The Valedictorian Perspective

A semi-regular dispatch on culture, music, design, nature, and the world we’re building.

We spent years becoming people we no longer needed to be.

I f you’re reading this, it's not too late.

There are events in your life that don’t just happen once. They keep happening in how you understand yourself afterward.

Identity is built in relation to things that feel stable. You’re part of a couple. You’re the person who does that work. You’re needed in a specific way, by specific people, in a specific place.

And then something changes. Not gradually. Clearly. The role is gone, or it no longer fits. And what’s left is the realization that a large part of how you’ve been seeing yourself was tied to something that no longer exists.

There’s a kind of persistent disorientation that comes with that. You reach for a way of being that used to make sense, but is no longer possible.

This is where the opportunity for reinvention presents itself. To establish a version of yourself that feels as clear as the last one and even more aligned. It becomes a choice to reinvent or retreat. To loiter in the memory of hope. What matters is what you believe your experiences said about you.

You find yourself in a new situation that doesn’t quite match the old conclusions. A conversation goes differently than expected. A new kind of work holds your attention. You feel more at ease in a room you would have once avoided. You develop a sense that the early interpretation is past its expiration date. And you begin to glimpse new possibilities.

Those moments matter more than they seem. Not because they tell you who you are now. But because they loosen what you thought was fixed. Identity, at this stage, isn’t about starting over. It’s about deciding what to keep believing from what you’ve already lived through.

In this issue:

• Isaiah Rashad’s IT’S BEEN AWFUL and the value of staying in conversation with yourself
• The Comfort Crisis and Disgrace
• The Devil Wears Prada 2, Munich, and the identities people carry too long
• Plus pancakes, resistance, and a drink worth making all summer

Her hair smelled like smoke and hotel soap.

01 / New Music and What We’re Playing On Repeat

A curated mix shaping the Valedictorian mood. Layered, intentional, exploratory and fun. Built for long drives, nights out, and creative inspiration. It’s the soundtrack to the lifestyle, brand, and world we’re building.

New + Noteworthy Album: Isaiah Rashad- ITS BEEN AWFUL

Isaiah Rashad’s IT’S BEEN AWFUL is the kind of art a musician can produce when they have the willingness to share their inner thoughts and the metacognition to fully observe and question them.

The album carries the tone of someone thinking out loud during long periods of time alone, even when surrounded by other people. It’s not confessional. There's no urgency to share. It’s invitational, it’s available if you’d like to check it out. Contradictory. Repetitive. Searching. The emotions are always real, sometimes true. Unsure, then suddenly clear, sometimes forgetting why.

The production is hazy, half-awake, patient, and understated. Muted drums. Slowed tempos. Warm, blurred, slightly out-of-focus textures that communicate something slept-in. The songs don’t rush toward anything. Life is the interlude. They sit in uncertainty long enough for the listener to settle into it.

That atmosphere gives the album its weight.

Rashad spends the record moving through questions of identity, addiction, relationships, fatherhood, self-perception, and survival with the understanding that there’s no real resolution. It sounds more like someone listening carefully to their thoughts, trying to discern the healthy ones from the destructive ones. Knowing they’ll loop. The New Sublime says as much.

M.O.M. is one of the clearest examples. There’s something interstellar, drifty, out of focus, and final about it. The production feels suspended in space, eerie and circular, drifting forward without urgency. It’s incredibly listenable. You can fade into it. Low BPMs, soft edges, dreamy half-whispered melodies. It’s comforting and relatable. But not all the time. Nothing is.

I think making a project knowing it won’t be everything to everyone all the time is the secret to making something good.

IT’S BEEN AWFUL doesn't confuse intensity with honesty. It’s not dramatic. Just exhausted. Like someone taking inventory after carrying too much for too long. There’s still attraction, longing, ambition. That’s what makes the project more honest. Even while shit is awful, the desire for relief and for something better still shines through. SUPAFICIAL feels built around exactly that tension.

