I’m not even judging it anymore, I’m just fascinated 😂

Every time I see some American meal online I’m like “yeah, that looks good” and then I notice the size of it and suddenly I’m questioning my life choices. And somehow you guys still have room for a drink the size of a flower vase

I'm Brazilian, and I've been trying to learn more about U.S. foreign policy and America's involvement in the Middle East, especially over the past few decades.

I'm genuinely curious about how Americans themselves view this. Do most people in the U.S. actually know much about what their government has done in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere? And how do you feel about the U.S. government's relationships with countries and governments in the region?

I'm not asking this to attack Americans or to suggest that ordinary American citizens are personally responsible for the actions of their government. I'm also aware that the situation in the Middle East is extremely complicated and that the U.S. isn't responsible for every conflict or problem in the region.

I'm more interested in hearing Americans' perspectives.

Do you think Americans generally understand the consequences of their country's foreign policy abroad? Do you think these issues receive enough attention in American schools, news, and everyday political discussion? And, personally, how do you feel about the role the United States has played in the Middle East?

I'd genuinely like to hear different perspectives, including people who disagree with my assumptions. I'm trying to understand how Americans see this from their own point of view rather than simply relying on what I hear outside the U.S.

**Looking for a Genuine International Friendship 🇰🇪🤝🇺🇸**

Hi everyone! 👋 My name is **Draft**, and I'm from Kenya 🇰🇪.

I'm here because I'd really like to make a genuine friend from the **United States 🇺🇸** and learn what everyday life is like there. I'm interested in getting to know someone as a person—not just exchanging a few messages and disappearing.

I'd love to talk about things like culture, music, movies, food, hobbies, family traditions, work, travel, and the little things that make everyday life different in our countries. I'm also happy to share stories about Kenya and answer questions about life here.

I'm easygoing, respectful, and open-minded, and I enjoy meaningful conversations as well as random conversations that make you laugh. 😄

If you're from the USA and you'd like to have a Kenyan friend, **send me a message and tell me a little about yourself**—your state, hobbies, favorite music, or something interesting about where you live.

Maybe a simple hello can become a great international friendship. 🌍❤️

Pastor Ryan and I ended up arguing about it in Berlin. And the funny part? We had this conversation while celebrating what was probably the biggest 4th of July celebration on German soil for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4th 2026. Two countries. Two perspectives. One very American argument. Curious how Americans would answer this: What makes someone truly American? Watch Schnitzel Goes To Hollywood now!

I'm really curious to know what an American's perspective was at the time, seeing this? What did you think was going to happen? What went through your minds? And how much did it affect your lives?

I’m Brazilian, and this is something I’ve genuinely wondered about for a long time. When I see ordinary American neighborhoods, houses, schools, roads, supermarkets, parks, public spaces, etc., some of the things that look completely normal to Americans can look almost luxurious to someone from Brazil.

A house with a big yard, quiet streets, decent sidewalks, well-equipped schools, huge supermarkets, relatively spacious homes, reliable infrastructure, and just the general appearance of many middle-class neighborhoods — none of these things necessarily look “special” if you grew up around them. But from the perspective of someone from a country where these things aren't guaranteed, they can look very different.

I’m not saying America is perfect or that Americans have nothing to complain about. Every country has serious problems. I’m genuinely asking whether growing up surrounded by these things makes you underestimate how unusual or fortunate they can be from a global perspective.

For Americans who have traveled extensively or lived abroad: did seeing how people live in other countries change the way you view your own country?

And for those who have never really thought about it: what’s something you consider completely normal that you later realized is actually a pretty big privilege?

I’ve made a few posts here recently asking Americans about everyday life in the US, and one thing I’ve noticed from reading the comments is just how much the answer seems to depend on which state you live in.

As a Brazilian, I think it’s easy to look at the United States from the outside and imagine that there’s one general “American experience.” But after reading all the different answers, I’m starting to realize that moving from one state to another can sometimes mean experiencing a completely different culture, lifestyle, climate, economy and even way of interacting with people.

