recent years.” The tech wars can sometimes verge on farce: One former Apple executive runs Ford’s customer-software team, while another runs GM’s.

At every level, the auto industry is facing the type of headache-inducing questions about job losses and employment that still feels many years away with AI. “There’s a new skill set we’re going to need, and I don’t think I can teach everyone—it will take too much time,” Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, said in May. “So there is going to be disruption in this transition.” Job cuts are already happening, and more may come—even after the massive autoworker strike this year that largely hinged on electrification. Such a big financial investment is needed to electrify the car industry that from July to September, Ford lost $60,000 for every EV it sold. Or peel back one more onion layer to car dealerships: Tesla, Rivian, and other EV companies are selling directly to consumers, cutting them out. EVs also require little service compared with gas vehicles, a reality that has upset many dealers, who could lose their biggest source of profit. None of this is the future. It is happening right now.

But if EVs are having an “iPhone moment,” we are still in the days when a few early adopters had the clunky, OG version. Most cars you see are a decade old; for all these EV sales, just 1 percent of cars on the road are all-electric. Even if we hit President Joe Biden’s EV target of 50 percent of sales by 2030, the sheer life span of cars will mean that gas vehicles will still greatly outnumber electric ones by then. Gas stations are not closing. Parking garages are not buckling under the weight of EVs and their hefty batteries. Electric cars remain too expensive, and they are limited by janky public chargers that are too slow, assuming they work at all. If you don’t have a house where you can install your own plug, EVs are still mostly just unrealistic. Most alarming might be the politics that surround them: Donald Trump and lots of other Republicans are vowing to stymie their growth. Carmakers are not even hiding that next year’s election might lead them to reconsider their EV plans.

Even so, the transition is not slowing down. Next year, America should hit 1.9 million EV sales, Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF, told me. Another burst of models is coming: A retro-futuristic Volkswagen van! A Cadillac Escalade with a 55-inch touchscreen! A tiny Fiat 500e for just $30,000! And yes, they are succumbing a bit to hype themselves. In June, Mercedes’s infotainment screen got an optional update. Now you can talk to it through a chatbot.

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.

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So much can go wrong at an office holiday party. And yet … see you in the break room at 5:30.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Why Trump won’t win Biden’s smart strategy for outmaneuvering Bibi That’s not censorship.

A Baked-In Norm

Many Americans have reconsidered the role of work in their lives in recent years. Is your office your family? No. Are your co-workers your friends? Not necessarily. Are you all still expected at the holiday party in the break room at 5:30? Yes.

For some, sipping complimentary eggnog and listening to Mariah Carey with co-workers is a delight. For others, the office holiday party is a form of personal purgatory. These gatherings can be polarizing, but even through the profound cultural shifts of the past few years, the tradition of the white-collar holiday party endures. The office holiday party is a vestige of a time when work played a very different role in people’s lives (and a time when it was typical to call the event a Christmas party). The concept has roots over a century old, Peter Cappelli, a professor and the director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. Bosses started hosting parties to do something nice for employees at the end of the year—and perhaps to try to quell union organizing in the process. (Work parties fit into the broader concept of welfare capitalism popular in the 1920s, which prioritized giving employees perks in an effort to dissuade them from joining unions, he explained.) The events celebrated good work and were sometimes provided in lieu of bonuses. Once the norm was established, it was hard for bosses to take back, Cappelli said.

If there was ever a time for holiday parties to peter out, it was 2020. Employees opened gift boxes alone at home or did wine tastings with colleagues on Zoom. But when offices that had gone remote reopened, and bosses tried to will things to return to the status quo, the holiday party returned. Its renaissance affirmed its power: The holiday party sent the message that, at least on the outside, things were back to normal. But although the event has endured, its form has changed: Over the past 20 years, Cappelli explained, cultural shifts and financial concerns seem to have led companies to try to rein in the bacchanalia of the olden days. Many companies once had a higher tolerance for workplace wildness, but in recent decades, this approach has given way to concern about accidents or employee lawsuits, Cappelli said. Employers, not wanting to be held liable for overserving their workers, started hiring professional bartenders and, in some cases, limiting drinks. Concerns about sexual harassment in boozy after-hours settings, accelerated by #MeToo-era reexaminations of office culture, further curbed the no-holds-barred atmosphere of the holiday parties of yore.

And, of course, throwing a bash is expensive. Especially since the Great Recession, Cappelli has noticed that no one wants to “look to investors like you’re blowing the budget on something splashy.” The Wall Street Journal reported this week that budget pullbacks have caused companies to host lower-key gatherings, such as office potlucks and smaller parties with reduced staff. And a recent survey of about 200 companies found that nearly a third of those having a party are choosing to host on company premises, and that fewer are serving alcohol this year than in 2022. The debauched, cash-torching tech events that were typical of the 2010s are no longer a great look for an industry that has cut hundreds of thousands of jobs in the past couple of years. Moving away from booze-centric celebrations has also become more popular: Bloomberg recently reported that at some companies, more active events such as pickleball lessons and guacamole competitions have unseated the conventional holiday party.

Still, some version of the standard holiday party remains the norm: Among the survey respondents, more than two-thirds of companies said that they are hosting in-person parties this year. For all of their potential pitfalls, holiday parties are baked into the norms of corporate America. They give bosses a chance to thank employees and celebrate their work, and to reinforce the social ties that make people loyal to their job. It’s a hard tradition to shake. “You really do look like Scrooge,” Cappelli said, “if you say, ‘I’m going to be the one that pulls the plug.’”

Related:

The type of charisma that saves a holiday party There’s no fun like mandatory office holiday fun

Today’s News

Three hostages held by Hamas in Gaza were killed by the Israeli military after they were mistakenly identified as a “threat,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement. A binder containing highly classified intelligence related to Russian interference in the 2016 election reportedly went missing in the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, according to CNN. It was last seen in the White House. A federal jury ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million to two Georgia election workers he wrongfully accused of trying to steal votes from Trump.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: What happens when AI takes over science? Damon Beres discusses how AI may change our definition of understanding. Up for Debate: What do you think of all-male or all-female social spaces? Conor Friedersdorf asks readers for their thoughts. The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman explores a 2023 novel that revolves around a character getting lost in the wilderness.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Danish Defence Command / Forsvaret Ritzau Scanpix / Reuters

The Most Consequential Act of Sabotage in Modern Times

By Mark Bowden

At 2:03 a.m. on Monday, September 26, 2022, at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, an explosion tore open one of the four massive underwater conduits that make up the Nord Stream pipeline. The pipe, made of thick, concrete-encased steel, lay at a depth of 260 feet. It was filled with highly compressed methane gas …

The attack on the pipeline—without loss of life, as far as we know—was one of the most dramatic and consequential acts of sabotage in modern times. It was also an unprecedented attack on a major element of global infrastructure—the network of cables, pipes, and satellites that underpin commerce and communication. Because it serves everyone, global infrastructure had enjoyed tacit immunity in regional conflicts—not total but nearly so. Here was a bold act of war in the waters between two peaceful nations (although Sweden and Denmark both support Ukraine). It effectively destroyed a project that had required decades of strenuous labor and political muscle and had cost roughly $20 billion …

Indeed, more than a year later, nobody knows for certain who was responsible, although accumulating evidence has begun to point in a specific direction.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

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Listen. Revisit Madonna’s greatest hits while she performs them on a tour that feels like a memorial—a spectacular one.

