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Political Comedy, With a Side of Desperation

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2024 › 11 › political-comedy-daily-show-jon-stewart-tony-hinchcliffe › 680598

When Donald Trump seemed poised to win the presidential election in 2016, Trevor Noah, then the host of The Daily Show, began the program’s live night-of special on a somber note. “It feels like the end of the world,” he said to a silent audience. “I’m not going to lie. I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place for jokes tonight, because this is the first time throughout this entire race where I’m officially shitting my pants.”

On Tuesday night, Noah’s predecessor, Jon Stewart, returned to anchor the same live presidential election-night special for the first time since 2012, and Stewart’s mood was noticeably lighter than Noah’s. Stewart didn’t make any apocalyptic declarations; instead, he seemed desperate to make his studio audience laugh—“We are obviously digging through the results to find some that you like!”—without reminding them too much of the election’s likely outcome, which had begun to clarify when the hour began. Stewart may have built his reputation as an acerbic comedic truth-teller, but on Tuesday night, he seemed subdued, more interested in soothing his viewers than in delivering biting assessments of the returns.

The overall approach felt oddly inert, perhaps a sign of how confusing the world of political comedy has become. That’s in part because comedians came to play a substantial role in Trump’s third presidential campaign. Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, went on a tour of podcasts hosted by comics who appeal to young male voters, including Tim Dillon, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan. Trump’s team also invited the comic (and another podcaster) Tony Hinchcliffe to take the stage at a rally last month at Madison Square Garden, where he made disparaging remarks about Puerto Ricans that received the kind of backlash many pundits called this year’s “October surprise.”

Forget attaining celebrity endorsements from pop stars and Hollywood’s A-list talent, in other words. Both Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, seemed to recognize the need for unconventional forms of outreach, but the Trump campaign in particular eschewed traditional journalists in favor of provocative comics and hosts who would provide friendly platforms for the former president. “A survey of many hours of conversations between these comedians and Trump mostly reveals slavish affection,” observed The New York Times of Trump’s podcast appearances, “and even a certain kinship … Trump and his hosts share a disdain of news media, a reflexive paranoia about so-called cancel culture, a delight in transgression and a love of cruel insult jokes.”

[Read: Why democrats are losing the culture war]

That shift toward comedians as sources of ideological validation has left established satirists such as Stewart in an odd position. Though Stewart has enjoyed plenty of success this election year—his return as the Monday-night anchor for The Daily Show helped reverse the viewership decline that happened during Noah’s stewardship, and his contract was recently extended through 2025—he continues to face an uphill battle in maintaining his impact.

As the face of a long-running television program, Stewart is constrained by ratings concerns and runtime logistics, but he’s also committed to performing a routine that’s barely changed over the years: an opening monologue, followed by correspondent-led segments, a guest interview, and a “moment of zen.” The new cohort of podcasters may also care about audience engagement, but they’re nimbler with their content—and they’re becoming more influential as a result. Stewart’s chosen platform for his comic punditry isn’t the dominant approach for political comedy anymore. (Several of The Daily Show’s offshoots, such as Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show, and Jordan Klepper’s The Opposition, failed to last, and on Tuesday, The Daily Show was the only late-night show to air a live special.)

Yet Stewart has seemed reluctant to adjust his strategy—or to criticize the actions of some of his peers. Note how he responded to Hinchcliffe’s set at the Trump rally: On an episode of The Daily Show, he praised Hinchcliffe as “very funny” and defended him against the negative news coverage of his set. In some ways, Stewart did what he’s often done: take aim at the larger institution of the media rather than a fellow comic. But by sidestepping the opportunity to scrutinize the growth of the comedian-to-campaign-influencer pipeline, he avoided examining his own role as a purveyor of political humor.

Other comedians have been more willing to consider their field’s shifting responsibility. In a Substack post, the ex–Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac chided his former boss for his reaction to Hinchcliffe. “For Jon, it seems like comedians should be free to say whatever they want, wherever they want,” Cenac wrote. “And he seems more willing to defend the idea that the circumstances surrounding their jokes are irrelevant as long as people laugh.” Those “circumstances”—taking stages at rallies rather than clubs, offering their podcasts as prominent campaign stops—have also caught the attention of Marc Maron, one of the most prominent podcast-hosting comedians. Maron posted a statement to his website a week before the election criticizing contemporaries he believed had become mouthpieces for misinformation and casual bigotry. “The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers,” he wrote. “Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant … When comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism.”

