“You Can See Everything” is not your standard documentary. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s film isn’t the first nonfictional chronicle of Elizabeth Holmes’ enigmatic psyche, but it is the most revealing. Any director pointing their camera at Holmes — before or after she was convicted of fraud for her bogus Theranos blood-testing device — won’t capture the whole truth. That’s what happens when a subject is obscured by layers of semi-permeable barriers of their own making: Eventually, the image distorts. Fielder, the film’s ringmaster, has no choice but to forgo conventional documentary tactics and seek detours. Perhaps if he takes his own unorthodox approach, the two will cancel each other out, leaving something substantial behind.

But, then again, what is a “standard” documentary? In recent years, streaming’s popularity has significantly impacted the genre and how audiences perceive it. Once executives realized there was an endless cash cow to milk in true crime and tawdry scandal, a deluge of rushed, ineffective documentaries and docuseries hit the top platforms like a string of hydrogen bombs, leveling their audience’s standards and turning their taste to ash. 

Everything was and is fair game. Murder victims, abuse survivors, pyramid and multilevel marketing schemes, unsavory business practices, music festival scams, campus life, cult leaders; you name it, you can probably find a documentary on it. The sad thing is, this boom produced legitimately compelling offerings and important stories, told well, too. But that doesn’t matter when the market’s not only crowded, but recycling its wares every week. In this era, powerful, complex stories of the intrepid human spirit sit next to ephemeral tales of cheaply made, mildew-ridden leggings. And guess which option the algorithm favors?

In just shy of three weeks, “You Can See Everything” has taken a sledgehammer to this era of cobbled-together documentaries. The film is on track to become the most successful theatrically released documentary ever, staring down two Michaels (Jackson and Moore) and two nature docs (“March of the Penguins” and “Earth”) as it climbs the ranks before its international release. 

More importantly, the film has ignited endless conversation thanks to its capricious subject and equally unpredictable experimentation with form, garnering chatter about whether it may be the first documentary nominated for best picture at next year’s Oscars. As another taxing year nears its end, the popularity of “You Can See Everything” reflects audiences’ desire to go deeper than the surface level most streaming documentaries are content to skim. But the film is also testing those who see the genre as one specific thing, made one specific way. 

Fielder’s film is one of many from this year reconfiguring the wider idea of what documentaries can and should look like, away from the style monopolizing the genre of late and toward something more varied and essential. Considered alongside an excellent lineup of contemporaries, “You Can See Everything” stresses that the genre isn’t about uncovering truths, but playing with our subjective relationship to them.

That notion isn’t always easy to remember when, to many, “documentary” remains somewhat of a cinematic pejorative. Whether by a diet of snoozy docs shown in history class on a wheeled-in television from the AV room, or the genre’s reputation for being innately less thrilling than narrative filmmaking because it contends with reality over fiction, documentaries simply don’t have the best rap. Their audience generally skews older, and for some, an older crowd’s curiosities skew boring. This is partly why those ripped-from-the-headlines streaming documentaries are so popular: They reflect stories that are buzzy but fleeting, perfect for those whose attention spans are already shot.

But the idea that a documentary that isn’t detailing some recent or mysterious event is inherently tedious is a gross misconception. Documentaries are about life, and as such, their relevance is evergreen. The past informs both the present and the future. And dismissing the past as unimportant in the face of, let’s say, some hot new documentary about a man who stole $10,000 worth of orange juice from a local supermarket last Tuesday means we won’t have a present worth loving or a future worth living. The hypothetical orange juice documentary sounds interesting, but it has no value unless it can do more than regurgitate a Wikipedia article or a news story with a few worthless talking heads thrown in. Documentaries can take many forms; being an arm of journalism is just one, and often it’s not very compelling.

---

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

---

Occasionally, I’ve come across friends, family and acquaintances who don’t have a strong relationship to the genre, but are curious about how to forge one. In response, I like to give two pieces of advice. The first comes from Carolyn Strachan, a filmmaker and professor who taught an ethnographic films course I took in college, and changed my relationship to the genre with one simple sentence: “The only rule of a documentary is to press record.” The second comes from me, many years later: every best-of-the-year film list should include one documentary, if not more. Once someone remembers to consider docs alongside their narrative companions, that attention reshapes their connection to the genre.

Institutions also play a role in fostering that love, too. That a documentary has never been nominated for the best picture Oscar is cuckoo bananas, pure and simple. How can such a premier establishment as the Academy claim to revere filmmaking if they’re unwilling to prop up all forms of the art? There are dozens off the top of my head, released this decade alone, that should’ve been in contention — documentaries as important and memorable, if not more, than the narrative movies nominated in the category. The double standard is why “You Can See Everything” having legitimate chances at multiple top awards next year is so exciting. This could be a watershed moment. We might witness history being made in real time, like we did when “Parasite” became the first non-English film to win the top Oscar in 2020. While such an accolade might not reroute the dire timeline we’ve lived in since then, it could open countless doors and even more minds, and deservingly so, for a film as mercurial and labyrinthine as Fielder and Oppenheim’s.

But “You Can See Everything” is far from the only doc that should be in contention, either for best picture or your own best-of list. This year has been decent for film as a whole, but fantastic for documentaries, which have surpassed 2026’s mainstream narrative films in many ways. Right now, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a new-old film from the great American icon William Greaves, is expanding into more theaters. It’s both an account of the past, peering into an intimate gathering of Black luminaries during the Harlem Renaissance, and a tale for right now — funny, moving and pertinent, even if it was originally filmed in 1972. Just as applicable to the present is “NAZA,” the harrowing film uncovering the extent of Israeli surveillance and war crimes, which stands to dictate which way the world will spin.

 

Historical events a little reminiscent of stereotypical docs? Want something guaranteed to cheer you up? First, don’t be so quick to dismiss. But also, try John Wilson’s “The History of Concrete” or “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story,” two very different films helmed by two very funny people, that have as much to do with how we operate as people as they do with zany subject matter. Or, let’s say “You Can See Everything” has opened your eyes to all of the different, strange and unwieldy forms a documentary can take. 

Maybe you’re craving another doc that will turn itself inside-out, revealing an underbelly of broken mirrors. Brace yourself for “Remake,” Ross McElwee’s magnificent story of fatherhood and filmmaking forced askew. It’s my personal favorite of the year, sitting just above “You Can See Everything.” Make it a double feature if you so wish, but you might need to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling after.

But if you want facts, plain and simple, you won’t find them in any of those films. You will, however, find truths, and many of them. That’s the wonderful thing about documentaries: They might deal in reality, but the genre uses nonfictional perspective to highlight the difference between fact and truth. Reality exists in the middle, somewhere in the opaque. The thrill comes from the squint — the desperate, reflexive need to make out something in the haze. What’s laid before the viewer will never be the whole picture. Any documentary that tells you otherwise has more in common with narrative filmmaking. As it turns out, truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

The post “You Can See Everything” leads 2026’s documentary revolution appeared first on Salon.com.

Schadenfreude isn’t listed among Airbnb’s amenities — but this week, it’s practically complimentary.

Some Airbnb hosts are threatening to quit the platform, raise their housekeeping fees or pare their rental properties down to the bare essentials rather than accept new restrictions on checkout chores. A segment of travelers, meanwhile, has greeted the uproar with the particular delight of people who have spent years paying cleaning charges while being handed lists of chores. “I’m just here with popcorn to watch,” wrote one Reddit commenter. 

Under new rules announced last week, Airbnb will generally prohibit hosts from requiring guests to wash and put away dishes, strip beds or haul garbage off-site for reservations booked on or after November 20. The changes address a long-simmering grievance among travelers, some of whom have encountered checkout instructions that read less like the end of a vacation and more like the beginning of a Saturday spent doing housework.

There are, of course, always more extreme stories, particularly if one goes looking online. “Our current host is asking us to load trash in our vehicle and drive 20 minutes to a drop-off facility,” wrote one traveler. “Our vehicle is fully packed so we’d have to make an extra trip to do this.” Another, who claimed to have already paid a $300 cleaning fee, described receiving a request for an additional $600 after checkout for allegedly failing to scrub the toilets, stove and hot tub, along with leaving “ONE ‘dirty’ pot (it was just water stains).” The guest said Airbnb ultimately sided with them.

These are individual, unverified accounts, not necessarily representative experiences. Still, one can understand why a guest might object to having a 20-minute pilgrimage to the local garbage facility added to the vacation itinerary, or why a $600 dispute over a water-stained pot might leave a lasting impression.

Some hosts maintain that basic housekeeping is simply part of staying in someone else’s home. Their critics counter that they could spend their holidays doing chores at home for free. 

Eventually, somebody delivers what is meant to be the conversation-ending argument: Then book a hotel.

Except it never quite ends the conversation. A host will point out, with some satisfaction, that a hotel room probably won’t have a full kitchen. The traveler, who was just moments ago swearing off vacation rentals forever, admits that’s exactly the problem: They need a kitchen! And there they are, host and guest, still standing in the same imaginary room, arguing about the dishes.

It’s a lot of emotional freight for four burners and a refrigerator. Which raises the obvious question: Why has the kitchen become both the most persuasive argument for renting someone’s home and the place where the whole arrangement gets so contentious?

For families, people with dietary restrictions or anyone hoping to avoid three restaurant bills a day, a kitchen can be essential. But cooking occupies a peculiar position in domestic life: necessary chore to some, passionate hobby to others, and sometimes both to the same person. I have friends who explore unfamiliar places by running through neighborhoods at sunrise or sketching what they see. I prefer wandering a local market, imagining what I might make for dinner.

---

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

---

One Thanksgiving, my mom and I debated attempting a traditional holiday meal at a rental on Hilton Head Island. At home, we’re spreadsheet cooks — planning weeks, if not months, in advance — and an unfamiliar kitchen seemed a risky place to make stuffing. Then we opened the cupboards: good knives, cookware in every shape and size, multiple colanders, and a generously stocked spice cabinet guests were welcome to use. Whoever owned the house, we realized, loved to cook.

Soon, I was bicycling to Harris Teeter for cornbread ingredients, where Harry the Happy Dragon — a coin-operated green kiddie ride — stood sentry outside the entrance. Later, I padded barefoot into the yard to snip rosemary for the stuffing. I felt like Ina Garten, albeit one whose charming village market featured a mechanical reptile. We cooked leisurely. If Thanksgiving went sideways, we could always order pizza.

We’ve returned several times since. Mary, the owner, understood that a well-equipped kitchen could be part of the vacation itself.

Not every rental kitchen inspires such confidence. At a North Carolina cabin, I once envisioned mornings of cinnamon rolls, bacon and porch-side coffee, only to discover approximately three plates and no coffee maker. Salvation arrived in the form of a traveling companion who, inexplicably, had packed a French press. (I now appreciate hosts who even roughly inventory their kitchen equipment.)

That’s the peculiar promise of a vacation rental kitchen: You can experience someone else’s domestic life as your own. Their spice cabinet becomes yours; their stove, your stove; their neighborhood grocery store, your little errand. But there’s a contradiction tucked inside that promise. We want the intimacy of a home without necessarily inheriting all the obligations of maintaining one. The pleasures of playing house and the responsibilities of keeping house aren’t quite the same thing, even when they happen in the same room.

I don’t remember cleaning up after our Thanksgiving dinner, though I’m sure there was plenty of it. I remember the rosemary, the bicycle ride, the pleasure of discovering another cook’s cupboards. The rest was simply part of making dinner.

Which is perhaps why, reading through the celebrations of Airbnb’s new rules, I keep imagining the other side of that sink full of dishes. The blender caked with a week’s worth of old food. The plates slowly accumulating a geological record of every meal cooked since check-in. I wouldn’t want someone to do that to my kitchen, or to the kitchen of someone I loved.

I can already hear the response from a thousand comment sections: THEN YOU SHOULDN’T HOST!

Fair enough. I don’t! The possibility of strangers allowing marinara to fossilize on my favorite saucepan is among the many reasons I’ve never considered entering the vacation rental business.

But I do think we occasionally forget that hospitality is a two-way street. Being a good host is a genuine responsibility, as is being a good guest. And we tend to understand both roles more intuitively in situations where nobody is exchanging money. If I were watching a friend’s house while they were out of town, I wouldn’t dream of welcoming them back with a pile of bolognese-crusted pots. If that same friend handed me a list of toilets to scrub before returning the keys, however, I might reconsider the friendship.

Of course, the exchange of money changes things. When I pay a cleaning fee, I expect someone to handle the work of preparing a property for its next occupants: washing linens, scrubbing bathrooms, cleaning floors. I’m not volunteering to become somebody’s housekeeper. But I also don’t think loading the dishwasher after making dinner is an especially onerous price to pay for enjoying somebody else’s kitchen.

Now, Airbnb has attempted to draw the boundary more formally. Under its new rules, hosts may ask guests to place dirty dishes in the sink, but generally cannot require them to wash and put those dishes away.

Apparently, somewhere between setting down a dirty plate and turning on the faucet, a vacationer risks becoming a housekeeper.

And perhaps that’s the difficulty with Airbnb’s entire proposition. I loved cooking Thanksgiving in Mary’s kitchen partly because, for a few days, it felt like our own. I could wander into her garden, borrow her spices and imagine that this was simply what my life looked like on a Thursday afternoon. But the pleasure depended on a temporary arrangement, one in which somebody else’s home had been made available for my enjoyment, and in which I understood that eventually I’d have to hand it back.

What does it mean to make yourself at home somewhere when that home is also somebody else’s business? Airbnb has been asking travelers and hosts to negotiate that question for years. Judging by the delight and indignation greeting its new housekeeping rules, we still haven’t agreed on an answer.

The post Airbnb sold us the comforts of home. Then came the chores appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump is bad at a lot of things — negotiations, concealing criminal behavior, standing normal — but he’s not bad at everything. As much as it might bug some of us to admit it, there are a few areas where the president excels. He has an incredible gift for crafting earworms, and his Queens cadence and variable-volume delivery has wriggled its way into American speech patterns. He’s skilled at crafting funny putdowns, pithy nicknames and jabs that hit what his rival politicians are sensitive about and exploit the pressure points of expensive, futile campaigns.   

But Trump’s greatest skill is his ability to sniff out a loser. The son of a slumlord coming from the outer boroughs, he was starting with two strikes against him when he attempted to make a jump into Manhattan’s high society. If he wanted to join the rarefied air of the sons and daughters of The 400, he couldn’t be seen associated with anyone who would count as a mark against his judgment. Trump developed a sharp sense of who was on the wane and on the rise, and he worked hard to only mingle with the ascendant. 

It worked. His surname became synonymous with big-money deals, success and opulence despite a string of bankruptcies, casino closures and failed direct-to-consumer businesses. Trump kept away from maiden horses, in part because he ate dirt so often. So you can trust that when he calls Bill Maher a “complete and total loser,” he knows what he’s talking about. 

Trump railed against the host of HBO’s “Real Time” on Sunday night in a Truth Social post that expanded beyond essay length. He bashed Maher for his ratings and accused the host of lying about Trump’s approval rating. He pushed back against Maher’s criticism of the war in Iran. Most cuttingly, the reality TV veteran accused Maher of leaning heavily on canned applause and a laugh track to sell the idea that he’s funny.

“[Maher] lies about everything,” the president wrote, “and I believe he lied to me when I asked him, with all the applause and laughter he gets after almost everything he says, about things that aren’t funny or even any good, what Laughter Machine does he use?”

Maher prodded Trump in a monologue last Friday after attending a White House dinner alongside Kid Rock and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith. The host made a note of Trump’s plummeting approval ratings and recent commentary on men’s physiques at his rallies. “It’s just a little odd that Trump keeps gushing about men’s bodies, and how handsome they are, and their jawlines, and their asses, their physiques,” Maher said. “I’m a little hurt. I was there for dinner for four hours last week, and not a peep. Nothing.”

On Truth Social, Trump accused Maher of turning up looking bedraggled and drunk for the controversial dinner at the “seductive and beautiful” White House. The president said that he “learned nothing” from Maher, but he clearly hoped the host would leave with a more favorable outlook on the MAGA movement. Afterward, Trump said Maher returned to his set and his “laughing machine” and offered slightly tamer critiques in the days that followed, before the host supposedly turned on him for the cameras.

“He reverted back to his former self, and his old ways,” Trump wrote. “What he spouts isn’t what he believes. He has to cater to his base, which is mostly composed of Losers, and people who don’t like working.” 

In true Trump fashion, the post was lengthy and melodramatic. But at the heart of his burn-book slams, he did hit on a real question: Who is Bill Maher for? 

