Today: the most Puerto Rican moments from Bad Bunny’s halftime show, how those perfect-haired soda-sipping Mormons went mainstream, and something that resembles a restaurant review, by ME. —Emily Gould
SPORTS
Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show Redefined ‘America’
Everything about the performance was a meaningful political gesture and also fun.
Watching Bad Bunny hoist the monoestrellada, the pro-independence Puerto Rican flag, was an emotional experience, Andrea González-Ramírez writes in The Cut today: “My eyes stung with tears as I imagined what my late grandmother Minerva, who spent so much of her life believing in a free Puerto Rico, would have said if she saw Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio waving it unapologetically on the biggest stage in America.” Yes, the show was full of Easter eggs, like the real wedding and the celebrity cameos, but it was also full of potent symbolism and trenchant critique.
He brought out Lady Gaga, dressed in light blue (the dress custom designed by Dominican designer Raul Lopez of Luar) with a flor de maga (the Puerto Rican national flower) in her lapel, for a surprise salsa rendition of her hit “Die With a Smile” in the middle of the show. She performed with Los Sobrinos, a young Puerto Rican band that has collaborated with Bad Bunny on his latest record, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, and tour — a passing of the torch to the next generation of musicians in the island. Bad Bunny also brought out Ricky Martin for a rendition of “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” a bolero from the album that directly criticizes the brutal gentrification and displacement that Puerto Ricans are currently experiencing. Then, the rapper sang “CAFé CON RON” with the group Los Pleneros de la Cresta, giving the country a glimpse of the traditional genre of plena that soundtracks our family parties and parrandas.
Toward the end of the show, he said “God bless America” before launching into a roll call of all the countries in the American continent. Performers ran out of the field holding each country’s flag, many of which have been touched in one way or another by U.S. imperialism, in a move that also decentered the idea of this country as the singular “America.”
By way of contrast, the Turning Point USA halftime show was very pathetic and starred a country singer with the made-up-sounding name “Brantley Gilbert.”
TRENDS
The Mormons Have Escaped Containment!
How America’s major homegrown religion achieved cultural domination.
Bridget Read went to Utah to find out how Mormonism went from a punch line (The Book of Mormon) to an aspirational archetype (The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Ballerina Farm, etc.).
America is in the middle of a second Mormon Moment, and its representatives are women with flowing hair and flawless skin in outfits that certainly don’t accommodate official undergarments, if any. The stars of Secret Lives are only one element of a host of cultural exports from Utah currently taking off. They were preceded by the cast of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, another reality show about active and former Mormon women, and by Hannah Neeleman, a prominent Mormon farmwife and social-media powerhouse known as Ballerina Farm. These Mormon and ex-Mormon women, the makeup and clothes they wear, the red-light-therapy masks and blenders and blankets they use, and the protein powders, supplements, and sodas they drink have found an enthusiastic audience across the rest of the country. In entertainment terms, they have moved from TLC to Disney, from freak to niche to prime time: Next month, a Mormon woman, one of the Secret Lives stars, will receive that ultimate all-American girl-next-door imprimatur and become the next Bachelorette.
How did this happen? The Latter-day Saints believe in ongoing revelations from God; as a result, they can be both inflexibly doctrinaire and expansively open to change. It makes it hard to tell, nearly 200 years after Joseph Smith founded his insular church, whether Mormons have assimilated or we’ve become more susceptible to the pitch.
As further evidence, I’d like to add that my friend Stephanie, a hippie who went to Bard and grocery-shops exclusively at the Park Slope Food Coop, showed up at my Halloween party as a MomTok member — clutching a Stanley and adorned with a slutty sweatsuit, beachy waves, and fake eyelashes — and I literally didn’t recognize her at first. Now that’s a cultural coup.
UTOPIAN RESTAURANTS
The Dream of the 2000s Is Alive at a Bed-Stuy Diner
Don’t go there! You’ll make the wait time worse for me.
I was hipped to the existence of Sal and Cookie’s by our Cheap Eats list, which singled out its gluten-free masa pancakes as a highlight. Since I have celiac, I knew I had to try them, but one obstacle to my ever getting brunch is that I am not legally permitted to go anywhere without a child on the weekends. So I took my children as my dates, figuring that “waiting on line for eggs” is a formative experience for a New York City kid.
The pancakes were amazing, as promised, with crisp edges, soft insides, and subtle chunks of corn, but even better was the whole vibe. The diner feels like it’s always been there, even though it opened only last year. Dark-pink and cream wallpaper and floral wall sconces lend the space an ad hoc, not overly studied coziness. The servers are so charismatic that when they tell you it’ll be 35 minutes for a table, you feel grateful that they spoke to you. Maybe it was the quality of the light or the mild hung-overness of the beautiful median-age 26-year-old clientele, but I got a full body-sense memory of all the weekend mornings circa 2002–06 I spent at Enid’s (RIP) covertly scanning the room for people I’d seen out the previous night, trying to sip a Bloody Mary slowly enough so that I wouldn’t puke. Ah, my youth!!
Nothing on the menu costs more than $20. The kitchen did not balk at either of my children’s weird off-menu requests (a fried-chicken sandwich, hold the bread and everything that makes it a sandwich. A bacon, egg, and cheese, hold the egg. I live with lunatics!!). The bacon is dream bacon, perfectly smoky and just the right balance of crispy and soggy. Also perfect, to me: The coffee is diner-weak, so you can drink 100 cups of it without tweaking. An unpretentious and affordable restaurant where young people can eye each other and recover from partying and a mom can listen to her child recount his latest D&D campaign in extensive detail? I didn’t think it was possible in 2026, but here we are. Please don’t overrun this place and ruin it.
Click Your Way Out
Craig Jenkins writes that Bad Bunny refused to let a baseless culture war over his halftime show be the story.
All the Super Bowl halftime shows since 1993, hilariously roasted/ranked.
A history of Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga’s powerful alliance.
A new memoir explores whether the author’s parents’ marriage was a social experiment.
Book critic Becca Rothfeld was snapped up by The New Yorker the minute the Washington Post laid her off.
It’s Sex Week on the Strategist. Think of it as “Strat after dark.”
Wolf Parade is chiller than I would be about the lack of an HR bump.
Thank you to Fran and Zach for covering for me while I wrote Serious Nonfiction last week!! I’m ready to get back to blogging, baby!!
Don't worry I won't go to Sal and Cookie's because it's actually not possible to get to Bed Stuy from Queens, but it sure does sound nice.
And in our hearts 💕