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From New Yorker

From Vox

The puppies, I should make clear, aren’t real. (There’s that concrete sequential thinking at work.) One day they simply emerged, fully formed, from our son’s mind. They were invisible companions and all-purpose explanations for any and all phenomena. How did he know that he liked mac and cheese and disliked most other foods? His puppies told him. Why was he tired when he woke up in the morning? He’d spent the night at his puppies’ house, which was in Australia, or maybe South America, or possibly down the street from us in Brooklyn. How many puppies were there? Twelve, or a thousand, or “an infinity.”

My wife Siobhan, who can see beyond the surface of the world with perfect 20/20 vision, adapted to this easily. But not me. Change a diaper, read a bedtime story (or five), give comfort after a skinned knee or hurt feelings, all of that I could do. But enter fully into a child’s imaginative world, temporarily abandon the facts and rules of adulthood to live on his level? That I struggled with.

And then I met Bandit Heeler.

Bandit really does live in Australia, in the coastal city of Brisbane, with his wife Chili and their two young daughters Bluey and Bingo. I believe he has a job of some sort; we never actually see him work, though at one point he strolls into the kitchen in a short-sleeved shirt and tie combo that would not have been out of place in my high school history class.

Also, Bandit is a dog. They’re all dogs (blue heelers, actually, a common and beloved Australian breed). And they’re on what Vulture rightly called “the best kids’ show of our time”: Bluey.

Our family discovered Bluey in the depths of the pandemic, when the world had seemed to shrink to the size of our apartment and the only window to the outside was the flat-screen TV in the living room. Created by the Australian animator Joe Brumm and streaming in the US on Disney+, each episode of Bluey runs about seven minutes, and centers on the imaginative games played by Bluey and Bingo. Their suburban home is transformed into a hotel; Bluey turns a set of chairs into a taxi taking harried passengers to the airport; a stick of asparagus at dinner becomes a magic wand that turns family members into (other) animals.

Bluey, Bingo, and their friends have no trouble losing themselves in imaginary games without getting bored or calling for a screen. But what sets the show apart is the role the adults — and especially Bandit, the dad — play in those games.

Unlike me, Bandit can instantly become an eager participant in whatever his kids dream up, almost as though some part of him is still 4-and-three-quarters-years old. In the hotel game, he’s an overly picky guest; in the taxi game, he’s the passenger desperate to get to the airport; when struck by the magic asparagus, he transforms into a highly convincing walrus. My brother — who has two young boys himself — jokes that the only problem with Bandit is that he sets the bar too high for the rest of us dads who might be tempted to give the occasional look at Twitter, rather than get down on the carpet for yet another toddler game with no rules and no end.

But that isn’t quite true. Watch the show enough times — and in our home we have watched it many, many, many times — and you can see the tugs of impatience and frustration begin to edge into the screen. How many times, after all, can an adult play “Postman” or pretend that the floor is lava? But each time Bandit still does it — in part because, as the Australians say, “it’s gotta be done,” but also because he loves his children. And more than that, because he loves to live in the worlds they create.

In a recent conversation with Vox’s Sean Illing on the spiritual practice of parenting, the writer David Spangler touched on the challenge of navigating the in-between aspects of parenthood — one foot in reality and one foot in the world of the child. “It’s about being large enough to encompass both at the same time,” Spangler said. “I’m not surrendering my adult responsibilities, but I’m also giving myself the gift of being open to those moments.”

That’s the gift my son has offered me, one I’ve learned to appreciate with the help of a blue dog with an enviable amount of patience and imagination. That doesn’t mean there isn’t some part of my mind, as bedtime approaches and Ronan begins telling stories of his puppies, that begins to think about just where you might put an infinite number of imaginary puppies, and if they live in Brooklyn, how much they’re paying in rent. But there’s another, growing part, that embraces a second chance at being the child I never really was.

In the second-season episode “Rug Island,” Bandit actually does have to go to work, only to be pulled back into the backyard game Bluey and Bingo are playing. They’ve turned a rug into a desert island — hence, “Rug Island” — and Bandit becomes a castaway trying to get home. A box of felt pens becomes everything from tropical fruit to a canoe oar, and Bandit spends the morning increasingly engrossed in his children’s game.

In the end, though, work calls, and Bandit is “rescued” back into the adult world — but not before Bingo gives him one last felt pen wrapped in a leaf. As he climbs up the stairs of the porch, a waiting Chili asks, “What did she give you?” Bandit unwraps the leaf and smiles.

“Everything.”