Watch. The curtain has fallen on The Crown (streaming on Netflix). But does the final season have anything important left to say?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you are facing down a holiday party with trepidation, it may comfort you to remember that you are at least not trapped in a virtual escape room with your co-workers. On a Tuesday afternoon early last year, I sat quietly on Zoom and watched such an event unfold for a group of tech recruiters. Sitting in their respective homes, they solved math puzzles and pieced together clues in breakout rooms. Some of the colleagues appeared to genuinely love the proceedings. Personally, I was quite relieved that I was not expected to contribute.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The video that ushered Saturday Night Live into the digital era barely made it to television, and when it did, it was largely ignored. It’s a heartfelt conversation between two friends (played by Andy Samberg and Will Forte) about a recent tragic loss; after every emotional beat, each of them takes a bite out of a large head of lettuce. When the video was screened during SNL’s live taping, the studio audience was clearly puzzled, the laughs barely rising above a polite chuckle. “Lettuce,” created in December 2005 by Samberg’s Lonely Island sketch group, could have been the end of SNL’s experimentation with prerecorded digital sketches.

But then, two weeks later, came “Lazy Sunday,” a music video in which Samberg and his SNL co-star Chris Parnell rap about “lame, sensitive stuff,” as Samberg once put it: buying Magnolia Bakery cupcakes and going to a matinee of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. To this day, it feels like something furtively sneaked onto the air, a blast of youthful punchiness wedged in between SNL’s often bloated bits of vaudeville. “Lazy Sunday” became a breakaway hit and ultimately helped demonstrate that SNL could still be a place where comedy felt fresh and strange rather than rote and reactive.

As Lonely Island’s profile rose, its grainy videos turned into slick, celebrity-studded spectacles. Perhaps the pinnacle of the group’s achievements was 2006’s “Dick in a Box,” in which Samberg parodied the songwriting and music-video conventions of ’90s boy-band pop, recruiting a veteran of that moment, Justin Timberlake, to join in. Wearing gift-wrapped packages on their crotches, Samberg and Timberlake deliver a pitch-perfect send-up of the baby-making ballads of acts like Color Me Badd and Backstreet Boys. The production is gleefully boneheaded and delightfully weird—but not so weird that the show’s core demographic would miss the joke.

Samberg left SNL in 2012; the other two members of Lonely Island, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, left around the same time. For a while, it seemed like the show might never recapture the group’s knack for virality. Two cast members, Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett, starred in several surreal “digital exclusives,” but they failed to attract much of a following (and were often cut before airtime). These had the bizarro vibe that viewers had come to expect from the form, but without Lonely Island’s mainstream legibility: more “Lettuce” than “Lazy Sunday.”

Then, in 2021, SNL hired Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy, a comedy team who’d met at NYU and called themselves Please Don’t Destroy. The group had developed a big following with short videos for TikTok and Twitter during the COVID lockdowns, but its members could easily have been dismissed as legacy hires by a nearly half-century-old institution: Both Higgins’s and Herlihy’s fathers wrote jokes for SNL. Despite that pedigree, the three have brought something new to the venerable sketch show, which recently returned from a hiatus lengthened by the writers’ strike. They’ve figured out how to tap into the manic, juddering energy of comedy in the smartphone era.

Part of what makes a Please Don’t Destroy sketch so disorientingly funny is the way it can snap from the quotidian to paranoid hysteria in seconds. In March 2021, before the group joined SNL, one video opened with Marshall returning home after getting his first COVID vaccine. His friends ask the then-ubiquitous question: Pfizer or Moderna? Neither, it turns out. Marshall proudly proclaims that he’s gotten the off-brand “Dumbrekka” vaccine (“They put me under for the whole thing, and it only took a couple of hours,” he reports cheerily). Higgins and Herlihy’s confusion builds to concern as Marshall describes his post-jab symptoms: “I’ve been expelling a ton of black bile,” he says. His friends try to impress upon him that his health seems imperiled, but Marshall angrily denounces them as “anti-vaxxers”—before promptly collapsing on the floor, unconscious.

On SNL, the group’s brisk, lo-fi skits still play like fever dreams, with the intense, quick-cut cadence that defines the TikTok aesthetic. The videos tend to begin in mundane settings, often the ambience-free office that the three young writers inhabit at Rockefeller Center. Their tenuous place in the show’s hierarchy and desperation to come up with material are a consistent backdrop.

Please Don’t Destroy, in its dry, Gen Z way, relies on the classic sketch-comedy gambit of escalating some minor concept into absurdity. But it’s arguably doing something deeper, too. The videos have a certain fraternal energy that is key to the group’s appeal; they feel like compressed buddy comedies with an edge of lunatic horror. The three men are presented as best friends, yet they are always on the brink of exploding into some outlandish fight. Because they seem to know almost everything about one another, they can attack insecurities with abandon, then reconcile just as quickly.

This dynamic is perhaps most clearly on display in a sketch where Marshall feels excluded after discovering that Higgins and Herlihy are lying about having plans just so they can hang out alone. Marshall decides to spy on his friends (with help from a deranged Woody Harrelson) and learns that not only are they happily playing video games without him, but they have secretly married and started a family.

Shifting ideas of masculinity is a theme SNL has frequently mined in recent years; one 2021 sketch, “Man Park,” advertises the equivalent of a dog park where men who struggle with intimacy can connect over football and Marvel movies. Although entertaining as far as it goes, the sketch was content to hit a familiar satirical target: the inability of men to express emotions. Please Don’t Destroy is at once more surreal and more nuanced in its portrait of male friendship. In one sketch, Marshall and Herlihy gleefully rattle off insults about Higgins’s ex-girlfriend, only to learn that they’ve gotten back together, that they are in fact now engaged, and that the ex-girlfriend has been sitting in the room the entire time. (Also, her entire family has been listening on Zoom.) The skit captures the male tendency to bond through ridicule, to avoid the subject of romance at all costs, and to fear that maintaining an adult relationship is antithetical to being one of the boys.

And despite the terrible things the three do and say to one another, the fun they have pushing the boundaries of their comedy ever further is palpable.

Inevitably, the group’s success has now led to a movie deal; in November, NBC’s streaming service, Peacock, released Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, written by and starring Herlihy, Higgins, and Marshall. The three play “themselves,” except they’re all employees of a Bass Pro–type store run by Marshall’s disapproving dad (depicted with cruel relish by Conan O’Brien). Seeking an escape from the daily grind, the friends go into the woods on a treasure hunt.

