Every October, as Halloween draws near, the same posts start popping up on social media. Where have all the trick-or-treaters gone? Is the tradition dying? Are the kids even doing this anymore?
Every time I see this argument, I find myself a little confused. “They’re right here,” I think as I prepare my crew for another night of going door to door, collecting candy and making memories.
To hear the internet tell it, in-person trick-or-treating took a nosedive after 2020. An unofficial USA Today <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/11/03/less-trick-or-treatershalloween-2023/71426191007/">online poll </a>conducted in 2023 found that 74% of more than 17,000 respondents said fewer trick-or-treaters came to their homes that year. Smart-home tech company Vivint reported similarly sparse numbers, with an average of just 1.95 trick-or-treaters per home, based on an informal survey of doorbell camera footage from across the country.
Reddit, naturally, has plenty to say about the supposed decline. One person responding to the question “Why does it seem like [fewer] kids trick or treat these days?” lamented, “Yea it was a low count this year. Really disappointed.”
“Times have changed,” another person concluded.
But not everyone was experiencing the same decline. One commenter reported having more kids than usual for two consecutive years and eventually having to turn off the porch light after running out of candy. I’m happy to report that here in my little corner of suburban Pennsylvania, the trick-or-treaters are doing just fine.
Sure, local organizations host trunk-or-treat events, giving families another way to celebrate. But around here, those events haven’t replaced the quintessential Halloween tradition of ringing doorbells and collecting miniature candy bars. Or full-size ones, if you’re lucky. 
Every year, we take my five kids to my in-laws’ exceptionally walkable neighborhood and spend two full hours hitting as many houses as we can. Our town holds trick-or-treating on Halloween itself, from 6 to 8 p.m., even when October 31 falls on a school night. Who cares about bedtimes on Halloween?
We’ve been out in less-than-ideal conditions, too. In 2019, a severe cold front brought wind, flash flooding, and localized downpours. Turnout for trick-or-treating that year was low, but it wasn’t zero. We didn’t reschedule Halloween. We put on our ponchos and made the best of it. Thankfully, the weather has been more cooperative since then.
On Halloween night, cars creep down leaf-strewn streets as waves of children and parents make their way from house to house. We pull wagons decorated with orange lights for visibility and stocked with juice boxes, wet wipes, extra bags for overflow candy, sweatshirts, and flashlights. Every year, firefighters arrive in their truck to hand out candy on the same familiar streets, delighting the little ones. Plenty of parents dress up, too. Some houses have no decorations at all; others go all out, complete with walk-through miniature haunted houses.
It’s a scene that feels almost like a time capsule. Halloween in our town is a little glimpse of the past, a vestige of my own 1990s childhood that, thankfully, hasn’t changed all that much.
My parents, transplants from New Jersey, were surprised by some of the local traditions when they moved here in the early 1980s. They braced themselves for Mischief Night, the October 30 tradition of egging houses and draping yards in toilet paper ahead of Halloween. But that kind of mayhem wasn’t part of life here and never has been.
What delighted them even more was the quiet, unwritten code of Halloween night. A lit porch light meant you could ring the doorbell and expect candy. A dark porch meant the residents weren’t home or weren’t participating. Either way, you kept walking. Some people left out bowls of candy that said “take one.” Sometimes those bowls were empty, but more often than not, they were full, with honesty prevailing for another day.
No one had to post a sign or explain the rules. Everyone just knew what to do. 
I don’t remember ever explicitly teaching my kids this custom, but they know to skip the dark houses and head for the ones with their porch lights on. It’s a small thing, but there’s something lovely about a tradition that survives without the need for threats and warnings. 
My in-laws live in an established neighborhood with a mix of ages, and that’s one of my favorite parts of the whole experience. Elderly neighbors open their doors, delighted to see the little ones in their costumes, and hand out candy with the kind of enthusiasm that makes you think they’ve been looking forward to the visit all day.
It’s sweet and innocent, and it makes me wonder whether those neighbors are just as happy to see us as we are to see them. How often do we visit our aging neighbors anymore? Do we ever stop by just to say hello? And for some of them, when was the last time their doorbell rang?
Halloween offers a rare, uncomplicated reason for neighbors to connect in this age of digital isolation. There’s no small talk required beyond a cheerful “Happy Halloween!” and a thank-you for the candy. Everyone is dressed up and in good spirits. It makes you wonder why it can’t always be this way.
After two hours of collecting treats, we all head back to Nana’s house for the main event: the great candy comparison and trade. All 14 cousins cram into the living room to sort through their sugary loot and see who scored the best stuff. Last year, the big hit was baseball card packs, another nostalgic surprise. 
For one special night, we tuck away our phones in favor of old-fashioned family bonding, with a generous side of processed sugar. 
It’s possible that trick-or-treating really has faded in some neighborhoods. The online polls and doorbell camera counts suggest that some people are seeing fewer kids than they used to. And yes, the cost of candy is outrageous, and the arguments over <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/my-kids-are-going-trick-or-treating-but-theyre-not-eating-the-candy">what ingredients it contains</a> are valid. But that doesn’t mean the whole country has lost the magic of Halloween. 
At least around here, it’s alive and well. The kids still race from house to house, and the neighbors still open their doors. The firefighters still turn on their sirens and delight the littles. And 14 cousins still gather around Nana’s living room to compare candy hauls. 
If trick-or-treating is becoming a thing of the past in other towns, I’m sorry to hear it. Because this is one tradition I hope never goes away.
***
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Trick or treating

The Internet Says Trick-Or-Treating Is Dying. Someone Forgot To Tell My Neighborhood.

family traditions

halloween

holiday traditions

lifestyle

suburban life

trick-or-treating

My first encounter with Patrick Stewart’s effortless gravitas came courtesy of a minor role in Mel Brooks’ 1993 medieval swashbuckler spoof, “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” in which he played King Richard. Appearing late in an already star-studded film, Stewart promptly stole the show. He displayed an uncanny knack for comedic timing and a naturally regal bearing (even while doing a cheeky Sean Connery impression), without a trace of aristocratic snobbery. He was that rare thing: a royal everyman.
Sir Patrick Stewart died on October 28, 2026, at the age of 86. He is survived by his wife, singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell, and his two children, Daniel and Sophie, from his first marriage to Sheila Falconer.
Stewart cultivated an effortless command over decades on the stage. Born into a working-class family in Yorkshire, England, Stewart trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, where he spent many years inhabiting the Bard&#8217;s kings, villains, and tragic heroes.
His theatrical repertoire was formidable, spanning Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” and “The Tempest,” and later acclaimed productions of “Macbeth,” a role he undertook at 66, considerably older than its customary interpreters. Stewart leveraged his maturity to his advantage, reimagining the Scottish tragedy against the backdrop of a Stalinist dictatorship, portraying a grizzled military commander whose descent into paranoia and murderous tyranny evoked the Soviet despot himself. His performance was chilling in its restraint, the transformation from seasoned soldier to bloodthirsty tyrant unfolding with a disarming self-possession.
He pushed his theatrical gifts to almost absurd lengths with his one-man adaptation of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” in which he single-handedly portrayed more than 40 characters, from Ebenezer Scrooge to Tiny Tim, with scarcely a prop in sight. I cannot conceive a more exacting exhibition of an actor’s craft, requiring the vocal dexterity, theatrical imagination, and sheer command of an audience that Stewart possessed in such abundance.
The greatest triumph of Stewart’s career, however, was his ability to inhabit the conventionally lowbrow world of science-fiction television with the same conviction and dedication he brought to the hallowed stages of Shakespearean theater. Where theatrical purists might have sneered at the indignity of trading the Bard for starships (and later the comic book world of the X-Men), Stewart approached both with equal seriousness.
When “Star Trek: The Next Generation” premiered in 1987, Stewart was 47, an unlikely leading man for a science-fiction franchise previously defined by William Shatner&#8217;s suave and swaggering Captain Kirk. Age, as Stewart repeatedly demonstrated throughout his career, was hardly an impediment to his ambitions. His Jean-Luc Picard was a different breed of hero: erudite, diplomatic, and pensive, and he donned a countenance that naturally exuded his moral authority.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of watching “Star Trek” reruns, an experience that helped shape my appreciation for the freedoms and ideals of Western civilization. “Star Trek” was, in many ways, a grand exercise in projecting Western liberalism and Enlightenment ideals onto a galactic canvas. The Enterprise traversed the cosmos as an ambassador of those ideals, carrying the philosophical inheritance of the West — individual liberty, scientific inquiry, and peaceful coexistence — to the farthest reaches of the universe.
Its imagined future was one in which humanity had largely transcended the petty divisions of race or class, united by a shared commitment to progress and the pursuit of knowledge. The United Federation of Planets represented an almost boundless faith in the universality of these principles, and in mankind’s capacity to build a better civilization upon them. It was a wonderfully optimistic conception of humanity’s future, occasionally naive (and sometimes self-righteous) but animated by a profound conviction in the possibilities of civilization. Much of that optimism owed its persuasive force to Stewart, whose candor made even the Federation’s loftiest moral pronouncements sound like plain common sense.
There are perennial arguments among science-fiction devotees over the superiority of “Star Trek” or “Star Wars,” and among Trekkies over Kirk or Picard. I grew up with “Star Wars” before being introduced to Stewart’s galactic adventures, but his career makes a persuasive case against such rigid artistic loyalties. We can appreciate both Beethoven and the Beatles, Shakespearean theater and science fiction, “Star Wars” and “Star Trek.” Indeed, Stewart himself demonstrated just how much these disparate worlds have to offer one another.
If there is one lesson to be drawn from Stewart’s life and career, it is the virtue of approaching the unfamiliar with an open mind and a healthy disregard for snobbery. If an accomplished star of Britain’s classical stage could trade the Bard for a starship, approach it with the same conviction he brought to Shakespeare, and emerge as one of television’s most beloved captains, perhaps the rest of us ought to be a little less precious about what we consider beneath us. His life was a testament to the rewards of curiosity, the pleasures of embracing the unexpected, and the extraordinary places a willingness to boldly go can take us. How fortunate that Stewart never considered the Enterprise beneath his dignity. He was, as I first discovered in Sherwood Forest, that rare thing: a royal everyman. We cannot all be kings, but we could all stand to be a little more like the man beneath the crown.
***
Harry Khachatrian (<a href="https://x.com/harry1t6">@Harry1T6</a>) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at<a href="https://www.betweenbottles.com/"> BetweenBottles.com</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Patrick Stewart’s Lesson In Boldly Going

