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On Feb. 11, the San Francisco 49ers will face off against the Kansas City Chiefs, who have three Super Bowl wins since 2019 already under their belts. What do you think?
“It’s a long shot, but if the Chargers win, the payout’s going to be huge.”
Clinton Alwan, Infomercial Extra
“I’ll take any reason to get drunk in my neighbor’s living room.”
Anthony Asnani, Charcuterie Arranger
“We’re doing another Super Bowl this year?”
Kiki DiToma, Systems Analyst
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Title 42, the Covid-era public health emergency measure that allowed for the quick expulsion of migrants at the border and nearly halted the processing of asylum applications for more than three years, has expired, with tens of thousands of people who have been waiting in Mexico after fleeing from violence, poverty, and political instability expected to make their way to the border. What do you think?
“I have bad news for anyone immigrating to America to flee violence and poverty.”
Elizabeth Roper, Rubber Harvester
“It’ll be such a relief to go back to the pre-Covid way of discriminating against migrants.”
Diego Migues, Brand Consultant
“I’m confident we can figure out another reason to deny people asylum.”
Jeff Blaylock, Holistic Healer
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Imagine you need to send a letter. The mailbox is only two blocks away, but the task feels insurmountable. Air hunger seizes you whenever you walk, you’re plagued by dizziness and headaches, and anyway, you keep blanking on your zip code for the return address. So you sit in the kitchen, disheartened by the letter you can’t send, the deadlines you’ve missed, the commitments you’ve canceled. Months have passed since you got COVID. Weren’t you supposed to feel better by now?
Long COVID is a diverse and confusing condition, a new disease with an unclear prognosis, often-fluctuating symptoms, and a definition people still can’t agree on. And in many cases, it is disabling. In a recent survey, 1.6 percent of American adults said post-COVID symptoms limit their daily activities “a lot.” That degree of upheaval aligns with the Americans With Disabilities Act’s definition of disability: “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.”
But for many people experiencing long COVID who were able-bodied before, describing themselves as “disabled” is proving to be a complicated decision. This country is not kind to disabled people: American culture and institutions tend to operate on the belief that a person’s worth derives from their productivity and physical or cognitive abilities. That ableism was particularly stark in the early months of the pandemic, when some states explicitly de-prioritized certain groups of disabled people for ventilators. Despite the passage of the ADA in 1990, disabled people still confront barriers accessing things such as jobs and health care, and even a meal with friends at a restaurant. Most of our cultural narratives cast disability as either a tribulation to overcome or a tragedy.
Consequently, incorporating disability into your identity can require a lot of reflection. Lizzie Jones, who finished her doctoral research in disability studies last year and now works for an educational consultancy, suffered a 30-foot fall that shattered half of her body a week before her college graduation. She told me that her accident prompted “radical identity shifts” as she transitioned from trying to get the life she’d imagined back on track to envisioning a new one.
These are the sorts of mindset changes that Ibrahim Rashid struggled with after contracting COVID in November 2020, when he was a graduate student. He dealt with debilitating symptoms for months, but even after applying for disability accommodations to finish his degree, he “was so scared of that word,” he told me. Rashid was afraid of people treating him differently and of losing his internship offer. Most terrifying, calling himself disabled felt like an admission that his long COVID wasn’t going to suddenly resolve.
Aaron Teasdale, an outdoors and travel writer and a mountaineer, has also been wrestling with identity questions since he got COVID in January 2022. For months, he spent most of his time in a remote-controlled bed, gazing out the window at the Montana forests he once skied. Although his fatigue is now slowly improving, he had to take Ritalin to speak with me. He was still figuring out what being disabled meant to him, whether it simply described his current condition or reflected some new, deeper part of himself—a reckoning made more difficult by the unknowability of his prognosis. “Maybe I just need more time before I say I’m a disabled person,“ he said. “When you have your greatest passions completely taken away from you, it does leave you questioning, Well, who am I?”