The Treasure of Foggy Mountain struggles in ways that are familiar from many of the SNL-themed movies that flooded theaters in the ’90s after the success of Wayne’s World—comedies that tried to elevate one-joke sketches like “Coneheads” and “A Night at the Roxbury” into film-length odysseys. There are flashes of comic virtuosity here, but like most SNL films, The Treasure of Foggy Mountain feels padded, even at 90 minutes, perhaps more so given the sprightly sketches with which Please Don’t Destroy made its name.

Simmering straight-male insecurity remains the engine of the comedy, with the needy alliances of the three pals shifting throughout the plot. Here, though, that dynamic wears itself out. As the stars hunt for treasure, their friendship is tested, before all is eventually forgiven; think The Goonies, except the children are nominally adults. Seeing the trio do their thing at feature length, you mostly just miss that dingy SNL office and those fun-house-mirror glimpses of their oddly charming bond.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Bizarro Buddy Comedy of Please Don’t Destroy.”

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Kaitlyn: Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Martha Stewart literally did surgery on a grape. This was nearly 20 years before the idea became a confusing internet meme. She invented it! In her 1999 book Martha Stewart’s Hors D’oeuvres Handbook, which I recently received as a 30th-birthday gift, Martha sincerely recommends hollowing out grapes and filling them, individually, with goat cheese and crumbled pistachios. She also recommends hollowing out cucumbers, apples, pattypan squash, and, if you can believe it, cherry tomatoes. Of course, I know that Martha has a good reason for everything she does, even if it isn’t obvious to me what it could be. I am very humble and I am taking notes.

Lizzie and I are always trying to educate ourselves about parties. We would like to be perfect hosts. We know our limits, but we strive to surpass them—it’s called shooting for the moon and landing among the stars. That’s why we study texts like Martha Stewart’s Hors D’oeuvres Handbook, and why another of my 30th-birthday gifts was a packet of papers that Lizzie printed off the internet, detailing how Nancy Reagan planned for dinners at the White House. I think my favorite book about parties is probably Putnam’s Book of Parties, from 1928, which explains a concept called “Mushroom Party”—you decorate a high-school gymnasium to look like an enchanted forest, then you make up a bunch of prophecies and write them on cards tied to mushrooms, then you ask someone to pretend to be a witch. As each teen approaches the witch, she stirs her cauldron and mutters:

Seek a mushroom in the forest,

In the dank and blue-lit forest,

Bearing on its stem this number.

Tell thee what the Fates shall give thee

In the days that lie before thee.

Go—but let not word nor laughter

Pass thy lips until thou find it.

And then everyone drinks coffee!

Of course, there’s only so much you can learn from reading. At some point, you’ll need to take the next step: a four-week course held on Zoom. That’s how Lizzie and I ended up enrolling in “The Table as Canvas: Designing a Bizarro Dinner Party,” hosted by the chef Jen Monroe, whose very cool and interesting career we’ve been following ever since she served us jellyfish sorbet at a dystopian-themed dinner party in 2017.

Lizzie: When Kaitlyn first sent me the course sign-up page, I imagined a laboratory of bizarro dinner-party scientists sitting studiously at stainless-steel tables somewhere in Midtown, learning how to make carrot rosettes. But I would come to find out, as Kaitlyn mentioned, that this was an online course. I’ll admit that there was a twinge of disappointment, but I understand that the internet means access to a larger audience and it also means none of your classmates ever have to see what you look like.

What reading did I do in preparation? Well, I’m basically always reading a P. G. Wodehouse novel to stave off my despair, and one of the many constantly repeated activities in his books is eating and drinking at large estates in the countryside. A chef is always in charge of the meals because everyone is rich, but none of the food ever sounds particularly appetizing: soft-boiled eggs, deviled kidneys, whatever a “savoury” is, a magical hangover cure made with Worcestershire sauce and a raw egg.

All of this to say that I may have been—pardon me—starved for inspiration when the first class rolled around.

A screenshot from class. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: The first week of class, I hustled home from work, went straight into the bedroom, and shut the door. Our instructor, Jen, called us from a room full of cake pans, and started off by asking us to “clarify” our “goals” for the course. My goal, as I said, was to become perfect.

Jen told us not to be afraid of the many constraints imposed by time, money, skill level, etc. These would only serve to make us more creative, she argued. For example, a former student had made her apartment more like a 24-hour diner for a 24-hour-diner dinner party simply by making the floors a little bit sticky on purpose. This innovation took hardly any time or skill and cost her nothing, except for the raised eyebrows of at least two strangers who heard about it years later on Zoom.

60-some people were on the Zoom call with us, and we soon got the opportunity to meet a few of them. After Jen played a clip of the food-fight scene in Hook, she put us in breakout rooms to discuss any notable childhood memories we might have about food. I said that my mom had always bought the puffy Cheetos, so when I went to the homes of friends whose mothers bought crunchy Cheetos, I thought there was something kind of sinister about that. “At least you had snacks,” one woman in my group responded. Well, sure.

Lizzie: My breakout room was a somewhat stilted place, but we did eventually get into a rhythm. I talked about eating crickets and astronaut ice cream at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City as a child. In my notes, I wrote, “I have no memories,” which longtime readers will recognize as something I’ve said before.

I also wrote, “We’re gonna need a bigger budget,” after Jen played a clip of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, the 1989 Peter Greenaway movie that takes place in a restaurant and ends with a dinner party to which I would not want to be invited. (Spoiler: A very crispy man is served atop a bed of Brassicaceae.) Thankfully, Jen did not play that particular scene, which would have turned all of our stomachs.

I left the class a little hungry and wondering why you can’t stream this movie anywhere right now.

Kaitlyn: I really wanted to watch it! They don’t even have it at the library!

Our homework assignment for the first week was to make a mood board that would capture the desired spirit of our dream dinner party. As I mentioned, I was very inspired by Martha doing surgery on a grape. I also love Jell-O. So I thought, What about a party combining these two things? For appetizers, I could hollow out lots of different fruits and vegetables, just like Martha, and then, unlike Martha, I could fill them with various flavors of gelatin. Because it’s almost Christmas, I looked for further inspiration from my favorite Christmas story, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, in which the characters are obsessed with festive, multicolored “Who Pudding,” which appears to be Jell-O-like.

After a few days of scrolling through Instagram, I had several dozen photos of improbable gelatin-based dishes with garish Dr. Seuss aesthetics. I was especially excited about the idea of “Cranberry Candles,” which are candles made from cranberry sauce, strawberry Jell-O, and mayonnaise, then decorated with orange-peel stars. I thought they would make a stunning centerpiece.

Martha's instructions for grape surgery. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: I like that the mayo is both in the Jell-O and served on the side. Mayo two ways. My theme came from Matt, who loves a Mai Tai and will do anything (anything!) to have one. Before the class started, we were planning on having a vaguely 1960s tiki holiday party inspired by Lee’s Hawaiian Islander, in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, so I stuck to that idea. I put this photo on my mood board, but as I currently own no rattan furniture, achieving this look may be slightly out of reach.

Because this holiday party was never meant to be a sit-down dinner, my menu so far is relegated to the “bites” arena, and lacks Kaitlyn’s structural, textural, and mayo-ral innovation. If you have ideas for how to make mini hotdogs and a fruit tower feel more elaborate, please let me know.

