Throughout July, The Swell is celebrating the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.
My first gray whale sighting was entirely accidental. My husband and I had pulled over at a park somewhere on the Washington Coast, gotten out of the car to stretch our legs and decided to take a brief walk on a nearby beach.
I must have only taken about 10 steps when the sea titan breached, its spotted skin flashing in the sunlight briefly before plunging beneath the waves. Then it emerged again and submerged, rising and falling and growing smaller as it moved further away.
Before I relocated to the Pacific Northwest, I had only seen whales and other wildlife common to this region on TV. That makes Seattle a fitting place to have taken in “Princess Mononoke” for the first time.
When it made its stateside debut in 1999, I was still intoxicated by the city’s proximity to mountains, old growth forests and water – so much of it, fresh or salty. With all that in my backyard, Hayao Miyazaki’s verdant scenery teeming with ancient trees did not look so foreign. That made its giant beast gods feel real too, along with their snarling rage against annihilation.
Next year, “Princess Mononoke” turns 30. Its setting is much older, a version of medieval Japan where humans are crafting iron into firearms and beasts can talk, but nobody wants to listen to each other.
“Princess Mononoke” begins with a worm-covered demon attacking a pastoral village, only to be slain by its prince, Ashitaka. When the thing dies, the worms fall away to reveal that it wasn’t always a demon, but a boar god felled by a dark force. The village elders send Ashitaka west to find out how this curse came to be. What he finds is a conflict pitting human progress, and its attenuating battle for power and domination, against nature.
I was raised near the shore of Chicago’s slice of Lake Michigan, a body of water wide and blue enough to pass for the sea. We didn’t have whales, just freshwater fish like alewifes, which stunk up the beaches with annual die-offs that occurred in huge numbers. When I was a kid, I always wondered why that happened, and the only explanation adults could provide amounted to, “Because.”
Humans are raised to accept such things are part of a cycle that repeats no matter what we do, and regardless of whether whatever we’re doing impacts that cycle. Right now, gray whale carcasses are washing ashore in Washington at an alarming rate, with 30 dead ones counted so far, only five short of the 2019 record that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration designated as an unusual mortality event.
What’s more depressing is that a research biologist interviewed by KING-TV, Seattle’s NBC affiliate, stated that the beached whales people have encountered likely represent only a quarter to a fifth of the total death toll.
The suspected culprit behind this loss is precisely what most would guess – warming seas, melting arctic ice and a decrease in prey availability. Yet many still doubt that the choices we make for convenience’s sake are destroying the planet.
Ashitaka’s frustrations hit me like an earthquake decades ago, and still do. His people are ancient and few, a clan whose kinship with nature left them vulnerable to warring nobles who all but wiped them out. When he comes upon Irontown, led by the highborn Lady Eboshi, and listens to its people brag about burning down the boar god’s forest, one might expect him to be angry.
But while I fumed at seeing a tavern full of men laughing at the wanton destruction of life, Ashitaka simply listens, then heads to their neighboring woods to find San, the wild girl the locals whisper about, a human raised by a wolf god.
San was also raised to hate humans, and understandably so: the people of Irontown don’t just want to murder her mother, they’re also intent on beheading the Forest Spirit that keeps the land and plants healthy. Without it, the trees and animals will die, making it easier for the humans to clear-cut the land and settle there.
Miyazaki is a noted pacifist, but “Princess Mononoke” is his most humanist work. Its English language version is also marvelously cast, with Claire Danes voicing San, Billy Crudup as Ashitaka, Minnie Driver as Lady Eboshi and, best of all, Gillian Anderson lending her imperious snarl to Moro, San’s wolf mother.
Their work is a cultural bridge much like Ashitaka’s effort to bring the worlds of beasts and men together for a common cause, depicting what Miyazaki sees as one of humanism’s central conundrums. “One wild elephant, or the people who have to deal in ivory on the black market to survive – which do you value more?” he asked in an Animerica magazine interview tied to the film’s U.S. premiere.
“It’s like this that humanism itself gets swallowed up by nihilism,” he adds, concretizing that image in his movie with many scenes of environmental degradation realized as crawling blobs of death.
Even so, “Princess Mononoke” doesn’t glorify violence or tilt the audience against people like Lady Eboshi, who is more like us than we’d probably admit. Yes, she’s manufacturing weapons to kill the wolves, and we love the wolves! She also employs and supports a community of lepers and former sex workers who society would have otherwise cast aside. “The world is cursed,” says one of the lepers, “but still you find reasons to keep living.”
Seattleites compensate for months of rain and darkness by spending as much time outside as possible. I’m writing this from a chair in my backyard garden, which is where I’ll probably be when you’re reading it. It’s a good way not to think about the inevitability of the clouds and cold returning, and to enjoy hummingbirds and other winged neighbors up close instead of through a clammy windowpane.
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But it also reminds me of why Ashitaka’s central question remains as moving as the film’s visual feasts: Why can’t humans and the forest live together in harmony? Nobody has an answer – not Lady Eboshi, certainly not San’s wolf mother or a monk who turns out not to be a monk at all. The best wisdom that man can offer is that everybody wants everything. “That’s the way the world is,” he says.
“Princess Mononoke” proves that sometimes losing too much motivates us to help nature to regain some ground. I drew that potent conclusion from it when I first saw it, before our summers grew hotter and a long-ago sight I’d planned to repeat became something closer to a once-in-a-lifetime experience. All these years later the story is still one of my favorites – as resplendent as it was the first time, and more necessary than ever.
If you’re looking to wean yourself off social media and replace it with a more productive habit — and who among us isn’t — a lot of the common advice can sound like it’s coming from a drill instructor: Go outside and touch grass. Routine is key. Get your butt in the chair and don’t get up until you’ve done the work. They might as well be telling you to do a hundred pushups while they’re at it.
Key takeaways
Curiosity is one of the most powerful human motivators. That’s why social media preys on it.
To reclaim your time, find a question that interests you.
Try to answer that question.
Let the process spark another question for you.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
As valuable as that advice may be when you need a kick in the pants, these imperatives create an uneasy tension between leisure and labor. It’s all well and good to try to turn away from the siren song of your phone, but how likely are you to stick with the alternatives — reading books, drawing, meditating — if they feel like homework?
