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prodigious reader, chronic forgetter
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This year, Pride Month arrives at an especially dire moment for the LGBTQ+ community. Under the second Trump administration, homophobic vitriol and violence are on the rise. On Elon Musk’s X platform, a “deepfake” video of Donald Trump canceling Pride Month has gone viral. And even as Pride celebrations continue as planned (in many places without as many corporate contributions)…
Welcome to the Unsleeping City, a magical New York overrun with the ghosts of crooked cops and members of a fairy mafia. Seven actors had gathered onstage at Madison Square Garden to occupy the fantasy world designed by Brennan Lee Mulligan, the game master for Dimension 20, a streaming show based around Dungeons & Dragons. This was a live one-off episode. Fireballs erupted around the actors as if they were pro wrestlers rather than a group of improv comedians enacting a tabletop role-playing game. The last time they performed in New York, in 2019, it was for 250 people. Tonight, a sold-out audience of nearly 20,000 fans had filled the Garden, to the cast’s surprise. “Everyone I’ve told about Madison Square Garden is like, ‘Oh, is there a smaller room at Madison Square Garden?’ ” Ally Beardsley, one of the actors, said beforehand.
In the game, Beardsley plays a drug dealer who wears a medical bracelet — from his recent top surgery — that gives him powers. Midway through, Beardsley broke character. “Fun fact,” they said as they rolled a pair of dice. “When I made this character, in his med bracelet was testosterone — which is not in pill form. Now I know.” Beardsley came out as trans shortly after Dimension 20 started. In the intervening years, they learned that testosterone is taken by injection. Their hairstyle changed and their voice deepened. In one episode, they made a joke about a bad dice roll making them so mad it burst their top-surgery stitches. Everyone in the audience had watched Dimension 20 from the beginning and witnessed Beardsleytransition in real time, regularly weighing in online to express how much they adored them. “Every time I cut my hair,” one fan wrote, “I dedicate the hair to Ally and pray to the gender gods that my hair will look half as hot as theirs.”
Premiering in 2018, Dimension 20 was the first breakout success for the independent streaming service Dropout. Unlike the major streamers, which try to offer something for everyone, Dropout is about immersing oneself in a world. In many ways, it can feel like one interconnected show about an expanding cast of -comedians — kind of like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but instead of with superheroes, its world is filled with improvisers with niche interests. Stars such as Jacob Wysocki, Rekha Shankar,and Lou Wilson may be far from household names, but if they were getting a matcha at a coffee shop near the UCB Theatre in L.A., they would be mobbed like they were three Timothée Chalamets. Broadly, Dropout shows are nerdy and lighthearted, living at the intersection of games and improv comedy. Besides Dimension 20, popular ones include Very Important People, a show where host Vic Michaelis interviews a guest in heavily made-up character; Make Some Noise, in which performers improvise based on prompts like “Female Characters Who Just Can’t Seem to Pass the Bechdel Test”; and, by a large margin, Game Changer, wherein the game changes every -episode — in one, a heart monitor is strapped to the contestants as they undertake increasingly intense challenges, winning points only if their heart rate doesn’t rise.
Dropout fans have developed a reputation for being young, progressive, extremely online, and deeply invested in the artists who appear on the platform. Many feel marginalized in their everyday lives and see the Dropout community as a place where they are accepted. Pronouns and content warnings are always displayed. (Got emetophobia, the fear of vomiting? Dropout will give you a heads-up.) The talent roster is largely made up of elder–millennial comedians who convey the hopeful vibe of the first Obama campaign. The world of Dropout feels a little like being a Harry Potter fan before J. K. Rowling got Twitter.
While the Dimension 20 seven played onstage at the Garden, Dropout CEO Sam Reich watched from above in a luxury box. “You can really compartmentalize the fandom until you see them in person,” he tells me afterward. “It was a bit of an out-of-body experience.” Reich, 40, purchased the service in 2020 along with its sister company, CollegeHumor, at a moment when it was an unwanted asset. The son of former U.S. secretary of Labor Robert Reich (i.e., the only former U.S. secretary of Labor most people would be able to name), he dropped out of high school at 16 and has been working in comedy and theater ever since. A trained improviser, he hosts Game Changer and Make Some Noise. On those shows, Reich plays a somewhat maniacal ham, dressed like, as one comedian joked on a recent season of Make Some Noise, “a mayor of a town where everyone sings.”
I meet Reich at a coffee shop a few blocks from the Garden before the show. In person, he is affable and cerebral. Dropout, he has said, was an attempt to create a company that lived up to his comedic taste and moral standards. At a time when streaming services have grown overstuffed with content, Dropout makes the case for going niche — if you can call close to 1 million subscribers niche. In a poststrike Hollywood defined by widespread unemployment and bloated CEO salaries, it’s also a model for a talent and business relationship that isn’t exploitative, owing to a profit-sharing program that benefits everyone from talent to the people who clean the studios. It has become an institution to believe in for a generation that grew up not believing in institutions. In April, some fans were bothered when the company announced that the monthly subscription cost would increase $1, from $5.99 to $6.99, but would stay the same for any current subscribers: Couldn’t they also pay the higher rate to better support the performers?
This kind of fierce loyalty has been crucial to Dropout’s growth. It has also come with complications: The more your viewers look up to you, the greater the risk of disappointing them. “I don’t like people putting us on a moral pedestal,” Reich tells me. “A lot of people confuse me for an idealist, but I just want more middle-class media companies to exist.”
The story of Dropout can be traced back to Reich’s own dropout story. When Sam was 14 years old, he became severely depressed. He was floundering at the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose notable alumni include Netflix founder Reed Hastings and Mindy Kaling (she went to prom with Sam’s brother). He went on Zoloft and got a therapist, but relief didn’t come until the next summer, when he enrolled in the Walnut Hill theater camp. “It blasted me out of my depression,” Reich tells me. “Then the new school year started, and I plummeted again.” At home, he was surrounded by high achievers. His parents had committed their lives to academia — both had spent many years as Harvard professors. His elder brother, Adam, who was class president, would go on to become a sociology professor at Columbia. “I was like, I think I’ll be over here being a clown,” Sam recalls.
