A federal appeals court has refused to let the Trump administration enforce key portions of President Donald Trump‘s executive order tightening mail-in voting rules, handing the White House another legal setback as states challenge the president’s authority to reshape election procedures ahead of November’s midterm elections.
In a 2-1 decision issued Saturday, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Justice Department’s request to pause a lower court injunction blocking major parts of the March executive order while the administration appeals the case. The lawsuit was brought by 23 Democratic-led states, which argue Trump exceeded his constitutional authority by attempting to impose nationwide election rules through executive action.
The executive order seeks to require federal agencies to verify voter eligibility before mail ballots are delivered, directs the Justice Department to pursue jurisdictions that officials believe violate federal election law and conditions certain federal election funding on states complying with the administration’s directives.
The Trump administration argued the lawsuit was premature because federal agencies had not yet finalized many of the policies outlined in the order. But the appeals court found the states had shown they were already facing immediate consequences from the directive, including deadlines requiring them to alter election procedures and coordinate with federal agencies before the November elections.
The ruling leaves in place U.S. District Judge Denise Casper’s preliminary injunction while the broader legal challenge moves forward. The appeals court did not rule on the ultimate merits of the case but concluded the administration had not shown it was likely to succeed in overturning the injunction at this stage.
The lawsuit centers less on the legality of mail voting itself than on who has the authority to regulate federal elections. The states argue the Constitution gives them primary responsibility for administering elections as they deem fit unless Congress says otherwise, while the administration maintains the president has authority to direct federal agencies in enforcing election laws.
The Justice Department could ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene while the appeal continues.
New Zealand’s Māori people often say that food is a feeling, a memory. It talks to your stomach.
Everything in Māori culture is tied to Papatūānuku, Mother Earth, especially its food. Located at the bottom of the world, it’s hard to imagine a place more closely connected to nature, where New Zealand’s Māori communities have long lived in symbiosis with the land.
“Māori food (kai) concepts acknowledge an interconnectedness with living cycles, which renew and sustain us,” says Michael Venner, director of Kora Tours NZ.
The pristine farms, forests, ocean and rivers serve as the country’s pantry, where Māori food is regional, and ingredients are harvested based on seasonality and availability.
“By understanding nature’s cycles and natural rhythms. Māori understood the connection between moon, sun, tides and seasons, the way all animals behave,” says Venner. “For example, if you know the correct moon cycle to go fishing on, lay your nets on the right tide, at the right place, you will have a higher success rate.”
A common everyday dish is a hearty stew or a “boil up,” made of pork bones, puha (an indigenous herb) and seafood like mussels, oysters and crayfish, alongside rēwena bread, a sourdough made with a fermented potato starter or a fried bread.
But Hāngī is arguably the most famous Māori cooking technique. Veneer describes it as, “A hot stone oven which cooks food layered inside baskets, covered by a wet cloth. Once partially buried for a few hours, it has roasted and steamed the food, infused notes of forest herbs, earth scents, smoked tea tree, Manuka honey and banana leaf.”
Veneer says if you get the chance to go to a traditional hāngī, do it. These special gatherings are often linked to special community events, like funerals, weddings and ritual occasions.
At Rosewood’s three hotels located throughout New Zealand, the chefs honor this ethically sourced ethos, working with local purveyors and farmers to source indigenous ingredients like beach spinach, fern fronds and abalone.
During dinner, each guest is given a traditional koha, meaning gift or offering, between the starter and main course. “It’s an opportunity for our chefs to share a thoughtful expression of place, often drawing inspiration from Northland’s rich coastal environment and Māori culinary traditions,” says JT Mulry, Culinary Director at Rosewood Kauri Cliffs.
At Rosewood Kauri Cliffs, they periodically serve a Māori-inspired, multi-course meal. “This dining experience celebrates the traditions, ingredients, and stories of Aotearoa. Traditional techniques, such as hāngī, are paired with native ingredients and locally harvested produce, creating food that is both simple and deeply expressive of place. At its heart, it’s about sharing stories, culture and hospitality through food,” says Mulry.
When European colonizers came to New Zealand in the 1800s, it changed the indigenous food. “Settlers arrived with national foods, preparation and cooking methods,” says Venner. “As more people came, food influence evolved and mixed; rural and urban food traditions, tastes and trends merged into the modern era.”
In Auckland, the Hāngī Master, Rewi Spraggon, honors his ancestors with his traditional hāngī catered cooking. The stones he uses have been passed down through the generations to create staples like a Hāngī Tuturu, a plate of pork, chicken, potato, kumara (New Zealand sweet potatoes), pumpkin, cabbage, stuffing and watercress salad. At his Queenstown food truck, more modern, European-influenced offerings include a chicken Hāngī burger, served with a potato spread, grated apple and watercress salad on a sweet potato bun.
Today, New Zealanders are proud of their food culture. “As New Zealand’s demographics changed, new traditions emerged. Since the 1980s, when people returned from overseas, they added to the menus and our palates changed with them,” says Venner. Now, it’s known for incredible lamb, cheese, wine and fruit inspired by the natural, high-quality, hard-working traditions of generations of Māori.
Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to hear from Rahm Emanuel, and he’s pretty sure the average voter doesn’t want Emanuel’s opinion either.
The former Obama administration insider and Chicago mayor published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, chiding progressive candidates for poisoning the well with supposedly unpopular policy positions ahead of the 2026 midterms. Speaking to CBS‘ “Face The Nation” on Sunday, the independent senator from Vermont pushed aside Emanuel’s concerns, saying that he’s just “nervous” because anti-establishment Democrats keep winning.
“[Emanuel] no doubt has the support of millions of working class people,” Sanders joked. “There’s no debate. There is a strong division within the Democratic Party.”
Sanders went on to paint that schism as the divide between people like Emanuel, who are “dependent on billionaire campaign contributors” and upstarts like New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.
“What is getting these guys nervous is we are winning all over this country,” he said. “People are sick and tired of the Rahm Emanuels and the Democratic establishment.”
Sanders pegged voter disaffection on the increasing difficulty and cost of living in the United States.
“People are asking simple questions,” he said. “Why in God’s name are we the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people? …Why do the economists tell us that in the richest country in the history of the world, our kids will likely have a lower standard of living than their parents?”
“People are tired and they want real change,” he said.
Bernie Sanders: "People are sick and tired of the Democratic establishment and the Republican establishment … the American people are tired of a rigged economy, a corrupt campaign finance system. They want real change. They don't want Rahm Emanuel and the establishment… pic.twitter.com/7fHrXxuYX4
Elsewhere in the interview, host Margaret Brennan asked Sanders about one candidate that he endorsed. Graham Platner dropped out of the Senate race in Maine following accusations of sexual assault. She wondered if Sanders felt he should have pushed Platner to leave the race sooner, given earlier scandals that dogged the Platner campaign.
“I don’t think so,” Sanders said. “When we heard the serious allegations … I asked, along with virtually all of his other supporters that he should get out of the race, and he did.”
UPDATE: German authorities said Sunday they shot and killed the suspect in the deadly attack near Berlin’s Christopher Street Day Pride celebration after locating him nearly 24 hours after the assault. Officials said the suspect confronted officers before they opened fire. Authorities now say the attack killed one person and injured 29 others, and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt described it as an Islamist terrorist attack.
German authorities on Sunday went on a manhunt for the suspect in a deadly vehicle attack near Berlin’s annual Christopher Street Day Pride celebration after a van plowed into a crowd, killing one person and injuring at least 29 others before the driver fled.
Police had issued a wanted notice for the 21-year-old suspect, identified under German privacy rules as Abdul B., warning the public not to approach him because he may be armed and dangerous. Authorities said the suspect is known to police and has ties to Islamist circles in Berlin but also stressed investigators have not yet determined a motive or whether he acted alone.
The attack unfolded around 10 p.m. Saturday in Berlin’s Tiergarten park near the iconic Brandenburg Gate, where hundreds of thousands of people had gathered throughout the day for Christopher Street Day, one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations. Police said a white van drove into the crowd before crashing into a tree. Investigators later said one or more people may have fled the vehicle after it came to a stop, and some victims also suffered stab wounds, raising questions about whether additional suspects were involved.
A woman was killed in the attack. Berlin’s fire service said three people suffered life-threatening injuries, eight others were seriously hurt and five sustained minor injuries. Organizers canceled the remainder of the Pride festivities and evening concert as emergency responders flooded the area and authorities secured the scene.
“What an abhorrent act in Berlin,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote on social media, calling the violence “an attack on our society.”
Was für eine abscheuliche Tat in Berlin. Hunderttausende Menschen aus aller Welt feierten friedlich beim Christopher Street Day. Sie wollten, dass wir gut und tolerant miteinander umgehen.
Das ist ein Angriff auf unsere Gesellschaft.
— Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz (@bundeskanzler) July 26, 2026
He continued on: “We are open and freedom-loving—and we will preserve and defend that. The act will be investigated and pursued with the utmost severity. My thoughts are with the victims and their families. I wish the injured a swift recovery and thank all emergency responders.”
Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner similarly described the attack as an assault on the city’s values of freedom and tolerance, while other European leaders and LGBTQ+ organizations expressed solidarity with victims and the Berlin community.
The attack comes as Germany has heightened security around large public gatherings following a series of deadly vehicle-ramming incidents in recent years. More than 2,200 police officers had been deployed for this year’s Pride celebrations before Saturday night’s attack.
German authorities said investigators are continuing to examine the attack, including the suspect’s motives and whether he received any assistance, though officials said they have found no indication that others were directly involved.
Locals have already set up makeshift memorials at the scene. “Liebe Siegt,” (“Love Wins”) declares a prominent sign, echoing similar sentiments at LGBTQ+ memorials everywhere, now from the Stonewall Inn to Brandenburg Gate.
Updated to reflect the status of the investigation: July 26, 2026, 1:48 p.m.
The starkest contrast between two summertime TV hits about women navigating midlife’s challenges shows up in the way its leading ladies handle themselves in the kitchen. For Jennifer Garner’s Hollis Shaw, the influencer around whom “The Five-Star Weekend” revolves, the kitchen is her happy place and moneymaker. Within moments of the series’ opening, she’s sliding a pie in the oven and futzing over tiny tarts and meringue kisses to photograph for her Hungry with Hollis followers.
