I was in a panic realizing my appointment at the spa was in 30 minutes. I still had to get dressed, dry my hair and make myself presentable. Dashing out the door with wet hair, I hiked to the subway. Huddled in the harsh, fluorescent glow of the number 1 train with no make-up, I began to see the trade-off. Buying relaxation comes with a free sample of humility. Head down, confident I was about to run into an ex-boyfriend, I sprinted five blocks to the Broadway Day Spa for my facial.

I burst through the door, straggly-haired and red-faced, and collided with the soothing wall of hush when it occurred to me that spas in New York need decompression chambers. I’d just run past jackhammers, dodged strollers, and jumped over piles of dog crap. Entering such a cocoon of calm shocked my system.

As if to solidify my title as Ugly Duckling, the man behind the counter was tanner and more beautiful than I could ever hope to be.  As I handed over my sad little Old Navy hoodie, I silently swore that next time I’d wear heels.

As I lay in the dentist-style chair and ready to let the leisure begin, I was informed that I’d put the sheet thing on wrong.  It was enough embarrassment to kick off the next piece of information, “Every single pore on your face is clogged.” Exit self-esteem.

New Yorkers can choose from an endless variety of activities and services promising to restore our vitality. Spas, salons, studios, and soirees beckon from every corner. In their midst, we are obsessed with obtaining a physical receipt for our repentant relaxation. We crave the red, greasy face, the extraction and exfoliation, the sore muscles and the depleted bank balance that assure us, yes, that we “treated” ourselves. At the end of this particular spa visit, I could shout to the world that I’d endured the soothing benefit of having someone smear acid on my face…Acid.

Why did I schedule this facial in the first place? I was hosting what I’d hoped would be a fun, laughter-filled, elegant dinner party and I wanted to look at least as good as the food. Of course, New York guests—even close friends—expect gourmet cuisine.  So I spent an hour running to three different markets to get the spices I needed, barely leaving time to pick up all the mixers for the fully stocked bar—an absolute necessity at any respectable city dinner party.

After my decidedly uncomfortable facial and the fun-for-my-friends-but-mindblowingly-stressful-for-me soiree, I needed to relieve some tension. Trolling Facebook, I found a deal on a $37 massage and made an appointment. The Madison Ave address was enough to replace a reputation at the time, but upon arrival I was singing a different tune. The salon’s name was scrawled in pen on the building directory, the elevator was rickety and the hallways were dingy. I peeked my head inside and saw another woman recovering from a massage, shiny and blissed out, which was enough of a sign to go through with it. The room was lined with signs on the wall forbidding “money deals” and instructing me to leave on my panties “for hygiene purposes.”  Oddly enough, it was the best massage of my life. Still, given my desire to quickly flee the scary dump, my shoulders didn’t truly relax until I was home in one piece.

Despite all the talk of plucking and rubbing, I’m not Paris Hilton. I didn’t grow up in a mansion with an army of staff.  I do my own laundry, clean my own bathroom and I’ve worked my share of service industry jobs. The Puritanical values that founded this country are still alive and well. Work is good, relaxation is evil, lazy, and indulgent. Going to a spa or gym isn’t a necessity. So dashing past a man collecting soda cans to recycle to drop $100 on someone else washing my face or stretching my quads, has a jarring poignancy.  Perhaps we compensate by making sure our leisure activities hurt. Twenty sets of squat-thrusts ought to cancel out last night’s nachos, and the shame of overindulgence.

We’ve bought into the myth that doing something for yourself actually has to involve doing something. In New York, it’s as if the maxim is “I do, therefore I am.” The idea of not doing something is unheard of. An hour of yelling for tourists to stay left as you try to jog the Brooklyn Bridge, the scramble for a spa chair at the nail salon on a Saturday morning or throwing elbows for space in front of the mirror to get your “om” on just in time to fight the post-yoga brunch crowd us is all evidence of how our relaxation has become an extension of our daily stress from which we are desperate to escape. Getting out of the city seems like an option, until you factor in cab fare or an hour-long subway-to-bus ride to LaGuardia, security lines and major runway delays because of the massive air traffic into NYC. I’m tense just thinking about it. So instead of rushing to spas, fighting for a table at a restaurant or even dashing to the airport, perhaps the most relaxing activity is simply not doing anything at all.

