American or Cosmopolitan
Every hot girl in Charleston, SC is dating a nuclear submariner.
Dear Balloters,
We’re back and better than ever just in time for Independence Day, with a fresh new look. Welcome to our new format, featuring two sides of every theme (The Ballot), guest essays, The Tally, Hot Mic, and a very exciting addition: columnists! First up, Nate Hanrahan, documenting his travels throughout the Southeast in our new series, STATES OF AMERICA.
In future issues, you can look forward to seeing:
DC scene reporting from Richard Vixen (Sophia Morales)
A literary lifestyle column from Mary Fischer
Our new resident advice columnist, DEAR DOLLEY ( inspired by America’s older sister, Dolley Madison) —> send in your questions (about anything) anonymously here.
Potentially more. Tbd!!! (If you want to pitch a series to us, email secretballotdc@gmail.com with your idea and samples of previous work)
The Rootless Cosmopolitan
Audrey Horne
“It’s hard to be a rootless cosmopolitan in America,” thinks the American rootless cosmopolitan. “I travel 3000 miles, cross two mountain ranges, and I’m still in America. What does it matter that I moved from San Jose to San Antonio to Raleigh, that makes me only a little less of a yokel than the guy who never moved at all.”
He reminisces with envy on the great Dr. Evil: ‘My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet.’ Now there’s a pedigree you could never come up with in the United States.
Even if he leaves, even if he escapes into the vast world, his American itinerary clings to him like mold. He has to work overtime to circumvent the pristine McDonald’s bathrooms, the photogenic ruins and the air-conditioned airport lounges, seamless globalization laid out for him like a red carpet. Where is the authentic experience? Where can a man develop his lore?
No, to be a true cosmopolitan American, you have to put in the work. Crucially, a successful cosmopolitan American must not deny his own Americanness. He must embrace it and let the cosmopolitan qualities pass through him. Here, then, are my suggestions for such a soul:
Pretend like your state is a foreign country. If you are from a big city, become extremely annoying about it and adopt a form of soft city-nationalism. “No TRUE New Yorker would ever,” etcetera.
Use WhatsApp as your primary texting vehicle
Choose a favorite global airport. The more far-flung the better. Even better, choose a favorite SEAT on the airplane on a long international flight.
Adopt an advanced taste in cooking. It’s good enough to be seasonal and locally sourced, but you need to be pushing the envelope. Gone are the days of miso gochujang pasta and jammy eggs. Gone are the days of NYT Cooking’s ramp season. You need to scan cookbooks from the 60s. You need to perfect your blanching technique. You need to embrace British flavors.
Start “exploring” a religion that predates the nation state. Be careful not to go too far beyond “exploring.” A light touch is best.
Dress like Dr. Orna. Especially if you’re a man.
Act extremely patriotic as compensation. This only works if the rest of your vibe is maximally disaffected. You ought to choose a deeply uncool national chain (regional is fine, but less ideal) to pledge fealty to and bring it up frequently in conversation as a marker of your advanced, self-aware Americanism. Applebee’s is good. Bucc-ee’s is on-the-nose.
Choose one continental philosopher to refer to by name, as if he were a personal friend.
Develop strong feelings on the curation at the Whitney, the MOMA, the Phillips, the Hirshhorn, LACMA, the PMA, the NGA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Renwick or the National Gallery, as compared to any foreign museum.
In DC especially, it helps to work at the State Department.
Audrey Horne coedits Secret Ballot, in between tweeting all day.
Patriot
Sarah Beth Spraggins
The great thing about the US is it is so huge that you don’t have to feel at home everywhere, but you can go anywhere. There is no such thing as Real America or Middle America. It’s all just true blue America, believe it or not.
