Lifestyle
A Couple Kisses That Sealed the Deal
When Olivia Christine Snyder-Spak matched with Elias Jeremy Stein on Hinge in September 2021, she was a decade into online dating but had never found an ideal partner. “I had probably gone on at least a few hundred first dates, sometimes even doing two in a day,” she said.
Mr. Stein was less versed in internet matchmaking and had been on only a handful of dates over the previous year. “I wanted a serious relationship and decided to try the online route since meeting people in person during Covid was harder,” he said.
At the time, Mr. Stein, 35, was renting an apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn; Ms. Snyder-Spak, 36, lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The two exchanged messages for a week about their shared love for cooking classes and art projects and exchanging funny stories. Then, Mr. Stein asked Ms. Snyder-Spak on a mini-golfing date.
When they met, in mid-September, at the Putting Green mini-golf course in Brooklyn, Mr. Stein was struck by Ms. Snyder-Spak’s energy. “She was super cute and seemed bubbly,” he said.
They played golf for an hour, chatting about their backgrounds and professions as they navigated the course. “We laughed a lot because Olivia kept hitting the ball far away from the hole,” Mr. Stein said. “The conversation was so good that I asked her for drinks afterward.”
They walked to the nearby Other Half Brewing, sat outside and continued talking over beers for the next several hours. “We were easy with each other, and it was clear we had clicked,” Mr. Stein said.
Eventually, it started to rain heavily. As they waited for their Uber rides, Mr. Stein asked Ms. Snyder-Spak if he could kiss her. “I said yes, and when he smooched me, it felt like a movie kiss,” she said, describing it as “very romantic.”
They settled into a dating cadence almost immediately, seeing each other several times a week for activities like sushi-making, comedy shows and museums. On Halloween, they went to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. “The spookiness of a cemetery seemed fitting, and the fact that Eli felt the same way was a big sign that he was going to be a great teammate, down for whatever,” Ms. Snyder-Spak said.
A vacation to Turks and Caicos Islands in January 2022 solidified their commitment. “Our flight back got canceled because of bad weather and a staffing shortage, and the two we booked after that also got canceled,” Mr. Stein said. “We eventually ended up in Miami and got bumped on our flight home.”
Nevertheless, they had fun. “That’s when I knew that Olivia was the one.”
The experience made Ms. Snyder-Spak “realize that I wanted to do hard things together with Eli forever,” she said.
Mr. Stein grew up in Durham, N.C. He is a product manager on the software development team at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York and the founder of Admissions Intelligence, a college admissions platform that uses artificial intelligence. He has a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Vassar College.
Ms. Snyder-Spak is from Woodbridge, Conn., and works as the director of nonfiction at the entertainment production company Topic Studios, in New York. She has a bachelor’s degree in film from Dartmouth.
After their Turks and Caicos trip, the couple began spending several nights a week at one of their two apartments. In July 2022, they began renting a place, which they’ve since bought, in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Their bond grew as they decorated their home and traveled to places like Brazil, Portugal and Costa Rica. “My love for Olivia was getting stronger, and it was the right time to propose,” Mr. Stein said.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
On Dec. 13, 2023, during a nighttime picnic in Prospect Park, Mr. Stein asked Ms. Snyder-Spak to marry him as the Geminids meteor shower brightened the skies. As they kissed after she said yes, they caught a glimpse of a shooting star.
More than a year later, on Dec. 29, they wed on the front stoop of a Park Slope brownstone owned by Rabbi Yael Werber, a friend of the couple and the ceremony’s officiant. Rabbi Werber is affiliated with Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. Afterward, they walked to Mille-Feuille Bakery Cafe in Prospect Heights and indulged in three desserts.
In September, Mr. Stein and Ms. Snyder-Spak had hosted a six-day, pre-wedding celebration in Asheville, N.C., for 140 guests; it included activities such as solving a murder mystery, visiting local breweries and tubing down the French Broad River. The festivities culminated in a symbolic wedding ceremony on Sept. 1 at Yesterday Spaces, an event venue in Leicester, N.C.
“All my online dating before Eli was worth it because I found the guy I was looking for all along,” Ms. Snyder-Spak said. “I remember the hard work, but now everything feels like magic.”
What freedom looks like today.
Getty Images/Viktoriia Miroshnikova/Photo illustration by NPR
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Getty Images/Viktoriia Miroshnikova/Photo illustration by NPR
What does freedom mean today?
Happy Juneteenth! For those not in the know, today commemorates when U.S. federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people were freed – a full two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Since then, Juneteenth has been celebrated all over the country, especially in Texas and across the South, where Juneteenth parades, cookouts, festivals and pageants happen every year. Two weeks from now, the country will celebrate the Fourth of July – and its 250th anniversary. For many Black Americans, there’s always been a tension between these holidays – and their two different ideals for what it means to be free. As voting rights protections are rolled back and Black history is being scrubbed from government websites, what does freedom look like for Black Americans today?
