Why Can’t We Quit Weddings?

A lot of marriages in the U.S. today are radical by grandparent standards. Women as breadwinners. Stay-at-home dads. Gay marriages. Polyamorous marriages! Yet despite all these evolutions, the ritual that ushers in those marriages—the American wedding—has hardly changed at all. Weddings are constantly evolving, but often in the direction of more elaborate, more luxe, more wedding-like. Why are we obsessed with perfecting what is essentially a 19th-century artifact?

In this episode, we talk to Xochitl Gonzalez, who wrote a confessional for The Atlantic about her years as a luxury wedding planner, and authored Olga Dies Dreaming, a bestselling novel about a luxury wedding planner and a cast of obnoxious clients. Gonzalez tells us about the out-there demands of the uber rich. (Preview: monks; pizza; an orchid bear.) We talk about how those demands trickle down to the average couple, with delusions of a celebrity-style wedding, done on the cheap. And we puzzle over the big question: Why are we so fixated on this grand old tradition?

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I watched The Wedding Planner last night. Just, I was like: Oh my God.

Xochitl Gonzalez: Can we talk about it? Because I know that movie like the back of my hand.

Rosin: I mean, I love J. Lo, but I have not dipped into a rom-com from that era in a while. Every moment of it felt kind of manufactured and awkward.

Gonzalez: Oh, so completely. That is like the era of the cultural stereotype.

Rosin: Yes. Yes!

Gonzalez: Of shorthand, right? Like one trope after another. Although there’s a great line when the boss of her little wedding-planning operation is like: “I’ve done things no innocent planner should ever have to.”

[Laughter.]

Rosin: Right. I did think of you when I heard that line.

Gonzalez: Right. It’s a good line. That’s actually a good line.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. If you’re getting married this summer, I pity you. Not because of the marriage. I’m sure that’ll be fine. But because of the wedding. Social media seems to have changed the game for the average couple. Every wedding is now supposed to look like a luxury wedding and yet somehow cost a lot less than an actual luxury wedding.

But the weirdest thing for me is that weddings still exist at all. Marriage is totally different than it used to be. Women’s roles are totally different. And yet the wedding just keeps getting more … wedding-y.

Why do we keep innovating and improving on what is basically an artifact from the early 19th century?

So because surely some of you out there are attending a wedding or 15 this summer, we are going to talk about weddings with someone who has lived through many, many of them: Atlantic writer Xochitl Gonzalez. She just wrote a confessional for the magazine about her years running a luxury wedding business. And before that she wrote an exceptional novel called Olga Dies Dreaming about a wedding planner, that was way more intense about the class and race dynamics of the American luxury wedding than the Jennifer Lopez movie. Why do we have to mention that movie? Hi, Xochitl.

Gonzalez: Hi. It’s so nice to talk to you.

Rosin: Yeah, it’s nice to talk to you. So I wanted to go back to a time when you were first starting out planning luxury weddings. What year was that?

Gonzalez: It was 2003 when I started. But I should say: You kind of have to work, unless, I always say, unless your name is Bronson Van Wick. Who’s a real person who’s extremely successful, and you have that kind of name—where it’s like, Oh, Bronson Van Wick. I think you have to sort of work your way up the ranks.

Does that make sense?

Rosin: Yeah. Like in the movie.

Gonzalez: Yeah. So it probably took us maybe two or three years before we were really doing luxury weddings. Which at that time, probably anything over 75 was considered luxury.

And then you get into ultra-luxury, which then was probably anything over a quarter of a million dollars. Which I know sounds like a lot, and to my jaded wedding-planning eyes, it’s like, Eh, it doesn’t get you that far.

Rosin: Oh my God. All right, so let’s say around 2005 you start planning some serious weddings. What is the first request someone made of you that you were like, Oh, okay, okay, okay?

Gonzalez: I mean, then I’m going to say that it was relatively reasonable, right? It was like: “Could you get me this celebrity singer to come to the wedding?” Like: “I want every table to have an ice sculpture, with the flower arrangement frozen inside of it.”

You know, it was just weird stuff that they maybe had seen in a magazine. Or [since] this is the dawn of wedding TV, that they might have seen on wedding television. Everything was very celebrity and upscale-emulating.