Hannah Waddingham’s “Ride or Die” assassin, Judith Burton, earns her pay quite differently: She kills the world’s worst people. To her, the kitchen is an arsenal; in the premiere, she beats two men silly with a stock pot, a skillet and several dinner plates. Later, her best friend, Debbie Claybourne (Octavia Spencer), is shocked to discover that Judith stores a submachine gun in her oven.
Both series meet a cultural moment many middle-aged women would call miraculous, and pharmaceutical and cosmetic corporations would describe as profitable. No generation of 40- and 50-somethings has been as extensively catered to as Gen Xers and geriatric Millennial ladies, for whom hormone replacement therapy, along with the secret ways of retinol, hyaluronic acid serum and collagen therapies, have been normalized.
Every TV show is selling us something: “Five-Star Weekend” markets the expectation of how women should age well and politely.
There comes a point at which a woman realizes she’s a lot closer in age to Diane Keaton in “Something’s Gotta Give” than Amanda Peet, and she’s OK with that. Remember which one got to smash Keanu Reeves’ doctor?
In this economy, though, not many people can afford a house in the Hamptons or Nantucket. But we can vacation vicariously with Hollis and her friends Dru-Ann (Regina Hall), Brooke (D’Arcy Carden), Tatum (Chloë Sevigny) and Gigi (Gemma Chan) to the place Dru-Ann virally nicknames “white person clam island.”
(Greg Gayne/Peacock) Regina Hall as Dru-Ann, Jennifer Garner as Hollis, D’Arcy Carden as Brooke, Chloë Sevigny as Tatum in “The Five-Star Weekend”
“The Five-Star Weekend,” based on Elin Hilderbrand’s novel, is currently topping Peacock’s list of most popular series because of its breezy familiarity; we’ve spent time with these women in past summers, dating all the way back to “Big Little Lies.” You should know the formula by now. They have enviable wealth and careers, except for one who’s relatively less well-off than the rest. A tragedy or a mystery that brings everyone to a seaside locale; here, the sudden death of Hollis’ husband sends her sailing off to her family home on Nantucket, where all the interiors are as creamy and dreamy as a Nancy Meyers film. And there must be romance, represented in Hollis’ conveniently single high school sweetheart, played by the perennially foxy Timothy Olyphant.
Everybody’s hiding something from themselves and their host, who has planned all their fun with a pathological degree of anal retentiveness. There is a spa trip and fancy dinner at a restaurant and behind it all, lurking silently, a cancer scare.
If the “Five-Star” crew were to meet “Ride or Die” duo Debbie and Judith at a pub, they’d have war stories to swap. Debbie is a politician’s wife who sidelined her career aspirations to support his ambition to be Prime Minister. She gets him within spitting distance of Downing Street just in time for her husband to dump her.
You think that’s bad? How about this: Hours before that happens, Judith’s younger handler Sam (Calam Lynch) invites her to retire over lunch, suggesting that her recent 50th birthday might have made her a little psychologically unstable. “My mum turned 50 last year,” he shares, “and she went absolutely insane!”
The funniest part of that conversation is when Sam labels Judith a WOACA, a Woman of a Certain Age, pronouncing it as if he were Fozzie Bear punctuating a joke in an old-timey stand-up set. Only the real joke, it seems, is that Judith assumed her mission-completion rate and dedication were enough to maintain the respect of Sam and their boss, played by Bill Nighy. Not so.
(Courtesy of Prime Video)
There’s an additional slathering of irony in Garner, the woman behind “Alias” superspy Sydney Bristow, playing the happy homemaker. Meanwhile “Ride or Die,” created by Tessa Coates, introduces Waddingham, the elegant and proper boss lady from “Ted Lasso,” by showing Judith trading an easy assassination by distant sniping for an up-close-and-personal stabbing. Just for the fun of it.
I’d say that’s a pretty good representation of the gap between the long-shot fantasy of midlife and an intimate understanding of how it actually turns out.
As every perimenopausal woman knows, it’s really hard to relax when so many people in the world deserve to be punched.
Every TV show is selling us something: “Five-Star Weekend” markets the expectation of how women should age well and politely, which is to propose we seek respite from all the heartbreak, ageism and our creeping fear of obsolescence and decrepitude by leaning on our nearest friends. That, and sitting in salt rooms and mud baths or gazing at the bottom of our stand mixer’s bowl. Expressing our rage at all that, however, is still frowned upon.
That makes Debbie and Judith relatable and extraordinary figures, in that they are 50-something women, played by 50-something women headlining a high-velocity espionage thriller, linked to developments each is entitled to be angry about. Instead of proposing Waddingham as a Bond co-star, she’s the expertly skilled agent flanked by a best friend with an equally formidable intellect – the Moneypenny to her 007.
With the scrape Debbie and Judith find themselves in, a beach holiday is out of the question. Besides, as every perimenopausal woman knows, it’s really hard to relax when so many people in the world deserve to be punched.
“Ride or Die” reminds us that our local multiplexes used to be dominated by buddy action blockbusters in past summers, most of which starred men.
An exception was “Thelma & Louise,” which became the talk of the season and then year when it landed in theaters 35 years ago in May. Susan Sarandon’s Louise and Geena Davis’ Thelma spurred debates about what it meant that this film, written by a woman, created two female folk heroes out of the cold-blooded killing of a would-be rapist. Feminists loved it, but plenty of other women viewed it as improper.
It only occurred to me recently that Sarandon was 44 years old when she played Louise, the pal who pulled the trigger. I wasn’t thinking about that when I first saw “Thelma & Louise” because my 40s were far away enough to not even consider that detail. Now I know how much it matters.
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Ultimately, what sisterhood there is between “Five-Star Weekend” and “Ride or Die” can be seen in the way they consider the resources a woman has as she enters middle age. If we are “Five-Star”-fortunate, we can hire assistance to handle the inevitable difficulties associated with this time of life, whether that means groundskeepers or divorce lawyers. Would that were possible for all of us.
“Ride or Die,” for all its fanciful twists, ultimately has more realistic counsel for all the WOACAs watching: Bank on yourself and your extensively earned skills. You don’t need to be rich to burn the road behind you to the point of no return, just confident enough to keep barreling forward. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll have a trustworthy person riding shotgun in your getaway car.
It’s tough to find any semblance of a silver lining in the humiliating implosion of Donald Trump’s foreign policy over the last year, especially after a week that has brought us another escalation of the war no one supports, a recycled trade war with Canada, an out-of-nowhere nuclear deal with a country that should never have access to nuclear weapons, and yet more threats against a small nation that poses no threat to the United States.
But here’s the upside, just maybe: The tiny and perverse cadre of “anti-anti-Trump leftists” has been decisively silenced. If you find that phrase baffling, consider yourself fortunate. You evidently haven’t wasted any of your one wild and precious life arguing with renegade Marxists about whether the Trump-Putin alliance, in world-historical terms, was “objectively” superior to neoliberal internationalism on the Clinton-Obama model.
If this is a safe space, I will admit here that at one time I was around one-third vulnerable to such arguments. I don’t mean the part about Trump being a force for progressive change in any sense, even if entirely by accident, since that was obviously and hilariously wrong, not to mention based on the same “enemy of my enemy” pretzel logic that produced the disastrous Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. But on the level of a sophomore-seminar intellectual exercise, I could understand why self-appointed contrarians like Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald saw Trump as a disruptive force who might upend the softcore imperialism of the previous three or four decades, which had led to the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global hegemony of corporate capital.
You didn’t have to be an unregenerate Leninist or an online troll or a Pat Buchanan-style paleoconservative (or all three at once!) to be momentarily seduced by Trump’s “America First” nonsense. Disgruntled Americans of all varieties voted for Trump by the millions, based in large part on his populist, isolationist rhetoric. Maureen Dowd’s notorious “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk” column from 2016 should be inscribed above the gates of one of the lower circles of hell as a permanent warning to know-it-all media commentators.
It was, of course, immensely helpful to Trump’s agenda of fabrications, exaggerations and outright lies that we experienced the failings of mainstream U.S. foreign policy all over again during the strange interregnum of Joe Biden’s presidency, with its pious invocation of a “rules-based order” — where the rules are set by America, of course — and its theological commitment to a now-entirely-imaginary “two-state solution” in the Middle East. Several things can be said in retrospect about Biden’s fateful embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu on the Tel Aviv tarmac after the Oct. 7 attacks: It was an authentic and heartfelt gesture, it was a grievous political error and it paved the way for a humanitarian catastrophe now widely perceived as genocidal.
(GPO/ Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images) Joe Biden is welcomed by Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben Gurion Airport, Oct. 18, 2023.
Trump’s return to power has, at the very least, finally confounded all the doofuses who ever took anything he said at face value, and has also dispensed with the contradictory or two-faced rhetoric of the Biden years. There’s no more talk of universal human rights or the spread of democracy. The fundamental logic of Trumpian policy is cynicism all the way down: We don’t care about any of those things and we never did. To paraphrase Stephen Miller, surely the most instrumental figure in the Trump White House, the only thing that matters is power.
Maybe we should be grateful for the epic and reckless corruption of this administration, since Miller’s ambitious schemes to reshape America and the world as a white-supremacist wonderland are consistently undercut by the enormous levels of graft surrounding him. (Miller strikes me as a true believer whose corruption is moral rather than financial, one of many traits he appears to share with Joseph Goebbels.)
As the Trump administration veers unsteadily into its lame-duck phase and a likely midterm wipeout, its quest for a legacy achievement becomes increasingly pathetic, not to mention increasingly dangerous. Trump’s dance of death with the Iranian regime might have a comical aspect if the lives of many thousands of people and the future of the global order were not at stake. By goading the president into restarting the war for the third time (by my count), the new roster of hardline leaders in Tehran, at least for now, have strengthened both their domestic control and their international reputation. It’s difficult to imagine, in fact, how Trump and his ludicrous cast of advisers could possibly have screwed this up worse than they did. (D.C. rumors suggest that high-testosterone “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth will ultimately be compelled to walk the plank over this fiasco.)
Maybe we should be grateful for the epic corruption of this administration, since Stephen Miller’s ambitious schemes to reshape America and the world as a white-supremacist wonderland are consistently undercut by the enormous levels of graft around him.
Meanwhile, the search for something that can be pitched to last-ditch MAGA loyalists as a victory, no matter how petty and insignificant, continues. Trump has never given up on his dream of seizing or annexing Greenland, but it was always more like an extortion scheme or a real estate scam than a military threat. Roughly the same applies to his improvised plan to rebuild Gaza as a Trumpified new Riviera, which took even Netanyahu by surprise and was never likely to escape the uncanny valley of AI fantasy.