[Read: What happened to Jon Stewart?]

Maron’s comments double as a demand that his fellow performers recognize the stakes of participating in this political moment. But the comedy world’s response to those stakes has run the gamut. Perhaps some of the podcasters he’s calling out want to wield actual power to sway voters—and therefore, like the powerful leaders they’re catering to, build a dedicated fan base of their own. Other comics, like the team behind Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” may see their role as entertainers meant mostly to gesture at the issues driving headlines. After this latest election cycle, the one thing that seems clear is that political comedy—the point of practicing it, the changing flavor of its influence—is growing ever muddier.

For Tuesday night’s live show, meanwhile, Stewart opted to provide mostly distraction. His punch lines were as soft as his analysis of election results, struggling to dispel the undercurrent of unease. That’s not entirely Stewart’s fault: His audience seemed tense from the start, and the show faced some unexpected developments, including announced guest Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania canceling at the last minute, forcing Stewart to improvise and fill the extra time. Only at the end of the hour did Stewart fully embrace his own distress at the election returns, putting his head in his hands as he delivered a closing statement. “Look,” he began, before groaning and stumbling over his words. “What we know is that we really don’t know anything … I just want to point out, just as a matter of perspective, that the lessons that our pundits take away from these results, that they will pronounce with certainty, will be wrong. And we have to remember that.”

The plainspoken commentary was a refreshing moment that cut through the preceding aimlessness—but it also revealed a truth about the comedic genre’s stalwarts, like Stewart. Americans look to voices such as his in anxious moments; it’s why SNL has booked the typically no-holds-barred stand-up Bill Burr to host its postelection show this weekend. Yet Stewart has never claimed to be anything more than a performer, even when he was deemed the “most trusted man in America” during his initial run hosting The Daily Show. As he pointed out, none of us knows anything—perhaps, least of all, the comics who are tasked much too often with making sense of the nation’s chaos.

I’ve Watched America and Ukraine Switch Places

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › international › archive › 2024 › 11 › message-america-ukraine › 680597

“Ukrainians don’t care who will be president of the United States,” my boss, the editor in chief of one of the largest television stations in Ukraine, told me in 2012 as I headed overseas to cover the American election. I was at the Obama campaign’s headquarters, in Chicago, when the president gave his victory speech that year—but back then, Ukrainian television didn’t broadcast live at night, so my report didn’t air until the next morning, local time.

Covering the 2024 U.S. election for the Ukrainian media was an entirely different experience. People in Ukraine were following every turn. Multiple Ukrainian radio stations called me for reports from the rallies I’d attended in Saginaw, Michigan, and State College, Pennsylvania. Ukraine is at war, and the United States is its biggest provider of military aid; the future of that relationship was at stake. The contest’s eventual winner, Donald Trump, had promised to end the war in 24 hours—which Ukrainians understood to mean that he intended to sell our country out to Russia.

But for me, that was only one dimension of this election’s significance. I’ve covered five American presidential contests for the Ukrainian press, starting in 2008, and in that time, I feel that I have witnessed an American transformation that resonates uncomfortably with the Ukrainian past.

After Ukraine became independent, in 1991, our political parties were for decades run from the pockets of oligarchs. A handful of unimaginably wealthy men, each with holdings in media and industry, controlled factions of political representatives who competed almost exclusively with one another. Political campaigns lacked substance and consisted mainly of personal attacks. In the United States in 2008 and 2012, by contrast, the candidates had real constituencies and actual debates about health care and the economy. Many Ukrainians envied the strength of American institutions, media, and civic engagement.