At the time, Preston Bailey was like the pinnacle of weddings. And he was doing this thing where he would make animals out of flowers. So, like an eight-foot-tall bear made out of orchids. That kind of thing. And so people would be like: “Could I have little animals made out of roses?”

So it wasn’t that creative in the beginning. And then as it went on, you started to get weird gag things. Like: “I want to bring up this pony during a toast.” Or I had somebody that was like: “I want to have tattoos set up at the after-party so that my granny can get a tat at my wedding.”

And so you have a remote tattoo artist coming into town. But the first area that I’d say things started to get unusual, really, was the ceremony. We had a couple that was like: “You have to fly this monk in from Tibet. And then you have to help our rabbi get a visa because we need this one particular rabbi, because he was famous for being like the first gay rabbi in a particular denomination.”

We had one couple that didn’t want to leave a carbon footprint for their ceremony. That was a big deal at one point. Nobody wanted to leave a carbon footprint. So we used real trees that then we had to find a place to replant them.

Rosin: God, Xochitl. I have to stop you and say, like: This is insane. I mean, this is not what I was expecting. I thought it would be like a cute little story and, no, it’s like: fly a Buddhist in from Tibet…

Gonzalez: Oh yeah.

Rosin: Transplant trees! I mean, this is like the things that you have seen are extra. I mean, what was the thought going through your head? When somebody calls you and they’re like: “I would like a Buddhist flown in from a different country,” what is going through your head?

Gonzalez: Well, it was kind of a frog boil. So I always feel like I don’t do that well with these questions, because at the time, you just were like, “Oh, okay. Of course.” Because, the week before, you had just gotten a slightly less crazy request. So they just sort of kept escalating, and you’re like: “Well, obviously we’ve gotta get the monk from Tibet here.”

And then, you’re like, “Well, is he willing to fly commercial?” That’s like your first question.

Rosin: Oh my God. I could hear that in your voice. I could hear that you were lapsing into normal mode where it’s just like, Sure, I’ll do this, and I’ll do that, and I’ll do that. Like as you’re telling me, I’m realizing how otherworldly this is. But for you, it just registers as another thing on your checklist.

Gonzalez: Yeah. I think that the hardest part about writing about it is sometimes recognizing when things were strange. Do you know what?

Rosin: Yes. Yes.

Gonzalez: You’re like, Wait, okay. That was strange. Now that I’m away from it, I can see how that was strange.

Rosin: Right. So what I understand was at first the wedding requests were derivative because there were a lot of wedding magazines. And so people just saw what other people had, and they wanted those things.

Gonzalez: Totally. And you had more wedding magazines, which I think is so hard for people to even wrap their heads around.

But there was Inside Weddings, In Style Weddings, Modern Bride. And then you had The Knot, and then you had Martha Stewart, and then you had regional versions. like, so you would have Brides and then you’d have New York Bride. You’d have The Knot and then you’d have The Knot New York.

You just had so much bridal content on newsstands. And then—’06, ’07—you start getting blogs.

So now you’ve got digital media. You’ve got print media still happening; you have books. You had Pinterest. You could be doing wedding stuff. You could be watching a wedding movie. You could be going crazy on blogs all night. You could be reading magazines on the subway on your way to and from work. You could be buying advice books and etiquette books and design books. Like, you could spend a small fortune just on bridal media.

Rosin: I mean, there really was a wedding-industrial complex.

Gonzalez: There was!

Rosin: That’s not a made-up term.

Gonzalez: No, you know,—I think there was a rebellion against the “traditional wedding,” right? There was this overtaking, of like: How can I make this feel like only we would have this wedding? Right? I think that there was like a chicken and the egg.

Blogs came about, and kind of really drove that. Because suddenly it’s not Darcy Miller at Martha Stewart determining whether or not this is good enough to be in print, right? It’s like, I need content. To go up like 10 times a day, right, on this blog.

And so you were sort of like, Well, what are we going to do? You know, we did this one thing, and it was like pinwheels and calico prints. [Laughter.] And I think that was like one of the first weddings—it was like a phase, I call it “The Bunting Years,” where everybody had bunting everywhere. And we were sort of like pioneers in bunting. And I’m obviously quite proud of that.

Rosin: [Laughs.] Congratulations.