I’m inclined to feel similar about this week’s reports that Seb Gorka, an unhinged far-right free radical with some sort of roving-ninja role in the Trump White House, is urging a military assault against Islamist militia groups in Mali, a West African nation with complicated internal dynamics and no relationship whatever to U.S. national security. Again, this might be amusing if real human lives weren’t at stake, and if billions in taxpayer dollars appropriated by Congress for aid to impoverished countries like Mali weren’t being diverted to right-wing nationalists, white supremacists and anti-LGBTQ groups instead of humanitarian and healthcare NGOs. (Read this ProPublica report for more on that.)
Things have truly gotten dark if we’re looking to JD Vance and Marco Rubio as the proverbial adults in the room, managing the worst impulses of their increasingly disinhibited and incapacitated boss. I don’t know which of those two geniuses signed off on the reported nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which may fall apart, goddess willing, under the weight of its impromptu idiocy and the fact that literally no one thinks it’s a good idea. Mohammed bin Salman, that kingdom’s journalist-murdering leader, is roughly the last person in the world who should have access to nuclear materials. If this deal goes through, it could rank among the very worst of Trump’s foreign policy blunders. Of course there’s still time for more.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a busy man. When he isn’t working out with fellow Cabinet members and denying promotions to Black and female officers, he’s making videos ordering the troops to take testosterone tests to prove they are manly enough to serve their country. He’s fighting the culture war morning, noon and night. When he can find the extra time, he’s also running the Pentagon as it wages war in Iran, commits murder on the high seas in the Caribbean and prepares to invade Cuba — and possibly Mali and Greenland. Hegseth has a lot on his plate.
That includes demanding a $454 billion increase in the 2027 Pentagon budget, which brings the total request to nearly $1.5 trillion — a 44% increase from the previous year. Hegseth has called this a “generational investment” that comes out roughly to all of U.S. military spending in World War II. You might think that it’s because of Donald Trump’s war in Iran and all the munitions the military is going through, but you would be wrong because, like most wars, it is paid for separately from the Pentagon budget through emergency supplemental requests.
During a combative appearance on Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hegseth asked for another $67 billion in supplemental funding for the rest of the budget year. But the shock of that request paled in comparison to another number. Hegseth estimated that the Iran war has cost $37.5 billion so far, far higher than the $30 billion figure the Pentagon only recently gave to lawmakers.
That number is astounding on its own, but according to most sources and experts, it significantly lowballs the war’s true cost, which continues to mount. NBC News reported that, according to internal estimates by the Defense Department peg the amount at $80 billion to $100 billion.
It’s not unusual for administrations of both parties to bulk up the Pentagon budget, although the Republicans have always been the most passionate about it. But this is beyond the wildest dreams of Pentagons past. With all the cuts the Trump administration has made to everything else in the government, you’d think they would be a little less greedy. But that’s not how they roll. In Trump’s first term, military spending was profligate, and this time it’s a free-for-all.
Hegseth is basically asking for an unlimited supply of money to finance an extremely unpopular war and such “generational investments” like the “Trump-class battleships,” otherwise known as the Golden Fleet. We needn’t worry that they are being irresponsible, though. They are committed to rooting out “woke” wherever they find it, and that will surely save a few bucks somewhere down the road.
When the senators asked him why the Pentagon needed all this extra money, Hegseth fell back on the Trump administration’s catch-all explanation: “Joe Biden did it.”
When the senators asked him why the Pentagon needed all this extra money, Hegseth fell back on the Trump administration’s catch-all explanation: “Joe Biden did it.” In this the secretary was correct. Biden requested military funding for Ukraine through emergency supplemental requests. But the Trump administration has created an unprecedented innovation. In partnership with MAGA allies on Capitol Hill, they are trying to get it passed through the reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered but is subject to ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, who can strip the provision if it is determined to be non-budgetary.
The U.S. is running through its supplies of expensive precision-guided munitions and air-defense interceptors at record pace in the Iran war, and there are concerns that reduced inventories are going to affect readiness in case the country is drawn into a war it didn’t choose. Hegseth, though, would not cop to that, insisting instead that all was well — and that the Pentagon just needed more cash to fix up the depleted military Biden left them.
House Republicans have proven more pliant. On Wednesday, by a margin of 216 to 212, they passed a $1.15 trillion defense bill to cover some of what the White House is requesting, adding some juicy extras for artificial intelligence and other tech-bro projects led by the private-equity types who are running much of the Pentagon these days. According to Guardian, one of them, former Uber executive Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering who is an aggressive promoter of AI, made a profit of up to $24 million by selling a private investment he held in xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, earlier this year. (In March 2025, Michael declared the value of his stake at between $500,000 and $1 million.) Since the company isn’t public, no one is quite sure how he came to own the shares or who he sold them to, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the defense department entered into two separate contracts with xAI before Michael sold his shares.
He’s not the only one who appears to be milking the military-industrial complex. The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the president’s eldest sons, have a portfolio of tech companies that are raking in billions from the Pentagon. These are not businesses with which the Trumps have any experience, and the partnerships and investments have all been initiated since their father became president the second time. Don Jr. has said publicly that he works with Hegseth to steer more contracts to drone manufacturers, of which he is a beneficiary. Both brothers are heavily involved with firms that have contracts all over the Pentagon. They insist, though, there’s no conflict of interest and no one in the department has even considered favoritism.
As usual, Hegseth behaved like a teenage bully during the Senate hearing. He argued with senators, blamed Biden and insisted that America has won the war in Iran while simultaneously requesting many more billions to win it. Since the GOP is attempting to push this supplemental package through using reconciliation, they won’t need Democrats to pass it, so one can probably expect that he’ll get what he wants. The firehose of money flowing to the Pentagon and all the insiders who are making massive bank from it isn’t going to dry up any time soon.
Hegseth ended the week with a gratuitous gesture to his commander in chief, who spent a good part of his time explaining that the 18 deaths in the Iran war are nothing compared to all the deaths in previous wars. To make Trump feel better, Hegseth removed from the tally four troops who were killed in renewed fighting, bringing the official death toll back down to 14. Military officials told the New York Times that “one reason behind the change was . . . because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”
Nonetheless, Trump attended the dignified transfer of the four fallen soldiers’ remains and concocted a story to burnish his war lust. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’”
Although those candidates have drawn much attention, this is hardly a new trend. Bernie Sanders, the nation’s most prominent identified democratic socialist, has represented Vermont in the House or the Senate since 1990. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the movement’s rising star in Congress, has served in the House since 2019. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani successfully campaigned as a DSA member in 2025.
There’s no one agreed-upon definition of socialism, even among avowed socialists themselves. But what if the word “socialism” can actually describe some of the most popular and important institutions in the United States?
I’m a social work professor who studies how people manage their money and their well-being. From both my research and informal conversations, I’ve learned that as much as Americans like to think we are, or should try to be, independent, we actually rely on one another and the government a great deal. I call this arrangement “interdependence.”
And even in a conservative state like North Dakota, where I live, socialist, or interdependent, arrangements are seen as pillars of the community. It’s where helping each other gets a little more formal structure.
To “slay,” for example, means to kill. For younger Americans, it has come to also mean to do something impressively. The way words are perceived can change too, with connotations morphing from negative to positive.
Maybe that has something to do with the fact that U.S. median wages are not rising fast enough to keep up with the increase in the cost of living; or that Americans are mainly seeing the promises of capitalism delivered to their nation’s richest people.
Meanwhile, most workers find themselves on the hook to fund more of their own retirement than their parents did and to pay more for their healthcare and insurance coverage, hindering their efforts to save for retirement. Many service sector workers find that they only get shifts when an algorithm says their labor is required – leaving their schedules and earnings unpredictable.
For those who have joined the workforce since the Great Recession, an economic downturn that lasted from late 2007 until mid-2009, financial insecurity has largely defined their economic experiences. Millions of American families are left needing to pay more and more to cover their bills, and with less disposable income.
Policy platforms to increase housing access, improve working conditions and make utility bills more affordable are a few of the priorities that have propelled democratic socialist and other very progressive candidates to recent victories in their primaries.
I think it’s fair to say that North Dakota has a long history of maintaining policies and running companies and other institutions that could be considered socialist. And that can hold true no matter how you define socialism or whether you think it’s a good thing.
Consider the state-owned Bank of North Dakota, the only financial institution of its kind in the United States. Founded in 1919, it offers numerous education, business, agriculture and infrastructure loan programs to support the economic development of the state and its citizens.
This advertisement for North Dakota’s Farmers Co-op illustrates the long history of farmers working together to source oil and gas and sell their crops. Jeffrey Anvari-Clark/Icelandic State Park Historical Buildings, Cavalier, N.D.
Rather than send wheat to Minneapolis to be processed, incurring high transportation costs, farmers and the state banded together to form the North Dakota Mill, the only state-owned mill in the United States. Notably, no public funds support the mill. Instead, the mill supports the state, with 50% of its profits going to the public coffers.
All of these examples ultimately result in economic benefit and opportunity. For instance, co-ops can reduce the risks of trying to go it alone to launch a small business.
With food insecurity and school lunch debt a problem for many families, many North Dakotans are looking to the state to control the situation – a socialist notion. A ballot measure with significant public support will be put to state voters on Nov. 3, 2026. If approved, the state would have a constitutional mandate to provide free lunches and breakfasts for all K-12 public school students.
Just don’t call it Socialist Security
So while many Americans still don’t like the idea of socialism when they hear that word, it really is a matter of semantics: The word itself is loaded, but few would deny that these examples really do lead to a better quality of life by putting people first.
And in much of the country, the government is responsible for operating water and other utilities, running fire departments and operating public libraries. Those services keep many communities healthy, safe and informed.
Cooperating for the benefit of our families, our communities and our cities, states and nation is what’s kept us progressing as a society. If you can look past the label, I think that you might see arguably socialist programs operating at the national level and in states like mine as opportunities to live a good life by working together.
The Trump administration is asking Congress to rename New York City’s Penn Station, reviving a proposal that would put President Donald Trump‘s name on one of the nation’s busiest transportation hubs.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy urged lawmakers this week to direct Amtrak to rename the Manhattan rail station as part of legislation tied to the long-running overhaul of Penn Station, according to letters first reported by multiple news outlets. While the request does not specify a new name, Duffy has previously said “Trump Station has a nice ring to it,” and the proposal has drawn immediate backlash from New York officials and transit advocates.