Kaitlyn: I think the fruit tower will be good. I can’t wait to see the fruit tower. I do think it will be expensive and possibly wasteful. I know I would feel some hesitation to rip a banana off of a beautiful sculpture. Lizzie and Matt will really have to enforce a rule of “eat the fruit tower,” and I think they might even have to pay someone to go first.

For the second week of class, Lizzie came over to my apartment and Nathan put the Zoom up on the TV for us. To start, Jen reminded us that we were supposed to have been thinking about the “feeling” we wanted to evoke with our dinner parties. I’d forgotten to do this.”What’s your feeling?” Nathan asked. “Uh … Grinch,” I said. He was like, “Evil?” And I said no, of course not. I was thinking more of the end of the movie, when he’s carving the “roast beast” and everybody is singing. “Redemption?” he offered. Yes!

Nathan said the feeling for his dream dinner party would be “decay,” but he didn’t explain how he would execute that, because we promptly reminded him that he is not in the class.

Lizzie: Peter Greenaway might have an idea he could use …

This week’s class was about menu and logistics. Jen kindly reminded us to consider our limits. For example, we may want to think twice before cracking into our 401Ks to buy enough beef tenderloin to feed a midsize town’s elementary school. This would have been helpful a few years ago, before I accidentally spent a few hundred dollars on a giant slab of beef tenderloin for a New Year’s Eve party.

The most fun part of the class was when Jen showed us some of the “bizarro” things she’s done with food. It made me realize I could probably dream bigger, which I guess is literally the point of being inspired.

Kaitlyn: We got excited when Jen showed us some wacky, multicolored lollipops she’d made. She said that all she’d done was melt a bunch of Jolly Ranchers and mix them together. That sounded like something we could do—which would cost about $7—and everyone would be impressed by the result!

Toward the end of class, she started to get into the nitty-gritty—the practical considerations. Don’t invite more people than you have plates for, bring a rolling suitcase to the grocery store, that kind of thing. Jen said that it’s important to consider course timing and portions, as well. Serving too much food can be just as bad as serving not enough food, she explained. Here, Nathan and I told Lizzie our patently unsympathetic story about being served too many dinner courses and too many complimentary desserts at the fancy restaurant Pujol in Mexico City on my aforementioned recent 30th birthday. (When the waiter brought a pair of cream puffs along with our check, I almost cried.) I understand that this is a disgusting thing to complain about, but that is exactly why serving too much food makes people feel bad!

Nathan then pointed out that my Jell-O dinner might have the opposite problem: It might not fill anyone up to eat only Jell-O for dinner. I’d already thought of a solution to this, though. In the corner of the dining room, there will be a table with a pile of loose baguettes on it. If anybody gets hungry, they can just walk over there and rip off some hunks. And you know, if you have to grab a piece of pizza on the way home, that’s not the worst thing in the world. That’s why we live in New York City.

Lizzie: Jell-O does have a small amount of protein in it (due to the hooves), but maybe you could boost the satiety factor by throwing some salami in there. I also have concerns about people leaving my party hungry, but I’m thinking I’ll include one of those hidden-picture images in the invitation where it looks like Santa but it’s actually dozens of chicken nuggets—essentially subliminal messaging suggesting that people should eat beforehand.

Kaitlyn: For homework, we’re supposed to begin doing more in-depth research and development and testing our recipes. The first one I’m planning to try is a dish I saw on Reddit. It’s a can of pineapple rings with lime Jell-O poured directly into it. After it sets, you dump the whole thing out and slice it up. Also, to Lizzie’s point about protein, I’m thinking I’ll do a “Garden Salad Ring,” which is lemon Jell-O with radishes and hard-boiled eggs inside.

Lizzie: As I mentioned earlier, my menu could still use some work. Shrimp luge, perhaps?

Kaitlyn: Please look out for a special Christmas Day issue of Famous People! It will be about a triumphant holiday dinner party at Lizzie’s house.

Lizzie: Let’s call it dinner-party-lite.

Zoom into a map of Italy and you will notice a gap where the tip of the toe of the boot-shaped peninsula seems to touch Sicily—the stretch of sea that makes Sicily an island. The Strait of Messina is just a couple of miles wide at its narrowest point, and between two coasts that never quite meet, the Mediterranean produces a distinct hallucination. Every so often, sailors see it: the fata morgana, a trick of light that makes the shoreline seem closer. The sorceress Morgan le Fay, in a Sicilian telling of the Arthurian legend, lured a barbarian king to his death in these waters, smiling as he drowned.

In the south of Italy, distances deceive. The train between Palermo and Bari travels roughly the same space as between Turin and Rome in triple the time. A Ministry of Infrastructure study concluded that Sicily might as well be a hundred times farther from the mainland than it actually is, for all the time required to cross the strait by car on a rusty ferry. Of all the islands without a bridge or tunnel connecting them to Europe, Sicily is the biggest and—in geographical terms only—the nearest.

Build a bridge, then, and have it over with! The ranks of men who pursued this idea include the emperor Charlemagne, the Bourbon king of what was once called “the Two Sicilies,” the later king who unified Italy, the infrastructure-loving fascist Benito Mussolini, and the long-serving Silvio Berlusconi. All failed.

[From the December 1863 issue: Something about bridges]

The bridge along the Messina Strait is “Italy’s Apollo project,” Francesco Costa, a Sicilian podcaster, told me. The state has spent more than 1 billion euros on studies, models, stipends, torts—everything but construction.

Matteo Salvini, Giorgia Meloni’s infrastructure minister, says he will build it. His predecessor Paola De Micheli told me that his odds might be the best ever: All layers of government support the project, the funds are in reach, and Salvini has inherited Berlusconi’s plan and vision. The plastic model looks great. The bridge will, in Salvini’s words, serve as “a model for the Italy that believes in itself.”

This summer, I spent three weeks in the country, asking politicians, academics, and friends if they thought that Italy would at last link Sicily to the mainland. “Non lo faranno mai,” most people said—“they will never do it.” Only a few paused and considered. “Who knows?” a fruit seller in Sardinia said as he weighed some figs. “Maybe this will be the time they do it.”

The absent bridge tells a story about the beguilement of great infrastructure—and about power as an optical illusion. So many times, the bridge has seemed a certainty, only to vanish like a mirage, taking down powerful men.

The first Italian to try to bridge the Messina Strait may have been Consul Lucius Metellus, circa 250 B.C.E. After winning the battle of Palermo in the Punic wars, his army was flush with bounty, including, according to Pliny the Elder, some 140 elephants. Metellus’s ships weren’t big enough to carry them, so the Romans tied rafts together, then led the animals across them to the mainland. The structure might have stood for a few days, allowing toga-clad people to cross back and forth, before it was destroyed by the sea.