It’s a lot more fun, and a lot less arduous, to try to beat social media at its own game instead, and harness your curiosity.
Social media apps work in part by playing off our natural curiosity. Every time we refresh the endless scroll, they promise to give us new information, capturing the parts of our brains that always wonder what’s about to happen next. But they rarely actually satisfy that curiosity. They just repeat it endlessly: What’s going to happen when I scroll this far? Or this far? Or this far? The answer is almost always: the same thing as last time.
Away from social media, however, the world works differently. If you get curious about a question off the algorithm, it can lead you somewhere new and interesting.
Even when we begin with a utilitarian goal, curiosity can take us in surprising directions. A few years ago, I got interested in running. At first I would just lace up my shoes, do a few perfunctory stretches, and jog straight out of my front door. But I gradually became curious about the mechanics of what I was trying to do. I began investigating running form, which led me to theories about how you should be doing different kinds of running every week. From there I learned about how strength training was important to support running, and then weight lifting led me to nutrition. I’m still not a particularly fast runner, but I am a data bank on all the ways there are for a person to make themselves just a little bit faster, and I know there’s more for me to keep looking into.
The goal here should be to get away from simple goals (running more, as in my example) to a more open and adventurous experience of what interests and engages us (understanding how I can support my body when I’m running). The experience is simple: Find something that fascinates you, learn a little more about that — whether from your friends, a documentary, or even an old-school internet search — then try to figure out what new questions that opens up and keep asking them. It’s a process that allows us to become our guides, whether we know where we’re headed or not.
In a recent essay, the writer John Paul Brammer explains that that’s exactly how he got himself to read more.
“Curiosity is a child,” Brammer writes. “When it wants something, when it truly wants something, it’s nearly impossible to keep its hands away.” Brammer found his way to reading by getting curious about David Foster Wallace, which in turn led him to Wallace’s influences: from Donald Barthelme to Thomas Pynchon to Clarice Lispector.
“I read out of strict obedience to curiosity, the desire to know what these words in this sequence might hold,” Brammer writes. “I had to make it fun at first. This was messy. I sipped from this book, then that one. It wasn’t formal or rigorous. I read whenever I felt like it.”
Where habits are mindless and rote, curiosity is something to be indulged: It’s fun, even hedonistic. Embracing curiosity means finding ways to play with art and ideas, as if they’re clay, instead of chipping away at them, as if they’re solid stone.
“The relevant science isn’t something I’m qualified to parse,” Brammer writes in his essay. But when I looked into that very science, I found that his experience aligned with it quite well.
“If you link curiosity to the accumulation of knowledge, you can actually self-boost your curiosity over time, with the end result of more continued interest.”
Kou Murayama, University of Tübingen
“People have likened the state of being curious about something to an aversive state,” says Celeste Kidd, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. “It’s unpleasant, akin to something like an itch. When you have that aversive state, when you really want some piece of information, it feels very satisfying to scratch it. There’s all sorts of positive feelings that come with satisfying specific curiosity.”
The endless scroll of our phone apps can function like a hydrocortisone cream, offering a balm for the irritation without really dealing with the cause. It’s not actually scratching the itch. To do that, you have to get curious about a question that can guide you through an idiosyncratic and looping itinerary that is never fully determined in advance.
Writer and tech designer Celine Nguyen has written about letting her curiosity guide her down rabbit holes in her essay on “research as leisure activity,” a phrase she borrowed from librarian Karly Wildenhaus. Speaking to me, Nguyen describes getting interested in the way the rise of vibe coding is affecting app design.
“This idea around shifting design processes made me think of this art historian Claire Bishop,” Nguyen says. Bishop’s most recent book deals with the way technology changes our response to contemporary art, and Nguyen says that “after reading that, I was like, ‘I really like reading about contemporary art and performance. What else can I read in this vein?’”
Nguyen followed her new interest in dance to a fixation on choreographer Pina Bausch, and soon found herself scouring the internet for still images from Bausch dances.
“It’s sort of like this pleasantly fizzy, almost like ADHD brain thing,” Nguyen says. “It sort of feels like I’m wandering around this massive information landscape and I’m just coming off all these images or all these reference points or quotes that speak to me, and maybe at the end of this process I can sum up what it is I’m interested in.”
The point at which you satisfy your curiosity can be dangerous. Once the itch is gone, the desire to learn can disappear completely — even if you don’t know as much as you think.
Kidd describes a study in which she tried to motivate people to learn a new fact about something they thought they already completely understood, but were actually wrong about.
“When we paid them to look up the right answer, they weren’t motivated to seek out more information,” she says. “They did it, but it was like they were out to lunch. They were thinking about something else. That information did not go in.”
According to Kou Murayama, a professor of psychology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, the best way to maintain your momentum is to marshal your ephemeral curiosity into long-term interest by letting the answer to one question prompt a new one, as if you were figuring out where to eat each meal in a new city by asking your waiters where they like to eat.
“If you link curiosity to the accumulation of knowledge, you can actually self-boost your curiosity over time, with the end result of more continued interest,” Murayama says. “Curiosity is basically short-lived, but if it’s linked to accumulating knowledge, or if you can link it to your self identity or importance, then you can self-booster interest.”
The trick is to, like Brammer and Nguyen, guide your curiosity toward a topic that can keep surprising you over time. What that usually means is to look for a topic that you already know a little bit about that can keep surprising you.
“We’ve done studies with 7-month-old babies, and they’re seeking out particular kinds of things in the world that violate their expectations, just a little bit but not too much,” Kidd says. “It tends to be the case that people want to elaborate on knowledge they already have as opposed to going into other domains. If there’s some way to relate a desired new set of expertise to something that you already have some background in, that’s a thing that you could absolutely do intentionally.”
So if you want to find some creative outlet for your time — or even if you just want to read more — there are straightforward steps to take: Look for something that excites your curiosity. Look for something that you are uncertain about, something so maddeningly unclear that you can’t help but itch at it.
This mystery doesn’t have to be about science or philosophy. It could be about what happens to a character in a particular thriller, or how to capture a likeness in charcoal, or what a certain part of your city looks like. The point is that it should be the kind of question that you can’t let go of.
Then indulge in finding the answer — and let that question prompt another one. Then another. Then another.