Long COVID can wax and wane, leaving people scrambling to adapt. It doesn’t mesh with the stereotype of disability as static, visible, and binary—the wheelchair user cast in opposition to the pedestrian. Nor does the fact that long COVID is often imperceptible in casual interactions, which forces long-haulers to contend with disclosure and the possibility of passing as able-bodied. One such long-hauler is Julia Moore Vogel, a program director at Scripps Research, who initially hesitated at the idea of getting a disabled-parking permit. “My first thought was, I’m not disabled, because I can walk,” she told me. But if she did walk, she’d be drained for days. Taking her daughter to the zoo or the beach was out of the question.
Once she got over her apprehension, identifying as disabled ended up feeling empowering. Getting that permit was “one of the best things I’ve done for myself,” Vogel told me. She could drive her kid to the playground, park nearby, and then sit and watch her play. After plenty of therapy and conversations with other disabled people, Rashid, too, came to embrace disability as part of his identity, so much so that he now speaks and writes about chronic illness.
Usually, the community around a disease—including advocacy among those it disables—arises after scientists name it. Long COVID upended that order, because the term first spread through hashtags and support groups in 2020. Instead of doctors informing patients of whether their symptoms fit a certain illness, patients were telling doctors what symptoms their illness entailed. And there were a lot of symptoms: everything from life-altering neurocognitive problems and dizziness to a mild, persistent cough.
As long-COVID networks blossomed online, members began seeking support from wider disability-rights communities, and contributing fresh energy and resources to those groups. People who’d fought similar battles for decades sometimes bristled at the greater political capital afforded to long-haulers, whose advocacy didn’t universally extend to other disabled people; for the most part, though, long-haulers were welcomed.
Tapping into conversations among disabled people “has shown me that I’m simply not alone,” Eris Eady, a writer and an artist who works for Planned Parenthood, told me. Eady, who is queer and Black, found that long COVID interplayed with struggles they already faced on account of their identity. So they sought advice from disabled Black women about interdependence, mutual aid, and accessibility, as well as about being dismissed by doctors, an experience more prevalent among women and people of color.
Disabled communities have years of experience supporting people through identity changes. The writer and disability-justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha told me that when she was newly disabled, she was dogged with heavy questions: Am I going to be able to make a living? Am I datable? Her isolation and fear dissipated only when she met other young disabled people, who taught her how to be creative in “hacking the world.”
For long-haulers navigating these transitions for the first time, the process can be rocky. Rachel Robles, a contributor to The Long COVID Survival Guide, told me she spent her early months with long COVID “waking up every day and thinking, Okay, is this the day it’s left my body?” Conceiving of herself as disabled didn’t take away her long COVID. She didn’t stop seeing doctors and trying treatments. But thinking about accessibility did inspire her to return to gymnastics, which she’d quit decades earlier because of a heart condition. If she couldn’t lift her hands over her head sometimes, and if a dive roll would never be in her future, then so be it: Gymnastics could be about enjoying what her body could do, not yearning for what it couldn’t. Before she identified as disabled, returning to gymnastics “was something I would have never, ever imagined,” Robles said. And she never would have done it had she remained focused only on when she might recover.
Hoping for improvement is a natural response to illness, especially one with a trajectory as uncertain as long COVID’s. But focusing exclusively on relinquished past identities or unrealized future ones can dampen our curiosity about the present. A better way to think about it is “What are the things you can do with the body that you have, and what are the things you might not know you can do yet?” Piepzna-Samarasinha said. “Who am I right now?”
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Lindsay Ryan
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Awash in strobes, Seth “Freakin” Rollins begins his waltz to the ring. His nemesis, the YouTube star Logan Paul, is there waiting for him.