That may be Rashad’s best quality as an artist. Even at his most introspective, the music still moves. The listener never feels responsible for saving him from the thoughts themselves. He breathes, and so do the songs. There’s warmth in them. A sense that understanding yourself may never fully happen, but the conversation still matters.

Notable Singles

Raekwon ft. Jadakiss & Styles P- Broken Safety
Gener8ion, Yung Lean- Storm II
PawPaw Rod, Ft. Neil Francis- Tunnel Vision
The Bullitts Ft. Jay Electronica, Lucy Liu- Close Your Eyes
The Alchemist Ft. Boldly James- Ocean Prime

Album to Revisit: Talking Heads- Stop Making Sense

Stop Making Sense completely redefined what a live album and concert film could be.

Everything about it feels intentional. The staging. The pacing. The lighting. The way the band assembles itself song by song until the stage feels completely alive. Even forty years later, it still feels modern because it understands that energy is architectural and that you have to build it carefully.

The opening alone is enough to justify revisiting it.

David Byrne walks onto an empty stage with a boombox and an acoustic guitar and begins playing “Psycho Killer” alone. No spectacle. No introduction. Just “Hi, I got a tape I want to play.” Nervous rhythm. Tension slowly tightening around the room. It’s one of the most confident openings in music history precisely because it’s so restrained. The show knows exactly what it’s building toward.

And then it keeps expanding.

More musicians. More movement. More life. More energy.

By the time Stop Making Sense reaches “Life During Wartime,” the performance has completely surrendered to its own momentum. Byrne running frantically across the stage in the oversized suit has become iconic for good reason. It captures something essential about Talking Heads as a band: intellectual music that still understands the body.

The musicianship is incredible throughout. Tina Weymouth’s bass playing remains one of the defining sounds of the band, steady and deeply groove-oriented without ever feeling showy. Chris Frantz’s drumming gives the performances their constant forward motion, while Jerry Harrison’s keys and guitar work keep the songs expansive, restless, and bounding. Everybody feels locked into the same atmosphere.

The inclusion of Tom Tom Club material is also a brilliant decision. It gives both the audience and the band room to breathe while widening the emotional and musical range of the performance. The film understands pacing in the same way a great album does.

That’s really what Stop Making Sense is about: rhythm.

If you haven’t revisited it recently, you should.

Preferably loud.

Artists in Heavy Rotation

Ka, Pan Amsterdam, Caribu, Caroline Rose, Lice.

Find these and our pinned seasonal acts on the Valedictorian Playlist.

He just needed more time in the daylight of other people.

03 / Books We’re Into Right Now

A curated shelf for clearer thinking, deeper feeling, and sharper creativity. These are the ideas shaping the lifestyle, brand, and world we’re building.

The Comfort Crisis — Michael Easter

Better sleep, lower stress, easier routines, smoother mornings. The assumption underneath much of modern wellness culture is that the ideal life is one with as little friction as possible.

I don’t necessarily think that’s wrong. But I have wondered whether too much comfort becomes a problem. Cue The Comfort Crisis.

Michael Easter’s argument is fairly simple: human beings evolved under conditions that demanded regular difficulty. Movement, uncertainty, food scarcity, physical exertion, boredom, solitude. Not constantly, but often enough that challenge remained a normal part of life rather than something to avoid. The mind and body evolved within that challenge.

Modern life has removed much of it. Food is immediate. Climate is controlled. Most discomfort can either be solved quickly or distracted from. Even boredom has largely disappeared. The result, Easter argues, is that many people are materially comfortable while feeling psychologically and physically underdeveloped.

Thankfully, the book never becomes anti-modernity or obsessed with optimization. It’s more interested in the idea that some amount of voluntary difficulty may be necessary to feel fully engaged with being human. Comfort with boredom. Comfort with time alone. The realization that challenge tends to reorganize perspective.

Most people already know the feeling Easter is describing.

You go on a difficult trip and come back calmer. You spend a day outside and your attention feels cleaner. You push yourself physically and realize how much mental noise disappears once the body has something concrete to do.