Julian Fellowes and “Downton Abbey” really did a number on our common understanding of the upstairs-downstairs social dynamic. It isn’t entirely their fault, to be fair; Fellowes simply had the good luck to meet a historic moment, the end of the Great Recession, with a fable proposing that old-money British aristocrats might also be kind and generous to their happy servants.
Fellowes carries this ideal into “The Gilded Age” while also creating an aspirational couple, George and Bertha Russell, who came from nothing to conquer old Manhattan society with their wealth and a marriage connection to British nobility.
“A Woman of Substance,” based on Barbara Taylor Bradford’s 1979 bestseller, is being sold to an American audience as a “Downton Abbey” replacement. That’s not quite accurate. Think of it more as an inversion, with a bottom-up view of its heroine Emma Harte’s life viewed through parallel timelines.
Rags-to-riches stories tend to be as fabulistic as tales designed to sell the upper class as fair and solicitous to the needs of working people, or amenable to Cinderella fantasies.
One finds Emma, played by Brenda Blethyn, in the 1970s when she’s one of the richest women in the world, sitting atop a New York retail empire. As she’s being driven to her office, she’s blindsided by the news that her medical records have been leaked, revealing she is in ill health and sending company shares tumbling. A stunned Emma wonders who could have betrayed her so intimately, and why. After all, she surrounds herself with loyal, protective employees, including her own granddaughter (Mara Huf).
For answers, the story reels us back to 1911, when young Emma (Jessica Reynolds) scrubbed floors and toilets for the Fairleys, a family of British nobles. The Fairleys aren’t simply unkind, they’re cruel and cannibalistic. Adam Fairley (Emmett J. Scanlan), head of Fairley Hall, is a self-serving fop whose wife, Adele (Leanne Best), hasn’t left her room in ages and drinks from sunrise to sunset.
Adele’s plainer sister, Olivia (Lydia Leonard), is a spinster with a head for business who strokes Adam’s ego. Meanwhile, their older son, Gerald (Harry Cadby), is an elitist sex pest who abuses the help.
Emma should know better than to put her faith in her employers’ ability to recognize her intelligence and gumption. Still, she’s not immune to desire and, against her better judgment, falls for Edwin Fairley (Ewan Horrocks), Adam’s youngest son.
Rags-to-riches stories tend to be as fabulistic as tales designed to sell the upper class as fair and solicitous to the needs of working people, or amenable to Cinderella fantasies. “Downton Abbey” welcomed Tom Branson, a working-class Irishman, into their home and family when the youngest Crawley daughter, Sybil, eloped with him. It’s a nice story, but what happens to Emma is more common.
Both Emma and Edwin convince themselves that he isn’t at all like the rest of their family. They even exchange rings in secret. When Emma becomes pregnant, Edwin’s refusal to marry her is an ice-water splash to the face, waking her up and kickstarting her climb.
(Courtesy of BritBox) Jessica Reynolds in “A Woman of Substance.”
Emma is not simply heartbroken but angry at herself for allowing romance to distract her. Before we see her secret affair, we meet her dying mother in the cramped cottage she shares with her family. And as Ma gasps her final breaths, she makes her smart little girl promise to never lose sight of her ultimate goal.
Edwin’s slight, then, gives her an additional mission. She decides that her family, including the child she raises alone, will want for nothing. And she will grind the Fairleys into the dust to ensure that happens.
Despite the vast trove of limited series available these days, over-the-top ‘80s-style melodramas like this, sagas laced with delectable malice, simply do not exist today. “A Woman of Substance” reminds me of how much I’ve missed them, and it also makes me wonder if we might be ready for more of its kind.
When Bradford’s story was first adapted back in 1985, they set a viewership record for Channel 4, with 13.8 million tuning in for the finale. That was a one-time affair, while the new series has already earned a second season in response to its popularity in the UK, where Channel 4 streaming bragged that it is its most-watched drama in five years, averaging 3 million viewers per episode.
Notably, the show didn’t hook viewers with sex or other salacious material but, rather, plausible portrayals of greed and motivating vindictiveness. The Fairleys’ callousness toward each other mirrors the messy family dynamics of the Murdochs, the Trumps, the Musks and other astronomically wealthy families. We want nothing to do with them, yet they’ve made life worse for us, much like the Fairleys’ inattention to Emma’s dying mother and their role in her father’s death make her vengeance quest impossible to abandon.
(Courtesy of BritBox) Brenda Blethyn in “A Woman of Substance.”
There’s a price Emma pays for her mission, because there always is. Both younger and older Emma are fiercely admired but close themselves off to love. The most recent episode of “A Woman of Substance” closes with Emma proposing marriage to the man who owns the building housing her successful dressmaking business and curtly dumping a suitor who actually cares about her. Yet for some reason, he and the first good man to propose to her, Mac (Niall Wright), stick around to make sure Emma has strong hands to fall back on.
But that refusal to risk vulnerability comes back to bite her when the daughter she turned herself inside out to spoil pulls a move reminiscent of Veda in “Mildred Pierce,” betraying Emma for vapid reasons.
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James M. Cain’s 1941 novel and Bradford’s have that in common, along with a lot of other observations about the price of a woman’s ambition and what she trades to widen the moat between her and privation. Both Mildred Pierce and Emma Harte build their wealth by remaining clear-eyed as to what men can do for them financially as opposed to romantically.
Each story also emerged before decades of wealth expansion, with the movie version of “Mildred Pierce” coming out in 1945, right before the post-war boom. Bradford’s potboiler hit in time to meet the “greed is good” ’80s, a decade when the wealth divide increased sharply and economic survival felt only slightly less Darwinian than it does today.
The get-rich ethos that defines our time may be only rivaled by our perilously tantalizing obsession with vengeance. Mind you, it’s an expensive pursuit most of us can’t afford. That’s why that adage about living well being the best revenge tends to be offered to the party on the losing end of a betrayal. There is plenty of wisdom in that, but more satisfaction, I think, in Emma Harte’s demonstrated rebuttal. She’s determined to prove that brute-force payback is the best revenge, and dining on the carcass of your fallen enemy is the spoils of a life well-lived. It takes endless work and sacrifice, but this show makes her claws-out climb worth our attention.
“A Woman of Substance” is currently streaming on Britbox.