[Read: ‘They didn’t understand anything, but just spoiled people’s lives’]

Sure, I was a bit stunned when, at a 2008 John McCain rally in Columbus, Ohio, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger warned voters that socialism was on the rise and would destroy America the way it had his native Austria. I had just been to Youngstown, Ohio, where I’d interviewed laid-off workers who lacked basic health care; Austria, meanwhile, was a country I knew well, and it had one of the highest standards of living in the world. Why would an elected official peddle such nonsense to this enormous crowd? Still, American democracy seemed, to an outsider, like the picture of health.

The roles had all but reversed when I came back in 2016. Ukrainians had risen up in 2014 against the corrupt, Russia-backed government of then-President Viktor Yanukovych. Our transition wasn’t perfect, but we elected a government that was at last serious about reform. The Kremlin responded by occupying Crimea and assaulting eastern Ukraine, where it backed separatists in the Donbas region. A low-level war would continue in the Donbas straight up until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022. Even so, we were building up our democracy. Something was happening to America that seemed to point in a different direction.

That year, Americans were more divided than I’d ever seen them. And it wasn’t easy to talk with Republicans. Some Trump supporters told me that a European reporter could never understand their views on guns. One shut the door in my face at a campaign headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina, explaining that he didn’t trust the foreign media. I’d reported from the rallies of pro-Russian separatists in Crimea and the Donbas, who considered Kyiv-based journalists suspicious if not outright enemies, and I knew when to leave.  

That feeling wasn’t the only disconcertingly familiar one. The worldviews of many Americans I talked with that year diverged starkly from the visible facts of their lives. Democrats scoffed that nobody would vote for Trump—but the excitement at his rallies was plainly evident. A man at a Trump rally in Wilmington, Ohio, complained to me about unemployment. Neither he nor anybody in his family had lost a job—in fact, the mayor of Wilmington told me that the town had more than 300 job vacancies. A retired prosecutor told me that the only media outlet he trusted was WikiLeaks. I was reminded of Russia’s coordinated disinformation campaign against Ukrainians: Since the start of the war, we’d been flooded with fabricated news. We had struggled to make the international press understand that high-profile politicians were simply inventing stories. Now something similar seemed to be happening in the United States.

As of this fall, Ukraine is two and a half years into an all-out war with Russia, and America is eight years into a style of politics that my American colleagues describe as substanceless. I listened for mentions of Ukraine at the rallies I attended, and heard none. The closest the candidates came was when Trump, in Pennsylvania, promised that his administration wouldn’t get involved in the affairs of “countries you’ve never heard of,” and Kamala Harris reminded a crowd in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that Trump had a strange fascination with Russia. Nonetheless, the Trump supporters I spoke with assured me that their candidate would bring an end to all wars, including the one in Ukraine. I heard this from Bill Bazzi, the mayor of Dearborn Heights, Michigan. And I heard it from rally-goers, including an elderly woman at a J. D. Vance event in Saginaw, who told me that she’d persuaded skeptical family members to overlook Trump’s personality and focus on his leadership qualities and ability to bring peace to the world.

Harris didn’t speak much about foreign policy at the event I attended in Ann Arbor, but she did warn her audience about the risk of fascism. That word surprised me. Since the full-scale invasion of our country, Ukrainians have frequently used it to describe the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin. The international media have been reluctant to pick up the term, perhaps because it is so heavily freighted with historical meaning. But now it has become part of the American political vernacular.

This American campaign season was rife with reminders of a politics that were once routine in Ukraine, and that we are now happy to be mostly rid of. We know very well, from our experience, what happens when billionaires own media platforms: They can withdraw endorsements written by their editorial boards and back political candidates in order to curry favor. In Warren, Michigan, I talked with a man who claimed that he’d earned $80,000 in one month for collecting signatures for Elon Musk’s petition to support the Constitution. In another echo, the Trump camp threatened that it would challenge the election results if they didn’t name him the winner: Ukraine has some experience with elections followed by months of litigation.

Some of the Americans I met on the campaign trail wanted to know if I found the situation in their country disturbing. Sure. But everything is relative. Americans are fortunate not to live through what we do in Ukraine. There were times in the past week when I’d be reporting in the Midwest and, because of the time difference, the air-raid-alert app on my phone would go off in the middle of the day, announcing another nighttime attack on my home city of Kyiv. In between interviews, I’d scroll through photos of the buildings hit, hoping not to see my family’s home.   