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obituary

patrick stewart

royal shakespeare company

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star trek the next generation

Voters today are accustomed to political ads that seemingly have no boundaries, such as Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s incendiary <a href="https://apnews.com/article/election-2026-ohio-governor-acton-mother-ramaswamy-dc59bd5f0c47f9e06f37022e2ba2cce5" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://apnews.com/article/election-2026-ohio-governor-acton-mother-ramaswamy-dc59bd5f0c47f9e06f37022e2ba2cce5&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1793367146591000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1gXo7JBNT8_pKkqDeQ-RQ8">commercial</a> that uses his opponent’s estranged mother against her. But 50 years ago, a presidential campaign wound up quashing an ad that crossed the line with its references to the John F. Kennedy assassination.
In 1976, as the country emerged from a violent political era that included a series of assassinations, President Gerald Ford’s campaign media consultants sought to remind people of that in a provocative 4 ½-minute TV commercial. The ad proved so unsettling to the Secret Service, Ford’s campaign manager, and a focus group that it never aired.
The commercial, which you can watch <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mILEkcrHvQ">here</a>, starts off innocuously enough, with the campaign’s cheesy ’70s-style song, “I’m Feeling Good About America.” Overlaying the tune are shots of marching bands and quick voter hits describing how the country has turned a corner. “He’s restored faith in the American people,” says one man in a typical comment. Without specifically mentioning Watergate, Vietnam, or political assassinations, the spot is clearly making the point that President Ford has helped steer America from those traumas.
Essentially, the message is that a vote for Ford is a vote to Make America Good Again.
Then we see Ford greeting Americans in various settings before the scene switches to a University of Michigan rally.
“There is a change that’s come over America,” the narrator says. “And how long has it been since we’ve seen it on our college campuses?”
Then the commercial takes a dark turn. As Ford speaks, an explosion rings out, and the president visibly flinches. Given the pair of <a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/gerald-ford-charlie-kirk-assassination/">assassination attempts</a> on him the year before, it would be understandable if he were to take cover. Instead, he keeps going with his remarks, telling the crowd, “Trust must be earned.”
The loud noise turned out not to be a gunshot, but a firecracker. And that’s when Ford’s ad makers overplay their hands.
&#8220;Neither the cherry bombs of a misguided prankster, nor all the memories of recent years, can keep the people and their president apart,&#8221; the narrator says, as the scene shifts to Ford in Dallas, waving from the open roof of his limo. &#8220;When a limousine can parade openly through the streets of Dallas, there&#8217;s a change that&#8217;s come over America.&#8221;
<iframe loading="lazy" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8mILEkcrHvQ?si=e_gwLscnblbiJRGl" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
The Ford campaign’s media consulting firm, Bailey Deardourff &amp; Associates, commissioned the TV commercial as a way to jolt the president’s lagging race against Jimmy Carter.
“There was one opportunity that we had, and that was to create a five-minute spot that emotionally rang all of those bells of the last 12 years,” the firm’s co-founder, Doug Bailey, said in a <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L0bW6r1mLunpYuCUB6lgve5lXsg07BXK/view">2009 oral history interview</a> with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. “Of the assassinations, of the wars, of Watergate, and to reinforce emotionally with people what they had been through. To take them through that again, and shake them in a way that caused them to rethink how they were going to vote.”
It shook people, all right — including campaign manager James Baker — but not in the way Bailey had hoped.
“I showed it for people in the campaign and they just went crazy,” Bailey recalled. “First of all, the Secret Service just has a nightmare and I’m respectful of this, I mean, in their mind, it is inviting the nut cases to come forward. But in the campaign, Jim Baker in particular just thinks this is nutty, absolutely screwy, I have a screw loose someplace.”
Bailey said Baker understood what he was trying to do, but argued Ford would lose Texas if the ad ran.
“Well, forgive me but aren’t we going to lose the state of Texas anyway?” Bailey asked him.
“John Connally tells me that we will carry the state of Texas,” Baker replied, referring to the former Texas governor. “But you can’t make a reference to Dallas that way without losing the state of Texas.”
(Carter wound up beating Ford in Texas — and becoming the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state.)
Ford pollster Bob Teeter told author Jules Witcover the ad “was shocking” to members of a focus group who watched it. “It was just too emotional &#8230; It was just frightening.&#8221;
But Bailey didn’t think that should have been a deal-killer.
“My reaction to that was, ‘Yes, so they hated the ad. So what’s the next conclusion?’” Bailey said. “The whole theory of this ad was, of course they are not going to like it. That’s why it was designed to shake them up.”
Carter won the election, taking the popular vote by two points. Bailey, who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/us/politics/doug-bailey-gop-political-consultant-dies-at-79.html">got credit for</a> helping Ford nearly erase a 20-point disadvantage in the polls, went on to establish the daily briefing The Hotline in 1987. He died in 2013.
Teeter had another reason for opposing the ad, worrying the Michigan scene would turn off Ohio voters. That intense rivalry continues to affect politics today.
A couple of weeks ago, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed responded to Vice President JD Vance calling him a weasel. “I’m like, ‘No, no, no, what you’re talking about is a f*cking Wolverine,’” <a href="https://x.com/uspolitics1111/status/2110904924611424695/video/1?s=61">El-Sayed told a cheering crowd</a>, invoking the University of Michigan team name. “You can take your Buckeye and shove it somewhere else!” he added, referencing the Ohio State nickname.
Bailey recalled a similar dynamic 50 years ago.
“Now, you know as well as anybody that there is no bigger sports rivalry than there is between Ohio and Michigan,” Bailey recalled in the oral history. “Now, I’m an Ohioan, Teeter isn’t — he’s a Wolverine — he’s not only from Michigan, he’s from Ann Arbor. So his view was that this would cost us the state of Ohio. If you show all those University of Michigan students and Ford speaking at the University of Michigan in an ad, you’ll lose Ohio.”
Ford lost Ohio anyway.
***
Frederic J. Frommer, a sports and politics historian who has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other national publications, is working on a book, &#8220;Right On! How Money and Mayhem Revolutionized Baseball in the ’70s.&#8221;
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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The 1976 Ford Ad So Dark His Own Campaign Killed It

