At a recent dental appointment, I was unexpectedly seen by a new provider in my longtime dentist’s practice. Early in the visit, he realized we were both Iranian American. Like me, he had been born and raised in the United States. We were both fluent English speakers and fully accustomed to navigating American medical settings.

After we briefly discussed how the war in Iran was affecting our families there, something shifted. The exchange was short, but deeply human. I left feeling an immediate sense of connection, trust and familiarity with a provider I had only just met.

That experience helped me better understand something I had long observed among immigrant families – that immigrant patients often seek out healthcare providers from similar backgrounds. What they are often seeking goes beyond a shared language or cultural familiarity.

I am a health administration professor and lawyer who studies how people navigate health systems. In my work, and through conversations with immigrant families, including my own, I have seen how subtle interactions in clinical settings can shape whether patients feel confident or dismissed and unsure about returning for care. For some, choosing a doctor with a similar background represents their best attempt to feel more understood.

The fact that many patients actively seek out providers who share aspects of their cultural background, even when doing so may require additional effort or limit their options, illustrates that it is not a minor preference, but a meaningful part of how people experience care.

Beyond a shared language

Immigrants make up a growing share of patients in the U.S., accounting for about 15% of the population.

Large national studies suggest that patients often seek providers with whom they share a cultural background. That choice is especially pronounced among racial and ethnic minority patients, those who speak a language other than English at home and those with public insurance.

Even as the U.S. physician workforce becomes more diverse, many patients still report difficulty finding providers who share their cultural or linguistic background. At the same time, some evidence suggests the number of foreign-born physicians may also be declining. In my view, that makes the effort to find such providers all the more noteworthy.

A shared language may seem like the most obvious explanation for why immigrants seek out doctors from similar backgrounds. And in many cases, it does matter. When patients and clinicians speak the same language, communication improves and medical errors decline, especially for patients who are not fluent in English.

But language alone does not explain experiences like my own.

Narrative research on immigrant patients describes broader issues. For example, a patient might raise a concern about a persistent symptom, only to feel too quickly dismissed, or hear an explanation delivered in a simplified way that does not match their level of knowledge or experience.

These moments can be subtle, but as they accumulate over time, they may contribute to a sense that medical care feels transactional or dismissive rather than responsive to patients’ concerns. Even patients who are fully fluent in English and comfortable navigating the health system may come to expect not to be fully heard.

That expectation can shape where people feel comfortable seeking care.

Why shared background can matter

Sharing a background, whether through race, ethnicity, language or cultural experience, can sometimes help create a sense of connection – especially at the start of a relationship.

But research suggests the relationship is more nuanced than simply matching patients and doctors by identity. The way a doctor communicates, as well as whether they listen carefully, take concerns seriously and involve patients in decisions, also plays a central role.

In one study that examined physician-patient relationships across racial and ethnic groups, patients who felt personally similar to their physician – for example, in how the physician communicated, approached decisions or seemed to understand their concerns – were more likely to trust their doctor, feel satisfied with their care and follow medical advice.

Research on patient-centered care has similarly found that patients value interactions where they feel respected, understood and able to communicate openly.

Together, these studies suggest that while shared backgrounds can sometimes help create trust, communication and interpersonal connection may matter just as much.

More research is needed to understand how much these experiences reflect differences in communication itself versus connection spurred by a common background. But for immigrant patients, it may not be the shared identity itself that matters most, but the expectation that it will help them feel more easily understood. When patients consistently struggle to find that experience, shared background can become one of its few visible signals.

Understanding why immigrant patients make these choices ultimately reveals something more universal: Trust in medicine is shaped not only by clinical expertise, but by everyday human interaction. And patients value this quality so highly that they actively seek out providers who they believe will offer that sense of understanding and connection.

Yasamine Salkar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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When “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” aired its final episode on May 21, 2026, critics lamented more than the end of a television program.

It was a nightly ritual that millions of Americans participated in, with Bloomberg media reporter Lucas Shaw describing its cancellation as one more sign of “the decline of monoculture.”

Eulogies for “the monoculture” have appeared elsewhere. In fall 2025, BuzzFeed announced “the death of celebrity monoculture.” The Ringer asked whether summer 2025 was the “summer without monoculture.”

In all of these uses, the word describes a vanished era of shared cultural experience, a time when most people watched, listened to and talked about the same things.

But “monoculture” gets pulled in a different direction, too. Other writers, like cultural critic Kyle Chayka, have used it to describe the opposite problem: a sense that the culture today is becoming too uniform, too flattened, too much the same everywhere you look.

When the same word is used as a lens to view the world in different ways, something else is usually going on.

As a marketing professor who studies culture and consumer behavior, I find the current usage of “monoculture” telling. The word comes from agriculture, and tracing its journey from the farm to the algorithm reveals quite a bit about a tension many people are feeling right now: a craving for connection and community that coincides with a longing to stand out as unique.

From the farm to the feed

“Monoculture” began as an agricultural term in the early 20th century to describe planting a single crop across a large area of farmland. The practice was efficient and profitable, but it was also risky. Single-crop fields are more vulnerable to pests, disease and weather shocks. They also displace the smaller, scrappier ecosystems that once occupied the land.