The request comes as Penn Station undergoes its most significant transformation in decades. New concourses, expanded corridors and improved passenger facilities have reshaped the transit hub, which serves hundreds of thousands of commuters and travelers each day and remains the busiest rail station in the United States.
Rep. Jerry Nadler, whose district includes Penn Station, blasted the proposal, calling it another example of the administration prioritizing symbolism over the needs of New Yorkers.
Since the very beginning of the Penn Station renovation project, I and other New York elected officials, community advocates, and local residents have called on the Trump administration to provide transparency on the process and funding. As the only member of the Transportation…
Transit advocates likewise dismissed the idea, arguing lawmakers should remain focused on completing the station’s redevelopment and improving passenger service rather than debating a name change.
The latest push follows earlier reports that Trump privately floated renaming Penn Station during negotiations over federal funding for the Gateway rail project. By formally asking Congress to direct Amtrak to make the change, however, the administration has transformed what once appeared to be political chatter into an official transportation proposal.
It remains unclear whether Congress would include the renaming provision in any transportation package, but the request is already fueling fresh debate over the administration’s efforts to leave Trump’s mark on prominent public landmarks.
A Texas appeals court has handed Attorney General Ken Paxton a setback in one of the state’s highest-profile abortion enforcement cases, ruling that prosecutors failed to present enough evidence to justify shutting down the clinics of a Houston-area midwife accused of illegally providing abortions.
In a decision issued Thursday, the Fifteenth Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s injunction against midwife Maria Margarita Rojas and her clinics, finding that the state relied largely on affidavits filed in a parallel criminal case rather than admissible evidence in the separate civil proceeding.
“The trial court abused its discretion by considering incompetent evidence in support of the temporary injunction,” the three-judge panel wrote.
The ruling does not dismiss the underlying allegations or the criminal charges against Rojas, who in March became the first person charged under Texas’ near-total abortion ban. Prosecutors allege she illegally performed abortions and practiced medicine without a license. Rojas has pleaded not guilty.
Paxton’s office filed the civil lawsuit shortly after the criminal charges were announced, seeking to permanently close Rojas’ clinics and impose financial penalties. The appellate court concluded, however, that the state failed to meet the legal standard necessary to support the injunction because much of its evidence could not be considered in the civil case.
The attorney general’s office said it plans to appeal the decision to the Texas Supreme Court.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents Rojas, welcomed the ruling, saying the state had failed to produce evidence supporting its claims and arguing the injunction should never have been granted. The organization also noted that the criminal prosecution remains pending.
Although the decision technically removes the court order shuttering the clinics, Rojas’ attorneys said the facilities are not expected to reopen while the criminal case continues.
The case has drawn national attention as one of the first major tests of Texas’ abortion ban since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The law generally prohibits abortions except when necessary to save the life of the pregnant patient, with providers facing severe civil penalties as well as potential criminal prosecution for violating the statute.
The appeals court’s ruling addresses only whether the state presented sufficient evidence to obtain the temporary injunction, leaving the broader legal fight over the allegations — and the future of the criminal case — to continue.
Years ago on “Rick and Morty,” President Andre Curtis fumed that he can’t coexist with Rick Sanchez, a living god who won’t submit to his will. Giving the man his own spinoff is one way to fix that.
In “President Curtis,” America’s POTUS is an egomaniacal ’80s-vintage superhero who treats the White House as his lair. That’s not too far removed from the real commander-in-chief’s mindset, but any suspicions that co-creators Dan Harmon and James Siciliano are parodying Trump 2.0 are off base. The show’s only satirical tool is Curtis himself, a myopic blowhard (voiced by the charismatic Keith David) who, to paraphrase one skeptic, uses taxpayer dollars to play Batman. Flanked by his cyborg chief of staff (Stephanie Beatriz) and a half-leprechaun special agent (Jim Rash), Curtis would rather police America than govern it. (To that end, the show’s “Hill Street Blues”-adjacent theme is another genius grace note.)
But “President Curtis” is only as strong as the viewer’s affection for “Rick and Morty.” If you can’t get enough of that show’s visual irony, metatextual references and winking at entertainment tropes, here’s 10 more episodes of the same feeling, only Earthbound. Not that I’m complaining. There’s something about David, the mellifluous voice of Ken Burns’ America, committing to every expletive-laced punchline that makes me absolutely giddy.
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Sealing this TV candidate’s victory are all the ways Curtis shows himself to be more effective and dangerous than real politicians, in that he gets the job done. As he brags about singlehandedly ending Paul Bunyan, “I’ll say this much to anyone who thinks they’re taller than the law: ‘Timber, b***h.’”
“President Curtis” premieres at 11:30 p.m. Sunday, July 26 on Adult Swim and streams the next day on HBO Max.
Summer, a season of good eats and fresh produce, has been tainted by a rampant parasitic outbreak that’s made us all scared to indulge in a generous plate of Caesar salad.
Within a few short weeks, an ongoing outbreak of Cyclospora, a foodborne parasite that can contaminate raw fruits and vegetables — and lead to several unpleasant gastrointestinal symptoms — has fueled a nationwide panic. Bagged salad mixes and kits, which have been linked to previous outbreaks in the United States and Canada, were suddenly a no-go. Same with precut or packaged lettuce, fresh cilantro, fresh basil, raspberries, snow peas and green onions.
As the number of reported infections continued to rise and fears over our favorite seasonal eats reached a fever pitch, the exact source of the outbreak remained a mystery.
A culprit had been named: shredded iceberg lettuce grown by Taylor Farms, the pro-Trump produce supplier, and served at Taco Bell, the Washington Post reported on July 16. A recall was promptly issued the following day. The outbreak was soon coming to an end — or so it seemed.
Then came more confusion. Just two days later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) retracted its initial finding that a lettuce sample from Taylor Farms de Mexico tested positive for Cyclospora, classifying it as a false positive. The FDA, however, doubled down on the severity of the investigation, saying in an X post that the false positive doesn’t change “the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms.”
To clarify, this false-positive lab sample DOES NOT change the basis for FDA’s ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms.
As it stands, the exact source of the outbreak remains largely unclear. And while lettuce shouldn’t be given up entirely, experts are advising to consume it with caution.
Keep in mind that washing your produce, even in a vinegar bath, isn’t enough to effectively kill the parasite. Instead, it’s best to cook them to an internal temperature of 158°F (70°C) or higher, health officials urged.
Now may not be the time to whip up your favorite cold salads or overload on the “L” in your BLTs. But fret not, because lettuce can still be enjoyed to its fullest when cooked. And it’s actually really delicious.
From Nigella Lawson’s riff on a Caesar salad to creamy lettuce soup, here are a few ways to cook and enjoy a produce item that’s typically eaten cold and raw.
Grilled Caesar salad
Summer also happens to be peak grilling season. While you’re grilling meats and corn on the cob, throw on a few romaine hearts (washed) and make a grilled Caesar salad as a delicious appetizer.
Courtesy of Loves Food Loves to Eat and shared by Food52, this recipe serves two when eaten as a meal and four to six when enjoyed as a side. To start, whisk together Parmesan, lemon juice, oil, mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, salt and pepper. Cut the romaine heart(s) in half lengthwise, along with half of a baguette, and char them both on the grill over medium to medium-high heat. On a large dining plate, serve the romaine hearts whole alongside the bread. Finish with the homemade dressing and more parm.
Nigella’s riff on a Caesar salad
On the theme of Caesar salad, Nigella Lawson’s controversial recipe — which was criticized by fans and culinary professionals more than a decade ago — has earned its redemption by being timely, useful and effortless.
Unlike grilled Caesar salad, Lawson’s riff on a classic is essentially baked lettuce. A romaine heart (cut in half lengthwise) is first coated in olive oil, grated garlic and chopped anchovy fillets before going into the oven. It’s then taken out, seasoned with lemon zest and juice and baked once more. The finishing touch is shaved parm.
Sure, some may call it crazy or far-fetched. But during these trying times, Lawson’s revamped Caesar salad is pure genius.
Petits pois à la française
Lawson marries frozen peas and shredded Little Gem lettuce in her version of petits pois à la française, or French-style peas. The lettuce is cooked with buttery garlicky scallions and, once wilted, frozen peas and hot chicken stock. It’s then left to simmer and soak up all those flavors.
The finished dish is beautifully green, tender and, yes, gentle on your stomach.
Creamy lettuce soup
Almost anything can be made into a soup — even fresh, chopped lettuce. Epicurious’ recipe for a delicious summertime lettuce soup seasons, boils and purées a whole head of lettuce, including both the leaves and ribs, coarsely chopped.
The soup is built in a four-to five-qt. heavy pot and starts with chopped onions, scallions, leeks (or shallots) and a chopped garlic clove. Everything is cooked with unsalted butter, then seasoned with ground coriander, kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Peeled russet potatoes, lettuce and three cups of water are then thrown into the mix, boiled and, finally, simmered.
A blender is used to purée the soup in batches before it’s simmered one last time and finished with more butter, salt and pepper.
Enjoy the soup as is, hot or cold. As for toppings, finish each bowl with a drizzle of olive oil or a dollop of Greek yogurt if you’re craving protein.
Cooked iceberg lettuce works excellently in this soup, the recipe notes. You can also add depth and variety to your soup by adding any salad greens, like arugula, spinach, kale, or watercress.
An iceberg and a romaine stir-fry
Similar to other leafy greens, lettuce leaves can be tossed, stirred and cooked in hot oil. In fact, stir-fried lettuce is a beloved dish in Chinese culture, often eaten for good luck during Lunar New Year. In Cantonese and Mandarin, the word for lettuce (“saang choy” and “sheng cai,” respectively) sounds similar to “growing wealth,” according to The New York Times.
Hetty Lui McKinnon’s recipe calls for a head of iceberg lettuce, stir-fried, then topped with crispy garlic and a fried egg and served over a warm bowl of rice. There’s also plenty of ginger and soy sauce, sesame oil and vegetarian stir-fry/oyster sauce.
There’s also Claire Saffitz’s recipe for a beef and romaine stir-fry, which combines cooked scallions and ginger and a head of romaine (sliced crosswise into 2-inch pieces), seasoned with a pinch of salt, in a large, hot skillet. The lettuce mixture is later cooked alongside short ribs (which have been prepped with cornstarch, red pepper flakes, salt and soy sauce) and a simple sauce made with vinegar, wine and soy sauce.