The name “Tristan” grew in popularity after Brad Pitt played a character with that name in the 1994 movie Legends of the Fall. | Katelyn Mulcahy/FIFA via Getty Images
Have you noticed there are a lot of professional basketball players named Jalen? Well, it’s not just the NBA: There are a plethora of Jalens in the NFL, and even the NHL has one. How did this name get so popular? Did all their parents watch basketball in the 1990s and fall for Jalen Rose?
There are many ways names come about, and according to Cleveland Kent Evans, there is something unique about naming traditions in the United States. Evans is the former president of the American Names American Name Society, and he writes a column for the Omaha World Herald nabout what names are popular, and why.
“In American culture, individualism is so strong. What I hear most often from parents is we want to find a name which is different, but not too different,” he told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. “A lot of people are picking names which are unusual to them because they don’t know anybody their own age or their parents’ age with the name.”
So what makes some names go mainstream, and what outside factors play a role in what parents choose? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Evans, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
So we have this very American individualized outlook when it comes to names. I would love to get into how other social factors shape how we name people. How does race shape our names?
The African American community has had a very different experience with naming since the 1960s. If you go back before the 1960s, unfortunately prejudiced racist people, one of the things they used to see about Black people was that they have funny names.
Statistically, before 1960, that wasn’t really true. It was like Black people had names that were like 1 or 2 percent more unusual than white people. It was very small. What happened in the ’60s as part of [the] Black Power [Movement], they turned what had been a negative into a positive. Many Black people said, “We are the people who give our children unique names to show how much we love them, to show how valued they are.” And that’s when you got the tradition of creating new names. Instead of the individual names necessarily being what went through fashions, it was the syllables they were made out of. In the ’60s and ’70s for girls, the most common prefix was law. And so you had Lakeisha, Latasha, Latoya. Then in the ’90s, the most popular prefix was Sha. And so you had Shanisha, Shaquita.
“Just like there is no such thing as the perfect parent or the perfect child, there’s no such thing as the perfect name.”
How does class show up in the way we pick names?
People who are highly educated want new names for their kids, but for them, they have to find something that has a history in the culture. They’re the ones that go back and revive the old names, while blue-collar people are more interested in stuff which is new — things which are newly invented or things which have not been girls or children’s names until recently.
How do names become popular?
Things do not go from zero to top 10 overnight. But what happens is you often have what I call the Hollywood feedback loop. Screenwriters in Hollywood tend to be college educated. They often are going to give their characters names which are too young for them because they name their characters like they would name a kid. The screenwriters name characters and that presents the name to the whole population. Then all of a sudden it shoots up. An example of something changing social class that way was Tristan. Tristan sort of first came up among more educated people. There was a character in the original All Creatures Great and Small. Then you have the movie Legends of the Fall, which comes out with Brad Pitt playing the character Tristan. All of a sudden the name shoots up. It was not just the educated people who were naming their son Tristan anymore very suddenly at that point.
Are there any other examples?
One of the hugest increases just because of television was a few years ago. About 2008 there was a program on one of the cable TV networks called 16 and Pregnant. One of the first babies born on that show was a boy named Bentley. The name Bentley for baby boys was one of the fastest growing boys’ names ever. It went from almost nothing to within about three years being the 75th most common name for boys in the US.
Do people ever see naming their children as a way to break from their past or from their culture?
If you look at the immigrant groups that came from Europe in the 19th and the early 20th century, it was very common for the immigrants to want to give their kids quote “American” names. They would tend to pick things which they heard in the neighborhood. Then as the ethnic groups become assimilated, one of the ironies of that is that the grandchildren or great grandchildren of the immigrants go back and they say, “Well we want to revive our ethnic names.”
The first group that did that was the Irish. A lot of Irish people came over and they quit naming their kids things like Bridget. Then a lot of them wanted to bring back Irish names like Kevin. And then because they were doing it, those names started spreading to the whole whole country. So today Kevin is not an especially Irish American name. There are many, many Americans who have no Irish ancestry who are named Kevin.
What advice do you have for people out there who are like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to name this kid. What am I going to do?” How should people be approaching it? How should they be thinking about it?
Well, I think first of all, they shouldn’t worry about it too much. I got a communication from a woman who had an uncle who she really loved and really admired, whose name was Floyd. She said, “Can I really name my son Floyd? Won’t he be teased too much?” I told her, “Look, you really love this uncle. What you do is you name your son Floyd, but then from the very beginning, you tell him why you named him that and why his great Uncle Floyd was a marvelous person and why you loved him so much and make him proud of it to protect him from the teasing.”
Just like there is no such thing as the perfect parent or the perfect child, there’s no such thing as the perfect name. There are lots of different names that would work equally well for your child and you shouldn’t think that you have ruined their life by giving them the wrong name.
We were all so happy when the World Cup was fun. And now… | Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images
Just a few weeks ago, Americans were able to eat salad without the fear of liquid feces and breathe in air that didn’t taste like campfire ash.
And — we were just really excited to watch some soccer.
One major concern at the outset was whether America’s foreign and strict immigration policies would impact the levity of the games, and, at worst, deny entry to people, and perhaps even athletes and officials, from countries at odds with the current administration (it did).
But in the early days of the World Cup, Americans and fans across the globe were surprised by how much of the world embraced coming here — and vice versa. Visiting international fans shared their astonishment at the sublime oddities this massive country has to offer, posting about: ranch dressing (in bowls if you ask nicely), unlimited refills in towering glasses, dairy products, air conditioning, Tex-Mex, ammunition displays, chicken tenders, cowboy hats, and, among other things, the Cheesecake Factory. Oh, how we all rejoiced in seeing the rest of the world experience the Byzantine beauty of our chain restaurants for the first time, and how craggy we enjoy our fried chicken strips!
Adding to the cultural exchange on the sidelines, fans were also pleasantly surprised by how well the United States — historically a country that’s been bad at soccer — showed up.
We were high off the US team’s 2-0 win over Bosnia-Herzegovina. We looked like a team with guts! Malik Tillman scored a goal down a man after star striker Folarin Balogun was sent off with a (questionable — experts said) red card. Many players on the US team have immigrant parents, are army brats, or are American by birthright citizenship (a constitutional privilege that the Trump administration has sought to dissolve). Though Belgium, in the next round, was going to be a difficult matchup, you couldn’t count out toughness.