1976 presidential election

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john f kennedy

There’s a reason that low-stakes arguments like whether Airbnb hosts force guests to do <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/airbnb-finally-bans-one-of-its-most-hated-guest-requirements">too many chores</a> or exactly what plastic surgery <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/jennifer-lawrence-sparks-plastic-surgery-speculation-after-unrecognizable-photo-shoot">Jennifer Lawrence has gotten done</a> go viral. In times of societal upheaval when everything feels doomed, it’s refreshing to worry about things that don’t really matter.
You know, like The Cheesecake Factory.
The latest debate taking over social media is about which chain restaurants are trash and which are worth forking over some of your hard-earned money to before the robots take over and kill us all. It’s a fun little conversation to have as most of us can’t afford to go out to eat anyway. 
For plenty of middle-class Americans, Olive Garden feels like a Thursday night standby, Applebee’s has the half-price apps after 9 p.m., and Texas Roadhouse is great for steak and throwing peanut shells on the floor. The Cheesecake Factory is where you go for a fancy night out — to celebrate a birthday, a graduation, a promotion. This was all understood and accepted until Barack Obama came along and sneered at the idea.
The restaurant chain found itself at the center of a political and cultural debate when the former president <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/10/28/obama-cheesecake-factory-joke-trump-response">took a swipe</a> at President Donald Trump&#8217;s White House renovations, quipping that the gold-themed decor made the building look like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
It was a joke about Trump&#8217;s taste in interior design, but listeners also took it as a thinly veiled statement about how most of the country lives.
The Cheesecake Factory is aggressively gaudy and overdecorated. It’s true that everything there is oversized, from the booth sizes to the sheer number of items on the book-length menu. But people love it, and they’re willing to defend it. That’s why Obama’s comment touched a nerve, reigniting a familiar argument about the things regular Americans enjoy that supposedly sophisticated people turn their noses up at. 
That was where the debate got interesting. Somewhere along the way, enjoying a perfectly ordinary restaurant became something people felt compelled to defend. 
The Cheesecake Factory isn&#8217;t a Michelin-starred establishment, but that doesn’t actually matter. The idea that a restaurant has to be exclusive, expensive, or approved by Barack Obama and his millionaire cohorts to be worth enjoying is clearly snobbish. That attitude is becoming increasingly hard to bear.
Not everyone has to like The Cheesecake Factory, and in the real world not everyone does. There are still middle-class people who frequent small, independent restaurants and prefer to avoid chain establishments for whatever reason. That doesn’t make The Cheesecake Factory terrible; it’s really a matter of preference. 
But there are also concrete examples that prove The Cheesecake Factory doesn’t have to worry about what the culinary elitists think. It all comes down to the numbers, right? And here’s the thing: The business is doing rather well.
According to its October 27 earnings announcement, The Cheesecake Factory Incorporated <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/cheesecake-factory-posts-record-breaking-172710367.html?guccounter=1&amp;guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHad-ke6OB-aLl4yHefMeCFEo_4IBe4TVCZ-RtSidcso0xWRLI8kL9WwYMGcuAZaBW9jBTFZGMlRRTuYD4jFWgITejZU94vbGONf6Ovf4ywOxk-uuH18Q_7eChQkgo-MHweBNX_t_hl9ob7N8Ru7H6D6tyAYvhIFfAnxoARx6-WD">reported</a> third-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue of approximately $1.03 billion, up from $907.2 million during the same period a year earlier. Comparable restaurant sales at its namesake locations increased 15.2% year over year.
Those numbers cover a company that also operates other restaurant brands, so it would be inaccurate to attribute all this growth to Cheesecake Factory locations alone. Still, the company&#8217;s results are hard to argue with. While plenty of upscale fine-dining establishments are <a href="https://www.timeout.com/newyork/restaurants/notable-nyc-restaurants-and-bars-that-have-now-permanently-closed">closing forever</a>, even after boosts from big-name chefs and fawning food critics, The Cheesecake Factory remains. Glittering. Gaudy. Delicious. 
Perhaps consumers appreciate having a lot of choices on a single menu, and maybe they’re fans of generous portions. It’s surely helpful that they don’t need to finagle a reservation months in advance and then spend hundreds of dollars on pretentious dishes they don’t fully understand. Not every palate is refined, and that’s normal. It&#8217;s a possibility worth considering before assuming that millions of customers have somehow failed to understand what a great meal should taste like. 
In its defense, The Cheesecake Factory is not McDonald’s, and it’s not even Chili’s when it comes to food prep. The company says chefs prepare its more than 250 menu items <a href="https://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/about-us">fresh from scratch</a> in its restaurants. Its website describes busy preparation kitchens where employees work with fresh ingredients and make dishes to order.
That is an important distinction in a restaurant industry where the degree of preparation varies widely from one operation to another, with many resorting to premade, reheated options that all tend to taste the same. 
Buying ingredients through a distributor such as Sysco does not necessarily mean the food arrives fully prepared and restaurants merely reheat it. The Cheesecake Factory likely uses food distributors for ingredients rather than sourcing from, say, local farms. But because the kitchen cooks menu items from scratch, the food is several steps ahead of restaurants that rely solely on premade meals. 
With a menu the size of The Cheesecake Factory’s, this is no small thing. The company itself acknowledges that maintaining such an extensive selection while preparing food from scratch is unusual enough to have drawn criticism from people in the restaurant industry. The haters say it causes more food waste, longer ticket times, and an unnecessarily big inventory bill. But it’s proof that the restaurant does care about quality. And it’s working.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the Cheesecake Factory debate is how much cultural significance people are willing to assign to a place where someone might order a burger, split an appetizer, and take home a slice of cheesecake. It’s really not that deep. In the eternal words of Sheryl Crow, if it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.
Restaurants occupy an interesting place in our social lives. They&#8217;re about food, certainly, but they&#8217;re also about money and status. What we eat and where we eat it often becomes a reflection of who we are socially, and what we deserve. This doesn’t mean The Cheesecake Factory is the greatest restaurant in America, though some people may indeed think it is. But no matter what, it’s not a measure of someone’s value as a person. 
You can enjoy a chef’s tasting menu on Friday and celebrate your birthday somewhere with a 20-page menu the next week. Hit the drive-thru and don’t feel bad about it. Order the Godiva cheesecake.  
The world is on fire, the robots are coming for our jobs, and we’re all paying too much for groceries. The good news is that we still don’t have to care about what Barack Obama thinks.
Some debates are worth having. This one should end with a reservation for six.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