To get into it, Brittany is joined by Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson, chair of Africana Studies at Wellesley College.
For more episodes about the quality of Black life in America, check out:
Jesse Jackson & the end of the civil rights superhero
Is the economy slowing? Ask Black women.
What to expect when you’re expecting racism
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This episode was produced by Corey Antonio Rose and Liam McBain. It was edited by Neena Pathak. We had engineering support from Josephine Nyounai. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
First released in 2000, the acclaimed film Amores perros, which was produced and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga, has been remastered and is returning to theaters.
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Before Amores Perros became widely regarded as a modern classic, it belonged to Mexico. The film premiered at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival in 2000, where it won The Grand Prix, launching a run of international acclaim that has never quite ended. This month, Amores Perros is back in theaters in a fully remastered format from its original Kodak film stocks.
The film’s plot centers on three strangers whose lives intersect at the scene of a car crash. Each story wrestles with overlapping issues of social class disparities, crime and familial betrayal. The release in Mexico coincided with the end of the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI’s 71-year hold on power. Amores Perros was followed by a period of original, contemporary films in Latin America that would prove the region’s studios could compete with Hollywood in scope and complexity.
One of the film’s lead charachters, Octavio, is played by actor Gael García Bernal.
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The film marked the directorial debut of Alejandro González Iñárritu, who would go on to win four Academy Awards including back-to-back best director awards for Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015). In a recent interview with NPR, Gael García Bernal, a lead actor in Amores Perros, called the film’s launch “a new geography in cinema.”
González Iñárritu and García Bernal spoke with Morning Edition’s A Martinez about their early collaboration and the film’s continued resonance with new audiences.
Listen to the interview by clicking on the blue play button above.
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Margaux Bauerlein.
Preparations underway for the Great American State Fair, as seen on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall last week.
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A lot is changing these days in Washington, D.C., with even more on the horizon: 10 city blocks of the National Mall will soon transform into a multi-week state fair spectacle, complete with a Ferris wheel, in honor of the country’s 250th birthday.
The “Great American State Fair” will run from June 25 through July 10, promising to bring state-themed pavilions, movie screenings, musical performances, military flyovers, nostalgic snacks, a daily rodeo — and potentially scores of tourists — to the nation’s capital.
It will feature more than 150 exhibits, with full participation across the United States and several U.S. territories, as well as “businesses, innovators and civic organizations,” according to Freedom250, the White House-backed campaign that is organizing the fair in addition to other semiquincentennial events.
“A master-planned celebration will unfold along the National Mall from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, featuring vibrant pavilions representing every U.S. state and territory,” says the White House website, adding that the beaux-arts style tents will also highlight national themes like agriculture, the arts, faith and family.
Workers started setting up the fair, in view of the U.S. Capitol, in late May.
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However, not all states are sending official government delegations to the fair. Officials in more than half a dozen states — including Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington — confirmed to NPR that they are not participating directly. Most cited financial considerations and a desire to prioritize celebrations in their own communities, though others voiced political concerns.
Rachel Reisner, a spokesperson for Freedom250, emphasized in an email that there is “a vast majority participating” among the states. Additionally, others are being represented by local businesses and organizations — such as two companies from North Carolina and a museum from Illinois.
“Whether represented by a governor’s office, a tourism board, or a beloved state company or organization, every community will be celebrated, and every American will see themselves in this once-in-a-generation event,” Reisner said.
The state fair is one in a series of patriotic anniversary events planned for D.C. this summer, including the UFC fight night outside the White House last Sunday and a fireworks-heavy July Fourth celebration that President Trump rebranded as a political rally in a Truth Social post on Monday.
In another post that day, Trump encouraged people to attend the kickoff to the fair on Wednesday — and, by extension, the “summer long Celebration of 250 years of American Independence.”
“We are going to have fun, and celebrate America!” he wrote.
That opening event was originally billed as a concert, though many of the performers originally attached to it — including Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, the Commodores and Young MC — have withdrawn in recent weeks. Organizers now say the kickoff will feature remarks by Trump and performances by Lee Greenwood and Christopher Macchio, musicians who have sung at Trump events before.
What to know about the fair
The fair is an all-day, rain-or-shine event. It is free and open to the public, though preregistration is encouraged.
Freedom250 is promising attendees an interactive experience at the state pavilions, from Michigan’s mechanical milking cow to Florida’s re-creation of a Spanish fort honoring explorer Juan Ponce de León.
There will also be activations by a wide range of companies, organizations and government agencies, from NASA and John Deere to Meta and the Washington Commanders.
Each of the fair’s 16 days has its own theme, including two “MAHA Mondays” and a military and veterans’ appreciation day. July Fourth is branded as the Independence Day Celebration, and the fair’s final day is billed as “The Next 250: Innovation.”