Even though many Americans root for the underdog, and many see themselves as underdogs, it’s rare that America is ever actually the underdog.
But in the context of the World Cup, one of the rare things that American men will never win because soccer is one of those rare sports that no American man has ever been the best at, the stars aligned for Americans to have the scrappy longshot team of our dreams.
But it didn’t take long for the illusion to shatter.
As the Fourth of July weekend finished, FIFA announced that it had reversed Balogun’s red card and that he would, in an exception to the rules, be allowed to play against the Belgians. The move was unprecedented and fishy.
That red-card reversal also ripped open a portal into a nightmare realm.
Acting like a person who can’t keep a surprise party a surprise, President Donald Trump began insinuating that he might have had something to do with the decision. Then, on the morning of the match against Belgium, Trump said that he had placed a call to FIFA president Gianni Infantino about the red card and implicitly took credit for its reversal. Infantino not only confirmed the call but said that he takes calls from important and rich people all the time — a cartoonishly suspicious response from an organization that’s historically famous for corruption.
Trump on Balogun: "I saw the play, and I'm a person that loves sports … that wasn't a foul. That wasn't even an infraction … this referee, who is a little bit suspect if you check his past. He made a call that nobody could believe … he's our best player, or one of our best… pic.twitter.com/YfIqb1JA4u
Some fans, upon learning that the laws had been bent for the host country, reacted with astonishment, if not fury. Ethically, FIFA’s bar is on the floor, and this blatant move to help the United States somehow seemed to confirm onlookers’ worst fears.
In that moment, it was clear the US was no longer an underdog. Underdogs aren’t supposed to be able to put their thumb on the scale. They surely aren’t supposed to have their papa call favors. Perhaps all that talk of guts and toughness and how the team was a band of overlooked outsiders was just a mirage — and all that ranch dressing merely a charm offensive.
Whether you’re a soccer fan or someone who is ambivalent about soccer but loved the vibes, the shift was palpable. We’re all experiencing a collective whiplash and perhaps a sports-affected melancholy.
And now that the Cup is ending, Americans are now living in a country where vegetables, famously healthy, and good for you, carry the risk of “explosive” diarrhea. Diarrhea itself is something many would not consider a calm experience, so the idea that this is not just diarrhea but somehow a special, even worse diarrhea, one akin to detonation, feels especially terrifying.
This week also saw swaths of the US living under a plume of wildfire smoke — the dirtiest air in the world. Breathing outside is, according to scientists, the equivalent of smoking 10 cigarettes. Breathing in smoke-laced air and worrying about the looming spectre of diarrhea with every meal puts the shared cultural joy we had in perspective. But even without these extreme plagues, it’s worth mourning how fleeting those moments can be.
Being born a twin comes with certain expectations. To speak or act in tandem. To share belongings, space and birthdays. To exhibit a closeness that comes from a ready-made bond since birth. But what happens when the very existence of your twin is a lie?
In “Daemons of the Shadow Realm,” based on the manga by acclaimed “Fullmetal Alchemist” creator Hiromu Arakawa, Yuru leads a simple life in the premodern Edo-style Higashi Village. With his trusty bow and arrow, he hunts game and safeguards his twin sister Asa – who, for unexplained reasons, resides behind bars in a dark cell. One fateful day mysterious interlopers massacre the villagers, including Asa. One of the intruders – a tall, dark-haired young woman – claims that she’s the real Asa, not the body in the cell, and that Yuru is in danger if he stays.
“When Yuru is faced with that situation, and everything he thought he knew about Asa was fake, and there happens to be another Asa, I think he’s in this state of shock,” Kensho Ono, the voice actor for Yuru, told Salon at Anime Expo via interpreter Mike McNamara. “He’s unable to process what’s happening in front of him.”
According to the real Asa, their parents had smuggled her out of the village at a young age but weren’t able to take Yuru with them. Although not quite a situation of being separated at birth, this Asa still poses a similar challenge for Yuru. Not only is the eyepatch-wearing young woman taller, stronger and more aggressive than the Asa he once knew, she grew up with their parents in the modern world. How could he embrace this stranger as his twin?
“I think in ‘Daemons of the Shadow Realm,’ when you see the real Asa appear, there’s some kind of connection. There’s a lot of time apart, but that time you spent together that can’t be denied,” said Ono. “That introduces an interesting relationship between the twins. In the show we haven’t gotten to see much of the twin component yet, so I think that’s something that will definitely be unique as we start to draw more of those connections between each other going forward.”
All this time, he had hardened his heart against his parents, believing they had abandoned him and Asa. In truth, his parents had wanted to save him from the same villagers who deceived him with the False Asa. But just as he found hope in reuniting with them, he also learned that they had mysteriously disappeared mid-flight en route to Okinawa. Now, he has to contend with replacing the memories of the other Asa with the reality of this badass sibling and accepting that he still may never see his parents ever again.
“If Kensho-san says something in the character Yuru, and I hear that, I actually adjust my performance a little bit to match some of his tempo or timing.”
In contrast, Asa has had the benefit of their parents’ love and still feels affection for her brother whose absence she felt keenly. Once he enters the modern world to search for their missing parents, she tries to make up for lost time. Asa delights in sharing mundane activities like eating a meal together or taking his picture with her phone.
“Despite the similarities that twins have, there’s still this dynamic of like an older and a younger,” said Yume Miyamoto, who voices Asa. “In our case it feels like an older brother and me the younger sister in the relationship, and I think there’s this idea that he has to protect me in some way, so there’s a dynamic there.”
In spite of the characters’ separate upbringing, Miyamoto still wanted to convey their bond in her vocal performance.
“For example, if Kensho-san says something in the character Yuru, and I hear that, I actually adjust my performance a little bit to match some of his tempo or timing,” she said. “It’s something that might be very subtle, and maybe most viewers won’t even notice it, but for me it feels like we’ve closed the distance between the characters.”
Ono added, “I had no idea until she told me that.”
As if their unconventional childhoods weren’t troubled enough, Asa and Yuru’s twinship comes with another heavy burden: saving the world. (This is shonen anime after all.) According the legend, boy and girl twins born in Higashi Village on a day with equal parts day and night herald a cataclysm that only they can mend.
