'The Ditch Weekly'

 

[I selected this article for reposting on Rick On Theater for one reason: the teens who are its subject have impressed me.  This is my way of sending them a shout-out (though I doubt any of them will see it . . . unless one of them Googles her- or himself, or their publication). 

[Go, you guys, go!] 

“COVERING THE HAMPTONS FROM A TEENAGE VIEW”
by Callie Holtermann 

Print is dead? Don’t Tell These 15-Year-Olds.

A newspaper started last year by Montauk eighth graders offers a local take on their world, minus the celebrity sheen. 

[Callie Holtermann’s article about The Ditch Weekly ran in the New York Times on 25 May 2025 in the “Sunday Styles” section.  It was published on 23 May 2025 as “They’re 15. Wait Until You Read Their Newspaper“ on the Times website and updated on 27 May 2025. 

[For this article, Holtermann reported from Montauk and East Hampton, New York, both in Suffolk County, the easternmost county on Long Island.  Montauk is a hamlet within the town of East Hampton, which occupies the easternmost tip of the peninsula known as the South Fork of Suffolk County.

[Montauk is 114 miles east of downtown Brooklyn in Kings County (i.e., New York City’s Borough of Brooklyn), the westernmost county on the island. East Hampton is 100 miles from Brooklyn.  (Between Kings and Suffolk Counties on Long Island are Queens County, which is also the Borough of Queens, and Nassau County.)  Montauk and East Hampton are 117 and 103 miles from Manhattan (New York County), across the East River to the north of Long Island.]

The Ditch Weekly, a Montauk newspaper, is staffed by middle and high schoolers.

On a Saturday morning in May, five hard-nosed reporters filed into an office on the South Fork of Long Island and picked up their red pens. 

For two hours, they combed through the drafts in front of them. Clunky sentences were tightened. Inelegant adjectives were cut. Powdered doughnut holes were eaten, and mini bags of Cheez-Its, too.

This was the final proofreading session for an issue of The Ditch Weekly, a seasonal newspaper about Montauk that is written and edited by locals ages 13 to 17. Its staffers had gathered to put the finishing touches on their first paper of the year, which would be published over Memorial Day weekend [24-26 May 2025—the unofficial beginning of summer in the U.S.].

Billy Stern, the paper’s 15-year-old top editor, kept tabs on their progress in a planning document on his laptop. According to his color-coding system, reporters had already filed articles about nearby summer camps and the construction of a new hospital on the grounds of a former baseball field.

He turned to Teddy Rattray, 15, the paper’s most prolific columnist and Billy’s friend since Little League, to float ideas for a restaurant review.

‘‘We still haven’t done hot dogs,’’ Teddy said. Billy agreed: Hot dogs should be an editorial priority.

The operation has grown slicker since the boys got into the news business last year, as eighth graders at East Hampton Middle School. Billy had been looking for a summer job that was more stimulating than his usual gig squeezing lemons at a food truck. He enlisted Teddy and Teddy’s cousin Ellis Rattray to put together an eight-page paper exploring Montauk from a teenager’s perspective.

‘‘We were still very young; we had no idea what we were doing,’’ said Billy, a junior varsity quarterback whose hair was tousled into a cruciferous mop.

The trio got an early publicity bump with an article in The East Hampton Star [see below], a stalwart local paper whose owner and editor is Ellis’s father, David Rattray. Hyperlocal and proudly anachronistic, The Ditch Weekly in some ways resembled a more wholesome little brother of The Drunken Canal, Dimes Square’s onetime paper of record. Here was another unexpected print publication from members of a digital generation, just with more boogie boarding and fewer club drugs.

[The East Hampton Star is a weekly, independent, family-owned newspaper published each Thursday.  Founded in 1885, it’s one of the few such papers still existing in the United States. The Drunken Canal was a New York City-based newspaper of a little over two dozen pages from 2020 to 2022 (i.e., the pandemic years) that focused on youth culture in New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood. Dimes Square is a “microneighborhood” of New York City between Manhattan’s Chinatown and LES. The name is a play on “Times Square,” and refers to Dimes, a popular, health-conscious, Californian-style restaurant located at the intersection of Canal and Division Street on the LES.]

The Ditch team published 10 issues last summer before taking a break to start high school. But on FaceTime calls and in English class, where Billy sits one desk in front of Teddy, they have been plotting their return.

For The Ditch Weekly’s sophomore summer, its staff has swelled to 20 teenagers. Their goal is to distribute 2,000 copies of the paper a week through Labor Day, funded entirely by ad sales. And they do not want their parents to be involved – except for when they need their parents to drive them places.

Perhaps most ambitious of all, they hope to persuade other teenagers to put down their phones and pick up a newspaper.

‘‘When you’re on your phone, it gets boring after a while,’’ said Dylan Centalonza, 14, a new writer for the paper who covers motels with her twin sister, Fallon. ‘‘This is something you have to put work into.’’

Local News, Local Kids

The teenagers who work on The Ditch Weekly are almost all year-round residents of the South Fork of Long Island. They have summer jobs working at golf clubs and jewelry stores; their parents are real estate agents, financial advisers, farm stand owners and restaurateurs.

They are well aware of the area’s reputation as a part-time playground for the superrich, where Manhattanites sip cocktails poolside and browse the Gucci store. But they are frankly bored by the idea of covering that world and the celebrities who often populate it. ‘‘There’s so many that sometimes you just walk right past them,’’ said Lauren Boyle, 14, adding that practically everyone on staff had bumped into Scarlett Johansson.

They would rather assign stories about the version of Montauk and its surroundings that they know best. In interviews between copy-edits, they described quiet winters attending East Hampton High School and summers spent surfing and biking around Montauk Shores, the community of high-end trailer homes that overlooks Ditch Plains Beach.

[Ditch Plains Beach, widely considered one of the best surfing beaches in the area, is about two miles east of the village of Montauk.]

‘‘Everyone thinks of it as just a rich, touristy place, but there’s so much of the past that nobody really knows about,’’ said Ellis, 15, who wrote an article last year about the history of Montauk’s skate park. Working on the paper, he added, ‘‘I learned so much about the town I live in.’’

Early issues of The Ditch Weekly, which is named for the founders’ favorite sandy hangout, contained Teddy’s review of dueling pancake houses (headline: ‘‘Battle of the Buttermilk’’) and Billy’s interview with a surf shop owner. Ellis wrote a weekly roundup of mischief from police reports (headline: ‘‘Spring Shenanigans’’).