Every time I go to California, I think, get me out of here. To me it feels sharp, exposed, cultish, like a door flung open to the sky. But this past week I drove through Bakersfield with my college friends after one of their weddings— the place Eve Babitz says she’d never go to in Slow Days, Fast Company. Of course, she does go, for a boy, and it turns out he grows the most gorgeous grapes she’s ever seen. We drank the kind of wine outside of Bakersfield that I would not normally like to drink, heavy tannic California reds. We got to taste 100s of dollars worth of it for free in a naturally temperature-controlled cave.
When I got home, I went outside and walked around the Lincoln Memorial, by the Jefferson memorial, and the Washington monument. There is a roundness, a comforting human architecture to this part of the country. It’s like being on a college campus, inside the womb of an idea. It’s a natural incubational place for a woman like me. It makes sense that I would want to live around symbolic stone structures and manicured grass, near a small, traversable ocean. Unlike the terrifying Pacific, you can practically row across the Atlantic. That’s why they call it a pond.
Most of the British people I know don’t really understand the United States. I work for a British magazine and every day, I am made aware of our special relationship, our differences and similarities. One of the main things they struggle to wrap their heads around is the sheer size of America. They cannot fathom the importance of Dallas.
Our Protestant work ethic and relationship to productivity, so often derided, is something I am learning to love. This week, the fact that Taylor Swift is getting married on a Friday (cheap) was tossed out as a fun article idea. Coworkers in London chimed in saying that they thought it was posh to get married on a Friday. We don’t have posh, I explained. Rich people in America have jobs.
Americans are many, spread across a massive fertile continent, ambitious no matter how much we win, and earnestly spiritual. Recently, I caught myself walking by the Watergate hotel, wearing a long skirt, a white tank top, and flip flops. I leapfrogged the white stripes on the road. Three different streets come together in different peaches, greens, and steel greys swatches. I felt like Gwyneth Paltrow, pregnant with Apple, a debutante of heaven. The greens were made greener by the whites. In my headphones, I was listening to contemporary Christian music.
CCM may be the most derided of the musical genres native to the United States, but it is my culture, and every once in a while I have to remember where I came from. The four cord melodies and simple, circular lyrics really do point to transcendence. Only in America could we take pop and make it about God.
Sarah Beth Spraggins coedits Secret Ballot
Bombshells
I trudged through the snow to a VC conference at Dartmouth last February and met a B-school student who was a Navy veteran. I said I was up from South Carolina. He told me that he met his wife in Charleston. I cycled through names of guys who may have gone through the Nuclear Power school at Joint-Base Charleston at the same time as him.
The Ethan that I knew was different from the Ethan he knew. He asked the last name of the Chris I mentioned. I said I couldn’t remember, but he dated my friend Erin. It was the wrong Chris; his Chris dated Abby. All the Nukes we knew had the same first names, none of their wives did.
Last Friday I was back in Charleston for a Nuke’s wedding. I cut through the College of Charleston campus while walking from my old apartment on Spring Street to the new book shop they put in the defunct Billabong store on King. The ratio on that route is still approximately the same: seven women to every three men. The women on St. Philip Street are all still beautiful; really put together in an FIT-South sort of way while the tourists give themselves up in Lily Pulitzer and the like. The men are the usual distribution of Citadel cadets learning to dress themselves, bachelor parties, and dads taking their daughters to tour the college. I’ve looked into the census data for Charleston county. The stats say the ratio isn’t that lopsided, but walk the streets downtown and you’ll see it’s that extreme. Ask your friends there what it’s like in bars and on Hinge: it’s that extreme.
A 70/30 ratio creates real trouble for the women in Charleston city limits. Not enough men to go around; fewer men who fall well on the matrix of: good looking, earns decent money now, might earn a lot later, texts back at acceptable intervals. The only group really doing anything about this problem is the Department of the Navy.