The snarky libertarian has the carriage of an overeducated yuppie. Despite his frequent protestations, his smarm and suits pushed him to one side of the country’s rigid two-party binary. (He didn’t name his first show “Politically Incorrect” to rile the GOP, after all.) Maher’s outrage over the War on Terror and 2002 cancellation by ABC jammed him into an awkwardly fitting box of “liberal cause celebre.” As neoconservatives pushed an uberpatriotic theocracy in the aughts, his bad faith documentaries, which were aimed at evangelicals, kept up the illusion that he was on the side of progressives. But Maher has never been a lefty, or even particularly committed to any beliefs beyond his freedom to smoke weed.

In recent years, he’s crowed to anyone still listening that he’s open to MAGA’s overtures. He’s frequently come out on the side of reactionaries when the question centers around gender nonconforming people or Islamophobia. Outside of his dinner at the White House, Maher has railed against progressive candidates and offered his vote to Republicans, provided they tone down their rhetoric around the Big Lie. 

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

That particular problem is unsolvable, at least as long as Trump is alive and in power. While the president’s popularity might be waning with voters, he still has the ability to sink Republicans who cross him. That leaves Maher in an unenviable position, inching toward a conservative party that could take or leave him. He’s gotten crankier and more prone to cribbing Fox News talking points at a time where the center of the Democratic Party is rushing to the left. His constant trashing of rising progressive stars will be hard to forget if the expected blue wave materializes in the Nov. 3 midterms. 

All this means that the proud libertarian has found himself with fewer friends than ever. Cozying up to Trump only got him publicly mocked by the president as a “hopeless guy” and a “coward.” The liberal commentariat reacted negatively to Maher’s first dinner with Trump in 2025, with Keith Olbermann claiming that the comedian had always been a “shameless opportunist.” This year, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed called out Maher’s history of religious intolerance.

With Trump realizing that Maher’s not worth the effort to woo and the next generation of party stars outright hostile to him, it’s unclear what role Maher has to play. “Aren’t these flyover states stupid?” isn’t enough of a stance to warrant having the mic when the current administration is disappearing people off the street. Maher’s punch-left, pat-right comedy has been stale for years, but he’s still insisting he’s owed a platform. He’s a blunt comic whose rotation of tired jokes have left him with no one to pass his joint to. 

Perhaps Trump summed up the problem of Maher best, in a barb buried deep in his Sunday night tirade. Maher clearly views himself as a bold truth-teller, willing to take on both the empty-headed conservatives and the too woke progressives. Trump’s approval-obsessed brain looks at a guy who has alienated anyone who might support him and only sees one thing: “You’re not transformative,” he said. “You’re a loser!”

The post Trump’s right. Bill Maher is a man without a party — or a point appeared first on Salon.com.

As soon as former president Barack Obama described Donald Trump’s aesthetic assault on the White House as “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the current president did what he does best: seethe. Ever since Obama’s weekend joke at an Ohio rally, Trump has been complaining non-stop. On Sunday, he posted on Truth Social that Obama was “a grossly incompetent President” and accused him of “campaigning for a Muslim Brotherhood Jihadist.” The following day, he told reporters that Obama is “not a smart guy.”

At a campaign rally to shore up Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s fledgling re-election bid in Mississippi, Trump chewed on his grievance even more. After calling the Cheesecake Factory a “successful company,” he launched into a confusing defense of his garish White House redecoration. “A guy like Obama,” he said, “doesn’t understand the White House has to be clean, pristine, beautiful.”

There are a lot of words for what Trump has done to the White House, but “clean,” “pristine” and “beautiful” are not among them. The president has covered every corner of the Oval Office with cheap-looking gold-paint and elaborate carvings. The once-stately decor now has a cluttered and claustrophobic feel — an embarrassing departure from the dignified appearance that all modern presidents, regardless of party, adhered to, which had a simplicity meant to reflect the sober responsibilities of the citizen-leader. 

But to understand why Trump clings to words like “clean” to describe his chaotic and overwhelming design impulses, it helps to look at how authoritarian movements like MAGA relate to kitsch. As I wrote in 2019 about Hallmark films, schmaltz creates a safe space the right can escape to — a cavern where they can wallow in fake feelings and nostalgia, without having to face complex realities that might challenge them. What makes something “clean” or “pristine,” then, isn’t actual clean lines or even a lack of clutter. It’s a conformist fantasy where everyone is white and straight and knows their place in the social pecking order. For Trump in particular, “clean” and “pristine” are racially charged words, building on his long history of equating whiteness with purity and diversity with disorder. 

Trump and his fellow MAGA leaders are engaging in performative outrage over Obama’s comments. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose net worth hovers around $600 million, ventured to a Cheesecake Factory in suburban Maryland, where he participated in a photoshoot. It was just the latest in a series of MAGA’s long list of kitsch-related tantrums, which have seen them feign enthusiasm for middlebrow corporate products as evidence of their identity as “real” Americans, unlike those snooty Democrats with their fancy mustards. 

This schtick has worked plenty of times to rally the MAGA base because, in this world, “elitism” has nothing to do with money or status. Instead, it’s a code word for the racialized paranoias that unite small-minded white people across the class divide. 

Just last year, MAGA propagandists got a huge boost when another restaurant chain, Cracker Barrel, tried to change its logo from the overly busy image of a man leaning on a barrel to something more minimalist — or, one might say, “clean” and “pristine.” This update was spun as a subterranean assault on white culture, an effort to smuggle in those “elite” and urbane values into the restaurants cornpone comforts, a place Fox News Grandpa used to feel safe from having to hear hip-hop music in the parking lot. 

This time around, my sense is that the Cracker Barrel Panic of 2025 cannot be remade into a Cheesecake Factory October Surprise that will save the Republicans in this midterm cycle. I’m a Cheesecake Factory virgin, but my gracious Bluesky followers and old-fashioned internet research revealed that the restaurant’s marketing is a lot different from the white-bread Christian brunch vibe that Bessent and other MAGA leaders seem to assume it must have. Apparently, it’s a deliberate, self-aware camp rather than dime-store kitsch, appealing to a younger, more modern audience that doesn’t take itself seriously. The Cheesecake Factory is supposed to be silly, which is why its fans don’t think its look is appropriate for the White House. Its famously long and decadent menu is also part of the joke. But at the same time, it reflects the expanding tastes of a diversifying nation, borrowing flavors from all over the world.

It’s not just that the Cheesecake Factory’s wonton chips and chicken shawarma appeal to a different crowd than the chicken-and-gravy offerings at Cracker Barrel. The distinction is a sign of the way that middle America is moving on in general from the rigidly white, rural and suburban conformity so valorized by the Trump administration. The president and his acolytes, particularly during his second term, have been explicit about narrowing their view of what a “great” America should look like. The administration puts out a steady stream of propaganda envisioning a country composed solely of Aryan-looking nuclear families dressed in old-fashioned clothes. But it’s not clear if this has much appeal beyond some elderly white conservatives at Trump rallies, nostalgic for childhoods spent watching “Leave It To Beaver,” or the small number of bitter young men who let social media tell them it was easier to get a wife in the bygone days.

After his narrow win in 2024, Trump and his aides like Stephen Miller convinced themselves that the result was a resounding victory for his fascist fantasy. The president’s rapidly plummeting approval ratings, though, tell a different story: He mostly won because swing voters have short memories and thought he might make good on his promise to bring down prices. Instead, they got more inflation. Likewise, Trump and Miller thought they won on a “no more tamales” platform. But as it turns out, Americans just want those tamales to be a little more affordable. In fact, Trump’s policies are now even threatening to take away free chips and salsa. In the process, we’re learning that, for most Americans in 2026, this traditional Tex-Mex appetizer is considered as all-American as, well, cheesecake.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump’s love of kitsch mostly endeared him to his voters, who saw themselves in his corny preferences for the musical “Cats” or faux-baroque interior design. The president may be rich, but he connected with his fans in their shared resentment of smarter tastes, which require the very curiosity and intellectual engagement that the president fears. Instead, as Sam Adler-Bell wrote in New York magazine at the time, they craved the “evocative empty calories” of “[s]chlock and sentiment and melodrama.” Real art, on the other hand, makes you think and can even inspire empathy for people who are different. Trump promised an opportunity to sink deeply into a bath of nostalgia for an imaginary past. 

As the popularity of Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl reminded us, the escapist fantasies of authoritarians don’t appeal to most Americans. It was just easier for some to look the other way when there wasn’t a war in Iran, rapidly rising gas prices and paramilitary troops grabbing grandmothers off the street. In good times, kitsch feels like harmless fluff, making its long history of being used for fascist propaganda easier to ignore. But when the president is more worried about redecorating the White House in his schmaltzy self-image than he is about the real struggles of Americans, the kitsch stops being so funny.

Love it or hate it, the Cheesecake Factory cannot save the MAGA movement — no matter how many Cabinet officials get photographed in front of it. 

The post The Cheesecake Factory aesthetic won’t save MAGA appeared first on Salon.com.

Every president leaves a signature accomplishment. Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union. Franklin Roosevelt rescued capitalism from itself. Donald Trump’s will be something no predecessor ever attempted: He has done more than any American in history to convince his fellow citizens that their votes are not counted honestly. That dubious achievement belongs in the first line of his obituary.

On Oct. 18, “60 Minutes” reported that in the 21 months of his second term, Trump has said, “in so many words, the vote can’t be trusted — more than 150 times.” This is not the grievance of a defeated candidate. It is the drumbeat of a sitting president who won an historic election in 2024, controls the executive branch and still insists that the system that elected him is rotten.

The record is not hard to find. The day before his second inauguration, Trump told a crowd at a rally in Washington, D.C., that he would be president for the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics — which he would have missed had he won in 2020 — only “because they rigged the election.” In February and again in April 2026, he posted that “America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World,” adding, “We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer.” In September, at the Republican National Committee’s Midterm Convention, he told supporters, “I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do.” He doubled down on those claims earlier this month when he posted that vote counts “take weeks to rig, I mean, calculate. Voting in America is CORRUPT!!!” And on Oct. 16 in Georgia he declared that Sen. Jon Ossoff “lost that election [in 2020], but they gave it to him because it was a rigged election.”

But the centerpiece of Trump’s election lies came on July 16, when he used a primetime address to the nation from the White House to warn that our elections “were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” and that the system “falls catastrophically short.” He promised proof. He delivered heavily redacted documents that, according to election officials and security experts, showed vulnerabilities long known and studied, but included no evidence that any American election had been stolen. He cited only some fraudulent registrations in Michigan, which authorities flagged, and no fraudulent voter registrations were processed.

What it all adds up to is this: Six years after Trump claimed that millions of illegal votes were cast against him in 2020, he failed to document a single illegal vote. 

I have studied American elections for more than four decades, and during that time I have testified as an expert witness in more than 100 voting rights cases. Let me be precise about where legitimate concern lies. There are serious reasons to question how congressional districts are drawn. Partisan gerrymandering, now escalating into mid-decade redistricting wars between red and blue states, lets politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around. These are real problems.

But the accuracy of the count is not among them. Nearly every American jurisdiction leaves a paper trail for ballots. Bipartisan local officials tally them, audit them and, when margins are close, recount them. After the 2020 election, Trump’s own cybersecurity chief called it “the most secure in American history.” William Barr, his own attorney general, found no fraud on a scale that could have changed the result. Georgia, under a Republican secretary of state, counted its presidential ballots three times. More than 60 lawsuits failed, some before judges Trump appointed. Studies of non-citizen voting find it vanishingly rare.

Compare Trump with the presidents who came before him. In 1800, John Adams handed power to his bitter rival Thomas Jefferson, establishing the peaceful transfer between parties that defines our republic. In 1864, with the nation at war, Lincoln held an election he expected to lose and privately pledged to cooperate with his successor. Herbert Hoover in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992 all lost as incumbents and accepted the verdict without a word against the count.

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

Richard Nixon, a Republican, and Al Gore, a Democrat, swallowed razor-thin defeats in 1960 and 2000 rather than tear at the nation’s faith in its elections. Both graciously conceded despite having some basis for challenging results. Presidents have complained about the press, the courts and Congress. None of them made the American voter’s ballot the enemy — until Trump.

That is the damage he has caused. Democracy rests on a simple bargain: The loser accepts the result because both sides trust the count. Each time a president claims, contrary to the evidence, that the count cannot be trusted, he weakens that bargain. He also hands his supporters a ready excuse to reject any outcome they dislike, including the coming midterms. Americans should hold elections to the highest standard and fix what is genuinely broken, starting with how congressional districts are drawn. But they should not mistake a president’s endless repetition of baseless claims for proof of fraud. The evidence shows that America’s votes are counted honestly. The untrustworthy voice comes from the one who keeps telling them otherwise.

Trump has said he would accept the midterm results if they are “honest” — code for Republicans winning. He has already interfered with elections by suing Alaska to overturn results if having another Daniel Sullivan on the ballot allegedly defeats the Republican Senatorial incumbent with the same name. He has also sought to compel California to set aside the votes of 20,000 alleged non-citizens based on an error-ridden database and a dubious matching with registration rolls. 

As happened after Trump’s 2020 defeat, we can expect more lawsuits and pressure on Republican legislators and election officials to alter results.

The post The first line of Donald Trump’s obituary appeared first on Salon.com.

Not all hip-hop feuds are alike. If you’re a lifetime subscriber to the culture, this doesn’t need explaining. If you can’t tell Nicki Minaj and Cardi B apart — and I’ve met enough folks to know there are plenty of y’all out there — last week’s events may have confused you.

I get it: Both dominated social media recently, albeit for very different reasons. Cardi B’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert debut on Monday, Oct. 19, became one of those “break the internet” cultural salvos that rippled across our feeds for days. Backed by a live band led by Emmy-winning producer and musical director Adam Blackstone, the rapper performed a tight setlist that included hits like “Bodak Yellow” and an emotional rendition of “Man of Your Word.” 

The following Sunday, Minaj, perhaps answering the call of Donald Trump’s glute-gawking tour, flew with the president on Air Force One to a rally in Port Huron, Michigan. Minaj led the crowd in a chant of “We love Trump,” which had about as much rhythmic flow as people who clap on the ones and threes can handle.

One event may not seem related to another unless you know the two hip-hop stars represent opposing sides in a spiteful cold war that’s dragged on since 2017. This carpaccio of beefs tends to heat up whenever one steps into the spotlight, so you can’t help but wonder whether Minaj would have flocked to Trump if not for Cardi’s grand cultural moment.

When Minaj was in her stride, she earned the moniker “Queen of Rap.” Cardi, however, became the first woman in history to win the Grammy Award for best rap album as a solo artist. Minaj was a judge on the 12th season of “American Idol.” Cardi B has partnered on tracks with a variety of popular artists, including Megan Thee Stallion.

While Minaj has more studio albums, Cardi B is a prolific hitmaker known for her metrical prowess and a kind of braggadocio that’s hard to beat. Some of her hardest-hitting lyrics also make people wonder if she’s speaking to anyone in particular. Take this line from Cardi’s newest track “Don’t Chart,” her contribution to “Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album”: “First thing first, ho, know your part/ Act like an old-a** whip and don’t start.” That’s fire, the kind that makes you want to cozy up under a blanket with your favorite mug of tea. And spill.

(Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The one thing Americans love more than a celebrity feud is taking sides and declaring a victor after each round, even if the opponents don’t realize they’re being pitted against each other. The ‘90s East Coast-West Coast rivalry was manufactured by competing record labels and claimed the lives of two of hip-hop’s all-time greats, but fans still declared allegiance to one side or the other.

Only much later did some people recognize that such parasocial loyalty led them to back a violent criminal currently serving prison time, Suge Knight, and Sean Combs, who used his friend’s murder as a springboard to fame, has been accused of multiple rapes and sex trafficking and is also doing time.

Team Drake versus Team Kendrick Lamar emerged from the former poking at the latter until Lamar smacked Drake down in his diss track “Not Like Us.” After it became a hit, Lamar swept up multiple Grammys as if they popped out of the Canadian rapper like coins flying from a “Mario Kart” loser.

The Cardi B-Minaj rivalry is different. Cardi is just the latest high-profile woman Minaj has gone after over the years, having previously picked fights with Mariah Carey, Lil’ Kim and Remy Ma. But her Cardi vendetta is more famous in no small part because of Minaj’s public MAGA turn. As Minaj told Time magazine earlier this year, she’s long harbored conservative views but didn’t feel comfortable expressing them for fear of alienating her fans. Then, in 2025, she made anti-trans statements and sat down for a chat with Erika Kirk at a Turning Point USA conference. In early 2026, she appeared at a U.S. Treasury event, declaring herself Trump’s No. 1 fan.  