A certain amount of difficulty may not be interrupting life.

Wisdom is knowing how much is enough.

Disgrace: A novel - J.M Coetzee

What makes Disgrace so effective is how much life it fits into so little space. The novel is barely over two hundred pages, but Coetzee controls the pacing so precisely that David Lurie, the book’s protagonist, feels completely knowable by the end of it.

Lurie moves through the world with a commitment to personal sovereignty that he mistakes for honesty. He believes desire justifies itself. That acting outside convention preserves something essential in the soul. There’s a kind of false nobility in it, and Coetzee is sharp enough to understand why someone might cling to that belief after enough disappointment, failed relationships, professional decline, and isolation.

Lurie’s affair with one of his students, Melanie, becomes the catalyst for much of the novel’s unraveling.

That’s what gives the novel its tension.

Not whether Lurie can change, but whether he values anything enough to want to.

Coetzee quietly expands the emotional and political scope of the story through Melanie’s family, his daughter Lucy’s life on the farm, and the changing social order in post-apartheid South Africa. Underneath everything is power. Sexual power. Social power. Colonial power. The slow realization that the structures that once protected certain people no longer function.

Lucy’s decisions become especially difficult in that context. Her willingness to submit to a new reality in order to remain on the farm mirrors Lurie more than either of them would probably admit. Both become so committed to their own ideas of dignity that they place them above their own futures.

That parallel is what makes the story so tragic.

Coetzee never overstates any of this. That’s what makes the novel linger.

It understands how difficult it becomes to change once behavior hardens into identity.

04 / Film: The movies we've watched and returned to

T he films we’re watching and rewatching, the ones that shape our taste, match our mood, and make us feel something real.

The Devil Wears Prada 2

What makes The Devil Wears Prada 2 work is that it understands exactly what people loved about the first film, and resists the temptation to overcomplicate it.

The movie is still about ambition, taste, status, performance, and insecurity. But twenty years later, those things carry different weight. The characters are older now. More successful. More established. And yet, each of them is still negotiating some version of the same internal struggle they were dealing with the first time around.

Anne Hathaway’s Andy still moves through the world with urgency. Emily Blunt’s Emily still chases relevance and proximity to power. Stanley Tucci’s Nigel remains the emotional center of the franchise, loyal to Miranda while quietly carrying the disappointment of never fully inheriting the world he helped build.

And then there’s Miranda Priestly.

What the film does wisely is allow her to age without softening her into irrelevance. Meryl Streep plays her with the same precision and restraint that made the original work, but there’s more humanity around the edges now. Not sentimentality. Just recognition. The film understands that power looks different when you’ve already spent decades sustaining it.

Kenneth Branagh is excellent as Miranda’s husband and the film allows their marriage to feel supportive rather than dramatic.

Justin Theroux’s Benji works as a perfect contemporary foil: a wealthy tech founder willing to buy almost anything because value itself has become abstract. BJ Novak’s character brings the same logic into media, treating legacy publications as assets to optimize rather than institutions worth preserving.

The themes are substantial: aging, relevance, commerce, loyalty, reinvention, survival. But the film keeps them light on their feet. There’s conflict, but never dread. You trust the characters enough to stay relaxed inside the story. The movie never mistakes darkness for depth.

Visually, emotionally, socially, the update to 2026 works. The writing understands how people speak now, how power operates now, how fashion and media now exist inside tech, branding, algorithms, memes, and private capital. But it still feels recognizably Prada. Sharp. Fast. Stylish. Funny.

There’s something reassuring about spending time with characters who have aged alongside their flaws instead of overcoming them completely. The movie understands that identity doesn’t usually transform all at once. Most people simply become more recognizable versions of themselves over time.

Munich (2005)

What makes Munich endure is that it refuses to simplify what revenge does to the people carrying it out.