Coconut milk braised lettuce
Inspired by traditional Indian cooking and Southeast Asian flavors, this Food52 recipe bathes and simmers sautéed heads of romaine in a delicious mixture of gingery coconut milk, fresh lime juice and fish sauce. The cooked lettuce is then topped with fragrant crushed peppercorns and minced garlic, both cooked together in ghee over medium-high heat.
President Donald Trump returned to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Friday night, three months after gunfire abruptly ended the original event, delivering an hourlong speech that opened with a solemn tribute to the victims and first responders before gradually giving way to familiar grievances, campaign-style riffs and renewed attacks on political rivals and the media.
“As I said three months ago, the show must go on,” Trump told the roughly 700 guests gathered under heightened security at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria, where the annual dinner was rescheduled after the April shooting. He praised the Secret Service officers and law enforcement personnel who responded that night, calling the attack “an assault on our democracy itself” and declaring that “we do not yield to political violence.”
Trump acknowledged he had abandoned the harsher speech he originally planned before the attack.
“I was so psyched, I was going to rip people,” he said, adding that “something changed.” Moments later, however, he promised the audience “we’ll do a little ripping if you don’t mind,” signaling a shift away from the night’s opening message of resilience.
From there, the speech frequently wandered between jokes, political attacks and extended tangents. Trump ribbed journalists about wearing bulky bulletproof vests, revisited complaints about media coverage, praised White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and joked about another presidential campaign despite the Constitution’s two-term limit.
One of the night’s longest detours centered on Trump’s planned White House ballroom. Standing inside the Waldorf ballroom, which he built when the property operated as the Trump International Hotel, the president touted bulletproof glass, future drone defenses, underground security upgrades and Czech crystal chandeliers before predicting future White House Correspondents’ dinners would someday be held in the new venue.
Trump also congratulated New York Times reporter Tyler Pager, one of the journalists whose subpoena over reporting on the Qatari-donated Air Force One replacement was withdrawn by the Justice Department a day earlier, even as he renewed complaints about what he called “fake news” coverage. The president argued that speaking directly with reporters can improve stories, while insisting many outlets continue to treat him unfairly.
After one hour and four minutes, Trump closed out his speech by donning a “Trump 2028” red hat to continue to tease a possible third term.
The rescheduled dinner was smaller and more tightly controlled than April’s event, with a single entrance, multiple security screenings and no traditional red carpet. The association honored Secret Service agent Victor Gonzalez, who was shot in his protective vest while confronting the gunman, along with Washington Hilton employees who helped guests during the attack.
“We are back,” outgoing WHCA President Weijia Jiang told the audience. “We refuse to let an act of violence have the final word.”
By night’s end, the evening had come full circle. What began as a ceremony emphasizing resilience after political violence ultimately settled into the freewheeling, often meandering style that has become a hallmark of Trump’s public appearances, mixing condolences, boasts, policy asides and personal feuds into a single address.
Somewhere in the halcyon years of internet writing, I read — or, at least, I remember reading — a piece titled “Holden Caulfield was the first millennial dipsh*t.” I’m almost positive this piece existed, and the fact that I couldn’t find any mention of it in the sad, hollowed-out husk of the 2026 internet offers no proof that it didn’t. What did turn up are a newer generation’s takes on Holden, many of them unexpectedly harsh: He’s “the most insufferable character ever written,” “an entitled brat,” the “original ‘needs to touch grass’ guy,” a “clueless rich kid who’s never had to try,” a “self-important, spoiled and worthless little sh*t,” and “an emo narcissist with an inflated sense of his own self-worth.”
Millennials were the first generation to anoint old Holden as “problematic” — a 2009 New York Times piece titled “Get a life, Holden Caulfield,” quoted educators who still taught “The Catcher in the Rye,” a book that turns 75 this year, and was once a standard in the English curriculum for grades 9–11. One educator said that, when she taught at a public charter school, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’” A teacher who taught the book over 3 decades noted that “Holden’s passivity is especially galling and perplexing to many present-day students . . . “[T]hey do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes.” And one recalled a boy telling her, “We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’”
One of the timeworn accusations against Holden Caulfield is hypocrisy: This guy calls everyone else phony, but he’s just as phony!
Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews suggest that Gen Z has similar smoke for Holden, which makes sense when you consider that for these kids, active-shooter drills are as much a part of grade school as multiplication tables, and creepy full-grown adults are sliding into their DMs asking for nudes. You can’t really blame them if their response to the self-absorbed internal monologues of an unreliable narrator is, Oh, boo hoo. Get some real problems.
But they’ve got another bone to pick with Holden Caulfield: He is being used as a prop by performative men to impress those around him. “Among Gen Z, books have become a symbol not of intelligence but of ‘hotness,’ an accessory to be worn with a good outfit, wedged in the bottom of a designer bag or pretentious tote,” wrote one young woman in a piece for the Times of London. And she has some pitiless words for the callow young men toting “The Catcher in the Rye” pretentiously around: The book, she writes, “has become a go-to summer read for incel types who overly identify with the petulant protagonist Holden Caulfield . . . [W]henever [my friend] sees a man with J. D. Salinger in hand, she assumes he must still be at school: ‘It screams English literature A-level.’” Another piece, this one written by two Gen-Z women, posits that Holden himself is “the ultimate performative male.”
This take is ungenerous but not surprising, given that one of the timeworn accusations against Holden Caulfield is hypocrisy: This guy calls everyone else phony, but he’s just as phony! It did make me wonder, though, whether Gen-Z readers who are assigned “The Catcher in the Rye” still get the same decontextualized introduction to the book as I and the rest of Gen X did. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I read the book, but each time I’ve returned to it as an adult, and there have been a few, I reach the end thoroughly baffled. Are students still introduced to “Catcher” as a novel about disaffection and anomie rather than one about grief, trauma and other things that were absolutely not talked about in Salinger’s day and rarely talked about in mine? And if so, why?
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The idea that the art can be separated from the artist has never made sense to me — and the way it was foregrounded within the cultural discourse of #MeToo too often felt like a disingenuous avoidance of the clear reality that great art has been made by people who cause profound harm to others. “The Catcher in the Rye” is a text that is flatly impossible to decouple from its author: A book about trauma written in the midst of trauma by a traumatized man. This doesn’t mean that anyone reading the book needs to know Salinger’s whole deal, but both its creation (much of it was written during World War II, when Salinger served as a counterintelligence agent and was one of the first G.I.s to see the human toll at Dachau) and its wild commercial success (which repelled the author and led to his withdrawal from public life.)
Are students still introduced to “Catcher” as a novel about disaffection and anomie rather than one about grief, trauma and other things that were absolutely not talked about in Salinger’s day and rarely talked about in mine? And if so, why?
As Mikki Halpin noted in these virtual pages following his death in 2010 at the age of 91, Salinger’s quasi-hermithood, among other things, gave cover to his relationships with inappropriately young women; his desire for privacy was inflated into mythology by a “literary establishment,” Halpin wrote, whose collective investment “in the fictional, reclusive Salinger . . . is a convenient cudgel with which to silence any discussion of Salinger’s personal life, particularly any revelation of unsavory truths.”
I would add that the Salinger myth also delayed a reckoning with his most famous character’s mental health. Gen Z men are not the first to use “The Catcher in the Rye” as a prop, after all: Years before I read it, I knew it only as the book Mark David Chapman was carrying when he assassinated John Lennon in 1980 and that, in 1981, was left in the hotel room of John Hinckley Jr. shortly before he attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. (In 1989, it resurfaced in another high-profile shooting when Robert John Bardo murdered actor Rebecca Schaeffer, dropping his copy as he fled her Hollywood home.) There’s been plenty of skepticism about whether the latter two were Chapman copycats rather than murders actually inspired by the book. Either way, reluctance to associate either Salinger or his most indelible creation with crazed murderers meant keeping their own wounds at arms’ length.
(MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images) “The Catcher in the Rye”
This is, in part, why I’m surprised at Gen Z’s dismissal of Holden Caulfield as a whiny white rich-kid hypocrite. This cohort has come of age having open conversations about mental health that were unthinkable as recently as 4 decades ago; they understand the way formative traumas burrow into the minds and bodies of those affected and eventually grow unmanageable. I can definitely understand why there might not be, let’s say, a surplus of empathy for a privileged young man carelessly and repeatedly squandering his expensive education. But brushing by consequential facts of Holden’s life — parents who treat him as an out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem, the death of his brother, the suicide of his classmate, a history of being molested by older men — to call him performative feels awfully heartless for a generation this conversant with how trauma works.
Listen, I don’t know anyone who liked Holden Caulfield the first time they read the book, probably because he is not supposed to be particularly likable; Salinger wrote the book for adults, not teens. But reading “The Catcher in the Rye” as an adult, and again as the parent of a Holden-aged boy, has made me realize that if the circumstances in which young readers meet the character have been slow to change, and the lens on him informed largely by a calcified reputation of youth in revolt, that’s on the adults in the room who, like the adults in his life, can’t hear everything he’s telling us.
The shift was as swift as it was cold. Standing before reporters in the briefing room on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked a direct question: Would President Donald Trump or his administration intervene to stop the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate to the United Kingdom on 59 charges of rape, sex trafficking, assault and extreme pornography? Her single-word response — “No” — denied the brothers, who have been championed by many MAGA media figures as examples of white male persecution, a lifeline.
On Thursday, federal marshals in Miami took the Tates into custody. In addition to the charges they face in the U.K., the brothers remain embroiled in grave human-trafficking and minor-exploitation proceedings in Romania and investigations in Florida about new allegations.
In the days since their arrest, their attorney Joseph McBride — who has also represented Jan. 6 defendants — has insisted the arrest is political persecution, and he has been amplifying supportive commentary online from media figures with close ties to the Trump administration. MAGA influencer and white nationalist Nick Fuentes wrote that it would be a “national humiliation” if Trump agreed to extradite the brothers to Britain over what he called “trumped up ‘Me Too’ charges.” Other far-right influencers reportedly joined in, but to no avail.
For years, the brothers were treated by the MAGA ecosystem not as alleged traffickers facing serious criminal scrutiny, but as useful avatars of male grievance and anti-feminist rebellion.
Trump’s refusal to intervene in the Tates’ extradition fight is a much-delayed correction. For years, the brothers were treated by the MAGA ecosystem not as alleged traffickers facing serious criminal scrutiny, but as useful avatars of male grievance and anti-feminist rebellion. That bargain is now boomeranging in the direction of a different Trump: Barron.