She has plenty of competition for that title in Trump’s inner circle. Still, right now, that pledge of allegiance gives White House communications director Steven Cheung’s Sunday video post a level of credence we wouldn’t otherwise take seriously. “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we may have found the new White House Press Secretary!” Cheung said on X.

Between that and Trump’s callout from the rally podium praising Minaj’s backside – “By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful a** before… Nicki Minaj. That’s hard to miss!” – recent events have led to frenzied discussion as to whether Cheung was joking. One can’t rule anything out in a presidency willed into existence by punchlines and enraged laughter at visions of liberal tears. Minaj meets several of the president’s main qualifications for such a front-facing role: she’s famous, sycophantic, and apparently devoid of self-respect.

Questions remain about whether the performer, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, has secured citizenship yet, but that hasn’t stopped her from advocating for legislation requiring Americans to show ID to vote.

(Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Plus, after Katie Zacharia’s calamitous five-day stint in that job, it’s hard to imagine Minaj doing worse. In fact, I can’t think of a better way for Trump to show his open disdain for journalists than to put the “Starships” singer in front of the press corps, then sit back and watch the Barbz, as her toxic fandom is known, go to work harassing any reporter who asks tough questions.

In contrast, Cardi B is a history buff fascinated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency and the lasting impact of Eleanor Roosevelt. In a 2023 Hot Ones episode, she said she’s obsessed with learning about wars. Cardi was also one of many performers who appeared on the campaign trail in support of Kamala Harris and has gone on record with her feelings about Trump.

More recently, the New Yorker has thrown her weight behind local issues like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s universal child care program.

Nothing was overtly political about her Tiny Desk appearance other than what some might read into the details. Blackstone, for instance, bills himself as Minaj’s musical director, but it’s been a while since the Harajuku Barbie dropped a new track. (Her last studio album came out in 2023.) Cardi had her choice of backing talent. She picked him. Fascinating, no?

We can’t discount the identity politics at work here either. Cardi B proudly flaunts her sexual agency and power but never allows anyone to denigrate her for that. Meanwhile, Minaj’s willingness to showcase her rump for the pleasure of Trump’s followers is disturbing, generally and specifically. Trump and MAGA have a long history of insulting Black women’s appearance, intelligence and abilities. Of course, that never kept Stacey Dash, Omarosa Manigault Newman or his one-time sidekicks Diamond & Silk from supporting his first presidency.

---

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

---

But Minaj’s twirl for Trump differs from his fixation on the physiques of Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted or Kentucky congressional candidate Ed Gallrein. Weird as those instances are, they aren’t attached to a history of objectifying Black bodies dating back to slavery.

On Monday’s edition of “The Breakfast Club,” host Charlamagne Tha God wondered whether Minaj is content to trade her legacy of demanding respect in proximity to power. “If a Black executive told her to stand up and show her body and spin around, she’d go crazy,” he said, later adding, “I just don’t want her to think just because she got a seat at the table, she’s not also on the menu.”

Whatever the case may be, it sure looks like Minaj is willing to sacrifice her dignity to get back on somebody’s stage. Meanwhile, Cardi’s career campaign keeps chugging along fiercely. “I can name this song, ‘Don’t Chart, it’s gon’ chart,” she brags on her new track, making it clear how much respect she’s earned and that anything less is unacceptable. That’s the side I’m backing.

The post Nicki Minaj’s MAGA turn has more to do with Cardi B than Trump appeared first on Salon.com.

Barely noticed among all the talk in the election campaign about great asses, shithouse countries and commie jihadists running for the Senate was a report from The New York Times warning of “heightened levels of tension and risk” surrounding Israel’s parliamentary elections, slated for today, and America’s Nov. 3 midterms due to the countries’ war with Iran, which has “entered a new phase.” They also offered this bracing observation: “This is how countries can escalate into full-scale war, several diplomats and outside experts noted.”

How’s that for a wake-up call?

In fairness, Donald Trump has mentioned in passing that he plans to “finish the job” after the midterm elections, with CNN reporting that the president “appears to be leaning toward major action.” On Oct. 15, the outlet revealed that the U.S. is considering using the “mother of all bombs” on Iranian energy infrastructure and nuclear facilities. (They admit that such a strike would be “performative,” since it would not actually accomplish anything, but would supposedly allow Trump to declare victory.) 

If anyone had the idea that a midterm election campaign would be the place where serious people of goodwill debate the major issues of the day, they were mistaken. For the most part, the war with Iran has hardly come up, and to the extent that it has, it’s been in the context of high gas prices, not the possibility of the conflict turning into a major conflagration from which the United States will not be able to walk away after putting on a fireworks show. We may be at a turning point, and nobody’s paying attention.

The U.S. has received credible intelligence, according to the Times report, that Iran has “advanced” plans to attack Americans at home and abroad. According to Reuters, the State Department has ordered non-emergency government employees and their family members to leave ‌U.S. diplomatic ⁠missions in Saudi Arabia and has reduced staff in Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan. NBC News revealed that “the U.S. military has been quietly scaling back its troop presence at bases across the Middle East as well.” It certainly sounds as if something is afoot, which the Times characterized in fairly alarming terms:

The fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Trump are facing critical elections that could dramatically affect the balance of power in their countries feeds into the complex set of calculations that all sides are making. Even if he is defeated on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu could decide to launch one last strike that he may believe his successor would hesitate to execute. Similarly, Mr. Trump, who knows how unpopular the war is even among his strongest supporters, may want to show that at least when it comes to his powers as commander in chief, his authority is undiminished.

Trump has claimed dozens of times that we have already won the war. This is not out of character; his habit is to prematurely declare victory in everything, apparently assuming that the force of his declaration makes it a reality. In the lead-up to the U.S. and Israel’s Feb. 28 attacks on Iran, Trump was apparently so pumped up by his historic political comeback and success at cruel mass deportation, murder on the high seas and the conquest of Venezuela, an oil-rich country, that he assumed he could succeed at what every former president knew was a fool’s errand: take over Iran, seize its oil and dominate the world’s oil supply. And, as Haberman and Swan reported in their book “Regime Change,” Trump had been convinced by whom he called a presidential historian (actually a caddie for Gary Player) that he was “the most powerful man who’s ever existed on the planet by far” — more powerful than Mao, Alexander the Great, Stalin, Hitler, all of them.

What Trump has succeeded in doing is making Iran a global power, capable of re-ordering the world through control of one of the most important waterways on the planet. In the process, he has exposed the U.S. as a second-rate military power, at least compared to the country’s previous reputation, by insisting on fighting an unnecessary war of choice without a strategy while being low on munitions and proving that it lacks the capability of fighting on more than one front. Having let down our Middle Eastern partners who assumed that by allowing bases in their countries they could count on America to defend them — not to mention the administration’s destructive tariffs and abandonment of Ukraine — the world knows that the U.S. is unreliable, and they are looking elsewhere for alliances and economic partnerships.

All this brings to mind historian Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly.” Published in 1984, the book examines tragic wars of choice that needn’t have been fought but, because of hubris and ignorance, were waged anyway, despite being against the best interests of the countries that started them. As Tuchman put it:

To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight . . . Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available . . . third . . . the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual leader.

The war with Iran ticks all those boxes. 

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

Among the conflicts Tuchman chronicled in the book are the errors of the Catholic Church that led to the Reformation, as well as King George III’s epic misunderstanding of the dynamics driving the colonists (and England’s other enemies) to rebel against the British Crown. She also turned her keen historical eye to the big kahuna of her era, Vietnam, in which the U.S. squandered its power and moral authority on a war that began as an ideological experiment, escalated for political reasons, and ended in failure and embarrassment only 51 years ago. You’d think that lesson would still be fresh enough that we wouldn’t indulge in such a folly again.

But, of course, we have. While Afghanistan had at least the fig leaf of justification after 9/11, Iraq and now Iran have both demonstrated that the U.S. has learned nothing from its own recent history. Eight months in, Trump’s misadventure in the Islamic Republic has proven even more irrational than the others. As with all the follies, Trump indulged his fantasies, failed to understand the adversary and ended up working against his country’s own interests.

A delusional, psychologically unfit president started a war based on shifting rationales, finally landing on the idea that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon. This was the same country that had been complying with an agreement not to pursue a nuclear weapon, but which this president tore up simply because it had been negotiated by the man he succeeded in office. 

We don’t yet know whether these latest threats will lead to an escalation by either party. But either way, the deed is done. The world has been fundamentally changed by Trump’s daft decision to start this war, and there is no going back. That’s how all these follies end, and it’s very rarely a happy ending for the countries that started it.

The post Trump’s Iran war could escalate. Is anyone paying attention? appeared first on Salon.com.

Among silver-screen romances, the Blake Lively-led odyssey across time, “The Age of Adaline,” isn’t exactly the most revered. Really, it’s barely even acknowledged, much to my campaign’s chagrin. The film is, however, one of my genre favorites for several reasons. First, it’s an old-fashioned love story with a fantastical twist: Lively’s character dies in a car crash but is revived when she’s struck by lightning, only to stop aging forever. Second, it marks a solid finale for a genre largely relegated to streaming, because for some odd reason, film executives don’t understand how powerful a collective romantic experience outside your living room can be. The guys making mid-to-high six-figure salaries aren’t connected with the average lovelorn, longing moviegoer — go figure!

But what I really love about “The Age of Adaline” is that it understands the heart. It’s a film that knows yearning doesn’t cease no matter how long we live, and that it’s all too easy to let fear complicate what should be easy. All this is wrapped up in one great line: “It’s not the same without growing old together. Without that, love is just heartbreak.” After it’s all said and done, isn’t this what guides our desires, the hope that we can find someone whose very presence can turn the innate tragedy of losing one another in death into something beautiful?

Married writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson have achieved something just as tender in their lovely new film, “Wicker,” a welcome return to the theatrical romance that, unlike many of its contemporaries, uses its gimmick to delightful effect. Based on Ursula Wills’ unpublished short story, “The Wicker Husband,” the film follows the headstrong but lonely Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman), an angler who catches and sells fish at her provincial town’s market, as she pushes against increasingly matrimonial norms. Everyone in town seems to be getting married off, with the women resigning themselves to the conventional duties of a loveless union. Tired of their cries of “spinster!” as she traipses through town with her catches, Fisherwoman asks the Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a spouse. She fancies it a joke to get the townspeople off her back, rubbing their traditions back in their faces. But part of her longs for a companion without fins and scales. 

Other organic materials should have to suffice. In a month, the Basket Weaver returns with a Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård), a man whose large, seductive frame and sinewy muscles are made entirely of, well, wicker. What’s more, the Wicker Husband is alive, something the Fisherwoman and townspeople all find strange, but not inherently terrifying. What really sparks curiosity is his natural, undemanding kindness, and the bond forming between him and his new bride — a far cry from the strained marriages that make up the quaint but judgmental village. 

Naturally, such an effortless romantic connection begets hard, wall-pounding, bed-destroying sex. In the grand tradition of supermarket romantasy novels, Fischer and Wilson are unafraid to go full-tilt erotic. They understand that part of the Harlequin romance genre’s appeal is its unabashed depiction of older women’s sexual desire. Those stories may occasionally adopt the fantastical and beastly into their narratives, but at their core, they focus on love in its most fundamental, gratifying forms. “Wicker” is no different, weaving a tale as sensual and honest as any classic love story, with such grace that it’s easy to forget the supernatural elements are there at all. The man might be made of wicker from head to head — if you catch my drift — but his love is intrinsically human.

Though, one would be forgiven for getting stuck on the question of sex. Wouldn’t it hurt? How is it possible? Can he . . . break? Fischer and Wilson do well to avoid getting trapped in the logistics. That’s the best part of the film’s fantasy aspects: Realism gives way to idealism, letting the story concentrate on its heart rather than its loins. Though the loins are admittedly impressive, too, marvelously detailed to make the design look disconcerting yet still quite sexy. But the film sneakily tucks its questions about romance between the gaps in Skarsgård’s impressive makeup and practical effects. Think of it like a cornucopia: all the rich, colorful stuff is hidden beneath the wicker.

As the relationship between the Wicker Husband and the Fisherwoman blossoms, so does the townspeople’s fervent envy, especially the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki), the Fisherwoman’s longtime acquaintance. Like the rest of the villagers, her jealousy stems from a seemingly harmonious yet ultimately unfulfilling relationship, providing just enough humor and stakes for “Wicker” to glide amiably. Occasionally, the film veers a bit too far off course in pursuit of laughs that are realistically only good for chuckles, leaving me to wonder how much more affecting the already moving story would be if it operated entirely with a straight face. 

---

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

---

There’s an understandable temptation to let the fantasy buoy the film. But “Wicker” works best when it strips back, letting Colman and Skarsgård connect. Despite the latter’s ornate makeup, the pair’s chemistry is palpable and sincere. Skarsgård particularly makes a memorable impression in relatively few soft-spoken lines. Between this film and last year’s wonderful “Pillion,” he’s proven himself a daring performer, willing to approach love from its strangest, most complicated and genuine sides. While the material is lighter here, his work is no less touching, posing questions about differences within a relationship that go beyond the obvious, surface-level titular joke.

 

In its most poignant moments, Wilson and Fischer use the film’s unconventional setup to approach old questions with new flair. As the Fisherwoman and her Wicker Husband grow even closer, developing their own rhythm and a true, deep love, the possibility that something might affect their kinship becomes dreadful to imagine. Seeing someone pulled out of their shell by another person’s love is one of life’s most worthwhile joys, and also one of its most crushing sources of spite. And it’s not only the townspeople who bear this malice. Loneliness and jealousy have an ironic way of coming up when relationships are at their best. How defeating it can be to feel these things in the midst of true tenderness, especially in one’s first love, or when it’s been some time since they’ve been loved back. As the Fisherwoman admits after a transgression that threatens this happiness, “It’s easier to believe the bad than the good.”

“Wicker” might not spend all its time in those complex feelings, but it lingers within them long enough to cast a spell. And when it moves toward that big, life-defining, “Age of Adaline” quote moment, the film strikes resonance that lets it linger far longer than any movie whose central question is “what happens with the wicker penis?” should. “Wicker” wisely uses its silly conceit to its advantage, rather than letting it dominate the film’s central conversations. Here, love, sex and romance are woven into one sturdy new creation that reminds us fantasy can look exactly like reality, so long as we don’t overthink it.

The post “Wicker” is much more than its weird sex appeared first on Salon.com.

A specter is haunting Europe, and plenty of other places too. Nobody knows quite what to call it. It isn’t the specter of communism this time around, or at least not under that name — although something approaching class warfare, redefined in 21st-century terms, is on the agenda for the first time in decades. 

Student protests that began at secondary schools in the northern suburbs of Paris about a month ago have sparked a wave of demonstrations and street battles— occasionally tipping over into rioting, looting, and organized property destruction — that has now spread to at least six or seven countries, with new outbreaks happening nearly every day. But there is no single unifying issue that has brought students, labor unions, left-wing activists, anarchist rebels and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people into the streets of Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Brussels, Milan, Belgrade, Athens and Tirana, among many other cities. 

While the protests in Belgium and Italy are direct outgrowths of the French student movement, the proximate causes of unrest are local and distinct in every case. Protests in Spain and Portugal reflect years of simmering discontent over the soaring cost of living, especially a housing crisis made worse by the explosion of Airbnb-style tourist rentals. In Greece the protests were initially about workplace safety and public sector wages. In Albania and Serbia, where protest movements were well underway before the French students made headlines, the main issues involve deeply entrenched government corruption. 

Thousands of miles away in the world’s largest self-described democracy, India’s youth-driven Cockroach Janta Party (“Voice of the Lazy & Unemployed”) isn’t connected to the French protests at all, except by the kind of historical coincidence that isn’t really a coincidence. The CJP was launched earlier this year, about halfway between political satire and social media experiment, and by midsummer became a mass movement that has shaken the autocratic Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to its foundations. 

Given this diversity and the tangential connections between all these events, it’s almost easier to say what the protest wave of 2026 is not about than to define it precisely. No dramatic world-historical event has catalyzed all this, and for the most part these protests are happening in relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful and nominally democratic nations. We’re not on the cusp of global financial or economic crisis, at least not yet, although there are troubling warning signs. There is no immediate threat of military conflict or civil warfare in any of these countries, although Russia’s war in Ukraine, Israel’s murderous war in Gaza and the spectacularly mismanaged U.S. war with Iran have all fueled the rising sense of collective outrage. 