“…There is a traditional optimistic story that runs as follows. Our hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king, but gains a reprieve by promising to teach the king’s favorite horse to talk within a year. That night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain. He replies, ‘A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might talk!’…”

by Professor David Deutsch FRS, University of Oxford

All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time. But optimism is also a stance towards the future, because nearly all failures, and nearly all successes, are yet to come. Optimism follows from the explicability of the physical world, as I explained in Chapter 3. If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how. Optimism also assumes that none of the prohibitions imposed by the laws of physics are necessarily evils. So, for instance, the lack of the impossible knowledge of prophecy is not an insuperable obstacle to progress.

That means that in the long run t here are no insuperable evils, and in the short run the only insuperable evils are parochial ones. There can be no such thing as a disease for which it is impossible to discover a cure, other than certain types of brain damage—those that have dissipated the knowledge that constitutes the patient’s personality. For a sick person is a physical object, and the task of transforming this object into the same person in good health is one that no law of physics rules out. Hence there is a way of achieving such a transformation—that is to say, a cure. It is only a matter of knowing how. If we do not, for the moment, know how to eliminate a particular evil, or we know in theory but do not yet have enough time or resources (i.e. wealth), then, even so, it is universally true that either the laws of physics forbid eliminating it in a given time with the available resources or there is a way of eliminating it in the time and with those resources.

The same must hold, equally trivially, for the evil of death—that is to say, the deaths of human beings from disease or old age. This problem has a tremendous resonance in every culture—in its literature, its values, its objectives great and small. It also has an almost unmatched reputation for insolubility (except among believers in the supernatural): it is taken to be the epitome of an insuperable obstacle. But there is no rational basis for that reputation. It is absurdly parochial to read some deep significance into this particular failure, among so many, of the biosphere to support human life—or of medical science throughout the ages to cure ageing. The problem of ageing is one of the same general type as that of disease. Although it is a complex problem by present day standards, the complexity is finite and confined to a relatively narrow arena whose basic principles are already fairly well understood. Meanwhile, knowledge in the relevant fields is increasing exponentially.

Sometimes ‘immortality’ (in this sense) is even regarded as undesirable. For instance, there are arguments from overpopulation; but those are examples of the Malthusian prophetic fallacy: what each additional surviving person would need to survive at present-day standards of living is easily calculated; what knowledge of the person would contribute to the solution of the resulting problems is unknowable. There are also arguments about the stultification of society caused by the entrenchment of old people in positions of power; but the traditions of criticism in our society are already well adapted to solving that sort of problem. Even today, it is common in Western countries for powerful politicians or business executives to be removed from the office while still in good health.

There is a traditional optimistic story that runs as follows. Our hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king, but gains a reprieve by promising to teach the king’s favorite horse to talk within a year. That night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain. He replies, ‘A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might talk!’ the prisoner understands that, while his immediate problems have to do with prison bars and the king and his horse, ultimately the evil he faces is caused by insufficient knowledge. That makes him an optimist. He knows that, if progress is to be made, some of the opportunities and some of the discoveries will be inconceivable in advance. Progress cannot take place at all unless someone is open to, and prepares for, those inconceivable possibilities. The prisoner may or may not discover a way of teaching the horse to talk. But he may discover something else. He may persuade the king to repeal the law that he had broken; he may learn a convincing conjuring tick in which the horse would seem to talk; he may escape; he may think of an achievable task that would please the king even more than making the horse talk. The list is infinite. Even if every such possibility is unlikely, it takes only one of them to be realized for the whole problem to be solved. But if our prisoner is going to escape by creating a new idea, he cannot possibly know that idea today, and therefore he cannot let the assumption that it will never exist condition his planning.

Optimism implies all the other necessary conditions for knowledge to grow, and for knowledge-creating civilizations to last, and hence for the beginning of infinity. We have, as Popper put it, a duty to be optimistic—in general, and about civilization in particular. One can argue that saving civilization will be difficult. That does not mean that there is a low probability of solving the associated problems. When we say that a mathematical problem is hard to solve, we do not mean that it is unlikely to be solved. All sorts of factors determine whether mathematicians even address a problem, and with what effort. If an easy problem is not deemed to be interesting or useful, they might leave it unsolved indefinitely, while hard problems are solved all the time.