The key to understanding how the Tate brothers rose to such political heights — and why their collapse now threatens to drag the president’s youngest son into a potentially damaging congressional spotlight — can be found in the conservative media ecosystem that laundered Andrew Tate into a right-wing icon.
When mainstream platforms like YouTube, Meta and TikTok finally moved to deplatform the Tate brothers in 2022, the right-wing media apparatus stepped in to grant Tate a second — and far more dangerous — life. Tucker Carlson first gave Tate a platform on Fox News back in 2022 and later hosted a long, sympathetic interview. Elon Musk reinstated Tate’s X account, restoring his reach to over 11 million followers while repeatedly tweeting defenses that hand-waved sex trafficking allegations as political distractions. The late Charlie Kirk chimed in on behalf of Tate: “What he says is so powerful. Our society is configured towards collapsing the American man.” MAGA podcaster Candace Owens dedicated hours of airtime to declaring the Tates’ innocence while launching vicious smear campaigns against their victims.
The brothers were indicted in Romania in 2023 on charges of rape and human trafficking, accused of running a criminal operation that lured women — including, prosecutors allege, a 17-year-old — into pornography and prostitution. But in February 2025, weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, Romanian authorities lifted the travel restrictions that had kept the Tates in the country, and the pair immediately boarded a private jet to Florida. At the time, the country’s foreign minister Emil Hurezeanu said that a U.S. official had expressed interest in the case. Trump, for his part, said he knew “nothing about” any pressure his administration might have applied.
The reporting since then has filled in the blanks. ProPublica reported that federal authorities were told to return electronic devices they had seized from the Tates during an investigation and chided by political appointees like Paul Ingrassia — a vocal Tate defender appointed to the General Services Administration. Heidi Blake, the New Yorker reporter who has covered the Tates more exhaustively than perhaps anyone else, has traced a direct line from a Munich Security Conference conversation between U.S. special envoy Richard Grenell and Hurezeanu to Romanian prosecutors reaching out to the Tates’ lawyers within days, asking what the Americans wanted. Experts labeled the political interference highly inappropriate, but it worked. The travel ban on the brothers was lifted.
Within days of Andrew Tate landing back on U.S. soil, another woman came forward accusing him of assault and strangulation — the same pattern of abuse, Blake has said, described by victim after victim in this case.
This machinery surrounding was never a secret. What has been less investigated, at least until this week, is how deep the personal relationships ran — specifically, the friendship between Andrew Tate and the president’s 20-year-old son.
According to reporting in the New York Times, Tate spoke with Barron Trump over a Zoom call last year with a mutual friend present, and the two discussed their shared belief that the Romanian case against Tate was an effort to silence him. That claim — the idea that a rape and trafficking prosecution amounts to censorship — is the same framing Tate’s MAGA allies have pushed for years. Barron’s older brother, Donald Trump Jr., has called Tate’s 2023 detention “absolute insanity.” Tate publicly boasted about his access to MAGA’s top circles, bragging in 2024 that he was “very close with the Trump family” and that he was looking forward to reminding Donald Trump that he was a “bulletproof bada*s.”
For Trump’s presidential campaign, the alliance delivered results. By leveraging the manosphere media network that Tate helped anchor, the campaign mobilized a wave of low-propensity young male voters in 2024.
So why did the Trump White House suddenly cut the Tate brothers loose? The breakdown was not sparked by a sudden moral awakening regarding sex trafficking or rape. It was likely sparked by the cardinal sin of the MAGA media universe: political disloyalty.
In February, as the administration weighed military action in the Middle East, Andrew Tate took to his livestreaming platform to launch a furious, unhinged tirade against Trump’s strike on Iran.
“I do not support war with Iran for Israel,” Tate raged to his audience, accusing the administration of driving the country into disaster while ignoring domestic collapse. “If you’re at home in America right now and you feel like your country is f****d… and moral degeneracy is out of control . . . why would the U.S. going into a war with Iran benefit anybody in America at all? Give me one possible reason. NOBODY WANTS THIS WAR.”
For a White House that demands absolute, unyielding fealty, Tate’s high-profile attack was an unpardonable breach.
When the British government authorized 38 new criminal charges against the Tates and submitted an updated extradition request to the Justice Department, the White House’s calculation was simple. The political cost of protecting two alleged serial rapists, one of whom was actively attacking the president on foreign policy, far outweighed any remaining value they brought to the youth-culture strategy. The administration threw them to the wolves.
While the administration may hope that cutting the Tates loose will close the book on this embarrassing chapter, the fallout from their tangled relationships with the first family and the wider MAGA sphere may just be beginning.
Rep.Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., has formally urged House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer to open a swift investigation into the Tate brothers’ relationships within Trump’s inner circle. In a searing letter, she highlighted grave diplomatic and ethical concerns regarding whether political networks leveraged their influence to shield accused human traffickers.
It doesn’t help the administration’s case that the Tate brothers were, by multiple accounts, still socializing with Trump-world figures in Washington in the days before their arrest. Ansari said she learned only this week that the brothers had traveled to D.C. for meetings, including one with Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas.
The Arizona congresswoman wants the committee to subpoena communications between the Tates and administration officials, and she wants Barron Trump to testify under oath about whether he “influenced official actions or administration policy” about the brothers.
There is no evidence that Barron engaged in criminal wrongdoing or played any role in the government’s decisions involving the Tates. But his choice to enthusiastically fraternize with a self-described misogynist facing dozens of horrific felony counts has exposed him to scrutiny.
Barron Trump was not an unwitting bystander dragged into a media storm. He was an active participant in defending Andrew Tate, using his influence to validate an accused predator because it fit the edgy, anti-establishment aesthetic of the modern manosphere media. Now, as congressional scrutiny looms and the Tate brothers prepare to face trial in a U.S. federal court before being extradited to London, the president’s youngest son is left facing the stark consequences of his MAGA alliances.
Major cannabis companies have donated millions to PACs aligned with President Donald Trump, according to the most recent Federal Election Commission filings. But the donations are not just a symptom of an increasingly pro-marijuana administration; they’re also indicative of an ongoing lobbying war between the marijuana, hemp and alcohol industries.
Over the past couple of months, four major marijuana companies — Verano, Curaleaf, Trulieve and Vision Management Services, a subsidiary of Green Thumb Industries — each gave $2.5 million to America First Agriculture Action Inc., a Trump-friendly super PAC. They weren’t alone in their donations. Ascend Wellness and Arboretum Bidco, two additional major cannabis companies, also gave $500,000 and $1 million to the PAC. Trulieve gave another $250,000 to the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund, a pro-Israel super PAC.
Taken together, these donations account for the vast majority of the $13 million that America First Agricultural Action Inc. has raised so far this cycle.
Charles Gantt, who serves as the treasurer for Trump’s major super PAC, MAGA Inc., also serves as the America First Agriculture Action Inc.’s treasurer. Though the industry’s PAC is relatively new, filing its statement of organization in March, it’s already released ads praising Trump’s marijuana policy.
The pro-Trump (and pro-Republican) turn of major marijuana companies marks an odd twist of fate as some of the industry’s biggest players are embracing a party that has been historically hostile to liberalized drug policies like marijuana legalization.
The pro-Trump (and pro-Republican) turn of major marijuana companies marks an odd twist of fate as some of the industry’s biggest players are embracing a party that has been historically hostile to liberalized drug policies like marijuana legalization. Notably, it’s also coming at a time when support for legalizing marijuana is sharply declining among Republican voters.
The main divide in cannabis in the United States comes down to the legal distinction between hemp and marijuana. Though both products are cannabis and are scientifically considered the same plant, they are distinguished legally. Hemp refers to cannabis containing less than 0.3% THC — the plant’s main active compound — by volume, whereas marijuana refers to cannabis with a higher THC concentration.
This minor biological difference has major regulatory implications as marijuana remains federally illegal and hemp has become de facto legal thanks to a provision in the 2018 Farm Bill. Despite the similarity of the products, marijuana companies operating in states that have legalized the sale of marijuana face significantly higher regulatory and tax burdens than hemp companies.
The situation is further complicated because the Trump administration has moved to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III drug, which would keep it illegal, but remove some red tape around research and taxes. Similarly, the psychoactive hemp market is facing an existential threat following a provision slipped into a bill to reopen the government following last year’s government shutdown.
The modification would close what was essentially a loophole created by the 2018 farm bill, which has allowed for the sale of psychoactive hemp products. This provision, however, won’t take effect until November, which has set off a flurry of activity in the recreational hemp industry to try and save their businesses, as well as proposed legislation that would keep hemp legal.
The alcohol industry also has a stake in both the legal status of hemp and marijuana. Many in the alcohol industry see their cannabis counterparts as competitors, even as other alcohol companies have themselves entered the cannabinoid seltzer market.
Joe Gerrity, the CEO of Crescent Canna, which sells hemp-infused seltzers, told Salon that from the hemp side of things, there’s the perception that “Republicans are a lot stronger.” This in part owes to the fact that hemp farmers often live in more GOP-leaning areas, but also because fewer red states have legalized marijuana.
“The reality right now is [that] Congress isn’t getting anything done and the Trump administration has shown a willingness to move otherwise stagnant issues forward,” Gerrity said. “There’s no doubt it’s politically popular to embrace the cannabis industry from a party perspective, and frankly, it shocks me that we still haven’t seen a Democrat come out of the fold in a leadership position wholly embracing marijuana and pro-cannabis legalization.”
Ryan Hunter, the chief revenue officer at Spherex, a company that sells cannabis infused vape cartridges and other products, said that the current political landscape is shaped not only by the regulatory tangle, but by two individuals: Teulieve CEO Kim Rivers, advocating for the marijuana industry, and Howard Kessler, who champions the hemp industry.
“This is how Trump operates,” Hunter said. “You’ve got to grease the palms — whatever metaphor you want to use — and um so here we are. It’s not surprising to see these large amounts of money flowing into PACs that he’s in favor of. It’s just, unfortunately, how the game is played in this current era.”
Hunter also called the lobbying a “sign of maturity” for the industry, which is a sentiment shared by other hemp and cannabis businesspeople interviewed by Salon. At the same time, he said, the fact that the same plant is treated legally differently in cases of recreational marijuana, marijuana grown at home, medical marijuana and hemp is a mess that needs to be cleaned up.