Gonzalez: Yes, I know. Really I was very, very proud of that. And that wedding—I remember again, I was so proud of this—we had custom-made yarmulkes in denim and calico.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Gonzalez: It was so cute. It was very cute. But like, you know, I think what ends up happening is the ’00s—the era when I got into it—was sort of an era of growing flash. And it just kind of kept increasing and increasing and increasing throughout that decade, until the recession. And then we sort of merged into like—weird, I don’t want to say that it was “quiet luxury,” but it was more whispered. It was spent; it was quirky luxury. Quirky luxury.

Before the recession, finance was a bigger section of the luxury wedding market, but not necessarily people with inherited wealth.

You know, like they’re probably middle-class people that ended up going to business school, and, you know, they’re spending their Goldman money on a wedding. And they wanted to have nice weddings that would impress their friends.

And then after the recession, what happened was almost all the clientele in the luxury sector shifted to people with inherited wealth.

So like: They may have done well themselves, but their parents had also done very well. And that was who then felt comfortable, I think, after this giant shakeup in the economy. These were the people that still felt comfortable spending that kind of money, but they didn’t want people to know they were spending that kind of money.

So you start to get that twee aesthetic: where everything’s super-custom, but at the same time, it’s not the Plaza with orchids splattered all over the walls, right? It’s like flowers grown on a farm that only grew these flowers for your wedding, right?

I think we did the very first wedding that Roberta’s ever catered, and we had to bring up all of their pizza ovens. And, you know, it sounds really casual, right? You’re like, “Roberta’s is catering my wedding.”

And then it’s like: No, they’ve never catered anything before, and we are basically recreating their kitchen in a field. So it’s actually not cheap at all. But the couple wanted to be able to tell people “Roberta’s is doing my catering.”

Rosin: Right, right. We should say: Roberta’s is a famous hipster pizza place in Bushwick, Brooklyn. And so what are you learning about the ultra-wealthy as you’re going through this? Because it sounds like they go through eras. One era of conspicuous consumption moves into the next era of understated elegance.

I mean, we like to flatten the motivations and desires of the ultra-rich, but what do you think they wanted? I mean, partly it’s to get into a magazine or a blog?

Gonzalez: Well, actually, I would say that I think that is a more middle-class desire, to be honest. Like, I think that the ultra-rich are much more content with the people that were there seeing it. There’s a bit of social media, but there’s a remarkable amount of privacy around this stuff.

And especially I’d say that trend has even increased since I’ve left. Like in talking to different people still in the business—you know, when I say “ultra luxury,” I’m saying $2, $3, $4 million on a wedding. Like, there is a desire to not necessarily have every single thing sprawled over, and the sense that that makes it more exclusive to the people that were there.

Exclusivity is a big thing. It’s probably part of the reason why you see so many very wealthy people having tent weddings—because they want to go to a location that nobody has gone to before. Right? So maybe that’s like: You’re housed at a hotel, but you’re going to be down by a lake that no one’s ever used for a wedding before. Exclusivity and rarity, and giving guests access to that, is a big part of what I think the ultra-wealthy are trying to achieve with their weddings.

Rosin: Got it. So for the ultra-wealthy, it’s an air of mystery. Specificity. Exclusivity. And then how does that filter down to everyone else?

Gonzalez: So what’ll happen is—and you know, I spoke with this wonderful photographer, Alan Zapata. He charges I think around $40,000 and $50,000 for a wedding weekend.

And he’s like: “The No. 1 thing I have to do is get like 10 or 12 images ready to put on social media.” So it’s not that they’re not sharing; it’s just that they’re sharing very selectively. So what happens is these will go out. And in the olden days, maybe a wedding would go in a magazine—like you might see, let’s say, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, right?

And People then might do an interview with the person who planned it, Bryan Rafanelli. And Bryan will say, like: “Oh, here’s a way to get Chelsea’s look for less.” And you know, he’ll do a little editorial thing. What happens now is that people see this on social media, and it’s given without any context, right? So you see, let’s say Kim [Kardashian]—I’m thinking of a famous image like Kim and Kanye [West]’s floral wall. You see it in a magazine; it’s like: “How to Get That Look for Less.” And [it’s] like: Do it with carnations. You know, it was done with roses and orchids, like whatever. And now you end up just seeing it with no context, with no information, with no kind of like, quote unquote, wedding education.