In Charleston, a Hinge profile featuring a guy in Navy whites gets an eye roll. In other locales this eye roll is reserved for the “guy holding fish he caught” picture, but in this case the eye-roller still takes the match and usually goes on the date. Entrance into the Nuclear Power school screens for decent income as Charleston goes. It screens for him having his own friends, usually from the flagship state school he went to — maybe from his fraternity or at least ROTC. It screens for intelligence. He’s probably fit. Nukes make good money when they leave the Navy. If nothing else, he shaved that morning. Just sit through the explanations of the phases of Nuclear Power school that you heard on your last three first dates and you might hear something more novel on the second.
When I got to college in South Carolina, I met a distinct type of guy who bemoaned “Yankees” dating Southern girls the same way that heads of state talk about mineral rights. I’ve since met this type of guy all over Georgia and Mississippi as well. He usually stops this sort of commentary once he gets a girlfriend. No nuclear pacifist hates the existence of the Ohio Class submarine as much as this type of guy.
Nate Hanrahan is a writer and engineer.
From DC:
Washington’s home. The Mormon production studio, Angel Studios co-hosted a private screening of Young Washington last week with the State Department at the National Portrait Gallery (in theaters today.) Many members of the administration were in attendance, mingling with the actors.
Soccer mania. The United States beat Bosnia on Wednesday. Secret Ballot made their way from Aslan on 14th Street to the Fan Zone down on Capitol Hill, arriving just as they were winning the game, as fans threw water and beer in the air.
Shadow Play. Hywel Mills and John Jameson Gould made us aware of a one-time print magazine that they released recently, an offshoot of their foreign affairs outlet, The Signal. The issue is focused on the gulf states involvement with soccer worldwide. Hywel said that when his printer in London, a football fan, told him that enjoyed the issue and learned a ton, he felt he had accomplished his goal. The magazine is really special. You can purchase a print copy here.
Photo credit: The Signal Miserable. Sadly, the American State Fair was widely considered a flop.
Stargirl Forever!!! Sarah Beth’s audio postcard on American patriotism is in the 100th and final episode of Emma Glenn Baker’s Stargirl podcast, which came out this week. “Wishing everyone a hot wet American Summer,” Emma wrote on her instagram story. Listen here.
UFC Fan Fest
Loren Anton reports from the scene:
I encountered two drunk men in the street on the way to the UFC Fan Fest: Missouri and West Virginia. They asked me if I was going to “the UFC thing” and I offered to show them there.
West Virginia and Missouri weren’t city people. They were on day two of their bender and a little lost coming up from Navy Yard. After sharing some complaints about their families back home, Missouri asked me what I did for work. I told them I post mean tweets for politicians.
“I need to do that. Tired of this hard labor shit,” chimed in West Virginia.
They soon ran into their buddies and we separated.
The Fan Fest took place at the Ellipse near the White House. The Ellipse was infamously the staging area for the January 6th insurrection but also where Kamala Harris held her campaign’s “closing argument” in 2024. It’s not a very interesting park though. The last time I was there was for the Kamala rally.
A continuous sludge of UFC shirts and MAGA hats flowed through the security entrance at the Ellipse. None of them paid any mind to the anti-Trump protestors that flanked them on the sides.
We all slowly flowed into the Fan Fest. I just made it in time to catch Logan Paul and a few other influencers on stage— they were chatting about their penis sizes.
A little later, the famed Sean Strickland made a cameo in a different part of the fest and a mob soon formed to follow him. I had no idea who this man was but I nonetheless joined the mob in chasing him and his security entourage out the front. It seemed like he didn’t want to stick around long.
By the time indie artist “Downrange” started their set, I left the stage area to check out the other attractions. The lines were horrendously long for everything. The merchandise counter was flooded, so was the Meta AI UFC experience, the Budweiser Clydesdale horses, and even the Secret Service recruiting table. Worst of all, it took me 45 mins to get a beer. I should’ve come drunk like Missouri and West Virginia.
I left as soon as the winds picked up and watched the rest of the spectacle at a nearby bar. I really only paid attention when someone famous came up on the screen.
