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Nothing is more American than a rags-to-riches story: nobody becoming somebody through hard work, tying their bootstraps tight and moving on even when the going gets rough. And, as a result, just as American is the all-too-infamous Ponzi scheme or Get-Rich-Quick scheme, where oftentimes a mysterious, charming figure swindles those simply trying to get ahead in the laissez-faire market. What started in the 1920s by Charles Ponzi as a classic ‘invest in me and I will double it with no risk’ scandal has now evolved over the course of a century, taking the form of Multi-Level Marketing schemes and romanticized ideas about the kind of money an Ostrich Farm can fetch. Years of publicity and warnings of these kinds of frauds have made the American public wary, though, so what may classify as the 21st century’s new and improved version is harder to pin down.

But, the possible culprit is likely the one getting all the buzz: the busy, competitive, kombucha chugging world of AI tech start-ups. Publicity about start-ups has grown steadily since the myth of Steve Job and his legendary garage, but with the growth of AI tools, a dizzying amount of small start-ups praise and brag about their AI capabilities. Now, most Americans, instead of sending in their application to Who wants to be a Millionaire?, sit down in a cozy café with a partially fleshed-out idea and grand start-up dreams. Yet, the liberal, Silicon Valley image of a start-up—a stocked mini fridge of energy drinks and kombucha, flexible funky seating instead of cubicles and a casual, playful work environment more focused on team building than tasks—is far from most start-ups’ realities.

Brett Berry is a freshman computer engineering student at the University of Arkansas, who has gained experience in the field, despite his freshman status. Since early February of 2026, he has been a software engineer at a company called Tariff Ninja, which uses AI to track and provide advice about international product shipping to its clients. The way he found the job, though, wasn’t from a career fair, but a friend of a friend.

“One of my coworkers was dating the CEO… and I would always talk to her…every day about programming,” explained Berry. “And I think [there] is like a huge misconception [that] start-ups [are this] super easy thing you go and…get your kombucha out of the fridge.”

Instead of the relaxed, calm life one may expect from a part-time tech job, Berry explained that he spent hours fixing minute details to make the website not only presentable but work as it was intended to. Far from lollygagging, it took strenuous hours at his computer every week at home, due to his company lacking real office space, to build it into its current state.

“I’d say I roughly log about 20 hours per week in it,” he stated. “But I don’t log hours… just kind of thinking about it because…I think about it all the time throughout the day.”

Still, Berry has a very positive mindset surrounding start-ups and the field. While perhaps deceptive in the way it’s talked about, he agrees, money can be made if the right start-up is formed, as had been seen time and time again. He talked about Y Combinator funding, where a company is given millions of dollars to push them to success, moving to San Fransico and living out what he considered the dream of every start-up.

“You always fail if you never start. So, if you’re ever interested in a startup, you should always try. It’s the easiest time to try,” was Berry’s final note, hitting both the struggle with the field and the reconciliation that the worst thing any business can do is never give itself a chance.

Mark Zweig, professor at the U of A and acclaimed entrepreneur, had similar notes about the myths and legends surrounding start-up companies. Rather than the high-tech AI companies so often touted in news articles and social media groups, Zweig said he believes that the most profitable and successful start-ups are instead ‘Meat and Potatoes’ businesses.

“They’re not inventing anything new at all,” Zweig explained. “People are just doing a better job than the providers that exist currently in the market. That’s where I think the greatest opportunity is.”

In comparison to the modern glamour of AI focused companies, these businesses are more “blue-collar” in style; there are less yoga balls and free-flowing office space usually, but the exchange is a greater likelihood of success. Simply put, while they might not be “Billion-Dollar Ideas” as the phrase goes, they are likely to be stable, profitable income for years ahead. As Zweig put it:

“Is it something that’s really sexy that somebody’s gonna pay him a lot of money for his idea? No, it’s not. Is it a way that the guy could build, make himself into a multimillionaire, in a period of time, if he works hard, and buys another truck, and then buys another truck? Absolutely.”

When asked about the impacts of AI and the influence of short-form content on the field, Zweig said that he felt it gave a false impression of the field as a place built by dreamers, by creatives, rather than the more boring, practical truth.

“They spend too much time in coffee shops, fantasizing about how successful they’re gonna be…And it’s really not the idea that makes people successful…It’s the self-discipline and the work and … being willing to just grind it out,” he discussed. “If you want to really be successful in your own business, you need to be ready to work 78 hours a week, never turn off your phone…And it’s gonna take longer than a year or 2 of slogging like that if you really want to be successful.”

Overall, this shows a clear deviation from the myth of start-ups to reality. People who go into start-ups thinking they can spend a little bit of time on it then profit big are destained to fail, or, worse, will spend hours and thousands on an idea that never grows into a viable business venture. This is the biggest factor that connects Start-up culture to Get-Rich-Quick culture; the idea that it’s an easy, quick thing you do then profit immensely. In both cases, this never comes to fruition, like a false oasis in the middle of the barren desert.

Despite this, most still envision start-ups as youth living out the best part of their life, carefree, brazen and destined to succeed, because that is what college students were originally told about America: that American business is built on eccentric college dropouts who break the mold and take a chance. The body of the economy is much less exciting; it’s built on companies selling things like toilet paper, plates and home maintenance.

Start-ups represent a good that cannot be bought: stable, profitable, decent income. At a time of both high commercialization and low affordability, it is the most valuable commodity for incoming adults.

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The week of Sept. 10 to Sept. 15 was a big one for fashion lovers, especially those in New York City. Fall Fashion Week festivities have just commenced, with over 70 shows running. With hundreds of models showing off new fall collections, the week showcased the opportunity for hundreds of artists, marketers, event planners and volunteers to collaborate and shine a light on the art that gives them life: clothing.

But it’s not only high-end designers and A-list celebrities who get to experience and plan these state-of-the-art fashion shows. Several students at the University of Arkansas have had chances to trade Fayetteville for NYC a few days out of the year to volunteer at these events, get hands-on experience to advance their career plans in the industries they have been dreaming about since they were kids.

When juniors Kendal Nobrega and Madeline Secker were invited to help a clothing brand called “The Lab” for the Spring 2024 New York Fashion Week, they both knew it was an opportunity they could not pass up. Their obsession with fashion runs deep, and they said they have early memories of knowing they wanted to work in the industry.

Nobrega said that her first “aha” moment of interest towards fashion dates back to when she was six years old and was offered fashion magazines to browse through at a bridal salon.

“From there, I decided to start trying to copy the dresses for my Barbies out of socks and tissues, just to try to make clothes for them,” she said. “That’s where my relationship with the sewing side of fashion started.”

Secker said she always had an appreciation for fashion but realized that she truly wanted to work in the industry when she was a junior in high school, watching the hit show “Sex and the City” for the first time.

“I remember [Carrie Bradshaw’s] closet in her apartment, and the way that she would walk around New York City in heels every second of the day… I was like, that’s what I want to be doing,” she said. “I want to live, breathe and be in New York City, where everyone can express their fashion as who they are there.”

Secker and Nobrega were asked to fill differing volunteer roles in their time in NYC, but both were asked to help with menial tasks as needed. Secker worked in the event-planning and guest accommodation side of shows, collaborating with other PR assistants and hospitality volunteers.

“I was the one who greeted everyone; if there were very important people, I had to make sure they sat in the right spot; all the models’ parents, all of the designers’ family and friends,” Secker said.

Nobrega’s role was more involved with the preparation of garments, assisting designers, and dressing the models. She worked with the designers as they came in to make sure all their garments were prepped and ready to be on the models, spending much time unpacking, steaming, and fluffing the garments before each show.

The two would wake up at around four a.m. every morning, walk down to the design venue and assist with anywhere from four to seven shows per day.

Nobrega said that while the hours were chaotic, jam-packed, and at most times, stressful, it was incredibly fulfilling to put so much work towards showing art that they admire.

“I think my hands might still have some scars from the burns of steamers, but it was all worth it,” Nobrega said. “You could be up close and personal with garments that probably took hundreds of hours to construct, and just seeing the craftsmanship behind it was so cool.”