‘‘A Greenwich Village man is facing a felony charge for possession of cocaine after police spotted him in downtown Montauk,’’ he wrote in a dispatch last July, followed by an account of a spat between two intoxicated people over the ownership of a Rolex.

There are also more ambitious offerings. Lauren was especially proud of an article she had just written with Valentina Balducci, 15, about how Montauk business owners stay afloat in the winter offseason. Last year Teddy’s older sister, Nettie Rattray, 17, snagged an interview with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer [b. 1971; lawyer and politician; 49th Governor of Michigan since 2019 and her second and final term ends on 1 January 2027] of Michigan about Gen Z voter turnout that ran on the paper’s front page.

Their output is impressive enough to invite some questions.

‘‘I get asked a lot, ‘Are the kids actually doing it?’’’ said Dana Stern, Billy’s mother, over omelets at a diner in East Hampton. Her attempts to contribute are usually shut down, she said. ‘‘They made it very clear that they don’t want adults helping.’’

Billy does not want the paper to be perceived as a junior spinoff of The East Hampton Star, even if both publications have a Rattray on the masthead. Mr. Rattray, who surely has wisdom to pass down about running a newspaper, wrote in an email that he had intentionally stayed out of Ditch Weekly operations beyond helping Ellis learn how to decipher police reports.

Still, the office the teenagers work out of belongs to Dr. Stern, a dermatologist. A staff member on The Star’s production team, Matt Charron, taught Billy how to use page layout software last year. And Bess Rattray, Teddy’s mother, has offered occasional journalistic advice informed by her career writing and editing for The Star and Vogue. (One suggestion, directed at her son: Don’t accept free pancakes from a restaurant you plan to review.)

The parents are mostly just grateful that their children are doing something other than sitting inside and playing video games, Ms. Rattray said.

‘‘Last year we were kind of keeping them on schedule, through sheer parental panic,’’ she said. This year, she added, ‘‘the parental role is really going to be winnowed down to ‘driver.’’’

‘Print Is Dying’? Don’t Tell Them That.

It is not exactly an obvious moment to break into the newspaper business.

‘‘I hear a lot of, ‘Print is dying,’’’ Ellis said. He and Billy started discussing potential business ideas in the summer of 2023, like selling food on the beach or writing a newsletter. A conversation with Mr. Rattray about his line of work made them consider a paper.

Billy, who joined his high school newspaper as a freshman, called a printer to get an idea of production costs and looked up ad rates on The Star’s website. ‘‘The numbers worked out,’’ he said.

The founders’ parents said they were not covering the paper’s expenses, which are supported by advertisements that the teenagers sell to local restaurants, real estate agents and surf shops. (A few ads have been sold to relatives of staff members.)

Harry Karoussos, the paper’s 13-year-old head of sales, said that he and Billy usually walk into stores with a copy of the paper and a three-page media kit. A degree of transparency is required when he calls business owners to make them aware of advertising opportunities with The Ditch Weekly.

‘‘I have to, like, notify them that I’m a kid,’’ he said, estimating that he had made at least 40 sales calls this year.

Despite industrywide headwinds, The Ditch Weekly is ‘‘very profitable,’’ said Charlie Stern, the paper’s chief financial officer, who at 17 is something of an elder statesman on the staff.

He is also Billy’s older brother; the two have a standing meeting on Sundays to discuss ad revenue and expenses. Staff writers are paid $50 to $70 an article, and printing costs are around $900 per week. A portion of their profits are donated to A Walk on Water, an organization that facilitates surfing for children with disabilities.

The team declined to disclose their profits, but Ms. Rattray admitted that she had been ‘‘astounded’’ by the paper’s financial success. With his cut from last summer, Teddy bought an e-bike.

‘Mom, It’s Under Control’

Back at Ditch headquarters, where the doughnut holes were dwindling, veteran staff members sat with the paper’s first two writers from New York City, Annie Singh and Sofia Birchard. The group debated: Would a TikTok account help them reach more teenagers, or would it cheapen the appearance of their reporting?

‘‘It’s definitely easier to blow up’’ on TikTok than on Instagram, where they currently have an account, Valentina said.

[The Ditch doesn’t seem to have a website, but I gather that the Instagram account serves that purpose at present.]

‘‘And even if we don’t blow up, that’s fine,’’ Lauren responded. ‘‘As long as we have some social media that makes us look fun. We’re not, like, boring people, I don’t think.’’

Nearby, Hudson Tanzmann, 15, the paper’s head of distribution, said that he and Billy had been trying to set up a more sophisticated delivery program than the current system of leaving stacks of free papers at stores around Montauk, weighed down by painted rocks.

The enterprise has turned friends into colleagues, and summer vacation into a cascade of deadlines.

Billy is in charge of making sure everything gets done, hence the color-coded planning document. (‘‘Red is, We need it now,’’ he said.) At times Dr. Stern has worried about her son’s stress levels during what should be the most relaxing season of the year. ‘‘Billy’s always like, ‘Mom, it’s under control,’’’ she said.

But if the learning curve is occasionally painful, it is also kind of the point. Grace Dunchick, 15, said she had returned to The Ditch for a second summer because she liked trying something new alongside her friends and having a physical product to show for it.

This summer, she plans to photograph beachgoers and write about the trends she observes, in the tradition of the fashion photographer Bill Cunningham [1929-2016]. ‘‘I spend a lot of time on social media, so anything to break me away from that,’’ she said, adding: ‘‘It’s really bad. It’s like, actually an addiction.’’

She looked over at her friends, still gathered at the proofreading table, and editorial inspiration struck. ‘‘That would be a cool article.’’

[Callie Holtermann, who joined the New York Times in 2020, reports on style and pop culture for the Times.

[In two posts on ROT, “Books in Print” (14 July 2010) and “We Get Letters” (7 April 2015), I wrote about the disappearance of paper documents, both handwritten and printed. 

[Over the years that I’ve done research projects for school, publication, my individual edification, or out-of-town clients, I used old newspapers and magazines—some of them really old, back into the early 20th century, the 19th century, and even the odd 18th century—digging through newspaper morgues and clipping files, peering at microfilms and microforms years before there were computer databases or Google.

