A year ago we kicked off America at 250, a celebration of where we’ve come from, where we are, and where we’re going. We’ve spent the past 12 months making the case why this is still the greatest country on Earth. On the eve of the semiquincentennial, we’re rounding out the series by asking our writers and columnists a simple question: What’s your favorite thing about America? —The Editors
First up, Bari Weiss celebrates the impulse that built America.
Risk. Our founders took the ultimate one—that of their lives—when they defied the world they had been born into to set out to make their own. Those rebels and renegades created the cultural DNA of our country. Everything we now think of as American—the NFL and Neuralink; Starbase and Starbucks; the First Amendment and fast food—has been built by people who have taken their own great risks to build their own little Americas anew.
Staying still is for other people.
TGIF czar Nellie Bowles picks the invention Europe won’t forgive us for: air-conditioning.
My favorite thing about America: air-conditioning. This summer, Europe decided that its people must suffer in the heat so as to feel very, very bad about the climate. The old and infirm are dying across the continent from heat. Hospitals are performing surgeries in sweltering conditions. The Europeans believe that if the climate is changing, we mustn’t change anything to survive it. If you usually wear a sweater in May, you must keep the sweater on this May, even if it’s warm, because you need to remember that the climate is changing. Only by Europe (and, they hope, America) refusing air-conditioning can the planet be saved. And no, we cannot talk about the factories in China spewing sludge into the air. That is indigenous and ancestral, and to point it out is white supremacy.