Usually the hardness of a problem is one of the very factors that cause it to be solved. Thus President John F. Kennedy said in 1962, in a celebrated example of an optimistic approach to the unknown, ‘We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because but because they are hard.’ Kennedy did not mean that the moon project, being hard, was unlikely to succeed. On the contrary, he believed that it would. What he meant by a hard task was one that depends on facing the unknown. And the intuitive fact to which he was appealing was that although such hardness is always negative factor when choosing among means to pursue an objective, when choosing the objective itself it can be a positive one, because we want to engage with projects that will involve creating new knowledge. And an optimist expects the creation of knowledge to constitute progress—including its unforeseeable consequences.

Thus Kennedy remarked that the moon project would require a vehicle ‘made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival’. Those were the known problems, which would require as-yet-unknown knowledge. That this was ‘on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body’ referred to the unknown problems that made the probabilities, and the outcomes, profoundly unknowable. Yet none of that prevented rational people from forming the expectation that the mission could succeed. This expectation was not a judgment of probability: until far into the project, no one could predict that, because it depended on solutions not yet discovered to problems not yet known. When people were being persuaded to work on the project—and to vote for it, and so on – they were being persuaded that our being confined to one planet was an evil, that exploring the universe was good, that the Earth’s gravitational field was not a barrier but merely a problem, and that overcoming it and all the other problems involved in the project was only a matter of knowing how, and the nature of the problems made that moment the right one to try to solve them. Probabilities and prophecies were not needed in that argument.

Pessimism has been endemic in almost every society throughout history. It has taken the form of t he precautionary principle, and of ‘who should rule?’ political philosophies and all sorts of other demands for prophecy, and of despair in the power of creativity, and of the misinterpretation of problems as insuperable barriers. Yet there have always been a few individuals who see obstacles as problems, and see problems as soluble. And so, very occasionally, there have been places and moments when there was, briefly, an end to pessimism. As far as I know, no historian has investigated the history of optimism, but my guess is that whenever it has emerged in a civilization there has been a mini-enlightenment: a tradition of criticism resulting in an efflorescence of many of the patterns of human progress with which we are familiar, such as art, literature, philosophy, science, technology and the institutions of an open society. The end of pessimism is potentially as beginning of infinity. Yet I also guess that in every case—with the single, tremendous exception (so far) of our own enlightenment—this process was soon brought to an end and the reign of pessimism was restored.

Why do we have sex? To get something, whether it’s to get attention, to get off, to get even and on that rare occasion, to get a baby. You know, human things…

After years and years of mixed messages from the media, women are still trying to figure out exactly what it is they want to get out of sex.  But why this idea that we need to get something at all, rather than just pure enjoyment?

Guys can seem to do that just fine.  Is it possible for a woman to only have sex because she enjoys it?  When you think of a woman that is “sexual,” one of two images pop up: either a glamorous vixen reclining on a bed with her silk dress hugging her curves and her blonde hair perfectly done or an oversexed, trashy, cheaply-clad young and reckless girl.

Why such different images of a woman when given the same “characteristics”? One is iconocized as a sex symbol, while another is punished for being “too” sexually experienced.

These mixed messages are seriously affecting our sex lives. Society doesn’t encourage women to be assertive and direct in their sexual needs so sex can take a manipulative and promiscuous style. I have girlfriends that are in their twenties, have had several partners and still have no idea what an orgasm feels like. They don’t speak up in order to make the experience more pleasurable and thus continue the boring old cycle. The notion that guys enjoy sex more than girls is confirmed over and over. Women are made to think they have to be submissive when it comes to sex, rather than actually have a desire for it. If a woman does not see herself as being sexual, she is not likely to feel comfortable having sexual thoughts and fantasies. Men’s moms, their creators, couldn’t possibility have been freaks in the bedroom.

Here is when the manipulating and games come in to play. But really we’re not even she-devils that like to torment guys and their blue balls.  We’ve just adopted the idea that we can’t purely crave sex and therefore we must get something else out of this process.

We wield sex as a weapon. We’re doing a favor, but we make sure to make it known that this favor will sure as hell be repaid. Oh we would never say that you better take me out if I blow you, we do it in a more passive/aggressive manner that constantly keeps them on their toes. Haven’t gone out to dinner in awhile? Haven’t gotten flowers or a back rub in some time? Well then we start feeling used and once that happens the well dries up. Yup, as simple as that.

No more.

It’s funny too because my boyfriend knows damn well that I enjoy sex but he buys the “I’m not in the mood” routine hook, line and sinker. And we continue to play this game because we can’t get over the fact that we are only having sex to have sex. That’s what sluts do and I’m not nearly a slut.