[Many newspapers, especially small ones like the weeklies or semi-weeklies in towns like East Hampton and regional papers covering counties across the country, have closed down.  Some big-city dailies have shut down their print edition and now publish only online, such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has just announced that its final physical print edition is scheduled for 31 December, and in New Jersey, four dailies went all-digital earlier this year: the Newark Star-Ledger, the Times of Trenton, and the South Jersey Times covering Camden, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem Counties (last print editions: 2 February); and the Jersey Journal in Hudson County (1 February).

[As each paper goes digital and forsakes print, there will be fewer and fewer of them to preserve in any format.  Newspaper websites, like all websites, are, despite the myth that nothing ever disappears from the ’Net, evanescent.  Editors and publishers can decide after a while not to archive back issues, as the Jerusalem Post did in 2004 because the owner decided it was superfluous, making it hard to find old articles for reference.  Without some kind of access to hard copies of back issues, even microfilms or PDF’s, research becomes impossible.

[Libraries keep old books and periodicals we can get to when we want them.  Some old magazines are still paper copies, but they’ve mostly been transferred to microform and then digital computer files, but they had to start out as hard copies.  When there are only electronic files to start with, who’s going to archive them?  Will someone keep them updated so that as the storage and retrieval technology changes, as it inevitably does every few years, they can still be read? 

[The East Hampton teens are working with paper and ink, however retro that seems.  I hope someone in the Ditch group is keeping copies of their product for posterity (and that they’re giving a copy to their local library, who I hope is keeping them for future reference.  You might be surprised at how often little papers like The Ditch Weekly have been helpful to some research project of mine. 

[Has any of you ever heard of the Park Slope News?  Or Fountain of Light?  Or Park East?  They’re all tiny papers from which I got useful material for one project or another.  Then there’s Falcon Times and What’s What—a junior college student paper and one from a high school, both of which gave me information for which I was searching.

*  *  *  *
“TEENS LAUNCH A NEWSPAPER FOR MONTAUK”
by Christine Sampson

[This is the East Hampton Star article mentioned above in the Times report.  I thought it was worth adding to the post because it’s a local story, and was published on 23 May 2024, the day before The Ditch’s first issue came out.]

Three East Hampton Middle School students have embarked on a new project: a weekly newspaper called Ditch Weekly, chronicling all that’s happening in Montauk from a youth perspective.

In the first issue — 800 copies of which will drop today in shops and restaurants across the hamlet — readers will see restaurant reviews, interviews, photos, a hiking guide, and even a police blotter. The young publishers went out and sold advertisements — all the things a grown-up newspaper does. Look for nine more issues just like it spanning the rest of the summer.

The newspaper was the idea of Billy Stern, an eighth grader from Amagansett who comes from a community-oriented family. His older brother Charlie, who’s in high school, started an effective peer-tutoring program last year to help fellow students with math skills, and his twin brother, Wylie, volunteers for A Walk on Water [see above] and works for Corey’s Wave [surfing instruction].

“My parents are really hard workers,” Billy said in an interview. “They wanted us to do something, with our summers especially. They want me and my brothers to jump on opportunities when we’re young.”

Billy is joined on the Ditch Weekly masthead by two friends who were already pretty familiar with the news business: Ellis Rattray, whose father, David Rattray, is the editor of The [East Hampton] Star, and his cousin Teddy Rattray, whose mother, Bess Rattray, is the co-editor of The Star’s East magazine.

Ellis said his participation was inspired, in part, by his family’s involvement in the newspaper business. “This is my first time working with people on an actual job,” he said. “I feel like I’m becoming a better writer and getting used to newspaper style. I’d only written papers for school before.”

Teddy commented that “being a part of this newspaper really gives you the ins and outs of journalism. You learn how difficult it is.”

Along the way, the boys got some technology lessons from Matt Charron, who works on The Star’s production team handling photos and page layout. “They’re impressive,” Mr. Charron said. “They’re super motivated. Billy, especially, is so passionate about doing this.”

The boys agreed that deadlines — time management, in general — was the biggest challenge, but that working together has been a lot of fun.

Dr. Dana Stern, Billy’s mom, is proud of them and excited about the debut of Ditch Weekly. “It’s definitely been a huge undertaking, more so than anybody realized,” she said. “It encompasses so many different areas — running a business, writing, editing, and even just the experience of talking to adults and corresponding with adults.”

“There’s been a lot of ‘school-comes-first’ reminders,” Dr. Stern said, “but it’s been incredible.”

Billy said putting the first issue together was “grueling.”

“We thought an old-school newspaper would be a really cool idea,” he said. “We wanted to create something that would help us explore our passions, and I think it really has. I can’t wait to see it. It’s going to be great.”

[Christine Sampson, Deputy Managing Editor of The East Hampton Star, began contributing to the Star in March of 2015.  Her work has appeared in a variety of print and digital publications, including the New York Times, Patch.com, the Huffington Post, and Newsday.

[I love newspapers.  I always have.  Not just what they publish or the people who make them, but the paper document itself.  Each paper has its own style, its own look, from the nameplate on the front page, to the typeface, to the layout and writing style.  Big-city journals, small-town papers, neighborhood papers; dailies, weeklies, semi-weeklies; tabloids and broadsheets—they were all fun to encounter in their own ways.

[When I was a teenager and lived in Germany (my dad was a Foreign Service Officer; see “An American Teen in Germany“ [9 and 12 March 2013]), I kept a list in my head of the different airlines on which I flew and the airports where I landed or took off.  Later, I sort of did the same thing with newspapers I came across in my research.

[I think the first “exotic” newspaper I saw was one my father brought back from a business trip.  It was November 1960, and Dad went to Alaska to scope out potential investment opportunities for a group he and some associates had started just before the territory was admitted to the Union (3 January 1959).  Mom went along with him and they were in Fairbanks on 8 November—the day John F. Kennedy (1917-63) was elected the 35th President of the United States. 

[Dad brought back the whole issue of the next day’s Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the daily newspaper published the farthest north in the U.S., with the banner headline announcing the result of the first presidential election in which the new state had participated.

[I was in eighth grade and about to turn 14, and I’d been very focused on this election, the first one of which I was truly aware.  (Frequent ROTters will know that two of my schoolmates at that time were Julie and Trisha Nixon, the daughters of Vice President Richard Nixon [1913-94] who was the Republican candidate for president.)  I kept that newspaper, wrapped in a plastic sheet, for years, until it literally disintegrated from age and handling.