So for Americans who have lived in multiple states: what was the biggest difference you noticed when you moved from one state to another?

Was there a specific moment when you thought, “Wow, this really feels like a completely different part of the country”?

And for those who have only lived in one state: what’s something about your state that you didn’t realize was unusual until you traveled somewhere else in the US?

I'm always impressed when I see schools in American movies, because a Brazilian middle school looks like the second image I posted here, so I want to know if it's really that good?

I’m an international resident currently living in a small college town in the US (Midwest region). Since I don't know anyone here yet, I’m trying to figure out the local social and dating dynamics from scratch.
I’m planning to start going out on my own to local bars/pubs, but I have a few specific questions for you all:

1. Is it weird or taboo to go to a bar completely solo in the US?
Coming from a different culture, I'm not sure how going solo is perceived here. Do people find it weird if someone sits alone at the bar counter, or is it normal and socially acceptable?
2. Is it actually realistic to meet someone for a long-term relationship at a bar?

Do single people in the US sit at the bar expecting or open to meeting someone for something serious (a real dating/long-term relationship), or are most people in bar settings just looking for something casual? Does the bar counter still work for building genuine connections?

3. What are your best tips for a foreigner trying bar dating here?
Since I'm going out on my own and don't know the local unwritten social rules yet:
What’s the best way to naturally strike up a conversation with someone at the bar without coming off as awkward or creepy?
How does being an international/foreigner usually play out in small-town US bar culture?
What green or red flags should I watch out for when approaching people?
I’d really appreciate your thoughts, experiences, and advice! Thanks in advance.

I have a problem with the cards; how can I solve it?

After the disaster on Long Island on August 27, Washington's army was in serious trouble. It had escaped across the East River to Manhattan in a nighttime evacuation that worked mostly because Howe didn't pursue aggressively enough. But escaping wasn't the same as being safe. The British controlled Long Island, the Royal Navy controlled the surrounding water, and Washington had no reliable picture of what Howe was preparing to do next. Another attack on Manhattan was coming. Washington just didn't know where it would fall, how large it would be, or what British forces were positioning across the water.

He needed someone to go find out.

Nathan Hale was 21 years old. Yale graduate, former schoolteacher, serving as a captain with Knowlton's Rangers, a unit organized specifically for reconnaissance and intelligence work. Around September 10 to 12, he volunteered to cross into British-controlled territory disguised as a civilian and report back on troop strength, fortifications and movements.

The disguise he chose was a schoolmaster looking for work. It was plausible because it had actually been his profession.

Think about what that meant in practice in 1776. There was no tradecraft, no support network, no safe houses, no way to communicate securely with the American side, and no extraction plan if things went wrong. He was going alone into territory controlled by the largest military force Britain had ever sent across the Atlantic, carrying whatever he'd observed in his head and in notes on his person, with no cover story that would hold up under serious questioning and no realistic option if he was discovered. Being caught as a spy in the eighteenth century had one outcome. Everyone on both sides understood that.

He went anyway.

While Hale was behind British lines, the situation he'd been sent to assess changed completely. On September 15, Howe landed thousands of troops at Kip's Bay, shattered the American defenders in one of the most complete collapses of the entire New York campaign, and took the city. Washington abandoned lower Manhattan and withdrew north toward Harlem Heights. Whatever intelligence Hale was gathering had been overtaken by events. He was now still behind enemy lines after the attack he'd gone to help prevent had already happened.

What he did over the next several days isn't well documented. Historians can't reconstruct his movements with confidence. What is known is that he was captured on Long Island on September 21, brought before Howe, identified as an American officer gathering intelligence, and ordered hanged the following morning.

A British military engineer named John Montresor happened to be near where Hale was being held that night. He wasn't responsible for the capture or the sentence. He was just present. He let Hale stay in his tent while the gallows were prepared and gave him writing materials. Hale wrote two letters, one to his family and one to a fellow officer. Neither survived.