Bluey is available on Disney+ and Hulu Premium. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

Christine Quinn and Chelsea Lazkani on Selling Sunset are ready to sell some sunsets. | Netflix 
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Selling Sunset and the irresistible allure of Barbie-on-Barbie pettiness.

In the world of Selling Sunset, very beautiful women do most of the business of selling multimillion-dollar homes for an entity known as the Oppenheim Group, a real estate firm owned by twin bald men.

These women run that business in heels that are not made for running, though some have said they could sprint in their towering heels if needed. That’s all hypothetical, though, since they’re never in a rush, never pressed for time, never stuck in traffic in their expensive candy-colored cars. They move effortlessly between Hollywood Hills estates and their impeccable office, wearing very beautiful outfits — short pencil skirts that seem risky to sit in, puffed royal sleeves, sparkly sharp sequins, monogrammed trench coats, skinny suits — that are never repeated.

Created by Adam DiVello, the man who gave us the hall-of-fame fake reality show The Hills, Selling Sunset sparked itself to life in 2019. It was initially billed as giving us an authentic peek into the sun-soaked universe of high-end Los Angeles real estate — a sphere of existence hidden from normies who don’t have enough money to access it.

But the show made a self-aware turn into a fantasy office drama, and it’s incredible TV. The pressure to sell these massively expensive homes has all but vaporized, and no one is really that keen on being the top seller of sunsets at Oppenheim. Instead, the show offers a heightened look at what happens at work when most of the average worker’s concerns — money, stability, even professional goals — disappear, and the beautiful and poreless can instead focus on their allies and their very, very annoying enemies.

It’s in this mode that Selling Sunset becomes something cannily accessible.

While the average person might not be dressed in designer down to their socks or zip around Los Angeles talking about closing deals, normal people in all sorts of careers do engage in pettiness for all sorts of reasons, including fostering alliances (studies have shown that gossip can bring people closer together), alleviating boredom, and the sheer enjoyment of cooperative complaining. It’s only natural that a show that invites you to partake in glossy workplace drama is absurdly irresistible.

At the center of Selling Sunset is protagonist Chrishell Stause. The name Chrishell is a portmanteau, created by Chrishell’s mom to honor a gas station (Shell) and a gas station attendant (Chris) who helped her during her unexpected delivery.

Chrishell began on the show as an actress who’s brand new to real estate, a Nick Carraway in this Gatsbian Malibu Barbie world. Chrishell spends a lot of time in the first seasons learning how to sell mansions, but more importantly, getting along with the rest of the agents and assimilating into the fantastic plastic life of luxury real estate merchants.

As she learns, we learn too.

When she has to make alliances within the office, we find out which agents will be the easiest to win over. When she starts to speak in real estate agent, we pick up the differences between the Valley, the Hills, and Calabasas. When she has to wear pumps, we know which ones will go with her outfit.

The tension of the early seasons is whether Chrishell’s winsome, sunny attitude will be enough to succeed at Oppenheim. Any suspense is extremely minimal, however, because Chrishell is one of the show’s two main characters. The show would not go on without her, and she receives what is known in the reality show world as “an extremely favorable edit.”

Chrishell’s diametric opposite is Christine Quinn, an icy veteran at Oppenheim. Christine’s candid approach to her own artificiality makes her arguably the show’s realest character. She freely admits that she got her breasts done and that the Botox in her face makes it slightly difficult to emote. If people aren’t as forthcoming about their own fakeness as she is, Christine posits, then they must have something to hide.

Chrishell, with her organic earnestness and free-range sunniness, perturbs Christine. Christine’s territorial nature and gossip-laundering bug Chrishell.

The first couple of seasons of the show wrapped Chrishell and Christine’s antagonistic dynamic around the premise of real estate- related competition. Whoever could sell the most sunsets, I guess. Early on, the show framed Christine’s numerous listings as an assertion of dominance and Chrishell’s closings as small victories, signs that she would one day rival Christine’s success. The tension was pinned on who could make more money.

But as the show progressed, the producers and people behind the camera, and perhaps Chrishell and Christine themselves, began to abandon the charade that the show is about selling homes and lean into the superior, soapy office drama about two coworkers who would like nothing more than the other one to die. The overarching storyline over the past two seasons is that Christine can’t stop talking to the press about Chrishell’s love life, following the end of Chrishell’s marriage to This Is Us actor Justin Hartley.

