Despite his best efforts to govern like a tin-pot dictator, Donald Trump cannot control his own government. Now he is panicking. In the last week, his administration confirmed with its own actions that its problem with press leaks is not going away — no matter how many federal agents it sends to reporters’ front doors.

To be clear, Trump is not fighting leaks so much as trying to criminalize causing embarrassment. In a desperate, heavy-handed bid to plug the dam, on Friday night federal agents descended on the homes of several New York Times journalists. Their crime? Reporting about the president’s new, $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 “gifted” to him by the Qatari royal family. 

From the moment the gift became public, national security experts immediately warned that the luxury liner used by a foreign royal family posed massive security risks and would require extensive, highly complex retrofitting — a process experts estimated would take at least two years. But Trump, impatient to show off his new “palace in the sky,” demanded the process be rushed, and when he flew the plane to a NATO summit in Turkey, the reality of his rush job caught up with him. The Secret Service intervened on the return trip because the Qatari plane lacked basic defensive countermeasures needed to protect the president amid escalating hostilities with Iran. So Trump boarded the old Air Force One for the flight home, leaving his $400 million foreign gift behind. 

Now Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt find themselves facing the very real threat of being held in contempt of court and thrown behind bars if they refuse to hand over their sources for the information, a rare and consequential step that press-freedom advocates warn could have significant implications for investigative journalism.

Whenever the press exposes information that makes the administration look reckless, the response is increasingly subpoenas. This time, FBI Director Kash Patel was reportedly dragged into the White House for an eight-hour Friday strategy session to micromanage the leak investigation. The fact that this operation was conducted from the seat of executive power, rather than FBI headquarters, is an egregious violation of the post-Watergate norms meant to keep federal law enforcement free from partisan political interference. But norms mean nothing to Patel, who recently sued The Atlantic over its reporting.

The Times, for its part, called the subpoenas “an extraordinary escalation” and said the appearance of federal law enforcement at journalists’ homes should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the First Amendment. If the administration were sincerely worried about classified leaks, it would focus on the people who allegedly mishandled classified material, not on the journalists doing the work of reporting. Instead, the government is demanding testimony that could make every insider think twice before telling the press something the public needs to know. 

Notably, nobody in this saga has claimed the reporting is false. The White House isn’t accusing the Times of fabricating a story about the plane’s vulnerabilities. Instead the administration’s tactics echo the broader Trump-era pattern documented in earlier leak probes, including the Justice Department’s aggressive hunt for sources during Trump’s first term that swept up journalists and lawmakers’ records. Earlier this year, the DOJ issued similar grand jury subpoenas to reporters at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, then quietly withdrew them after both outlets pushed back — a reminder that these campaigns are not immovable legal inevitabilities but tests of institutional nerve. 

Before the Times published its story on Trump’s new plane, a senior FBI official contacted a reporter and a senior editor at the newspaper and asked them to hold the article, framing it as a national security matter while declining to explain what the actual security issue was. The official also asked the paper to disclose its sources, but the Times refused. 

The guidelines for targeting journalists have been steadily eroded under this administration. In 2025, then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued new guidelines that drastically expanded the type of information that could trigger a federal media crackdown, lowering the bar from strictly “classified” information to anything deemed “sensitive” or “protected.” Armed with this loosened standard, the administration has weaponized the justice system through investigations of leaks. 

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On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon and the DOJ are standing up a joint task force to hunt down and prosecute government leakers. In a video posted to X, Hegseth said he has delegated broad new authority to the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel to gather “all information, records and support” related to media leak investigations, and warned that anyone who discloses sensitive information will be met with “the full force of the law.”

But an administration that had actually cowed the media into submission wouldn’t need a joint task force. 

Hegseth spent his first year at the Pentagon trying to strangle the press corps that covers him: evicting news organizations from their workspaces, imposing mandatory security escorts on reporters simply moving through the building and demanding journalists sign pledges that they would seek official pre-approval before publishing stories about his department. Reporters, to their credit, refused and walked out rather than sign away their independence. Lawsuits followed. Meanwhile, the information kept flowing. The embarrassing stories kept landing, and the man in charge of the Pentagon now needs the Justice Department’s help to plug a hole he cannot plug alone. 

Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, put it perfectly when he noted that the administration’s obsession with leaks is actually a testament to the resilience of the press. “Every day, there’s another story coming out about what’s happening in this administration,” Baron told The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr. “They crank up their efforts to stop leaks [in response], going to an extreme that we haven’t seen before.”

After the Times published its story about Trump’s flight out of Turkey, the president, attuned to any public perception of weakness, did what he always does: He went to Truth Social to spin a ridiculous lie. He claimed he took the original plane “for old time’s sake” — a ludicrous tale, considering his unsentimental nature and the volume of complaints he has leveled against the aircraft — and sent the new luxury jet to a U.K. airbase to “honor our brave men and women of the Military” by letting them tour it.

But his diversions won’t work. They never really do. The embarrassing stories keep coming because the sources keep talking. Trump’s administration is a chaotic, paranoid ecosystem where officials constantly leak to either protect themselves, damage their rivals or sound the alarm on the shocking incompetence they witness every day. Try as he might, Donald Trump cannot subpoena his way out of the truth.

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People still marvel at Miyazaki’s handcrafted backgrounds and his painstaking dedication to balancing its feather-light score with the melodies of flowing water or the gentle crunch of a child’s footfalls on grass and gravel. But Mei’s first meet-cute with her giant friend Totoro is what got me: she plops on his round belly as he sleeps, waking him up with her laugh as he yawns with a mouth big enough to swallow her whole. But Totoro would never harm Mei. That would break the spell Miyazaki weaves in every frame leading up to that moment.

“Totoro is where my consciousness begins,” Miyazaki once said. “It explains how my mind works.”

In the late 1980s – and certainly today, much more so – urban living distanced millions of people from their close connection to nature . . . and their parents. America had its latchkey generation and, along with that, a growing sense that the world is a dangerous place, especially its wilder parts.

Among the many culturally specific details that distributors feared would be misconstrued by Americans, the sight of a small child tumbling into a troll’s nest in the woods without any element of threat must have been low on their list.

Yet that’s precisely what made my first viewing of “Totoro” so unforgettable: Mei and Satsuki’s safety was never in doubt. Their father doesn’t dismiss their brush with the forest’s spirits as juvenile fantasy, either. Instead, he tells them that trees and people used to be good friends. By rekindling that relationship, the sisters (who are voiced by Dakota and Elle Fanning in the 2005 English language version) gain a huge and adorable new neighbor.

 

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All that said, there were parts of the spirit world that I wasn’t entirely on board with. The Catbus is the movie’s second most popular mascot, but let’s be real — it looks like something out of acid nightmare. The thing’s Cheshire feline grin even made Satsuki a little nervous. Only when it reappeared later to give the girls a ride to the hospital did I drop my guard.

Today we take the hallowed status of “My Neighbor Totoro” for granted. In Japan, he’s a beloved figure on par with any Disney character. Pixar affirms this by incorporating a Totoro cameo into “Toy Story 3.” Sulley from “Monsters, Inc.” is said to have been inspired by Totoro, which Studio Ghibli winked at in 2021 by tweeting a version of the rainy bus stop scene that inserted him and his buddy Mike into the frame.

(©1988 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli) Still from “My Neighbor Totoro.” ©1988 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli

“Totoro is where my consciousness begins,” Miyazaki once said. “It explains how my mind works.” Deep observers of his catalog also view it as his most biographical feature, citing how closely Satsuki and Mei’s bucolic retreat resembles a chapter in the filmmaker’s childhood when his own mother was gravely ill.

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But to me, it’s a calm establishment of Miyazaki’s genius, acknowledged by its ranking on many best film lists, including one compiled by the late Akira Kurosawa — the only animated title he included on a list of 100 movies.

“My Neighbor Totoro” is a gateway into a pastoral ideal that still exists in living memory, reviving parts of our imagination that maturity has stifled into dormancy.  And for 86 minutes, it assures us that some of the greatest cinematic treasures are also blissfully conflict-free.