The Cheesecake Factory

The Cheesecake Factory Doesn’t Need Your Approval

barack obama

chain restaurant

cheesecake factory

food culture

white house renovation

In recommending one of my favorite shows to friends and family, I face a peculiar hurdle: It’s a cartoon. It is unfortunately common today for adults to be obsessed with shows aimed at children that have little else to commend them beyond juvenile humor and psychedelic art styles (think of the particularly peculiar phenomenon of &#8220;My Little Pony&#8221;). I must overcome this negative reputation if I want to persuade people to watch &#8220;Over the Garden Wall.&#8221; But if I can successfully convince them to indulge, I have yet to meet one person who has disliked the show. 
&#8220;Over the Garden Wall&#8221; aired as a 10-part miniseries on Cartoon Network in 2014. It won two Emmy Awards (Outstanding Animated Program and Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation) and quickly spawned an obsessive group of fans who dutifully purchase the show’s associated physical media, accessories, and memorabilia. When I say obsessive, I am quite serious. Check out the resale price on &#8220;Over the Garden Wall&#8221; merchandise on eBay if you’re doubtful. 
Since I first saw the show in 2015, my family has made &#8220;Over the Garden Wall&#8221; a lovely yearly occasion, getting together with friends and extended family to host a fall-themed party with rich soup, decorative pies prepared by my talented wife, and themed cocktails. Through the years, we’ve introduced dozens of people to the show, many of whom have become repeat viewers or started their own viewing party traditions.
But what is it about this show that inspires this group of fanatics, me included? What keeps us coming back to the show year after year? What has made the show achieve its current heights of popularity over a decade after its first airing? For my part, I consider the show’s popularity justified by its exceptional writing, memorable music, and truly heartwarming story. Two compellingly written children carry the narrative, whose references to American folklore and classic literature give the miniseries a weight that exceeds what one might expect from your average cartoon. (A warning for mild spoilers ahead.) 
The story begins with two brothers, Greg the younger and Wirt (voiced by Elijah Wood) the older, wandering in a wood, at first humorously discussing what to name a frog but then slowly realizing they have become lost. With no idea how they have arrived where they find themselves, they panic. The boys encounter a terrifying woodsman (given gravelly voice by Christopher Lloyd of &#8220;Back to the Future&#8221; fame), who warns them they are in “The Unknown,” says they are “more lost than you realize,” and speaks to them of “The Beast” who preys on weary, hopeless travelers in the wood. After some terrifying misadventures, the boys set off for a nearby town, hoping to find a way home.
On their way to the town, Pottsfield, the boys encounter a talking bluebird named Beatrice, who offers to lead the boys to Adelaide, “the good woman of the woods” who can give them safe passage home. What follows is a series of trials featuring rich aristocrats, village craftspeople, a talking horse, singing frogs, and the ever-present threat of despair. 
Astute readers have probably already noticed the immediate parallel many viewers draw between &#8220;Over the Garden Wall&#8221; and Dante’s &#8220;Divine Comedy,&#8221; particularly his &#8220;Inferno&#8221;:
<blockquote>Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, 
I woke to find myself in a dark wood, 
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. 
Ay me! how hard to speak of it — that rude 
And rough and stubborn forest! the mere breath 
Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood; 
It is so bitter, it goes nigh to death; 
Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey 
The tale, I’ll write what else I found therewith.
How I got into it I cannot say, 
Because I was so heavy and full of sleep 
When first I stumbled from the narrow way.</blockquote>
So read the first lines of Dante’s &#8220;Inferno&#8221; in Dorothy Sayers’ translation. The poet Dante recounts his pilgrimage as beginning with a period of sleep, drowsiness that set his foot on a wayward, sinful path. The viewers of &#8220;Over the Garden Wall&#8221; will find, in the series’ penultimate episode, that wayward wandering was the path Greg and Wirt followed into The Unknown. The pilgrim Dante, too, ends up guided by Beatrice, though he does not meet her until paradise, while Greg and Wirt&#8217;s Beatrice guides them through a far darker place. 
The parallels to Dante’s &#8220;Inferno&#8221; are not perfect, though many viewers have attempted to sketch them (some in lengthy video essays you can peruse on YouTube at your leisure). Some of the characters in The Unknown seem to share some sins punished in Dante’s hell (Quincy Endicott’s “unnecessary excess of wealth” perhaps speaks of avarice, for example), and viewers learn early in the show that the pumpkin-adorned residents of Pottsfield are skeletons who come to life and don pumpkins to “celebrate the harvest.” Is this the land of the dead? Have the young boys passed over the threshold into the afterlife?
Many clues throughout the show point this way. A song in the penultimate episode speaks of an “old black train a’comin’” that will “take you when it’s time” to a place “you can’t come back from.” This folksy song contains an undeniable reference to death. The viewer learns that the boys fell into The Unknown after narrowly escaping being hit by a train and falling into icy water. Perhaps, then, the whole tale is a hallucination on the threshold of death, a sort of “near-death experience” giving them lessons about what a horrific afterlife awaits.
But the setting is surely not unambiguously one of punishment or suffering. There are “lost souls” throughout The Unknown, who give in to despair and become ghastly oil-producing trees that fuel the Woodsman’s spooky lantern. But there are also people participating in life, love, and festal celebration throughout The Unknown in scenes hardly fit for Dante’s demonic hell. It is far more plausible that the boys — including Wirt, who accepts the title of “pilgrim” from a chorus of people at a small country inn — are passing through multiple possible afterlives, like Dante on his pilgrimage through limbo, hell, purgatory, and paradise. The conclusion of the story supports this developmental reading, as the boys return to their home after learning the lessons of The Unknown, possessed of a newly forged close relationship, a hope for the future, a named frog, and tantalizing evidence that what they experienced in The Unknown was not merely imagined.
However one ultimately interprets The Unknown, by the end of the story, the viewer will have enjoyed a delightful display of fall-themed animation, an impossibly captivating American folk soundtrack, and a heartwarming ending. What more could you ask for to celebrate the harvest?
***
Philip D. Bunn is an assistant professor of political science at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he teaches political theory and American politics.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Screenshot 2026-10-27 at 10.10.32 PM

The Cartoon That Hides Dante’s ‘Inferno’ In Plain Sight

animation

cartoon network

dante's inferno

over the garden wall

In the world of “Wicker,” no one is having good sex, except for the Fisherwoman. Her husband is tall, chiseled, and surprisingly limber. You see, he’s made of wicker.
After one too many jokes from the townspeople at her expense, the Fisherwoman goes to the Basketmaker to end their snickering at her singleness and get a husband. The artist-turned-miracle-worker tells her to meet at the chapel in a month, and when she obliges, she’s shocked to see that somehow, the weaver has really done it; he’s made a man out of a handbasket, and suddenly the whole village goes to hell.
“Wicker” has gotten a lot of attention online for its absurd premise and promise of frequent bed-breaking romps between Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) and her Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård of “The Legend of Tarzan”). Its trailer guarantees comedy and lots of logic-defying sex. It’s best if you don’t think too much about it. Based on a 2008 short story called “The Wicker Husband,” feminists are praising what they see as a powerful anti-patriarchy movie.
On the surface, that’s exactly what it is: The men in the film are controlling, bumbling, and oblivious. They don’t know how to keep their wives happy, and they’re disturbed that this wicker husband is showing them all up. One <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/10/wicker-movie-marriage-olivia-colman/689122/#selection-923.0-930.0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Atlantic</a> writer called it “a cautionary tale about marriage.”
The film is definitely playing to modern fears. “Wicker is perfectly calibrated for our moment of peak heteropessimism,” <a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/wicker-object-sexual-fiction-narratives.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">affirms</a> The Cut. Heteropessimism is another way to say that our culture is now pretty down on man-and-woman relationships. And in “Wicker,” it shows.
The men are comically inept. The village doctor is infamous for failing to treat (i.e., killing) his patients, and when the tailor passes out while helping to administer stitches, his wife finishes the job only to have the doctor, her father, congratulate her husband for the fine work. One character refers to marriage as a “contract” — not, of course, a “covenant.”
One character attempts to mend his roof to woo his wife like the Wicker Husband; instead, he falls, injures himself, and eventually dies. The baker and his wife are not having sex; when they finally do, he’s role-playing as the Wicker Husband. She gets pregnant and seeks out a secret abortion. Near the end of the film, the couple tries to get a wicker woman as a “third.”
There is something sinister about these portrayals, which the film plays for laughs. Can you believe the tailor doesn’t trust his wife to join in his business, telling her that “tailoring is my thing”? Isn’t it entertaining to watch the lecherous butcher finally get his comeuppance?
The women have their vices, but they are mostly just drained. Beaten down by the strictures of their small village and a culture that believes wifedom is little more than a duty to cook and clean and maybe occasionally sleep with your husband just to bear children who will overwhelm and annoy you, these women are petty and gossipy because their society hasn’t given them a chance to be otherwise, “Wicker” seems to say.
“It paints a picture of the bleak reality of many traditional marriages in a patriarchal society—one where women are expected to live a life devoid of pleasure and partnership, physical and otherwise,” says the beauty director at <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a74247199/wicker-movie-short-story-comparison/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Harper’s Bazaar</a>. “As you get to know the townspeople better, their growing jealousy of the fisherwoman and her husband feels earned. Who wouldn’t become jealous? Who wouldn’t turn to desperation?”
But “Wicker” might not ultimately be as anti-marriage as the feminists want it to be. Hiding behind these virtue signals to leftist sensibilities (ha, aren’t men ridiculous?) is a story about vulnerability, trust, and what it means to make and form a commitment. Marriage isn’t all bad; the Fisherwoman is married to a basket, but she is married, and her life is now better than ever.
The townspeople are not good people who happen to have bad marriages; they are bad, selfish people who let an orphan (the young Fisherwoman) fend for herself and then mock her for being single and smelling like the fish they buy from her at the market. Fisherwoman is a decent woman who didn’t realize what she had been missing. And now that she’s found love, she’s afraid of its power.
Her wicker husband may not be human, and he may literally owe his life to her, yet he does have free will. Being made of flammable material, he has more to fear from fire, but it’s Fisherwoman who feels like she’s about to get burned. “You have my heart now,” she tells him. “It’s very flammable.”
Husband and wife Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who wrote and directed the film, buried a sweet, if strange, love story beneath a lot of gender war garbage. Their comments about the movie point to a much different, and better, film than the actual result.
“The whole movie is about jealousy and envy corrupting a great love,” Fischer said in an <a href="https://inreviewonline.com/2026/10/26/the-best-sex-in-town-an-interview-with-alex-huston-fischer-eleanor-wilson-on-wicker/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">interview</a>.
Wilson seems to imply that Fisherwoman’s struggles will resonate with Gen Z; in the modern day, she might feel compelled to defend her husband to her girlfriends by explaining that he’s not like other guys.
“[N]ow, you meet someone that you like, and the world is telling you that men are horrible and you shouldn’t trust them,” she said. “It’s very hard to not listen to the echoes of society, and also your own past relationships and the baggage that you bring to a new relationship.”
Love and romance are exhilarating and edifying, but “Wicker” isn’t totally sure about marriage. After spurning him in a fit of jealousy, Fisherwoman returns to her husband and promises to do better. “My love doesn’t require a promise,” he assures her. It sounds romantic, but the deepest love does usually involve a promise, a veil, and a ring.
The irony of “Wicker” is that certain threads of the film, and the directors’ comments themselves, point to a fundamentally meaningful if deeply strange film that values the commitment it takes to make a lasting, loving relationship work. But the movie is too busy getting its viewers to laugh at horrible men for the sake of feminist applause to focus on its real, universal truths. If only this viral romance had the courage to challenge its viewers, it might be worth your time.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Hollywood’s Hottest Husband Is Made Of Wicker. That Says A Lot.