[Of course, none of this has anything to do with the content of any given article, which is the point of the research, but it’s interesting nonetheless.  It’s amazing how many variations there are on what’s basically the same basic design. 

[Sometimes, however, it is significant to see the original print edition, even a PDF instead of an HTML file.  The optical readers that digitize the original printed text can misread what they scan and you can get gobbledygook in the HTML version.  The HTML also often doesn’t preserve italics where the original print used it and you’d never know if you didn’t check the PDF or microfilm.

[But mostly, it was just fun—like playing the License Plate Game.]

New Word Coinages

 

[As many readers of Rick On Theater will already know, I’m a language geek.  I first studied Latin in 8th grade (back when there were still Romans here and there) and was so enthused that I actually chose to go to summer school and take first-year high school Latin. 

[I continued with Latin for two more years until I learned that my father was joining the U.S. Foreign Service and my brother and I would be going to Germany to live and would be going to school in Switzerland.  So, in my sophomore year, I took French (as well as Latin) and tried to teach myself German from one of those self-teaching books.

[I didn’t really get very far with one year of American high school French and the teach-yourself method was harder than I thought.  But when I arrived in Germany that summer to stay, and my dad had hired a tutor for German, I took off like a rocket.  This was neat!  Our lessons were all in German, and afterwards, I went out into the little city where we were living and explored or ran errands . . . all in German. 

[Latin had been fun, but people—people all around me—actually spoke this new language.  And little by little, so did I.  By the time I got to school in September, I was put in third-year German, though I had never had a day’s lesson before that summer.

[And now, as the school was in the Suisse Romande, the French-speaking part of Switzerland—I was near Geneva—I began to learn French, too.  Our classes were in English, but the rest of our lives were in French.  (Back home in Koblenz, my family had gotten friendly with a French army family that was also stationed there.  They had a son, Marc, who was my age and a daughter, Marion, who was my brother’s age.  We’d hang out like teens everywhere, and, while they spoke a little English and a little German, we spoke mostly French—more and more as my French improved.

[I got pretty good pretty fast.  I paid attention to what the native-speakers said and picked up the accents—both French and German—and the slang (including the scat) and the conversational expressions and the idioms, and eventually, I could almost pass for native.  (People often thought I was from some other part of the country, but they didn’t peg me for an American until I slipped up, or told them.  (I’ve told this before, in “An American Teen in Germany” and “Going to a Swiss International School.”)

[I didn’t get to the level of trilingual, but I was close.  There was even an incident, when I was with Marc at a Rhine River castle ruin where we had a German-speaking guide and were joined on the walk by an American couple and I found myself translating the guide’s German into French for Marc and into English for the couple, and then the English and French questions into German for the guide!

[This was one of those instances when the Americans thought I was a local, and they complimented me on how well I spoke English.  When I said I was American like them, they didn’t believe me at first.  Then I told them I was born in Washington and that my father was a diplomat in Koblenz, a few clicks along the river.

[One thing that fascinated me in this experience with languages I was having was in seeing how the three tongues—not just the words and phrases, but also the structures, the grammar and the syntax—resembled each other and how they were different.  As readers might know, French, German, and English are all related because they developed as branches of the same language group, the Indo-European family of languages.  (I would later go on to study Russian, which is another branch of the same group. The similarities and differences appeared there as well.)

[But I also got a kick out of learning how some totally trivial things are entirely different—like why the card game we call crazy eights, in French is huit américains (eight Americans).  And why do the French call an ‘April fool’ a poisson d’avril (April fish)?  (A German just shouts, "April, April!")  Here’s one that’s even a little insulting: what we call ‘brass knuckles’ (and the Brits call a ‘knuckle duster’), the Germans call a Schlagring, which is pretty close: ‘punch ring.’  But the French call it a poing américain—an ‘American fist’!

[When I went back to the States for college after three years of living in Europe—I would commute back and forth for two more years—I got two years advanced placement in both French and German, so I skipped all the freshman and sophomore classes and went right into junior- and senior-level courses.  Double-majoring was an obvious decision, and it also left room in my schedule for other classes I could take just for my own edification.  Among others I took, I took Russian and a course in linguistics, the scientific study of language and its structure. 

[Both those decisions, though I made them at the time just for my own pleasure and curiosity, turned out to be fortuitous.  I was an Army ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) cadet and was commissioned a second lieutenant when I graduated.  I took a six-month break and was reporting for active duty in December.  This was 1969, and there was a war going on in Southeast Asia.  I was a military intelligence officer and the life expectancy of MI lieutenants in Vietnam was five minutes after deplaning.

[I reported to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for the officer’s basic course.  (MI didn’t have its own officer’s basic course at that time, so it farmed us out to larger programs, including infantry at Fort Benning and armor (that’s tanks—you know, like Patton—the modern cavalry, for you non-military types) at Knox.

[Well, the first days of our training included many tests and examinations, among them a language aptitude test.  Lo and behold! it was exactly the same as the midterm and final exam of my linguistics class at college seven or eight months earlier—not the same questions, of course, but the same kind of problems to solve.  I maxed the test!  Not just the highest score of all the test-takers, but the highest score possible.

[So, when the officer from the Pentagon who was advising us MI officers about career choices had the mass meeting with all of us, the first thing he did was call out my name.  Of course, I figured I’d done something wrong—and so did everyone else in the room.  (I didn’t know about the test score yet.)  Then he announced what I’d done and said that I had the choice of any available language class, but that if I didn’t make a selection, the army’d choose one for me.  That meant only one language course—Vietnamese—which meant only one assignment—a year in Vietnam.

[Now, there was one slot in a Russian class and everyone who wanted language training was waiting to see what I’d do because I was going to get first pick and everyone had to choose from what was left.  Of course, I was going to take the Russian course!  It was a year-long gig doing something that was, for me, like playtime.  That’s all I needed to know to make my decision, but what I didn’t reckon on, because I didn’t know until I got there, was that the Presidio of Monterey is probably the prettiest post in the U.S. Army; Monterey, California, on a bay in the Pacific Ocean, an hour or an hour-and-a-half south of San Francisco, is easily one of most gorgeous spots on this continent; and my duty would be six hours of class—three in the morning, two hours for lunch, and three hours in the afternoon—for five days a week, and few military responsibilities.  All I had to do was study Russian.  OMG!  Please, please, please don’t throw me into that briar patch!