And so it creates desire in people that are soon to be brides and grooms, and it creates desire without any attachment to knowledge. It’s like, I could see a Chanel gown and know, Well, that’s a very nice gown, but I’m not buying that.

Right? But there’s no sense that this is the Chanel of wedding flowers, right?

Rosin: So because it’s appearing in your feed, it feels utterly attainable. You’re like, Oh, there’s a picture. It’s scrolling down my feed. Yeah.

Gonzalez: It’s like the next thing you see. Like your college roommate’s baby shower. It’s mixed in with content of people that are real-life people, but then these are not necessarily even people that you exactly know. And so I think it sort of makes a scramble in the brain, where it’s like, Well, I now need to have this—because it becomes detached from any reality of the wealth that’s supporting that.

Rosin: But you know, the mania just keeps transforming, and it doesn’t change anything for the actual couple. It makes it worse, because at first you have all these standard-bearers, like the magazines and the central blogs. And then it just becomes democratized. And so everybody has to do it for themselves.

So everybody has to create their own perfect photo shoot. That would’ve been, say, a bridal-magazine photo shoot. But you’re expected to somehow do it, create it, and pay for it yourself.

Gonzalez: Yeah, you know, I’d written a piece about this ages ago about my bra fitter—like the lady where I buy my bras on Atlantic Avenue. And this woman’s been in bras for 40 years, right?

And I was like, “I go to her because she’s an expert.” I think what has happened in the democratization of imagery, because it’s not really information necessarily, is the demise of expertise. And I don’t know that that’s helped people. I think it’s created more confusion. I think that there’s not necessarily reliable sources to even know what to ask.

So I always am curious: In that sort of middle tier, how good are those experiences that you’re seeing? Like, I think that people are performing on Instagram and taking out money—you know, for the things that are going to get them attention on the Gram.

To spend money on choreographies [so] you can do a choreographed dance that’ll get you hits on TikTok. Like, I wonder what these guests are eating. I wonder what they’re drinking. You know? I wonder what the experience is on the other side, and I wonder how much people care.

Rosin: Right. Because you have to skimp somewhere.

Gonzalez: Right? And that’s also the stuff that really costs the most. Giving a very nice meal; making sure people have transportation to and from the ceremony, back to the reception, back to the hotel after they’ve been drinking all night. Like, that’s the stuff that starts to really add up. But you don’t see that on the Gram, right?

[MUSIC]

Rosin: After the break, we check in with a bespoke pyrotechnics expert on how to give your wedding the grand entrance of your dreams…

Just kidding. We’re going to discuss why we can’t seem to quit the ever-bigger, ever-fancier, and ever-more-expensive wedding.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: So, we’ve talked about how couples see these luxury weddings on Instagram. And then, how does that have real effects on their typical wedding?

Gonzalez: So I think it sort of trickles down, and then people want. You know, I discovered this did not exist when I was still in the business. But two kinds of cottage industries have come up.

Wedding styling. You know, like in terms of the way you think of a stylist that’s going to get you ready for a runway if you’re a celebrity. Wedding styling has been around for maybe 20 years or so, but it was a very exclusive service, right? Like it was really for the upper tier of the market.

Rosin: When you say “wedding styling,” I just think someone comes in and does your hair—

Gonzalez: No, so this is like: “I’m going to help you find the dress, the shoes, the accessory.” Now it’s expanded to the look that’s going to coordinate that for your engagement photos, for the rehearsal dinner. What are you going to wear for the day-after brunch? Like, if you have an excursion during your wedding weekend, what are you going to wear for that? So it’s like a whole series of “bridal looks.”

And then the other little strange thing that I wasn’t expecting at all is: Social-media professionals to come and sort of document your wedding specifically for social media.

So they will be on TikTok; they’ll be making reels. They’ll be posting up select photos like in real time. And one of the services will “develop a strategy” for your wedding. And like their tagline was: “Because the day you spent 14 months planning should be seen by the world.”

Rosin: Oh my God. No. I mean: Is this trickle-down luxury to you? To someone inside, [is] it a good thing or a bad thing? To me, it’s very stressful. Just hearing you lay it out. I’m really glad I’m not getting married right now, but what do you think?