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Remember that scene in “The Lion King,” where Mufasa calls Simba to the top of Pride Rock and tells his son that one day, everything the sunlight touches will be his? Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos must put that scene on a loop every night to help him fall asleep. That way, it’s also the first thing he hears when he wakes up in the morning, ready for another busy day of using his money and power to make virtually everything so much worse. If only he let the scene play a little longer, he’d hear Mufasa’s critical addendum: “There’s more to being king than getting your way all the time.”

Last week, a still-unconfirmed report in Puck stated that Netflix is entering initial talks to acquire Letterboxd, the film-logging and review platform beloved by hardcore and casual cinephiles alike. Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount Skydance, private equity firms RedBird and TPG, and Reddit co-creator Alexis Ohanian have also reportedly tossed their hats in the ring, setting up early sales meetings with Letterboxd. In April, Semafor reported that Letterboxd was also in talks with Comcast spin-off Versant, which owns Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes. As of now, Letterboxd is majority-owned by the Canadian holding company Tiny, which has a 60% stake, while the remaining 40% is owned by the platform’s co-founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow.

Naturally, the news of a potential corporate sale hit the very active and very opinionated community of Letterboxd users like the two cars that bounce Brad Pitt back and forth between their windshields in “Meet Joe Black.” Each Friday, Letterboxd posts a prompt on its X account asking users to reply with their last four films logged on the platform. Hundreds of people treat the request like religion, posting screenshots of their recent ratings to find new people in the community to befriend and follow. But last week, the replies were inundated with complaints that Letterboxd had defected to the corporate dark side, along with fearful pleas for the platform’s owners to reconsider. An edited screenshot of Letterboxd’s user interface replaced the four film posters with a concise four-word appeal: “PLEASE. DON’T. SELL. OUT,” with the “N” in “DON’T” replaced by Netflix’s unmistakable red logo.

Some may argue that any platform scaling as fast as Letterboxd is bound to go corporate. Since its official debut in 2011, Letterboxd has amassed a whopping 26 million users. At that rate, the stable yet virtually limitless cash flow that comes from selling to a multi-billion-dollar company could be a boon for maintaining consistent growth and usability. (Letterboxd has become somewhat notorious for its extended server outages in the past couple of years.)

But there’s a major difference between Letterboxd selling to a mass-media company like Versant and a glorified porta-potty like Netflix — the dumping ground for all that is lousy and decrepit in film and television. Since its expansion from movie rentals and streaming into original content, Netflix has made it clear that its sole priority is Netflix, not its customers, and certainly not the art of visual media. For a platform like Letterboxd, which has built its brand on reverence for film and all those who love it, forking over ownership to a company like Netflix would be a cold act of back-stabbing betrayal. And while no brand is exempt from selling out, and tying your affection to a business is a fool’s game in the first place, if Letterboxd must change, the least they can do is change with a modicum of integrity.

Since 2011, Letterboxd has transformed from a simple film-logging platform where you can see what your friends are watching into a full-scale film media empire. The site and app are entirely free, but two paid tiers offer more profile customization, filters and features, all with zero third-party ads. It would be an understatement to say that the site’s library of films available for logging, rating and reviewing is extensive. Letterboxd houses virtually every film you could ever think of: blockbusters, indies, international films, softcore retro porn, short films, TV movies, that obscure film you caught half of on television when you were a kid but never stopped thinking about, and much, much more. A built-in function lets users add films to their watchlist with the touch of a button, and watchlists are easily sortable in case you’re in the mood for something specific.

In recent years, Letterboxd has made a foray into journalism, hiring an editorial team of staff and freelancers, who publish solid film writing on Letterboxd Journal. And on red carpets and film festivals, you can find movie and industry leaders feeding their four favorite films into a microphone emblazoned with Letterboxd’s orange, green and blue dot logo.

But despite all of this swift and massive growth, Letterboxd’s ethos has remained extremely simple: Cinephilia can be a solitary passion, but it’s made better with friends.