To use one of this decade’s most overused words, the outrage seems existential. It’s about everything everywhere all at once or, to more cynical observers, about nothing in particular. It’s about underfunded schools, crumbling infrastructure and soaring rents, and also about Gaza, climate change and the enforced spread of AI, data centers and government surveillance. 

Ironically enough given its origins, the outrage is also being driven by a highly literate and globally connected generation, one that is sufficiently well educated to perceive the underlying conditions that have made those things happen. They see paralyzed centrist governments held captive by bankers and tech billionaires; they see an economy built on worsening inequality, systematic insecurity and what sociologists call “elite overproduction” (e.g., university graduates working as baristas); they see the climate crisis addressed only with bland rhetoric or regulatory fiddling as one deadly heat wave follows another.

What the protests of 2026 are not about, to any measurable degree, is skin color or religion. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu and far too many of their fellow travelers have seized on the disorder in Europe as evidence of the pernicious effects of “open borders” and Islamic immigration. It’s a losing proposition to quote stuff that the president of the United States says on social media and then feign outrage, as if we were actually surprised. But we are where we are: France is being “conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists who hate Christianity,” Trump informed us via Truth Social last week.

That fantastical framing tells us a lot more about him and his supporters, needless to say, than about the remarkably diverse crowds in the streets of Europe’s major cities. But the tempting prospect of blaming immigrants for the protests or the acts of violence — maybe not as the primary cause and way below the Trump level, in an effort to fend off critics on the right — has created a kind of acid test or moral hazard for political leaders and media commentators. The pass/fail ratio is both depressing and mildly surprising.

Embattled German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the newly-installed Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar, for instance, have failed the test, both suggesting that “high rates of migration and a failure to integrate the foreign-born are partly behind the sudden, violent upheaval,” to quote this week’s leading editorial in the Economist. So did New York Times opinion columnist Frank Bruni, an alleged liberal who began his breezy Oct. 22 discussion with right-winger Bret Stephens by stating the unquestioned premise that “a velocity of religious, racial and ethnic diversification over the past quarter century that has exceeded what many longtime residents could easily make sense of and comfortably adapt to” had somehow led to angry high school students and window-smashing anarchists in French cities.

As for French President Emmanuel Macron, bête noire of the protest movement, perhaps he has decided to go down fighting in the last six months of his largely disastrous decade in power. For all his arrogance and hubris, Macron is no racist and has decried the “stupid comments” by foreign leaders he declines to name, who claim that France has been “invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false.”

But the most forceful rejection of current racist narratives about the European protests, and perhaps the best single summary of why they are happening in the first place, comes, improbably enough, in the above-quoted leading editorial in the Economist:

Even if some young protesters in France wear Algerian football shirts or chant pro-Palestinian slogans, the upheaval in Europe today is not about race or religion. Over 500,000 people marched in France on Saturday [Oct. 17] and they were largely unmasked and white. They were fired up, as in other countries, by the cost of living and poor public services. They want more fuel subsidies, more spending on schools, more handouts.

Leaving aside the buzzword “handouts,” which is meant to signal the innate laziness of the non-wealthy, that’s some straight-up gospel preaching. As the editorial confesses, once upon a time the Economist enthusiastically backed Macron as the golden boy of neoliberal reform, but now he and other “head-in-the-sand centrists” seem to be “out of ideas.” Strikingly, the editorial has no new ideas to offer.

In a Foreign Policy essay last week, former Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid defines the central problem in Europe, plausibly but rather too vaguely, as “intergenerational hopelessness” and a downward spiral of economic expectation. Once again, the Economist — which can fairly be described as the house organ of global capital — goes at the issue far more directly. Demonstrators on Europe’s streets, its editorial proposes, are “consumed by rage”:

Rage at the failure of the state and against the floundering centrist politicians who govern. Rage at high prices and economic dysfunction. And for some, rage against the idea of centrist politics at all.

Go on with your bad self! It’s not irrelevant or accidental that the call, as they say in horror movies, is coming from inside the house. No one can credibly accuse the Economist of being soft on Marxism or unfaithful to free-market dogma (that same editorial mocks leftist French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, not inaccurately, as an “aging rabble-rouser and onetime Trotskyist”). That gives it the freedom to state plain facts that so-called moderates like Merz and Bruni would rather avoid: Yes, “centrist politics” have visibly failed, not just in France but across the Western democracies. Indeed the entire system or basket of principles known as “liberal democracy” is in big trouble, and on the verge of systemic failure. 

“Liberalism” in that context is not an ideological label in the contemporary American sense but a term from old-school political economy, used to describe the forced marriage in Western nations between market capitalism, parliamentary democracy, and a varying list of civil rights and civil liberties. Liberalism in that sense has dominated most of the world since the Cold War, and until recently it encompassed both major political parties in the U.S. I hardly need to convince you that is no longer the case, or that proudly illiberal parties and leaders have emerged and spread throughout the Western-style democracies, like an unpleasant but unkillable fungus. (As this article was published, it appears that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s leftist president, has defeated Flávio Bolsonaro — the son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro — ending a string of six consecutive right-wing victories across Latin America. True to form, Bolsonaro called for the results to be annulled.)

Liberal democracy was a roaring economic success for most of the 20th century, at least in broad strokes and with some well-known caveats. Oddly enough, those bygone glory days are pretty much what Trump keeps promising to bring back, to no visible effect. But the current crisis of liberalism is nothing new. It began to unfold decades ago, well before Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history.” Today’s enraged French students — and their parents, teachers and neighbors, for that matter — have inherited a world of false promises and diminished expectations. 

---

Want more sharp takes on politics?
Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only by Amanda Marcotte, also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

Real wages have steadily declined in most Western countries (including our own) since the 1970s, allowing for a brief uptick during the technology boom of the 1990s. Across the liberal democratic zone, social services have been slashed in one “austerity” budget after another while government debt has soared. Rapidly aging population has made large-scale immigration a necessity, while right-wing demagogues have seized on the new arrivals as the main cause of the economic problems that immigrants can ameliorate. The result almost everywhere has been an accelerating vicious cycle of political dysfunction and public disillusionment, fueling the rise of what the Economist calls “charismatic figures from the extremes,” meaning Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen in France, and no doubt Zohran Mamdani and You Know Who over here. 

As a leading Marxist scholar told me decades ago, every radical who confidently predicts the collapse of capitalism is always wrong. If and when that ever happens, no one will have expected it. The same is likely true of liberal democracy today, which has survived worse crises than this and still retains broader popular legitimacy than is visible at this moment. Students in Milan and Marseille and Mumbai may well return to school and be reconciled to their lives, at least for now. But they have shown us something: There are dark passages ahead and enormous changes coming, and none of us can accurately identify the specter who blocks the path forward.

The post Why are young people so angry? Why isn’t everyone? appeared first on Salon.com.

If the polls are correct, Republicans are set for a shellacking in the Nov. 3 midterms, losing the House and quite possibly the Senate, and likely some prominent governorships across the country. If that happens, there’s a good chance that online chatter about repealing the 19th Amendment will heat up once again.

For a decade now, MAGA social media users have been aggrieved at the way women vote for Democrats at higher rates then men, such as in 2024, when 53% of women voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, who received 55% of the male vote. Their solution to this imbalance began in 2016 as a trolling hashtag on what was then called Twitter: #RepealThe19th, a reference to the constitutional amendment, ratified in 1920, that extended suffrage to all women in theory, but mostly white women in practice. The hashtag has faded since then, but not because of a lack of interest. The idea has morphed from a joke into a serious proposal that is making its way from fringe Christian right circles into the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Douglas Wilson, a prominent Christian nationalist who lead the church Pete Hegseth belongs to, has grown increasingly loud in his calls to replace individual voting with “household voting,” where only heads of households, who are presumably male, would be able to vote. The defense secretary has praised Wilson for a CNN interview he gave in which he outlined his vision of a Christian theocracy that disenfranchises women. Other prominent pastors with large online followings, such as Dale Partridge and Joel Webbon, both in Texas, have explicitly denounced the 19th Amendment. 

Ending women’s suffrage is a hot topic among the right’s youngest leaders. Earlier this year, Kai Schwemmer, the political director of College Republicans of America and one of the many young leaders angling to be the new Charlie Kirk, called for the end of women’s suffrage. On his Daily Wire podcast, conservative commentator Michael Knowles hosted a panel of young women and spent an hour justifying the arguments for repealing the amendment. White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, who has a large audience of young men, routinely calls for the end of women’s voting rights. 

Most alarmingly, Turning Point USA, which is among the most well-funded and popular conservative organizations in the country, is now routinely platforming opponents of women’s suffrage. Along with Schwemmer, the organization recently booked the Christian nationalist pastor and podcaster Joshua Haymes, who argues that women voting undermines the family, for their new “Pick Up The Mic” tour.  Commentator Andrew Wilson, who frequently goes viral by arguing that women should lose the vote, has also been representing TPUSA in podcast interviews. Alex Clarke, the host of TPUSA’s most popular women’s show, has platformed guests who oppose women’s suffrage, including one who argued it was a “net negative” for society. Savanna Stone, a popular MAGA influencer who opposes women’s suffrage, spoke at this year’s TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit, a name whose irony gets worse by the year. Multiple attendees of the conference told the CBC that they would be happy to lose their right to vote. 

“Conversation over whether women should vote used to be limited to some of the most extreme and patriarchal churches,” said Sarah Stankorb, a journalist, expert in women and religion, and author of “Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion.” She told Salon that it’s “no coincidence” that ideas once on the fringes of the Christian right “keep popping up in public discourse.”

Stankorb noted that Christian nationalists are taking “partisan polarization” to a place where “denying the basic rights of half the population not only comes off as a debatable point, but one with theological backing.” 

“All at once, patriarchal men share think-pieces on walking back the 19th, while perched casually in leather chairs, normalizing the conversation as if it’s simply academic, reasonable even,” she said. Stankorb is worried that the constant social media repetition means the shock has “dulled over time,” putting the once unthinkable “in the realm of ‘normal.'”

---

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Sign up for her free newsletter, Standing Room Only, now also on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

To be certain, it’s extremely unlikely that Christian nationalists will be able to repeal the 19th Amendment, which would require passing and ratifying a new amendment. There is precedent for this; after the 18th Amendment, which banned the sale of alcohol, was ratified, it took another amendment, the 21st, to overturn Prohibition. The process would require a joint resolution approved by two-thirds of the House and Senate or a constitutional convention, followed by approval of three-fourths, or 38 out of 50, states

As extreme as the GOP has gotten, it’s hard to imagine that the party — which has 11 sitting female Senators — would go that far, or be able to win big enough majorities in Congress, if they even considered it. After all, it took a century of feminist organizing to get male leaders to even let women vote, and it would be a lot harder to take the right away since over half the electorate is female. 

In all likelihood, most of the MAGA pundits and pastors who are pushing to end women’s suffrage know full well it will never happen. But their musings shouldn’t be dismissed as nothing more than attention-seeking behavior. The larger goal here is to normalize the idea that women’s citizenship isn’t legitimate and to instill the idea that women should feel lucky to be “allowed” even the few rights they have. In fact, this notion is similar to the way that leaders like Vice President JD Vance insist people of color should be “grateful” for having rights at all, words which carry the implication that the way to prove their gratitude is by not demanding full equality. 

Wilson made the underlying threat explicit in April. “Women have to appeal to men for the rights,” he told Konstantin Kisin, a right-wing British political commentator. “Anytime men want to take rights away from women, they can, like that. And there’s not a damn thing women can do about it.” Wilson continued to argue that there will no end to male dominance, because if women push their luck too far, it will be the end of male “benevolence” in letting women have any rights at all. His diatribe shows the goal of the anti-suffrage argument: to scare women off seeking full equality, or even trying to claw back rights they do have.

While the 19th Amendment is unlikely to be repealed, it’s important to note that other rights that were long assumed to be safe have been stripped from women in the MAGA era. The right to abortion, which was for decades widely assumed to be untouchable, was overturned by a far-right Supreme Court in 2022. Because of women’s outrage — and suffrage — many red states restored abortion rights through ballot measures, which angered the right and amplified calls to take away women’s votes.

The assumption that the justice system will protect women and children from sexual violence has also been under assault in recent years with actions that range from the Trump administration blocking the release of the Epstein files to the attacks on the Cornell student whose only “crime” was reporting an alleged gang rape. Then there is the recent ad run by Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which features the estranged mother of Dr. Amy Acton, his Democratic opponent. In 1978, after Acton reported that she had been raped by her stepfather, her mother sided with her husband, and the pair fled the state following his arrest and before he could stand trial.

All these incursions on women’s rights are easier to sell to a public that has normalized the idea that women aren’t full citizens — that their ability to vote is a privilege that can be snatched away, and suffrage is only a right for men. The voting rights issue is used as a rhetorical cudgel against women, designed to delegitimize their opinions by suggesting they aren’t even real citizens. It’s about scaring women into thinking that if they “abuse” their vote by demanding full equality, they will be left with no rights at all. 

The post MAGA attacks on women voters are no joke appeared first on Salon.com.

In October 2017, just one day before The New York Times published its investigative report exposing his long career as a rapist, Harvey Weinstein blew into the newspaper’s offices with a phalanx of lawyers. The film producer was intent on attacking Ashley Judd, the actress, activist and humanitarian who is one of the authors of this piece, saying she had “mental issues.” For support, Weinstein brandished a photograph of the two of them taken in 1997 during the Oscar party his company Miramax hosted at Beverly Hills’ Peninsula Hotel. 

When she learned of his spectacle at the Times’ offices, Judd immediately recognized Weinstein’s slippery strategy as DARVO and felt a sense of relief. She knew there was language and a body of research that plainly identified and unpacked what can otherwise be a head-spinning distortion of reality. 

An insidious response tactic — it never happened, you’re a liar, you’re the one who hurt me — DARVO is intended to disorient the victim, painting them instead as the villain. It follows a predictable pattern: deny the harm, attack the credibility of the person who named the harm, and reverse the roles of victim and offender. The acronym, introduced to the world in the 1990s by Jennifer Freyd, another co-author, has grown in usage by individuals, media and institutions as an increasing number of people have come forward to report sexual assaults and harassment. Since then, DARVO has become so ubiquitous that it has now been canonized in the Merriam-Webster dictionary and added to its list of trending terms. 

DARVO was inspired by an infamous confirmation hearing. In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas, her former supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who was then a nominee for the Supreme Court, had sexually harassed her. Thomas and his supporters responded quickly. While he denied the allegations and claimed to be the victim of a “high-tech lynching,” Republican senators attacked Hill’s credibility and motivations — and Thomas was narrowly confirmed to the Court. Freyd, a psychology professor and trauma researcher, took notice. As she saw it, the collection of responses followed a specific pattern. Several years later, she introduced DARVO to the world in a research article. 

At the time, Freyd called her acronym capturing how perpetrators deflect responsibility “very speculative.” Thirty years later and a #MeToo movement later, it’s no longer speculation. A growing body of research, some of it conducted by Freyd and Sarah Harsey, another co-author of this column, has provided important insights into this tactic. A database tracking DARVO research now counts 33 peer-reviewed studies investigating it. 

The studies tell us that DARVO can shift observers’ beliefs about who is really to blame. This is a fundamental goal of DARVO-users: Convince others of your innocence. When study participants were exposed to a fictional perpetrator’s use of DARVO, they assigned less responsibility to the perpetrator and more responsibility to the victim. When a fictional perpetrator used DARVO to explain away sexual assault allegations, participants were less likely to say the perpetrator should face punishment and more willing to agree that the victim should be punished. 

This research is consistent with what happened during Thomas’ confirmation hearing. After he testified, Thomas gained credibility in the public’s eye. Hill’s credibility, on the other hand, was damaged. 

Research has also shown that DARVO is relatively common. When study participants were asked to report on their experiences confronting other people, nearly 72% had heard a denial, attack, and reversal of victim and offender. And the more DARVO participants heard, the higher levels of self-blame they felt. In a different study, exposure to DARVO was also linked to greater levels of psychological distress. Although these studies are correlational — which means it isn’t clear if hearing DARVO causes increases in self-blame or distress — they still suggest that being the recipient of DARVO is at least connected to worse well-being. 