Sam was interested in magic and Monty Python; at 7, he discovered “Weird Al” Yankovic, who became his main obsession until Jim Carrey came on the comedy scene. At 10, he happily joined his father for the Washington, D.C., premiere of Batman Forever. After the screening, then-Secretary Reich was stopped by Newt Gingrich; Sam had picked up at home that he was more or less the enemy. His father was cordial, but when he introduced the Speaker of the House to Sam, Sam folded his arms and turned his back to Gingrich. In that moment, Robert says, he realized his son did have “some deep principles. He just wasn’t motivated.”
Before Sam dropped out, his parents enrolled him in the Center for Interim Programs, an organization that specializes in gap years, which allowed him to finish his sophomore year of high school in Oxford, England. While he was there, he got involved with the Burton Taylor Studio, pitching a staging of Waiting for Godot and casting the leads. When his father asked him if the actors knew how old he was, Sam said, “No, they think I’m an undergrad.”
The semester ended, and Sam returned to America. His parents tried to enroll him at Walnut Hill for the school year, but when the administration wouldn’t let him act in shows, or put on his own, he threw a fit. They tried a public school next, hoping his problems stemmed from the high-pressure environments he was in. Nope. One night, his mother was trying to help him with his homework and said, “This really isn’t working, is it?” “I burst into tears,” Reich tells me, “and we started strategizing how maybe I could get my GED and then figure out if college was something I wanted to do down the road.” (It wasn’t.) His father struggled with the decision. “When I was dropping out, he sat me down,” Reich says, “and he was like, ‘You’re good at so many things. Why does it have to be acting?’ My response was ‘I’m also interested in poetry.’ He replied, ‘Acting sounds good.’ ”
Back in Boston, Sam staged a production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead at the Tower Auditorium. This time, he told everybody he was 26. After a successful run, The Improper Bostonian printed an exposé with the headline “Busted!” revealing Sam had been 17 the whole time. He wrote a letter in response demanding a -correction — he was 16.
“Everything in my body was telling me to make art but also to be entrepreneurial,” says Reich, who takes pains to acknowledge the privilege of his dropping-out story. Since he wasn’t going to college, his parents agreed to help him with the money that would’ve gone to his education: $3,000 a month, gradually reduced over time until it was set to run out in 2006. It helped fund Reich’s move to New York and, in 2005, helped him start Dutch West, a sketch-comedy group with cinematic flair that stood out in the era of pre-YouTube online comedy. His work with the group put Reich on CollegeHumor’s radar, and in 2006, he agreed to take over the company’s nascent video operation at age 22, right around when he would have otherwise been graduating from college.
That year, IAC, Barry Diller’s online-media conglomerate, bought the fun-loving, party-photo-and-beer-chugging tips comedy brand for a reported $26 million. IAC and the founders hoped to grow it exponentially. “My mandate was ‘Go viral,’ ” Reich tells me. And it did. The channel found success splitting its content with dude-centric bait (i.e., 2008’s “Why Girls Don’t Fart”) and videos starring its employees, set at the office, called “Hardly Working.” People were watching, but it wasn’t making enough money. “It was like a muscle that had outgrown its arm,” Reich says. The company spent a dispiriting couple of years trying to sell TV shows and movies to traditional Hollywood companies. Then, in 2017, the same year that Seeso, NBCUniversal’s -comedy-only streaming service, failed to make it to its second birthday, IAC decided a -comedy-only streaming service was going to be CollegeHumor’s last shot at a sustainable business model. It named the service Dropout and would invest between $20 million and $40 million in the company over the next two years. The name was a play on -CollegeHumor — it implied a more rebellious departure than calling it something like Graduate.
While CollegeHumor was a channel on YouTube, Dropout would be its own platform. The thinking was that it would need scripted shows to justify the price of a subscription. Reich put a bunch of shows into development, including See Plum Run, the service’s first big scripted offering upon its launch in September 2018. While these shows were premium compared with what was available on YouTube, they couldn’t compete with what was on Netflix. After three months and modest growth, IAC decided to sell. Meetings were set up with media companies and studios; IAC was reportedly looking for $100 million. A company that “rhymes with Schmiacom,” Reich says, offered $3 million for CollegeHumor and Dropout’s back catalogue. By December, not wanting this to extend into another year, IAC was planning to accept the offer. Production would be shut down on all CollegeHumor and Dropout content, adding them to the list of online-media brands put down before they could ever figure out how to make money.
When Reich heard rumblings of the deal, which would have put him out of work and killed the brand he’d spent most of his adult life cultivating, he came up with a proposal. In its first year of operation, Dropout had launched a small number of unscripted games-related shows, meant to fill out the platform while the scripted stuff generated acquisitions. That included Dimension 20. While Dropout’s scripted content was not premium compared to what else was out there, Dimension 20 was something worth paying for in the actual play space. At the time, this space was dominated by shows like Critical Role, a YouTube and Twitch series in which viewers watch as a group of professional voice actors mount yearslong Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. Unlike its podcast and livestream competitors, Dimension 20 was filmed, allowing for additional camerawork and editing; there were close-ups and reaction shots that made the experience of watching people play the game more intimate. It gave the viewer the feeling of hanging out with their friends. Dimension 20 would be instrumental in sustaining the platform’s 75,000 subscribers in its first two years of operation.
Reich wondered if the company could operate with a spartan staff focused exclusively on unscripted content, which was less costly to produce. He made his pitch: IAC sells CollegeHumor, and thus Dropout, to Reich for $0, divesting itself from any financial commitment, and in exchange keeps a minority stake. Over time, he projected, it would make a modest profit that would exceed the $3 million IAC had been offered. IAC accepted Reich’s proposal two days before Christmas. On January 8, 2020, in an event called by those who were there “the CH-apocalypse,” IAC slashed the 105-person staff down to seven. The deal between IAC and Reich closed in March 2020. Later that week, COVID shut down all production.