Rollins pauses beneath the jumbotron and holds his arms outstretched like Christ the Redeemer. Green and purple spotlights dart and swirl around Boston’s TD Garden. Thousands of fans start screaming the “whoa-ohh-ohh” part of Rollins’s theme song; exponentially more are live-tweeting the broadcast at home. It’s just before 9 o’clock on a frigid Monday in March—we haven’t even reached Act II of the three-hour pageant. RAW debuted 30 years ago and remains the top-rated cable program nearly every week, trouncing Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow, whose fiery monologues are—knowingly or not—greatly influenced by those of professional wrestlers.
Rollins takes another step forward. Flames burst toward the ceiling. I’m mid-arena, enthralled, sitting next to Abraham Josephine Riesman, the author of Ringmaster, a new biography of WWE Executive Chair Vince McMahon, whose valorization of violent spectacle over morals led to, as the book’s subtitle wants you to believe, “the unmaking of America.” I’ve brought Riesman here to unpack that claim, and to better understand how one man could have such a profound influence on American culture and politics.
You may recognize McMahon as the eye-bulging star of the internet’s go-to reaction meme. He also happens to be a close personal friend of former President Donald Trump. (His wife, Linda, served in Trump’s Cabinet as small-business secretary after two failed Senate bids in Connecticut.) McMahon stepped down from his position as WWE CEO last summer following allegations of sexual misconduct with female employees and related hush-money payments. Nevertheless, he’s still the company’s biggest shareholder and, depending on whom you ask, its puppeteer.
Though ostensibly banished from public-facing wrestling engagements, McMahon is rumored to be in the building tonight to welcome back his former moneymaker John Cena. But Cena and his jorts won’t slide into the ring for a while. Right now, the jacked-up crowd is chanting “FUCK YOU, LOGAN!” at 27-year-old Paul, who revels in the hatred. It’s loud. “Look at the smile on Logan Paul’s face,” Riesman shouts into my left ear. “He’s a dangerous man!”
Is wrestling real? Is it fake? The answer to both questions is, paradoxically, yes. The outcome of each contest is scripted. The body slams and submissions are choreographed. Sworn enemies are, in all likelihood, friends. But the Undertaker (Mark Calaway) really did throw Mankind (Mick Foley) off the top of that steel cage during a 1998 King of the Ring pay-per-view match. Foley really did fall 16 feet and crash through the announcers’ table. He was carted off on a stretcher, only to fight the paramedics and stumble back to the ring, where the Undertaker once again sent Foley’s massive body flying, this time through the “Hell in a Cell” chain-link roof. A bit later, the Undertaker choke-slammed him onto a pile of thumbtacks. By the time the match was over, Foley had a badly injured shoulder and a broken tooth shoved up his nose. Professional wrestling delivers sensory overload that’s almost impossible to capture with mere description. “It’s the best [thing] I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” Andy Warhol said of a 1985 match at Madison Square Garden.
Eight years ago, a pervasive idea took hold in what passes for our “national political conversation.” During the summer and fall of 2015, with each new rally, interview, and debate, we were told that the outsider candidate Donald Trump was transforming American politics into wrestling. It was a convenient, if ahistorical, conceit. Politics and wrestling were entangled long before Trump descended the golden escalator and villainized imagined adversaries to the delight of hooting fans and cable-TV cameras. Around the turn of the millennium, Jesse “The Body” Ventura made televised wrestling cameos while serving as the governor of Minnesota. Teddy Roosevelt brought his love of wrestling into the White House. “George Washington wrestled,” Riesman writes in Ringmaster, “as did Abraham Lincoln, who fought in roughly three hundred matches—indeed, a famous one in New Salem, Illinois, in 1831 made Honest Abe a local celebrity and was a key factor in putting him on the path to politics.”
Millions of people love wrestling; millions more loathe it. Many people simply don’t know what to do with it. Although the symbiotic relationship between politics and wrestling goes back centuries, it is fair to say that Trump exploited WWE tools and tricks better than anyone who had come before him. TV networks once carried Trump’s campaign rallies live because of their sheer unpredictability. In January 2016, it wasn’t enough for Trump to kick protesters out of a Vermont rally; he directed security to “throw ’em out into the cold” and “confiscate their coats.”