A couple of millennia later, in the 1860s, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel set out to build a bridge less for practical reasons than as a celebration of unity. Many little states had just come together to form one country, and a bridge to Sicily would make the integration complete. The fascist dictator Benito Mussolini thought a bridge would send a message to those who questioned that unity: In response to a brewing secessionist movement in 1942, he declared, “It’s time to put an end to this story that Sicily is an island. After the war, I will order a bridge built.” The furthest both leaders got was to commission studies.

Strongmen have a notorious attraction to pharaonic public works, but democratic leaders are said to have the edge in summoning the innovation required to complete them. In Italy, both systems have pledged, but neither has delivered, a bridge to Sicily.

After World War II, to prevent the return of fascism, the architects of Italy’s democratic constitution empowered Parliament to remove the country’s leaders. And remove them it did: Since 1946, the average Italian prime minister has lasted less than half of the allotted five-year term. This instability has put the bridge’s proponents in the position of having to plead their case over and over again.

Such was the fate of Oscar Andò, the senator behind a 1971 law authorizing the creation of Messina Strait Inc., a public company that would be tasked with building the bridge. In 1986, the company selected a design from several outlined in a feasibility study. Antonio Andò, Oscar’s son and a former senator himself, told me that the company decided against a tunnel for both technical and aesthetic reasons. It also rejected a bridge design with pillars in the water, because the strait’s currents are particularly treacherous. The winner was thus a suspension bridge anchored to pillars on the two banks, rooted in dry land. No suspension bridge had ever had its supports so far apart: At two miles, the bridge over the Messina Strait would have the world’s longest span.

But before this design could become a reality in the early 1990s, a corruption scandal took down every Italian political party and the first republic itself. Silvio Berlusconi emerged from this wreckage: A construction and media magnate, he was corrupt, too, but at least he wasn’t a politician. Campaigning for a nonconsecutive second term in 2001, Berlusconi signed a symbolic contract with the Italian populace on live television, promising to quit if he didn’t achieve four of five pledges. One of these was to build great public works—most notably, the bridge to Sicily.

[Read: Berlusconi was Trump before Trump]

Parliament green-lighted the bridge in 2002, and Pietro Lunardi, Berlusconi’s infrastructure minister, told Corriere Della Sera that the “first stone” would be laid by late 2004 or early 2005. But construction never began. By 2006, opposition had gathered against the project. Prominent jurists warned of the danger of Mafia involvement. Some citizens of Messina didn’t want to see their nicest beach destroyed. Plenty of Italians simply disliked Berlusconi. Environmental activists were particularly vocal: Many vital migration routes for fish and birds pass through or above the strait, and the World Wildlife Fund warned that the bridge’s cables would confuse birds flying from Africa to Europe, that coasts would be degraded, and that trees would be cut down.  

“I don’t do bird-watching,” Antonio Andò told me when I asked about these objections. “But between the development of the south and the movement of some birds, one should be preferred over the other.”

Romano Prodi, Berlusconi’s opponent in the 2006 election, promised to paralyze all bridge plans if he won—which he did. But postwar Italian politics being what they are, Berlusconi was back in power two years later, and the bridge was back on the agenda.

Pietro Ciucci, the CEO of Messina Strait Inc. from 2002 to 2013, announced that the first stone would be laid by 2010. Why wasn’t it?

“Some declarations, especially at the political level, are not set in stone,” Ciucci told me.

Then, in 2010, Berlusconi pledged that a final plan would be before Parliament by the end of the year. What happened there?

“Absolutely nothing happened,” Ciucci told me.

His public-relations chief interjected to explain that these deadlines weren’t so literal; their purpose was psychological: “If you give soft timelines, people get too calm,” he said.

By the time Berlusconi resigned in 2011—he was indicted for allegedly having sex with minors and later  found not guilty on appeal—the bridge might have seemed the least of his unfulfilled promises. He hadn’t lowered income taxes or halved unemployment, either. He left behind a debt crisis that required austerity measures. The bridge now seemed a luxury that Italy couldn’t afford. In 2013, Berlusconi’s successor, the economist Mario Monti, liquidated Messina Strait Inc. and agreed to pay its contractors more than 300 million euros in damages.

Rendering of the Messina Strait bridge (Courtesy of Messina Strait Inc.)

A word perhaps unique to the Italian language is umarell, for a retired man who hangs around construction sites to watch and offer unsolicited advice. Perhaps the umarelli are the reason the idea of building this bridge never dies, their enthusiasm the force that sustains it no matter the political vehicle.

The unlikeliest of all the politicians to have resuscitated this project is surely Matteo Salvini, the current minister of infrastructure. The bridge entails a 12-billion-euro investment in southern Italy, a part of the country whose inhabitants Salvini called “parasites” as he campaigned for northern secession. As late as 2016, he mocked the prospect of a bridge to Sicily: “Engineers say it cannot stand,” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t want to spend several billion euros on some bridge in the middle of the sea.” Now Salvini is in charge of that very project.

[Read: The new populist playbook]

Lunardi, Berlusconi’s minister, told me that Salvini called him for guidance shortly after Meloni’s victory but before he officially assumed his post overseeing infrastructure. Salvini had been disappointed with this portfolio, as he’d hoped that Meloni, an ideological ally, would appoint him minister of the interior instead. Lunardi advised Salvini to build underground nuclear plants and a bridge to Sicily, saying that the infrastructure minister who accomplished these things would “go down in history.” Lunardi was delighted to offer counsel, because he thought that only a right-wing politician could get the job done. On the left, “there are no men, there’s no strength, no energy to do it,” Lunardi told me. “Maybe they’re good at directing films or things like that, but they can’t build this bridge.”

Salvini got to work. In May 2023, Parliament passed a law authorizing the bridge’s construction. Then, in June, Berlusconi died. Politicians paid tribute. The foreign minister said that the bridge should be completed soon so that the dead man could see it “from above.” Salvini said that Berlusconi’s last words to him were: “All the works I started, you will finish.” He even hired Pietro Ciucci to lead the construction.

The city of Messina extends along the horizontal line where Mount Etna’s volcanic hills end and the sea begins. How fortunate one would be, I thought, to live at this beautiful threshold. Then the ferry drew closer, and I noticed that the waterfront buildings were cracked, their windows boarded. Messina holds the European record for population decline from 2015 to 2020. Its desolate streets are pleasantly shaded by trees and low-rises; empty bars serve such wonders as crema di caffè and granita. Elsewhere in Sicily, the curse of architectural decay and economic paralysis comes with the consolation of tourism, but not in Messina. Here buses await cruise ships in the port to deliver visitors to the Instagrammable Taormina, 45 minutes away.

Visiting in early September, I found the city divided over whether it wanted this gift it never asked for. I had tried and failed to find opinion surveys: None had been done, I realized, because Messina’s wishes don’t matter much in Rome. Months after Salvini started talking about building the bridge, the mayor of Messina complained to the press that he hadn’t been contacted.

His name is Federico Basile. A slender former accountant, he’s proud of having improved water networks and increased the number of city buses from 20 to 152, 16 of them electric. His job, he told me, is not to weigh in on the central government’s initiative—although he does favor it—so much as to figure out what to do about a cemetery that stands in the construction zone, or whether he might create a “technology hub” in the renovated riviera.

