On Tuesday night, two things happened at once, and the country will be tempted to remember only one of them.

The first made me go quiet at my kitchen table. Chris Pappas won election to the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, becoming the first openly gay man ever sent to that chamber, and part of the margin that handed Democrats the Senate. In Indiana, J.D. Ford, the first openly gay person ever elected to that state’s legislature, unseated a Republican incumbent and is headed to the House. In Texas, of all places, James Talarico beat Ken Paxton to become the first Democrat to win statewide in more than thirty years, after a campaign in which anti-LGBTQ+ messaging was reportedly Paxton’s single largest category of advertising, and in which the vice president of the United States stood on a stage and used “gay” as a punchline against him. Talarico is straight, and he won anyway.

And on Long Island, in a district Donald Trump carried, a gay Democrat named Chris Gallant, whose private photographs were leaked against him precisely because someone believed that seeing him would be enough to end him, came within about two points of flipping a seat the forecasters had rated safely Republican. He conceded the election on Wednesday, down by roughly 6,700 votes in the closest race of the incumbent Republican Nick LaLota’s career. In the same breath, Gallant called LaLota a brother in arms and told the district he was still their neighbor, which is to say he refused the shame he was supposed to feel from the photo leak to the very end. Whatever that is, it is not the story of a man sunk by leather. It is the story of a man who nearly won the unwinnable while carrying the exact weight that was supposed to be disqualifying.

Put those results next to one another and a sentence forms that would have been unimaginable a decade ago: In 2026, you cannot reliably win an American election by making a man’s gayness, real or invented, the center of your campaign. Republicans tried it in Texas and lost the whole state. They tried it on Long Island and watched a red seat nearly flip. The oldest weapon in the drawer — the one that raised me, the one that could empty a lunch table in the 1990s — is losing its edge at the ballot box. Voters keep looking at the openly gay candidate and sending him to Washington.

That is the headline, and it is real, and I am not going to let anyone talk me out of being moved by it.

But here is the second thing that happened Tuesday night. In the same hours, often on the same ballots, and it is the part the rainbow-wave coverage is already rushing past. In Arizona and Nebraska, voters approved measures to bar transgender girls from girls’ sports. In Colorado, two measures aimed at transgender young people, one on sports and one restricting certain surgical care for minors, are narrowly passing. In Washington State, an initiative to keep transgender girls out of girls’ sports passed comfortably. The same electorate that refused to punish a Senate candidate for being gay reached down the ballot and punished trans kids for existing.

This is the thing I need people to see before the celebration hardens into a story we tell ourselves. The contempt did not disappear on Tuesday. It relocated. A political movement that has learned it can no longer win by hating gay men has not given up the strategy. It has updated the target. The MAGA machine that aired the Paxton ads and laughed at Vance’s joke is the same one now writing ballot measures about 11-year-olds, because cruelty still tests well when it is aimed at the group with the least power to answer back. Gays are simply the part of the community that got powerful enough to be left alone.

I know this pattern in my body, because I have watched it my whole life. The fear moves. First it was the plague, then it was the gay man as predator, then it was marriage as the end of the world, and each time the broader culture eventually got bored or ashamed and the fear went looking for a new address. Right now the address is a trans child in a locker room. The people who found that child did not arrive by accident. They are the same people, running the same play, because it is the only play they have ever had.

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So I want to be careful about the victory lap, even as I take one. It is a genuine and hard-won thing that Chris Pappas will be a senator and J.D. Ford will be a congressman, and that a straight man in Texas could not be destroyed by being called gay. Those wins are not small, and the people who did the work to make them real earned every bit of the joy. 

But a movement does not get to accept its own seats at the table while the youngest and most defenseless members of its own community are voted off the field in four states on the same night. This is not a win we get to keep cleanly. It is a split screen, and if we only look at our half of it, we become exactly the kind of people who could be bought off with a little representation while someone else pays the bill.

The refusal to be ashamed won some rooms on Tuesday. I felt it. The task now is to extend that refusal to the people the machine has decided to hunt next, to say as loudly for trans kids what the voters of New Hampshire and Indiana and Texas just said for us: that you do not get to make a person’s existence a punchline, or a wedge, or a ballot measure. We learned that lesson about gay men the slow and brutal way. The whole point of learning it is to spare the next group from learning it alone.

Chris Gallant did not quite win. But he came close enough to prove the old weapon is dulling. The question Tuesday really asked is whether we will hand the people wielding it a new one, or finally take the thing out of their hands.