In Boston, while watching Seth Rollins and Logan Paul provoke, then pummel, each other, Riesman predicted—with a distressingly low level of irony—that Paul would be president of the United States someday. Paul is a skilled trash-talker and, despite his youth, a veteran self-promoter, two qualities that would serve him well in politics. One of the WWE’s greatest orators, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, spoke at the Republican National Convention during the peak of his wrestling career. Johnson, a household name even without his wrestling moniker, has been hinting at his own presidential run for the better part of a decade. Kane (Glenn Jacobs), the fire-and-brimstone on-screen brother of the Undertaker, is currently the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee.
Trump, though twice impeached and not a wrestler, remains a proud member of the WWE Hall of Fame. Even if you’ve never watched a single match, you’ve likely seen the clip of the 45th president shaving Vince McMahon’s head with maniacal joy, or the one of him clotheslining his dear friend just outside the ropes. And if not, you’ve certainly seen the edited version in which instead of McMahon, Trump pulverizes the CNN logo. Trump shared that one on his official Twitter account in 2017, back before he was banned (and later reinstated) for inciting a violent mob at the Capitol.
I kept going over Riesman’s subtitle—The Unmaking of America—in my head while watching RAW a few weeks after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. During that speech, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, clad in a white, fur-collared coat suitable for the WWE legend Ric Flair, shouted, “Liar!” at Biden. Her congressional colleague Lauren Boebert has released scores of short, taped monologues that look and sound more than a little like wrestling promos. During Trump’s term, the CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s earnest sparring in the White House briefing room often resembled pre-bout barbs. Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, infamously asserted—with absurd sincerity—that his new boss had drawn the biggest crowd in inauguration history, period. Revisiting that day recently, I thought again of Ric Flair and his boundless hyperbole: “I’ve got a limousine sittin’ out there a mile long!”
Riesman’s book is not about politics, nor is it strictly about wrestling. More than anything, Ringmaster describes one man’s greed and his quest for ultimate power, for control. Thus, politics—implicit and explicit—are woven through the decades-long narrative history of violence-as-capitalism. Yes, matches are rigged, and story lines play out over months or years, but it’s not all a show: Wrestlers really do get hurt. Sometimes they covertly slice their own skin with a blade to produce real blood. Other times, stunts go horribly wrong, such as when Owen Hart’s theatrical descent into the ring with faulty wiring ended his life in 1999. Chris Benoit, after years living with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, murdered his family and then committed suicide in 2007.
“You have a lot of injury and death that comes out of wrestling in a way that it certainly does not in other athletic events, with the possible exception of boxing,” Riesman said. “Pro wrestlers die younger on average than a lot of other professions. And somehow that gets glossed over.”
Through exhaustive research and a few key in-depth interviews—namely with Hart’s more famous older brother Bret—Riesman unspools a story of a messy beast that’s not quite a sport and not quite an opera, and has long occupied a dangerous gray area. As a reader, your appetite for territorial wrestling-promoter disputes and regional-broadcast wars will vary, though Ringmaster contains several valuable insights about how money and influence affect politics.
“Even before he started accepting their campaign dollars, Rick Santorum owed a debt to the McMahon family,” Riesman writes. In the 1980s, the future U.S. senator and Republican presidential candidate was a young lawyer lobbying for deregulation on behalf of the WWE (then called the WWF). “Santorum was aggressive in his efforts to sway legislators and officials to Vince and Linda’s point of view,” we learn, especially when it came to loosening wrestling’s health-and-safety protocols.
