Throughout July, The Swell is celebrating the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.

To young children, Kiki’s adventure is a simple fantasy about a kid who can fly on her mother’s broom and launches a business with the same enthusiasm that elementary schoolers radiate while running a lemonade stand. 

Once Kiki leaves her village with her constant companion Jiji, a talking cat, she sails through the skies, albeit insecurely. She’s uncertain about her flight capabilities, and even less sure of herself when she encounters a more experienced and stuck-up witch who’s around her age, and who brushes her off instead of propping up her confidence. 

Eventually Kiki ends up in a bustling seaside city that hasn’t had a witch in its midst in many years. After a rough start, including a run-in with an irritating policeman, she lands at the home of a baker, Osono, who gives her a place to stay in exchange for labor and her delivery services.

Since Kiki’s abilities allow her to defy gravity, she runs packages across town, avoiding auto traffic and pedestrian crowds. Her world looks and operates like ours, and that means there are no free lunches.

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Osono’s kindness is part of the fantasy, in that she takes in a strange little girl and lets her live in her extra room without asking many questions. But even when Kiki botches a delivery by dropping a toy mid-air, sending it tumbling into a nearby forest, a bit of reciprocal effort solves the problem. Ursula, the artist who lives there, finds it broken and has Kiki scrub her floors in exchange for repairing it.  

I’ve read a few interpretations of the narrative’s emphasis on labor exchange that assume these moments are meant to teach children that labor has value. Maybe. As I see it, Kiki’s willingness to help others conveys a more important teaching about interdependence as an integral part of independence. Her efforts are acts of caring, moving others to do the same for her.

While Kiki’s coming-of-age year as a witch requires her to live on her own, she’s never alone and can’t succeed without other people. That part of the story appeals to the restless adolescent versions of ourselves that can’t wait to find our place in the world.

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The third act, however, hits hardest when you’ve lived long enough to lose your mojo and doubt yourself. Kiki meets a boy, Tombo, who is obsessed with flight and, specifically, Kiki’s marvelous ability to fly without the help of a machine. Initially she pushes him away, but Tombo is persistent. Eventually they become friends. And it’s to him that she admits, “Flying used to be fun until I started doing it for a living.”

Soon after that, Kiki wakes up to find her magic is absent. She’s expended so much of it on others that she has none left for herself. She can’t even understand Jiji anymore.

(1989 Eiko Kadono/Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli, N) A still from “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”

If every Miyazaki movie has a whiff of biographical relevance, one might see “Kiki’s Delivery Service” as his statement of creative purpose and motivation. Who can help a witch who’s lost her flight? A woman who lives alone in a house in the woods, of course – although she’s an artist, not a witch. Ursula’s advice to Kiki is the same as any career coach or mental health professional counseling someone through a crisis of confidence: Stop working so hard, take a walk and look at the world for a while.

“We each need to find our own inspiration, Kiki,” says Ursula. “Sometimes it’s not easy.”

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I can’t think of a person who makes a living from their talent that doesn’t feel that way at some point. We call it burnout. To Miyazaki, Kiki’s depletion is a sign that she’s leaving childhood behind. She regains her ability to fly but is never able to communicate with Jiji again. So maybe she doesn’t quite regain her magic but taps into a new version of it.

Magic is a five-letter word that does so much heavy lifting when it comes to describing the essence of what makes something special. Thinking of it that way makes life sweeter, too. Science can explain the world around us, but magic helps us appreciate the wonder in the atomic arrangement of nature, chance meetings with open-hearted souls and kindness without expectation of anything in return. “Kiki’s Delivery Service” has been telling us that since the very first time we saw it, and in new ways with each repeat viewing.

“Kiki’s Delivery Service” is streaming on HBO Max.

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After the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Alex Pretti, Ruben Ray Martinez, Renee Good and too many others, a familiar scene is unfolding in Madison, Wisconsin. Following yet another fatal shooting by law enforcement in broad daylight, the streets are full of protesters while social media is aflame with horrifying videos.

The difference is that this time, those responsible are local police — not Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The United States has watched federal immigration agents wreak havoc and fear in communities, shooting eight people to death in public on the streets since January and allowing more than 50 people in detention to die on their watch since 2025. The nation is justifiably angry, with nearly two-thirds of Americans saying ICE has gone too far. 