alexander skarsgard

film review

marriage

olivia colman

wicker

Not a day goes by without another celebrity crawling out of the woodwork to brandish his leftist bona fides. Few, however, can rival the blithe, brain-dead nonchalance with which Adam Brody castigated Israel in a recent <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/knock-knock-its-adam-brody">GQ interview</a>, delivering a statement one could easily mistake for an In-N-Out order: “Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide.” (“Thinking” is doing a lot of work here.) Which makes his return as the ravishing Rabbi Noah Roklov all the more awkward in Netflix’s increasingly aptly named “Nobody Wants This.”
Season 3 picks up with Noah and Joanne (Kristen Bell) newly “living together.” They affectionately remind one another of this milestone through a montage of morning coffees and shared dinners, punctuated by the inevitable domestic frictions: Joanne’s chaotic disorder, Noah’s unwanted infringement on her trashy tabloid time, and the peculiar adjustments of sharing a home with another human being.
Beyond their squabbles, Joanne has embarked on her conversion to Reform Judaism, under the tutelage of Rabbi Eden (Sarah Silverman). Andrew Rannells is a welcome addition as Sebastien, a snappy, quick-witted classmate whose barbs provide some of the season’s funniest moments. More poignantly, Joanne begins to appreciate the moral and spiritual architecture of the faith she is embracing. In one of the series’ finest moments, she reflects on her hope that Judaism will furnish her future children with a moral framework to guide them through difficult decisions, something she lacked growing up with a cartoonishly unconventional hippie mother and a closeted father.
The parallel storyline follows Noah’s brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons), and his estranged wife, Esther (Jackie Tohn), whose marriage has sundered after Esther decided she was unhappy and needed “space to find herself.” There is something of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” in the contrasting domestic trajectories: Joanne and Noah accept sacrifices in pursuit of a shared future, while Esther pursues personal fulfillment at the expense of the family she already has.
Esther plunges into dating apps and real estate, hoping to spice up her life, while Sasha struggles to comprehend the sudden disappearance of the marriage around which he built his identity. It hardly helps that his friends, particularly Joanne’s sister Morgan (Justine Lupe), pepper him with advice to seek solace in sleeping with other people. Sasha confides in Morgan that when Esther left, he scarcely knew how to exist without her. Their growing intimacy yields the season’s finest episode, a trip to New York where Morgan appears on “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen” and the unlikely pair finally confront their burgeoning romance.
The complications that follow expose the trouble with becoming entangled with someone still trying to “figure out” a marriage. Marriage isn’t a spectrum; you’re either married or you’re not. Yet showrunner Erin Foster’s writing also conveys something increasingly unfashionable in popular entertainment: Marriage and family demand sacrifice, fidelity, and a willingness to place obligations above personal gratification. Esther’s reasons for upending her family remain frustratingly nebulous, amounting to little beyond restlessness and unhappiness. Joanne, meanwhile, prepares to celebrate her last Christmas and revises her long-cherished wedding expectations, all to build a life with the man she loves.
But is Noah worthy of such devotion? It has become increasingly difficult to separate him from the dimwit actor portraying him, and I wonder whether Brody understands the character he inhabits. Roklov is a wearer of many hats: a romantic, a rabbi, a man who observes the Sabbath (albeit occasionally while smoking a joint with Joanne), delivers sermons on the High Holidays, and is committed to raising a Jewish family. Brody, meanwhile, seems happy to draw upon Jewish identity for his familiar brand of neurotic charm, yet speaks of the Jewish state with a glibness that makes his identity and onscreen vocation seem cosmetic.
His remarks have drawn a pointed rebuke from Tovah Feldshuh, who plays Noah’s formidable mother, Bina, while Foster herself has publicly disagreed with Brody and described the series as a “love letter to Judaism.” There is an irony in the fact that the show’s convert creator appears to understand the gravity of Jewish continuity more deeply than the actor paid to embody it.
Despite its meandering second season and Brody’s offscreen pedantry, Season 3 may be the strongest installment yet, delivering moments of genuinely touching romance amid the emotional wreckage of its supporting characters. Noah’s proposal is particularly thoughtful; I will spare readers the details, but to the men watching, take notes.
Whether Netflix grants “Nobody Wants This” a fourth season remains uncertain. Perhaps next time Noah will show up at shul wearing a keffiyeh instead of a tallit. For now, if Foster can maintain this level of writing, it will be a great mitzvah.
***
Harry Khachatrian (<a href="https://x.com/harry1t6">@Harry1T6</a>) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at<a href="https://www.betweenbottles.com/"> BetweenBottles.com</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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‘Nobody Wants This’ Understands Judaism Better Than Its Star Does