The ’80s were a curious time for wrestling culture, and most of Ringmaster’s memorable anecdotes take place during this period. In 1988, then-businessman Donald Trump “hosted” Wrestlemania at the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. That word is in quotes because, as with so much involving Trump, it was a con—the actual event took place across the street, at the Atlantic City Convention Center. (TV audiences were none the wiser, Riesman notes, and this helped Trump build his brand.) Two years earlier, the lawyer G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate fame, served as a Wrestlemania celebrity guest judge. A year before that, Gloria Steinem and the former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro filmed segments in which they emasculated “Rowdy” Roddy Piper to show support for Piper’s then-rival, the pop star Cindy Lauper. Although it was still derided as a sideshow, wrestling was going mainstream. Nonwrestlers—including Trump—played a key role in this evolution.
Over dinner before we walked to the arena, I asked Riesman, who goes by Josie, about the masculine stereotypes embedded within wrestling culture. Truthfully, my question was a little clumsier than that. I wanted to know if she thought that the “average” WWE fan we were about to encounter might be surprised to learn that she, a Harvard-educated transgender woman, could love something so barbaric.
“Wrestling is a carnival, and the carnival is a great leveler—there are people who came into wrestling as kids and came out as diehard Trump supporters or Second Amendment thumpers, but then you have people like me who came out as queer, weirdo anarchists,” she said. “I watched wrestling as a kid with a lot of people who came at wrestling from having been sports fans, but I was the one who came at it from the entertainment side.” Specifically, Riesman told me, she loved the wrestlers’ knack for elocution. “I had been doing musical theater, and it felt like musical theater to me. I found it thrilling; I didn’t care about the matches,” she said. “I love the drama.”
Ringmaster has one of the best dedication pages I’ve read: “For my mother, who custom-stitched me a tearaway T-shirt after I first saw Hulk Hogan on TV.” One Halloween, my own saintly mom used a black marker to draw the Rock’s trademark sideburns on both of my cheeks and helped me wedge a set of football shoulder pads under a JUST BRING IT shirt to complete the costume. Like most parents, she didn’t love that I loved wrestling, but she eventually understood that I and every other middle-school boy was obsessed with it. RAW, Smackdown—we couldn’t look away. Maybe it was transitive: Watching a “good guy” like the Rock deliver “the people’s elbow” to a bullying foe was cathartic.
Or maybe we were just addicted to the story lines. Reflecting on my interview with Riesman, and her use of the word drama, I thought again of Santorum, who, after his failed bid for the White House in 2016, joined CNN as a political commentator. Although CNN positions itself as centrist, it leans left, and, until his firing in 2021, Santorum was one of its few Trump defenders. In other words, he was the network’s go-to “heel,” in wrestling parlance—a bad guy. I thought back to a line from the former CNN chief Jeff Zucker, who helped bring Trump and The Apprentice into American living rooms back when he was at NBC. Zucker once told a reporter for The New York Times Magazine that he viewed CNN’s pro-Trump panelists as “characters in a drama.” On-camera feuds boosted ratings. Political TV panels, like professional wrestling, could be both live and structured with familiar set pieces each week. Yet you never knew what someone might say or do. With WWE, McMahon perfected a sports-and-entertainment behemoth that kept 12-year-olds like me glued to the TV. With Trump, Zucker and his competitors were crafting similar news-and-politics-and-entertainment products. Flashy graphics, flying taunts, unraveling democracy: Who could look away?
In Boston, the RAW broadcast cut away for a commercial break, and the jumbotron ran a WWE promo: “This May,” a booming voice began, “live from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia …” WWE is currently in the midst of a 10-year deal to stage programming in the Middle East, a privilege for which the kingdom is paying an estimated $40 million per event, according to Riesman. One of WWE’s rising stars, the scrappy and cerebral Sami Zayn, is the son of Syrian immigrants. Zayn reportedly refuses to participate in the Saudi gigs and thus, Riesman argued to me, “can never be champ.” Some wrestling insiders allege that it’s the Saudis who have banned him, on account of his ethnicity and political leanings. (Zayn has also been known to share links from the socialist magazine Jacobin—back in December, he wrote “GOAT” over a photo the publication had posted of the leftist public intellectual Noam Chomsky.) The WWE did not respond to a request for comment about Zayn’s involvement in matches in Saudi Arabia.