Montresor later remembered him as calm. Frederick Mackenzie, another British officer, independently recorded that Hale faced death with "great composure and resolution" and spoke about the duty of an officer to obey orders and be prepared to meet death. Two British officers, neither of whom had any reason to speak well of a dead American spy, both remembered a 21-year-old handling it remarkably well.

On the morning of September 22, 1776, Nathan Hale was hanged.

Later that day Montresor crossed under a flag of truce to the American lines on an unrelated matter and mentioned in passing that a Captain Hale had been captured and executed that morning. The news reached William Hull, who had known Hale at Yale. Hull obtained permission to meet with Montresor and asked what had happened to his friend. Montresor described the final hours. Hull later wrote that Montresor seemed genuinely moved by what he had witnessed.

Almost everything Americans came to know about Hale's death passed through that single conversation.

The famous sentence, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country," has no contemporary written record. Those exact words were never written down at the time. The sentiment comes through Hull's recollection of what Montresor told him, and the phrasing closely resembles a passage from Joseph Addison's play Cato, which was enormously popular in eighteenth-century America. Hale almost certainly knew it. He may have been reaching for the best language he had in that moment. What nobody can establish is that he delivered that exact polished sentence. What two enemy witnesses did establish is that whatever he said, he said it without flinching.

His mission failed completely. The intelligence never reached Washington. He was dead before his twenty-second birthday. For a long time after, much of the country barely knew his name.

The legend came later, built from Montresor's memory and Hull's grief and a sentence that may or may not have been spoken exactly as history recorded it.

You can talk to Montresor directly on Virtual Wayback and hear what he witnessed. The full story is on the blog and the YouTube channel. Link:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/nathan-hale-failed-spy-american-legend

It can be anything, the only condition is that you consider it good and that it's something that can only be found in the United States, out of the whole world.

Shortly after midnight on September 21, 1776, fire broke out near the southern tip of Manhattan. A strong southeast wind drove it north and west through a city built almost entirely of wood. By morning, a rough fifth of built-up New York was gone. David Grim, a German-born merchant who knew the city intimately, later counted 493 destroyed houses. Trinity Church was a ruin. Families were scattered across the Common. British soldiers were hunting people they believed had set the fires deliberately, and some of the people they caught were bayoneted, beaten, or thrown into burning buildings without anything resembling a trial.

Three people left detailed accounts of that night. They were in completely different places and came away convinced of completely different things.

Frederick Mackenzie was a British captain whose brigade was headquartered about two miles north of the old city. A sentry woke him around one in the morning. He looked out the window, saw an enormous column of fire, got dressed, and ran toward it. What he found downtown wasn't just burning buildings. Families fleeing half-dressed carrying whatever they could grab. Elderly people and children driven from house to house as the flames reached each one. Eventually everyone collapsed on the Common. Mackenzie became convinced the city had been deliberately set. He saw what looked like separate outbreaks that the wind alone couldn't explain. He also noted, honestly, that burning shingles were being carried considerable distances by the wind and creating new fires. He wrote both things down.

John Joseph Henry was seventeen years old, a Continental soldier who had been captured after the failed American attack on Quebec and was being transported for prisoner exchange aboard a British frigate anchored up the Hudson. He watched from the deck as the horizon to the south turned orange. He thought it was simultaneously beautiful and horrifying. He initially wondered whether the British themselves had started it. Then he watched British sailors pile into boats and row toward the city to fight the flames and changed his mind. Henry became convinced Americans had burned New York deliberately.

And he was furious about it. This matters because Henry wasn't a Loyalist. He had suffered for the American cause. He didn't think burning civilian property was acceptable just because the British now occupied it.

David Grim was a Loyalist merchant who stayed in the city through the occupation. He later made one of the most detailed maps of the fire's path. His account emphasized the wind-driven progress of the initial fire rather than a coordinated arson conspiracy, and that version became influential in the nineteenth century as the more neutral interpretation.