“We need to rationalize this,” Hunter said. “There’s no valid reason for the hemp industry to exist. You know, the amount of business that’s being done there, primarily around the beverages. I saw the other day that there were about 1.6 million cases of intoxicating hemp beverages sold last year. When you compare it to the number of cases of beer, which is around 2.5 billion, it’s de minimis.”
How regulatory changes happen, however, is a delicate issue. Josh Kesselman, Founder of RAW Rolling Papers, told Salon that “if Washington gets this wrong, reform could end up favoring the players who spend the most on lobbying while leaving small farmers, independent operators and the people who built this movement behind.”
“This plant should not be handed over to cannabis oligarchs who profit at the expense of everyone beneath them,” he said. “Any real reform has to protect access, protect small businesses, support research and move us closer to full normalization, not create a system where the culture gets pushed aside and the benefits flow only to insiders, lobbyists and billionaires.”
Morgan Fox, the political director at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said he doesn’t see comprehensive reform that would bring all cannabis products under a single national regulatory framework in the immediate future.
Fox noted that this sort of legislation already exists, it just doesn’t have the support to pass. He attributed this in part to powerful prohibitionists, like gambling billionaire Miriam Adelson and the Sembler family, whose donations to conservative political causes dwarf those of either hemp or marijuana companies.
“There’s certainly opposition from very, very powerful people within the Republican Party and within Congress that would make it very difficult to get any sort of legislation to the floor without severe pressure from the president,” Fox said. “I think that that’s relatively unlikely, at least in the near term, unless there’s a chance that it could potentially help him in the midterm.”
Not since “Once More with Feeling” — the 2001 musical episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” wisely released on vinyl by Mondo in 2019 — have I taken the genre of music best described as “TV songs” as seriously as I am, right this very second, listening to Lestat de Lioncourt‘s debut album, “The Failures,” released on Spotify and elsewhere just days after the finale of AMC’s “The Vampire Lestat.”
Confronted with pondering just how good or “valid” rock songs written for a show about vampires could be, you may be tempted to take on a “what in the Dingoes Ate My Baby is this now,” attitude about the whole deal, but factor in that each original song was written by Daniel Hart — who not only wrote the music for both previous seasons of “Interview with the Vampire,” but has also written music for “A Ghost Story,” “Mother Mary” plus countless other projects — and that these songs are sung by Lestat himself (Sam Reid), and it shakes out to the album as a whole being worthy of not just respect as a body of music, but heavy rotation for being actually . . . well . . . good.
Out of the 23 tracks on “The Failures,” which include demos, remixes and alternate versions of songs featured in “The Vampire Lestat,” the stand-outs and repeat plays, for me, can be found in the Sisters of Mercy-esque “When I Call Out Your Name,” along with powerballads from the show such as “The Loneliness,” “Stained Glass Eyes,” and “Brutal Love” — all of which would not seem out of place on a late-career Peter Murphy album.
“I actually found it much easier than writing songs about myself. Having the permission to be silly and bratty was so freeing,” Hart said to The Quietus, discussing composing from Lestat’s perspective.
Silly and bratty as the songs can sometimes be, they’re also beautiful, fun and worth a serious listen.
Early in his extraordinary new documentary, “Remake,” seasoned filmmaker Ross McElwee reminisces with his young son, Adrian, about their travels together, presenting McElwee’s films at various festivals around the world. “What’s your favorite place that we’ve been to, Adrian?” McElwee asks his son in the archival footage. Adrian recalls a snafu from the Munich Film Festival, but can’t quite remember the details. McElwee explains that the numbers on his film reels were mislabeled, causing extended confusion as they tried to put the footage back in the correct, chronological order. Still a child, Adrian looks off into the distance, biting his gelato spoon while registering the information.
Then the footage burns out, replaced by shots of Adrian across his youth, preserved in celluloid amber: raking leaves on an autumn afternoon, waving a sparkler around in the summertime, looking at himself in the mirror as a baby. McElwee’s voice, more mature and stoic than before, fades in. “The story I thought I was telling with my filmmaking, the stories of lives lived over decades, is now disjointed, confused — the reels are all out of order,” he says. “First there is a father, and he has a son: me. But then it starts all over. I am now father, and I have a son: you. But something goes awry. Something goes off-script. And then, suddenly, you’re gone.”
“Remake” is McElwee’s first film in 15 years, appearing like a jewel out of a mountain of life’s rubble. His extended absence from filmmaking was necessitated by Adrian’s death in 2016 and the monumental torrent of confusion and emotional displacement that followed. McElwee’s last documentary, 2011’s “Photographic Memory,” saw Adrian as a young adult, trying to come into his own and figure out his place in life amid a shifting social landscape riddled with digital black holes.
(Music Box Films) Adrian McElwee in “Remake”
McElwee stitches together the past and present to find new meaning in their seams, a jagged line that runs through time and points toward the future. To call his latest film a contemporary masterwork would be true, but there’s also no quantifying the magic McElwee conjures here, no comparing it to anything else.
In that film, McElwee set out to reconcile his somewhat fractured relationship with Adrian, who’d become distant and disillusioned compared to his spritely, curious youth, by traveling back to France, where he worked as a photographer’s assistant in his early 20s. In retracing his steps, McElwee sought to understand Adrian better, to comprehend the grasp digital media had on his son in contrast to his own fascination with the analog film camera he frequently used to capture his family, both for his own memories and for his documentaries. In “Remake,” McElwee laments the hope that making “Photographic Memory” gave him, an aspiration that he was depicting his son on the cusp of finding his way through the dark. “The film might’ve been shot as a documentary,” McElwee says, “but now it’s fiction.”
“Remake” may be the story and study of a tragedy. But McElwee’s nonlinear construction and brusque, confessional narration slowly transform the film into something much deeper, a poignant work of art that instantly yet subtly aligns itself with the great stories of our time. His mission is unassuming. This is a film McElwee feels compelled to make, as if it were something living inside of him that had to be excised by any means necessary.
Like all grieving, it is complicated and disordered, and beautifully so. McElwee stitches together the past and present to find new meaning in their seams, a jagged line that runs through time and points toward the future. To call his latest film a contemporary masterwork would be true, but there’s also no quantifying the magic McElwee conjures here, no comparing it to anything else. “Remake” is a truly singular piece of art, a self-reflexive rumination on life and the result of all its passions. It is memory embodied.
Sometime in the 2010s, McElwee received a call from director and producer Steve Carr, who wanted to explore remaking his breakthrough documentary, 1986’s “Sherman’s March,” into a narrative film. “Sherman’s March” loosely explored McElwee’s hapless search for love during a trip to his native South, where he planned on making a film about a Civil War campaign through the area. Along the way, the movie became less about American history and more about McElwee’s family and his experiences with religion and relationships.
Carr, the director of fun-for-the-whole-family crowdpleasers like “Daddy Day Care” and “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” didn’t exactly seem like the best candidate to take on something as intricate as “Sherman’s March.” But at the time, a teenage Adrian, hoping to break into the more commercial side of the film business, was vexed by his father’s reluctance to pursue Hollywood money-makers. So, in hopes that a remake might bring the two of them together in some way, McElwee signed the rights to “Sherman’s March” over to Carr, with a condition: McElwee would be granted access to produce a making-of documentary about the new film. McElwee set up his camera to film himself the day he signed the contract. He preferred an easygoing static tripod shot — a point Adrian contested, as is shown in the film. After some back and forth, McElwee relented, letting Adrian try his slow zooms and dynamic shots. The final product in “Remake” is a combination of the two styles, with the loving squabble between a father and his son left in the middle.
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“Remake” is often startingly honest in this way. McElwee refuses to scrub the truth from his personal histories, choosing instead to confront his own regrets head-on. His regret lingers alongside his grief, allowing the viewer to understand his complex feelings of remorse. Occasionally, McElwee will verbalize his paternal contrition. But most of the time, his choices in archival footage do the talking, asking silent questions. Was he too hard on his son? Did he push him in the wrong direction by trying to reorient his path? Did the fun of the film festival circuit eventually become a blinding limelight, through which Adrian couldn’t see past as he got older? None of these questions have answers. Still, McElwee seeks meaning that may be embedded somewhere in the film grain, revisiting the footage he compiled during the documentary for a remake that never came to fruition, and measuring its tenor against his finished films.
In the process, McElwee creates a patchwork tapestry, comprised of vignettes across time. This one heartwarming, that one agonizing. Together, they form a rich yet incomplete portrait of an existence cut short, which McElwee hopes to broaden by weaving in meaning from before and after Adrian’s life, all captured by McElwee’s omnipresent camera.
(Music Box Films) Adrian McElwee in “Remake”
But even that begins to feel disingenuous. There’s an elephant in the room in every scene, and its lens follows the subject everywhere. “Remake” stars McElwee, his son and the camera — that one simple tool that connects Adrian and his father through space and time, life and death. What forged McElwee’s passion and helped him establish his life’s work now reveals its dual nature as the wedge that kept him and Adrian apart. For McElwee, the revelation presents a new crisis. Was he so concerned with capturing his son’s malaise as Adrian became an adult that he missed details he might’ve seen if one eye weren’t looking through the viewfinder? Set against the backdrop of our modern culture, where we’re filming everything but listening to no one, McElwee finds himself trapped in irony’s clutches. In his desire to portray Adrian’s immersion in parasocial worlds filled with shadowy, destructive figures, McElwee’s own perspective was equally one-sided.
Of course, this is a film about life, and nothing in life is ever so simple. Alongside his regret, McElwee wears compassion for himself and even more for his son, bravely journeying into Adrian’s own archives, including footage from a film Adrian was making about his addiction and recovery. McElwee finds images both startling and serene; videos that fill in gaps he couldn’t on his own. He lovingly omits most graphic footage, but commits to approaching his and Adrian’s shared story from a different viewpoint — a remake.
“Remake” stars McElwee, his son and the camera — that one simple tool that connects Adrian and his father through life and death. For McElwee, the revelation presents a new crisis. Was he so concerned with capturing his son’s malaise that he missed details he might’ve seen if one eye weren’t looking through the viewfinder?
Throughout the film, alongside the contemplation on the sacrifices he’s made for his work, McElwee repeatedly revisits the importance of filmmaking from different angles: as a tool for preservation, for storytelling, for survival. A film, especially a documentary film, can often tell the story of our lives more succinctly than we ever could. It can also distort that same story into something untruthful. It’s both fact and fiction, and the meaning changes depending on your vantage point.