As Wrestlemania returns next weekend, Seth Rollins and Logan Paul will once again square off. During the main event, the title belt may transfer from the uber-dominant Roman Reigns to Cody Rhodes, son of the legendary wrestler Dusty Rhodes. The younger Rhodes is a buttoned-up, blue-eyed, bleached-blond character whose nickname is “The American Nightmare”—the inverse of his father, “The American Dream.” Rhodes’s logo is a menacing skull with eagle wings covered in an American flag. His entrance song also has its own choral “whoa-ohh-ohh.” It is hard to watch Rhodes strut out into the arena in his suit and tie and not think of a tougher, fitter, more strapping Trump—or, for that matter, Vince McMahon. Riesman’s full portrait of McMahon is by no means a puff piece, though I’d also hesitate to call it a hit job. For all of McMahon’s undesirable traits, for all the toxic masculinity, Riesman does seem impressed by his ability to vanquish his enemies through the years. More than an aloof businessman, McMahon is portrayed as an unhealthily competitive auteur who tapped into the American id and, on occasion, made magic.
Trump, in relative exile, seems obsessed with rekindling his 2016 campaign’s grotesque, supersize magic. For a while, Trump has been road-testing nicknames in hopes of denigrating his strongest 2024 rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “Ron DeSanctimonius” wasn’t cutting it. “Meatball Ron” had potential. “Tiny D” was, well …
DeSantis, for his part, recently reacted to news of Trump’s legal troubles with a slow-motion insult: “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” he said at a press conference last week. Though still a fairly new force in Republican politics, DeSantis, too, makes a brief cameo in Ringmaster. In April 2020, barely one month into the coronavirus pandemic, DeSantis deemed WWE an essential business, and permitted the organization to film fanless events at its facility in Orlando. The result was oddly quiet and a tad dystopian. “You can have a baseball game without a crowd,” Riesman said. “You can’t really have a wrestling match without a crowd.” Nor, for that matter, a political rally.
Riesman and I were at RAW right after I watched Trump deliver one of the darkest speeches of his career. “I am your retribution,” Trump told his CPAC fans. Though it wasn’t his strongest turn at the mic, the former president sounded more than a little like a pro wrestler, psyching himself up, hobbling back to the ring. And people seemed hungry for it.
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John Hendrickson
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CHICAGO—With dumbfounded question marks and astounded exclamation points littering the margins of almost every page, the handwritten annotations found Wednesday in a secondhand copy of The Autobiography Of Malcolm X made it painfully obvious that the previous owner of the book was white. “It’s amazing how many of the notes in here start with ‘But what about…’ or just say, ‘That’s going a little too far,’” the volume’s current owner, local man James Hawkins, told reporters as he flipped to a page in which Malcolm X is accused of reverse discrimination in a pencil scrawl underlined three times. “Every time the text refers to something like the ‘devil white man,’ the phrase has been circled and someone’s written ‘Hmm…’ off to the side. And when it starts mentioning the Nation of Islam, they just wrote ‘Terrorist?’” Hawkins went on to observe that the annotations don’t go past the first chapter.
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“Listen—no time to explain, but in 2027, someone known as ‘Mr. Beast’ is nominated for Best Director for a film called Coincidentally Spearman. He must not win! If this happens, a timeline is created wherein billions will perish. I have to go—I’ve used all of my time credits on this final jump, and if I stay around any longer, the multiverse will implode.”