Being overlooked is the violence being brought by local law enforcement. On July 22, four police officers in Madison held down Corey Ruiz, a 38-year-old Black man, and shot him three times during an attempted arrest. Tens of thousands have now seen the videos circulating on social media platforms: bystanders screaming in the background, the attempted arrest turning violent within seconds, another person killed by police. 

This is nothing new. Ruiz’s killing is a painful reminder that state and local police have been left out of the conversation about violence and accountability. Much of the country has moved on from the mass protests in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. 

But police violence has never slowed.

Police continue to kill around 1,300 people every year, with at least 689 killings in 2026 already. Much media attention has gone to ICE’s traffic stops, but far less to the 93 people killed by police in traffic stops this year. While the enthusiasm behind police accountability in 2020 resulted in some important changes — including state bans on chokeholds and no-knock warrants — we never saw the “major changes” 58% of Americans called for, including reforms that would protect everyday people from police brutality. Congress failed to pass even modest police accountability legislation in George Floyd’s name after bipartisan negotiations broke down, and most federal lawmakers have shown little interest in returning to the issue.

Under the Biden administration, the federal government remained an important force for police reform, including executive orders that increased accountability and prioritized deescalation and alternatives to use of force. These orders quickly fell after Donald Trump returned to office, alongside consent decrees designed to curb police violence, leaving communities to fend for themselves.

Part of the reason the issue has fallen off the national radar has to do with a (perverse) relative comparison. ICE has made local police look astonishingly well-trained, well-behaved and accountable, leading Senate Democrats to take action. In January, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto introduced a bill to redirect $75 billion in federal funding from ICE to local police. Her colleague and fellow Nevadan, Sen. Jacky Rosen, said, “It’s simple: ICE should be held to the same standards as our local police departments.” Rosen and Cortez Masto, and their colleagues like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are correct, but we should hold ICE and police to a significantly higher standard of accountability.

A majority of voters agree. Extensive polling by Vera Action has found that the most popular position on policing is “supporting police who put their lives on the line for us everyday and holding those who use excessive force or abuse their power accountable.” This message consistently ranks far above simply adding more police officers or funding. The majority position on policing is one of support and accountability — better policing, not simply more policing.

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Six years ago, the country’s demand for police accountability was subsumed by a muddled debate over “defunding the police” and valid concerns about rising crime. In 2026, we are past that conversation. The country is in the middle of a quiet public safety revolution, in which police departments, despite having fewer officers, are working with partners like mental health crisis response and community violence intervention to drive record-low crime rates.

Many people have become numb or indifferent to — or even defensive of — police violence. But ICE violence continues to shock us. The killing of Ruiz is a reminder that both problems persist — and can be solved with similar measures. As lawmakers propose accountability measures for ICE like better use-of-force standards, ending qualified immunity, improved training and more budgetary oversight, these same accountability measures should apply to police. We should also demand more than the tools, like body cameras, that have failed to stem police violence.

The officers who killed Corey Ruiz should and may face accountability. Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said, “Our community deserves full transparency and accountability,” and the killing is being investigated as a homicide. 

But it will be a rare exception. One ICE officer recently told a reporter that the Trump administration has empowered aggressive behavior by officers because they know “they’re going to be protected.” Until accountability becomes the norm across all levels of law enforcement, this violence will continue. 

The message should be clear: If America wants accountability from federal law enforcement, it is time to demand real accountability for police as well.

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As The New School’s 2026 class of performing arts graduates enters the workforce and we face the beginning of a new school year, we are reminded of what our students will take into the world. Viola Spolin, one of the great acting teachers of the 20th century, put it simply: “being part of the whole generates trust and frees the player for playing, the many then acting as one.” 

That lesson — how to genuinely inhabit a shared world with others — has never felt more urgent.

Our nation is divided on everything from food safety to our country’s future, and there are numbers to back this schism. Half of Americans report feeling divided from one another; a recent Stanford study gives this fracture a sharper name: the “empathy perception gap.” People have not stopped caring about others, but they believe that no one else does. This misperception carries profound consequences and is currently rippling through our world, eroding trust, deepening isolation and creating a social environment in which empathy is swiftly becoming an atrophied muscle in desperate need of exercise. 