The word migrated into cultural criticism in the 1980s and 1990s. Music writers like Robert Christgau and later Chuck Klosterman used it to describe a media landscape dominated by a handful of TV networks, magazines and record labels.

Much of the agricultural meaning came along for the ride. When people complain about “creeping monoculture” today, they’re often referring to the way the algorithms, artificial intelligence and the economics of the attention economy have flattened popular culture the way industrial farming flattened the prairie.

For example, urban studies scholars have traced how independent coffee shops across North America have come to look strikingly alike, with the same exposed brick, vintage furniture and tattooed baristas.

“Whether it’s popular fashion, architecture or interior design, idiosyncrasies are collapsing into a generic, hegemonic aesthetic,” they write, and it’s due, in part, to the way “social media algorithms promote the visuals that users are most likely to engage with.”

Generative AI is starting to foment the same dynamic. A study published in January 2026 found that when generative systems are allowed to run on their own, they quickly converge on what researchers call “visual elevator music” – generic, familiar outputs that strip away quirks and kinks. The technology that promises infinite variety, it turns out, has a strong pull toward sameness.

The original problem with monoculture in farming is the same one people now see in culture: Efficiency at scale crowds out the small, the spontaneous and the strange.

What people are actually responding to

But there is another way the word gets used, and it points in a different direction.

People mourning the loss of monoculture are rarely mourning the loss of aesthetic diversity. They are mourning the experience of shared attention, the sense that a lot of people were oriented toward the same thing. When commentators eulogized “The Late Show” as the end of a nightly ritual, this is largely what they meant.

In 1983, the series finale of “M-A-S-H” was watched by an estimated 106 million Americans. Finales from other shows – “Cheers” in 1993, “Seinfeld” in 1998 and “Friends” in 2004 – were also watched by huge swaths of the public.

There’s still the Super Bowl, which reliably pulls in 100 million-plus U.S. viewers. But in terms of weekly television and pop music releases, the shared cultural experience that once defined American life appears to have gone by the wayside.

So while some people worry that the culture is becoming too uniform, others worry that it is becoming too fragmented. “Monoculture” gets used in both cases because the word captures something a lot of people are struggling to name: a sense that the relationship between individuals and the larger culture they live in has become harder to navigate.

Standing out and belonging

This is where my own field has something useful to add.

Consumer researchers have spent decades studying how people balance two competing desires that turn out to be central to almost every cultural choice: the desire to belong to a group, and the desire to express something distinct about oneself.

My research on bicultural consumers – people who hold two cultures at once, like a first-generation Chinese American who navigates the traditions of family life at home and mainstream American culture at school or work – looks at how they manage this tension.

In my research, I found that biculturals prefer and choose "paradox brands” – brands that hold seeming contradictory meanings – more often than other consumers do. Burberry signals both centuries-old heritage and modern fashion. Range Rover holds rugged utility and luxury refinement in the same vehicle. For people who already live with contradictions every day, brands that don’t force a single identity choice feel right.

That tension is exactly what all the monoculture talk is reaching for. When people lament the death of monoculture, they are often missing the experience of belonging, of sharing references and emotional beats with millions of strangers. When they lament the rise of monoculture, they are often worrying about the cost of that belonging, the way being part of a mass audience can feel like a flattening of who you actually are.

The agricultural metaphor captures both sides. A monoculture is productive precisely because it concentrates resources. It is fragile precisely because it leaves no room for what doesn’t fit.

What the word can’t quite say

There is one thing “monoculture” struggles to capture, and it shows up clearly in events like Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.

By raw attention, the performance drew 128 million U.S. viewers and set a global cross-platform record with more than 4 billion views in 24 hours.

But the reception was far from uniform. To some viewers, it was a Spanish-language celebration – long overdue – of Latin Americans, both inside and outside the U.S. Some conservative critics, however, objected to a predominantly Spanish-language performance headlining America’s biggest broadcast.

Scholars of culture and branding have long understood that shared cultural moments work by giving a range of different people a common cultural experience, not by forcing them to interpret it in the same way. Marketing scholar Douglas Holt’s foundational work on iconic brands showed that the most powerful cultural symbols succeed because they let different audiences find different meanings in the same thing.

The word “monoculture” cannot quite hold that part of cultural experience – and it might be why people keep reaching for the term, only to see it slip through their fingers.

Maria A. Rodas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Zim Wiki is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.

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Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted. This markup is saved as wiki text so you can easily edit it with other editors. Because of the autosave feature, you can switch between pages and follow links while editing without worries.

1. Do not Drink and Drive.
2. Discuss, no no Argue.
3. Sleep longer, Eat Lesser.
4. Move ..Slow and Sure.
5. Try again, Work around.

Even if you have Ten Beds, you will sleep only on One.

Yast Partitioner may cause permission issues if used in some ways.

Use Gparted to make partition and format your disks.

You can also use Gparted to delete all partitions on pendrives. Then do a full format. To clean infected drives.

During all operations keep Wi-Fi or LAN or Internet disconnected.

Drives that are old, dirty, grimy .... Let it soak in a small Bowl of IPA Iso Propyl Alcohol for 10 mts. Then shake dry a few times and open air dry for a day.