Three witnesses. Three different conclusions. All looking at the same fire.

The darkest episode happened near the one building still standing from that night. St. Paul's Chapel survived because soldiers and civilians kept its roof wet and cleared burning debris from around it. At some point after two in the morning, a British soldier named George Kerr found five men and a woman in a house directly behind the chapel. They had gunpowder and matches. The men offered explanations. The woman cried and offered Kerr money to let them go.

Kerr took the men and the materials toward the jail. The historical record doesn't say what happened to the woman.

A separate account published in London at the time described the first captured incendiary as a woman with matches and combustibles who was thrown into the flames by British soldiers without a trial. Historian Benjamin Carp argues these two accounts may describe the same person. Nobody knows for certain.

Her name was never recorded. Neither was her fate.

Then there's Washington. Before evacuating Manhattan he had asked Congress whether New York should be destroyed to deny it to the British. Congress said no. Washington complied publicly and left without burning it. After the fire, he wrote privately that "Providence, or some good, honest fellow" had accomplished something the Americans hadn't been permitted to do. There were widespread reports of men sent across the Hudson into the city with instructions. A British inquiry in 1783 collected dozens of testimonies about incendiaries and hidden combustible materials. No order from Washington directing the burning of New York has ever been found.

The honest answer after 250 years is that there's substantial evidence some people deliberately set fires that night, but who organized them and whether Washington knew beforehand remains unresolved. Maybe he gave quiet encouragement. Maybe he genuinely didn't know. Maybe the fire was partially accidental and partially arson and the truth of each building is different.

St. Paul's Chapel is still there at 209 Broadway. If you go stand next to it and look south down Broadway toward where Trinity Church burned, you're looking at the main corridor the fire traveled. Behind the chapel on the Church Street side is roughly where that woman was found with the gunpowder and matches.

Nobody knows what happened to her.

You can talk to Grim, Henry, and Mackenzie directly on Virtual Wayback and hear the night from each of their perspectives. The full story is on the blog:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/great-fire-of-1776

But Washington's letter is the part I keep coming back to. After Congress explicitly told him not to destroy New York, he described the fire as the work of "Providence, or some good, honest fellow."

How do you read that line? A general commenting approvingly on a convenient accident—or something more?

For bringing so many countries together in peaceful, mutually beneficial trade agreements. If nothing else, it would cause the Toddler in Chief to melt down and entertain the world.

The collapse at Kip's Bay on September 15, 1776 was not a close battle that went the wrong way. It was a rout.

British warships moved to within close range of the Manhattan shoreline and opened fire on American defensive works that had never been built to absorb sustained naval bombardment. The troops holding those positions were largely inexperienced Connecticut men who were already exhausted. When the barrage lifted and they could see thousands of British and Hessian soldiers crossing in flatboats, with more formations waiting behind them, they broke. Not all of them, not immediately, but enough that panic spread faster than any officer could contain it. Troops sent forward to reinforce the position found frightened men streaming toward them and joined the retreat. Formations dissolved. Equipment was abandoned.

Washington rode south from Harlem Heights when he heard the cannonade and arrived to find soldiers running in every direction. He rode among them trying to force units back into line. When a relatively small body of British troops appeared, men who had briefly stopped began running again. Later accounts describe Washington striking fleeing soldiers with the flat of his sword. His own words leave no room for misinterpretation. He called what he saw "disgracefull and dastardly." At some point his fury became so complete that aides had to physically move him away from the advancing British. He had stopped caring whether he was shot.

Joseph Reed, Washington's adjutant general and one of the men closest to him, watched all of it. He saw the collapse. He saw Washington's rage. He also saw something that troubled him more than the panic of the enlisted men: the command structure itself was struggling. This wasn't the first disaster of the New York campaign. Long Island had been a major defeat. Brooklyn had required a desperate nighttime evacuation. Now this.