Aside from the new materials and tasks that Nobrega and Secker were encountering, they met many new faces in the fashion world as well, who provided guidance in their career paths.

Secker said she met a role model of hers after a show, Wilfrey Vasquez, who shared a motivating comment that keeps her striving towards her dream.

“He told me: ‘I can see that this is where you’re meant to be’, and it was so cool that he could tell how in love I am with [fashion], because I looked up to him,” she said.

Similarly, senior Abby Hutchison felt inspired by an encounter with bridalwear designer Dany Tabet when she met him during a Bridal Fashion Week trip in NYC for her job as a bridalwear consultant.

“Getting to know his background and what inspired the design that he created…I remember thinking ‘this is gonna make me be a better stylist and consultant,’’’she said.

Hutchison has visited New York Bridal Fashion Week for the past four years with her co-workers and bosses at Tesori Bridal, a local bridalwear store in Fayetteville. Through this opportunity, she has gotten a look into the role of being a fashion buyer for a clothing brand, as Tesori chooses their new styles and designers they will supply based on their viewings during the week in NYC.

“[Curating] looks with brides is something that I find so much joy in, and getting to be a bridal consultant gives you the opportunity to do something with fashion that leads to creating relationships,” Hutchison said.

Her experience meeting with designers and curating the looks that Tesori will bring home to Fayetteville for their next season has given her glimpses of what her future career could be like post-graduation.

“[Going to New York Bridal Fashion Week] I was like, that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life,” Hutchison said.

College students often hear the advice that content in class is vital to learning, but real-world experience is what cultivates true growth and success in a career field. Secker, Nobrega, and Hutchison all said that their time in NYC and being ingrained in the wave of the industry for even a short week reaffirmed their choice to work in fashion post-grad, teaching them abundantly more than a classroom ever could.

And while media depictions of the fashion industry can illustrate it as a sometimes surface-level, terse and militant one, students, i.e. the next generation of fashion designers, stylists, and creative directors, are the ones who choose to make their careers unique and personable to them and their attributes.

“It’s very much an industry that’s all about connections, who you know and how well you are within it and you can’t let it harden your heart,” Secker said. “If this is something you want to do, you have to fight for it, you have to fight for who you are, and keep going.”

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Brenda Stringfellow, 38, sat at the front of a classroom at Returning Home, leading a weekly leadership class where men work through accountability, decision-making and the practical steps of rebuilding life after incarceration. Ten men leaned forward, their attention fixed on her next words.

A whiteboard on wheels leaned against the wall, filled with handwritten prompts and responses. One part read, “What are we doing today? Moving forward!”

Since 2024, Stringfellow has served as the director of operations at Returning Home, a non-profit transitional living and reentry program for men in Huntsville, Arkansas, where she works daily to ensure post-incarceration recovery is not just words on a whiteboard. Through structured housing, life-skills courses and mentorship, she supports the participants as they rebuild their lives in a state where 46% of those released from prison return within three years.

Unresolved fines, fees and warrants, paired with limited reentry services, make it harder to secure housing, find work and stay on track—all of which raise the risk of returning to prison, according to the Council of State Governments Justice Center. The parole process itself often fails to account for job continuity, while statewide shortages in housing, behavioral healthcare, substance use treatment and workforce training compound the problem further.

Stringfellow leads the class as someone who once lived through what the men are living through in that room—recovery from substance addiction. At that time in her life, she built her own routines and accountability, which is exactly what she now weaves into the program for them.

The need for that structure is especially important for the men in the program, as approximately 90% of them have a history of substance abuse, Stringfellow said. That percentage reflects a larger issue. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the U.S. criminal legal system punishes substance use far more often than it provides treatment. Notably, roughly 41-49% of those arrested or incarcerated have a substance use disorder, compared to 8% of the general population.

As a group, Stringfellow prompted the men in the classroom to discuss the definition of triumph. “To encourage, to rally, to find inner strength, to be hardened,” one of the men read aloud.

“That’s huge,” Stringfellow said about the text, as the men’s eyes looked steadily at her, waiting for the next words that she would utter.

“When people talk about our stories as addicts, those are the words that they use — ‘They prevailed over addiction,” Stringfellow said. “They triumphed after incarceration.”

Seated near the front, 55-year-old Jonathan McDowell murmured a quiet “Mmm” in agreement.

“That’s y’all,” Stringfellow said, followed by a pause. “That’s us!”

Through its Community Alternative Program, the program aims to reduce recidivism by offering housing, addiction recovery support and life skills for roughly 30 men transitioning from incarceration. Entry into the 120-day program is referral-based, requiring a submission from a probation officer, attorney or public defender before a man can be considered.

Before Stringfellow ran the program, she had walked a similar path to those in the facility. She grew up splitting time between separated parents—one in Orlando and the other in Westfork—in households where addiction was a constant. Both of her parents were, in her words, “functioning alcoholics,” and substance abuse was present in both households.

When Stringfellow did not have community support or healthy relationships, school stopped mattering, and she was eventually kicked out for truancy. After smoking marijuana for the first time with a group that she described as “the wrong types of people,” she turned to opioids at 19 while in Orlando. What followed was a decade of substance abuse, petty possession and disorderly conduct. Eventually, she was convicted of residential burglary, receipt of a firearm and violating probation. Soon after, she landed in prison.

Forty days after her first release in 2017, she relapsed. It was only when her own support system advocated for her to return for treatment that the horizon of her life started to brighten. This was exactly what she needed.

“Rebuilding my life, learning how to give and receive love, was one of the hardest pieces,” she said. “It was something I had to learn that was taught to me in a very unhealthy way growing up.”

That second jail stint, roughly 30 days, was the first time anyone had offered her treatment instead of punishment, she said. When she was released, she cut ties with everyone she had known before prison and threw herself into what she called “ultra accountability.” She enrolled in Goodwill’s Traditional Employment Opportunity program, which places formerly incarcerated individuals in temporary jobs while providing job training and mentorship.

Because of a firearm charge on her record, she could not work inside a Goodwill store. However, by chance, the program placed her as a receptionist at Returning Home, which had just launched a reentry hub for released prisoners.

She has since been sober for nearly a decade and has never left Returning Home.

In 2021, she became director of the CAP program. Today, she is also a wife, mother, homeowner and the person standing at the front of the room, giving back what was once given to her.

The facility sits tucked away on a country road in Huntsville, where two-lane roads wind through open land and cows graze along the roadside as cars pass. The brick building is enclosed by tall trees, their scent carrying the quiet coolness of a forest.

Inside, the setting is cozy and modest. The walls in the house are plain, sometimes decorated with words of encouragement, and natural light fills the rooms.

Surrounding the table during the leadership class are plastic chairs filled with men who traded one kind of life for the chance at another. One of those individuals is 41-year-old Cody Scott, who arrived at the program in 2023 and went through the 120-day program. When it ended, the staff reviewed his case and gave him the option to stay for work. He volunteered doing case work for six months before being hired full time as the facility’s caseworker and manager, where his office shares a wall with Stringfellow’s.

He carries a caseload of 14 men, helping them sort through legal obligations, court dates and fines—the same work Stringfellow once did for him. “I had never been sober in my adult life,” he said of his past. He said he found his way back to his daughter, now 14, whose life he had not been a part of for nearly a decade, adding that Stringfellow was one of the first people who made him feel like this was possible.

“She’s got a way with bringing out the best in someone, and that kind of support was something I was not used to having,” Scott said about Stringfellow. “I was used to doing everything on my own.”

The residence’s community pantry stocked with cereal boxes hints at one of the small rituals the men had come to value—breakfast on Fridays, a time to sit together and debrief the week. At the end of every week following 50 hours of work and case management, the men go back to the facility to pay down their fines and share a meal. Stringfellow said that, on average, they enter the facility with $6,000 in fines each, and Friday is the day they make their way to the bank to pay some of it off.

That same day, a volunteer typically comes in to make biscuits and gravy, but that person never arrived that particular morning. So, Stringfellow drove down the street to the local donut shop and came back with enough for everyone. She laughed while telling the story, adding that there was something slightly humorous about watching men with face tattoos eat Valentine’s Day-themed donuts with heart designs.