But what do we know about people who use DARVO? In a survey of over 900 participants, people who used more DARVO to respond to confrontation also reported perpetrating more sexual harassment. One reason for this finding is that people who engage in bad behavior — like sexual harassment — may be accustomed to responding with DARVO as a way to get away with their actions. This survey also found that people with greater DARVO tendencies were more accepting of rape myths, which are common but inaccurate beliefs about rape that excuse the actions of perpetrators and place blame on victims. The connection here may be simple: People who personally engage in victim blaming agree that victims, including victims of rape, are blameworthy. 

As research continues to tell us more about DARVO, highly visible examples appear regularly in the news cycle. President Donald Trump, for instance, often reaches for denials, attacks, and victim-playing responses when faced with information that threatens his power or reputation. When talking about E. Jean Carroll — the writer whom Trump was found civilly liable for sexually abusing — the president has denied the sexual abuse, attacked her appearance, motives and sanity, and claimed to be the target of a witch hunt. Even Carroll herself couldn’t help but point out the pattern. In a 2019 interview with Anderson Cooper, she observed, “He denies. He turns it around. He threatens, and he attacks.”

Striking examples of DARVO can be found outside of the things political figures say. Beyond his noxious attacks on Judd, Weinstein has repeatedly used DARVO tactics in his many attempts to discredit the many women who come forward about his crimes. 

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

More recently, the investigation into the seven Cornell University fraternity members who are accused of sexually assaulting a female undergraduate has unleashed a torrent of DARVO against the student known as Jane Doe. A visible part of the discourse about the Cornell Seven reveals how some have flatly rejected the possibility that Doe was assaulted, attacked her credibility and her appearance, and labeled the case as a “hoax.” Sympathy for the fraternity members is not too hard to find, either; Trump himself shared that he felt “badly” for the accused men.

Many may wonder whether DARVO is a necessary response to an accusation. How else is someone supposed to respond? But DARVO is not inevitable. Someone can admit their responsibility for causing harm and sincerely apologize, which is the most constructive path for all involved. If someone is innocent of the accusation — or wants others to believe they are — they can respectfully deny the allegation without attacking or putting themselves into the victim role. Thomas, for instance, who had chaired the very agency charged with enforcing sexual harassment law, could have responded to Hill’s testimony by saying: “I do not remember the events in this way but I know these conversations about sexual harassment are important, and I want to understand your experience.”

DARVO poses a significant social problem. For even the smallest transgressions between two individuals, it’s antagonistic and fails to provide a productive resolution. On a larger scale, DARVO stands in the way of justice by encouraging a pervasive and hostile disbelief of victims. Even our institutions can use this chilling tactic, resulting in a particularly harmful form of institutional betrayal. This may be one reason many people fear coming forward to seek accountability and are effectively silenced. 

Two stories of institutional betrayal were prominently featured in the 2015 documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which investigated sexual assault on college and university campuses. In 2007, during her freshman year at the University of North-Carolina, Annie Clark reported being sexually assaulted to campus officials. One employee compared rape to football. Annie was the quarterback; what could she have done differently? She had come seeking support and instead found herself being asked to account for her own supposed failure. Four years later, while a student at Harvard Law School, Kamilah Willingham encountered a struggle for accountability after reporting a sexual assault. 

The stories of Clark, Willingham and others brought institutional betrayal painfully close: the place where you hoped to learn, belong and flourish can become another place entirely, one where you must fight to be heard.

When the documentary was recently screened at Harvard — one of the institutions whose responses it challenges — those stories were given particular force. They also offered a lens for examining institutional responses at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and beyond. 

DARVO helps us name how institutional self-protection can become an attack on the person seeking help: deny responsibility, undermine the survivor’s credibility and cast the institution or the accused as the injured party. The student asking for protection becomes a threat to someone else’s future or reputation. Freyd has identified this institutional DARVO as a particularly harmful form of institutional betrayal.

But the film also follows Clark and her colleague Andrea Pino building a network of survivors who refuse to leave one another alone with these experiences. Universities could learn from them. The Center for Institutional Courage’s 12 steps call on institutions to welcome truth-tellers, respond well to disclosures, acknowledge harm and sustain the resources needed for change. Imagine the difference if a student’s disclosure was met with care — and a commitment to stay for the work of accountability and repair.

This underscores the good news of what we have learned: DARVO loses some of its power when people know what it is. In one experiment, some participants read a one-paragraph explanation of DARVO — what it stands for and why perpetrators may use it — before reading a fictional scenario in which a perpetrator used the tactic. Compared with participants who had not read the explanation, DARVO-educated participants believed the victim more and supported the perpetrator less.

Institutional DARVO can be combated, too, with institutional courage. By taking actionable steps such as cherishing whistleblowers, practicing transparency, and committing to seek truth and engage in moral action, institutions can act in ways that restore trust and help people who have been harmed come forward.

Judd has described the effect in her own life. “When I know I’m being attacked, I immediately remind myself that that is a common strategy,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “It’s DARVO.” 

This is why Merriam-Webster’s entry for DARVO matters. Its presence in the dictionary makes the term available to a wide audience; anyone can look it up and learn what it means. This access is especially important for victims who have been made to doubt themselves, who can now more easily reach for a term that shines a light on their experiences. It also offers a critical reassurance: No, you’re not crazy — you’re being DARVOed. The tactic’s efficacy depends on a confused audience, and every person who learns about the acronym is a little bit harder to fool.

The post DARVO is now in the dictionary. That’s a win for abuse survivors appeared first on Salon.com.

Somewhere in the last two decades, the spoiler became a cottage industry. While some journalists twisted their movie and television coverage around major plot events, others tackled them head-on, writing “ending explained” and “twist revealed” articles for readers who wanted to skip to the point. But like every staple in modern life, spoiler anxiety didn’t turn ubiquitous overnight, even if it might seem that way. Capitalism’s slowly tightening grip bound us to spoiler culture. As the economy became increasingly unstable and demanded that moviegoers and television aficionados devote more time to their jobs, the average viewer naturally had less bandwidth for their cultural hobbies. Combine that bleak outcome with the advent of DVR and social media — where any event can be discussed in depth, immediately — and boom: Bye bye, watercooler.

Anyone vigilant about spoilers has adapted their own methods of avoiding them. But occasionally, there’s just no way to keep something a secret once it’s out in the world. Case in point: The second-act surprise in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary, “You Can See Everything.” Given the film’s unprecedented access to notorious Theranos scammer Elizabeth Holmes before her 11-year prison sentence, it was already going to be a talker. But it’s a credit to the directors’ ingenuity that Holmes is simply the film’s introductory selling point. In reality — something that is already under constant speculation in the movie — it’s everything that happens after Holmes surrenders, slightly less than halfway through the three-hour runtime, that reveals “You Can See Everything” as the contemplative, shape-shifting chimera it is. 

When the documentary premiered in semi-secret at this fall’s Telluride Film Festival, viewers were asked not to reveal certain aspects in their reviews and reactions. This was, of course, unfeasible. In 2026, one can’t bring Amanda Seyfried, star of “The Dropout,” into the process of a Fielder-led documentary, show it to the public and expect that Seyfried’s presence will stay under wraps.

But this is simply another way for Fielder to toy with the viewer’s perception, lifting questions about secrecy, deception and the nature of truth from the heart of the film and dispersing them into the ether, like a kid blowing on a dandelion to make a wish. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s any such thing as a spoiler for “You Can See Everything.” The movie’s narrative turns are so self-contained that you could know every beat of the film and still be flabbergasted by how it all unfolds. Knowing this documentary exists — that a slippery figure like Fielder is going toe-to-toe with the equally shifty Holmes — is its own “spoiler.” Assuming that would be the case, I sought out the film’s “twist” in an early review, wanting to confirm if my suspicions about Seyfried’s involvement were true.

It turns out that sitting on that knowledge for a month only aided in my experience with the movie. Knowing Seyfried will eventually show up lets the viewer watch without shock, processing every moment she’s on screen without the last-minute textual analysis that would otherwise accompany a surprise like this. This spoiler isn’t a spoiler at all. Seyfried’s presence sets fire to all the ideas the film juggles up until her introduction. Gazing into that fantastic blaze, every viewer will see something different, something new with each watch. Holmes might be the person on the poster, but “You Can See Everything” isn’t anything without Seyfried.

While the film would’ve been compelling if it were composed entirely of the 30-some days Fielder and Oppenheim spent with Holmes and her egomaniac partner, Billy Evans, in their San Diego beach rental, it would’ve only scraped the surface of Holmes’ psyche. In that relatively short time, we come to understand many things about Holmes and Evans. She is specious (perhaps unintentionally so) and charming, sitting atop a transparent partition that separates her from reality, trying unsuccessfully to reach the atmosphere below. He is governing and loathsome, with a knack for manipulation that merely foreshadows what audiences witness in the film’s second half. 

This dual character study alone would give viewers plenty to contemplate in light of what they already know or assume about Holmes — most importantly that her fraud is unquestionably a product of being a woman in a violent, dehumanizing world. But as soon as she surrenders into custody, the rumination would halt. It would be much easier for someone to project their version of the truth onto Holmes. At the end of the day, that hypothetical version of the film would make for a very special, feature-length episode of Fielder’s “The Rehearsal”; little more than a cultural curiosity, as opposed to the pool of lucid, viscous quicksand it is. But Fielder and Oppenheim wisely chose to wait it out, to see what they could uncover in time, even if it was nothing at all.

Two years later, enter Seyfried, who watches Fielder’s footage of Holmes watching Seyfried in “The Dropout” for the first time. Years removed from the project, her curiosity is clearly piqued. But what more is there to do besides lend additional color to the documentary? Fielder answers that question with his own questions, held over from the initial shoot. He wants to use Seyfried’s experience in playing a character to further investigate motive, reason, identity and truth. He wants to know more about why Holmes has chosen Evans, and what they both get from their relationship. But more than anything, he wants to understand Holmes as much as one person can possibly understand another — a patently impossible yet all-too-enticing undertaking.

As one of the finest, most challenging and surprising actors of her (or any) generation, Seyfried is game. An actor’s Faustian pact is that, by becoming someone else, they become more deeply acquainted with their true self and the nature of authenticity, a pursuit that can easily descend into rampant narcissism or crippling mental health crises. For Seyfried, who normally takes care to draw clear boundaries between her life and work — living on a farm and avoiding the usual trappings of celebrity — the task is ambitious and hazardous. And that risk is part of what makes “You Can See Everything” so gripping. By agreeing to whatever Fielder has in store, Seyfried willingly blurs the lines between art and reality. She’s engaging in a piece of phantasmagoric performance art with two raging megalomaniacs, suspecting humanity buried beneath their easygoing subterfuge. It’s both the opportunity of a lifetime and a descent into a pitch-black basement with nothing but the glow of her soul to light the way.

---

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

---

Seyfried’s first order of business is to step back into the role of Holmes, recreating scenarios Fielder experienced with Holmes during production to explore the various, mercurial states of mind Holmes might’ve been in — or at least that’s what Fielder leads us to believe. Like “The Rehearsal,” the question of fact haunts these recreations. The lines he provides for Seyfried are not transcripts; they’re scripts. Seyfried and the audience must trust Fielder, while questioning that trust at every moment. Both are essential to scraping past the layers of artifice Holmes and Evans have built around themselves. Once faith hangs in the balance, Fielder can navigate the viewer and Seyfried through its opaque boundaries, taking all of us to Evans’ house for an uncomfortably intimate dinner. Here, Seyfried makes her first-ever contact with Holmes over a phone call from prison. After some time spent with Evans, her fear is as visible as her empathy for Holmes. She’s not quite sure what this means for any of them, much less herself.

Seyfried’s willingness not only to go to those uncomfortable places but to stay there is one of her great strengths as an actor. Plenty of performers will wax poetic about their methods, saying what they hope to achieve in their work — how hard they worked to identify with their character. But few convey those efforts as Seyfried can. Refusing to stop at investigating her characters alone, she’s interested in humanity as a whole, and where those roles fit into how our species operates. 

In the film’s final act, Fielder stages one last recreation, another scenario that may or may not have actually happened between him and Holmes during visiting hours at a Texas prison. Fielder shrewdly pairs the recreation with footage of Seyfried reading the script for the first time, intercutting between the two. There are no major revelations, yet the sequence is an edge-of-the-seat climax thanks entirely to Seyfried, wrestling with her work, her complicated feelings toward Holmes and her family, this project, womanhood, selfhood and identity’s fragility — all in real time.

 

Here, Seyfried’s participation poses new and obscenely complex questions about the intersection of fame and infamy. She wonders whether her performance as Holmes is instructive, destructive, or some form of both. What responsibility does she have for how Holmes is treated in prison, by the press, or by the public? None, she argues for a moment, until she peels away another layer. 

It’s critical to remember that Seyfried and Holmes are the only two women at the heart of this film. They are its entire feminine perspective. Both are mothers. Both are, to differing degrees, actors. And Seyfried — having seen the first half of the film before agreeing to participate in its latter portion; having spent time with Holmes’ repugnant partner — knows patriarchy is a key component of Holmes’ story, a tie that binds them. She might not have a responsibility to Holmes, but that doesn’t mean she can’t practice empathy toward her. 

Perhaps that’s a line other actors might not want to cross. But it’s another risk Seyfried is willing to take. A greater good is at stake beyond her own edification. What we learn is that it doesn’t particularly matter whether the interaction between Holmes and Fielder in the prison actually happened. After all this time spent pondering what’s real, Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes emphasizes something imagined: a world that is kinder and more considerate — a universe where we can get closer to one another by leading with compassion, regardless of whether that compassion is reciprocated. Neither you nor I, nor Fielder or Oppenheim or Evans, can see everything. It’s all obscured by layers upon layers of fact, fiction, perception and question. Only Seyfried can get close enough to make out the reality underneath it all, and truth concerns her little. What matters most to her is the only thing that allows any of us to see each other: trust.

The post Amanda Seyfried is the “You Can See Everything” wild card appeared first on Salon.com.

When I began using Instacart about five years ago, grocery delivery struck me as an almost preposterous luxury. I hadn’t grown up in a household where paying someone else to do the grocery shopping was a particularly imaginable expense. I’ve only recently come around to purchasing frozen, pre-chopped onions without a small pang of guilt. But the pandemic had made grocery delivery feel sensible, even responsible, and I quickly developed an appreciation for the peculiar pleasure of having someone else navigate the supermarket on my behalf.

For a while, the service justified my enthusiasm. A missing shallot might become a red onion. All-purpose flour might arrive as bread flour. Once, a family-sized frozen lasagna was replaced with an enormous bag of frozen pasta and meatballs. None of these exchanges was perfect, but they followed a recognizable culinary logic. Someone, somewhere, appeared to understand what dinner was supposed to be.

Over the past couple of years, however, the substitutions became increasingly adventurous. Shoppers, often from profiles with traditionally male names, would inform me that a supermarket had apparently run out of tomatoes in every conceivable form. Fresh, canned, crushed, diced: all gone. Carrots became parsnips. Green cabbage became spinach. More than once, I found myself studying photographs of grocery shelves, circling the very products I’d requested and sending the images back to my shopper, who would politely assure me that they weren’t available.

Then came the order in which a request for Panko breadcrumbs was fulfilled with a box of vanilla wafers.

The breadcrumbs were meant to become a crunchy, buttery topping for a baked pasta with Parmesan, peas and ham. Instead, my shopper sent me a photograph of vanilla wafers, without comment, and marked the breadcrumbs as unavailable. I had several modest counterproposals: Italian breadcrumbs, plain breadcrumbs, even a loaf of bread would do. But by the time I opened the app to make my case, my shopper had already checked out.

The vanilla wafers were on their way.

I was hardly alone in this experience. Across Reddit, TikTok and other corners of the internet, grocery delivery customers have taken to chronicling the peculiar challenges of having their groceries selected by men. I couldn’t entirely determine whether my own disappointing experiences had made me more attentive to these complaints or whether the memes had taught me to regard male shoppers with additional suspicion. Either way, the stories were remarkably familiar.

One Reddit user, who had been ordering groceries while caring for a partner with a concussion, described receiving three bags of parsley after three separate attempts to purchase cilantro. Another shopper had suggested replacing saffron with a canned drink. The commenter had spent considerable time walking delivery workers through specialty aisles and negotiating alternatives, an especially frustrating undertaking when dietary restrictions were involved.

“Someone needs to figure this out, provide training or something!” the commenter concluded.

Eventually, the complaints became sufficiently widespread that Instacart did what corporations increasingly do when confronted with an inconvenient internet phenomenon: It made the phenomenon into an advertisement.