COVID turned out to be good for business. That March, Reich quickly decided to get the main cast of players (most of whom had recently been fired) equipment to shoot remotely, so Dimension 20 never went a month without a new episode. Those who had been following Dimension 20 tuned in to Game Changer — which had launched the previous fall — to watch the same performers on that series. Reich started posting Game Changer clips to his personal TikTok account, and he noticed they could garner hundreds of thousands of views this way. In the comments of each post, people were asking, “What’s this show?” Dropout created a Dimension 20 account, which is when things really started to build. By the end of 2022, Dropout had around 350,000 subscribers.
Social media has become central to Dropout’s development decisions. Reich and his team established a checklist of questions for new shows: Will it do well on social media? Is it worth nerding out about? All the shows the platform launched in 2022 — Play It by Ear, Dirty Laundry, and Make Some Noise — fit the criteria, but it’s Make Some Noise that affirmed this strategy. Dropout’s version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? is the platform’s most instantly accessible show. Each episode, three improvisers are given a series of shortform prompts made up by Reich, Elaine Carroll (Reich’s wife and former Dutch West collaborator), and a few other -writers. Individual prompts perfectly slot into TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. For example, Make Some Noise’s Bechdel Test prompt has 10.5 million views on TikTok alone — but if you watch the show on Dropout, it feels like a cohesive episode of television and not a series of clips. Wysocki, a sort of SoCal stoner version of Jack Black, emerged as the algorithm’s favorite Make Some Noise cast member, which motivated the development team to make him a fixture of the entire platform. All Dropout shows are now built with clips in mind.
By the end of 2023, the company had grown its subscriber base by 50 percent. One day that year, Michael Schaubach, a freelance director on Dimension 20, suggested to COO David Kerns that it would be nice if Dropout offered royalties. After doing some research, Kerns went to Reich and Andrew Bridgman, the chief digital officer, and said, “Royalties are very tricky to calculate, and maybe we could do that at some point, but what if in the shorter term we did something like it?” They landed on the idea of profit sharing.
Since the end of 2023, Dropout has shared profits with every person it pays a dollar to. How much a person receives depends on how much the individual made over the year and what their day rate is, but Reich says it ranges from a tenth to a quarter of a person’s total earnings. Full-time staff are also given three two-week-long mandatory paid vacations in which the entire company goes on hiatus so no one receives any emails or requests when they aren’t working. (This decision was agreed on by the staff, who preferred better vacation time over the flexibility to plan trips whenever they wanted.) Dropout pays for auditions, which means it also shares profits with up-and-coming comedians who audition but don’t get cast. “Anybody who’s in our business should be invested in how talent thinks of them,” Reich says. Eighty percent of why he decided on profit sharing is to make sure talent wants to work for Dropout. “What loyalty this will inspire among our people,” he says, smiling. “Then it’s 20 percent ‘Fuck you, David Zaslav,’ ” he adds, referring to the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Before it was implemented, Reich ran the idea of profit sharing by his father, who has written extensively on the subject. Robert tells me how Sears Roebuck used to profit-share in the 1910s, when the Department of Labor suggested it “as a way of avoiding the labor-management conflicts that were tearing the nation apart.” Some fans like to describe Dropout’s model as socialist, a characterization both Robert and his son reject. It is, after all, a for-profit company. No, Robert says: “It’s a means of saving capitalism.”
Dropout’s rates are competitive and often higher than the going ones for comparable jobs. Performers on its smaller or newer shows get around $2,000 for an episode. For the bigger shows, like Game Changer and Make Some Noise, it’s around $3,000. Very Important People, which demands guests be put in heavy prosthetics and improvise in character for a whole 30-minuteepisode (like John Early and Kate Berlant, who played zombie megachurch owners, or Saturday Night Live’s Bobby Moynihan as a recently unfrozen man), pays from $5,000 to $10,000 an episode. By comparison, CBS’s After Midnight pays $1,400 an episode (SAG scale). Stand-up Gianmarco Soresi tells me that his half-day of shooting Game Changer paid two and half times more than a role on a new Tracy Morgan show on Paramount+. At least one castmember said the main cast of Dimension 20 makes around $7,000 an episode — in part an acknowledgment of their role in the early success of Dropout.
Dropout also produces comedy specials, for which the pay varies by comedian. It paid at least one mid-level comedian $30,000 for a special, which, in the long run, can be a better deal than the $200,000 Netflix offers most stand-ups for a two-year license — in those cases, the streamer doesn’t cover production and promotion (Dropout does), so the stand-up can end up losing money.
Reich wouldn’t share how much he makes a year as the CEO and the host and showrunner of two of the biggest shows on the network. The first year after he bought Dropout, he says, he made $0 because the taxes he owed from acquiring the asset canceled out anything he’d earned. The second year, 2021, he made close to nothing. The third year, 2022, he made more than $1 million. “Ever since that year,” he says, “we started to try to deliberately reduce the amount that’s going to the top.” Profit sharing started in 2023. Zaslav was paid $52 million in 2024, and he doesn’t own Warner Bros. Discovery, let alone appear in an episode of The White Lotus.
In the fourth episode of Game Changer’s current season, Reich introduces a game built around crowdwork. In it, three stand-ups with sizable online followings — Soresi, Jeff Arcuri, and Josh Johnson — call on audience members wearing shirts printed with prompts like ASK ABOUT MY FAITH and ASK ME ABOUT MY FAMILY. Arcuri picks a woman in an ASK ME ABOUT MY LOVE LIFE T-shirt, who shares that she married her college professor, whom she met when she was 20 and he was 38; the interaction is funny and pleasant enough. But throughout the taping, Soresi kept calling back to the woman’s relationship, dumbfounded by how everyone in the audience was cool with the age gap. Later, Soresi heard that the woman had complained about the experience on the Dropout Reddit. Reich checked in with her afterward and said he would cut anything she was uncomfortable with. She was fine with it, but ultimately, he determined that Soresi’s behavior was “bullyish” and removed his portion of the interaction while keeping Arcuri in the edit. (Crowd Control will be spun off into its own series, hosted by -Jacquis Neal, later this year.)