The fight between Chrishell and Christine splits most of the remaining employees at Oppenheim into two camps. Heather and Mary, who are slightly interchangeable and tired of Christine’s queen bee status, gravitate toward Chrishell. Davina, a terminally sour human, becomes Christine’s henchwoman for a couple of seasons before switching sides. Chelsea, a new recruit this season, slides into Davina’s old role and terrorizes Davina for being disloyal. Amanza, who is disinterested in selling homes and good at reality television, and Maya, who is good at selling homes but disinterested in reality television, float in the middle. Emma, who owns an empanada empire but still sells homes, and didn’t date Ben Affleck, fails to distinguish herself at all.

Thankfully, there is no HR department at Oppenheim, and because Selling Sunset is a television show, these very beautiful women just sort of exist to be mean to each other and never really get in trouble.

Mitchell Haaseth/Netflix

Christine and Chelsea are very beautiful, but they probably have kompromat on you.

A darkly hilarious recurring conceit this season — that perfectly summarizes the trivial rudeness of their work relationships — is the desk assignments. Christine’s desk was given away during maternity leave, and there’s a mess about who’s sitting where when she returns. The women who don’t like Christine hem and haw, and it’s all sort of relatable because moving desks is a pain — all those cords, phones, monitors, computers, papers, everything that’s stuffed into drawers. It’s especially annoying if you’re moving to accommodate someone who doesn’t like you. The women talk about the act as an ordeal, an arduous chore that would take all day. After much complaining, the dust settles and deeply forgettable Emma tells her coworkers that she will be the bigger person and “move” desks.

She huffs. She puffs. Then she just folds her laptop up and takes five steps to her new desk.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

Just because these women aren’t particularly concerned with being the best seller on the show, it’d be a grievous mistake to say that the show is completely devoid of ambition. Plenty of reality television stars have parlayed their fame into becoming celebrities. Think about the Kardashians, or the stars of DiVello’s previous big hit The Hills. Selling Sunset’s agents aren’t outliers. I’d wager that they have a keen eye on parlaying their show personalities into real-life stardom, and knowing that adds a glorious layer of self- awareness to the show. They’re in on their joke, the camp of dressing up like Barbie dolls, never eating at their endless lunches, and throwing their heels into every clack.

In doing so, they’ve heightened petty drama to absurdist proportions just for our enjoyment. It’s the joy of office politics and eavesdropping without actually being in that dysfunctional office. They’re meaner and prettier than we’ll ever be, and somehow have turned committing OSHA violations on their coworkers into full-time jobs. I hope they’re getting paid handsomely to do so.

Give them raises. Give them the world. Selling Sunset is perfect and I can’t look away.

Many were already tuned out of politics. Now, they’ve seen one political party fail to act on the generational change they expected, and another radicalize against democracy. Together, these factors represent a growing tide of disillusionment with electoral politics and dissatisfaction with the status quo.

With midterms around the corner, this dissatisfaction could drag Democratic candidates already expected to struggle (the president’s party historically does poorly in midterms) down further. Young voters are an especially important group for Democrats: They delivered Biden’s biggest margins in 2020, a year that saw half of them turn out (an 11 percentage-point increase from 2016), including in battleground states that will feature competitive races.

After numerous conversations with activists, advocacy groups, organizers, pollsters, and young people, three theories have emerged that attempt to unify the various strains of the youth’s discontent with Biden specifically, and Democrats generally: frustration with the lack of progressive policy successes, concern about the state of the economy, and disenchantment with government due to leaders’ chaotic response to the pandemic.

Biden started off his term with a respectable level of support from Americans aged 18-34. Polling from Gallup and data the progressive research firm Navigator assembled for Vox both placed his support among youth in the 60 percent range just after his inauguration. And the president’s support was decent even in the surveys with Biden’s worst youth numbers, like those conducted by Quinnipiac and Civiqs, which showed 44 percent and 49 percent support, respectively.

But since, Biden’s approval rating has plunged in every one of those polls’ tracking: by 13 points (Navigator), 21 points (Civiqs), or 23 points (Gallup and Quinnipiac).

The decline has been steady in the last year, broadly, and worse when looking at young Black or Latino Americans’ perceptions; it stands in stark contrast to Biden’s support among the oldest voters, which remains steady. And as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote about Gallup’s data, the drops in Biden’s Gen Z and millennial support overlap with his losses among non-white Americans and independents, both of whom make up significant portions of this younger age cohort, “so a bigger decline in support from Black and Hispanic adults is going to show up more in younger groups.”

For now, Biden’s youth problem is still reversible, Dakota Hall, the executive director of the political advocacy group Alliance for Youth Action, told me: “I would say we’re not in the danger zone but we’re fastly approaching it.”