They’ll have help of course. The prophecy states that they’ll acquire the powers of “Break” – to dismantle or undo something – and “Seal” to contain, reconstruct or suppress something. At this time, only Asa has unlocked the power to break and essentially died to do so, which partly explains her rakish eye patch. This weighty destiny also explains why the Higashi villagers went out of their way to keep Yuru close.
As with anyone who’s been manipulated by others, Yuru isn’t sure he wants to cooperate with anyone at the moment. He’s still trying to grasp who he is in this world and in relation to the real Asa.
“I think [the theme of] identity for me resonates because you look at our character Yuru and how he must feel like he’s been betrayed by the villagers and the people around him,” said Ono. “They hid a very big truth from him, so I think trying to understand what he wants to do and the source of his actions and motivation, there’s a lot of trust issues for sure that that he’s going to have. How he faces reality in his own right is something he has to think really, really hard about.”
The prophecy also claims that the fated twins have the power to command daemons, supernatural beings with unearthly abilities. Before leaving the village for the modern world, Yuru awakens Left and Right, two statues that have marked the entrance to the village. Resembling oni, hulking entities with superhuman strength, Left and Right are only too happy to be free of their stone confinement and explore the strange new world of speeding palanquins (cars) and hand-held smoke signal devices (cellphones).
“There’s a lot of trust issues for sure . . . How he faces reality in his own right is something he has to think really, really hard about.”
In fact, daemons of all stripes populate the series – and always in pairs. Much like the twins, their abilities appear predicated on a complementary duality to assist their masters. A sampling of daemons Yuru encounters are, in no particular order, the cat and dog Kotetsu and Jiro; the Tenaga-Ashinaga known as (and for having) Long Arms and Long Legs; and a ponderous tortoise named Torty and speedy hare named Bunbun. And most recently, Yuru learned about the child spirits Zashiki-Warashi, who had disguised themselves as the False Asa and his childhood friend Danji for many years.
With each new set of daemons Yuru meets, the more he becomes aware that he and Asa are also part of this ecosystem of balanced pairs. Whether he chooses to fulfill his destiny alongside his twin remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Yuru is happy to utilize Left and Right to investigate his parents’ mysterious disappearance. Whether it’s vanquishing assailants or surreptitiously surveilling enemies, daemons provide significant advantages for their masters. This led Salon to ask the series’ voice stars how they’d command their own daemons.
“My focus is more on mundane daily life,” said Ono. “Within the anime, there are daemons that help and assist the chores of daily life, and that to me I find quite attractive. Like folding the laundry.”
Miyamoto has a similar humble but thankless task she’d want help with. “I’d love to have a daemon that can blow dry my hair for me,” she said. “My hair is quite long, and it takes a long time [to dry], and by the end of it, I’m usually sweating. So if someone can do it for me, that’d be amazing.”
For some of us, it’s just enough to get by with a little help from our daemons. Not everyone is fated to save the world with their prophecy-fulfilling twin.
“Daemons of the Shadow Realm” releases new episodes on Saturdays on Crunchyroll.
Throughout all three hours of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” — the acclaimed writer-director’s take on the ancient Greek epic attributed to Homer — I repeatedly returned to one question.
This isn’t entirely atypical. In the past, Nolan’s films have pushed me to ponder ideas both enormous and infinitesimal; much of his work ricochets across this spectrum at a dizzying rate, which is part of why his movies, though always grand in scale, feel different from your typical blockbuster fare. Unlike many of his contemporaries working in the big-budget space, Nolan has no affection for the slow build. His films are designed to be all-consuming experiences, opening in media res, grabbing the viewer by the ankle and dragging them into action already in progress. This technique also makes them difficult to refute based on feeling alone. When you’re swept up into the story immediately and held there for 180 minutes, it’s harder to pinpoint exactly where the film ends and your own impression of it begins. With its exhaustive narrative breadth and action set pieces that only a budget of a cool $250 million could afford, the fact that “The Odyssey” exists at all is intended to feel like a miracle. But that’s precisely why I couldn’t seem to shake that one nagging question: What’s the point of all this?
I mean, I know the point. The point is to dazzle. The point is to convey cinema’s great power. The point is to remind us that there is no filmmaker working today other than Christopher Nolan who can make a movie of this size.
(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal) Mia Goth as Melantho and Anne Hathaway as Penelope in “The Odyssey”
Fresh from his latest victory, Nolan reaches for the stars and grazes the Gods. His determination may be admirable, but the sheer, futile arrogance of such a display backfires in equally spectacular fashion.
But do any of those things warrant “The Odyssey”? Nolan, fresh off the success of “Oppenheimer” — a historical biopic about the father of the atomic bomb that became a runaway hit, generating nearly a billion dollars and seven Oscar wins — had a blank check waiting on his doorstep upon returning home from Oscar night. He could conceivably do whatever he liked, go in whichever direction he pleased. And yet, Nolan returned to Homer’s poem, the structural basis of almost all storytelling throughout human record, which, if you break it down more acutely, includes Nolan’s filmography.
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Nolan has called the lack of mainstream adaptations of the work a “curious gap in Hollywood history.” But I’d argue the lack of “Odyssey” films partially stems from the fact that the text speaks for itself. Pursuing an adaptation of this caliber feels like a losing battle, something a filmmaker does just to prove that they can. Without any noteworthy changes that give the source material unexpected new meaning — significance you could only get in a movie theater, and not from the story or any of its scholarly interpretations — that air of self-importance quickly turns to a sour funk. In an ironic twist, Nolan’s own ambition in adapting “The Odyssey” looks something like Odysseus’. Fresh from his latest victory, Nolan reaches for the stars and grazes the Gods. His determination may be admirable, but the sheer, futile arrogance of such a display backfires in equally spectacular fashion.
None of this is to say that there isn’t merit in a filmmaker, particularly one of Nolan’s stature, wanting to explore their artistic desires. But that’s also why “The Odyssey” is such a keen disappointment. Someone like Nolan — who has passed just about every bar there is to pass, raised that bar, and then passed it again — probing his ambition within the context of a work as substantial as “The Odyssey” should prove to be compelling in its own right. To use a recent example operating on a similar blockbuster scale, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” did this particularly well, assessing humanity and movies together against the backdrop of Spielberg’s favorite themes. One could enjoy “Disclosure Day” as a solitary experience, or measure it against Spielberg’s body of work to explore an even deeper meaning.