Reich occasionally wonders if Dropout has taken the instinct to please its fans a bit too far. “The audience has maybe encouraged us to create some stuff that’s a bit more comforting by default,” he says. Performers who are part of the Dropout universe tell me they would like it if the material were a bit more challenging. Not that it should go full edgelord, but, to put it in Dropout-friendly terms, right now it can be very Hufflepuff, and it might benefit from being more Slytherin. The stand-ups I spoke to felt a bit boxed in by the feeling that they had to be kinder and more gentle than they are normally (and these are stand-ups generally considered to be kind and gentle). They brought up Nathan Fielder and Tim Robinsonas examples of the type of comedy they would like to see on the service — which is to say, not necessarily politically transgressive but more willing to make the audience squirm. Multiple successful comedians I spoke to who are familiar with Dropout but have not appeared on the service wondered if it would be possible for it to exist as it does but to be a bit cooler — more ironic, more cynical, more grown-up.
Reich says there would be nothing worse than if Dropout started trying to be cool, but he tells me the company is constantly talking about ways to expand the voice without losing the identity. He wants to get more comedians into the fold but doesn’t want to start pulling from stand-ups in the Joe Rogan–verse. What about someone like Stavros Halkias, the lovable, id-driven former Cum Town co-host, who has emerged as a front–runner for the title of Joe Rogan of the left? Reich says his name comes up a lot. To the Fielder suggestion, Reich says he personally just doesn’t like cringe comedy as a viewer. Even though so much of the comedy on Game Changer stems from getting the performers out of their comfort zone, Reich wants the audience to feel comfortable.
Sometimes that’s impossible. In October 2024, fans called to boycott Dropout after the appearance of a guest on Dirty Laundry whom they believed to be Zionist; 1,474 fans signed a petition calling on the company to denounce Zionism. Earlier in the year, the service had raised more than $218,000 for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Reich thought the backlash might blow over. When it didn’t, the company posted a statement on Instagram: “Where Dropout stands is here: Israel is committing genocide against Palestine, and the people of Palestine deserve to be free and safe.” It went on to say, “If there are individuals who perpetuate speech and actions that go against Dropout’s values, they will not be invited back.” The call for a boycott ended, but, predictably, the statement resulted in an even more intense backlash from pro-Israel viewers. After receiving a number of physical and legal threats, Dropout took down the statement, releasing a more vague one that said, “We stand committed as ever to the safety, freedom and lives of the Palestinian people” and “welcome all to our platform who treat others with respect, empathy, and human dignity.”
Sitting on the main stage at Dropout’s Silver Lake studio, Reich is deeply uneasy when I bring this up. Behind him, production staff are putting up the Pee-wee’s Playhouse–esque background that has helped Make Some Noise’s clips flourish online. He calls the decision to release a statement an error in judgment. “It was a hard lesson in how outspoken and political we can afford to be,” he says. With its growth, he continues, Dropout has lost something. “There are a lot of kids who look up to us, and there’s a grief for me in not being able to be an outspoken idealist in all the ways I would like to be.” He adds, “I’m also CEO of a company. There might be something that a comedian out in the world can say that I can’t say because I’m responsible for a lot of people’s welfare.”
The closeness between Dropout and its fans is in some ways the biggest hindrance to its growth. Still, at the moment, Dropout is continuing to grow. Following a period of relative stasis, Game Changer premiered its new season in April, and Dropout acquired 100,000 new subscribers. Kristen Wiig was in talks with Dropout about appearing on Very Important People, and though a schedule couldn’t be worked out, it’s clear that Hollywood talent is curious to play in the Dropout sandbox. With viewership numbersrivaling those of most network late-night shows, especially when social clips are factored in, Dropout will surely become a stop on celebrity press tours, alongside shows like Chicken Shop Date. Reich imagines a world in which Dropout licenses a big sitcom — say Parks and Recreation — that could both bring subscribers and fit in with the platform’s sensibility. But growth, Reich adds, has a cost. “There are 5 million subscribers out there for Dropout, but are there 10?” he wonders. “The biggest argument for growth is as a hedge against shrinking.”
Right now, he’s more concerned with making sure everything they do feels like it couldn’t exist anywhere but Dropout. He worries about shows seeming like video podcasts or drifting into the bland aesthetic of “high-number cable television,” as he puts it, referring to networks like HGTV: “If you’re looking at just budget, Dropout shows and HGTV are not far away from each other.” He’s been discussing a travel-show concept with Wysocki. “We have a good take on it,” Reich says, but the fear is that it ends up feeling too much like general programming. “How do we make sure what we’re doing feels original and funny and of the internet?”
*This story has been updated to clarify pay information for cast members of Dimension 20.
More From the Hollywood Issue
Our How to Seattle guide is filled with 101 very great recommendations of all the cool shit to do in Seattle. You’re welcome! But now that we’re friends, we have some real talk, tough love about the things you should not do while you’re here. We see people making these mistakes all the time. And we hate it. Ignore our advice at your own peril!