The wall outside Basile’s office is lined with portraits of Messina’s past mayors. The only one not wearing a tailored suit is Renato Accorinti, an anti-bridge activist, elected in 2013, who wore only T-shirts with slogans. Among the highlights of his administration were the opening of a homeless shelter, a visit from the Dalai Lama, and the day he recognized the hard work of a street sweeper to the applause of all present. To Accorinti, the strait is a “sacred” place, a natural reserve he fought for UNESCO to recognize as a World Heritage Site, and the bridge is a distraction from Messina’s problems.

[From the July 1953 issue: Sicilian idyll]

“In the south, there are no streets, no schools, no money, no jobs, no railways,” Accorinti told me. “And you want to spend a colossal figure of money we don’t have on those three kilometers. What will you solve with those three kilometers? Just to say you did the biggest thing in the world?”  To build a bridge in a place with no decent roads or railways, he said, is to build a “cathedral in the desert.”

Citizens of Messina, like the two mayors, have split into camps. The nonpontisti (literally, “non-bridgers”) fear the not-unrealistic prospect of never-ending construction. Supporters, such as Davide Passaniti, who runs a pro-bridge social-media campaign, argue that the risk is worth taking, and the funds, if not spent on the bridge, will not be spent on Sicily at all.

One day in Messina, I ducked into a church during a rain shower and asked the cleric there, Monsignor Santi Musicò, what he thought about the bridge.

“Well, if it can bring some good, welcome,” he told me, “but if things remain the same, it’s better  they don’t do anything.”

He had lost hope for Messina, he told me, and now presided over fewer weddings than funerals. I asked whether he thought the bridge would ever be built.

“If he wants it,” he replied, pointing upward—I assumed toward God. But then he made clear that he was referring to another unpredictable higher power: Salvini.

By the summer, the bridge had begun to draw criticism. Salvini dislikes the media but cares about his image—enough that his head of public relations once texted me, “Please treat us well or else they will hang me.” Hence, his party posted a website to debunk “le fake news” about the bridge, using the Trumpian phrase in English.

The single-span design has remained essentially the same since the 1980s, even though every government that has promised to build it has improved the models. The result is a formidable feat of engineering that promises to withstand higher-magnitude earthquakes better than any bridge in the world. Bridges elsewhere have copied the “Messina Deck type,” with a railway in the middle and car lanes on the sides, an innovation meant to slow down fast winds.

But some of Italy’s best engineers fear that this bridge defies the possible. Humanity took more than a century to lengthen the span of suspension bridges by 0.9 miles, going from the 0.3 mile Brooklyn Bridge in 1869 to the 1.2 mile Çanakkale Bridge in 2016. Records were broken little by little. The span of the Messina Strait bridge would extend two miles. That’s a big jump. Moreover, ships have gotten taller over the past four decades. The head of Federlogistica, an Italian guild of transport firms, warned that those higher than 65 meters would not be able pass or reach the port of Gioia Tauro, one of the most important in Europe. Traffic in the port could shrink by as much as 17 percent. The bridge could become a wall.

If the object really is simply to link Sicily to mainland Italy, the world’s longest suspension bridge, with all these problems, might no longer even be needed. Enrico Giovannini, a former infrastructure minister, oversaw an independent study concluding that a bridge with pillars in the water—the idea discarded in ’86 because of strong currents—might be worth revisiting given new technologies. Oliviero Baccelli, a transport-economics professor at Bocconi University, told me that he’d endorse a tunnel, but he understood that it “would not be particularly seductive or make the country proud, because actually anyone can do it.” An engineer who presented the tunnel idea to the government a few years ago put it this way: “Mussolini wanted the bridge. Berlusconi wanted the bridge. The bridge is a symbol. A tunnel, nobody sees.”

[Read: Fascism returns to Italy]

In press tours across Italy, Salvini has brushed off reporters’ objections with one-line quips. Asked whether the cables might endanger birds, he said: “Birds are not stupid.” To a critic who pointed to the risks of undertaking such an untried feat of engineering, he said: “Just like the dome of Brunelleschi is unique in the world.” The quick replies could be Salvini’s way of playing politics—or a sign that he doesn’t have a plan.

I spoke with him on a brief video call in September. When I asked him about the ships, he said that those taller than 65 meters could be “counted on the fingers of one hand” and that “99 percent” would be able to go through. Berlusconi’s model, he told me, was the only way to link Sicily and Calabria. “This is the most studied project that has never been realized,” he said.

A little while before our meeting, a memo from Prime Minister Meloni had leaked to the press in which she cautioned that money was running scarce: “Matteo should contain himself.” But Salvini remained sure that Meloni’s support would come through, and he was right. Within a couple of weeks, he announced that the bridge was in the budget, and that construction would start in the spring of 2024. The first train will supposedly cross the Messina strait in 2032. The umarelli who cannot make it to the construction site will be able to watch the progress live online.

Torre Faro, a fishing town north of Messina where one pillar of the bridge will rise, has gotten used to the perennial possibility of its own demolishment. In the Berlusconi years, the manager of the Faro Motel postponed maintenance work as he waited for an expropriation letter that never came. The establishment is now in ruins. But even here, the bridge has supporters. “Before the Eiffel Tower was built, some people opposed it,” the owner of a local mussel farm next to would-be construction sites told me. “I am not like them.”

The bridge is a symbol of greatness. Who wouldn’t want it? But by becoming a symbol of greatness, this bridge has lost its claim to be what bridges normally are: symbols of unity. Pundits and politicians, supporters as well as critics, have encapsulated this problem with a clever aphorism: This is the bridge that divides.

The bridge is likely Italy’s oldest, unfulfilled ambition. When the kingdom was born, when Mussolini promised an empire, when postwar prosperity peaked, when Berlusconi made his campaign pledges, when the Italian right prevailed, the idea of this grand structure beckoned. The bridge to Sicily is not the spirit of a specific time. It’s a mirage that appears whenever the state feels powerful.

Then an economic crisis strikes, the government collapses, or something happens to make Italians reconsider whether some vague idea of greatness suffices to justify the enormous cost. The mirage fades.

Salvini often says he will name the bridge after Berlusconi, the man he credits with getting closest to building it. But he is wrong about that. The haphazard runway the ancient Romans rigged for the elephants to cross remains the best attempt so far. That floating, fleeting bridge through the strait of Messina, the first and maybe the only, holds a lesson. When the bridge was conceived to fulfill a practical purpose, it got built.

The protagonist of the new film Poor Things is no ordinary heroine. As played by Emma Stone, Bella Baxter is a corpse reanimated by a man who replaced her brain with that of her unborn child; she’s therefore a blend of juvenile innocence and adult promiscuity, shamelessly charting her own course through life because she’s never been conditioned to meet societal constraints. She has no clue what womanhood is supposed to entail or how she’s expected to behave, yet she looks full-grown—a Frankenstein’s monster dressed in frilly outfits, without a single scar in sight.