[This was my life for 50 weeks, plus two off at Christmas/New Years.  By the end of the course, I knew I was being posted to Germany—exactly where, I didn’t know.  I got myself released from the last hour of the Russian classes to shoot over to the German department to brush up on that language, and at the end of my tour at the Defense Language Institute, I took the proficiency tests in German and French, and, of course, the Russian test came at the end of the course.  So, my record now reflected that, along with whatever other attributes I offered, I was proficient in three foreign languages: French, German, and Russian.

[From California I had to come back east for intelligence training.  They tapped me for counterintel, which was five months of training at Fort Holabird, Maryland, located in the dock area of Baltimore harbor.  The training was fine, even interesting—I was learning to be a counter-spy, how could that not be interesting—but the post sucked.  It was very old and it was closing (the Intel Center was moving out west to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where MI would finally have its own officer’s basic programs), so the army wasn’t expending any time, effort, or funds to keep the place up.  We were the last officer class to train there and then it was being decommissioned.  (The Watergate burglars were incarcerated there in 1974, after the place had been shuttered for three years.  As I’ve said several times, they were well and truly punished being locked up at Holabird.)

[At Holabird, I got my assignment for Germany.  At first, I couldn’t believe it.  Berlin!  Not just Germany, which I already knew, but Berlin.  It was reputed to be the best assignment in Europe (maybe even the whole army), and for MI, because of its sensitivity, only the top personnel available were sent there.  Then, of course, I saw why.  Aside from anything in my personal make-up the army might have spotted, there’s no place on Earth where the U.S. had troops where facility in English, French, German, and Russian was a major asset, especially in Military Intelligence, than West Berlin.

[Unlike the rest of Germany—both of them, really, the West and the East—Berlin, because there’d been no peace treaty signed after World War II, was still under occupation.  The four post-war sectors were still occupied by troops from the wartime allies: the United States, the British, the French, and the Soviets.  We all had unfettered access to all four sectors, and we all took advantage of that provision.  On top of that, Berlin was the spy capital of Europe in those days.  There were probably more intelligence operatives of one kind or another in Berlin when I got there than anywhere except Saigon.

[So, my language acuity, my language study, my interest in languages, and the three I ended up studying, plus that remarkable piece of luck with the test at Fort Knox—not how well I did on it: that wasn’t luck, but that it was that kind of test and that I’d taken that linguistics course just before—all came together to land me in West Berlin for my last 2½ years in the army.  All because I was—am—a language geek.] 

“BAMBOOZLING ELDERS WITH TERMS ALL THEIR OWN”
by Madison Malone Kircher 

[I read the article following this one a few days ago, and decided to repost it.  Then, as I was working on it, I found the piece directly below in the New York Times of 12 November 2023 (in the “Sunday Styles” Section).  I decided to run them both.  (It turns out there are a few more articles on the subject of either Internet slang or the current cant of Generation Alpha, and you’ll find them in some of the embedded links as you go along.  Madison Malone Kircher’s article was also posted to the paper’s website as “Gen Alpha Is Here. Can You Understand Their Slang?” on 8 November.]

Are you a sigma? How much rizz do you have? And, are you going to pay that Fanum tax?

Do you know what a gyat is? What about a rizzler? And how, precisely, does one pay a Fanum tax?

Welcome to the language of Gen Alpha, the cohort [birth years 2013-24] coming up right behind Gen Z [born around 1997 to 2012]. These children of millennials [born from 1981 to 1996; also called Gen Y] have begun a generational rite of passage — employing their own slang terms and memes, and befuddling their elders in the process.

[Most people in the U.S. are familiar with the concept of social generations (as distinguished from familial generations).  I’m a member of the Baby Boom Generation, born between 1946 and 1964 (I was born at the end of 1946, 15 months after the end of World War II).  My parents were both part of the Greatest Generation, born from 1901 to 1927 (Dad in November 1918, six days before the World War I armistice; Mom in April 1923, just five months after Benito Mussolini was named prime minister of Italy and established the first modern totalitarian state in Western Europe, a preliminary step on the path to World War II).

[Generally, the span of birth years for social generations varies around 15 years, but it’s not set and different historians and writers use different dates to define generational membership.  Gen Z is the last demographic cohort—another term for ‘social generation’—to have members born in the 20th century. 

[Gen Alpha gets its name because it follows the scientific protocol of using the Greek alphabet to designate chronological order or hierarchy, and Gen Alpha is the first cohort entirely born in the 21st century and the 3rd millennium.  (Gen Beta is the projected designation for the cohort born in 2025-39.)]

Which brings us back to gyat (rhymes with “yacht,” with a hard “g” and a firm emphasis on “yat”).

“There’s no cute way to say it — it’s just a word for a big butt,” said Alta, a 13-year-old eighth grader in Pennsylvania. “If someone has a big butt, someone will say ‘gyat’ to it.”

Alta and her brother Kai, an 11-year-old sixth grader, said they had learned the word on TikTok and that it had suddenly become popular among their classmates. The internet encyclopedia Know Your Meme credits the sudden popularity of “gyat” to the Twitch livestreamer [sic] Kai Cenat. (In August, Mr. Cenat made headlines when his fans swarmed Union Square Park in Manhattan after he promised to give away gaming consoles at no cost.)

“I don’t say ‘gyat’ to people, though, unless they’re my friend,” Alta said. “And we say it to our mom.”

Several other new words have become part of this generation’s vernacular, and six members of Gen Alpha offered their decoding services for this article. (Their parents gave permission for them to be interviewed, with the agreement that their last names would not be used.) Many of the children cited a catchy parody song [this link seems to be broken, perhaps due to the controversy over TikTok; try gyatt for the rizzler by Buni | Suno] making the rounds on TikTok as a key to the slang’s rising popularity. The lyrics go like this:

Sticking out your gyat for the rizzler
You’re so skibidi
You’re so Fanum tax
I just wanna be your sigma

A rizzler is a “good person,” according to Malcolm, a 10-year-old in Washington state.

“Having rizz is when you have good game,” Alta said. “Being a rizzler is like when you’re a pro at flirting with people.” (Rizz is short for charisma.)

The word can be used as a compliment or a joke, according to Jaedyn, 12. She said that the boys at her school in New Jersey had been singing the song lately, adding that it gave her a headache.