I’ve been an active Letterboxd user and one of the platform’s many evangelists for nearly a decade. It’s the only social media platform that doesn’t drive up my blood pressure within 15 seconds of logging on. While some use the site as a social network, I like to think of it as a personal diary. For those who use art to help shade in the textures of their lives — as sticking points to shape a memory — there is no better place to do so than Letterboxd. One of my favorite things about the site is that I can look back at the hundreds of films I’ve logged into one easily accessible archive to see what my opinion was on any given film, or who I watched it with and in what context. It’s an amazing place to keep track of your own opinions and watch how they transform. The first time I watched “Vox Lux” in January 2019, I wasn’t so sure about the Natalie Portman pop-star drama, giving it three stars. By the third time I’d logged it in 2020, “Vox Lux” earned a full, effusive five stars, a heart, and a glowing review.

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Like others, I have my own system of beliefs about how the platform is best used and how films should be logged. That’s one of the great things about Letterboxd: Everyone uses it differently, and those variations reflect a wide array of tastes in film. Some cinema snobs might find Letterboxd a distasteful asterisk on film culture. But if you really adore the art form, Letterboxd’s popularity is a rare net positive in an era when tech is largely being used to pit humanity against art and each other.

So, of course, companies like Netflix, Paramount Skydance and Sony would seek to corrupt that purity in pursuit of power. Netflix and other streamers have already split the film industry down the middle, separating those who venerate the art form from those who venerate the dollar, leaving many Hollywood titans flailing somewhere in the middle. Take Rian Johnson, whose deal with Netflix has led to his “Knives Out” films being relegated to tiny theatrical release windows in limited markets before being tossed onto the streamer. (If the franchise didn’t vie for awards, which require a theatrical release for consideration, it likely wouldn’t play in theaters at all.) Then there’s Greta Gerwig, who fought for exclusive 45-day theatrical releases for her upcoming adaptations of “The Chronicles of Narnia” — one of the first major films distributed by Netflix to break from the streaming model Sarandos pioneered. Sarandos has been openly cavalier about his belief that the theatrical release is “outdated,” going so far as to claim that Netflix saved Hollywood. But with the box office rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic, boasting record returns over the last year, Sarandos and all media companies that subscribe to the Netflix business model are desperately seeking new ways to market bad films.

This is precisely why dedicated Letterboxd users fear a potential sale: If Netflix, Sony or Paramount gets its hands on the platform, Letterboxd is likely to go the way of everything else those companies touch. A streamer-owned film-logging platform can kiss objectivity goodbye. Letterboxd’s “popular with friends” feature would likely be littered with streaming slop. The recently launched Letterboxd Video Store — a “rental store built for film discovery,” filled with curated selections and unreleased novelties  — would become a synergistic attempt to get users to pay to rent streamer-exclusive films without a subscription. Letterboxd Journal would be replaced by the advertorial “journalism” of Netflix Tudum, or lame writing about the library of films currently available on whichever streamer or studio makes the shiniest offer. Letterboxd, as we know and love it, would cease to exist, transforming into another nu-media ouroboros. Even if nothing gold can stay, must it always meet such a tragic end?

I wish there were a more pleasant answer. Maybe there’s a chance Letterboxd will be sold to Versant, and the company will integrate movie tickets and Rotten Tomatoes scores directly into its interface — it wouldn’t be the worst fate. But if I could log how many times I’ve seen this sort of film play out on Letterboxd, it would be one of my most-watched. MySpace and Tumblr, once spaces for boundless creativity, died the moment they sold out. Facebook revealed itself as Satan’s playground. Twitter opened a floodgate of Nazis and nonconsensual, illegal AI porn the moment Elon Musk took control.

Letterboxd was once a shining beacon among all of these horror stories, which already had their own unique problems before their formal acquisitions. In its 15 years of operation, Letterboxd has only adapted in ways that better serve its users and the film industry as a whole. Sure, it might be annoying that studios are trying to pass off overly enthusiastic five-star Letterboxd reviews as legitimate film criticism in marketing on posters and in trailers. But that’s not Letterboxd’s fault. The site’s only flaw is being a nice place to spend some time online — interacting with friends while finding new movies to watch and adore or abhor — in an age when online joy is punishable by death.

I guess if Letterboxd decides to sell to a media company and becomes objectively worse, disappointed users can migrate to A24’s physical, paper-bound film logs. There’s nothing unsavory there! Oh, that’s right, A24 just took $75 million of Google money to fund AI development. Pencil and computer paper, it is. If Netflix gets into the office supplies business, then we’re really screwed.

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