Like her, Poor Things is brazenly, gleefully original in its presentation and ideas. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, the movie takes place in a steampunk, otherworldly Victorian wonderland, and Bella’s story unfolds like a twisted fairy tale. Seeking freedom and adventure, she embarks on a journey around the world, which leads to encounters with characters who are simultaneously enthralled and threatened by her singular perspective—and who all try to control her in their own way. With them, she pursues experiences, many of them sexual, that shape her understanding of what it means to be fully alive. The film can, as a result, be hard to classify: It is at once a strangely charming bildungsroman, an erotic melodrama, a body-horror-tinged mystery, and a wondrous feminist meditation on the power of self-discovery.

But the film can be defined as a triumph of creative collaboration. Lanthimos and Stone have completed four projects together—including 2018’s The Favourite, last year’s short film Bleat, and the forthcoming Kind of Kindness—and Poor Things offers the best evidence of their particular artistic alchemy thus far. With it, Lanthimos, who’s known for making absurd black comedies such as The Lobster, has built a maximalist film that’s relentlessly funny, terrifically horny, thoroughly provocative, and “different in every respect” compared with his previous work, he told me. Stone, meanwhile, delivers the most fearless performance of her career, nimbly capturing every step of Bella’s social and sexual awakening.

I spoke with Lanthimos and Stone last month over Zoom. We talked about their partnership, the unique challenges of making Poor Things, and how their individual sensibilities contributed to the film’s intimacy. As they reflected on their work, the two often gently teased each other with a playfulness of which Bella would approve.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Shirley Li: This is the third collaboration of yours being released. Forgive me for putting this so bluntly, but why do you keep working together?

Emma Stone: No, I understand. As an actor, it’s no small thing to trust the person who is bringing the whole thing together, and Yorgos really takes responsibility for his films. If something goes wrong, the only person he blames at the end of the day is himself, and I share that personality trait. I know how much he cares and how miserable the whole process makes him up close.

Li: Miserable?

Yorgos Lanthimos: Well, it’s so stressful, the whole process. I’m not psyched. I’m, you know, frightened.

Stone: We would watch YouTube videos that make us laugh to try to calm down.

Li: What videos?

Stone: [Laughs] You tell, Yorgos.

Lanthimos: Inappropriate things, mostly. [Both laugh] Things we should not, um …

Stone: Funny things!

Li: I know you’re no strangers to making sexually frank scenes—The Favourite was also risqué—but tell me more about collaborating this time, because those sequences are an enormous part of Poor Things. You can trace Bella’s development through her sexual experiences; the film shifts from black and white to full color when Bella’s having sex with Duncan Wedderburn (played by Mark Ruffalo), the caddish lawyer who introduces her to the larger world. Emma, you’re a producer on this film, unlike in your previous work with Yorgos. How did that affect the making of Poor Things’ most explicit scenes?

Stone: I was privy to how everything was unfolding. I don’t know how helpful I was. In terms of how it practically existed on the day, we had a very trusted team that was in the room for all of that: Robbie Ryan, our director of photography; Hayley Williams, our first assistant director, who’s wonderful; and Olga Abramson, our focus puller. We had an incredible intimacy coordinator named Elle McAlpine. It was just extremely professional but also fun and alive. We had conversations about literally everything, so there were no surprises.

Lanthimos: I don’t think we discussed a lot about the theory of things or the characters and analysis. We discussed more practical things.

[Read: Will sex scenes survive the pandemic?]

Li: The film’s sex scenes have received a range of responses. Some see them as proof that sex scenes are coming back to the movies; others have criticized them for being too graphic. Are you surprised at all by the variety of reactions?

Stone: [Apologetically] He doesn’t look at those.

Lanthimos: I get a general sense of things.

Stone: We knew that Bella was without shame and was deeply curious and was exploring the world in a way that we maybe haven’t seen before. The camera shying away from her puts a kind of societal onus onto her that she doesn’t deserve. She’s free. Why should we be ashamed?

Lanthimos: What maybe surprised me is, it seems like the film’s been perceived more so on the positive side of what we’re discussing. I’d expected maybe more reservations. That’s something that I do think about: If I had made the film when I wanted to make it, 12 years ago, would it be the same? Or is it that the world that we live in has slightly shifted, and now people can actually accept and be interested in this story of this woman as a free being with sexuality? Maybe it wouldn’t have been seen or talked about that much if it was done 10 years ago.

Li: Emma, do you agree? Yorgos did first talk about Poor Things with you when you were still working on The Favourite, and in the roughly six years since, there have been real-life upheavals in women’s freedoms, which is obviously relevant to the story Poor Things tells.

Stone: I hesitate to say this, because it sounds bad, but when I’m drawn to something, it really is just because it’s something that I feel drawn to. But it’s hard, because you make a film and then you go and do press for it, and, like we found with The Favourite, it’s like, It’s so timely! Hillary lost the election last year; what do you think? There is this sort of thing that gets put onto these stories as they’re released. I think that a story that is original always feels timely, because it’s something that feels deeply true or upsetting or whatever it may be.

To say that, years ago, this wasn’t as true as it is right now—that people are being horrific about Roe v. Wade and things like that—I think that’s an unfair idea, to say that a story becomes more relevant or less relevant. So I don’t know why Yorgos said that [Laughs], and I think you should strike it from the record.

Lanthimos: [Laughs]

Stone: I said it!

Li: To be fair to Yorgos, it does feel like this year’s been rife with films about women on journeys of self-discovery; this film plays like a surreal version of Barbie. With that in mind, did either of you envision a certain audience for Poor Things as you were making it, and consider the potential reactions to its sexual frankness from there? And given your different cultural backgrounds, did your approaches differ?

Stone: Hm. [To Lanthimos] Do you ever envision your audience?

Lanthimos: I don’t.

Stone: I’ve never heard him envision the audience. [Laughs] But yes, I mean, obviously I grew up in Arizona and he grew up in Athens, and there is a sort of, uh, different structure to what we learn about, about nudity and sexuality. A conversation that he’s brought up a lot, and I feel the same way, is the American relationship to violence on film is a kind of free-for-all. It’s a PG-13 movie if a bunch of people get shot but you don’t see blood. It’s R if you see the blood.

The culture of America and its relationship to violence is really fascinating, that it would be so prudish around sexuality, something that’s a part of a natural human experience and the way that people literally are created and born—that’s shameful, for some reason, but the way they die is not. As I’ve gotten older, it really is baffling to me, that acceptance of one but not the other. And I do think there’s a reversal of that in a lot of European cinema. Maybe I’m wrong. Yorgos?

Lanthimos: Maybe. I don’t know.

Stone: I don’t know either! I’m just sort of waxing poetic. I’m teaching a class. [Laughs]

Li: Speaking of which, I’m curious about what this collaboration taught you compared with your previous partnerships.

Lanthimos: I have to say, it’s not necessarily during Poor Things, but with the last few projects, I’ve learned to trust. I think when I was starting out, on my earlier films, I was way more suspicious of people.