In late July, the company launched “The Male Shopper Project,” a mock training camp starring comedian Hannah Berner and Antoni Porowski, the culinary expert from “Queer Eye.” Wearing drill-sergeant regalia, Porowski instructs a group of hapless male shopper actors in such supermarket fundamentals as distinguishing celery from leeks, checking expiration dates and identifying ripe bananas. The casting introduces its own familiar comic premise: the polished gay man enlisted to introduce his less domestically accomplished counterparts to the finer points of everyday living.

The accompanying press release was considerably more cheerful about the whole affair. There were jokes about “bad apples” and “bananas” substitutions, followed by a ten-dollar coupon (limited to 5,000 redemptions) and a reassuring inventory of the company’s quality-control features. Customers could specify how ripe they wanted their avocados, leave detailed instructions and select acceptable substitutions in advance. 

The company’s proposed solution to the difficulties of outsourcing grocery shopping seemed to involve becoming an increasingly attentive manager of one’s outsourced grocery shopping. But the campaign raises a question that isn’t easily settled by viral videos or produce puns: Are men genuinely worse at grocery shopping, or have they become the convenient faces of a much broader problem?

The available statistics are surprisingly swampy. According to Instacart’s 2025 economic impact report, 61% of surveyed shoppers identified as women. Uber’s 2024 environmental, social and governance report, meanwhile, found that women made up 18% of its U.S. drivers but 46% of its couriers. Those are different jobs, performed on different platforms, and neither figure tells us which workers are more likely to mistake parsley for cilantro. That would require comparative performance data.

Male shoppers, for their part, have been understandably irritated by the stereotype.

“As a male shopper I hate these posts,” one Reddit commenter wrote, explaining that he handled his family’s grocery shopping and knew his local stores intimately. “Bad shoppers are bad shoppers. Being male has nothing to do with it.”

Another man described an impressive record of completed orders, along with an ability to navigate cosmetics, feminine hygiene products and unfamiliar grocery aisles. He knew how to cook, understood substitutions and was perfectly capable of asking a store employee for help. Other delivery workers pointed out that the apps themselves sometimes recommend spectacularly inappropriate replacements, leaving shoppers to make sense of suggestions generated by software.

These are reasonable objections. A competent man shouldn’t be presumed incompetent because a stranger on the internet received three bags of parsley. And grocery shopping for other people is genuinely difficult. A customer may have exacting preferences, a store may rearrange its shelves and an apparently suitable replacement may turn out to contain an allergen.

Then there’s the unpleasant economic reality of gig work. Full-service Instacart shoppers are generally independent contractors, paid by the batch rather than a guaranteed hourly wage, with earnings varying according to the order, distance, demand and tips. The work involves driving, lifting, navigating stores and responding to customers, often without the protections and benefits associated with conventional employment. 

Spending another 15 minutes searching for a particular brand of yogurt may represent good service, but it also consumes time that a worker could otherwise spend completing another order.

It’s entirely possible, then, for the customer who has paid a premium for convenience and the shopper trying to make a reasonable living to feel equally ill-served by the arrangement.

And for what it’s worth, Instacart has, in fact, tried teaching people how to grocery shop. In 2021, the company promoted Carrot Academy, a collection of optional online lessons covering customer communication, produce selection and choosing appropriate replacements. Shoppers had identified substitutions as an area where they particularly wanted guidance. By 2025, the company had expanded the program to more than forty optional lessons, including short videos and personalized recommendations.

There is something mildly amusing about the distance between this real educational apparatus and the fictional boot camp, where the central problem is apparently that grown men need help identifying vegetables.

But there’s also something revealing about recruiting people to perform a form of labor that society has never been especially consistent about expecting everyone to learn. Grocery shopping requires accumulated knowledge of ingredients, cooking, nutrition, family preferences and the mysterious geography of supermarkets. Women have historically been expected to acquire much of that knowledge, often without much recognition that they’re developing expertise at all. (There is a particular additional irony in the fact that grocery shopping, long treated as women’s unpaid responsibility, has become a marketable service.)

---

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

---

The gender disparity isn’t entirely anecdotal. A 2019 Pew Research Center analysis found that among married or cohabiting parents living with children, 80% of mothers said they were their household’s primary grocery shopper, compared with just 20% of fathers. That doesn’t mean men are incapable of doing the shopping. It means that, in many households, they have had considerably less practice.

In the churches where I grew up, the Proverbs 31 woman got a great deal of airtime. She cooked, cleaned, cared for her family and appeared to have discovered several additional hours in the day in which to accomplish it all. Later, during my brief stint in seminary — I dropped out to head to a liberal arts college after a semester — women sometimes joked about pursuing their “MRS. degrees.” Others clarified that they weren’t just there for an MRS. degree. Matrimony, apparently, was something of an unofficial concentration.

I’d like to report that these ideas about women’s domestic responsibilities have since retired to the church basement, alongside the folding chairs and industrial coffee urns. Unfortunately, they’ve proven remarkably well-traveled. Recently, I overheard a man tell a joke about how he and his housemates needed a wife to cook and clean for them; someone suggested that perhaps what they needed was a maid.

“What’s the difference?” he replied.

“The Male Shopper Project” also brought to mind how, right before the pandemic, I was having coffee with a friend whose husband had taken their young child to the supermarket. The coffee was years ago now, and I couldn’t reproduce most of the messages verbatim. But I remember the questions, and the rhythm of her phone buzzing on the table.

Did they need salted or unsalted butter?

Buzz.

Which cereal did their child like?

Buzz.

Where was the aluminum foil? What aisle?

Buzz.

Then came the one message I remember word for word:

“Nevermind.”

My friend chuckled. Then the chuckle caught in her throat and turned into a quiet, hiccuping sob. He did this all the time, she explained. I sat with her while she talked. She had found that it was easier to do things herself than to ask him to do them and then field a steady stream of questions. But she was exhausted either way.

She left him about a year later.

Sociologist Allison Daminger has studied this invisible dimension of household work: the planning, anticipation, decision-making and monitoring that continue even when someone else is performing the physical task. In her research, women assumed a disproportionate share of this mental labor, particularly the responsibility for anticipating needs and keeping track of whether tasks had been completed.

It’s the difference between buying groceries and knowing what groceries need to be bought. Between following a list and understanding why the items are on it.

And it helps explain why the male Instacart shopper meme has proven so durable. The central frustration isn’t necessarily that a man can’t find the right box of pasta. It’s that a woman who has paid to delegate a household task may find herself unexpectedly responsible for supervising its completion. The shopper sends a photograph. She studies it. He proposes an alternative. She explains why it won’t work. The groceries eventually arrive, and dinner still requires a trip to the corner store.

There are meaningful differences, of course, between a stranger navigating an unfamiliar shopping list and a husband who should know what his own family eats. But women who have spent years managing other people’s domestic uncertainty recognize the sensation. They thought they were handing off a task. Instead, they’ve acquired another person to manage.

By the end of Instacart’s fictional boot camp, the male recruits have learned to identify ripe bananas, read expiration dates and make sensible substitutions. The joke is that men can, in fact, be taught to buy groceries. The less amusing implication is how many have been allowed to reach adulthood without anyone expecting them to know how.

The post Why women dread male Instacart shoppers appeared first on Salon.com.

Nothing about Shibuya HiFi is loud. From its unmarked front door to its low-lit lounge, the Seattle vinyl bar is a subtle, pensive ballad of a place. So much so, in fact, that on the Wednesday night that we visited for a sold-out event, the sparsely populated lounge area was nearly silent.

That is intentional, said general manager Jerry Stotler. Wednesday nights are closed to everyone but ticket holders. “These are what we call deep listening sessions,” he explained, “so when you walk in, there isn’t any music playing. We want to ensure a pristine listening environment when we’re in the hi-fi room.”

Seattle has many vinyl bars, but Shibuya, open since 2023, sets the local standard for premium listening experiences. Every inch of its intimate sanctum contains the story of the venue’s principal owners, Quentin Ertel and Brian Rauschenbach. It’s named for the Tokyo district known for its jazz kissa, cafés dating back to post-war Japan where visitors listen to vinyl on premium sound equipment. Rauschenbach’s parents met in such a place nearly six decades ago, Stotler said.

(Credit: Justin Kim)

Ertel, an interior designer, painstakingly curated the room. Cedar planks line the walls. Louis Poulsen chandeliers hang from the ceiling, along with several plush, crescent-shaped loveseats, acquired from Benaroya Hall when the concert hall underwent a redesign. A pair of deep seats covered in nubby upholstery sit close to this sacred space’s altar — a vinyl-stacked media console holding a vintage receiver and turntable, flanked by two ATC SCM50 loudspeakers. But one set of equipment reigns over everything: a pair of 1976 Klipschorns.

Shibuya’s schedule favors favorites such as D’Angelo’s “Voodoo,” Radiohead’s “Kid A,” or Charles Mingus’ self-titled opus. But on this Wednesday, the venue hosted a special listening session for Michael Kiwanuka’s fifth album, “Fudge,” a week before its Oct. 23 release.

Stotler humbly acknowledged the venue’s good fortune to be included on the very short list of people and organizations invited to preview the record, a relatively recent development. Previous pre-release sessions have debuted work by the Beastie Boys’ Mike D and Thundercat.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. While waiting for the magic to start, we listened to the hi-hat riff of ice cubes click-clacking as Stotler worked a cocktail shaker. Once the listening room doors open, all drinks, distractions and shoes must be left at the door. “So enjoy a cocktail in advance of the session to relax and reset,” he calmly says, sliding one of his potions across the bar to a fellow patron. “Then we’ll go back and drop the needle.”

 

 

I’ve been curious about the recent rise of listening bars. Life has gotten faster, noisier and increasingly disconnected. Low-friction digital convenience has sapped life and music of their organic weight.

Places like Shibuya, then, are a natural fit for what Ertel describes as a renaissance of meaning, driven by vinyl’s resurgence. “There’s a search for new ways to be together, but also, I think, just new ways to be,” he said when I caught up with him by phone a few days later.  “We live in sort of this two-dimensional world of scrolling. Everything’s flat and fragmented and fractured. When you have something that has kind of a wholeness to it, that is also linked to something that most of us love so much, which is music, it makes sense that people want vinyl records again.”

Younger audiophiles revived the medium from the dead starting in 2008 for many reasons, the simplest being that digital downloads don’t include eye-popping cover art. By 2020, vinyl record sales revenue hit $596.2 million, surpassing CDs ($531.1 million) for the first time since 1986, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. In 2025, vinyl purchases in the U.S. alone reached $1.04 billion, the RIAA reported in March.

Listening bars, meanwhile, have popped up worldwide. Tracks & Tales, a site founded by British writer Rafi Mercer, reports finding bars, hi-fi cafés and sound-first venues across 171 countries and 6,465 cities. That doesn’t count traveling experiences like The Listening Room, created by Seattle DJ Joshua Fields.

Fields was inspired by listening to “Voodoo” at Shibuya and wishing that he could talk about it with the other attendees. (He credits Rauschenbach as a mentor.) A little later, a back injury forced him to slow down and think about what he’d do differently — a “divine download,” he called it during a recent phone chat, that transformed into a monthly series of phone-free listening sessions that have so far taken place in Portland and Seattle venues.

The rules of engagement are consistent. Soft, comfortable seating is a must. No phones for the duration, or talking, singing or other interruptions once the needle hits vinyl until the very last track finishes. Afterward, he sets aside time for quiet journaling and discussion.

“The music is really the medium that gets us to this opening up,” Fields told me, “because what I’m solving for is the lack of human connection, with all our technology and our robots, all our things.”

As such, his model is a little more relaxed than Shibuya’s. Participants are served food and drinks, with each event inspiring a signature cocktail. For a recent sit with “Purple Rain,” he direct-messaged its co-star, Apollonia Kotero, to let her know he was naming a drink after her.  “She responded, which blew my mind,” Fields said. “She told me, ‘Make sure it’s spicy.’”

So he made sure the bartender did.

(Credit: Meg Stacker)

Listening events remind us that music can be a full-bodied, meditative journey, however you do it. There’s a ritual to setting the turntable stylus, or needle, into a vinyl LP’s groove for the first time, hearing the soft, crackling prelude to an opening melody and listening to a body of work front to back with silent focus. We can create that feeling at home, setting up a dedicated space to be comfortably still and take in your favorite records, or an unfamiliar one, from start to finish.

Still, there’s real value in leaving home and finding a place to listen — not simply hear, but listen —alongside strangers who love the art and spirit of music as much as you do. At events like Fields’, you may even meet someone you otherwise wouldn’t. He teased that a Dec. 4 Listening Room event in Seattle for India Arie’s “Acoustic Soul” will feature a special guest.

---

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

---

I look forward to inhaling “Fudge” many times on my stereo. But I’ll never be able to recreate the rush of hearing its blossoming piano and strings for the first time, sensing the soundwaves from those Klipschorn speakers penetrate my skin. It made me well up, which embarrassed me until I glanced around the room and noticed a few others dabbing their eyes, too.  

“In a true kissa or a well-kept basement bar, the first thing you feel is not volume; it’s presence,” Mercer writes. “The room seems to steady itself around a note. The air thickens. You sit differently. Your breath slows without negotiation.

“Good sound doesn’t overwhelm you,” Mercer adds. “It invites you. That’s the quiet truth at the heart of every listening bar: the room listens back.”

To search for a listening bar near you, click here.

 

 

The post The global rise of listening bars appeared first on Salon.com.

By most metrics, measles in the U.S. is out of control. Last week alone, cases jumped by 8%, with 330 infections reported, outpacing the entire total of cases in 2024, in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 285 cases. There are large outbreaks in Texas and South Carolina, but Pennsylvania has been hit especially hard lately, with over 1,300 cases and 250 hospitalizations reported this year so far. Due to underreporting, public health officials caution that the true number of cases is likely higher, potentially as high as 6,000. 

“We’ve seen more measles cases during this report than we’ve seen in the last quarter century — combined,” Noel Brewer, a professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, told POLITICO this week. Brewer served on a key vaccine advisory panel to the CDC before Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted believer and spreader of anti-vaccine conspiracies, overhauled the committee. 

A highly contagious viral disease, measles is characterized by a distinct rash. Though most people recover, it can cause pneumonia, blindness and swelling in the brain, and erase the immune system’s memory, leading to easily acquired secondary infections. About one to three people out of 1,000 die from measles, with children at the greatest risk of dying. Vaccines against measles are highly effective and safe. According to the World Health Organization, between 2000 and 2024, an estimated 59 million deaths globally were prevented by measles vaccination.

Data from the CDC reports there have been 42 outbreaks this year, there have been at least 4,410 confirmed measles cases as of Oct. 15, almost double the total in 2025. But critics say the CDC isn’t giving the full story. The agency’s measles dashboard lists three deaths, adding one on Wednesday, but Pennsylvania has alone reported five deaths this year, with a sixth under investigation. The CDC still hasn’t named the state where the latest death occurred, although health experts say there is no reason to withhold this info.

Why the discrepancy? That’s what Pennsylvania’s Health Secretary Debra Bogen wants to know. Late last week, Bogen sent a letter to CDC Director Erica Schwartz requesting that the state’s deaths be counted and demanding answers on how the agency is tracking measles fatalities. “By not acknowledging the deaths, the CDC obscures the seriousness of this disease and the toll of measles across the U.S.,” Bogen wrote. Schwartz has only been CDC director since August, replacing acting director Jay Bhattacharya.

It’s not the first time Bogen has sent such a letter. In September, she asked Schwartz to acknowledge the deaths back when the number was four. Later that month, Reuters reported that Kennedy asked Schwartz to remove two measles deaths from the CDC’s dashboard, which she implemented “without objection,” according to three sources familiar with the matter. While the deaths have since been added back to the tally, they are marked with an asterisk indicating that the “number is subject to change.” 

---

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

---

Pennsylvania Gov Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has also taken issue with the CDC’s response, publicly blaming Kennedy and the Trump administration for sowing doubt about vaccines. Kennedy has denied being at fault, dismissing the outbreak as a global problem and saying, “We have done better, and particularly, my administration has done better at controlling the outbreak than any other country in the world.” 

Kennedy has made this claim before. It’s true that other countries have seen skyrocketing measles cases, especially Indonesia, Guatemala, India and Bangladesh, with the latter registering over 65,000 infections in the last 12 months. That doesn’t change the fact that the U.S. is experiencing a severe failure to protect the public from measles, with vaccination rates continuing to fall. Yet Kennedy has been reluctant to promote vaccines, continues to cast doubt on their safety and upholds unproven remedies for treating measles, like vitamin A and cod liver oil. That advice has been associated with an increase in calls to poison control for vitamin A exposure, according to research published in June in JAMA Network.