What can Biden do about that? Address these three (sometimes overlapping) reasons for his diminishing support:

1) Some young voters want Biden to be more progressive

Ask an activist or advocacy group focused on politically engaging young people about Biden’s polling, and you’ll hear a similar refrain: Biden was never a popular president among young people, and his inability to keep several of the bold and dramatic promises he made during the 2020 presidential primaries are to blame.

Some of those promises require Congress’s action, something an evenly divided Senate has made difficult for Biden. But young voters believe that many of the things they’d like to see Biden do, such as forgiving some student debt and declaring a climate emergency, could be accomplished in part by executive action. According to reporting by the Washington Post, Biden is exploring the idea of canceling at least some of that debt by executive order. He reportedly may continue to extend a pause on student loan payments until a final decision is made, likely before the end of August.

Young voters, however, don’t want Biden to think about getting rid of debt. They want him to do it.

“They feel they are let down in this moment, due to [Biden’s] lack of executive action, and changes that young people care about, namely, the student debt crisis, and the failure to eliminate and eradicate some student loan debt,” Hall, of the Alliance for Youth Action, told me. “The continuation of the delays, while providing economic relief to some young Americans, it’s not enough. It’s not what they voted for.”

About a third of young Americans have student debt, according to the Education Data Initiative, and the Biden administration’s recent extension of the pause on payments has broad support.

Though he never promised to unilaterally cancel all student loan debt, the president supported congressional action to forgive up to $10,000 of it. Progressive members of Congress and activists, in turn, have asked him to consider an executive order by reinterpreting the Higher Education Act to grant the secretary of education authority to “release” loans.

That legal debate remains murky and untested. Nevertheless, many youth voters want Biden to at least try: In the Alliance for Youth Action’s polling with Civiqs, nearly two-thirds of young people support Biden’s student loan actions so far, and 35 percent want full debt cancellation; that number rises to 50 percent among young Democrats.

The Civiqs data also suggests that simply canceling student debt might not solve Biden’s problem with youth. Pollsters found about a third of young Americans oppose any action on student loan forgiveness. Only young Democrats support complete loan forgiveness by large margins; more than a third of young independents and 75 percent of young Republicans oppose any forgiveness.

But progressives also argue that student debt isn’t the only reason that has young voters abandoning Biden. Youth activists and organizers pointed to inaction on other progressive priorities, like comprehensive immigration reform, gun control, and downsized climate efforts in the bipartisan infrastructure law — as well as failed attempts at passing voting rights, criminal justice, and policing reforms.

2) The economy’s not great, and young voters blame Biden

Inflation is the top concern of most Americans today — and that includes young Americans.

The current inflationary spike is the first time many millennials and Gen Zers are confronting this kind of economy. Coupled with rising rent, debt, and ultra-hot housing markets in the country’s 20 largest metropolitan areas, the current affordability crisis is hitting young people especially hard: In part due to the last recession, millennials were already a lost generation financially, and Gen Zers both graduating into a recession and dealing with a pandemic economy saw higher rates of job instability, causing them to dip into their savings more than older generations.

When the economy roared back in 2021, many young people felt respite: Their purchasing power increased, and their spending rose as well. But inflation, and dissatisfaction with capitalism, caught up.

Gen Z and millennials were more willing to switch jobs and career paths during the Great Resignation, seeking better pay and flexibility — only to see rising costs eat away at that progress. In metro areas, pandemic-induced rent relief and discounts disappeared; prospective homebuyers have been priced out of markets; and a growing number of Americans, especially young people, live in multi-generational households now, in part because of financial constraints. Today’s consensus is that young people are having a harder time saving money, paying for college, and buying a home.

“They have real deep economic anxiety and pain in this moment,” Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of the liberal youth-vote organization NextGen America, told me. “Many young people feel worried about the future. Young American adults are the first generation in American history to be worse off than their parents.”

Some of that economic hardship has also crystallized into dissatisfaction with a society centered around capitalism and work, especially on social media, as my colleague Terry Nguyen has written. Gen Z especially “has adopted more anti-capitalist language to express these discontents,” Nguyen writes, and that could translate into a rejection of capitalist figures like Biden — and America’s current economic order. Whether it translates into political action or voting may become clear this year.

Overall, for young voters, as with older voters, the president, as the country’s most visible leader, and head of the party in power, is the default object of economic fears and they don’t think he’s doing enough to address affordability.

3) A poorly managed pandemic eroded trust in the government

Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, no one knows exactly what’s happening. Are cases up? It might depend on where you live, but even the way governments track risk and reality has changed.