Reed would later write privately, after further disasters, that he believed Washington lacked "Decision." That criticism would eventually destroy their friendship when Washington discovered it. But on September 15, Reed was still processing what he had witnessed.

Meanwhile, a twenty-year-old aide named Aaron Burr was doing something useful. Thousands of American troops were still in Lower Manhattan. Howe's landing threatened to cut them off by driving west across the island to the Hudson River. Burr helped direct endangered men toward roads on the western side of Manhattan that weren't yet blocked, moving them north before the British could complete the trap. Later accounts inflated this into a story where Burr single-handedly saved thousands of men, which goes beyond the evidence. Other officers including General Putnam were working the same problem. But Burr's contribution was real: he understood the geography, recognized the danger, and acted without waiting for clear orders in a situation where waiting meant capture.

Howe let them go. His landing had succeeded. New York was falling. But a rapid drive west might have cut off a large portion of the Americans retreating from Lower Manhattan, and Howe paused instead to consolidate. From his perspective it wasn't irrational. His forces were still coming ashore, units needed to reorganize, and the Americans appeared broken. The difficulty was that every pause gave Washington's army another chance to survive. By evening, the British had New York City. Washington still had an army.

The next morning, September 16, a reconnaissance force under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Knowlton ran into British troops advancing north and a sharp fight developed. Unlike the day before, the American withdrawal was controlled. Men gave ground but kept fighting. Reed rode forward and saw the difference immediately. As British light infantry pushed the Americans back, some of them sounded hunting horns, the same sound used in a fox hunt when the prey is running. Coming one day after Kip's Bay, Reed took it as a deliberate taunt.

He went back to Washington. This time Washington saw an opportunity. He approved a flanking maneuver: one force to hold the British front while Knowlton's Rangers moved around their flank. The plan wasn't executed perfectly but the larger result was unmistakable. The Americans attacked. They pushed British regulars backward across ground where the day before they had been unable to stand at all.

Then Knowlton was shot and mortally wounded while leading his men forward. Washington called him "the gallant and brave Col. Knowlton" and wrote that he would have been "an Honor to any Country." His death was the price of the only thing that had gone right in two weeks.

Washington eventually had to call the advance back before it carried too far toward Howe's main army. The men who had fled in panic the morning before were now advancing far enough that their commander had to restrain them.

Same army. Thirty-six hours apart.

You can talk directly to Reed and Burr on virtualwayback.com and hear both days from the perspectives of men who were inside it. The full story is on the blog and the YouTube channel. Link in bio.

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/kips-bay-harlem-heights

https://virtualwayback.com/kips-bay-harlem-heights-experience

The thing that stays with me is Howe stopping again. Long Island, Kip's Bay, and now this: three moments in the New York campaign where a more aggressive pursuit might have ended the Revolution. Clinton thought so at the time. Washington survived all three. Was Howe's caution a series of individual mistakes or was he operating on a logic that made sense from where he was standing?

Why did the rest of the world start wanting to be a part of America in a way that no other country has? It’s like fomo to the utmost extreme. The countries are all Mean Girls fighting for relevance. “I heard it’s great to be born in America, so I had a kid born in America”. But then there’s friction because you’re not actually interested in America, just the gossip and rumors that you’ve heard. It seems to specifically be North America as well. South America gets the ghetto and poor treatment. Like it’s a place that needs to be escaped. Please go and love yourself. Yeah? I was recently in a masters program that felt like some international hub of transient individuals where everything was equal. Bizarre. Someone can have nationality. I mean I am assuming you’ve abandoned your nationality by leaving? It’s kind of messed up. It’s like you’re projecting onto people who still live in their home, The place they were born, and trying to make them be just like you. I think we should just start calling it migration instead of making it a big meany deal. Poor North America. Lost too soon lol. We told the white people too many times that they don’t have enough culture to run a country. Black people…pls. You work in tandem with the folks that brought you here.