Don’t Say “Pike’s Place”The quickest way to out yourself as a newcomer or tourist is to refer to Pike Place Market as “Pike’s Place.” In fact, famous Seattleite Ken Jennings recently corrected a contestant who lost points by making the familiar faux pas on Jeopardy!, adding, “We’re sticklers in Seattle.” In 2021, Ballard High School grad and Hacks actress (and queen of my heart) Jean Smart also told the Seattle Times that the misplaced possessive “s” was also a pet peeve of hers. Mispronouncing Puyallup, Sequim, Tukwila, Mukilteo, or Spokane is also a dead giveaway, so try to brush up on your local vocab to avoid embarrassing yourself. JULIANNE BELL
Don’t Skimp on the TipSeattle currently has one of the highest minimum wages in the entire country, and tourists often use that as an excuse not to have to tip well or at all. Don’t be that jerk. Service industry workers still very much rely on tips to round out their paychecks. In 2024, CNBC declared Seattle the eighth most expensive city in the world based on factors such as cost of living, rent, and groceries. Even the highest minimum wage isn’t a living wage in this city. (Blame our local billionaire-ass-sucking politicians.) When visiting bars and restaurants, don’t skimp on the tip. MEGAN SELING
Don’t Rent a ScooterThree companies offer e-scooter rental services in Seattle, and last year they combined for a total of 6.3 million rides. They’re very popular! But in some people’s hands, they’re also a dangerous nuisance. The rules are simple: Stay off sidewalks and ride in bike lanes when possible. If you ride around like an asshole, darting in and out of traffic or riding on sidewalks at full speed, you’re not only gonna piss people off, but you might be on the receiving end of a pricey hospital bill. Last year, Harborview saw more than 160 serious injuries caused by rentable e-scooters and e-bikes. Some riders have died. Some riders have been involved in road rage incidents. You’d be better off walking or taking public transportation. MEGAN SELING
Okay, Fine, Rent a Scooter, but Don’t Throw It off a BridgeFine. Rent a scooter. They can be convenient, and there are a lot of hills here. But do NOT leave your scooter in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking a crosswalk, or blocking a bike lane. And definitely do not throw it off a bridge. People do that! And you know what? It’s someone’s job to go get that scooter, no matter where it ends up. Don’t make their lives harder. Park it off to the side of pathways or in a designated scooter or bike parking area. MEGAN SELING
Don’t Wait in Line for More than 15 Minutes at Hey BagelIt’s true that Hey Bagel, the new-this-year bagel shop in the University Village, offers some of the best New York-style bagels you’ll find in Seattle. They’re baked fresh throughout the day and sold warm. They don’t cut ’em, they don’t toast ’em, they don’t make ’em into sandwiches—you get a bagel and a little container of cream cheese and just rip ’n’ dip right there in the shop. That said, if you want a more varied bagel experience, or if the line at Hey Bagel is more than 15 minutes or so, head to Bloom Bistro in Georgetown. According to a recent blind taste test at The Stranger offices, they’re just as good, if not a little better! And they’ll make ’em into fancy sandwiches stacked high with all kinds of fillings, too. MEGAN SELING
Don’t Depend on Public Restrooms, They Don’t ExistShit happens, but not in Seattle. Our city is actually notorious for having very few (and very inadequate) public restrooms. The most recent count, reported by Fox 13 in February, stands at 100. For the whole city! New York has more than a thousand! That’s about how many Starbucks stores we have! How embarrassing. MEGAN SELING
Don’t You Dare Speak One Word on the BusWhen you step onto a King County Metro Bus, you will notice no one is talking. We like to keep it this way. If anyone takes a phone call, or—god forbid—strikes up a conversation with their seat partner, everyone on the bus will listen, and we will judge. We want to hear every pin drop and every inhale and exhale so we know we are alive. But don’t mistake our interest in life for an actual interest in life on the bus. If there is conversation, people might get the wrong idea that we’re a big, bustling metropolis instead of a sleepy fishing village—an identity we still cling to. We cannot have that. If you see something, do not fucking say something. Keep it quiet. NATHALIE GRAHAM
Stay the Fuck Away From Bike LanesUnless you’re a local, stay far away from our bike lanes. We see bike lane abuse all day, every day—people drive in them, park in them, and leave their rented scooters or e-bikes blocking the paths. Things have gotten so bad, in fact, Seattleites have started several social media accounts dedicated to shaming bad bike lane behavior. Don’t become a viral post on Bluesky. Stay the fuck away from bike lanes if you don’t know what you’re doing. MEGAN SELING
Don’t Be a Jerk for No ReasonLook, there’s a lot to be bummed about, we get it. We all have stuff going on in our personal lives. It costs $290 to leave the house. No one here understands how a roundabout works. We’re not even going to mention the news. And yeah, sometimes the idea of other people is downright annoying. That said, it’s time to get over ourselves a little, no? Seattle might be dark and soggy eight months out of the year, but if we all put a little effort into being a little friendlier (or, bare minimum, not glaring at people you pass on the sidewalk), we might be onto something. EMILY NOKES
Don’t Use an UmbrellaIt’s not that we’re against umbrellas. Some locals love them! We have an annual music and arts festival named after them! But umbrella use in Seattle is a privilege, not a right. Every day, we’re subject to bumbling bumbershoot carriers strolling through crowded spots like Pike Place Market and farmers markets with their umbrellas at full mast, with little to no regard for who’s standing nearby. Hundreds of Seattleites lose an eye every rainy season due to tourists’ umbrella negligence (probably), and even more umbrella carriers lose a tooth after getting punched in the face by a disgruntled local. Best not to risk it, just brave the rain. MEGAN SELING
Here’s a story in two parts, both of which will be crushingly familiar to you. The main character of our tale is Iowa (uh oh) Senator Joni Ernst, who held a town hall in her home state this past Friday. Ernst’s constituents at that town hall were vocally angry about President Trump’s massive tax bill, which passed in the House a month ago and threatens to cut half a trillion dollars in funding to Medicaid. People will die if this bill passes in Ernst’s chamber. When one audience member informed the Senator of this fact, she responded, with supreme Midwestern condescension, “Well, we’re all going to die.”
That’s the first part of our story. The second part is Ernst’s formal response to the heckling, which she recorded on her phone while walking around a graveyard. Take it away, womanboss.