Biden has suggested Americans learn to live with the coronavirus, even as cases once again begin to rise. By prematurely declaring a “summer of freedom,” getting out ahead of the CDC on boosters, and telling people masking is now “up to them,” he muddled the image of a unified government approach.

That’s not to say Biden completely failed on the pandemic — his administration has overseen a fairly successful mass vaccination campaign, distributed free rapid tests, and has revamped efforts to increase access to antiviral medicines. Still, young people have seen deaths and illnesses in their families, have experienced the dysfunction of American health care, and faced incredible disruptions during key years of early adulthood. Those lost months delayed key life moments and transitions, uprooted friendships, and turned Gen Z into the loneliest generation.

In 2020, pandemic chaos helped fuel a historic jump in young voters’ participation in electoral politics, with record numbers of young people turning out to vote against Donald Trump. Part of Biden’s pitch was a promise to get the virus under control and return to normal — and until the delta and omicron variants hit, a quick end to the pandemic seemed plausible. But things went downhill around the time Biden promised Americans would be able to declare victory by 2021’s Fourth of July.

Instead, young people saw massive failures by government leaders to provide clear guidance and sensical rule-making. Variants diminished the gleam of vaccines, more people contracted the virus than ever, and young people lost trust in institutions to handle everything from big-picture recommendations on masking and vaccines, to localized decisions about closing schools and ending college semesters early, quarantining and testing regimens, and how hard to police social life.

At the national level, the president began to shift the tone of the federal response from a more communitarian effort to care for each other and get vaccinated, to leaving everyone to fend for themselves. The result is malaise, confusion, and dissatisfaction with Biden’s performance.

The vibes are off

These three explanations have a lot of overlap and all speak to a sense of frustration with Democrats, America’s system of government, and political parties, and fear about being worse off than older generations.

They also describe a cohort of voters who are not apathetic or disengaged from politics, but rather tuned in to current events — even if they don’t follow all of the policy debates in Washington or know about each mechanism that limits government action. Broadly, they appear to pin blame for the country’s status quo on the president in power.

Underlying that takeaway is a sense of disappointment, and even betrayal. A pandemic that threatened their lives and a president who threatened their futures brought youth out to vote in 2020, but they have felt cheated by social, economic, and political developments since.

“We keep being told that something better is coming,” Rahhel Haile, the executive director of the Minnesota Youth Collective, told me. “With Joe Biden, it was ‘Oh, this is going to be better than Trump,’ and the approach is the lesser of two evils. And people are dissatisfied with that, and want a leader that can actually change things and can actually think about the precariousness of the future of a young person’s life.”

Some of this isn’t Biden’s fault — what his administration can accomplish is limited by the Senate filibuster, how House seats are distributed, internal party dynamics, the federal judiciary’s composition, and checks on executive action. That doesn’t matter to the most idealistic, progressive young people who want their conditions improved, however.

It may be that there’s little Biden can do to win over the most progressive young voters. But that doesn’t mean he can’t win back the youth in general: This cohort of voters is not as monolithic as they are often described.

They tend to not identify with a political party — identifying more commonly with social issues like climate action and marijuana legalization — and though they’re more liberal than other generations, are still more moderate ideologically than many leaders claim. The student loan debate shows this divide: Though the most progressive wing of young voters back loan forgiveness, about a third of young people still oppose it.

Biden still has the support of the most ardent liberal young Democrats, who are willing to back his current agenda in part due to identifying with his party. However, he’s bleeding support among young independents and Republicans, both moderate and conservative, who might prioritize the government addressing economic worries right now, but see no action and feel ignored.

Given recent court rulings and the collapse of Biden’s Build Back Better plan in Congress, it’s useful to ask if the country is entering an era when presidents will also forever be stymied by courts and narrow congressional majorities — worsening the appearance that government can not be a force for progress or improving material conditions, and giving young people less of a reason to trust political leaders who invoke the language of hope, change, and a moral battle.

Pollsters and activists told me Biden’s decline doesn’t have to be an irreversible trend, and that the governing party still has time to tackle inflation, affordability, debt, and the pandemic before young voters refuse to change their minds.

If Democrats fail to do so, some of the pollsters I spoke with said this dissatisfaction has a real chance of going beyond lower Democratic turnout and into active vote-switching in midterm elections. That could intensify the risk Democrats already face of being locked out of power for the next decade, a situation that could hurt young voters as well, as GOP control of Congress would likely only hinder the very reforms and changes many young people want.

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