Lots of MAGA darlings, manosphere VIPs, and GOP heavy weights were in attendance at the fight, but I didn’t catch any of them at the Fan Fest though. I don’t blame them– it probably wasn’t their kind of crowd either.
Buying In
Friend of the Ballot Tonya Riley assesses a recent Lit Society salon:
I’ve fallen for my share of Instagram ads, but “literary lifestyle brand” Bond & Grace gets credit for the first literary salon I’ve added to my cart. Its Lit Society had crossed my feed before, but this was their inaugural event in D.C.—a city Ballot readers know takes its salon culture seriously.
I arrived at the trendy 14th Street bar Jane Jane for the “On Yearning” salon on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. I expected the event to be run by local ambassadors, but it was actually hosted by all three of Lit Society’s co-founders, one of whom also lives in D.C. I introduced myself before the event, and we made small talk about the city’s literary scene and my own writing.
I squeezed into a booth already set with an Instagrammable spread of snacks and introduced myself to the three other readers. Our group, sorted by a post-checkout quiz into “the conduits,” ranged from women in their late 20s to one in her 50s. Most of us had been assigned the same book, Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan, but the discussion questions were broad enough to keep the conversation high-level and philosophical. Lit Society’s chief product officer wandered between groups during discussion rounds, inviting different tables to share.
The experience felt like a cross between a salon and a speed-dating event (which, unsurprisingly, I also inundated with Instagram ads for.) The sold-out event speaks not just to our BookTok moment, but to a growing desire to get off our feeds and back into the world. The brave among us might happily show up unannounced at some cramped Capitol Hill row house for a grittier salon experience, but for me, the structure—and the anonymity of not knowing who would be there—took off the pressure of performing intellect.
You can’t buy “lit girl” cool, but Lit Society proves you can profit off it. Their cunty neck scarf and branded baseball cap are already in my cart for the next salon.
From New York:
Love, Eve. Matt Starr of Dream Baby Press interviewed Vanity Fair’s Lili Anolik on her latest book — a selection of Eve Babitz’s letters entitled Too L.A. Monday at McNally Jackson Seaport. We enjoyed watching Lili light up talking about her love for Eve. Caroline Calloway was spotted carrying a potted orchid nearby.
Hot Hot Hot. Allie Rowbottom read from her new book Lovers XXX at a Punisher’s reading in Soho Sunday, but your editor left early due to the stifling heat. The crowd, as usual, was full of good-looking people in skimpy outfits.
Scene Report. For more insight from the beating heart of rootless cosmopolitanism, read Audrey’s analysis of the New York literary reading scene here.
Don’t Miss
Sesquicentennial Schedule — The city is alive with the sound of America 250, which includes flyovers Friday and Saturday, potentially sonically overpowering some of the FIFA matches broadcast on the National Mall. Be forewarned! Here is the city’s official schedule:
July 3 PM: Nats Park will have fireworks following the game
July 4 AM: 10:30 Independence Day Parade starting at Third St. and Pennsylvania Ave. NW
July 4 AM: 11:00 Independence Day Game at Nats Park
July 4 PM: 1:00 and 5:00 the FIFA Fan Zone will be broadcasting the first ‘round of 16’ games
July 4 PM: Trump Rally near Washington Monument
FIREWORKS: 10:30pm. Find a rooftop where you can.
July 5: 8:00pm England vs Mexico match (“Viva Mexico,” says Audrey)
New Liberal Action Summit kickoff July 15 in Navy Yard [link]
C-List Rappers & Sweaty Hill Staffers The kids of Cruel Kids table infamy are having another party tonight in their series titled after the article in New York Magazine. They reached out to Secret Ballot and then banned us from attending, but there are over 600 people on the list, so you could probably get in if you wanted to.
Red Coats. All kinds of festivities are happening this weekend, but the Brits seem to be the most excited, from GB News hosting a party to a private highly-organized debate on American Exceptionalism.
Cheers to another 250 years of Secret Ballot