Some of them probably would not care if they skipped breakfast altogether, she said. But some of them would. For her, it has never just been about the food.

“It’s a big piece of fellowship, it’s a big piece of our community,” she said. “You find out so much over a meal.”

She has noticed that during family meals around holidays the men open up in ways that they rarely do day to day.

“That’s when they talk the most, really,” Stringfellow said. “That is when they are more transparent.”

That, she said, is why breakfast matters to her and why she went out of her way to get the donuts that morning upon realizing the volunteer cook did not show.

Beyond the building, a pool surrounded by a gate sat, still and waiting. Once a month on a Saturday, the facility holds a family day, which includes three hours of meals, games and a bouncy house. It is one of the few times the men are allowed visitors on site, and for fathers, it is a chance to let their families see how far they have come.

On a nearby bench, a resident sat smoking a cigarette, his face buried in his phone. No one called him back inside. Stringfellow pointed out that quitting smoking does not need to be a focus right now, especially given everything they have walked away from. Whenever they feel they need one, they can have one.

What does get monitored is substance use. The men are regularly and randomly tested as part of the program’s structure, with a minimum of one test per week and several over the weekend. Stringfellow added that although none of the residents have fought a drug test, scheduling is always difficult. And when they go on pass, a time when a resident is authorized to leave the supervised facility for a designated amount of time to engage in community activities, they are immediately tested upon their return.

Back inside on the kitchen counter, the box of donuts sat beside the bulletin board where that week’s results were posted.

For Stringfellow, the tests carry personal weight. “When I was finally able to pass drug tests, it was a very proud moment for me,” she said. She remembered avoiding her probation officer and the courts during active addiction, knowing the result would be a disappointment. Now, watching the men in the program apply for jobs and fight to see their children—doing it because they know they can pass—is one of the more rewarding parts of the work, she said.

During the week, those same men clock in at places like Tyson and Butterball, which partner with the facility to help provide the men a work foundation. Through this, they build routines and paychecks one shift at a time, learning what it means to show up.

“Man, I gotta get up. On time. I gotta set an alarm,” McDowell said during the class, as he reflected on the transition into routine that many of the men described about their early days in the program.

Another individual who has learned to ease back into work is 56-year-old Christopher Benko, though everyone at the facility calls him by his last name. He speaks slowly and deliberately, with a faded tattoo on his right hand and a warmth that makes him easy to talk to. He arrived at Returning Home with a broken femur still healing, the clothes on his back and a severe drinking habit, sleeping on the streets.

As Benko described it, he was going downhill until he waved the white flag at his probation officer and asked about programs that could set him on the right path. Since arriving at Returning Home, he has found employment at Butterball, opened a checking and savings account, recently got his license back and bought a car. His fines are paid, and he is almost off probation. He continues to add money to his savings with the intention of purchasing a house, although he said he is “still new to the house-buying thing.”

The National Low Income Housing Coalition states that a conviction record, layered on top of a national shortage of 7.3 million affordable rental units, leaves many formerly incarcerated people with nowhere stable to land upon release. Without stable housing, the path to recidivism is short. Benko knows this reality. But through his own hard work and mentorship from leaders like Stringfellow, he is working toward a place to call his own.

“I still to this day am just like, I don’t know how I got to where I am at,” he said, “but I know I am in a great place.”

In the facility’s TV room, hooks lined the wall with positive character awards, a form of peer recognition the men give each other to acknowledge integrity in action. They do this publicly during every house meeting on Monday. Sometimes the awards follow a write-up, nodding at the way someone handled a sanction. Other times, it is celebrating the day someone got their driver’s license back.

As Stringfellow invests in the men and recognizes their accomplishments, she also works on her own self-improvement. For a year and a half, she has been enrolled in the Christian Leaders Institute, an online program that seeks to empower individuals with Biblical knowledge and leadership skills. The same way she pushes the men to keep growing is the same way she approaches her own growth.

“I think it’s really important to always invest in how to be better at what you’re passionate about,” she said.

She also learns from the men themselves. Working in her position, she said, has made her a better leader. She has grown to learn how to support others, handle difficult situations and hold boundaries. “It’s definitely a learning experience every day,” she said.

“I 100% know that I experienced those things to be better equipped to help my guys—not to tell them what to do, but just to come from a level of empathy of, ‘Hey, this is what worked for me, and this may not be best for you, but I’m gonna grind this out with you and we are gonna figure it out,’” she said.

Stringfellow said she ended up working with men largely by chance, but she has come to believe that men sometimes resonate with female figures better. She said she does not cast herself as a mother figure to these men, but she recognizes the weight of being a consistent female presence in their lives.

When working with the men in the program, she leads with honesty. “Your kids weren’t enough for you to be sober before, they’re not enough now,” she tells them. “It’s got to be about you and a bigger purpose in life.” For Stringfellow, that conviction is the foundation of everything Returning Home offers: structure, accountability, a community that does not give up on them and a path toward finding that purpose.

Every week, she conducts a leadership class intertwined with verse-mapping, which is a structured, in-depth Bible study method that analyzes a single verse by diving into its historical context, keyword meanings, alternate translations and cross-references. While the organization identifies as a ministry, participants are not required to be Christian to enroll, and all faith-based activities are voluntary.

The same Friday that she picked up heart-decorated donuts, the class centered on the story of David and Goliath, one of the most well-known stories in the Bible that highlights the underdog.

David is a young shepherd boy who defeats a giant warrior against all odds and would later become king. Goliath is described as a giant soldier standing around nine feet tall, clad in heavy armor and carrying a massive spear. The text indicates that Goliath was so intimidating that the opposing army would not face him, until David, carrying only a sling and a few stones, stepped forward.

“Sometimes we wait for better tools, and David didn’t wait for better tools,” Stringfellow said.

Upon reading the verse where David released the stone from the slingshot, Stringfellow asked the men what their Goliath was, encouraging conversation about their recovery journey and how their story relates to David’s triumph over what stood against him.

Several men pointed out multiple incarcerations, substance abuse, as well as relationships and choices they described as “poor.” At a separate time, Stringfellow mentioned how she spent her early years socializing through drinking and substance abuse. Together, the group acknowledged that hardships such as those in their past are only some of the challenges they will face throughout their lives.

For the men, including Stringfellow, the work happening around that rectangle of tables is not just spiritual. According to research by Brian and Melissa Grim, faith may be one of the most effective tools they have toward ongoing triumph in recovery. But Stringfellow is careful NOT to frame it that way. Rather than relying on faith passively, she said it is something that should walk alongside the work. Saying “God’s got this” only goes so far, she believes, without the actions to match it.

The men, whose faces were still but nodded in agreement, were the same ones who teased each other between moments of reflection, the kind of ribbing that only exists between people who trust one another. Benko, in particular, seemed to be a recurring subject, with his name prompting easy laughter around the room. He was quick to laugh along.

Throughout his time at the facility, he said he has watched other men leave permanently without saying a word, whatever their reason may be. But he said he would never go out that way. When his time comes to graduate from the program, he plans to move somewhere close and keep returning for visits.

“Fines paid, everything good,” Benko said, grinning as he talked about his recovery. For men in the facility like him, triumph is a busy kitchen on a Friday morning and the unfamiliar feeling that this time, they have a community worth staying for.

“She’s my sister,” he said of Stringfellow, “and they’re my brothers.”

The tight-knit community Benko described—the one worth staying for—is the same one Stringfellow once rebuilt herself following years of addiction. As she continues showing up for the men in the program, even if that means driving down the street at dawn and coming back with a box of Valentine’s Day-designed donuts so they can have their morning ritual, she does not let the weight of her past hold her back. After all, that same history is what gives her credibility in rooms that matter most to her.

“My past is really what skyrocketed me into the position I’m in now,” she said. “It’s done nothing but helped me today.”

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Rick O’Kelley was sprawled across a wooden church pew when the world was supposed to end.

