The story that inspired me... In 1977 New York City was dying. Bankrupt, burning, abandoned by the federal government. Businesses fled. The middle class fled. The streets belonged to crime and despair and a municipal government that had run out of options.
Milton Glaser made the world's best known logo out of three letters and a shape. And then he did something that changed everything: he gave it away. No copyright. No control. No license fee. He insisted it belong to everyone.
What happened next is the only argument needed about the relationship between art's generosity and cultural power. I ♥ NY didn't just save a tourism campaign. It saved a city's belief in itself. Its meaning penetrated the consciousness of the entire world — into every language, every city, every heart. Fifty years later it is still circulating, still being transformed, still generating meaning. It became infinite because he refused to fence it.
This is not sentiment. This is strategy. Generosity is the most powerful creative act. And we are at a moment in time that demands it again.
America turns 250 this year. A generation of children is in crisis — measurably. They came through a pandemic with their social architectures destroyed at the exact ages those architectures form. We handed them social media algorithms engineered to extract their attention at the cost of their sense of self, and their mental health. And now we thrust upon them AI — bringing more isolation, even less warmth, no loyalty, and disguised as friendship with none of its humanity. Each technology more frictionless. Each one more dehumanizing.
The data on youth loneliness, anxiety, and disconnection is not ambiguous. We have done serious damage and we have done nothing to reckon with it.
And while all of this has unfolded the performing arts have been losing audiences, education, and accessibility — diminishing their cultural relevance. And yet they remain the single most transformative cultural infrastructure we have. You cannot stream your way to what happens when a child stands on a stage and feels a story move through them. No algorithm delivers it. No AI approximates it. Embodied experience is irreplaceable and we are letting it disappear when we need it most.
Which brings me to Hamilton.
Lin-Manuel Miranda made a work that is, at its core, an argument about who gets to tell the American story. His imagination took the founding documents and released them into new bodies, new voices, new melody. The work itself is an act of radical inclusion — it says this history belongs to all of us, it always did. And then it became one of the most expensive and exclusive, least accessible cultural experiences in the country. The argument the work makes is priced out of reach of the people it was made for.
Hamilton celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. This year — the actual 250th anniversary of the nation that inspired it — there is nothing... but the opportunity to make history again.
Not as charity. As completion of the work's own logic. As the most American thing Miranda could do — trust that what he made is brave enough to embrace abundance.
You can set off a million fireworks. You can fund five hundred thousand initiatives. But the grass roots act of giving children the chance to embody this work — to be Hamilton, to be Eliza, to stand in front of their families and communities and sing about who America is and who it could be — and you are doing something no other anniversary gesture can do. You are giving a generation an experience of collective meaning at the exact moment they need it most.
Why should this fall to one artist? Why not? Milton Glaser didn't wait for change. He made the decision to create it. Artists may be the only people capable of generosity at this scale because generosity is not incidental to what they are — it is constitutive of it.
And for those with significant investment in Hamilton — this is not sacrifice. It is the strategy that big tech companies aspire to: genuine cultural embedding. Give this generation the chance to perform this work now. Let their parents and grandparents, siblings and friends watch. Let it live in school gyms and community centers, church halls, and dance on the streets across the country.
I wrote to the government. I wrote to the National Endowment for the Arts. I wrote to the rights holders. I wrote to Miranda's team directly and DM'd Lin-Manuel himself. The anniversary is here. So far, I hear only silence.
So I am writing to you.
Art's generosity is specific and strange. It gives without depleting.