Jaedyn added that “nobody really knows” the meaning of “skibidi.” It has entered the lexicon by way of the animated series “Skibidi Toilet,” which has racked up more than 700 million views on YouTube. A typical episode is about 15 seconds long and features a man who pops his head out of a toilet bowl and launches into a song heavy on the use of the word that gives the show its name. (It’s easier if you just watch it. Boomers might think of “Skibidi Toilet” as a 2020s answer to the animations of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”)

“I don’t like,” Tariq, 8, said of the series. “It creeps me out. Every time I go to the toilet, I just want to get it quick done.” Tariq, who lives in New York State and is known online as Corn Kid, said he was not familiar with the other terms.

Fanum tax refers to Fanum, a popular streamer on Twitch who regularly appears online with Mr. Cenat. When friends are eating in Fanum’s presence, he insists that they share some of their food with him. That’s the Fanum tax.

And sigma has something to do with wolves.

“Everyone in my grade, at least, says it in a way where they’re like the alpha of the pack,” Alta said. “If you’re trying to say you’re dominant and you’re the leader, you’ll call yourself ‘sigma.’”

In a TikTok video posted in October, Philip Lindsay, a special-education math teacher in Payson, Ariz., listed a few terms he had been hearing in the classroom, including Fanum tax and gyat. “Which does not mean ‘get your act together,’” Mr. Lindsay, 29, said in the video, which has since been viewed over four million times.

His students tried at first to make him believe that gyat was an acronym that stood for “go you athletic team,” he said in an interview. He recently had to explain gyat’s real meaning to a colleague whose students had convinced the teacher to display the word in the classroom.

Mr. Lindsay said the new words struck him as more “meme-like” than earlier slang terms. He added that he believed they were “driven mainly by social media, TikTok specifically.”

Gen Alpha is still being born, according to demographers. Its birth years span from 2010 to 2025, said Mark McCrindle, a generational researcher in Australia who coined the name Gen Alpha several years ago.

Online, members of Gen Z have begun to realize they are no longer the new kids on the digital block — and that Gen Alpha might be coming for them, in the same way that they had once gone after millennials.

Anthony Mai, a TikTok creator with a large following, recently posted a video of himself wearing a comically deadpan expression as the Gen Alpha-slang song played. “Gen Alpha is making their own memes now,” he wrote in a caption. “It has begun. We are the next cringe gen on the chopping block.”

Intergenerational comedy has become a staple on social media platforms, where creators dramatize the differences between age groups. Skibidi and gyat fit snugly into the memes and video shorts belonging to this subgenre.

“Whenever I think about the linguistic differences between generations, I just think, Are we really going to do this again?” said Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media at the University of Alabama. “Generational differences and divides have always been played up to some extent, even before the heyday of the internet, but social media really exacerbates them.” She cited “OK, boomer,” a retort popularized online by Gen Z in 2019, as an example.

As Gen Alpha’s slang terms make their way into the wider (read: older) world, the young people responsible for their popularity are ready to move onto what’s next.

“If millennials start saying them, we’ll be like, ‘We’re done with these now,’” Jaedyn said.

[Madison Malone Kircher is a reporter for the Times.  She writes about the internet for the Styles desk.]

*  *  *  *
 
“HE’LL TRANSLATE THE LATEST SLANG FOR YOU”
by Callie Holtermann 

[Callie Holtermann’s article on today’s neologisms from the mouths and keyboards of the latest generation to make itself felt on our culture and its verbal expression ran in the New York Times on 27 July 2025, in the “Sunday Styles” Section.  On the Times’ website, it was posted as “The Harvard-Educated Linguist Breaking Down ‘Skibidi’ and ‘Rizz’” on 12 July.]

A Harvard-educated linguist breaks down ‘skibidi,’ ‘rizz’ and other algorithm-fueled words.

Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs — a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. Influencers shared stories from their “seggs lives” and spoke about the importance of “seggs education.”

[Adam Aleksic (b. 2001) is a linguist and content creator posting educational videos as the “Etymology Nerd” to an audience of over two million. As a linguistics student at Harvard College, he founded and served as president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. He’s discussed online language on National Public Radio, repeatedly contributed to the Washington Post, and his work has been mentioned in the New York Times, The Economist, and The Guardian. He’s lectured on language and social media at Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and other top universities, including a TEDx talk (independent event similar to a TED Talk in presentation that can be organized by anyone who obtains a free license from TED [Technology, Entertainment, Design]) at the University of Pennsylvania. Adam is based in New York City. (from his Penguin Random House bio)]

Lots of similarly inventive workarounds have emerged to discuss sensitive or suggestive topics online. This phenomenon is called algospeak, and it has yielded terms like “cornucopia” for homophobia and “unalive,” a euphemism for suicide [or ‘dead’] that has made its way into middle schoolers’ offline vocabulary.

These words roll off the tongue for Mr. Aleksic, a 24-year-old linguist and content creator who posts as Etymology Nerd on social media. Others may find them slightly bewildering. But, as he argues in a new book, “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language” [Alfred A. Knopf, 2025], these distinctly 21st-century coinages are worthy of consideration by anyone interested in the forces that mold our shifting lexicon.

“The more I looked into it, the more I realized that algorithms are really affecting every aspect of modern language change,” Mr. Aleksic said in a recent interview, padding around the Manhattan apartment he shares with a roommate and wearing socks stitched with tiny dolphins.

Even those who steer clear of social media are not exempt. If you have encountered Oxford University Press’s 2024 word of the year, “brain rot” (the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” thanks to a fire hose of digital content), you, too, have had a brush with social media’s ability to incubate slang and catapult it into the offline world.

Mr. Aleksic has been dissecting slang associated with Gen Z on social media since 2023. In wobbly, breathless videos that are usually about a minute long, he uses his undergraduate degree in linguistics from Harvard to explain the spread of terms including “lowkey” and “gyat.” (If you must know, the latter is a synonym for butt.)

The videos are more rigorous than their informal quality might suggest. Each one takes four or five hours to compose, he said. He scripts every word, and combs Google Scholar for relevant papers from academic journals that he can cite in screenshots.

He appears to be fashioning himself as Bill Nye for Gen Z language enthusiasts. In the process, he has become a go-to voice for journalists and anyone older than 30 who might want to understand why “Skibidi Toilet,” the nonsensical name of a YouTube series, has wormed its way into Gen Alpha’s vocabulary [see article posted above].