The post Gay candidates won where it was supposed to be impossible appeared first on Salon.com.

Ford vowed to never sell customer driving data to third-party data brokers as part of a new privacy promise aimed at setting the automaker apart from competitors that have faced legal and regulatory blowback for sharing telematics with data brokers without authorization.

As part of its new promise, Ford says it will strive to protect customer data by using aggregating and anonymizing techniques. It will also "provide clear and easy-to-understand information about how we use your personal information." And while Ford says it will still use data to improve safety, it will allow customers to adjust how much or how little data they would prefe …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Ford said it's making an "explicit commitment" to its customers that "their vehicle data is safe" with the company.

Ford is rolling out two new chargers capable of powering a home or the grid — so-called V2X capability.

We're still a few months away from the official reveal of the Ford Fathom, the automaker's first next-generation electric vehicle. While we wait, Ford has been whetting our appetite with news about the sub-$30,000 pickup - including today's announcement about the Fathom's bidirectional charging capabilities.

With an increasing number of EVs coming out with bidirectional vehicle-to-home (V2H) or vehicle-to-load (V2L) charging capabilities, Ford is trying to position the Fathom as a key entrant - and one that simplifies the system by making it an everyday reality rather than a $10,000 luxury perk. Unlike the discontinued F-150 Lightning, wh …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Life is a circle that we begin drawing at birth and complete at death. Surely, you’ve heard this analogy before. It’s just one of the many poeticisms used to make sense of this amorphous existence. But less talked about are all the full circles that exist inside life’s larger ring: the mini revolutions we collect throughout the years — things that not only make up a life, but make that life worth living. Comedian Maria Bamford’s new Netflix documentary, “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story,” is a shining ode to both the big picture and its small details, arguing that a life without detours and surprises is no life at all.

While it deals in cycles, Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley’s documentary is linear, tracing Bamford’s life from her early years growing up gifted and strange in Minnesota to her time performing idiosyncratic, character-filled stand-up, to a midlife informed by it all. And though its structure is conventional, its subject is anything but. Most comedians are — how do I put this gently — known to be some level of unwell. (Whether they understand that is another matter.) Bamford, on the other hand, has made a career out of being so deeply in touch with her mind and self that it would frighten the average neurotypical viewer if it weren’t so damn funny.

That fear is partially what “Paralyzed by Hope” seeks to scrutinize and change. Here, Bamford is as honest and casually hysterical as she’s always been, discussing mental illness with the candor such a stigmatized and distorted topic deserves. She’s unafraid to go deep and dark, naming feelings and investigating mistakes. It’s disarming and occasionally exhausting, but that’s the point: If such repetitive heaviness is difficult for the viewer, imagine how it is for the person experiencing it.

But at the risk of becoming trite, “Paralyzed by Hope” embraces the light that comes with radical honesty. For Bamford, comedy is a chance to close those mini-revolutions and understand the otherwise inconceivable by connecting with the audience. Her family and experiences are integral to her act and essential to strengthening those ties. Accepting that she’ll always be looking toward the end of life’s circle, she’s delighted to fill its contents in the meantime. As Bamford’s friend, comedian Gary Gulman, says toward the film’s end: “Those interactions are antidepressants, and she’s created so many of these little antidepressants.”

The post In her achingly honest documentary, Maria Bamford comes full-circle appeared first on Salon.com.

Say what you will about the first and second couples at the heart of “The Diplomat” – and by now they’ve generated plenty of gossip fodder – but nobody would question the resilience of their unions. Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) and her husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell), have certainly had their ups and downs; the series begins with them contemplating divorce just as Kate is thrust into an ambassadorship to Britain.

The more politically seasoned Hal manipulates Kate into staying with him, kicking off a multi-season barrage of wheedling and scheming that culminates in President Grace Hagen Penn (Allison Janney) picking him as her vice president.

Over four seasons of Debora Cahn’s transatlantic political drama, Kate has been instrumental in keeping the highly tenuous special relationship between Britain and America from crumbling, even as her boss and husband insist on taking jackhammers to it.

Grace is indubitably corrupt, and yet her devotion to her husband Todd (Bradley Whitford) is nevertheless true. Sure, occasionally Todd must scream underwater to keep his head from exploding. And yes, a fourth-season subplot finds the first gentleman hightailing to London to find some purpose beyond perusing wallpaper swatches. Well, that and placing some distance between him and his wife’s unnerving autocratic behavior.

Even so, during their daily check-ins, Grace and Todd still call each other babe and exchange declarations of love. When Grace finally sets all of America’s alliances aflame, Todd remains standing by her side.