He was 8 or 9 years old, still small enough to stretch out along the wooden pew, his head resting against the hard varnish. Outside the 81 Freewill Baptist Church in Rudy, Arkansas, everything was business as usual. It was the early 1960s. Other residents were on their way home from work, and children were outside playing until the street lights came on, signaling it was time to go inside for dinner. But inside the house of worship, the faithful intently waited.

His mother had rushed him and his brothers there after hearing a radio broadcast warning that Jesus Christ would return that very day. Their minister had also dreamed that a comet was a sign of the Second Coming, or Jesus’ return. So, members at 81 Freewill Baptist Church—which still operates today—drove to the sanctuary and sat along with others and waited.

O’Kelley, who typically fell asleep by 9 p.m., drifted off.

He was woken up close to midnight, only to find out it was time to go home. Nothing had happened. The earth was still spinning. No end of the world. No Second Coming.

Another eight years or so passed. At 16, just weeks away from his seventeenth birthday, O’Kelley arrived home to find his parents enraged.

He had befriended a Catholic girl who had just moved to town and did not yet know anyone. It was a solely platonic relationship, but that did not matter to his parents. They were concerned that she was Catholic, reflecting the deep doctrinal and theological differences between Free Will Baptists and other denominations.

His father’s belt came off before any questions were asked. Soon after, the teenager found himself cornered in his room as the belt swung toward him. “Where is God to protect me?” he remembers thinking.

His mother stood nearby to do the talking, speaking for his father, saying he could not be friends with the girl because she was Catholic.

“Where is God to protect me?” he thought again.

O’Kelley grabbed the belt with both hands, yanked it away and ran out of the house. “Where was God to protect me?” he asked once more.

He ran to a nearby creek where the Boy Scouts often met, found a bench to spend the night on in the cold air and still made it to school the next day.

“I’d been raised in church to be a friendly guy, to try to be nice to all people — and now they’re telling me I can’t be friends with this girl,” said O’Kelley, now a 73-year-old retired homicide investigator and former chief investigator for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.

O’Kelley’s experience provides insight into the American religious life experienced by some of today’s growing number of non-believers, where people raised in deeply rooted Christian traditions sometimes question their faith later in life, struggle with it or eventually leave—or move to churches that better match their beliefs—after years of internal doubt and pressure.

In Rudy, O’Kelley was raised in the Free Will Baptist Church. But the name is ironic, he said, because he had no free will, though he acknowledges the title actually refers to the belief that sin exists because individuals have the freedom to choose it. His great-grandfather had been a minister in the denomination. His grandfather was a deacon. His father would eventually become one, too.

That cycle stopped at O’Kelley.

For most of his childhood, he questioned the existence of a higher power, reflecting a broader national shift. According to a 2026 Gallup analysis, 42% of men ages 18 to 29 said religion was “very important” to them between 2024 and 2025, up from 28% between 2022 and 2023. Young men now surpass young women on the importance they place on religion, reversing a long-standing gender gap. But many Americans, like O’Kelley, are walking away from the Church.

Professor Lynda Coon, an associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas with 40 years of experience as a historian who focuses on religion and cultural history, said the decline reflects something she has been watching build for years. Rather than abandoning spirituality altogether, she said, many young people are simply no longer willing to conform to one institutional structure.

She points to the rise of Christian nationalism as another driving force pushing people away. The movement, which asserts that the U.S. was founded by and for Christians, has been building for decades.

“People think this happened overnight, but it’s been building since the 1970s,” she said, referencing movements tied to dominionism, or the belief that God intends Christians to gain influence within civil institutions so that biblical principles can guide and govern the nation. She also added that the gradual blurring of church and state is a key part of that story.

“We’re sort of the heirs to that situation right now,” she said.

For O’Kelley, the pressure to accept Christ and receive salvation, or the Christian belief that a person is forgiven of sin and granted eternal life through faith in Jesus, began at age 12. That is also the age at which Free Will Baptists believe Jesus was in the temple speaking with the elders, O’Kelley said. Every Sunday during altar calls, the older women of the congregation—the great-aunts, the grandmothers, always the elders—would reinforce that expectation.

The women would move through the pews during the invitation and lay hands on the 12 and 13-year-olds and push them toward the front. O’Kelley’s friends gave in one by one. “Just go up there and get it over with and they’ll get off your back,” his buddies told him. He watched them get baptized and then go right back to practicing the same behaviors as before. But O’Kelley never went up to the altar because he said it was dishonest.

People in the church were not permitted to ask questions. “I saw all kinds of cases growing up where I thought, ‘If this stuff is real, why is this happening?’” he said. “But we weren’t allowed to talk about it. Every time you’d ask a question, it was blasphemy.”

The moment the world was supposed to end, along with the beating at 16, were pivotal points that confirmed his skepticism of the church. He never believed, he said. When his parents passed away in 2006 and 2009, he stopped pretending entirely. Today, when people ask him if he is a Christian, he says no—although he used to say yes to avoid being questioned. He does not practice any other religion, nor does he label himself as atheist or agnostic. To him, any religion is just “organized crime that is protected by our government.” Religion is made up, he said, because he has yet to see evidence.

What he does see, and what has been a driving force of his denial, are things that make him ask where that higher power was to protect him and others.

His first homicide victim was a 22-year-old Catholic woman who was murdered by a 16-year-old boy for the $12 and change in her purse. His last homicide case was a 35-year-old Protestant mother who was killed by her 15-year-old daughter, who attended church with her.

“Where was God to protect these women?” he asked.

In 2008, he experienced a brain aneurysm while working as a computer programmer. He made it to his car and called 911. At that point, he was at peace with the possibility that he might die, as he did not believe in any kind of afterlife and felt certain he would return to the same state he was in before he was born. What did concern him was the thought of a young Fayetteville detective searching his pockets the same way he had done in the deaths he investigated.

Today, he believes the existence of a higher power is something churches cannot answer. For some, that inconsistency leads them to step away.

Danielle Post, a 48-year-old photographer and artist, described a similar experience of unraveling in a different church.

She grew up in a fundamentalist non-denominational church in Oklahoma whose rules she found hypocritical and hard to make sense of, even as a young kid. She was not allowed to watch “The Smurfs,” as she was told it was satanic. But her mother took her to “Smurfs on Ice.” She also could not have a unicorn toy but was taken to see “Legend,” the 1985 Ridley Scott film in which Tim Curry plays the Devil, because it portrayed him as the villain. She could not, however, watch “E.T.” nor could she listen to Boy George. But the Beatles were fine because they were from her mother’s era.

Her mother converted from Catholicism and left the denomination because she questioned the Bible and was told it was not up to her to read it, because the men would explain it. She then landed in the fundamentalist world during the Satanic Panic, or a moral panic in North America, driven by fears that widespread satanic cults were ritually abusing children. Post believes that fear was intensified in her family by her father, a closeted gay man, and her mother’s resulting guilt. Every time something surfaced about her father, her mother would blame herself, saying it was her fault for not being a good wife, pushing her to the extremes of her faith.

At age 5, Post witnessed what was described as an exorcism. Her first one. She watched the people around her, unsure of how she was expected to respond when the pastor approached. After about 30 seconds of chanting, she began imitating the sounds. She then fell to the ground as others did during what was described as being “slain in the Spirit.” She then pulled up a blanket and slept through the rest of the service, but her mother later referred to that day as a miracle and talked about it for years.

Post stopped attending church when she was 15. As an adult, she tried to reconnect with her faith during a difficult period in her life. Her infant son had been physically abused by her ex-husband, and the baby had black eyes and other injuries that a 5-month-old could not have inflicted on himself. But later, people in the church told her the abuse stemmed from demons that only appeared because her ex-husband had tattoos and piercings. Her mother called her crying and distraught, saying that the tattoo on Post’s body had also played a role.

“That’s not how the child got four black eyes,” Post thought.

She left again, this time permanently. “I felt free,” she said. “A lot of the things within church—it’s very fear-based. Even though they try to make it seem like you have nothing to fear, it’s always, ‘If you don’t do right, you’re going to Hell.’ And I no longer had that fear.”

Post now raises three children without religion and said her daughter goes out of her way to stand up for people who she believes are being treated unjustly. All her kids stand up for what they consider just, she said.