[William Sanford Nye (b. 1955) is a science communicator, television presenter, and former mechanical engineer known universally as “Bill Nye the Science Guy” (for his like-titled TV show [1993-99; Public Broadcasting Service and syndication]).]

What he wants now is to be taken seriously outside of those circles. “I want to balance being a ‘ha-ha funny’ TikToker with academic credibility,” he said. “It’s a little hard to strike that balance when you are talking about ‘Skibidi Toilet’ on the internet.”

‘Rizz’: A Case Study

Mr. Aleksic settled in his living room, under the apparent surveillance of several stick-on googly eyes left over from his most recent birthday party. To the left of the entrance was a makeshift ball pit filled with orbs that resembled enormous plastic Dippin’ Dots. (He installed it as a bit, but has come to appreciate its ability to foster conversation.)

[Maybe I’m alone here, but I never heard of Dippin’ Dots, so I had to look it up. If there are others in my boat, here’s the scoop (pun intended—sorry):

[Dippin' Dots is a brand of ice cream, yogurt, sherbet, and flavored ice that comes in small, bead-shaped pieces about the size of a small pea. They’re created by flash-freezing the ice cream mix in liquid nitrogen at extremely low temperatures which prevents the formation of large ice crystals, resulting in a denser and creamier texture than regular ice cream.]

In person, he is animated but not frenetic, a click or three less intense than he appears in his videos. He is happy to lean into the persona of a fast-talking know-it-all if it means engaging people who wouldn’t otherwise spare a thought for etymology.

He started speeding up his cadence when he realized that brisk videos tended to get more views. “I’ll retake a video if I don’t think I spoke fast enough,” he said.

Just as Mr. Aleksic changed the way he spoke in response to algorithmic pressure, language, too, can be bent by users seeking an audience on social media.

Take “rizz,” which means something along the lines of “charisma.” According to Mr. Aleksic, the word was popularized by the Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, whose young fans picked up the term. So did the robust ecosystem of people online who make fun of Mr. Cenat’s every move. Soon, the word had been flagged by TikTok’s recommendation algorithm as a trending topic that it could highlight to keep viewers engaged. Influencers — including Mr. Aleksic — who wanted their posts to be pushed to more viewers now had an incentive to join in.

Words have always traveled from insular communities into wider usage: Mr. Aleksic likes the example of “OK,” which was Boston newspaper slang in the 19th century that spread with the help of Martin Van Buren’s re-election campaign. (His nickname in full, “Old Kinderhook,” was a bit of a mouthful.)

[Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) was the 8th President of the United States, serving from 1837 to 1841. A primary founder of the Democratic Party, he served as New York's attorney general (1815-19) and U.S. senator (1821-28), then briefly as the 9th governor of New York (1829). He was from Kinderhook—hence the nickname—in the eastern part of New York, relatively close to the Massachusetts border.]

But “delulu” [noun: delusion; delusional person; adjective: delusional] and “rizz” didn’t need the eighth president’s help to travel across the country — they had the internet. And TikTok’s powerful algorithm is more efficient at getting the word out than Old Kinderhook’s most overachieving press secretary.

Today, the cycle of word generation has been turbocharged to the point that some of its output hardly makes sense. Nowhere is that more evident than in a chapter titled “Sticking Out Your Gyat for the Rizzler,” a chaotic mélange of slang that is hilarious to middle schoolers precisely because it is so illegible to adults. Words and phrases don’t need to be understood to go viral — they just have to be funny enough to retain our attention.

Mr. Aleksic argues that “algospeak” is no longer as simple as swapping sex for “seggs”; it is a linguistic ecosystem in which words rocket from the margins to the mainstream in a matter of days, and sometimes fade just as fast. When influencers modify their vocabulary and speech patterns for maximum visibility, those patterns are reinforced among their audiences.

Does that have to be a bad thing? Moments of linguistic upheaval, like the proliferation of “netspeak” in the early 2000s, are not always as scary as they seem, the linguist David Crystal [b. 1941; British writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster] argued in his 2001 book “Language and the Internet” [Cambridge University Press]. Rather, they can allow for bursts of creativity.

“The internet is Homo loquens at its best,” Professor Crystal told The New York Times in 2001. “It shows language expanding richly in all sorts of directions.”

[Homo loquens is Latin for “speaking man,” a term that highlights the uniqueness and significance of human speech and language abilities as a distinctive behavior of our species. Note, for comparison, the scientific name for our species is Homo sapiens, ‘knowing man,’ and a 1938 Dutch book by historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) is Homo ludens, ‘playing man,’ that examines the play element in culture and society.]

An Etymology Nerd Is Born

It is easy to imagine that Mr. Aleksic might be the son of linguistics professors, or perhaps a descendant of the creator of Scrabble. In reality, he is the child of two atmospheric research scientists at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. His mother works in air-pollution modeling, he said, and his father is “an expert in cloud physics, or something.”

Mr. Aleksic grew up in Albany, N.Y., and got interested in linguistics as a freshman in high school after reading “The Etymologicon” [Icon Books, 2011] by Mark Forsyth. He started his own blog about word origins — etymologynerd.com — which broke down one word a day, including, early on, sophomore (which shares Greek roots with “sophisticated” and “moron”).

In college, he helped found the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and majored in linguistics and government. During his final semester on campus, he began posting linguistics videos on TikTok at the suggestion of a friend. The strategy earned him millions of views as well as some critics, who gather in Reddit forums to pick apart his facts or his delivery. “I like fun facts about etymology,” one wrote. “I don’t like having them shouted at me.”

Mr. Aleksic doesn’t mind those complaints. He said he works hard to keep viewers’ attention, for example, jumping between camera angles roughly every eight seconds. He longed for a forum in which he could discuss his ideas at length, and last January, he began refining an idea for a book about algorithms and language.

That’s an ambitious goal for a recent college graduate without an advanced degree or decades of research experience, the kinds of qualifications that abound in the linguistics publishing crowd. But youth has its upsides when it comes to the world of internet slang, said Gretchen McCulloch, the author of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language” [Riverhead Books, 2019].

“The tricky thing with internet linguistics is that the point at which you’re the most qualified to speak about it from personal experience is also the point at which you have the least, sort of, academic credibility,” Ms. McCulloch said in an interview.