It’s a miserable political and marital state of affairs when a Netflix hit’s radioactive relationships make a person nostalgic for eras when first and second Ladies were intellectual forces respected by their husbands. Neither Dr. Jill Biden nor Michelle Obama dimmed their light to appease right-wing sexists bent on characterizing their professional achievements and eloquence as emasculating.

In that respect, Hillary Clinton showed them and us the way: When her husband Bill won office, the first lady chaired a task force that delivered a massive health reform proposal doomed from the jump. We will never know if we’d have universal healthcare by now if a man had run the task force, but Republicans taught voters to distrust any first lady who aspired to do more for Americans than bake cookies and tend the roses in the White House garden.

( Clifton Prescod/Netflix © 2026)

Contrast those misty memories with Monday’s connubial proof-of-life photo-op featuring Donald Trump and his oft-absentee wife, Melania, signing an executive order creating a task force on women’s health. This was a rare appearance for the first lady, who many assume can’t stand her husband. One can’t imagine why.

“Look at her. You think she’s easy? She’s not so easy, but she’s very smart,” the president assured assembled reporters before signing the order and remarking, “I don’t know if her signature means anything,” while handing the pen to his wife.

When he tried to seal the moment with a kiss, the first lady turned her head, leaving him to lip-lock her hair instead. He then patted her hand, mumbling, “Good job.”

And Kate? All she does is clean up her husband’s messes. Following his advice to blackmail a loose-cannon Prime Minister into resigning causes her reflux to erupt with a vengeance. Hal’s part in a secret plot to purloin a Russian doomsday weapon from a sunken sub and her efforts to keep the enemy from finding out trap her in a perpetual cycle of dashing to bathrooms. America’s president named Kate to be her sin eater, and occasionally she has to barf up her guilt to keep her prevarications straight.

Working for the Penn administration is an ambassador’s nightmare and hell on the esophagus. Without a partner, it would be untenable. Without Kate, Hal and the stalwart staff surrounding them, our international relations may very well be in tatters.

The Penn administration will never be confused for Kennedy’s Camelot, and nobody in their right mind would characterize the Clintons’ or the Wylers’ marriages as ideal.  

Like Bill and Hillary, Kate and Hal are working on their relationship despite Kate’s extramarital flings and Hal’s penchant for skullduggery. Their marriage is on thin ice. But their shared devotion is more plausible than whatever deal the Trumps have struck.

To watch these real and fictional partnerships play out without doubting their credibility is… I don’t know, is uplifting the word? Soothing, maybe.

It makes us fondly recall a past when first ladies competently delivered coherent speeches from podiums and made strong policy advocates. When presidents reached for their wives’ hands and their spouses responded in kind. It was a nicer, smarter time.

(Netflix © 2026)

Yet Kate and Hal’s working partnership earns them few points with Grace and Todd. The thing is, Todd isn’t stupid. He’s malleable and clueless about a lot of things, including whether it’s appropriate to interpret a female colleague’s nervous vomiting as an indicator that she’s pregnant. But when Grace survives an assassination attempt, Todd is genuinely shaken. When the president requires an emotional backstop and perhaps a bit of reining in, the first gentleman exercises his own version of diplomacy. When it suits him.

Hal’s mastery of persuasive dark arts makes him a perfect partner for a president who surreptitiously and proudly moves to upend the international power structure. Still, Todd doesn’t like the way Hal and Grace giggle together in secret.  

We’re attracted to “The Diplomat” for many of the same reasons Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing” kept liberal viewers rapt during the George W. Bush years. The Penn administration has none of the idealism or conscience that drove Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlet, whose vision Janney’s press secretary, C.J. Cregg, and Whitford’s deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman, worked to preserve as best as they could.

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It’s both entertaining and frightening to see the same actors portray an effective marital alliance devoted to trashing norms and weaponizing American exceptionalism.

But that’s also why this show works. In real life, the political class favors men like Hal much more than women like Kate, although (and because) Kate is truly Hal’s better half, morally speaking. In Britain, the charismatic Todd embraces his special envoy status with verve even as he suspects he’s out of his depth.

As America watches the president’s wife treat him with the same disdain he shows the rest of the world, a competent political union, however strained, is somehow reassuring. If the Wylers can survive the nightmare of American politics, maybe we have a chance too.

“The Diplomat” is streaming on Netflix.

The post “The Diplomat” reminds us that political couples used to be smart appeared first on Salon.com.