Despite this, someone told her a few years ago that she must not have morals because she was not a Christian. “I don’t know about you, but I love other people for who they are,” she responded. “I respect other people, unless they give me a reason not to. I try to live my life in kindness and acceptance of others.”

Her mother, she added, has struggled with her family’s path away from faith, once questioning how she ended up with two “unbelieving” children, with Post describing herself as “punk rock” and her brother, who also left the church, as a “staunch atheist.”

That kind of generational break is increasingly common in American religious life, and scholars have pointed to a broader pattern often described as “the great dechurching.”

A 2024 NPR discussion of the phenomenon reveals that about 40 million Americans have left churches and other religious institutions in the past 25 years, with religious sexual abuse scandals among the factors contributing to some departures. While the Catholic Church has been the center of that scrutiny, a 2025 Pew Research study reports that 62% of U.S. Catholics say clergy sex abuse remains an ongoing problem, although 68% believe it is equally as common among other religious leaders. However, many of the reasons cited in the NPR discussion are more mundane, reflecting broader cultural and social shifts in how people engage with Christianity today, such as changes in work, family life and mobility.

Religiosity is increasing among at least one demographic: young, white conservative men.

Grahm Burks, a 23-year-old University of Arkansas alum, said his level of engagement with faith is roughly seven out of ten. He goes to church most Sundays and considers himself a traditional, conservative Christian, although he said he knows why people often avoid the label.

He grew up Methodist. In his northern Louisiana high school, a pastor was reassigned after someone said something about a gay person and feelings were hurt, he said. When he got to Fayetteville, he started playing guitar at U of A Wesley College Ministry on campus. Then, leadership changed again, and he decided he was done rebuilding from scratch.

“It’s a bunch of petty squabbles,” he said. “I’m tired of dealing with it.” He now goes to St. Joseph’s with a Catholic friend, though he is not Catholic himself. Regardless, he, like many others, longs for a stable environment to practice his faith.

Over time, Burks thinks Christianity has become a right-leaning identity, while rejecting it became a left-leaning one. He said President Donald Trump is a significant factor in Christian nationalism in the U.S., but not necessarily a cause, adding that he thinks Trump is “a symptom of the whole culture war problem.”

Coon, the professor and expert on the topic, said she sees younger generations reshaping religion through what she calls “DIY religion,” or do-it-yourself spirituality. She said her Generation Z students increasingly draw from multiple traditions and approaches rather than conforming to institutional structures. “They’re not conforming to a particular institutional structure of religion,” she said.

She noted that moments of church-state blending are not new historically but tend to reappear in different forms. When that happens, she said, religious communities often debate the proper relationship between faith and political authority, especially in democratic systems like the United States.

What college student Burks described as a “new counterculture,” built around what he calls being “racist, homophobic, conservative” and “hypernationalistic,” has taken hold particularly among young white men, he said, with figures like far-right commentator and live streamer Nick Fuentes rising rapidly in influence. On the other side, people are looking at the association and deciding they want no part in it, but he does not think the people leaving are necessarily losing their faith.

“Because people don’t want to associate with these hypernationalists,” he said, “I think they’re just leaving the church.”

He does not think there is anything morally wrong with the concept of progressive Christianity, although he said he does not think people should be “so free and wild about [their] theology and about [Christian] principles.”

“I’m not quite on the side of those principles,” he said of progressive Christianity, “but I think they have the right idea that we need to try and be a lot more accepting and not fall to the side of that extreme hypernational Christian side of the faith.”

Vanessa Ryerse, the 52-year-old co-pastor and co-founder of Vintage Fellowship, a small progressive church in Springdale that meets once a month, was raised in the fundamentalist denomination called the General Association of Regular Baptists, where members were not allowed to associate with Southern Baptists because Southern Baptists were considered too liberal, according to her religion at the time.

Ryerse spent years inside that system by attending a Christian school, Bible college and ministry before shifting her mindset. She specifically recalls a Good Friday service she attended while living in Michigan, where she was asked to leave the service because her infant child was coughing, even though her other two children under age 5 were still seated in the room. That moment was when she decided to leave the denomination entirely, creating her congregation with her husband roughly six months after that incident.

That response is an example of what Coon calls “recalibration” of Christianity, arguing that religious systems often shift rather than collapse. During those periods, new forms of Christianity emerge that respond to political and economic change instead of replacing a belief entirely.

With that, Coon added that history shows recurring movements that call for a return to what she described as Christianity’s “apostolic roots,” emphasizing service, humility and reduced focus on institutional power. She said these cycles often appear when religion becomes closely tied to wealth or political authority, which prompts internal reform movements.

Now she leads her congregation the way she believes Christ intended. About 20 years after the Good Friday service that prompted Ryerse and her husband to leave, she greeted her congregation members at Vintage Fellowship church in Springdale on a recent Sunday, which happened to be Easter.

The door in the Springdale church unlatched into an open floor plan, the room filled with families — men gathered on couches talking, women clustered together in easy conversation. Many members were tatted up with piercings and colored hair. In the kitchen area, there was a turquoise fridge filled with food and drinks for all guests.

“It’s about that time,” one man on the couches said, prompting the group to stand up and move toward the other area, where there were five tables topped with coloring sheets, Play-Doh, and Crayons.

As Ryerse’s husband began the service, 68-year-old Lois Fess sat alone at a table, sketching on a blank sheet of paper with Crayons. Her hair was cropped to about an inch on top, while the rest fell well past her collarbone. She wore a long white dress splashed with purple, green and pink, paired with brown moccasins.

As a child raised in the Southern Baptist church in Colorado, Fess believed she was part of a more progressive congregation because her mother took her to a church that allowed dancing, which was something many Baptists still considered sinful.

When she looked up from her paper, she asked, “Do you like my deconstructed basket?” She had drawn six small blobs scattered throughout the paper, all of different colors. In the corner, she had used the green Crayon to cluster straight scribbles together, the kind of thing someone does with a pen to test if it works. Nearby, a semicircle was layered with crossing lines. On the opposite side, an arc of tight, curly marks took a crescent shape. At the bottom, a tiny and simple outline of a bunny anchored the page.

“It’s an Easter basket and it’s deconstructed,” Fess added. “We were talking deconstruction, so I just deconstructed the basket.”

She paused, then softly sighed.

“Yeah, and the fact that—I actually don’t know that I can explain it now,” she said, as the basket related to deconstruction.

Before the service, Fess had reflected more directly on what the idea of deconstruction meant to her.

“Most people are somehow injured from their previous upbringing in churches, some more than others,” she said. “I would say me less, but I’ve heard about folks just totally isolated from the world just because of how strict their upbringing was.”

Deconstruction in a religious context is the process of reexamining long-held beliefs, which surfaced earlier in Ryerse’s service as she discussed her evolving view of Easter. Her husband dropped a raw egg on the wood floor to suggest that faith is fragile, because it requires care and can easily be lost. Ryerse later led the service and discussed that modern Christianity often frames Easter as a story of power and victory, while its first witnesses experienced something quieter.

Toward the end of the service, Ryerse went up to the small stage, where there was a cluster of grape-flavored Capri Sun and a bowl of Goldfish crackers. She began handing them out, echoing the traditional communion ritual. Ryerse had grown up going to Ms. Julianne’s Sunday school in the church basement, where the woman never once took a break and never missed a week.

She would ask the children, “Who does Jesus love?” and when a child answered “Me,” she gave them a Goldfish. Years later on Easter Sunday, Ryerse would do the same thing but with everyone in the service, including adults.

Her service focused on openness, where she invited people to be comfortable and to engage faith in a less rigid way. She pointed to Jesus’ ministry as rooted in ordinary people and mutual relationship, not status or authority, and pushed back against ideas that faith requires strict self-denial to achieve worthiness.

For Fess and many others, deconstruction was tied to rethinking what she had been taught, and some had chosen to walk away from it completely. Taken together, the shifts in the traditional church have contributed to a steady movement away from it—although not always as outright rejection, but sometimes as disengagement or rethinking.

At the front of the room, the bowl of Goldfish sat where communion might have been.

