Detail from “Bâtiment” by Leandro Erlich at the Grand Palais in Paris, June 2026. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
Your Porch Party proprietor is on the move this week, so I will keep this short. It is my first time out of the country since Trump regained office. Attendant with that experience is the strange telescopic sensation of seeing your own country from afar, as others see it: not, after all, the center of the universe. More like a once respected uncle, past his prime and ranting madly, about whom everyone now quietly makes eye contact across the dining room table. Back home, a teen fan of the Columbine killers shoots people in a public library, giant cars mow people down, the president babbles obsessively about algae. The Pride parade coexists with the hapless soldiers stationed without purpose in DC’s hot streets.
People still want to go to the United States, but many know they cannot. In Paris last week, I talked to one young white French man about to move to Washington to work at a restaurant, and then an equally enterprising trilingual fashion student born in Nigeria, who mentioned matter-of-factly that moving to the U.S. for work was not an option for her under the current government. It is strange that the country seems to be trying to remove itself so aggressively from the global flow of ambitious people looking for opportunity, after being the ultimate destination in that regard for so long.
One of the best things I saw in Paris was an exhibition of the work of the Argentine artist and optical illusion specialist Leandro Erlich, who specializes in putting mirrors where you expect windows and vice versa. The show ends in an awesome interactive installation featuring whoever happens to be visiting, captured in a mirror that convincingly makes it look like they’re clinging to the façade of a very French-looking house. (Erlich has recreated the piece with houses of other local architectural vernaculars for exhibitions in other countries.) It’s impossible not to start playing on and within this artwork, making a constantly changing tableau with strangers. You can see the artifice, and yet it’s also oddly real-looking. The overall effect is irresistibly silly, like starring in your own Buster Keaton movie.
Another moment of “Bâtiment.” (Photo by Amanda Katz)
Spectators can see the “building” and the mirrored reflection, and yet somehow the visual prank still works. (Photo by Kara Swisher)
Like a lot of parts of this show, this piece, from a series called “Bâtiment” or “Building,” resonates more deeply than you initially expect. Later, it kept making me think about my own country. We should be able to invite artists, and all kinds of creators, freely from abroad. The country we build should be this welcoming and collaborative, this playful, this much of an organic outgrowth from the artifice of the founding documents. We should be able to envision ourselves in a tableau together, even if it takes a carefully angled mirror to see it.
At the proudest moments in our history, our country has been more like this, and I believe that that spirit is still in there somewhere. I look forward to the chance to show that side of ourselves to the world again.
(Photo by Amanda Katz)
(Photo by Amanda Katz)
In short
This Jon Swaine investigation (gift link) on erstwhile director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for the Washington Post is full-on bananapants—like, “what did I just read, is this the ‘Lost’ of national politics” level crazy. I’m assuming you already know that self-described “first Hindu member of Congress” Gabbard grew up in a Hare Krishna spinoff group, often called a cult, run by a fellow white person from Hawaii? Well…according to a disaffected secretary, someone who is probably that self-same cult leader has been running Gabbard’s political career, down to scripting her talking points and critiquing her facial movements on TV, for years and years. Probably. Anyway, just read this insanity and let’s discuss.
Three progressive candidates for U.S. Congress whom Zohran Mamdani had endorsed in New York City, all to the left of other more moderate Democratic alternatives, won their primaries. Now there are ten zillion pages of Google search results for “mamdani kingmaker,” and really rich people are reportedly freaking out about our new democratic socialist overlords.
Also in the Washington Post: GLP-1s, along with RFK Jr. and his protein-obsessed buddies in the manosphere, are creating a seismic change in America’s food habits “rivaling the low-fat craze of the 1990s, food economists say.” Out: salty, processed carbs. In: cottage cheese. Sooo much cottage cheese.
Recommended
This piece by Ryan Moulton, on the colors that the computer screen is unable to show you, is the best thing I’ve read in a while, and I say that even though the physics largely flies over my head. Basically, our technical rendering of the colors of the real world is making us miss out on a ton of nature’s most magical blues and greens. Why does this matter? “The way we see the world isn’t just intermediated by screens. It is also intermediated by our own thoughts, what we notice and don’t, and what we think is important,” Moulton writes. “In the same way that the designers of color standards had to make decisions about what sensations to reproduce and what to leave out, we are ourselves constantly triaging which of the demands on our attention are most important. The intensity of a color may not make the cut.”
With that in mind, go jump in the ocean or search your nearest park for an iridescent bird. And stay cool out there. This canicule is not for the faint of heart. See you next time.