You always called me angel. At first I didn’t like that. It felt dysphoric, which was confusing, because you were trans yourself, “more” trans than me, having spent years on testosterone, having looked, even before any intervention, more like a guy than I ever could.
The post All the Time We Had appeared first on Autostraddle.
The Trump administration is ending a USDA assistance initiative as the country’s food pantries are “stretched to the breaking point" and a hunger crisis looms.
By Amanda Becker for The 19th
Oaks and Sprouts, Tonni and Graham Oberly’s family farm, got the email from the Ohio Association of Foodbanks just after five o’clock on the first Friday in March.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, had notified the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services that it was ending a program that gave state, tribal and territorial governments federal dollars to stock food pantries from farms within a 400-mile radius. The Ohio Association of Foodbanks, in turn, shared the notice with the more than 150 farms that supplied the state’s food pantries with fresh produce, meat and dairy. One of them was Oaks and Sprouts, whose younger and diverse owners are just the type of growers the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance program aimed to connect to food-insecure Americans.
Last growing season, Oaks and Sprouts had a contract worth up to $25,000 with the program, a significant amount for the small farm. The produce made its way to food pantries in nearby Springfield and Dayton and, from there, to the Ohioans who rely on them to feed themselves and their families. For Tonni Oberly, a trained doula with a background in public health, joining that distribution chain connected her work at the farm to the focus of the city and urban planning doctorate she had recently completed: how place impacts the health of Black mothers and children.
“Food is such an important part of that — access to food in your neighborhood, access to healthy food, the affordability of food — how food impacts our maternal and child health outcomes is really crucial,” Tonni explained on a crisp April day as she and Graham walked through the hoop house where they were germinating seeds for spring planting.
The federal program had also allowed the Oberlys to diversify their farm’s revenue stream beyond the traditional sales to restaurants and at farmer’s markets. It had given them a measure of predictability as they built a regenerative farm on land previously cultivated by Graham’s aunt and uncle and, before that, his grandparents.
“We can plant seeds and know that they’re sold, versus with the farmer’s markets, you plant and you hope people buy it — or even selling to restaurants, they don’t preorder months ahead of time,” Graham explained as he and Tonni stood on the acre of land where they grow garlic, tomatoes, patty pan squash and lettuce varietals that include romaine, butterhead and salanova.
The Oberlys estimate that they were able to hire two of their four seasonal employees last year because of their contract with the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, known as LFPA. They try to pay a good wage for the work — $17 an hour. That’s a decent amount for a place like rural Champaign County, where the median household income is about $20,000 less than nationally and the poverty rate is just over 10 percent. The farm’s goal, they explained, was to grow food in a way that is good for the land, their employees and their customers. Tonni named Oaks and Sprouts for a passage of scripture in Isaiah: “They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.” It is a metaphor for living a righteous life.
The email from the Ohio Association of Foodbanks landed as Oaks and Sprouts was in the thick of planning for its fifth growing season — the third in which the Oberlys planned on participating in the LFPA program. It attached a USDA notice saying that the Trump administration had “determined this agreement no longer effectuates agency priorities and that termination of the award is appropriate.” After the current contract year closes on June 30, the LFPA program, which authorized $900 million worth of locally raised healthy foods for anti-hunger organizations, would end.
Created by the Biden administration in 2021, the Local Food Purchase Assistance program was at once an attempt to support small local farms and an acknowledgement that one of the most direct ways to bring healthy food to hunger-vulnerable populations is to buy it from underserved farmers nearby.
But a USDA press release announcing its creation featured words like “equity” and “climate,” targets of President Donald Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency in their efforts to root out so-called “woke” federal programs. Even before Trump took office, the Oberlys’ program coordinator with Ohio CAN (Community + Agriculture + Nutrition), as LFPA is branded in this midwestern state, had warned them that its renewal could be in jeopardy.
Still, Oaks and Sprouts, like the vast majority of the farms participating in Ohio CAN, began planning for the 2025 growing season. There were reasons to be hopeful. For starters, while the Local Food Purchase Assistance program was part of the Biden administration’s broader COVID-19 relief effort, its funding stream was first used for direct food purchases during Trump’s first term. Ohio CAN, like many state-level local food purchase programs, is also widely popular. Independent experts who analyzed its first year in the Republican-led state concluded that it was a “success by any measure.”
Trump’s picks to lead key federal agencies in his current term also seemed to be working in the program’s favor. Take Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. One of the first things she did upon confirmation was to send state, local and tribal governments a letter that outlined her “vision for the Department’s 16 nutrition programs,” including a commitment to “create new opportunities to connect America’s farmers to nutrition assistance programs.”
Then there’s Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former environmental lawyer, the figurehead of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and an outspoken critic of processed foods. One of his top priorities is encouraging states to prohibit the more than 40 million low-income Americans participating in the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, from using benefits to purchase soda and candy; so far this year, more than a dozen states have been considering such legislation. Many experts say a more effective way to encourage healthier eating is to improve access to fresh foods, exactly the type that LFPA farms were producing and selling to food pantries.
More than 1.3 million Ohioans participated in SNAP during fiscal year 2024, or about 12 percent of the state’s population, according to a Center of Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of USDA data. While the majority of SNAP recipients are White, Black Ohioans are overrepresented when compared to the overall state population. An anonymous survey by the Ohio Association of Foodbanks showed that more than 40 percent of people who visited emergency food distribution centers in 2023 had at least one household member under the age of 18 and nearly as many reported living in a household with someone who is disabled.
The country’s safety net to prevent hunger is a complicated web of federal programs. Most are housed within the USDA and many are jointly administered by federal and state governments. These include SNAP, previously known as food stamps; the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC; school meal programs; Meals on Wheels, focused on seniors; commodities purchases for food banks; and the Local Food Purchase Assistance program that Tonni and Graham Oberly’s farm participated in.