Some people came forward. Others stayed seated. No one told anyone else to go up just to get the pressure off their backs, and no mother was asked to leave because her child was crying.

“There are a lot of us that are trying to address that,” she said, referring to the exclusion and rigidity that has driven so many people away from the church. “That movement may be hard to find, it might be hard to understand that there are a group of people working to combat that. But it does exist.”

After decades of navigating spaces that she felt had little room for her, she built one open to all. Ryerse said that the arrangement of the church and the focus on individuality and acceptance are a direct reaction to the church she stepped away from.

“People need to know what that feels like,” Ryerse said. “If you come from an environment where you’ve not experienced that before, you need somebody to show you what that looks like. That’s healing.”

The post ‘Who does Jesus love?’: Inside America’s changing relationship with Christianity   appeared first on Hill Magazine.

When Laura Icenogle, 51, was asked what Arkansas does well in supporting dementia caregivers, she laughed.

It was a full, loud belly laugh that took up her entire breath, the kind that would undoubtedly be contagious in almost any other setting. But the reality behind it wasn’t funny. It was the exhausted sound of a woman who spent nearly a decade watching systems fall short and being the only person left to hold the pieces together.

Her situation is a common standard for families in Arkansas. Here, when people struggle with dementia, the support systems are often too thin to matter, leaving families to wing it through a mess of financial and logistical hurdles that never seem to end, resulting in caregivers paying the price in the form of their mental health.

Right now, over 60,000 Arkansans are living with the disease, a higher share of the senior population than the national average, according to the Arkansas Alzheimer’s Association. In a state that is largely rural and already struggling with high rates of chronic health issues, the need for help is simply moving faster than the resources can keep up.

By 2015, Icenogle’s life had already begun to revolve around her father. He was a veteran living in Prairie Grove, dealing with a tricky combination of dementia, Parkinson’s and mental health challenges. As his condition progressed, it became clear he could no longer manage alone.

As an only child, the responsibility settled entirely on her. It forced a life-altering pivot that most people never have to consider. She walked away from a career on Wall Street, abandoning the high-speed, high-stakes logic of the finance world for the slow, more illogical world of memory loss.

The transition was jarring. In New York, her world was defined by logic: problems were identified, analyzed and solved with data and quick, decisive action. There was a sense of agency and a clear path to a result.

But in Prairie Grove, her world would become defined by the navigation of a system that no one could make sense of. She was faced with a father whose health was getting progressively worse, and a disease that didn’t care about a “return on investment” or a logical progression. She became a full-time caregiver overnight, learning to navigate an entirely different world.

Dementia is rarely a steady decline; it is a series of unpredictable ups and downs. While the clinical timeline for dementia progression usually spans from eight to twelve years, according to the Alzheimer’s Society, that path is rarely predictable. For many, it starts with small lapses you can almost ignore: a forgotten name, a lost set of keys or a repeated story that feels like a simple quirk of aging. But eventually, it hits a point where the smaller things create a bigger crisis, and 24-hour supervision becomes the only way to keep a loved one safe.

A guide of support available through dementia progression at the Schmieding Center for Senior Health and Education. The Schmieding Center is a space in Springdale that gives support and resources for those caring for loved ones with dementia.

For Icenogle, dealing with the Veteran’s Affairs added an additional layer of frustration to her father’s decline. He relied on the VA for his medical treatment, but Icenogle said the system’s rigid disability ratings often failed to reflect the treatment a person actually needs. Though her father was battling a multitude of medical conditions, that made caring for him more difficult, the VA placed him at a rating that limited the help Icenogle would receive with his care.

“They have the services there,” she said. “But if you don’t meet that rating, you can’t access them.”

Even with the Veterans Health Care System of the Ozarks near Fayetteville, the physical proximity didn’t bridge the divide. These ratings determine whether professional help arrives, or a family is left in isolation. She found herself fighting a system that prioritized codes over the man in front of her.

“I was pulling teeth and nails to get someone to give him a shower once a week,” she said.

For a while, the crisis remained within Arkansas. Then, in 2019, that changed.

Her mother, who was living in Franklin Township, New Jersey, with Icenogle’s stepfather, started to develop early signs of cognitive decline. Her moment of clarity regarding her mother’s state came without warning during an accidental pocket dial.

On the line, Icenogle could hear her stepfather trying to guide her mother into a wheelchair. He repeated the same instruction again and again, while her mother, who was battling Parkinson’s, struggled to follow. The confusion played out in real time over the phone: the sound of two people drowning in a room a thousand miles away.

“That was the moment,” Icenogle said. “There was no pretending anymore.”

After that, the geography of her life shifted. Roughly 1,300 miles separate Prairie Grove from Franklin Township, and Icenogle and her husband began moving between the two in response to whatever demanded their attention most at the time.

She had to coordinate care from wherever she was not. Appointments were scheduled and confirmed remotely and information didn’t always transfer cleanly between providers. She found herself repeating the same details to different nurses and clarifying instructions that had been lost between conversations. She was constantly on edge regarding her father’s care, as she was the only family he had to lean on.

That kind of sustained pressure, often referred to as shadow work, is the invisible labor of caregiving. For people like Icenogle, it can look like hours spent on hold with insurance companies, late nights preparing for what the day ahead will hold and constant, never-ending anxiety that comes with waiting for the next phone call.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, nearly 60% of caregivers report high levels of emotional stress, with more than one-third describing that stress as severe. Over time, the strain can turn physical. The CDC found that long-term caregivers face increased risks for heart disease, weakened immune responses and chronic exhaustion, especially when support is limited.

For Icenogle, the breaking point of that system became clear during a trip to New Jersey. While she was there caring for her mother, the VA called and told her that she needed to pick her father up from the emergency room back in Arkansas.

“I kept telling them I’m not there,” she said. “There is nobody else.”

After endless back and forth, the hospital eventually found him a ride, but they made it very clear that it was a temporary solution to Icenogle’s predicament. Her dad needed someone there permanently.

Finding additional help for her dad was draining. She struggled to get access to transportation services, pain medication, palliative care and any form of in-home help.

Managing one parent was consuming but managing two, separated by half the country, was unsustainable. As both parents declined, Icenogle eventually brought her mother and stepfather to Arkansas. She consolidated their care into one place, not because it was easier, but because it was the only way to keep doing it at all.

What she was navigating is part of a massive, growing national problem. More than seven million Americans aged 65 and older are living with Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, and this number is projected to nearly double by 2050, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. The number of caregivers to address this problem, however, is not growing anywhere near the same pace.

But in Arkansas, the systems meant to support that growth are visibly strained, specifically in the workforce. According to Indeed, home health aides in the state earn about $14.09 per hour on average, which is 20% below the national average. It is work that is physically demanding and emotionally heavy, and without better compensation, fewer workers are staying in those roles.

In Northwest Arkansas, these shortages are already creating bottlenecks. At the Schmieding Center for Senior Health and Education, a program in Springdale that provides training and support to dementia caregivers, social worker Lauren Gale said that families can sometimes wait up to six months just for a dementia evaluation through the Washington Regional Senior Health Clinic.

Those delays are tied to a shortage of physicians trained in geriatrics, a field that has not kept pace with the aging population. Because Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates for geriatric care tend to be lower than other specialties, it is less financially attractive for new doctors.

Those delays narrow the window for early intervention, leaving caregivers to interpret symptoms and make life-altering decisions on their own without a clear roadmap.

The financial cost makes resources unattainable for many as well. After Icenogle’s mother was diagnosed, the family hired a live-in aide, but within a year, the cost approached $100,000.

“It just disappears,” Icenogle said. “You don’t realize how fast until it’s gone.”

For many, this represents a cruel reality of handling Medicaid, where families must drain every cent of a lifetime’s worth of savings, just to qualify for state help. It is a system that punishes those who save and leaves them with nothing to pass on. Medicare does not cover long-term in-home care, leaving gaps that are filled either by life savings or unpaid labor.

According to AARP, in Arkansas, labor is provided by roughly 178,000 family members who have become a makeshift workforce. They pour an estimated 257 million hours into unpaid care every year. If that labor were paid, the bill would rack up to $4.6 billion annually.