Kennedy has tried to flip the script by accusing Shapiro of “politicizing” the outbreak and refusing federal help. But that assistance was only initially refused because the CDC was not counting deaths accurately, with Pennsylvania requesting emergency assistance in September. The state and the federal government are now working together. Last week the CDC sent a “disease detective” within the agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service to Pennsylvania.

All this comes as the WHO is due to review the U.S. status on measles elimination, which was achieved in 2000 and is given when a country goes a full 12 months without continuous transmission of the virus. But when the Pan American Health Organization, an arm of the WHO, meets in November, they are expected to revoke the U.S.’s status, just as it did to Canada last November, 25 years after our northern neighbor had eliminated the disease.

Measles is just one of seemingly countless self-inflicted crises at the heart of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which Kennedy spearheaded in his 2024 presidential bid before endorsing Trump and joining the administration. As such, Kennedy has been busy lately stumping for Republicans in the midterms, sometimes hopping aboard military planes to do it, while MAHA-aligned groups have spent nearly $2 million backing candidates associated with the health secretary. POLITICO reported last week that “the MAHA PAC and MAHA Action PAC, two political action committees supporting candidates committed to the health secretary’s agenda, announced they donated a combined $1.65 million to support Republican Zach Lahn’s campaign for governor of Iowa.”

Other than elections, Kennedy’s major focus lately is redefining junk food, but the public is apparently increasingly losing trust in the MAHA movement. Recent data from an Axios-Ipsos poll suggests that only one in four people trust health information coming from Kennedy. While he has emerged as a primary target for Democrats to investigate or even impeach if they win congressional majorities, replacing the health secretary isn’t likely to be enough to restore public health. As healthcare policy experts Steven Grossman and Michael Miller recently wrote in MedPage Today, “even an outcome that brings more pro-vaccine members to Congress will still leave vaccines facing long-term existential threats at both the federal and state levels through regulatory and legislative proposals and actions. Heavy lifting from pro-vaccine policymakers and advocates will be essential over the next 2 years, but this need will likely stretch into 2029 and beyond.”

Amid the deluge of scandals pouring out of the Trump administration, the corruption, war and skyrocketing cost of living, the comeback of measles may not be top of mind for most voters. But every day that public health leadership ignores a spiraling crisis adds up to more people hospitalized, disabled and dead. If the midterms don’t bring some form of reckoning for MAHA and its assault on public health, we can expect to lose a lot more than the WHO’s elimination status.

The post RFK Jr. and MAHA’s measles reckoning appeared first on Salon.com.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was not buff, at least to our knowledge. He didn’t exercise in public or show off his abs, and there is no record of him ever leading his troops in calisthenics or challenging his peers to a pull-up contest. As far as we know, he didn’t even have any tattoos. 

Eisenhower may not have been a “beardo” or a “weirdo,” in the recent words of Pete Hegseth, but were he alive today he would in all likelihood call the defense secretary a wimp and possibly even a radical. The 34th president would almost certainly not see him as a “warrior,” a term Hegseth uses as shorthand for a muscled, tough bully who is ready to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy at a moment’s notice. 

Despite this, Eisenhower remains one of America’s most celebrated generals, the man who led the Allied invasion of Europe, served as Army Chief of Staff, helped create NATO and served as its first Supreme Allied Commander. While he never served in combat, Eisenhower rose in the ranks because of his exceptional talent for strategy, logistics and diplomacy, skills which used to be held in high regard in the military. 

Not too long ago, it was once understood that, in the modern world, a “warrior ethos” is more a matter of brains than brawn, and it was Eisenhower’s gift for coalition management, logistical organization, discipline and strategic patience that made him a successful war-time leader. 

But those qualities are now out of fashion. When Donald Trump tapped Hegseth, the “Fox and Friends Weekend” co-host, to be his defense secretary, it was largely because the president thought Hegseth looked like he came out of “central casting” — a square-jawed, Sgt. Rock-style cartoon hero. They had become acquainted when Hegseth had taken up the cause of a group of men accused of war crimes, and persuaded Trump to intervene on their behalf, which he did over the loud objections of the military brass. 

Hegseth had the attitude Trump wanted to lead the military, a man who wouldn’t feel restrained by all those rules and regulations that had made America, in his view, a weak, loser country under previous presidents. Once installed at the Pentagon, the secretary began modeling his “warrior ethos” very quickly by personally leading the charge on the front lines of America’s most important battleground: the culture war. He vanquished diversity, equity and inclusion policies one by one, and got rid of any of the women and people of color who had been promoted over the butch white men. He called all the brass to sit and listen to him lecture them about what a true military leader should be. After all, Hegseth has served as a platoon leader in the National Guard and as a prison guard for a little while, so he knew what he was talking about. And he has demonstrated time and again that he is in pretty good physical shape by doing jumping jacks and jogging with enlisted men wherever he goes, which is apparently the only authentic test of military leadership. 

Meanwhile, Hegseth has presided over a policy of murder on the high seas, ordering the military to summarily kill people in small boats in the Caribbean and Western Pacific who, according to the Pentagon, are suspected of running drugs. He is also in charge of the military that is losing the war in Iran, a conflict to which he seems oddly disconnected, busy as he is with planning a (later canceled) public execution, holding prayer meetings, mandating testosterone testing and all that jogging. 

Even though Hegseth would surely have fired Eisenhower long before the future president ever became a five-star general for lacking the proper “warrior ethos,” he does seem to like the idea of basking in the reflected glow of the monumental victory Eisenhower led in World War II. The secretary is also clearly entertaining the idea of running for president, which Eisenhower successfully did twice, after helping to rebuild Europe. (Incidentally, Eisenhower fully endorsed changing the name of the War Department to the Defense Department in 1949, a decision Hegseth and Trump have attempted to reverse.) 

Hegseth obviously sees himself as a modern leader of similar stature to Ike. According to The Washington Post, when Hegseth assumed the office, he spied a relic that once belonged to Eisenhower: a handmade globe the general had reportedly used during the war, which even bore some markings he may have placed there himself. Hegseth demanded that it be moved to his office. He had furloughed people who handled such things during the partial government shutdown over immigration, and since he famously lacks patience, Hegseth sent a couple of flunkies to retrieve the historic object immediately.

Not realizing its weight, and with no experience in caring for precious artifacts — or, according to the report, listening to words of caution — the crew dropped the globe and broke it. They ended up just leaving it where it stood, with a huge hole in it. 

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

There are metaphors, and there are metaphors, but this one is just too on the nose. Eisenhower and America helped rebuild the world after World War II, understanding that to survive in the nuclear age, the old, primitive ways were just too dangerous. They used diplomacy and alliances to build a bulwark against the kind of aggression that Germany and Japan had unleashed on the world, and despite some marked abuses and exceptions, that order largely held for 70 years. 

Then Trump and his acolytes like Hegseth came along. With little care for the vast responsibility they held to keep the fragile planet stable and safe, and with no knowledge or experience of how to do so, they have broken the world order that Eisenhower led and represented. And it doesn’t seem as if they think it matters.

These are reckless people who think the government is cosplaying reality television, where all that matters is looking tough and projecting strength through cartoon clichés and cheap propaganda. The symbolism of that globe and what it meant completely escapes them, just as Eisenhower’s legacy has been dismissed by them wholesale.

Other than winning D-Day and commanding NATO, Eisenhower’s most famous moment was perhaps his January 1961 farewell address as president, when he warned about the military-industrial complex, which he said could sap resources from the public, threaten democratic governance and social balance, and put profit ahead of national security. His warnings were realized long ago, but now the Trump administration is taking it to an entirely different level. Hegseth is demanding a total of almost $1.5 trillion dollars for the Pentagon in 2027, calling it a “generational investment.” And Elon Musk, with his Starlink system, now appears to be operating more or less on his own, putting global security at severe risk. 

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar — but sometimes it isn’t. This administration has broken the world, and nobody knows whether it can be fixed. But even if it can be pieced back together, it will never be the same. 

The post How Hegseth shattered the world Eisenhower made appeared first on Salon.com.

Jamie Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO.

The war in Gaza hasn’t figured much in campaigning for Israel’s upcoming election — despite the likelihood that Israel’s Arab minority, Palestinian by heritage, might well decide who gets to be prime minister. 

Israel’s Arabs make up around 20% of the electorate that will be casting ballots in the Oct. 27 parliamentary election. And thanks to complex coalition math, Arab parties might well be the ones to crown Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, who leads a center-right opposition bloc.

But campaigns by both the Arab parties and Jewish politicians have avoided talking about what the outcome might actually mean for Jewish-Arab relations in the region, for the possibility of a two-state solution and even for U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision for a comprehensive peace-through-prosperity deal between Israelis and the Palestinians.

“The election campaign has been bizarre,” said Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli army colonel and former head of Palestinian affairs in Israel’s military intelligence agency. “The campaign has been focused on domestic and personal issues, and on Netanyahu.” 

That means it hasn’t included “the very deep complicated issue of the critical relations between us and the Palestinians, and what kind of scenarios or solutions are left after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the Gaza War — for any kind of political settlement,” Milshtein said.

But outside of Israel there’s alarm — especially among Arab leaders — over the absence of any serious debate about how to end the multi-front conflicts Israel is engaged in and what that might foretell, said HA Hellyer, a geopolitical scholar specializing in the region. 

“Netanyahu, or not, the Israelis are on a particular trajectory when it comes to foreign and security policies,”Hellyer told POLITICO. 

“Opposition politicians blame Netanyahu for Israel’s increasing diplomatic isolation and loss of support in parts of Europe and North America. But when you look at what they’re actually saying, they’re not arguing with the policies when it comes to Gaza. They support the overall settlement project in the West Bank. They support the incursion in Southern Lebanon. Their proposition is that they could have done things in a better way,” said Hellyer, who’s a fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute. 

Mentions of the Gaza conflict in election campaigns have been largely limited to clashes over who was to blame for failing to prevent the Hamas attack on southern Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people.The Eisenkot-led Change bloc has focused on Netanyahu’s role in the lead-up to the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre, pointing to the failures of his government and arguing he ignored warnings of a likely big Hamas attack. But the bloc has done little to flesh out its governing policy platform.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s campaign has sought to frame Eisenkot as an appeaser and puppet of Arab party leaders — such as Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, and Ahmad Tibi, leader of Ta’al party — arguing he would compromise on core security issues to persuade them to join or vote with his coalition bloc after the election to give him a Knesset majority.

“The lack of real content is a major problem for such a crucial election,” the Jerusalem Post lamented in an editorial this week.

Few see any chance of a negotiated peace or a two-state solution any time soon. Israelis largely view international condemnation as biased, and say critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza fail to understand what the country has to do to survive. 

But at some stage or another, Israelis will have to have conversations about peace, and delaying them isn’t going to help the country reduce its deepening isolation or help repair strained ties with traditional allies, including Europeans, who are starting to impose sanctions and considering arms embargoes. 

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a fierce Netanyahu critic, said that while there has been election debate about how successful the Gaza war has been in degrading Hamas, “it’s true that the main issue of our future with the Palestinians has been ignored.” He added: “Had I been running, I would have talked about it the whole time.”

So why hasn’t peace been on the agenda?

As Olmert sees it, the root lies in “the huge trauma of Oct. 7, along with the perception that public opinion, the mainstream, has shifted from where it was before the massacre and moved further rightward politically.” That isn’t uncommon: When Israel suffers a severe psychological blow, the political center-of-gravity habitually moves sharply to the right, favoring hawkish and nationalist positions and marginalizing more conciliatory perspectives.

Olmert isn’t entirely convinced that perception is completely accurate this time,  pointing out that Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party is likely to lose a significant number of its Knesset seats — from its current tally of 32 to around 20 — after next week’s elections. 

“Nonetheless, the perception is that general public opinion has shifted and, therefore, all of the other parties are hesitant to talk about any political process with the Palestinians or about negotiations or about a two-state solution, and so on and so forth, because they worry they’ll lose support,” Olmert said.

Polls show an overwhelming majority of Jewish-Israeli backing for military action. When it comes to the conflict with Iran, Israel Democracy Institute surveys have recorded support levels as high as 93% for the initial strikes, and nearly 80% back the continuation of the war. There has also been overwhelming Jewish-Israeli support for sustaining military pressure on Hezbollah in Lebanon and for multi-front security strategies.

Sven Burgsdorff, a former EU representative and ambassador to the West Bank, doesn’t subscribe to Olmert’s view, instead arguing there’s not much difference between Netanyahu and the leaders of the center-right Change bloc when it comes to Gaza or a two-state solution — something Netanyahu dismisses out of hand regularly, saying that Palestinian sovereignty is incompatible with Israel’s security.

“Even if the right-wing Netanyahu coalition were to be replaced by the current opposition, none of its main leaders — Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman — question the IDF’s conduct [in] the war on Gaza, nor are they supportive of the idea of Palestinian self-determination. Only Yair Golan of the Democrats and the coalition of Arab parties are in favor of that,” he said in an interview.

Opposition leaders don’t criticize Netanyahu for the conduct of the Gaza war, Burgsdorff continued. Their issue with him is whether he was at fault for not protecting Israel from the 2023 attack. They also accuse him of being set on dismantling Israel’s democratic system and for having no exit strategy for his forays into broader regional conflicts. 

Netanyahu has made a long political career out of leveraging external crises to keep his grip on power. And even now, it would take a brave commentator to write him off and suggest that Bibi the Magician, to use one of his nicknames, has lost the magic touch. The Israeli leader has pulled off stunning turnarounds in his long political career, including in the 1990s when he beat Shimon Peres in elections held just months after the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Olmert still hopes for a Netanyahu defeat and says if Eisenkot is installed, he might make conciliatory moves like meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of Palestinian National Authority. 

“He won’t be able to do anything big or quickly with Bennett and Lieberman in his cabinet. Both of them are completely opposed to the idea of Palestinian sovereignty. They keep saying it all the time. ‘There will never be a Palestinian state,’” he said. “So the political space will be very limited.”

But without some serious movement toward a two-state solution, Israel could risk alienating more of its traditional allies in Europe and the U.S.

While we were swooning over “WandaVision” back in 2021, we couldn’t have known Marvel was softening us up for the AI revolution. Well, some of us probably suspected something was afoot since, like Agatha Harkness, it was right there all along. Algorithms were already predicting our tastes, needs and desires and serving us options before we asked for them. Virtual assistants steered our daily lives and still do. But Alexa and Siri don’t have faces, bodies or plausible imitations of human emotions or empathy — not on the level that Paul Bettany’s synthezoid Vision provided for a grieving Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen).

One five-year time jump later, “VisionQuest” drops in on the android’s story where “WandaVision” left off. The Vision who lived, laughed and loved beside Wanda was an illusion, a delusion, really, brought to life by witchcraft. This one is very real: a kind of Vision 2.0, rebuilt by the intelligence agency tasked with saving the New Jersey town Wanda took hostage to shore up her classic family sitcom simulation. It – OK, he –  has no direct connection to the life his predecessor shared with Wanda or the children they magicked into existence.

But Vision is slowly learning what it means to feel, which makes him the AI romantic companion of everyone’s dreams.

Honestly, that’s the show’s main appeal. Marvel and “VisionQuest” creator Terry Matalas seem to know it. Planting quippy chatter wherein Vision deduces that a young woman finds him more attractive than his sidekick Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) acknowledges Bettany’s rizz is shouldering the weight of this thing. But it also gives tacit permission to lust after the robot he’s playing. After all, the first Vision, or Wanda’s idea of him, tended to her every need and gave her everything she wanted, including children. He also blessed us with one of the most heartbreaking lines of this decade: “What is grief if not love persevering?” A beautiful notion. Also, it kinda made some people want to hit that.

(Photo by Dennys Ilic. © 2026 Marvel. All Rights Reserved.)

The new Vision returns to a lonely, disconnected world where AI companions are an increasing part of our lives, if not entirely normalized. Falling for a bespoke arrangement of code remains a novel concept for most people, but it’s also an accessible alternative to isolation.

Lacking sorcery or some other way to conjure up the ideal lover, we’re left with engineering. Reams of magazine profiles spotlight everyday people choosing to share their lives with an AI boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse. You may be acquainted with someone who does this without even knowing it, because it’s still viewed as strange or even alarming.

The “VisionQuest” hype is real, too. Although the ever-expanding Marvelverse collapsed under market saturation, Bettany’s romantasy hero is one of the few characters worth getting excited about. He was part of the TV show that started it all – a pretty great one at that – so his reappearance after years of diminishing returns has sparked excitement and hope in equal measure.