Pulling on the thread of one program puts tension on the others. For example, once a family exhausts their SNAP benefits for the month, they may rely on one of the country’s more than 60,000 food pantries and emergency meal centers to feed themselves. As the USDA is ending programs like the LFPA, Congress is looking at other food assistance programs to find the $1.7 trillion in savings over the next decade needed to renew Trump’s 2017 tax package, which primarily benefited corporations and the wealthy.
The confluence of cuts and changes, coming as more Americans than ever rely on government help for food, has hunger-relief advocates worried the safety net will unravel.
Congress has proposed changes to SNAP that include recalibrating the formula used to calculate benefits, adding work requirements for some parents and forcing states to take on a larger portion of the funding. Rollins, for her part, sent a letter to states in April reminding them that it is ultimately the USDA that has the authority to grant their requests to waive the time limit on able-bodied adults receiving SNAP benefits unless they meet work requirements.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration also ordered states to hand over SNAP recipients’ personal data, including their Social Security numbers, addresses and, in at least one state, citizenship status, National Public Radio reported. The directive came amid the administration’s broader push to amass Americans’ personal data and target immigrants.
Though people in the country illegally are not eligible for SNAP benefits, their U.S. citizen children might be. Last month, USDA directed states to enhance identity and immigration status verification as part of Trump’s broader immigration crackdown, even though there is no evidence that immigrants are improperly participating in the program at significant levels. Advocates worry that in the current climate, using the SNAP program to collect participants’ data could have a chilling effect on seeking food assistance.
The USDA also recently paused $500 million from a separate program that buys large quantities of food from farmers for food pantries, with food banks in Ohio, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and elsewhere losing millions of dollars worth of shipments as a result. When the administration ended the LFPA, it also terminated a $660 million program that linked local farms to schools and child care centers.
The changes and uncertainty are coming at what Vince Hall, the head of government relations for Feeding America, the nationwide foodbank network, called an already “very precarious moment for food banks because there’s no resiliency left in the system.”
“They're stretched to the breaking point. They are serving unprecedented high demand, the highest in over a decade. They are dealing with a decline in donation revenue from the pandemic highs that has been quite steep. The decline of financial donations from the pandemic highs, combined with some of the highest — in fact, record — levels of demand at food distributions has just stretched them to the breaking point,” Hall said.
“If we have policy adjustments that disqualify people from the SNAP program, or if we have a recession and unemployment goes up, or if we have a series of natural disasters, there are any number of things that can work to increase demand, and the food banks just aren't ready,” he added.
In an emailed statement, a USDA spokesperson noted that as of mid-May, states still had $246 million in unspent LFPA funds. “The secretary encourages states to utilize these dollars for schools, charitable feeding organizations, and other programs that serve those in need,” the statement said.
Alabama has exhausted its funds; Ohio had about $435,000 left from $26.6 million allocated; just $1,500 remained in Tennessee’s coffers, according to an official tally.
The spokesperson added: “On any given day, the Department issues more than $405 million worth of nutrition benefits across its 16 nutrition programs. There is no need for new programs, but perhaps more efficient and effective use of current.” These are not reassuring words to many of the program’s participating farmers and food pantry operators, whose best-case-scenario path forward is for the program to be revived under the administration’s own branding.
Graham and Tonni Oberly had to pivot quickly.
After they received the email from the Ohio Association of Foodbanks, they secured a spot for this season in a farmer’s market in Dayton that is larger than the one where they used to sell their produce nearby. They are adding cut flowers to their lineup and growing Chinese Cabbage for the first time, while also trying to expand the number of local restaurants to which they sell what they grow.
But the modicum of predictability that the Local Food Purchase Assistance program gave this new farm for the past two seasons — the USDA considers farmers and ranchers “beginning” for their first decade and eligible for special assistance — will be gone this year. As will the direct line for Oaks and Sprouts to help address food insecurity in their own community.
Graham Oberly grew up on the Ohio-West Virginia border in a family that fought mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, earned a degree in natural resources management and worked as a sustainability coordinator for The Ohio State University before moving into farming.
Oaks and Sprouts is a marriage of the Oberlys’ passions. The regenerative farm is a way for Graham to tend the land of his ancestors and preserve it for future generations. With the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, the farm was also a way that Tonni could expand her work caring for Black mothers and children.
More than 47 million Americans — including one in five children — are considered food insecure, meaning they do not have enough food to eat or access to healthy foods. Rural Americans are more likely to face hunger due to lack of transportation, lower wages and racial discrimination. The highest rates of food insecurity are among Indigenous and Black Americans, according to a Feeding America analysis, with Black children twice as likely as White children to face hunger. USDA research also shows that households with children headed by a single mother are more likely to be food insecure. And food-insecure women are more likely to be obese than food-insecure men or children, with all of the related health issues, in part because they prioritize providing healthy foods for their children instead of themselves, according to the Food Research & Action Center.
In Ohio, the food insecurity rate is slightly higher than the national average. In 2023, Ohioans visited the state’s food banks 14.7 million times, up more than a third over the year before. Ohioans are eligible for food bank use if their household is at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level — and more than a quarter in the state qualify, or about 3.4 million people. Of the 43 percent who were also receiving SNAP benefits, nearly all of them — 93.4 percent — reported exhausting those benefits within the first three weeks of the month, according to the Ohio Association of Foodbanks.
Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-era stimulus package provided direct assistance to taxpayers, $350 billion for state and local governments, and $130 billion to help safely reopen schools, among other provisions. The plan also earmarked $1 billion for USDA programs to build capacity in the country’s food-banking system amid unprecedented need and global supply chain disruptions.
Half of that money went to additional purchases via The Emergency Food Assistance Program — and that is the $500 million canceled by Trump’s USDA in March. Another $400 million was slated for what became the Local Food Purchase Assistance program. Biden’s USDA renewed both pandemic-era programs due to their popularity.