Sure, one might argue that in “The Odyssey,” Nolan is studying his own hubris, accepting the innate faults that come with bringing Homer to the big screen. But I don’t think Nolan understands that’s what’s happening here, and that’s because his “Odyssey” doesn’t have anything new to say about the original text or his beliefs as a filmmaker. If anything, “The Odyssey” only waters down every artistic statement Nolan has already posed.
(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal) Robert Pattinson as Antinous in “The Odyssey”
Like Homer’s poem, Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is told nonlinearly, scattered between the perspectives of Odysseus (Matt Damon), his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and their son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). Ten years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus still hasn’t returned home to Ithaca, and his kingdom has been overtaken by suitors crudely courting his wife’s hand. As their impatience grows, the window for Odysseus to reclaim his kingdom and restore a crumbling world to Zeus’ law — essentially open-hearted hospitality and treating others as you’d be treated — is closing. As Telemachus travels to seek news of his father’s whereabouts, or if he’s even alive, Odysseus recounts his story to the island nymph, Calypso (Charlize Theron): The bloody Trojan War, a cyclops, a sea witch, dalliances with the dead, sirens, and a crew of impatient men.
Nolan makes only a handful of changes to the translations of the original text. Instead of Gods like Poseidon and Zeus playing an integral role in the story, they are left as unseen forces that motivate the characters’ actions. (Every 40 minutes or so, Zendaya appears to Odysseus as the goddess Athena to spout some ethereal wisdom before disappearing, but Athena plays more like a postwar trauma manifestation than an actual character.) Characters speak with a more casual, modern dialect. And, perhaps most memorably significant, the Trojan Horse is discovered half-submerged on the beach, and not outside Troy’s gates on wheels. Nolan uses this adjustment to build out the film’s emotional throughline: an extended rumination on the evils of war and the repugnance of men. And while it’s a smart and novel twist on a colloquial metaphor that has almost come to precede Homer’s poem, Nolan’s Trojan Horse doesn’t inspire any reflections on war that weren’t addressed more directly and cleverly in “Oppenheimer.”
(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal) John Leguizamo as Eumaeus in “The Odyssey”
Here, a filmmaker who managed to reach the peak of Olympus makes the prideful, ill-fated decision to hoist a ladder toward the stars, trying to get even higher, past where even the Gods can see. And truthfully, there’s dignity in that curiosity, in wanting to know if greatness is all there is.
Every question “The Odyssey” poses has been asked dozens of times before by Nolan himself, and in far more interesting ways. Here, Nolan once again returns to his pet themes of playing God, human mistreatment, the passage of time, and bearing witness to the world’s slow, painful destruction. All of these things are surveyed with more thought and care in many of his other works, especially “Oppenheimer,” but also in “Interstellar,” “Tenet,” and even translated into the hyper-accessible superhero fare of his “Batman” films.
Many great filmmakers are immersed in the same ideas, returning to them in one way or another with each film. But to do that with something like “The Odyssey” is unnecessary, even haughty. Nolan attempts to assert the text’s relevancy in our contemporary age, but that’s not something any scholar or even the average reader would contest. This is Homer, after all, famously the foundation of all great work. What’s perplexing is that Nolan’s said as much himself. So why try to tackle “The Odyssey” at all, if not only to — as Nolan also acknowledged — be one of the only loyal feature-length film adaptations in history, and have his name forever cemented in the same conversation as Homer’s?
In the second act (that is, the second hour of the film’s three), Nolan gets close to revealing why. Tied to the mast of his ship as he and his crew pass the singing sirens, adorned on the jagged rocks at sea, Odysseus screams out with pain and desire. After the ship has made safe passage and the sirens’ voices have drifted into the air, Odysseus’ second-in-command, Eurylochus (Himesh Patel), asks him what he heard. Odysseus tells Eurylochus that their song contains everything he’s ever known and everything he never wanted to admit to himself. And, in a line of dialogue that will stick with me — one that shot straight to my heart faster than any of Nolan’s oft-repeated contemplations on war or morality — Odysseus says, “Their song told me that what you want the most is what you already had.”
There’s no better summary of Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” Here, a filmmaker who managed to reach the peak of Olympus makes the prideful, ill-fated decision to hoist a ladder toward the stars, trying to get even higher, past where even the Gods can see. He knows there is no foundation to hold him, nothing to prop his steps against, but he tries anyway. And truthfully, there’s dignity in that curiosity, in wanting to know if greatness is all there is, or if there is something more that exists beyond what we can perceive. But both history and myth have proven that there’s no measuring up to the Gods.
Charlotte was cleaning out her parents’ garage last summer when she found a box of catalogs, circa 1996–1999. dELiA*s, MoxieGirl, Alloy — they were all there. “Instant flashback,” she says, describing how she sat right down on the concrete floor to page through them. Growing up in what she calls “rural suburban” Pennsylvania, Charlotte and her older sister made yearly pilgrimages to the Urban Outfitters flagship store in Philadelphia to spend their summer-job money on baby tees and suede Converse One-Stars. But in between, Charlotte, now 43, says they fought over who got the first look at the mail-order catalogs that, at the time, were the first to cater specifically to a tween and teen-girl audience.
Before the advent of yawning, warehouse-sized big-box stores, print catalogs served as portals to the future.
Flipping through them three decades on, she realized what made dELiA*s and its ilk so different from the other mail-order catalogs that materialized every few months in her family’s mail pile like L.L. Bean, J. Crew, Tweeds and Talbot’s. “The whole thing was very Girl Power. [The models] looked their age and made goofy faces or looked like they were shouting. It wasn’t like ‘okay, stand there and look pretty.’” The catalogs delivered a rush, Charlotte said, because “It felt like they were telling a story that regular teen magazines kind of couldn’t.”
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These days, nostalgia for a more analog world keeps growing, even for those who weren’t alive during much of it (one marketing survey found that more than a third of Gen Z is nostalgic for the 1990s) and that might explain the Instagram Reels, Reddit forums, YouTube videos, and Tumblrs that look wistfully or snarkily or earnestly back to a decade when everything was so much slower. The internet was slower and the information more avoidable; both waiting and anticipation were part of the standard framework of living. And shopping was something that required time, planning and forethought. Before the advent of yawning, warehouse-sized big-box stores, print catalogs served as portals to the future: Just opening one, Charlotte’s sister, Aimée, says, “was a completely different experience than walking into a store, because you were alone with your imagination and immersed in possibility.”