We are living through a crisis of empathy and, more precisely, of empathy not being learned. We live saturated in opinion, reaction and digital noise, a culture that turns other people into content: flattened, accelerated, easy to dismiss. We’re quick to cut off those we disagree with, and the conditions that might allow for empathy to flourish — time, attention, presence and vulnerability — are increasingly scarce. Empathy becomes something we endorse in principle but rarely practice. There is one place, however, where these conditions not only still exist, but are required: the stage.

Actors, musicians and performers train to inhabit perspectives not their own, to remain present through discomfort, and to sustain attention across time. In rehearsal and performance, they develop the capacity to hold another’s reality without collapsing it into their own. Crucially, they do so in the presence of others — before audiences who are themselves engaged in the rare act of collective attention. 

Empathy, on stage, becomes a cornerstone of experiencing live performance that pulls heartstrings, inspires raucous laughter or elicits a collective groan when a poorly-hatched plan falters. For example, in “Hadestown,” the moment Hades allows Orpheus to lead Eurydice back to the land of the living on one impossible condition — he can’t look back to make sure she’s there — converts a moment of positive surprise when the song lands into a dark swell of tension, anxiety and doom. It’s felt between the actors on stage and from the orchestra pit to the last row of balcony seats.

Of course, this is not a new function of the stage. When audiences gathered in ancient Athens to watch plays by Sophocles, they were confronting a shared reality together. Theater operated as a civic technology, a structured environment in which a society could examine itself in public. What the ancients understood, and what remains true now, is that empathy can be taught through the sustained act of attending to another’s experience in the presence of others. 

The stage has always taught this, and the evidence of its impact is no longer anecdotal. Participation in the arts has been shown to reduce isolation, improve mental health and strengthen social bonds. 

Broadway is home to several plays that address these issues head-on while bringing deeply human experiences to life in creative, even comedic ways. For example, in “Every Brilliant Thing,” the lone person on stage, currently played by Tracee Ellis Ross, is tasked with cheering up a deeply depressed mom by making a list of things that make life worth living. The answer: bring the second cast member — the theater audience — into the brainstorming session to help them understand and connect more deeply to the very human situation the main character finds himself in.

Programs in social prescribing — the act of doctors prescribing non-medical care — are now expanding from their origins in the United Kingdom to states like Massachusetts and New Jersey — recognize that engagement in shared cultural activity can be a meaningful complement to clinical care. Medical schools, too, have long incorporated the study of performance to develop empathy and observational acuity in future doctors. These practices point to something central: The ability to encounter another person’s experience with care and attention is a skill, and it can be taught.

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That skill is cultivated through education in the performing arts. Actors and musicians learn to exist and create out of tension without rushing to resolve it. They learn to inhabit perspectives that are not their own, and to recognize the humanity within them. They practice sustaining tension, navigating uncertainty and responding in real-time to others. 

Playwrights from Shakespeare to Sondheim to Manuel-Miranda, meanwhile, write around human emotion while infusing relatability to enrich the audience’s theater experience. But it’s the actors who execute their vision by playing off of each other and leaning into creative impulse when the scripted scene or real-time audience reaction calls for it.

The ability to hold another person’s reality alongside one’s own, without reducing it or rewriting it, requires training, repetition and exposure. Studies have even shown that inhabiting a character increases one’s ability to see from others’ perspectives. And crucially, they do so in the presence of others—before audiences who are themselves engaged in the rare act of collective attention. 

At its best, the performing arts create a space for shared witnessing. Audiences experience a story alongside others, in real time, aware of each other’s presence. Faces clench before pivotal moments of conflict on stage. Eyes tear up when unrequited love leads to isolation or forbidden love leads to death. Our bodies experience excitement and anticipation when hearing musical tension or suspension. Outside the theatre, this collective attention is increasingly rare and necessary. In a society shaped by fragmentation and misperception, the capacity to remain present with complexity is one of the most urgent skills we can cultivate.

A performing arts education does more than train artists to perform. It prepares individuals — actors as well as audience members — to live with tension rather than flee from it, to participate in spaces of collective witnessing and to build communities grounded in attention, responsiveness and critical reflection. It offers a structured, repeatable method for developing empathy as a lived, practiced capacity. At a time when our social contract with each other is fraying, and we speak to Claude or ChatGPT as much as we chat with friends or family, we need more spaces where this work can happen, and more people trained to do it.

The stage is one of the last places where we learn, together, how to be with one another. It may be the most important classroom we have left. 

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