Alyssa Charpentier

It’s a Friday morning in Los Angeles, and Shinedown’s Brent Smith has just dropped his phone in a flower pot. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he says in his gentle Knoxville twang as he hops onto our Zoom call, a mere 60 seconds tardy.

The internet was never going to be a safe place. One of the trade-offs of America’s First Amendment is the acceptance of speech and content that do not align with our personal worldviews. The freedom to communicate independent thought is a vital societal function, but in the age of meme culture, it’s also a telling symptom of what is happening inside a nation’s heart.

Liminal spaces are etched into the human experience. Changing terminals at the airport finds us navigating that curious in-between. Hotels, transitions, even short-lived, tremulous connections—anything that suspends us in grey stretches of time—can feel liminal. We can’t build a home on impermanent ground, but liminal things aren’t meant to be destinations.