This year is the 25th anniversary of Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. Our fantastic new intern Zoe Kalaw has been rummaging around the site and finding connections and stories that resonate. 

Over the next month, she will be offering her thoughts on what she has been reading as well as providing video reflections on our Instagram page.

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Excursion #1: 
Between Polarization and Longing

When faced with an archive of stories that spans decades, and me being only 20 years old, my first instinct was to visit the year I was born: 2004. This felt like a natural starting point for exploring a collective memory I didn’t personally live through but have inherited. As a Political Science major at UChicago, I’m especially drawn to stories that touch on politics and identity, so when I stumbled across Mocking People Who Vote Differently Than You by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, it felt like finding the first glinting pebble on my stroll through Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. Sayrafiezadeh’s story of navigating political difference within social and familial spaces in 2004 feels startlingly current. He writes about the unspoken rules of liberal conformity and the awkwardness of dissent, especially around the 2004 Bush/Kerry election. What struck me most was the emotional friction: the pressure to belong, the impulse to judge, and the quiet discomfort of nonconformity. These are still very much alive in our political climate today. In fact, the piece made me question the popular narrative that today is a time of “unprecedented” division. If anything, this story reminds us that polarization didn’t appear overnight—it’s been building, quietly and not so quietly, for decades. As I read, I couldn’t help but notice the way race and identity linger beneath the surface. Sayrafiezadeh references his “funny name,” and that small moment took on a deeper meaning for me. Just four years later, America would elect Barack Obama—someone else with a name that became symbolic of “difference.” I found myself wanting an update from Sayrafiezadeh: Did that moment shift his experience of political identity? Did it ease any of the tensions he described, or just reframe them?

From there, I jumped ahead 16 years and landed in early 2020, at the start of the pandemic, with Nostalgia for the Norm by Peter Wortsman. This piece is quieter, more introspective, and filled with the haunting stillness that many of us remember from those first lockdown months. Wortsman captures the eerie beauty of a hushed city, the anxiety of unpredictability, and most poignantly, the human desire to return to something familiar. At first, this piece felt unrelated to Sayrafiezadeh’s. One is about elections, the other about a pandemic. One is tense, the other reflective. But as I walked a little further into Wortsman’s story, I began to notice a connecting thread. Sayrafiezadeh challenges the idea that things were ever unified; Wortsman yearns for what’s been lost. Together, they map out a kind of emotional geography of nostalgia. We crave belonging, clarity, a “before” that feels simple—but maybe the past wasn’t ever that simple to begin with. Maybe what we’re really searching for is a way to live with uncertainty, without clinging to imagined versions of the past.

That’s what I’m starting to see as I explore Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood: it’s not just a history of events—it’s a mosaic of longings, tensions, and quiet reckonings. My hope with these excursions is to walk slowly enough to notice the throughlines and ask questions that don’t always have answers. What do we hold onto when the world shifts? How do we make peace with discomfort—political, personal, or otherwise? And most of all, what can stories from 20 years ago teach us about the narratives we’re living today?

This is just the beginning of the tour. I’ll keep collecting pebbles.

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Zoe Kalaw is a Boston native and a student at the University of Chicago. As an intern at Mr. Beller’ Neighborhood, she has been exploring and writing about stories from our archives to mark our 25th anniversary of our publication.

• Mocking People Who Vote Differently Than You
• Nostalgia for the Norm