Trump has won the contest for the U.S. presidency. If he withholds military aid, Ukraine may suffer huge losses on the battlefield and enormous civilian casualties. But one way or another, Kyiv is going to have to work with his administration. My time reporting on the campaign has convinced me that this election was not an aberration so much as a reality to be accepted. For the foreseeable future, the United States will turn inward, becoming a country more and more focused on itself. Outsiders will simply have to take this into account.

[Listen: Autocracy in America]

As for the threat of encroaching authoritarianism, I remain an optimist. Take it from a member of the generation of Ukrainians who successfully defended democracy: To capture a state requires not just a strong leader but an apathetic society. Democracy survives when citizens actively defend their rights on every level.

I saw a lot of that in Nevada and Arizona, where I spent the last two days of the campaign following canvassers. I went door-to-door with members of the Culinary Union of Las Vegas—a guest-room attendant, a cocktail server, and a porter—and listened as they urged residents to pay attention to the Nevada Senate race. In Phoenix, I followed a group of volunteers from California who’d spent weeks trying to talk with people they disagreed with. They told me they had knocked on 500,000 doors in Arizona. Friends in New York and Washington told me that they or their relatives had done campaign work outside their cities—writing letters, phone-banking. Even those critical of both candidates and the system itself cared deeply about the country; some who were alienated from the national races focused their energies on local ones. I have never seen anything like this in Europe, where elections are all about going to the polls once every few years.

One thing we have learned in Ukraine, confronted with foreign invasion and war, is that life goes on. The same will be true for America after November 5. I’m reminded of the time a foreign journalist asked a Ukrainian general how Ukraine would survive the winter. He confidently replied that after the winter, there would be spring.

Why Did Latinos Vote for Trump?

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 11 › latinos-vote-trump › 680596

Donald Trump called Latino migrants rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. After one of his final rallies, at which a comedian described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage,” many people, myself included, thought Latinos would decisively turn against him. We were wrong. Exit polls show that 46 percent of Latinos voted for him, and among Latino men, he won 55 percent of the votes—a huge increase from 36 percent in 2020.

Many Americans are baffled. How could Latinos—many of whose family members could be targeted by the mass deportations that the Trump team is promising—make this choice? But seeing the results—and hearing from Latino Trump voters—it made perfect sense to me. This was, simply, a vote for capitalism.

American values are especially powerful in groups with large immigrant populations; those values are what draw people here. Though many of America’s earliest immigrants came here seeking relief from famine and poverty, our freedoms—to worship freely, to speak freely—are what we became famous for. The promise was mythologized on the Statue of Liberty: our welcome to the tired, poor, huddled masses, who yearned not to grow filthy rich, but to be free. In the 20th century, immigrants fled religious persecution and political oppression to find in America freedoms that they, and their descendants, cherished and took seriously. I was raised by my grandfather, a Puerto Rican veteran of World War II. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I was taught that our political freedoms and our moral obligation to democracy mattered more.

At the same time, from the very beginning, the land of the free has also been about the freedom to make and spend money. America put God on our money, but for many Americans, money is God. This nation put profit over morality through centuries of slavery. Individual expediency in the name of capitalism is as American as the right to bear arms. Around the world, no idea has been marketed more effectively than the American dream. America: where even corporations can be people! And when we talk about someone living “the American dream,” we aren’t referring to their trips to the voting booth or the way they utilize their freedom of assembly. We are praising people who have achieved financial success and accumulated material things.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters]

We deify and elevate these people in the media, in social settings, and online, and we rarely question the ethical price that may have been paid to get them there. Just look at Trump, the “self-made man” whose father’s real-estate fortune launched his career. Until Trump became a political villain, he was an American success story. He was regularly on Oprah and sung about in hip-hop songs, and he had that cameo in Home Alone 2. And the truth is, for many Americans—Latinos included—he still is that man. He is living the dream; he has buildings with his name on them.