This idea got me thinking about a class I took in college about ethnographic filmmaking, after an extended break from school following some of my own issues that took me off-track and made my life listless. Searching for direction, I found guidance in professor and documentary filmmaker Carolyn Strachan, whose average RateMyProfessor score hovered somewhere around 2.1. She was a stickler for analysis, whose intensive assignments were the bane of many classmates. But her thorough coursework and off-the-beaten-path syllabus of films opened my eyes to countless new ideas and perspectives. Her class reignited my passion for both writing and film, and pushed me back toward a version of myself that I recognized.
It took some time to realize how fundamental this course was. But when I understood the connection last year, I tried to get in touch with Professor Strachan to thank her, only to find out that, in 2022, she died after a long battle with cancer. It was a personal matter that never came up in class, but almost certainly influenced her passion for her work and her teaching. Immediately, I thought of how many of my peers complained that her assignments were too difficult, and her film choices were too unconventional to analyze easily, even for college-level writers. She wanted too much from us, they thought. Now I see that she simply wanted us to work a little harder to see how truly beautiful and varied life can be.
I was upset that I’d never be able to thank her, to laud her for pushing students out of their comfort zones by showing them documentaries that were not easily palatable. There was nowhere to put my grief. So, I’m putting some of it here. As McElwee’s film reminded me, there’s no easy way of making sense of life. But art is our foremost way of working through it, of trying to understand who we are, who we become and how. There’s no better way to honor someone than through art, even if it’s imperfect, even if it can’t reflect their substantial impact, no matter how brief.
Shortly after he and Adrian reminisce about the mishap in Munich, McElwee continues his narration. “So, yes, you’re gone,” he says. “But you’re not gone, not entirely. Because I still have all these moments with you I captured on film.”
If you live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle or any city with a high population of Burning Man devotees, it’s nigh impossible for “The Man Will Burn” to be a prejudice-free viewing experience.
If you don’t, the extent of what you know about Burning Man is likely based on the breathless cable news coverage of 2023’s Mudpocalypse, or headlines like this: “Burning Man’s Orgy Dome asks for help.” I assure you that it did not originate in The Onion.
No counterculture event is more shrouded in hype than this annual gathering of thrill-seekers, Instagram influencers, billionaires and whichever artists can still afford to attend. People from some walks of life, ranging from the upper middle class to the .001%, shed their social divisions and come together in the Nevada desert to party and screw and inhale art and drugs and open all their chakra holes or whatever.
(Courtesy of HBO) Zoe
Then they bring that energy home with them. You will know these beings, called Burners, by their love of neon fake fur, white girl box braids and disconium stretch pants. They may also insist on being called by their Playa name, something like “Dirty Rizz,” even though their driver’s license identifies them as Derwin.
Hence my interest in Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi’s four-part docuseries. I was genuinely searching for real answers in “The Man Will Burn” to lingering questions like, what’s up with these clowns and why do so many people despise them? Noujaim and Gandhi don’t provide answers. Not intentionally, anyway. What we can surmise is purely based on who they feature over its four hours and who’s left out.
Three episodes of “The Man Will Burn” have aired with very little interrogation of how well it lives up to its hallowed 10 Principles, one of which is Radical Inclusion. In a docuseries about an overwhelmingly white community, a Black artist’s camp receives the briefest drive-by. Granted, one of the people the series follows, Ray Christian, is a Black veteran from North Carolina who finds community with a welcoming camp from his area.
Overall, though, Noujaim and Gandhi would rather build their drama around Burning Man Project CEO Marian Goodell, a nice lady struggling to keep this hipster hootenanny alive.
(Courtesy of HBO) Marian Goodell
Goodell and the senior members of The Org, as everyone calls the BMP, are the last connection to its late founder Larry Harvey, who died in 2018. Harvey’s dream began with a beach burn in San Francisco in the mid ‘80s. When the crowds grew too big, he and his fellow artists moved the festivities into the Nevada desert. Then, within the last few years, Elon Musk’s brother sailed into the chat on a raft of cash.
If “The Man Will Burn” has a villain, it is Kimbal Musk, the avatar for all the billionaires who changed Burning Man and the world for the worse after arriving on the scene a few years ago. It helps that he’s dressed as the Worst Guy at the Sex Jamboree, down to his cowboy hat – the modern safarist’s pith helmet.
Seattleites, however, can attest that Burning Man’s ruin began long ago, pretty much since Microsofties and Amazonians invaded it in the early aughts. Along with turning local party conversations into Olympic games for the obnoxious, these folks had the same gentrifying impact on The Playa as they did in historically non-white neighborhoods and overall affordability. The hagiographic tone of “The Man Will Burn” obscures that.
Burning Man turns 40 this year. If it were a person, that threshold might mark the start of some serious self-examination.
But it does make one wonder what Burning Man would be without tech bros. Indeed, where would all of us be?
“The Man Will Burn” has a similar value to Burning Man itself, in that you can either afford to care about its nonsense or continue living life like a person with bills to pay. Then again, for those of us who enjoy reading certain entertainment like tea leaves, even slight efforts like this provide a colorful gaze at how economic stratification upends systems originally meant to level the field for creative people, including ones intended purely for play.
It’s also obvious to any critical thinker that the idiot rich aren’t the only plagues on Black Rock City. Like any religion, to use the term Harvey drops in an audio clip, the problem isn’t the concept. It’s the people. A notion that blossomed from an idealistic vision was Martinized into a cult-like excursion for the privileged. Some make one week-long party into their whole identity. Those people are some of Burning Man’s worst PR reps, contorting the meaning of its principles to suit themselves.
The episode witnessing the Renegade Burn, a bootstrapped Burning Man that took place while the COVID pandemic was still raging, exemplifies this. Those howling weekend barbarians hail their ability to pull it off as evidence of their Radical Self-Reliance and dedication to community.
Meanwhile, the locals in the nearby town of Gerlach, Nevada, worried about where all those people planned to defecate. In their bushes? Their yards? An enterprising shopkeeper stocks makeshift potties. That is the last we see or hear of that dirty business, which might as well be a visual metaphor for this docuseries’ shortcomings.
Burning Man turns 40 this year. If it were a person, that threshold might mark the start of some serious self-examination. Alternately, that’s a classic age to light the fuse on a midlife crisis by, say, divorcing, cashing out a 401K account and running off to Nevada in August to get blasted on psilocybin and ketamine while dancing nude in the middle of a dust storm. Who are we to judge?
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For those very delights — oh, and the art too, yeah, sure — are why many people still want to go, a desire that watching “The Man Will Burn” will only strengthen. But you’re urged to also peek at the views beyond this pretty thing right in front of you, starting with the price tag. In 2026, tickets start at $550 per person plus $165 for a parking pass. That’s before calculating expenses for gear, food, water and other vital supplies.
No wonder the Orgy Dome’s keepers are fundraising. I’d rather not picture them doing that naked, but it’s fun to imagine some sparkly-faced busker on some corner in the Haight, singing an a cappella version of Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” and passing the hat to pay for lube. But that can happen any place on any day, and nobody has to mess up an arid ecosystem to enjoy it.
“The Man Will Burn” streams new episodes over the course of four weeks, starting July 9 and ending July 30.
President Donald Trump is ramping up the war in Iran once again, but this escalation comes while the United States has comparatively fewer tools in its military arsenal — and to soften the war’s economic effects.
Since the total breakdown of the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran in early July, the conflict has intensified, with the countries exchanging fire for 11 days straight, resulting in four American deaths. The total number of U.S. deaths since the war began in February now stands at 18, alongside nearly a hundred casualties, per reporting from the New York Times.
The escalation comes as the U.S. is in a weaker position than when it started, with historically low levels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, and with comparatively diminished military and diplomatic resources.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that the reserve fell to about 311 million barrels of oil over the previous week, the lowest level since March 1983. This happened as part of an ongoing tapping of the reserve that’s expected to conclude in mid-to-late August or early September. Pending a change in regulation, this will be the end of the line for releases from the reserve, which is required by statute to maintain a minimum inventory of about 250 million barrels of oil.
According to Max Pyziur, a director for transportation fuel and natural gas project at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, this drawdown is one of the major factors that has helped suppress the price of oil and gasoline in the United States since the start of the war.
Without the ability to rely on the reserve, Pyziur said he expects the government and oil companies to explore more alternatives to Middle Eastern oil, such as sources in Venezuela and Argentina, along with additional transportation options to get oil out of the region. While these alternatives are already being explored, new infrastructure will likely take years to come online, Pyziur said, which means Americans will have to deal with elevated prices.
“The tools are running out,” he said. “We only have so much time as far as strategic reserves. We could be in an extended period of time with a four-dollar handle on gasoline prices, five bucks for diesel. And if that continues, well, then that affects the economy, that affects expectations, and it might affect political outcomes if the Democrats are smart.”
Pyziur also noted that oil prices have been suppressed in part because China slashed its own imports of oil. A resumption to pre-war levels of imports could cause global oil prices to increase significantly, but there’s no guarantee that China would ramp up imports, he said. The country’s previous import levels were part of an effort to fill its own oil reserves, and even if it decides to resume them, there would be a limit to how much oil they could store.
But it’s not just American oil reserves that have diminished since the beginning of the war in February. The U.S. military’s own weapons stockpiles, including crucial drone and missile interceptors, were expended in the first period of the war. Remaining stockpiles of other munitions vary.
Anelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Middle East Program, highlighted that there are some questions as to whether Trump is even fully aware of current levels of munitions stockpiles, due to a reluctance among Pentagon leaders to deliver bad news to the president.
“The situation is significantly worse this time. But I don’t know that we’re sort of grappling with that. The average American again may think, ‘Oh, just another round of this stupid war, here we go again,’ it could really be much worse this time,” Sheline said.
One potentially significant difference is the entry of the Houthis into the war, with the Iran-aligned group announcing a blockade of Saudi Arabia. While it remains to be seen how exactly the promised blockade could play out, the Houthis’ engagement represents a significant expansion of the war.
The most consequential difference between now and when the war began, however, may be the degradation of trust in diplomatic efforts between the U.S. and Iran. This makes escalation more likely, Sheline said, which could result in attacks on infrastructure like desalination plants, which serve as a necessary water supply for parts of Iran, as well as the Gulf countries.
“The Iranians may be less willing to engage diplomatically because they’ve been burned several times in the past,” she said. “The possibility of escalation, therefore, seems much more likely, the result then potentially being a truly devastating humanitarian impact, both for the Iranian population and for the Gulf population.”
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