A notion that began in order to de-power women ironically gives them an upper hand in a relationship. Or as a desperate attempt for control.  Women are assumed to depend on men for shelter, money and status but sex makes men have to depend on women for satisfaction or risk their sanity. The same is true for women not in relationships. It’s true that a woman in her 20’s and 30’s who hasn’t met the right guy is going to get well into the double digits. We’re not in high school anymore where you date someone for five months before seeing any below the belt action. As skill levels increase so does our pace. And then you get to know the person and things don’t work out, then on to the next. But what does all this sex do to a woman. How does she justify falling into bed? She gets the glory of a sex kitten, teasing guys until they have to have her. It’s empowering to feel so desired, yet ironically they’re depending on the guy to feel this way.

We’re a country that uses sex to sell practically anything yet we can’t get to seem to get over the fact that we have it, let alone enjoy it. Women are made to procreate, and doing so requires having sex.  We’re meant to be sexual beings.  So stop worrying about what’s right or wrong… listening to people how to have sex and just stop being afraid to have it. The enjoying it part will come along with the help of a patient boyfriend or battery-operated device.

Point is we shouldn’t feel like we’re compromising something (giving up something) by having sex.

We can play the game that sex is a reward because the notion has been ingrained that women don’t like sex as much. I would never make the first move. I like sex too much to give in to the stereotype.

Sexual pleasure derives from the way we feel about the way we look. It’s pretty funny that we can fake an orgasm, and we only know the truth.

And if we have been taught to be emotional and sensitive how can we remain so detached when it comes to sex?

KJ Apa
Photography by Shanna Fisher

For those who read the Archie comics, there’s a strong character impression of him as a teenage oblivious goofball. What was your process in reinterpreting him for a more dramatic role?
Well he’s still oblivious about a lot of things, but not really a goofball. The character is very different to the comics. My process is to read the scripts and get a good feel of how my character relates to his friends and family etc. Those relationships help to develop the character for me.
 
In the Archie comics, there was sexuality but not a lot of contact. What is it like to be a version of Archie that gets to be shirtless that actually kisses the girls and hook up with older women?
The luckier version I guess. [laughs]

Luke Perry, who plays your dad on the show, was a huge teen heartthrob in the 90s. Has he given you any advice on how to navigate stardom? What have you learned from him?  
Luke is an amazing mentor. He has helped and guided me in more ways than I can fully explain. He’s the man!

What are some misconceptions that some people may have about the show, and what would like for them discover?
Maybe that the show is a mirror of the comics—but it’s not. It’s a 2017 version, so it’s very relatable with some of the issues that are faced. But it also has the drama of issues that are kind of completely offbeat.
 
Being from New Zealand and working on this show, what are your impressions of the teenage American experience? Also, how do you think this relates to how it was portrayed in the Archie comics?
School in New Zealand is very different. I went to a boys only school for 11 years so my experience was very different. I didn’t have a huge social life—I think that’s the main difference. The comics have all the relationship interplays that have continued in our show.
 
What was it like having Lorde apologize to you? Did you end up having tea with her? What was that like? If you didn’t, what would be your ideal hang out session with her?
Hahahahahha no we didn’t have tea. I think we’re both too busy for that.
. 
You recently took a road trip from Vancouver to Los Angeles. What was it like to get that kind of exposure to the United States? What were some of your favorite moments exploring the country with your co-star Cole Sprouse? Did anything crazy happen?
I am in awe of the beauty of this country. Cole has really opened my eyes to how epic the landscapes are.
 
Being that you got so much exposure to so many States in this country, what’s your impression of what happened with the election?
I don’t understand American politics. It’s very different in New Zealand.
 
In real life who would you choose Betty or Veronica?
Jughead.

[clothing KJ’s own]

photography by Shanna Fisher
stylist Alison Brooks
groomer Simone
location Hotel Covell california

“… You know, we slept in our truck, but it was still that thing of keeping faith… I would never let my parents see homelessness again. I will never let my parents be hungry. I will never let my parents walk to anything…”

By Christina Ying
Photography by Shanna Fisher

When asked if there was one item that he could take on stage that would crack everyone up, actor RJ Cyler had the perfect answer, “It would have to be a really big stage, but I would have to say a Prius.” Yes, you read that correctly. He said a Toyota Prius. As off-kilter as the answer seems, Cyler only puts it like this, “I literally could make a story out of anything.”