Latinos broke for Trump for many complicated reasons, including sexism, religious conservatism, racism (or a desire to assimilate into whiteness). But the simplest answer is often the best: To many, Trump represents prosperity. And the ability to financially prosper is what America is all about. People believe this, because America told them so.

In polls, Latinos consistently put economic issues at the top of their list of concerns. After the election, the media was full of voters reaffirming this. As one Pennsylvania voter of Puerto Rican descent told NBC News, he wasn’t bothered by Trump’s comments about the island: “For me, it’s work. It’s the economy. It’s groceries.”

Why, one might ask, was this narrative so much more persuasive to Latinos than to Black Americans? Perhaps because the American dream wasn’t created with Black people in mind. The civil-rights movement was painstakingly built by exploiting America’s political rights to assembly and free speech. When Black Americans in the North couldn’t buy homes because of redlining, many could still—despite obstacles—vote. Perhaps Black voters understood better than many Latino voters an essential truth: Access to the American dream is elusive, but America’s freedoms are indispensable.

One of the great takeaways of this election is that the narrative of America as the land of the free has ceased to be many voters’ top priority. This election was a battle for the soul of the nation—but the fight wasn’t between American ideals and un-American ones. It was between our best and worst selves.

What I Didn’t Understand About Apple Picking

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › family › archive › 2024 › 11 › apple-picking-farm-orchard › 680587

In September 2020, I took my kids apple picking at a small, quiet orchard in Massachusetts called Windy Hill Farm. It was our first weekend away from home since the pandemic had started. The trees dripped with so much fruit, they looked like they were wearing jeweled capes. My son was 10 and my daughter 13, and as they ran and played and picked, the fears I’d been carrying about the virus, the changing world, and the terrible news fell away. At home that night, my daughter made apple crisp, which we ate for dessert and breakfast.

Four years later, as her college-application deadlines loom, time feels like a gale. Our apple-picking tradition seemed like something we couldn’t miss—but choosing an orchard near our home, outside Philadelphia, was more complicated than we anticipated. One farm we used to love now offers a “Premium Package” admission fee of $31.99 per person, which includes a one-quarter peck picking bag plus a corn maze, a hayride, and goat food. (The apple cannon, which shoots apples at targets, costs extra.) Another farm nearby doesn’t charge an admission fee—hayrides, mini golf, face painting, and their apple cannons are à la carte—but even if we skip those extras, it’s usually so crowded that parking is akin to a death duel.

Farms like these, offering what has become known as “agritainment,” have transformed apple picking from a simple activity into one that can resemble visiting a theme park. Some people might dismiss this sort of spectacle (or apple picking of any kind) as trivial. “Cosplay outdoorsiness with us!” the Saturday Night Live cast member Aidy Bryant says in a 2019 sketch parodying the harvest experience. But going to a farm each autumn—even if it’s not the most tranquil orchard—can offer more than it may seem to on the surface: a ritual, an encounter with nature, and a connection to history.

The apple is closely woven into American culture. Apple is the first word many schoolchildren associate with the letter A. It is the main ingredient in our quintessential pie, the key to keeping the doctor away (according to one aphorism), and, of course, our most popular phone brand. In a way that many Americans may not realize, apples are also “part of the fabric of our history,” Mark Richardson, who works at the New England Botanic Garden, in Massachusetts, and who spearheaded the restoration of its historic apple orchard, told me. In the 17th century, for example, alcoholic apple cider was an incredibly popular drink in America. Children even drank a diluted version, which was often considered to be safer than water.

[Read: Wild apples]

Today, farms across America, apple orchards included, are under threat. At the country’s founding, farming was the most common way to make a living. But over roughly the past hundred years, the number of farms in the country has dropped significantly. According to the Department of Agriculture, in 1935, the United States had 6.8 million farms; in 2023, it had 1.89 million. The reasons for the decline are multifaceted. Many farmers left the profession to move to cities, and some of those in younger generations chose not to take over family farms. Policy changes and financial hurdles have pushed others out.