New federal efforts like the GUIDE Model are supposed to bridge these gaps, but for most families, that support is still a future possibility. This leaves local support centers, like the Schmieding Center, to pick up the slack. Schmieding Center social worker Jay Vogler runs what he has called a Memory Café. It is a space with activities and socialization, giving both the patient and the caregiver a rare chance to just feel normal for an hour.

The center also hosts essentrics sessions: gentle full-body workouts that are meant to improve both physical and mental well-being. That specific rhythm helps cut through the confusion for the participants while giving caregivers a few hours of much-needed breathing room: the time to go to the grocery store without checking a clock every thirty seconds, the time to get a haircut or simply the time to sit in a parked car in total silence and relaxation.

Even with those wins, the gaping holes in support are hard to ignore. In NWA, the most apparent issue, according to Gale, is the lack of reliable daytime care. While caregivers in larger cities can often rely on adult day centers that are covered by Medicaid, the last adult day center in the region closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Outside of the Schmieding Center, options are slim. There are additional respite services in the area, but locations are limited and not plentiful.

Even within the Schmieding Center, capacity is at a breaking point. Adherence to certain guidelines gives them a limit to how many people are allowed within the space at a time. That limit is often far lower than the need.

“I send out a weekly registration to 25 participants, and it’s full within the first 20 minutes,” Gale said. “Jay and I see caregivers just plummet themselves because they’re trying so hard.”

This labor triggers a secondary crisis: a mental health emergency among the caregivers themselves. According to the Arkansas Alzheimer’s Association, 30% of caregivers have reported being diagnosed with depression.

Without consistent access to professional respite, caregivers often experience prolonged trauma, watching a loved one’s personality vanish while their own social connections and mental stability erode. In Arkansas, where professional help is scarce in comparison to the need, this burnout often leads to higher rates of mental health struggles among unpaid family members who feel they have no off switch.

This is a large reason why many support groups have been created for family caregivers for loved ones with dementia in NWA.

At Clear Creek Memory Care in Fayetteville, peer support takes place on the first Monday of each month in a side room right by the entrance.

In March of 2026, Eleanor Dalmut, 76, arrived early to the Monday meeting. She is a petite woman with peppery hair pulled to the nape of her neck, but her presence fills the room. She spent seven years caring for her husband, Frank, before he passed away in January 2025. She continues to return to the meetings to serve as a source of support for those going through what she once went through herself.

“When my husband passed away… I continued to come because I felt like I had something to offer for the people coming up behind me,” she said.

The room is small, and the circle of chairs is misshapen to make room for everyone who needs to be there. There are two tables taking up space in the room: one is filled with hot pizza for attendees to snack on during the meeting, and the other has a vase with two bright green hydrangeas, bringing lightness to a meeting focused on such serious matters. The air is thick with love, heartache and compassion, only other caregivers understand.

The conversation flows easily between practical questions, like how to get a loved one to become more involved, and more difficult ones, like the unspoken reality of end-of-life decisions. There is no judgment here, only a collective understanding of what it means to love someone who is slowly disappearing in front of your eyes.

Dalmut remains a steady presence in the center of it all. With kind eyes and a quiet, reassuring presence, she becomes someone others turn toward for guidance. It is a kind of support that is difficult to replace.

It was something Icenogle did not have access to consistently throughout her time caring for her parents.

Her caregiving journey ended in 2024. Both of her parents died within months of each other, and she was there for both, holding each of them in her arms as they passed on.

But for the caregiver, the crisis doesn’t necessarily end at the funeral. After a decade of hyper-vigilance and of making someone else’s health the center of your life, the silence that follows can be deafening.

What she experienced is becoming the new reality for Arkansas. The state is aging, the number of residents with dementia is rising and the systems meant to support them are falling behind. While many of these systems are creating issues at a national level, specific state support is lacking as well.

Arkansas is struggling to provide plentiful and affordable respite programs, consistent support systems and fairly paid caregivers. Unless the state’s support systems expand, more families will be left to like Icenogle once was: giving everything up to support their loved ones through their decline until there is little left of themselves to give.

The post The Weight of Caring: A Look Into the Arkansas Dementia Crisis  appeared first on Hill Magazine.

Early one morning, a barista yelled out “Strawberry matcha!” over a rustling crowd of students, many running late to class.

A tote bag on one arm, with Clairo blaring through his wired headphones, an allegedly-six-foot-two man made his way to the counter to retrieve his order. He went about his day as normal.

That was, until he opened Yik-Yak and found a picture of himself and his matcha trending. He was then labeled as a ‘performative male.’

But where did this term originate from?

In 2024, the ‘performative male’ jokes took the internet by storm. The term was largely authored by women, aimed at men who perform ‘femininity’ to appeal to the female gaze.

Renne Walden, a junior at the University of Arkansas, proposed that there are larger forces at play with the performative trend.

Walden stated that Gen-Z’s reliance on social media has instilled a need for belonging among students, which leads them to borrow their identity from others so that they can fit in.

“I think we’re often striving to become more palatable to people because we crave connection,” Walden said. “When we experienced COVID, social media was our only way of connecting for a long time. That isolation made us aware of what it’s like to lack community.”

Walden stated that students are forced to create connections through the media that they consume as opposed to genuine individuality, which blurs the line between individuality and copy-and-paste culture.

Despite gaining popularity in 2024, the performative male archetype still holds weight. The term has influenced fashion and musical trends among students on campus.

A fashion group at the U of A, ‘Fits N’ Shit,’ has surged in popularity over the past year. Every Friday, the group goes around campus and takes pictures of students with the ‘best’ outfits. These pictures are then posted to their Instagram page.

Jagger Shushi, ‘Fits N’ Shit’ founder and a senior at the U of A, said the page isn’t a fashion competition, but rather a place to be recognized for experimenting with style.

“It’s just fun to get dressed,” Shushi said. “I think it’s something you shouldn’t really take too seriously.”

Christopher Keller, a junior at the U of A, has been featured on the page many times.

Keller said that while he likes seeing the group on campus, he has seen a noticeable shift in behaviors around the group.

“There’s people out there who plan their outfits and purposely wait around for them to come so they can get their picture taken,” Keller said. “It’s literally the term performative. They are performing.”

Keller talked about how getting called performative affects his forms of self-expression.

“Growing up in a really conservative town, my form of self-expression was through my clothes,” Keller said. “I used clothes to gain confidence in myself, and I think if we call people’s style performative, it sucks the enjoyment out of it.”

The label doesn’t just follow these men into their closets, but also to their streaming platforms.

Charles Hill, a sophomore at the U of A, said that he is a victim of the matcha drinking and Clairo listening stereotype.

According to Hill, a large part of the performative male persona is listening to female artists and while some men copy-and-paste what they see women consuming on social media, many are genuinely expressing themselves and their personal interests.

“I think people’s fear of being seen as unmanly is greater than their fear of being seen as performative,” Hill said.

This poses the question: does displaying femininity in any capacity automatically label someone performative?

Alyson Hubbard, a sophomore at the U of A majoring in studio art, expressed the importance of men consuming art made by women.

“I feel that performative culture is discouraging men, especially young men, from engaging with feminist literature,” she said. “Everyone of every gender needs to be consuming art by women because it embodies the female experience and the struggles that we go through.”

Hubbard described gender as a spectrum and stressed the importance of men exploring it.

“Discouraging any feminine behavior, what’s the flip side to that?” Hubbard asked. “It’s alpha male toxicity. I would much rather have a world full of performative men than misogynistic men.”

Hubbard expressed that she doesn’t think that men have the place to be upset about the joke, considering that women have faced their own version of this with the term ‘pick me girl’: a label that reduces a woman’s exploration of masculine traits as attention-seeking.

“Obviously misandry is never as harmful as misogyny is gonna be,” she said. “But if we want to create a generation of respectful and informed men, we need them to be able to be open to more feminine expressions.”

But where is the line drawn between femininity and inauthenticity? Who draws it?

The post Performative Men: Who Hung the Stage Lights? appeared first on Hill Magazine.