I just wanted to have total control over everything and think that I know best. And so, by finding people that I can trust and admire, and working with them over and over again, I just learned to let go of certain things. And when you find those people, you just need to provide them with freedom and an appropriate environment, and they can flourish. In return, you get much more than you had imagined.

Stone: This is like therapy, Shirley.

Lanthimos: Yeah.

Li: I’m trying.

Stone: It’s good! I would describe our collaboration the same way. You’re so out of control as an actor. You don’t control the edit or how the film is going to end up, and that can be scary as time goes on, and you see some of the films that you’ve been a part of and you’re like, Oh my God, I guess that’s how that turned out. So to have this faith in him, that it will be something that I believe in, that’s incredible.

We have very different backgrounds and very different approaches to things, personality-wise. He’s very internal, and I am more external. But for whatever reason, there’s something between us that clicks. I never imagined getting to make the types of things that we’ve been able to make together. I’ve even learned to develop film with him!

Lanthimos: In print!

Stone: In print! He takes pictures on set all day on film cameras, and we started developing them in Budapest. That was the wind-down after days of shooting.

Li: Now, obviously, the two of you didn’t make Poor Things in a vacuum. You brought a lot of familiar faces on board—the aforementioned cinematographer Robbie Ryan, the screenwriter Tony McNamara—but you also recruited some new collaborators in the cast and crew. What do you look for when you introduce someone into the Lanthimos-Stone fold?

Lanthimos: I guess the first thing is talent. [Laughs] But my process is so intuitive, and so that’s why it’s very hard to talk about. Mostly, if you can sit down and spend time together without it being overly difficult and without having to, um …

Stone: Explain too much?

Lanthimos: Yeah. If you don’t have to make a huge effort to be with the other person, I think that’s quite important.

Stone: Ditto. You’re able to be freer and do more interesting work when you’re with people you really feel are all there for the same reason. You don’t have to waste time getting comfortable.

The Joy of Cooking, one of the most popular cookbooks in American history, entered kitchens in 1931 with a simple premise: Anyone can learn to make a meal. The Depression had disrupted the food supply, leaving a generation of new homemakers doubting their ability to furnish healthy, varied dishes from sparse pantries. The book’s popularity lay in author Irma Rombauer’s approachable, if I can do this, you can too tone, an attitude that would help change how everyday Americans made dinner.

Nearly a century later, another generation of young cooks has faced another global catastrophe, and emerged with their own relationship to cooking. While the coronavirus pandemic sent millions of Americans away from restaurants and into their kitchens, its culinary impact was formative for Gen Z, many of whom were in their teens or early 20s when it began. Whether stuck in their parents’ homes or on their own, these young people embraced cooking as an act of independence and, as one researcher told me, coping. On TikTok, cooking tutorials have hundreds of millions of views. Today, cooking has become a major generational avocation and source of pride.   

The pandemic fundamentally disrupted many young people’s day-to-day life—school, sports, spending time with friends—and, with it, the anchor of routine. For example, Mia Kristensen was 16 when her high-school classes shifted to Zoom. Around this time, she first downloaded TikTok. The bright vegetable bowls she saw her peers making—familiar to her as a vegan, but somehow finer, more inspiring—became aspirational. Cooking was something to look forward to during the day, she told me. Making dinner from scratch became an achievement.

TikTok certainly helped with cooking’s proliferation, as it dished out entertaining, accessible cooking tutorials by and for young people marooned at home. The medium met the moment, just as it had before: Irma Rombauer paved the way for Julia Child on television, J. Kenji López-Alt on YouTube, and now TikTok creators, whose pandemic-era videos helped convey that everyone was managing as best they could. People were in their own kitchens, yes, but displaying their handiwork in one global digital setting.

[Read: The best kind of food to cook during a pandemic]

There seems to be no sign of “kitchen fatigue” now, according to MaryLeigh Bliss, the chief content officer at YPulse, a marketing firm that researches Gen Z and Millennial habits. In fact, saving money is an additional motivation to keep cooking. As more and more Gen Zers enter the workforce, they face steep housing, goods, and education costs. According to one report, more than half of Gen Zers surveyed have an anxiety disorder, citing worry about the future as the top cause.

Indeed, researchers told me that knowing how to cook—even if it began as pandemic escapism or an economic consideration—has become a key identity marker for Gen Z. This generation tends to define itself through hobbies, many discovered online, like mastering a video game or knitting a scarf. Cooking as a pastime—like being a “foodie” before it—can signal a number of values, according to Kathy Sheehan, a senior vice president of Cassandra, a market-trends research firm. It might say someone is interested in different cultures, or prioritizes shopping for local, seasonal produce.

Zoomers are particularly concerned with building well-rounded lives, and cooking reflects this, Roberta Katz, a cultural anthropologist and the author of Gen Z, Explained, told me. Cooking is a creative act that can serve as a quiet interlude, largely free from technology. For young people who’ve spent nearly their whole lives with the internet and the iPhone, cooking’s tangibility can be stabilizing. “It grounds you in a world that’s in constant motion,” Katz told me.

That tactility was important to Celeste Mosley, 21, who told me she became depressed during the pandemic. After finding a rice-pudding recipe on TikTok, making it became, “the only thing that got me out of the bed half the time,” she said. Pour the rice. Slice the butter. Stir, stir, stir. The process became meditative for her. This isn’t a surprise: The process of cooking can improve one’s mood as well as one’s anxiety, according to Nicole Farmer, a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center who studies behavior and nutrition. Following directions connects the task at hand with past experiences—I’ve strained tomatoes like this before, or This pasta is new, but I know how to use oregano. Cooking’s combination of new and familiar actions can boost the brain’s “effortless attention” and executive-planning function, which can alleviate depression symptoms. In one study, adolescents skilled in the kitchen reported lower levels of depression than less culinarily inclined peers.

In simple terms, cooking commands your full attention and all of your senses. You must juggle skills, whether culinary (slicing), cognitive (planning), or creative (constructing a meal from ostensibly incongruous leftovers in the fridge). You might feel raw rice through your fingers, hear knives clattering on cutting boards, smell a turkey roasting. Cooking, Farmer suggests, can boost self-confidence; it also facilitates social bonding when meals are shared.

[Read: What home cooking does that restaurants can’t]

Now in my 40s, I remember one college summer, proudly leaving my shifts at a bakery heaving an enormous black bag over my shoulder, Santa-style, with the day’s bounty of unsold treats. My five roommates and I largely subsisted on leftover muffins for dinner—they were both filling and free. And weren’t the berries lodged in them part of a major food group? Among the skills I acquired in the winding thicket of young adulthood, cooking was not one.

But my friends’ teenage son, who told me he hadn’t known that he liked to cook before the pandemic, recently served eight of us a dinner of chicken with lemon and garlic sauce, red-lentil soup, and flan. He is preparing to leave for college, but learned how to make shakshuka for breakfast from a viral video. He can taste something in a restaurant and replicate it at home. Whether or not Gen Z has read The Joy of Cooking, it has navigated its own relationship with food through historical disaster, and ended up with both a life skill and a craft.