Gonzalez: To me, I think it’s pretty stressful. I guess I could say I get worried about society, right? And what living virtually has done to us in terms of our priorities, about real life versus appearances, if that makes sense. And so I’m not against weddings—you know, I had a relatively low-budget [wedding]. I’m not married anymore, but I never regret having that wedding because, you know, my grandfather walked me down the aisle. We did the dance. I have those memories. I have these great photos of me and my best friends who were still my best friends. I remember I have these memories of us getting ready together, and doing the whole thing.

And this was great. But it was not only a different time economically when I did that—that was around ’04 or ’05—but it was also a different mindset. And that sense is certainly not pervading the general population of the economy right now.

And so I think that’s why I’m sort of shocked at the way in which money’s getting spent sort of flippantly. More people are taking on wedding debt now than ever before, and through personal loans too. Like, it’s not even just credit-card debt; it’s taking out personal loans to finance or supplement their weddings at sometimes up to 30 percent interest rates.

And knowing that—is it for people’s experience? Is it for the memory, or is it for the Gram? And that part makes me a little nervous or uncomfortable, I should say.

Rosin: Yeah. I’m really confused by why we just cling to this tradition. Like as you’re talking, I’m thinking: Has not one single couple, when you were wedding planning, just said “No”? Like, “This is not us. This is nothing to do with our life. Like we’re putting ourselves in aspic, like getting this perfect old tradition, and to the max—but this is not us, and I don’t want to do it.”

Gonzalez: Well, probably. It’s self-selected by the people that came in the door, right? I will say, I did have one couple; they called off their wedding because the mom of the bride was so particular and worried about what people thought and how things were going to be perceived. And they started to bicker. And they ended up, they were like, “We don’t want to do this. This is terrible. We don’t even want to be together anymore.” And they called off the wedding. And I remember running into them, separately, like a year later. You know, they were not together. And like: “I think it’s probably the best thing that we did. The wedding was just too much.”

And then after that, like two years later, they ended up just eloping. They got back together; they eloped. And the desire to have this perfect wedding that represented “them as a couple” just was too much. Literally, they were like, “I can’t do it.”

But I think it was also money that everybody had, right? So the calculus was different. I think I’m sort of just disconcerted to a certain extent at, like: What is the point of making it a visually stunning event if you know that you’re going to be kind of paying that back for forever?

Rosin: Because you just get one second of—

Gonzalez: It’s a dopamine hit, right?

Rosin: Yeah. Well, what do you think? Like, marriages are so different. Fewer people are getting married. Women’s roles are so different. And we keep injecting this one tradition with so much money, so much importance. Like, so much perfection. It’s really odd.

Gonzalez: So, you know, the wedding in America the way that we think about it, right? The white dress and the reception. That sort of all emerged in the ’50s post-war, right? Like, when we had a middle class.

Rosin: Yeah.

Gonzalez: And it was this kind of way to say: “Here we are as a family.” Right? Like for the bride’s family to be like: “We are in the middle class.” And so the niceness of the wedding was a performative way for your neighbors and your community, your church community, your residential community to see, like: Oh, okay. Like: Look what they were able to do for their daughter. And there was a certain aspect of the lady’s hurrah, right? The bride’s hurrah of showing herself off.

And I think what’s funny is that as we’ve been able to sort of let go of ... like, I think the number of people that anticipate buying a home has declined, right?

We’ve let go of so many “middle-class American aspirations,” but we haven’t been able to let go of the wedding. It’s not perceived as a luxury. Weddings, period, are a luxury. Whether you are in the luxury end of the market or not, they are a luxury start to finish.

But there’s something that we have not accepted as a luxury. They feel like an entitlement. Like: If you are going to marry, and by that I mean legally do it, then if you are an American and you consider yourself middle class, you should be able to have a nice wedding.

And I think that’s where a lot of the resentment of the cost comes in. It’s like, “You running your business is stopping me from having my nice wedding that I’m entitled to.”

And I think that there’s a real reluctance to give up the dream.

It’s one of the few middle-class dreams that I think people don’t want to give up. People have given up on college, and I don’t think that they want to give up on weddings.