Cyler indeed has created an incredible story out of his career, beginning in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2013, his family decided to make a move to California, selling their house and belongings so that Cyler could have a shot at an acting career. “When we moved to LA like five years ago, it was just like okay. We are all we got. Cuz we left everything that we had in Florida, and we left family and friends, and just decided that we were just trying to start a new life.”

As he prepares for his role on Showtime’s new television series, I’m Dying Up Here, Cyler has immersed himself in the psyche of a broke up-and-coming stand-up comic named Adam determined, desperate for money, and will do anything to survive. “It was cool that I was able to step into a character that I could relate to so much,” he says. “Just some of the thinking patterns of Adam, you know, it’s just really, really, cool to just be able to be so honest in this role.” The show takes place in 1973, during an emerging stand-up comedy scene in Los Angeles. The show is a slight adaptation of William Knoedelseder’s 2010 book I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Standup Comedy’s Golden Age, about the history of Los Angeles’ Comedy Store, and its antics of sex, drugs, and stardom.

Cyler’s narrative came with its challenges, as he recalls his family’s struggle with homelessness during their transitional move to California. “Well I mean, it was rough on the family of course. We had to split up for a year because my papa had to stay back in Jacksonville with my brother so that he could sell our house. So when we first moved out here it was just me and my mom,” he says. When Cyler’s father finally made it to California, the family still faced hard times but remained close-knit throughout the whole process with an unshakeable belief in their son’s success. “Me and my momma and papa were all homeless together. You know, we slept in our truck, but it was still that thing of keeping faith because we knew that God wouldn’t have moved us out to California for no reason.”

The investment and sacrifice have paid off. At 21, Cyler has already collected honors varying from Forbes “30 under 30” and The Hollywood Reporter’s “Hollywood’s Rising Stars 35 and Under.” The acceleration started in 2015 when he landed his first movie role, in Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s teen dramatic comedy, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. The film won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Dramatic Audience Award at Sundance, and after receiving accolades for his performance, he landed a recurring role on HBO’s Vice Principals.

This year he has two major film releases, Netflix’s War Machine with Brad Pitt and the much-anticipated Power Rangers reboot as the Blue Ranger. Despite the incredible career streak that he’s had recently, his family still keeps him grounded throughout the whole process. “I never left earth cuz mostly it’s just where I come from you know? Hollywood is a new thing to my mom and my dad, and they just moved and let me have a chance at this dream.” The transition from playing a teen hero to acerbic and foul-mouthed comedian has positioned Cyler as a performer who commands our attention.
In the past few years, he’s been back and forth for auditions and filming. “Yeah I’m just trying to make a mark on the little industry of my craziness,” he says. “During War Machine I came back to shoot the pilot for I’m Dying Up Here. And then, I came right back to Abu Dhabi to finish War Machine and then after that we went to Vancouver to shoot Power Rangers and then I’m Dying Up Here got picked up while we were shooting Power Rangers. Yeah. No sleep nowadays.”

Cyler’s performances contain a gravitational pull even when he’s not saying anything. He’s also positioned himself to be in the right place at the right time, where the industry needed fresh faces. “We started this audition process like a hot little minute ago,” he says. “Me and my manager we drove around LA for a good three months, just doing auditions and meetings and stuff.” He’s always positive in interviews, though candid about his family’s struggle to get to Hollywood. “My parents really raised me and my brother to take pride in what we love doing and also not losing ourselves when we do start to move forward in life. Just by the grace of God, you know? Just keeping faith in him, that’s the only thing that keeps me sane. ”

Perhaps, it’s this spiritual grounding that’s allowed him to succeed thus far. Many young Hollywood stars are left to their own devices without their parents once they make it big, but Cyler’s trajectory toward success remains a team effort. “It’s mainly just my parents that keep me grounded and the people that I keep around you know that’s mainly what defines who a person is like—the company that they keep… I would never let my parents see homelessness again. I will never let my parents be hungry. I will never let my parents walk to anything.”

The constant hustle of his life hasn’t left much room to discuss anything else. He doesn’t want to talk about politics or anything extraneous, and it’s factor that’s helped him stay steadfast on his career rise. As he just puts it, “Me worrying about that doesn’t make sure that my parents can eat the next day. So that’s just the way to approach everything now, and it just works.”

photography by Shannon Fisher
stylist Alison Brooks
groomer Simone
location Hotel Covell california

Mason Margiela navy sweater
H&M button down shirt and red chinos
Rag and Bone hat
Haider Ackermann long tee
Freecity cargo pant
Vivienne Westwood suit
John Varvatos white dress shirt