By Emalee Powell

In every classroom on the University of Arkansas campus, there is a stark black-and-white picture of the Ten Commandments. Once an attention-grabbing sight, the framed picture is now a normalized part of every classroom.

As the temperatures begin to finally drop and leaves begin to turn, the U of A approaches the first anniversary of the controversial Act 573. Despite this drop in temperature, however, tuition prices and enrollment numbers continue to rise year after year. All of these affairs call into question the power of a student’s voice on this campus: Do their voices matter? Are they being listened to?

Act 573 instructed “institutions of higher education” to “prominently display [the national motto and the Ten Commandments] in a conspicuous place.” In October 2025, the U of A placed over 500 framed copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms and other shared public spaces all over campus, despite mass protest by students, staff and alumni.

Although the university denied wrongdoing by attributing its actions to lawful legislation, it did acknowledge student concerns, evident through posters hung around campus that stated that tampering with the copies would constitute destruction of the U of A’s property. Ultimately, despite public pushback, the university took little action to protest Act 573.

A graduate student at the U of A, who has chosen to remain anonymous due to her position as an instructor, shared, “Many students feel deeply uncomfortable about their presence in the classroom.”

For a university that prides itself on its increasing enrollment and diverse student body, students feel the environment does not reflect the various cultures and perspectives that exist on campus.

“We can’t expect [students] to come into a classroom and feel comfortable with what’s being presented there,” she said.

Similarly, students have spoken out against the university’s tuition, arguing that the price of attending is too high and goes to the wrong places. They have also protested the rising acceptance rates, saying that the university is accepting too many students with too little housing.

When asked about her opinion on the policies of U of A, the graduate student argued that the price of tuition should guarantee a comfortable learning environment for all.

Still, the U of A Board of Trustees voted in 2026 to seize funds for the football team by charging students a fee. The Associated Student Government, as both representatives and students themselves, chose to let the student body decide if their tuition should be funneled into sports. Over 82% of students voted that they would not support this use of their tuition.

Although this athletic tax was not implemented, the board initially acted against the vote of students to not add an additional charge.

In Bill 13, from February 2026, ASG stated that as “advocate[s] for the entirety of the undergraduate student body of the University of Arkansas…The Associated Student Government Senate affirms that student affordability and academic excellence must remain the University’s highest institutional priorities.”

When questioned on an anonymous Yik Yak poll, only 13% of 126 students said that they felt like their voice mattered.

The same graduate student, who has experience teaching classes on her own, offered her pedagogical experience to explain the failed communication between staff and students.

“When you’re at a larger university, like this, it’s very easy for your voice to get lost and for there to be more excuses for things to be ignored administratively,” she said.

Coming from a smaller university to the U of A, she noted, “I think that we could focus on making students comfortable… like, for example, listening to student voice and providing a platform for students to actually be listened to.”

Right now, there is a gap between the administration and the growing pool of students, and it is only getting wider.

The U of A continuously reaches record-high freshman classes year after year. On Sep. 9, 2025, Dr. Indrajeet Chaubey, the Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, released a statement that revealed record enrollment in freshmen, the entire undergraduate class and the entire university for that year.

In the statement, he boasted that the U of A has accepted more than 34,000 students, with the largest undergraduate and graduate class yet.

“Why aren’t we making more buildings for classrooms or restricting the numbers that we put on classes, so that students are able to build relationships with their professors and therefore [get] recommendations or internships?” the student said.

The needs of a fast-growing student base are not being met due to the rate at which it is increasing. As a result, career-building connections between faculty and students are becoming more strained.

Frustrated, she asserted, “We’re expanding so fast, we’re restricting ourselves to giving little care to our actual student base.”

Wyatt Rice, a senior at the U of A and Director of Campus Relations for ASG, shared that each of these issues is the subject of serious discussion for both ASG and administrators.

Rice said that ASG is constantly striving to “advocat[e] on behalf of students,” and “to facilitate accurate communication between students and decision-makers.”

As a trusted resource and democratic connection to the university for students, ASG takes pride in listening to students’ voices. In fact, they want students to talk more.

“This is the first step… to the university being more representative of the student voice,” Rice said.

The students need to find their voices, and they need to be loud.

When questioned about the gap between student life and university policy, Rice encouraged everyone on campus to participate in the campus community. In the past, these ventures have been successful. Increased funding for Registered Student Organizations and renovations to both the Health, Physical Education, and Recreation Building and Maple Street proves the impact that student advocacy can have.

“The more students use every available avenue to make their voices heard, the more pressure there is on the institutions that can actually act,” Rice said.

The post Let’s Call Those Hogs appeared first on Hill Magazine.

Sunlight trickles through the leaves of the tree growing in the center of the new location of Dodo Coffee Company, a tree that grows out of the perfect hole in the ceiling. Students share laptops while working on homework, an older woman is reading in the corner, and a couple stumbles through their conversation, on what might be their first date. On every table sits little clear cups filled with coffee: cups all stamped with a Dodo bird.

Dodo Coffee first opened its doors in a little drive-through shop on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in 2024 and has since evolved in the way they deliver coffee to Fayetteville. Their humble, ground-up approach to selling coffee out of that tiny, white-bricked home is part of what attracted University of Arkansas students, through its low prices and personable employees.

Throughout the years, the shop has lived in that tiny home, then a trailer, and now in a full brick and mortar established location on West McMillan Drive, and the company continues to catch students’ eyes.

Junior Macy Penick said Dodo was a constant in her daily routine as a freshman, especially after comparing it to all the other coffee shops that she and her roommate had scouted out on their Fayetteville coffee bucket list.

“We very quickly figured out that it was our favorite, and we stuck with it as our go-to for the rest of the year,” she said.

Just like many college students, the company has had to quickly adapt to new styles of business operations in very short spans of time, each exhibiting a new authentic space for students to connect with others.

“So many of my friendships have formed [at Dodo], because in college I feel like people were always asking to get coffee and catch up, or ‘let’s go get coffee and I want to get to know you more,’’’ Penick said.

As more people started to frequent the location, Penick said she regularly saw the same people and became friends with them, too.

Dodo employee and sophomore Delaney Neal recalls a specific morning with a similar experience: she had a prolonged wait for her drink at the trailer, and while she waited, more and more of her friends both close and new, kept showing up.

“That’s what’s so fun…every time you go, you have a chance of seeing somebody you know,” she said.

Dodo’s new location that opened on Aug. 24 of this year is the first to have an indoor-outdoor space with seating areas for customers to enjoy their drinks in. Now, students can bring their books, schoolwork and other hobbies with them to work while sipping their coffee.

“[The new location] has made it so fun for people to come and make it an outing,” Neal said. 
“I see people sit to do homework or do Bible studies here now all the time.”

Another employee at Dodo, senior Kenna Wallace, said the work environment is incredibly positive, from the conversations she had when interviewing to the connections she’s made with regular customers.

“When I went in for my interview, the owners were so nice, and they talked about how they want to spread light to the community …for Dodo to be a place that brings people together,” she said.

Additionally, she said that Dodo is accommodating students’ school schedules, which motivates more U of A students to work there.

“They’re super good about working with your schedule, and they never want to schedule you too much if like you have a heavy course load,” Wallace said.

The company also attempts to be as organic in their coffee as they are in their mannerism towards customers. With ethically sourced mold-free beans and naturally sweetened syrups, the company strives to serve naturally based beverages in every order.

After undergoing training and education sessions about the beans and syrups, Wallace said she places even more trust in the company and in the fact that “they only want to serve high-quality coffee to their customers.”

Even more than the coffee or the polished modern seating and architectural flair it adds to Fayetteville, Dodo attracts communities through their culture. Here, employees are urged to make an effort to create meaningful conversations with customers, rather than simple, surface-level ones, with the intent to make someone’s day a little more bright.

“Our number one rule is to make everybody’s experience there a good one, because that could be the only good moment they have in their day,” Neal said.

Just like the tree at the center of their new location, Dodo continues to be a place where students and Fayetteville alike can put down roots of connections and make their communities a little bit stronger.

The post Students Go Cuckoo for Dodo appeared first on Hill Magazine.