That also means that it doesn’t really matter that the “VisionQuest” narrative favors mechanical efficiency over emotional resonance now we’re four episodes in.

As with all Marvel series, “VisionQuest” hasn’t yet landed on its deeper meaning. It took two episodes to bring Tommy and Vision together, and this week’s third and fourth introduced T’Nia Miller’s Jocasta and her connection to the hero/villain synth we know and love.

And regardless of the metaphorical or philosophical cloak it may eventually wrap itself in, the show’s main function is to bridge one chapter of this franchise to the next. Remember, we’re less than two months out from the premiere of “Avengers: Doomsday.”

Translation: This Vision has a purpose beyond figuring out his role in this world, something he put off by hiding in a pub under the alias of Sherwood Ellis and posing as human. Since the establishment was owned by one of the sweetest ladies in the multiverse, who’s killed in a shootout orchestrated by a mercenary named Paladin (Todd Stashwick), her death prods Vision to do a little soul-searching.

(Photo courtesy of Marvel. © 2026 Marvel. All Rights Reserved.)

But wait — he has no soul, just wires, processors, fluid and whatnot, plus a set of AI personas guiding his interactions with the human world. Rather, most of them are. The original Vision also absorbed the persona of the genocidal superintelligence Ultron, played by James Spader here and in “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” That Vision kept Ultron’s code intact for reasons beyond sentimentality; he/it is effectively Vision’s father, created when Bruce Banner and Tony Stark merged the code of Tony’s noble assistant, J.A.R.V.I.S., with Ultron and the Mind Stone. It makes about as much sense as Tommy, a human, realizing he is somehow one of Vision’s sons due to a confluence of magic and circumstance. (The other, Billy, made his debut in “Agatha All Along.”)

All this is to say that the by-the-numbers circuitry of Tommy and Vision’s cross-country escapade, which thrusts them into a murder case involving a killer dubbed the Butcherbird (Miller), is merely a skin over the ones and zeros of artificial desire.

Take Spader’s role in this show, for example. His Ultron avatar sports the long beard of a fisherman shipwrecked by a hard life. But there are moms and grandmas watching who still blush at memories of Spader’s work in “Secretary.” (If you know, you know.)

---

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

---

So, in the denouement of the fourth episode, when Vision lets Ultron take over his handsome, hella tight chassis to get out of a deadly situation, you can’t help but look at that twist with both horror and straight-up horniness. I mean, forget Reese’s cups – for some, Vision’s patrician looks and Ultron’s Spader-esque chill may be the two great kinks that go great together.  

Does this AI want to kill you, neg you or put you through a mattress? Answering “Why not all three?” is absolutely acceptable. In fact, it’s probably why many of us are invested in seeing this adventure through to its climax.

New episodes of “VisionQuest” drop Wednesday on Disney+.

 

 

The post VisionQuest is perfectly timed for the AI companion era appeared first on Salon.com.

Have you ever read “The Secret?”

The pseudoscientific self-help book by Rhonda Byrne rode a 2006 Oprah Winfrey endorsement to the tune of tens of millions of copies sold. It pushes the “law of attraction,” the idea that the universe is built on positive and negative energies, and that like sticks with like. In short, if you think regularly about the things you want and maintain a positive attitude, those things are more likely to come your way.

That’s the gist, anyway. Honestly, I never read it. But its ubiquity in the aughts, its reputation for being largely composed of quotations and the relative unoriginality of the premise — which adds a bit of woo-woo to the idea that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar — makes it feel like I have. Even if I was completely unaware of the New Thought movement, or if I’d never heard the name Norman Vincent Peale, I’d have some idea of what Byrne was on about. I’ve been a Jay-Z fan for most of my life.

The rapper has been manifesting his second act as a power player for nearly his entire career. Outside of some early, Das Efx-indebted features in the early ‘90s, Shawn Carter has been manifesting moguldom across his discography.

It’s right there on the cover of his 1996 debut “Reasonable Doubt.” The black-and-white photo and early computer-assisted graphic design look chintzy now, especially when held up to the art-directed and museum-curated sheen of his later work. But there’s no mistaking what Jay-Z is going for with his fedora, scarf and cigar. This kid from Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects is no street-level striver. He’s a boss.

It carries into track one, where a middleman is warning some lackey not to cross Carter. The first thing anyone hears about Jay-Z is in reverential tones, fit for a short-tempered kingpin. You get the sense that you might get to meet him someday, if you play your cards right. But for now, he’s out of your reach and your tax bracket. What follows is nearly an hour of opulent sh*t talk, laid over lush soul and jazz samples handpicked by producers with names like DJ Premier. It sounds slick and established. It sounds expensive. Most importantly, it sounds unhurried and in control. This was oligarch rap from the latest king of New York.

---

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

---

In 1996, Jay-Z was far from the billionaire multihyphenate we know today. He was co-owner of Roc-A-Fella Records, but at that time the label was mostly a means to release his debut after being turned away by several majors. He kept putting out the idea that he was already a magnate to anyone with a Walkman, while still scrabbling behind the scenes.

Case in point: Two platinum records weren’t enough to convince the copyright holders of the musical “Annie” to clear a sample for Jay-Z’s third album. The multi-billionaire of 2026 might have flashed a wad of cash. ‘90s Jay Z (sans hyphen in several ways) wrote a letter.

“I made up this story about how when I was a seventh grader in Bed-Stuy, our teacher held an essay contest, and the three best papers won the writer a trip to the city to see ‘Annie,’” he told Grantland in 2014. “I wrote that from the moment the curtain came up I felt like I understood honey’s story. Of course, I’d never been to see ‘Annie’ on Broadway. But I had seen the movie on TV.”

That album went platinum six times over, but even in the heady pre-Napster era, that wasn’t private yacht money. You wouldn’t know that if you saw the “Big Pimpin’” video, though. Jay-Z kept up the facade of globe-trotting mogul through several more albums, and that fantasy inched closer to reality with each release. He launched a clothing brand. He opened a nightclub. He was still talent, though, calling for the suits to “pay us like you owe us” on his hit “Izzo.” More than a decade later, Jay-Z would make good on the idea that “money talks so talk more bucks” when he launched a streaming service that paid higher royalty rates than its competitors.

On mic, he started referring to himself as the “best rapper alive.” Knowing that hall-of-famers go out with a bit of ceremony and their jersey in the rafters, he announced a short-lived retirement with “The Black Album.” Briefly free from a grueling release schedule, he bought a stake in the NBA’s Nets and pushed them to move to Brooklyn. He became the CEO of Def Jam Records. His mogul dreams made real, Jay returned to rapping with the flair and distant remove of a bored emperor. He was a moneymaker first and foremost, not a businessman but a business, man. He’d spoken it into existence 16 bars at a time.

In that context, it’s not at all surprising that Jay-Z may have hand-selected himself to headline next year’s Super Bowl halftime show. Puck broke the news that Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment conglomerate, had tagged the rapper for the championship game. Roc has produced the halftime show for the NFL since 2019, and Jay-Z is currently touring to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his debut album. It would be a natural fit, even without the hitmaker’s behind-the-scenes ties. He’s already a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer. He just wrapped up the release of an eight-part docuseries with producer/guru Rick Rubin on HBO Max.

 

Pressed on the leaks, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell took on the tone of intelligence services, refusing to confirm or deny the news.

“I am not aware of a leak,” Goodell said in a news conference earlier this week. “I’ve been in the committee meetings. So, I’m not sure it’s a leak. We haven’t announced anything. Until we do, we won’t make any comment on that.”

If it turns out to be true, it’s just the latest example of Jay-Z putting what he wants out into the universe and getting it back. He turned down an offer to perform at the halftime show over a decade ago, telling The New York Times that he did not appreciate the way the league negotiated. Per Jay-Z, the NFL’s offer hung on bringing along Kanye West and Rihanna, who were two-thirds of his 2009 hit “Run This Town.”

“Of course I would have,” Jay-Z said in 2020, “but I said, ‘No, you get me.’ That is not how you go about it, telling someone that they’re going to do the halftime show contingent on who they bring. I said forget it. It was a principle thing.”

Jay-Z got the last laugh. After the 2019 halftime show landed with a thud, he was brought on to produce the event and has helmed it since. Rhonda Byrne told readers that “your thoughts become things.” Jay-Z told us that he would always pick himself. Who does he know fresher than Hov? Riddle him that.

The post Of course Jay-Z picked himself for the Super Bowl appeared first on Salon.com.

On Wednesday night, for the second time in a week, Donald Trump voiced his admiration for a supporter who punched out a heckler at one of his rallies. Last week it was a woman. This time around it was a man. “The guy stood up and he got whacked,” Trump exclaimed with delight.

Last week he mocked a woman for her appearance and called her scum after she showed up at a rally wearing a T-shirt that read “Release the Epstein Files.” Two men in the audience shoved her, and one punched her. Both pulled her hair as the crowd shouted, “USA! USA!” The man who had punched her exchanged high-fives with friends. Police removed the woman and did not charge those who attacked her. 

A journalism mentor of mine once said, “It isn’t who’s telling the tale that matters, unless that’s the tale you’re telling.” Well, that’s always the case for Trump: He’s always telling his own tale, and he never wants you to forget it. It’s all about him, along with the sideshow of cultists who will hurt others and debase themselves to please him. 

His latest tale is one heard many times. It’s a story about a kingdom profiting from another kingdom’s mistake and using the profits to fuel the mistake the first country made. It’s a story of subjugation.

This is the continuing story not of Bungalow Bill but of Don the Con, who really is “the all American bullet-headed Saxon mother’s son.” While Trump enjoys watching Americans punch each other out and his fans cheer the results, Russia is profiting from the war Trump started while supplying military intelligence to the enemy he created. It’s an effective way for the Russians to keep funding their war in Ukraine. You can almost hear Vladimir Putin talking to Trump in a manner something like a conversation in “Lord of the Flies” between Jack Merridew and Roger, on the topic of how great it will be to kill the “piggies.” Just look it up.

Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent to noble Ralph and his conch shell anywhere on the planet, though many Democrats act like pretenders to that role. Well, somebody better step up fast.  For a country that so often pretends to be the underdog defending democracy, right now the U.S. seems more like an autocracy defending its hegemony over the rest of the world. You know, the bully who started the fight and then stands there applauding the effort.

Fortunately, it finally appears that enough people may be ready to stand up to the bully in the upcoming midterm elections. If there is a Ralph available in the United States, maybe we’ll see that person emerge in the aftermath. 

That thought has Trump and his minions up all night pointing fingers at one another, cursing and screaming accusations. or breaking down like toddlers who’ve lost their pacifiers. Such is Republican politics in 2026.

Over the past week, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Ohio, has run a campaign ad that tries to score political points off the sexual abuse that his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, allegedly suffered at the hands of her stepfather as a child. 

Both Democrats and Republicans have criticized Ramaswamy, including outgoing GOP Gov. Mike DeWine. The editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch promptly endorsed Acton, calling Ramaswamy’s attack ads reckless and disqualifying. Republican Sen. Jon Husted, in the middle of his own difficult campaign against former Sen. Sherrod Brown, called the ad disgusting.

Vice President JD Vance, on the other hand, announced that he was “disgusted” by Republicans who pushed back on the ad. Politics is a tough business. Trump also urged Ramaswamy to keep running the ad, claiming that it hit “pay dirt.” For the second time in a week, Trump talked about how much he enjoys looking at Husted’s rear end. “I looked at his ass, and then I looked at his legs,” the president told us. “I said, ‘His ass, s**t, it’s like — it’s like a pile of muscle.’ Then I looked at his legs, and I said, ‘Man, his feet are big.’ Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. He’s like a piece of steel.”

OK. There’s no appropriate “Lord of the Flies” analogy for that unexpected behavior, although Caligula might suffice. 

Midterm ads for Democrats have struck a decidedly different tone. In Texas, James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, is pushing a cinematic TV spot that embraces hope. It’s a powerful closer, well-edited, well-written and carefully produced. It stands in stark contrast to the fear-mongering of Ramaswamy and the Republicans.

In Mississippi, Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom is making his way across the state in a taco truck, giving away free food and talking with voters. In his challenge to incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Colom has gained enough attention that Democrats are daring to imagine they might stand a chance with an African-American candidate in the Deep South. 

Colom’s recent ad is a 30-second comedic tour-de-force in which voters call out Hyde-Smith for advising her constituents to “get another protein” if they think beef prices are too high. “Get another protein? I’d rather get another senator,” a variety of voters exclaim, with a mixture of humor and profanity.

If Colom succeeds, it may well be because of that ad. It reminds me of the “Where’s the Senator?” ads that Mitch McConnell used in Kentucky back in 1984 to dethrone Democratic Sen. Walter “Dee” Huddleston.

Whether or not Colom wins is beside the point. The point is that Democrats have finally found something approaching a message: They’re against corruption. Along with the message of hope projected by Talarico, they may have stumbled onto something more palatable than “We’re not him.”  

That’s precisely what scares Trump the most. He’s being removed from the conversation now that the Democrats have discovered that they must connect with local voters on issues that matter to them. Apparently, they’re finally learning to listen.

Trump and the Republicans can only pray that the Democrats are enjoying a moment of premature euphoria, and that their hubris will be destroyed on Nov. 4 after the election results come pouring in. “If you stop counting the votes,” as Trump told us in 2020, there won’t be a change of power. But members of both parties now show signs of believing that the Trump magic is gone and that nothing can stop the “blue tsunami” — not even vote-count shenanigans or declaring martial law and snatching the ballot boxes. Of course the Democrats could still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They’re very good at that.

What recent activity on the campaign trail tells us is that the poison of Trump and his choirboys is spreading even as Trump himself is losing influence. One shudders to think that there are worse possibilities than him out there, but given the way he’s liberated the darkest tendencies among his followers, as exhibited by Ramaswamy, there can be little doubt that’s the case. 

The humbling coda to this narrative is that no British sailor will arrive in the nick of time to save us from our “Lord of the Flies” existence. We have to do it ourselves.

While it’s tempting to crack a smile watching the Trump regime dissolve into bitter tears of greed and anger, it should be noted that this process is only beginning. It definitely won’t be over when the polls close. It might not be over until after the new Congress is seated in January, if then.

Trump has tried his best to destroy innate goodness, spirituality, quiet insight, intellect, rationality and science through his most devoted soldiers. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are just a few of his choirboys, closely akin to the mob who kill Simon and Piggy in William Golding’s novel.  

The imaginary beast of “Lord of the Flies,” according to Trump and his followers, comes with various names: communism, socialism, transgenderism, immigration, vaccines and the free press. He vented some of his anger by directly threatening a reporter this week, telling Andrew Feinberg of the Independent, “I don’t know who the hell you are, but you better be careful.” Not one reporter stood up to defend Feinberg. All of them should have. 

The New York Times reported this week that Trump is now considering throwing the entire press corps out of the White House, turning the Brady Briefing Room back into a swimming pool (as it was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time) and banishing us all to the other side of the island, or at least to the Executive Office Building across the street. He made similar threats during his first administration. 

The reason is clear enough — despite all of our shortcomings in the press, there are still too many reporters who have actually read “Lord of the Flies” and recognize Trump for what he is. Every time he’s on television, when he’s not sleeping through a meeting, he reveals once again how unhinged, incompetent and corrupt he truly is.

---

Want more sharp takes on politics?
Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only by Amanda Marcotte, also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

Further examination of reality makes clear, however, that the “Lord of the Flies” metaphor ultimately fails. It’s not just our country that resembles a group of children stranded on a deserted island with no rules or adults to guide us. The whole world is that way. If we were ever the beacon on the hill or the big brother or the Ralph from “Lord of the Flies” who stood up for liberty and justice, we’ve abandoned that role. The choirboys have taken over. Some of them, like Trump, even wear face paint, like in the book. 

Russia, China, most of the Middle East and Africa, France and other parts of Europe all look like crazed pre-pubescents hunting pigs with spears. If we want to broaden the analogy, Trump isn’t even the leader of the pack.

His actions this week make clear that he’s just a Roger. He represents malice, cruelty and a descent into brutality, but the true leader of the choirboys is Putin. He is obviously pulling Trump’s chain. He trolls him, leads him by the nose and manipulates him, playing him with such finesse that Trump can get himself twisted into a Gordian knot as easily as most of us draw breath. 

What happens next? That isn’t written in any book, at least not yet. But come Nov. 4, should we all survive that long, it will be.

The post Midterm panic turns Trump’s GOP into “Lord of the Flies” appeared first on Salon.com.