adam brody

israel

judaism

netflix

nobody wants this

Even though it seems to have spawned more <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hollywoods-liberal-darling-just-ruined-his-own-masterpiece">debates</a> over director Aaron Sorkin than the supposed evils of Facebook, Sorkin’s new movie, “The Social Reckoning,” reflects a growing awareness that technologies shape us, for better or for worse. Critics and admirers may argue over how much <a href="https://www.seenandunseen.com/whos-really-trial-social-reckoning">blame</a> social media deserves for the current problems of loneliness, peer pressure and bullying, narcissism, and political polarization, yet underlying the debate is the idea of the power of “persuasive technology,” a term Stanford University behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg first used in the late 1990s. To Fogg, persuasive technologies were modern computer-based systems that subtly influenced human behavior. Yet centuries before the arrival of the smartphone or Facebook, the novel was quietly performing a similar cultural function. It, too, was a persuasive technology. The difference is that it persuaded through stories rather than with notifications, algorithms, clicks, and likes.
Yet today the novel seems to be dying. Surveys in Britain and the United States show plummeting rates of long-form reading (basically anything over 1,000 words — such as this essay). Publishers still produce bestsellers and book clubs continue to emerge, but the data seem to suggest that the short attention span encouraged by endless streams of digital content on social media is making many unable to engage in “deep reading,” and especially the sustained concentration required by a novel, anymore. That a decline in reading is bad for society is a rare point of agreement between those on the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/13/democracy-survive-death-reading-fascists-uk-ports">Left</a> and <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/21/the-death-of-reading-is-a-civilisational-catastrophe/">Right</a> sides of the political divide. Therefore, it might be worth thinking about what, in our societal shift away from books to becoming the “too long, didn’t read” generation, we might be missing.
This question struck me as I read Philip Hensher’s “A History of the Novel in Britain.” Examining the period when what we recognize as “the novel” was emerging, Hensher stresses how “the novel quickly becomes and remains a form of intense social exchange.” Novels, he explains, developed out of “conduct books,” which told morally worthy stories, a bit like longer versions of those “Aesop’s Fables”-type stories such as “The Hare and the Tortoise” many of us read as children. In conduct books, the main characters were flat and two-dimensional, their exaggerated actions functioning purely to point to certain virtues or vices. Hensher notes, however, that “the novel springs … from a desire to show a clearly imagined audience how life might be lived.” His argument, essentially, is that the novel becomes a kind of simulation machine, revealing the relationships, successes and failures of people who, though fictional, live recognizably human lives.
Now, there is one aspect in the debate on a decline in reading that we don’t talk about much: Nobody reads as much as they think they <a href="https://circeinstitute.org/blog/what-shall-we-then-read/">ought to</a>. There are always many “great books” one hasn’t gotten around to reading. Plus, regardless of those “100 books you must read before you die” lists that periodically appear, there is no magic prescription for what constitutes the books one must read. People’s tastes in books are as subjective as their tastes in food. 
Nor is what follows an argument that reading makes someone morally good, which is as absurdly simplistic as the <a href="https://unherd.com/2026/10/what-liberals-get-wrong-about-social-media/?edition=us">claim</a> in Sorkin’s new movie that unregulated social media makes one intrinsically bad. If reading made one a better person, Germany might have avoided its horrific descent into National Socialism. Few societies in the world were more educated or more literate than Germany in the 1930s. Yet Germany’s intellectual elites did not challenge the rise of Nazism; rather, significant numbers of German academics and students actively embraced the Third Reich.
The novel’s great benefit is not that it is a machine for producing virtue. It is a machine for producing experience. Jordan Peterson argues in “<a href="https://ia801508.us.archive.org/22/items/MapsOfMeaningTheArchitectureOfBeliefPetersonlnwAdam/Maps%20of%20Meaning%20The%20Architecture%20of%20Belief-Peterson%20%28lnw%20Adam%29.pdf">Maps of Meaning</a>” that narrative allows societies to transmit behavioral knowledge across generations cheaply and efficiently. As one of the 20th century’s most passionate proponents of stories, C.S. Lewis, put it: “In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.” Essentially, we learn what particular choices might feel like from the inside and where they might lead. In the arena of social relations, the novel works, according to psychologist <a href="https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/minds-flight-simulator">Keith Oatley</a>, a bit like a flight simulator. 
A flight simulator allows pilots to accumulate experience before they find themselves responsible for flying the plane. It recreates routine and emergency procedures in a safe environment where mistakes become lessons rather than disasters. A pilot learns how to recognize developing problems and to appreciate how decisions made in one moment can have consequences much later. By the time a real emergency occurs, the pilot should already have encountered versions of it before. Modern armies employ a similar philosophy. Systems such as the Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_integrated_laser_engagement_system">MILES</a>) and <a href="https://simunition.com/">Simunition</a> allow soldiers to train in realistic combat scenarios without the dangers of live ammunition. Soldiers learn what a battlefield feels like before it becomes real. 
Novels can perform a similar function in the social and moral sphere. They allow us to experience real-life scenarios before life places us in them. Now, I read novels for pleasure and am not thinking of how to better myself when I pick a book. People read for all sorts of reasons. Reading, as <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/what-happens-if-no-one-reads-culture-education?r=987sn&amp;utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=web">Spencer Klavan</a> puts it, is “an act of pure freedom.” Yet while some people dismiss novels as an escape from reality, the opposite is often true: They can also enlarge reality by allowing us to experience more of life than our own biography could ever contain. 
If we think about reading this way, it gives us an important motivation to take the time to read a book when it might seem more expedient just to watch the movie. Because, it turns out, an important point is not just about the acquiring of stories, but about how our brains acquire them. 
Novels differ from films and television as they demand more from the imagination. A film gives us a fictional world that someone else has created; a novel asks us to build some parts ourselves. We have the outlines but need to flesh out the faces, colors, and textures from our own imagination. A 2023 <a href="https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2023/research/reading-beats-tv-for-sparking-imagination/">study</a> at the University of York found that participants who had been reading things performed better on subsequent imagination tasks than those who had been watching films, suggesting that reading stimulates imaginative thinking more actively because the mind must generate images rather than simply receive them. From the brain’s perspective, explains Keith Oatley, long-form reading is remarkably similar to thinking about real people and real situations. And that might actually be useful once in a while.
Here is an example of how experience acquired through novels might help us. Say we are contemplating engaging in a risky and uncertain lawsuit; Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House,” with its account of a grindingly destructive and ultimately fruitless legal case, might give us pause. We imagine we will win, but what happens if no one wins? “Bleak House” gives us a simulation of that outcome. 
Or perhaps by spending time with what many agree is the pinnacle of fictional social network building, George Eliot’s “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/16/the-guardian-view-on-middlemarch-the-greatest-novel-in-the-english-language">Middlemarch</a>,” we can observe, and therefore remember, how seemingly insignificant decisions affect lives and communities in momentous ways. To give some illustrations from Eliot’s fictional town of Middlemarch: an idealistic young woman marries the wrong man because her naive ideals blind her to his defects, which are obvious to everyone else. An apparently unimpressive character turns his life around because the woman he loves won’t accept him until he becomes a better person. Another, full of glorious potential, fails in his dream to transform the town because he refuses to address seemingly minor character flaws that eventually undo him. As readers, we get to see these small decisions play out over decades.
The architecture of social media encourages a different set of habits. The business model of most social media platforms involves immediate engagement: clicks, likes, shares, and reactions delivered in seconds rather than the slow accumulation of understanding over hours or days. Whatever its benefits may be, social media maximizes attention to the present moment. A novel asks us to follow a choice to its consequences; a feed asks us to move on to the next stimulus before those consequences have even had time to unfold. 
If there is a reckoning to be had over the rise of social media, it may lie not only in the rise of a technology that captures attention, but in the decline of one that cultivated judgment. In losing our ability to read, we may be losing one of modern civilization’s most effective instruments of moral and psychological improvement.
***
Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-1367184863

The One Habit That Could Save You From A Lifetime Of Regret

aaron sorkin

novel

reading

social media

Online gambling is about to ravage many young men’s futures.
An opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times recently compared <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2026-10-14/celebrities-online-sports-betting-tobacco-gambling-addiction" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2026-10-14/celebrities-online-sports-betting-tobacco-gambling-addiction&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1FEbkCBaMcEdSdPdggYXAG">celebrities</a> promoting online gambling sites to spokespersons for cigarette companies in the past. It’s an apt comparison, considering the tension between online betting’s glamorous persona and its frequent reality of financial debt, addiction, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11600009/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11600009/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1J7ljJrATMR_LJSNvpNSSB">suicide</a>, and devastation to marriages and families.
The global sports betting market is worth over $120 billion. Prediction markets, which allow the average citizen to place bets on the outcome of everyday events, are on track to reach an astounding $1 trillion in volume by 2030.
Many bettors, however, fail to recognize that this isn’t a lucrative, skill-based path toward financial freedom; it is, instead, risky and dependent on chance. In fact, <a href="https://institute.bankofamerica.com/economic-insights/online-betting-platforms.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://institute.bankofamerica.com/economic-insights/online-betting-platforms.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2oCXjJP6xl_QZsynPJRVmr">one in five Americans</a> views sports betting as a form of investing. This statistic doubles to two in five when asking Gen Zers, who account for roughly half of all online betting activity.
Online gambling is different from traditional forms of casino gambling in that a person can gamble at all hours of the day, with few restrictions, no matter where he is. This makes it easier for someone who can’t afford to gamble to partake, and for a casual hobby to slide into a full-blown addiction.
It also becomes easier for someone with a gambling problem to hide it, because it’s the norm nowadays for people to be on their phones constantly, even when in public or during private moments, like having dinner with a loved one or using the bathroom.
Advertisements for gambling apps are everywhere, encouraging young people to join in. Videos of gamblers bragging about their online wins are all over social media.
It’s no wonder that online gambling has skyrocketed among adolescents, regardless of whether they live in a state that requires players to be over the age of 18 or 21. A study published earlier this year found that <a href="https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/betting-on-boys-understanding-gambling-among-adolescent-boys">36% of boys</a> aged 11-17 say they took part in gambling or gambling-related activities in the past year.
But adult recreation has no place influencing the life choices of children, who are too young to understand the related consequences. In some cases, a child will gamble using a family member’s credit card or Social Security number, without their knowledge.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a gambling disorder can involve a preoccupation with gambling, repeated unsuccessful efforts to cut down or stop, lying to hide one’s gambling activity, and gambling to make up for money lost. There has already been <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42747355/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42747355/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1kFH4oZksFsnHplvUGpoHx">a documented increase</a> in emergency department visits among boys and young men who sports bet.
Adolescents, especially boys, tend to act impulsively and enjoy taking risks due to their still-developing frontal lobes. Online gambling can be especially alluring to children because these digital interfaces resemble video games, with bright colors and constant engagement.
Earlier exposure to gambling increases the risk of later developing problematic gambling. (Although fewer women gamble than men, it’s worth noting that problematic gambling tends to develop <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/27/opinion/gambling-addiction-middle-school.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/27/opinion/gambling-addiction-middle-school.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2pQFoIzo3zAy1swRv3bKMf">more quickly</a> in women.)
<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26497079/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26497079/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw24LBorv12LztZMzWBHT7J-">Scientific research</a> has demonstrated differences in the brain associated with gambling disorder. Combined with excessive screen time (by way of the smartphones boys are using to place and monitor their bets), online gambling has the potential to rewire adolescents’ development in concerning ways. For example, studies have linked excessive screen time to ADHD symptoms and <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41173869/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41173869/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1uUEKHysAieEziqYAo3qPo">altered growth</a> in a part of the brain implicated in addiction.
As we look to the future, you may be questioning to what extent online gambling explains the larger trend of young men <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sextinction/Debra-Soh/9781668057391" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sextinction/Debra-Soh/9781668057391&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0Z3k0Pq990nqBE-XVn6A_g">struggling in society</a> and their lack of interest in coupling up. A young man can’t realistically pursue goals or make solid life plans if he is fixated on gambling every moment of the day. He can’t settle down if he is constantly chasing his losses and can’t afford to take a woman out on a date.
Like an addiction to drugs or alcohol, managing a gambling addiction requires abstinence from the habit, and this will be a lifelong process. If you think you might have a gambling problem, there is no shame in seeking help.
As someone who previously worked clinically and in research settings with patients struggling with substance use disorders, for individuals with a family history of addiction, I’d suggest avoiding not only addictive substances, but gambling as well. <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4405260/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4405260/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0NuQGBr1SGbDi_Xnt8m0Ci">Research</a> has shown overlap between addiction to substances and problematic gambling, in adults and adolescents.
We should discourage the normalization of this vice, especially when in the presence of children. Talk to your kids about the harms of gambling so they understand why, despite our culture’s insouciance, it’s not a good idea to start. This will not only ensure their ability to make good financial decisions and thrive, but it will also protect their mental health.
***
Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist and the author of “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sextinction/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sextinction/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2O0F73fnmw0PcxvJPOBi7w">Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy</a>.” She was featured in Matt Walsh’s film, “What Is a Woman?” Visit her at <a href="https://www.drdebrasoh.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.drdebrasoh.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1792781339729000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3-5TjkncMEXUqujGiA-qta">DrDebraSoh.com</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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The Online Gambling Industry Has Its Eyes On Your Teenage Son