Rosin: But I mean, we have definitely transformed the traditional marriage. Like, if you had a friend who had a very stereotypical 1950s-style marriage where the gender roles were very rigidly prescribed, you might be confused. We just don’t do that anymore. Like, women’s roles are dismantled. But—we refuse, we will not dismantle the proposal, the wedding dress. The wedding. So many things about the wedding are so traditional.

Gonzalez: One of the things that I think is probably the funniest to me is that we did a pop-up wedding chapel with The Knot the weekend that gay marriage passed in New York. Okay. And we had two or three little ceremony setups, and I think [something] like 20 couples got married in Central Park that day. And I remember being like, This is so cute.

Like, this is bad for business. But I was like, wouldn’t this be great if in expanding what marriage [is], who can get married, we expand what could be a nice wedding. And then instead you fast-forward 20 years, and it’s just like: Everybody’s still having these super-traditional weddings.

[Laughter.]

Rosin: I was going to say, I’ve been to many a gay wedding—

Gonzalez: I was going to say: I feel like the gay weddings that I’ve been to have been just as, if not more, elaborate—right?—than any of the hetero weddings. So I almost think it’s hilarious that when you think about the total deconstruct of that 1950s stereotype of what a marriage is like, we still can’t get away from the wedding.

And I think it’s got romance attached to it. And I think there is sort of this idea, again, of in a funny way, it is not the right to live together in relationship.

And you know, it’s that great Sondheim song like about marriage. Like, “It’s the little things you do together.” It’s not about that part. It’s literally about the right to have a wedding.

[Laughter.]

It’s like the fight for your right to party: like literally. And so I think that in some ways we’ve conflated a good wedding with good marriage.

And I do think we’ve become obsessed, in this country, with celebrity. And I think it’s sort of a performative way to now have both. You know, show off some class status. But more than anything, I think people are like: It’s a way to sort of have celebrity [status] for a day. Like, attainable celebrity for a day.

Rosin: So in the way that you’d want to, you used to want to be a princess for the day, or royalty—

Gonzalez: Yes. Now you’re like a Kardashian for the day, right? And what does that come with? It comes with luxury: It comes with designer clothes, it comes with a glam squad. It comes with a camera following you around the entire day. It comes with all these things. And like, people don’t want to give that up.

So it’s a tiny version of celebrity. I think what’s funny to me when I kept thinking about it is people will sit and like hem and haw about like, “Oh, can we afford to get a car? Can we afford to do this? Can we afford to like, send our kid to this school?” And in the meantime, they’ll be like, for no hands down, “Just borrow $50,000. Let’s have this wedding.”

Rosin: Oh my. Right. You know, in the Jennifer Lopez movie, which I just rewatched last night, she herself is chasing the dream. Like, she wants to have her own wedding. And in your novel Olga Dies Dreaming, which I loved, Olga ends up with a guy, and there’s no wedding in sight.

Gonzalez: No.

Rosin: And she seems, like, way more herself. Is there some message I’m supposed to read into that? Like, just forget the wedding?

Where did you land, because you wrote this novel when you’ve essentially exited wedding planning, right?

Gonzalez: Yes; I’d exited. And you know, I think she was commitment-phobic in the beginning of the novel and ends up with somebody, but she’s got serious commitment issues. And I think I’ve landed on: The relationship is so much more important than the performance of the relationship.

I love a good party. I think, if you’ve got the cash—who doesn’t love a good party? But I don’t know that the wedding has to be the reason for the party. A party for no reason’s also kind of fun.

Rosin: So: Skip the wedding; just have a party. That’s your mantra now?

Gonzalez: Yeah. I still support parties.

Rosin: Yeah. Pro-party. Okay! Well, you are working on a new novel. There’s going to be a cover reveal soon. Is there anything else you want to say about it?

Gonzalez: Oh, it’s about power and creative couples. It’s a first-generation art-history student in an Ivy League school who discovers a forgotten female genius artist who was murdered by her husband 20 years before. And I’m very excited about it. It’s a little bit of a mystery.

It’s a little bit of a campus novel. It’s a little ghosty. And it’s called Anita de Monte Laughs Last.

Rosin: Ooh. Amazing. Can’t wait. Thank you, Xochitl, for joining us today.

Gonzalez: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Theo Balcomb. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Our executive producer is Claudine Ebeid. Thank you to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. If you like this episode, leave us a review wherever you’re listening. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.