The extravaganza will span a wide swath of the National Mall, much of it already blocked off with fences and construction cranes. The fair may also impact air travel in the area.
In a press release this week, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority warned travelers at D.C.’s Reagan National Airport that their flights might be adjusted or delayed due to some of the America 250 celebrations — including the opening and closing days of the state fair.
“Many events will include downtown flyovers or other aerial displays such as fireworks or parachute jumps, which will affect flights periodically at Reagan National,” it said, adding that the most significant disruptions are expected on July 3 and 4.
Why some state governments aren’t participating
Nearly 10 states say they will not be spending funds or sending personnel to the D.C. fair. While all but one are led by Democratic governors, many told NPR the decision not to attend was a financial decision, not an overt political statement.
“The states were expected to fund and to staff a multi-week exhibit in Washington, D.C., which would entail getting staffers down to D.C., housing them, feeding them, and with the booths and everything … the estimated budget was at least $100,000,” said Cathryn Vaulman, a spokesperson for Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont.
Vaulman said that money would have come out of the state’s budget for its own 250th celebrations — so leaders made a “resource-based decision” to focus on those instead. But she noted that plenty of other blue states, like New York, are still planning to staff the state fair.
Some other states estimated their costs as $100,000, though others were much higher: Sarah Hansen, director of the Maine Semiquincentennial Commission, told NPR that its cost estimates were “half a million dollars or more,” which she said was not feasible for the state, “given the federal government’s refusal to provide any funding.”
Washington Lt. Gov. Denny Heck’s office told NPR over email that the state opted out in large part because of confusion over costs.
The fair will span 10 city blocks on the National Mall for over two weeks.
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“We had heard participating states (whether that was state agencies, tourism authorities, etc.) were generally planning for their costs to be anywhere between $100k to nearly $1m,” Dallas Roberts, Heck’s chief of staff, said in the email.
Each state and territory gets about 600 square feet to build its exhibit, with no set dollar amount required to participate, according to Freedom250. It acknowledges that cost was a concern for many states, which is why some partnered with tourism bureaus and companies.
“Our ask was not your government entity must do this and give money; it was an invitation to the state to represent their culture, heritage, and landscape however they would like,” Reisner, the Freedom250 spokesperson, wrote in an email, adding that the event is funded by “both private and public dollars.”
Officials in a handful of states have been more outspoken in their criticism of how the event is being run.
Speaking to GBH News’ Boston Public Radio earlier this month, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who also opted out, said Trump “invited all the states to participate and wants to charge us to go down and put something on his exhibit.”
“It’s just ridiculous,” she added. “This is taxpayer money.”
Luke Harkins, a spokesperson for Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, told Oregon Public Broadcasting that the state is not participating “due to both the cost of participating in the Fair and growing concerns that the event in Washington, D.C. is shaping up to be a more partisan affair than originally presented.”
Officials from different states told NPR they had different understandings of how representation from their state would work.
Jayette Bolinski, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, said the Peoria Riverfront Museum volunteered to represent the state with an “Illinois-centric pavilion” featuring a hologram of stories from over 50 residents — none of which was paid for by state funds, she stressed. Vaulman, of Connecticut, said she believes its booth will have photos and posters of some sort, while Hansen of Maine said their inquiries to Freedom250 about this “have gone unanswered.”
What else is on the anniversary agenda — and who’s planning it
Planning for national 250th anniversary events mainly falls to two main groups, which have become increasingly politicized.
In 2015, looking ahead, Congress created a nonpartisan commission to orchestrate anniversary celebrations, which in turn created a nonprofit called America250. It’s composed mostly of private citizens, along with several members of Congress and representatives from federal agencies.
America250 appears to focus mainly on getting Americans involved in celebrations at the local level, such as attending synchronized nationwide block parties. It has gathered — and recently sealed — a time capsule with contributions from every state and is hosting a July Fourth concert in Los Angeles, with tickets selling for $17.76, featuring the Smashing Pumpkins, Chris Stapleton and Queen Latifah.
Freedom250, on the other hand, emerged from a Trump 2025 executive order establishing a task force for celebrating the milestone. Critics — including progressive consumer advocacy group Public Citizen — see this group as Trump’s attempt to bypass America250 after trying unsuccessfully to pack it with loyalists.
Freedom250 describes itself as “the national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday.” Another sign of its standing in the administration: The official White House webpage for the 250th links out to Freedom250, not America250.
The group has organized many other high-profile anniversary events, including the White House UFC event, the July Fourth rally on the Mall, a July Fourth tall ship event on the East Coast and the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C., an Indycar event scheduled for the National Mall in August.
Trump’s executive order says the 250th task force must disband at the end of the year, unless he extends it. And many of the beautification projects his administration is undertaking in D.C. — from restoring fountains to installing statues to repainting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — are tied to the anniversary but could shape the city far beyond it.
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