While more than 90 percent of all U.S. farms qualify as “small,” with gross cash annual farm incomes of $250,000 or less, they account for just 17 percent of the total value of food produced in the country, according to USDA statistics. Still, they play a critical role in diversifying the overall food ecosystem by supplying produce, dairy and meat that are not available from large-scale agribusiness. Many grow a variety of crops instead of focusing on one or two. Since they are often serving their own communities, they are less vulnerable to disruptions to complex global supply chains.
In 1973, as global demand for U.S. farm exports exploded, Earl Butz, the agriculture secretary under Republican President Richard Nixon, told American farmers to “get big or get out.” Farmers mostly listened. In the years since, while the number of farm acres has remained roughly constant, the number of farms has continued to decline. When Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary under Biden, released data from the 2022 Census of Agriculture, he noted that in over five years, the country had lost 142,000 farms — a roughly 7 percent decline. “As a country, are we okay with losing that many farms? … Or is there a better way?” Vilsack asked.
The Local Food Purchase Assistance program was an acknowledgement that one of the most direct ways to bring healthy food to hunger-vulnerable populations was to buy it from underserved farmers nearby. More than 95 percent of American farmers are White. They are also older — the average age of a U.S. farmer is just over 58, according to USDA statistics — and predominantly male; women make up only 36 percent of farm operators. Under Vilsack, who also served for the entirety of Democratic President Barack Obama’s two terms, agriculture policy aimed to address the decline in small farms by extending credit and other types of support to people historically less likely to farm — namely women and people of color.
White men’s dominance over U.S. farming is not happenstance. It’s the result of more than 200 years of official government policy that reflects the fraught relationships the country has with race and land.
In the 1830s, the U.S. government forcibly relocated thousands of Indigenous Americans from their ancestral lands in the east, where they had cultivated for generations, to a different climate in the west. Thousands of them died from disease, starvation, exhaustion and exposure to the elements during a brutal journey that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. In the 1860s, in the waning months of the U.S. Civil War, General William Sherman pledged that when the Union won, formerly enslaved Black people, who had farmed for White enslavers, would be eligible to receive 40 acres and a mule to farm their own land. President Andrew Johnson reversed course after he took office, returning the land to White people.
People of color — and women — struggled to access credit, including via the USDA, to buy the land and equipment needed to start even a small farm in the decades of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, throughout the Civil Rights and feminist movements, and into the 1990s. Between 1999 and 2010, the USDA paid settlements in three class actions brought on behalf of Black, Latinx and Indigenous peoples — Pigford v. Glickman, Garcia v. Vilsack and Keepseagle v. Vilsack — arguing that the agency had discriminated against them when they sought loans and other assistance. In 2022, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act created a $2.2 billion fund to compensate farmers and ranchers who experienced past discrimination, including women.
The federal judge in the Pigford case, Paul L. Friedman, noted that “[a]s the Department of Agriculture has grown, the number of African American farmers has declined dramatically,” and the USDA and “the county commissioners to whom it has delegated so much power bear much of the responsibility for this dramatic decline.”
“The Department itself has recognized that there has always been a disconnect between what President Lincoln envisioned as ‘the people’s department,’ serving all of the people, and the widespread belief that the Department is ‘the last plantation,’ a department ‘perceived as playing a key role in what some see as a conspiracy to force minority and disadvantaged farmers off their land through discriminatory loan practices,’” Friedman wrote.
This history — and a tacit recognition of the role USDA played via its discriminatory practices — underpinned the ethos of the Local Food Purchase Assistance program.
In its first year in Ohio, the program bought from 164 growers. A majority of them were classified as “socially disadvantaged,” which for the LFPA, the USDA defined as women; Black, Indigenous and other people of color; LGBTQ+ people; veterans; and small, emerging and disabled farmers. That year, nearly 12,000 pounds of grains, 223,000 pounds of dairy and milk, 39,000 pounds of eggs and more than 2.5 million pounds of produce that these farmers produced went into the state’s food pantries. The more than $9 million worth of food was distributed via five hubs and 12 regional food banks, according to a report independent researchers produced for the Ohio Association of Foodbanks.
The researchers noted: “Overall, producers were drawn to participate in the Ohio CAN program because sharing high quality products with communities in need was often central to their core mission and personal values.” A farmer called the program a “godsend” and said they felt like they were on the “front lines of food insecurity and food instability.” One foodbank representative in a historically redlined area, where banks discriminated against residents of certain neighborhoods because of their race and ethnicity, said it was the first time a farmer had offered them okra and they hoped “we'll be able to work more closely with her to get larger, larger quantities in next year.”
The USDA’s decisions to end the Local Food Purchase Assistance program and to cancel planned commodities purchases for food banks have not been popular. The Iowa Farmers Union helped small farms facing lost contracts send press releases about the impact. Singer-songwriter Willie Nelson, a founder of the annual Farm Aid concert, penned an open letter to farmers encouraging them to protest the cuts. Food bank administrators from Oregon to Maryland to Florida have warned it will stress their ability to meet still-historic demand that has not diminished since the pandemic.
There have also been public spats between Trump’s USDA and Democratic governors like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, who accused the agency of reneging on a three-year deal; Rollins said he didn’t have his facts right and was “trying to make this a political issue.”
For the Oberlys in Ohio, the politics are personal. Their five-year-old farm was just starting to be woven into the constellation of state and federal programs that fed food-insecure neighbors while giving Oaks and Sprouts a toehold in a precarious industry that employs one in eight Ohioans, either directly or indirectly, and generates billions in the state each year.
The end of the Local Food Purchase Assistance program severed the Oberlys’ direct path to care for the people in their community, along with their land. Or as Tonni Oberly put it: “Supporting the local food system is one of the best ways to support the local economy, it supports farmers and community members — it’s a win-win.”
Rollins earlier this week, while touring farms in Nebraska, released what the USDA called a “Farmer’s First” agenda to support small farms. It did not revive the Local Food Purchase Assistance program; the 11-point proposal also did not contain the word “equity.”
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