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WASHINGTON—Advertising the event as a chance to interact personally with a conservative icon, organizers confirmed Thursday that the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference would feature a new exhibit where visitors could purchase and toss pieces of raw chicken to Rudy Giuliani. “This year, for $5 a pop, attendees will be treated to an up-close encounter with the former mayor of New York and given a thrilling opportunity to feed him a handful of his favorite food—raw chicken,” CPAC spokesperson Nancy Garner said as she stood outside a 9-by-12-foot enclosure that contained a warming lamp, a sunning rock, a water feature, artificial plants, and the disgraced onetime U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. “Can you see him? Those are his heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes peeking out from under that rock. He may look harmless now, but don’t be fooled. He’s still feral. Be sure to step back as soon as you release the chicken, because he’s going to leap forward and grab it with a big jowly chomp before it even hits the ground. And if you think that’s neat, watch what happens when you throw a few airplane bottles of blended scotch into the cage! Video is allowed, but please refrain from flash photography, as he is quite old and easily disoriented. That’s how Kelly Anne Conway was bitten earlier.” At press time, CPAC was reportedly on lockdown after Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) left the door open while attempting to get a selfie inside the Giuliani tank.
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It shouldn’t be hard to persuade people to take a sip of yerba mate. It’s completely natural. It makes you feel simultaneously energized and relaxed. You can drink it all day without feeling like your stomach acid is burning through your esophagus. It’s the preferred caffeine source of Lionel Messi, Zoe Saldaña, and the Pope. I’m drinking yerba mate with my Argentinian mother-in-law as I write this, and I’ll probably be drinking it with her or my husband when you read it. And yet, my track record for tempting friends into tasting it is abysmal.
The average Argentinian or Uruguayan drinks more than 26 gallons of the green infusion each year, but as far as I can tell, the average North American has never even tried South America’s most consumed beverage—at least not in its traditional form. After more than 100 years, plenty of added sugar, and growing consumer desire for “clean caffeine,” something companies are calling yerba mate is finally on shelves near you. But in this land of individualism and germophobia, the real thing will simply never catch on.
The plant has been seen as a moneymaking commodity since Europeans first arrived in the Americas. Long before North Americans rejected yerba mate, European colonizers were falling head over heels for the stuff. Within a few decades of their arrival in what is now Paraguay in the early 16th century, the Spanish were already drinking the local infusion they’d picked up from the indigenous Guaraní. The Guaraní people had used yerba mate—which they called ka’a—as a stimulant and for its medicinal effects since time immemorial. They collected leaves from a particular species of holly, dried them, and then either chewed the ka’a or placed it in an orange-size gourd to be steeped in water and passed among friends.
The Spanish liked the energy yerba mate gave them and began selling the leaves. But according to Christine Folch, the author of the upcoming book Yerba Mate: A Stimulating Cultural History, Jesuit missionaries in Paraguay were the ones who transformed yerba mate into a true cash crop, by developing techniques for cultivating it on a large scale—methods that relied on the forced labor of indigenous people. Yerba-mate use exploded. By the 1700s, it was consumed all over South America:from what is now Paraguay across Peru, Bolivia, southern Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile.
In the United States, the first major push to popularize and cultivate yerba mate didn’t happen until 1899, when representatives from Brazil and Paraguay boasted about its benefits at the International Commercial Congress in Philadelphia. Soon after, the first U.S.-based firm, the Yerba Maté Tea Company, was founded. The company’s marketing slogan was straightforward and catchy: “Drink Yerba Maté Tea and be happy.” “Here, then, we have an ideal drink,” a 1900 Yerba Maté Tea Company pamphlet proclaimed, “one that promotes digestion, gives immediate strength of the body and brain and acts soothingly upon the nervous system.” Plus, it added, “the ladies will be especially interested to know that it exercises absolutely no bad effects upon the complexion.”
The promotion frothed up interest: Curious individuals wrote to their local newspaper asking where to buy yerba mate, and farmers searched for information on how to grow it. Newspaper articles from the time prophesied a future when yerba mate might displace tea and coffee. Entrepreneurs formed new companies hawking yerba mate; some saw Prohibition as a perfect opening for the buzzy nonalcoholic drink. It was peddled hot and cold. In the 1930s, the United States Army even considered distributing daily rations of the beverage to soldiers.