Running a farm can be expensive, hard work. The costs of production and labor can be high. For small farms, which the USDA defines as those that make less than $350,000 in revenue each year, it’s hard to compete with larger farms and international operations. And for any farmer, there’s no guarantee you’ll have a viable crop to sell at the end of a season. Elizabeth Ryan, an apple farmer and owner of Breezy Hill Orchard, in New York’s Hudson Valley, told me that her farm lost nearly $1 million last year because of a May frost. Climate change is making apple growing harder. Fire blight, which is caused by a bacterial pathogen that is active in warmer temperatures, can decimate orchards, Richardson told me. “I don’t think there’s any better example of the impact of climate change on an agricultural crop,” he said. As temperatures continue rising, fire blight may become even more prevalent.

In this uncertain economic landscape, many small farmers, seeking new forms of revenue, have opted to turn their farms into full-fledged recreational experiences, like those I saw when I was searching for a farm to visit. This kind of agritainment has “literally saved farms,” Ryan told me, though she said her orchard largely sticks to the basics. Andre Tougas, a second-generation farmer who owns Tougas Family Farm, in Northborough, Massachusetts, told me his farm primarily focuses on the picking experience, but has also expanded its offerings to draw in visitors beyond the short window of apple season. It provides wagon rides under the apple blossoms in spring, and it grows strawberries and other fruits that visitors can pick from spring through fall. After the picking window has ended, the farm also continues selling its own apples, which tend to be special varieties you can’t find in most grocery stores—Rosalees, Ambrosias, Ludacrisps. The past two years, one of the farm’s busiest days was in December, Tougas said, weeks after the official end of apple season, right before it closed for the winter.

Before I spoke with Ryan and Tougas, I had spent only about one day a year on a farm. I had understood so little about a farmer’s life and struggles, and nothing about the lengths to which farms had to go to survive. Now I feel lucky to be able to visit any farm at all—even those with mini golf and apple cannons. The activities that once seemed unnecessary and carnivalesque now seem more vital. And even at the farms with all the bells and whistles, you can still create a tradition of escaping into nature, and finding a quiet spot to linger in the orchard.

I’ve always gone in autumn, when time passes in a last burst of full color—leaves morphing into bright shades, fruit swelling, plants going dormant. Ryan told me that every fall her farm has visitors who “come when they get engaged, and they come back when they’re pregnant, and they come back when they have a little kid … We feel very connected to people.” These connections—to other humans, to the natural world—are especially valuable considering we spend much of our lives in a “digital landscape,” Timothy Erdmann, a horticulturist at Chanticleer Garden, a public garden in Pennsylvania where I sometimes teach writing classes, told me. When you buy admission to an orchard, he said, “you’re buying a right to forget what you heard on the radio driving to the farm.”

I go with my kids because I love the time outside as a family, away from our screens, and because it feels as if we’re creating memories my children will hold on to for a long time. “Memory is wildly complicated,” Lisa Damour, a psychologist and an author whose books and podcast on raising teens helped guide me through the pandemic, told me. But whether or not my kids form lasting memories of the apple orchard, they’re likely to appreciate the trip, Damour said, because “what kids really want is our agendaless presence, above all”—to know that their parents can let go of the pressures of modern life and simply “delight in them.” When she said that, I thought of how rarely any advice I’d read on parenting teenagers mentioned delight. And it made me think of how my mother raised me.

The fall I was 18 was the last one I had with my mom. She got sick very suddenly that December, and a few weeks later was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her liver. She died nine days after the diagnosis. Now, more than 30 years after her death, I barely remember picking apples together. But I can picture the mason jars of cinnamon applesauce she made afterward and her apple crisp, which we ate for dessert and breakfast. And I remember her delight for the world, and for me.

This year, my kids and I ended up going to the farm nearby with the terrifyingly crowded parking lot. We wandered past mountains of pumpkins and gourds and laughed at their names: Lunch Lady, Pink Porcelain Doll, Heap of Happy Harvest. We rode through the orchards on a hayride and splurged on a “Harvest Float,” a cider slushie swirled with vanilla ice cream and topped with a cider doughnut, like a hat. It was outrageously delicious. We also walked among the trees, and when we did, my teenage son and daughter both held my hands. It confirmed for me the truth of something Ryan had said when we spoke: When people go apple picking, “I don’t think it’s really about getting the apples.”