The film is structured like a thriller. Assassinations, surveillance, safe houses, coded meetings across European cities. The pacing is tight, the tension constant, and Spielberg keeps the movie moving with the kind of precision that makes even its quieter scenes feel unstable. It’s easy to see why the film still holds up for people who love espionage stories, especially the more psychological and morally complicated kind.

But what gives Munich its weight isn’t the operation itself. It’s the gradual erosion of certainty underneath it.

Eric Bana’s Avner begins with a clear sense of purpose. The film imagines him as a man asked to turn grief, duty, and national trauma into action. At first, the mission feels almost procedural. Names, locations, targets, consequences. But as the team moves from one killing to the next, the film becomes less interested in retaliation than in what repeated violence does to the people asked to perform it.

The cast plays that shift with restraint. Bana never turns Avner into a hero or a victim. Daniel Craig, Ciarán Hinds, Hanns Zischler, and Mathieu Kassovitz each give the team a different temperature: anger, discipline, doubt, practicality. Together, they make the operation feel less like mythology and more like a work in progress.

Spielberg doesn’t deny the horror of the Munich massacre or the fact that a response was coming. What he questions is what happens after the response becomes a way of life. That is where the film connects to identity. Not in an easy political sense, and not as a clean lesson. More as a warning about what happens when a person becomes organized around response. Around the belief that what has happened must keep determining what comes next.

Visually, the film still looks incredible. The European settings feel tactile and cold in the way great espionage films should. Hotel rooms, train stations, late-night meetings, people waiting for phones to ring. Even the action sequences feel tense rather than spectacular.

What lasts, though, is the exhaustion.

Not only from the violence, but from the constant need to keep explaining it to yourself as you continue.

That’s what makes Munich difficult in a way most political thrillers aren’t. It understands that people rarely emerge from prolonged conflict unchanged, even when they believe in why they entered it.

I Looked up from the sweating glass to her eyes.

05 / Food & Drink — Taste, Texture, Atmosphere

T hese are the flavors and rituals shaping our mood this season, the ones that uplift us, ground us, and influence how the Valedictorian experience will feel.

Food and drink become memory faster than almost anything else.

Not only because of taste, but because of their ability to shape mood and help us internalize a feeling about where we are and the experience we’re having. Conversations that ran long. Summer evenings. Trips with friends. Kitchens full of people waiting for the next thing to come off the stove.

They become part of the atmosphere.

That’s what makes hospitality an act of attention.

Not extravagance. Not performance. Just noticing what makes people feel relaxed, comfortable, welcome, and connected to where they are.

Sometimes it’s complicated.

Sometimes it’s pancakes and a good cold drink.

The Only Buttermilk Pancakes

There are breakfasts you make because they’re practical, and then there are breakfasts that are meant for slow, luxurious mornings.

Good pancakes change the morning.

I don’t make them constantly, which is probably part of why they still feel special. But when I do, I want great ones. Crisp edges, soft center, enough structure to hold butter and maple syrup without collapsing into mush. Comforting without feeling heavy.

The buttermilk gives them depth and tenderness, the extra egg yolk makes them richer without becoming dense, and letting the batter rest before cooking changes everything. The pancakes rise better, brown better, and develop the kind of texture that feels impossible from a boxed mix.

The other important thing is restraint. Don’t overmix the batter. Don’t press them down while cooking. Don’t rush them.

Pancakes are better when you give yourself the time to enjoy them.

The Only Buttermilk Pancakes

2 cups cake flour
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups buttermilk
2 large eggs
1 egg yolk
4 tablespoons melted butter
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Method

In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.

Add the buttermilk, eggs, egg yolk, melted butter, and vanilla extract. Mix until the wet and dry ingredients are just incorporated. The batter should still look slightly uneven. Don’t overmix it.

Let the batter rest for 15 minutes.

Heat a griddle or pan over medium heat and add a little butter. Use a ¼ cup measuring cup to portion the batter into the pan. Cook until bubbles begin forming across the top and the edges start to set, then flip and cook until golden brown.

Serve immediately with butter and real maple syrup.