And yet, by the end of the 1930s, demand remained low. Marketers were perplexed, writing, “When can we expect an increase in consumption? The United States and France have proven themselves impervious to all temptation.” Americans just didn’t seem to have a taste for yerba mate; one 1921 review in the New York Herald read, “The flavor and taste were of a peculiar rank and insipid nature. If our South American friends can relish this beverage they are very welcome to all of it that grows.”
True, yerba mate is bitter and tastes like freshly cut grass. But coffee tastes like burnt rubber the first time you try it, and Americans can’t get enough. Something deeper is going on here. Ximena Díaz Alarcón, an Argentinian marketing and consumer-trends researcher, says it makes sense that Americans never put down their mugs of coffee or tea to pick up a gourd filled with yerba mate. “There’s no cultural fit,” she told me from her home in Buenos Aires.
Traditionally, yerba mate is consumed from a shared gourd through a shared straw called a bombilla. “Here in Argentina,” Alarcón said, “mate is a cultural habit, it is a tradition, and it is about sharing with others.” But sitting down for an hour or two and sharing a beverage, especially from the same straw, is not something Americans are accustomed to.
Still, even when entrepreneurs of the past stripped away the communal aspect of yerba mate and sold it to North Americans in individual tea bags, coffee and tea definitively won out. That makes sense: A huge part of the appeal of mate is the ritual and community of it, not just the compounds it contains. Bagged mate simply doesn’t have as much going for it. In order to persuade Americans who have no connection to the tradition of yerba mate to incorporate it into their lives, the drink has to be both convenient and superior to coffee or tea—in the process, losing the very things that make it so beloved in South America.
Over the past decade, Americans’ burgeoning thirst for healthy, plant-based caffeinated drinks has helped bring yerba mate into food fashion—at least superficially. Today, you can find it at the corner store and at major grocery chains such as Whole Foods and Walmart. But the yerba mate that fits American culture has no leaves, no straws, and no gourd. Instead, it is an ingredient mixed into canned and bottled energy drinks. This style of yerba mate is convenient and fast, and requires no swapping of spit.
Although carbonated, canned yerba mate has been around since the 1920s, the demand for it is new. Today, “people want more natural products and simpler ingredient lists,” says Martín Caballero, an editor at BevNET who grew up drinking yerba mate when visiting family in Argentina. “So using yerba mate as an energy caffeine source has been something we’ve seen more of.” Like, a lot more: In 2021, the Coca-Cola Company launched Honest Yerba Mate; Perrier now has an “Energize” line featuring yerba mate, and the start-up Guru sells an organic energy drink “inspired by Amazonia’s powerful botanicals.” (For the record, yerba mate doesn’t actually grow in the Amazon.)
At least one company has directly felt the difference between marketing real yerba mate and the diluted stuff. Guayakí, founded in 1996, built its entire business around working with indigenous communities in Paraguay to sustainably grow the plant. At first, the company sold only tea bags and loose-leaf yerba mate, but in the mid-2000s, it shifted its focus to selling yerba-mate energy drinks. Adding bubbles and sugar paid off, as did an ambitious marketing campaign targeting college students: Over the past decade, Guayakí has likely introduced more Americans to yerba mate than all previous marketing efforts combined. And although I admire their efforts and business philosophy, their canned “Classic Gold” tastes an awful lot like watered-down Diet Coke. But perhaps that’s the strategy.
These days, it’s easy to find young influencers promoting the canned version of yerba mate—or, as they often call it, “yerb.” Meanwhile, I’ve mostly given up my role as an ambassador for old-school yerba mate. My friends and colleagues just aren’t interested in sharing a green, bitter drink. But my baby couldn’t be more excited about it. Every morning, we offer her our gourd and silver straw (after sucking up the warm water so she doesn’t get jacked up on caffeine), and she grins before placing la bombilla between her tiny lips. I like to think she loves it for the same reason I do: not for the taste, but for the intimacy and ritual.
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Lauren Silverman
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