She, too, is fascinated by how short-form video is affecting language, though she wonders which changes will be permanent and which will fade with time. Take the way that influencers often begin their videos with superlatives like “The most interesting thing about . . . [.]” Will those hyperbolic phrases bleed into other forms of communication, or will they lose their potency with overuse? There is a whole graveyard full of internet-speak — “on fleek” [‘perfectly done,’ ‘exactly right,’ ‘excellent’], you will be missed — that has fallen out of fashion.

While Mr. Aleksic wades through these big questions, he is also making time for really small ones. He is hoping to make a video about urinal conversations, which have been the subject of more academic papers than you might think. While we spoke, he pulled up his email inbox to scan through the questions that had come in from his followers. (He gets about 10 a day.)

“Somebody emailed me about the word ‘thank’ versus ‘thanks,’” he said, scrolling through a message. “You know, that’s kind of interesting.”

[Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for the Times.

[There are several of other posts on language and words on Rick On Theater.  Some that might amuse you are: “Franglais,” “Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations,” “‘GHOTI’” by Ben Zimmer.]

"The Reformation" – Introduction: "A Revolution Behind the Curtain"

by Callie Holtermann 

[Jesse Green is the chief theater reviewer for the New York Times.  Over the summer, he wrote a series of articles examining the conditions in the theater in the United States, to be published in Sunday’s “Arts & Leisure” section. 

[There are four essays in the series, published under the omnibus title “The Reformation,” starting on 12 June with “Is It Finally Twilight For Sacred Stage Monsters?” which looks at the powerful bullies and tyrants in the business.  The following three pieces, one each month through September, cover other problems besetting the people who make their lives in the theater.

[At the time of Green’s third essay, 7 August 2022, Callie Holtermann, a writer for “Times Insider,” a feature which purports to explain who the Times is and what it does, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how its journalism comes together, published this short article, “A Revolution Behind the Curtain,” on page 2 of the front (news) section.

[I’ll be posting the four essays in Green’s series in order of their publication, but I’m posting Holtermann’s article, which I view as a belated introduction to “The Reformation,” first despite its later publication date.]

A new series of essays captures American theater as it attempts to reject some of its foundational inequities.

Forty years ago, Jesse Green, then a recent college graduate with a degree in English and theater, was a general assistant at the Williamstown Theater Festival [in Massachusetts]. He made waffles, cleaned toilets and performed other work, all of it unpaid and “some of it unsafe and some of it degrading,” he wrote later.

The festival introduced a young Mr. Green to the excitement of professional theater, but it came with a warning. “In order to be worthy of the great art form, we also had to be subjugated,” he said.

Now the chief theater critic for The New York Times, Mr. Green examines, in a series of essays called “The Reformation,” the long-held notion that actors and others who toil in the theater must suffer for their art. The four essays, all written by Mr. Green, explore the consequences of the American theater industry’s long-overdue admission that bullying, dismal pay, dangerous working conditions and mistreatment and exclusion of artists of color cannot be excused as the purported cost of great art, he said. Blending reporting and criticism, he aims to understand how calls for change in each of these areas will reshape the industry and the work it produces.

Mr. Green began developing the series during the period of darkened marquees and Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. Criticism of the industry had swelled into a 29-page set of demands from the coalition known as We See You, White American Theater, which included suggestions to rename half of all Broadway theaters, impose term limits for industry leaders and require that at least half of those in casts and creative teams be people of color.

“That was sort of a hook: Here is a really well-stated list of complaints and suggestions and demands,” Mr. Green said. “I began to think, so what are the theaters going to do about it? And also, what am I going to do about it?”

He brought the idea to Nicole Herrington, The Times’s theater editor, who agreed that the moment was worth documenting. “Who knows if in 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we might look back and this was a pivotal moment or not?” she said. “But we wanted to take stock of what was happening.”

The essays are being published once a month through the summer, connecting the end of the last theater season to the beginning of the next one.

The series’s inaugural essay, published a few days before the Tony Awards in June, examined the abusive practices of some of American theater’s foundational creators, directors and choreographers. The second considered calls for pay equity in theater, and the third, which appears in the Arts & Leisure section on Sunday, is about the physical and emotional demands made of theater artists. The fourth installment, to come later this summer, will address diversity and equity in theater. [The four essays are listed by headline below, in my afterword. ~Rick]

The assignment is a change of pace for Mr. Green, who often writes reviews of new shows as quickly as overnight. He referred to the interviews, thinking and preparation for “The Reformation” as “the huge part of the iceberg under the water.” Writing the 2,500- to 3,500-word reported essays, the first drafts of which can take a few days or longer, is “the tiny little tip that’s sticking above the water,” he said.

His monthslong research process has included interviews with almost 30 people, most of whom are not celebrated stars.

He spoke to a costume designer in the Midwest who makes less than $20,000 a year, an associate literary director who was laid off in the depths of the pandemic in 2020 and a dramaturg who took on a second job as a communications consultant — all for the series’s second essay, about the harsh financial realities of a life in theater.

Such weighty themes are challenging to reflect in artwork, said Felicia Vasquez, a staff editor for art and print who designed the series. She knew Deena So’Oteh, an illustrator whose Halloween cover for The New York Times Book Review featured five pairs of bloodshot eyes rolling back into the head of a spectral figure, could handle the job.

“My work in general skews a little moody,” admitted Ms. So’Oteh, who sketches out several concepts for each illustration on her iPad. In most of them, large objects loom over smaller ones, casting long shadows across the page: “There is this juxtaposition of one individual versus this giant system,” she said. 

[So’Oteh’s artwork was reproduced on the digital versions of Green’s articles, but I didn’t replicate them for the blog posts.  Readers with access to the Times website can see the illustrations there.]

Mr. Green believes that system has reached an inflection point and that its art may evolve in ways both exciting and provocative to the old guard.

He welcomes the possibilities. “The theater must change,” he said. “It has to take into account the demands and wishes of people who have pretty bravely come forth in the last few years to say what’s wrong, and allow the form to become what it becomes next.”

[Callie Holtermann joined the New York Times in 2020.  “Times Insider,” an offering of podcasts, stories, events, and newsletters, takes audiences behind the scenes and into the workings of the newsroom.

[“Is It Finally Twilight For Sacred Stage Monsters?” Jesse Green’s first article in “The Reformation” will be posted in three days.  The other three articles, “When Paying Your Dues Doesn’t Pay the Rent,” “Shutting the Door On a Hard-Knock Life,” and “Racism Erodes the American Theater,” will follow every three days after that.  Please come back to Rick On Theater to read the whole series.]