That part matters too

Nature’s Gatorade

There’s a category of drink that sits somewhere between wellness culture and hospitality. Not quite a smoothie, not quite juice, not really trying to be functional. Just cold, refreshing, and delicious.

People online have been calling versions of it “Nature’s Gatorade.” We need to workshop that. But it's clean, bright, hydrating, and slightly luxurious in the way a really good non-alcoholic drink should. Especially in the summer.

The base stays the same every time: coconut water, citrus, mint, salt, something fresh blended into it. From there, it becomes incredibly riffable.

Cucumber makes it cool and spa-like. Blueberry gives it a richer, darker sweetness. Strawberry works really well. Mango feels like it’s going to become part of the regular rotation too.

That flexibility is part of the appeal. You start building your own versions around mood, weather, whatever’s in the kitchen.

More than anything, though, it feels good to drink.

It’s just physically refreshing. The kind of thing that makes a hot afternoon feel slower and easier to move through. It’s also a genuinely great alcohol alternative. You still feel like you’re having something considered and enjoyable rather than sacrificing the experience altogether. I'll be drinking this all summer.

Base Ingredients

2 cups coconut water
¼ cup fresh mint
Juice and zest of 1 lime
Juice and zest of ½ lemon
1 tablespoon maple syrup
Pinch of salt

Variations

Choose Between or mix

1 cup peeled and diced cucumber
1 cup Blueberries
1 cup Strawberries
1 cup Mango
Really anything soft, bright, and in season- Cant wait to try Kiwi

Method

Blend everything until fully incorporated and smooth. Serve over ice.

The base does most of the work.

The rest is just deciding what kind of afternoon you want to have.

Ignored the limit. Remind me in 15 more minutes.

06 / Wellness — Mind, Body, Spirit

W ellness is shifting from aesthetics to regulation: nervous system care, breathwork, and rituals that slow you down and bring you back to yourself.

Resistance

There’s a certain kind of resistance that shows up in small moments.

You know you should get up. Brush your teeth. Turn off the lights. Go to bed. And instead, you stay where you are. Not because you’ve decided not to do it. You know you will eventually. But the resistance to movement feels higher than it should.

It’s easy to ignore because it feels minor. But it accumulates. Over time, a surprising amount of energy gets spent resisting things that are already decided. Most of what keeps you well doesn’t require invention. It requires consistent action.

The gap between knowing and doing is where the cost lives.

Research in habit formation and behavioral design shows that actions taken immediately after awareness are more likely to repeat and stabilize, partly because they avoid the cognitive weight of deciding again. The action begins before resistance fully forms.

You stand up when the thought appears. You move toward the sink before the alternative forms. You go to bed before you start calculating how little sleep you can get away with.

Over time, that reduces the energy spent working against yourself.

And that energy moves somewhere else. Into better patterns. Into decisions that used to feel just out of reach. Into choices that compound over time.

It doesn’t feel like discipline.

It feels like less interference.

You notice. You act. And then you move on.

07 / Closing Thoughts

T hat's it for this issue.

I wrote a big part of this issue in Nova Scotia, during a family trip to visit more family. Overnight drives, coffee stops, small towns, the ocean appearing again around turns in the road.

I’d been thinking about identity while there. Not only who you think you are, but how much the people around you shape and reinforce that understanding. Siblings who remember older versions of you. Family who make you relax simply by being honest about who they are. Friends who make life feel less negotiated. How they can all support and complicate things.

I think exposure matters more than people admit. Time in the daylight of other people.

Travel helps because it interrupts the assumption that your way of living is the only coherent one. You see how other people structure their days. What they prioritize. How they move. What they’ve decided matters.

The same is true of friendship.

A good friend group doesn’t only support you emotionally. It expands your imagination by introducing different standards and ambitions. Different ways of speaking, dressing, building, relaxing, caring. You begin to realize how much identity is shaped through proximity. Through repetition. Through what you continuously allow around you.

Identity isn’t only internal.

It’s environmental too.

Saúde,
Haven