addiction treatment

mental health

online gambling

opinion

sports betting

teenagers

If my parents had had the chance to see my future before I was born and someone had offered them a way to eliminate my risk of a paralyzing spinal cord cancer, of course they would have taken it. What loving parent wouldn’t want to protect their child from pain? But what if that “choice” wasn’t about preventing cancer at all, but about choosing a different baby altogether — one who wasn’t me? That’s not medicine; that’s erasure.
This is the future some technologists are promising. Recently, a company called Orchid made headlines for offering full genome sequencing of embryos, the broadest form of preimplantation genetic screening to date.
Its CEO, Noor Siddiqui, recently gave a TED Talk and <a href="https://x.com/noor_siddiqui_/status/1956193329928134696">put it</a> bluntly on X: “What if your baby never walks? What if they are never able to live independently? What if you could have stopped it…but chose not to? You optimize everything—career, diet, skincare—but you’re going to chance it on your child’s genome?”
At first glance, this might sound compassionate: sparing children from devastating disease. But listen closely, and you’ll hear echoes of an older — and much darker — logic.
In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in Buck v. Bell, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” upholding the forced sterilization of people deemed “unfit to reproduce.” Doctors sterilized thousands of poor women, black Americans, and people with disabilities under state laws justified by the science of the day: eugenics. The idea was simple but cruel: Some lives were less worth living, and less worth passing on.
We recoil at those words now. And yet, the same worldview persists under the sheen of biotech innovation. In 2020, The Atlantic published an <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/">article</a> titled “The Last Children of Down Syndrome,” describing how Denmark’s universal prenatal screening has nearly eliminated births of children with Down syndrome. Siddiqui calls genetic diseases, like Down syndrome, a “typo” on their DNA. It is not a leap of science fiction to imagine parents or even the government using Orchid’s tools the same way, systematically narrowing the range of who is “allowed” to be born. 
It is laudable to alleviate suffering, to seek cures, to heal when we can. But there is a profound moral difference between alleviating suffering and eliminating the people who suffer. That line is not blurry.
We face this same ethical tension later in life, too. Consider the health care rationing metric called “quality-adjusted life years,” or QALYs, which places greater value on a year of life lived without disability than on the life of someone like me. This calculus makes disabled people less worthy of treatment — not because our lives are shorter, but because the system sees us as less valuable. 
People on both sides of the political aisle believe in this ideology of optimization. In fact, President Donald Trump’s “Most Favored Nation” drug pricing model is importing QALY health care rationing to the United States.
This is not to sugarcoat the suffering that comes with illness or disability. Caregiving is messy. Interdependence is costly. Disability is painful. Not a day goes by that I don’t long to run in the yard with my children or wake up without pain. But even with these burdens, my life is worth living — not because it is optimal, but because it is human.
That is what companies like Orchid miss when they market children’s genomes as if they were consumer tech. A child is not a startup to optimize. We cannot reduce human value to risk scores, health profiles, or projected IQ.
The real measure of human progress is not how efficiently we prevent imperfection. It’s whether we can build a world where we welcome, support, and dignify our neighbors. The value of existence doesn&#8217;t lie in optimization. It comes from the irreducible worth of every human life.
***
Rachel Barkley is director of <a href="https://ableamericans.us/">Able Americans</a>.
This article is part of <a href="http://upstream.dailywire.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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I Had A Rare Spinal Cord Cancer. Genetic Screening Would Have Erased Me.

disability advocacy

down syndrome

embryo selection

eugenics

genetic screening

In Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel &#8220;The Awakening,&#8221; protagonist Edna Pontellier begins to withdraw from her role as a wife and mother, cheats on her husband while he is away on business, and eventually drowns herself in the Gulf of Mexico when another prospective lover leaves her. When I first read this book as an undergraduate, I had a professor who explained how Edna’s suicide indicates her ultimate, proto-feminist empowerment: She would rather end her own life than honor the marital and maternal commitments that impede her unfettered self-actualization. Eye roll. 
But my professor was certainly right that &#8220;The Awakening&#8221; foreshadowed today’s values. The woman who abandons her commitments to “live the life she wants” remains a vaunted figure among mainstream feminists. Some notable examples include Elizabeth Gilbert of the best-selling 2006 memoir &#8220;Eat, Pray, Love,&#8221; which lionizes <a href="https://www.oprah.com/inspiration/elizabeth-gilbert-taking-a-spiritual-journey">selfishness as self-care</a>; the late feminist icon <a href="https://lawliberty.org/the-tangled-legacy-of-gloria-steinem/">Gloria Steinem</a>, who glorified abortion as the path to ambition; and the popular writer Lara Bazelon, who trumpeted the personal and professional benefits of her own divorce in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/opinion/divorce-children.html">pages of The New York Times</a>. 
So, it comes as no surprise that, in a <a href="https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=alex+cooper+tells+women+they+can+do+better+than+her+husband&amp;cvid=89da7b5811134d37a902c1e100f7e3d8&amp;gs_lcrp=EgRlZGdlKgYIABBFGDkyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQ6wcYQNIBCTEzNDk0ajBqNKgCCLACAQ&amp;PC=HCTS&amp;ru=%2fsearch%3fq%3dalex%2bcooper%2btells%2bwomen%2bthey%2bcan%2bdo%2bbetter%2bthan%2bher%2bhusband%26cvid%3d89da7b5811134d37a902c1e100f7e3d8%26gs_lcrp%3dEgRlZGdlKgYIABBFGDkyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQ6wcYQNIBCTEzNDk0ajBqNKgCCLACAQ%26FORM%3dANAB01%26PC%3dHCTS&amp;mmscn=vwrc&amp;mid=7095BCFF75F5EAFACF3F7095BCFF75F5EAFACF3F&amp;FORM=WRVORC&amp;ntb=1&amp;msockid=f82b1d82d02011f180f6f7884f873a9f">recent viral clip</a>, the megapopular “Call Her Daddy” podcast host Alex Cooper told actress Sophia Bush that women who wonder if they can “get better” if they leave their marriages should do so because “the answer is always yes.” Double eye roll. 
Marriage Is Supposed To Be A Vocation, Not A Transaction
Obviously, a view of marriage that misconstrues “I do” to mean “until something — or someone — better comes along” renders marriage obsolete. The entire purpose of marriage is its permanence as the foundational building block of family and society. It was the broad acceptance and even celebration of divorce that killed marriage as a near-universal adult vocation. A lack of stigma or shame attached to dissolving a marriage weakens societal investment in the institution more broadly. Predictably, we now have fewer divorces because unprecedentedly few people are getting married in the first place. So, there is a sense in which people talking about divorce — whether to celebrate it, condemn it, or forgive it — need a time machine. 
But the fall of marriage writ large only underlines the common root of both Cooper’s glorification of marriage’s ephemerality and many Americans’ reluctance to get married at all: the commodification of other human beings. Our culture now sees men and women as replaceable goods rather than irreplaceable people. That’s what was and remains at the root of no-fault divorce laws and our blasé acceptance of them, as well as Cooper’s second-wave feminist throwback of a message that women should view men as disposable. 
While it’s true that the fall of marriage is at least as much an economic issue as it is a cultural one, transactional worldviews such as Cooper’s feed into trends that discourage marriage across the board: some women refusing even to consider dating men who aren’t a <a href="https://x.com/i/trending/2056271063391367616">certain height</a> or preferring the solipsism of AI “boyfriends” to the liability of real ones, and some men fetishizing women solely according to equally shallow characteristics or preferring the <a href="https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/what-happens-when-men-prefer-porn-20250318-p5lkf4">ease of pornography</a> to the expense of dating. 
When we view people themselves as mere commodities, it should come as no surprise that the union of two commodities into one would become a delicate item that we’re quick to throw out when it’s no longer convenient. 
Women Are Adults, Not Children
Many critics of Cooper’s hot take that wives should feel free to leave their husbands on a whim have rightly pointed out that we would consider a man arguing the same in reverse to be disgusting, misogynistic, and shameful. That is, if a man said that husbands should feel free to leave their wives for a “better” woman, the same people who say “you go, girl!” about women leaving their husbands would be crying “toxic masculinity.” 
This is, of course, absolutely true. But those who hold this double standard anyway tend to justify their hypocrisy by maintaining that men have been free to abandon, abuse, and use their wives (and women more broadly) for most of world history. It is only recently that women have been in a legal and cultural position to claim the dubious privilege of behaving like dishonorable men. To this way of thinking, the same infantile, selfish behavior that we see as reprehensible in a man must be laudable in a woman. 
Of course, the notion that women broadly can best men in a game of “trade up your spouse” may accord with the feminist zeitgeist, but it does not accord with reality. If there is a misogynist in chief, after all, it is Mother Nature. Most men, for example, remain capable of fathering children long after their wives can conceive them. Understood in the shallowest and crudest way, then, men’s broad ability to “do better” than their aging spouses will therefore always outstrip women’s. 
But instead of calling men to higher standards of permanence and fidelity while continuing to enforce those standards for women as well, mainstream feminism has mostly been invested in celebrating women at their worst and calling it empowerment. As a result, we’ve sacrificed any understanding of virtue to the lowest version of equality. This permanently infantilizes and patronizes women. 
The fact that we have always expected faithfulness and self-sacrifice of wives does not make faithfulness and self-sacrifice any less valuable in either sex. Respectable adults make and keep commitments to others — marriage first among them — in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. Women, like men, are adults. Viewing women as true equals means recognizing that where rights are equal, so are their accompanying responsibilities.
***
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including <a href="https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/about">on Substack</a>.
This article is part of <a href="http://upstream.dailywire.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Leaving Your Marriage To ‘Do Better’ Is A Feminist Fantasy

alex cooper

divorce

feminism

A social media search for the term “unpaid labor” yields thousands of videos and posts upset that homemakers will never receive a salary for what they spend all day doing. One post, from a group called “Care Gap,” <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DJ6tch0IRCU/?hl=en">notes</a> that “women spend nearly 80 hours a week on unpaid labor.” Other accounts attempt to <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6HEO3Kt0TF/?stkn=ajducDRpajFydjg4">quantify</a> the “unpaid labor” homemakers do, with one video estimating the cost of her work at $150,000. Readers immediately have thoughts of someone working double overtime as, essentially, a slave. It is the most uncharitable and denigrating way to describe homemaking, and it does a huge disservice to homemakers themselves. 
As more and more households subsist on two full-time incomes, work has become increasingly associated with a place and a paycheck rather than a state of living in which everyone participates. The <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304387825001051">term</a> “unpaid labor,” while technically an accurate description of domestic work (you don’t actually receive a salary or hourly wage for homemaking), describes such work in a way meant to denigrate labor for which you do not receive a paycheck.
In nearly every other sphere of life, we do work for which we do not earn a salary or an hourly rate. No one pays you to comfort a grieving friend, bring a meal to a new mother, or organize a surprise birthday party for your dad. But it would be hard to find anyone who would seriously claim this is useless work. Yet when it comes to motherhood, people get very angry that it is “unpaid.” Another <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIeFIAZsyBj/?stkn=MTl2bW5reWs3ZDZzNg==">video</a>, speaking of working moms, notes that “women are working two jobs and getting paid for one.” As a culture, we are constantly measuring worth and value only by the most obvious of indicators — such as a paycheck or net worth — rather than the infinite value of the social advantages of a mother being able to spend most of her time with her children.
When we use the term “unpaid labor” to describe the tasks associated with motherhood, we set women up for failure. New mothers are often, understandably, overwhelmed by how much the very small people they just birthed need them. From breastfeeding to pregnancy to the natural bond a baby enjoys almost exclusively with his mother in the first few weeks of life to birth itself, women absolutely do most of the work to raise little humans when they are tiniest. In such a demanding time, a mother’s workload becomes all the more unbearable if she is surrounded by folks in her life and on her tiny screen harping on the fact that her labor is “unpaid.” A mother on her third nightly wake-up in as many hours will start contemplating what a rich lady she’d be if society wrote her a paycheck for her efforts of late. And she’s right; the paycheck would be astronomical. But no paycheck could properly compensate for the work she is doing because it is, in a word, priceless. 
The trials of young motherhood are real, but cultural feminism worsens them. Throughout a woman&#8217;s education, people tell her that thanks to third-wave feminism, her role as a parent doesn&#8217;t have to be much different from her baby&#8217;s father&#8217;s role, as long as she marries a nice feminist who does 50% of the dishes. Biology is a bit of a cruel teacher in these cases. The tasks of early motherhood are undoubtedly hard, but the way we describe them to women makes them downright impossible. Mothers and fathers aren&#8217;t interchangeable, and the difference between how each experiences parenthood doesn&#8217;t simply lie in arbitrary divisions of household labor. There&#8217;s a difference that&#8217;s baked into a mother&#8217;s and a baby&#8217;s biology, and our culture would do well not to ignore that, for women&#8217;s sake.
Even beyond the early stages of motherhood that demand so much more from a mother than a father, the division of household labor tends to fall disproportionately on a woman. There are biological and instinctual reasons for this but also practical ones. Even if one does not believe there is a biological bent toward domesticity and homemaking in women, one can admit that if a woman is taking time off for maternity leave and passing up career promotions to work more manageable hours during early motherhood, she is likely to earn less than a man, and the man should then take on the bulk of the earning for the household while she handles the bulk of the domestic chores. The fact that only one party receives a paycheck for his work is not indicative of how important the other party’s work is. 
This rather traditional division of labor exists in the majority of households, not just households that are Christian or conservative. In only <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/">16% of opposite-sex couples</a> is the wife the breadwinner. It is difficult to believe that this is because 84% of couples are particularly religious or anti-feminist or even traditional. The most feminist of men and women seem to still find themselves dividing up the labor of being a family by the man taking on the money-making work and the woman taking on the homemaking work.
Indeed, people often discuss the so-called gender pay gap, but the more significant pay gap exists between married fathers and other single men and women. To a mother who sees her household income as a joint effort (which it is), the 10% to 30% increase in wages her husband earns by being a married dad is part of the value she provides indirectly through her work in the home. In other words, even if we were to quantify a homemaker’s labors with dollar signs, she would hardly appear “unpaid.” 
The term “unpaid labor” itself evokes images of the most infamous kind of unpaid labor: slavery. In reality, a term like “priceless labor” may be a far better description of what a mother does. She does not lack a paycheck for her work because it is insignificant, but because no paycheck would be adequate recompense. It can be difficult for women who spent college and their early career chasing a larger paycheck as an indication that they are doing well in life to switch to a kind of work whose recompense is far harder to quantify. 
We can help mothers joyfully accept the labor of homemaking if we change the way we as a society think and talk about the recompense they receive for it by doing away with demoralizing descriptions like “unpaid labor.” For homemakers, this “joyful acceptance” looks like thinking too highly of your role’s worth to attempt to attach an imaginary paycheck to it. For the husbands of said homemakers, this looks like loudly and continually recognizing and celebrating the work of homemaking as real and dignified labor. For society more broadly, this looks like a complete overhaul of the way we think of value, as something that only comes in dollar signs and occurs outside of the home itself.
***
Sarah Wilder is a visiting fellow at Independent Women and contributor for IW Features.
This article is part of <a href="http://upstream.dailywire.com">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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The Phrase Making Motherhood Harder Than It Has To Be

domestic labor

gender roles

motherhood

unpaid labor

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