As a form of media, mail-order catalogs themselves were a story of longing and aspiration that came to define shopping as an American way of life. What you bought and where you bought it from was a statement about who you were and who you could be. This was as true of the inch-thick catalogs from department stores like Sears (whose holiday-season edition was upgraded from mere catalog to “Wish Book”) as it was of the thousands of specialty retail catalogs, from J. Crew and Tweeds to Swiss Colony and Fingerhut, that followed its lead.
(Denver Post via Getty Images) A woman shopping from a JCPenney catalog
Aimée thinks that Millennials in particular have so much nostalgia for catalogs because they were the generation that witnessed e-commerce overtake mail order. “We didn’t know at the time that the internet was going to basically turn into a 24-7 shopping mall,” intent on making shopping quotidian and constant, she says. “I think a lot of us weren’t prepared for the way that having tons of choices for what to buy and where to buy them would become kind of paralyzing.”
But there’s also a nostalgia for catalogs as self-contained and curated; a static set of choices rather than pages and pages of search results. There’s a stark contrast between the frantic sense of urgency online retail often whips up (It’s limited edition! This item never goes on sale except right now! OMG there’s only one pair left in your size!) and the catalog’s invitation to flip, peruse, think, rethink — basically, to shop deliberately rather than reflexively.
For a long time, the only catalogs that mattered to me were the ones from Scholastic Books handed out in elementary school classrooms, and the catalog from a little shop in Vermont called The Enchanted Dollhouse. The former was purpose-driven, with check boxes next to each book; the latter, pure fantasy that was much more inspirational than acquisitive. Then, at the home of my Friend With Cool Parents, I got a load of catalogs from Think Big!, a 1980s-era retailer devoted to giant versions of normally small things (crayons, paper clips, forks) and Esprit, whose catalogs were the first I’d ever seen that featured real people (often Esprit employees), modeling the label’s bright sweatshirts and shorts.
Catalogs have long had a formative impact on would-be consumers, offering a sense of aspiration on behalf of a future self, or a peek into the pasts of their loved ones. J. Crew was a revelation to one friend who was elated, at age 15, to have pages and pages of unisex garments — barn jackets, rugby shirts, roll-neck sweaters — that could be emulated with some judicious thrifting. Another noticed that his father always seemed to be in a good mood when a catalog from Orvis showed up in the mail, and was able to slowly piece together a close relationship that started when he asked his dad to explain fly fishing. A longtime IKEA enthusiast, meanwhile, described a moment of heartache when she ordered something from the company and found out that not only does the company no longer pack its latest catalog in the box with merchandise, there are no more paper catalogs at all. “The stores always stressed me out. I could go through [the catalog] in the peace and quiet of my own apartment and actually be able to breathe while browsing, then make a list, with aisle numbers, for what I wanted to buy. They have digital versions of their catalogs now, but I just can’t see that process being as fun.”
It’s too simple to say that the internet killed the catalog, especially since the demise of mail-order retail was consistently predicted as early as 1990, in a New York Times piece reporting that “Even for J. Crew, the Mail-Order Boom Days are Over”: “[T]hese are tremulous times for consumer buying, and the years of dynamic growth for mail-order catalogs are dusty memories. Even the fabled Lands’ End, one of the most successful and envied mail-order catalogue operations, has been struggling with sinking profits recently.”
The diminishing returns of instant gratification might explain why catalogs are nearly always, according to trade publications and business journals, on the verge of a renaissance.
Mail-order retailers actually embraced the internet fairly early on, in part because so many of them already had the fulfillment infrastructure and marketing to transition catalog customers smoothly online. In many cases, it wasn’t the internet that changed their fortunes, but financial restructurings involving private equity that turned fulfillment protocol away from customer service and toward speed and efficiency. (One former J. Crew call-center employee recalls “wanting to explain to people why they were paying more money for increasingly bad quality even though I had nothing to do with it.”)
By 2005, when the trade publication Catalog Age changed its name to Multichannel Merchant to reflect the rise of e-commerce, even legacy brands like Lands’ End and L.L. Bean could see that the future of mail-order retail was online, even if many of their customers remained staunchly analog. E-commerce scaled and sped everything up; even dELiA*s successful proto–fast-fashion model, which gave customers access to trends while they were still peaking, couldn’t match the European fast-fashion juggernaut of H&M, Zara, Mango and more that arrived in the United States in the early 2000s. Charlotte wonders if what resonates with Gen-Z about dELiA*s-era mail order might be the gap between when items were ordered and when they arrived: “You had a few weeks of imagining how this cargo skirt or that track jacket was going to make you just a little bit more confident, and that was a lot of the magic.” It’s not that the clothes were ever disappointing, she clarifies — it’s just that the anticipation was such a big part of the process.
The diminishing returns of instant gratification might explain why catalogs are nearly always, according to trade publications and business journals, on the verge of a renaissance. Even Amazon can recognize the importance of a piece of direct mail that makes holiday shopping less likely to cause choice paralysis. But retail businesses have in many cases lost the consumer trust that originally made their catalogs a promise of consistency and quality. What customers are more likely to count on these days is that corporate restructuring will result in worse quality — erratic sizing, cheaper materials, and more slapdash production — and a matching level of customer service.
Meg and Hamilton Swan, the insufferable yuppies of “Best in Show,” are introduced in the mockumentary rhapsodizing about the ease of mail-order shopping (“We are so lucky to have been raised amongst catalogs”), particularly as it sidesteps the need to talk to strangers in person. It’s tempting to think that if the Swans were shopping in 2026, they’d be longing to once again hear the friendly tones of an L.L. Bean representative rather than deal with yet another AI assistant on the website from a company whose parent company is plagued by data leaks.
Online shopping, says Charlotte, “is something I avoid, especially as I get older — I just don’t have the patience to decode the sizing differences of four different brands selling basically the same shirt.” She and Aimée have joked about the prospect of starting a dELiA*s for middle-aged former indie girls, but it always ends, she says, “with us on Instagram, looking for something we know is already out there.”
Through my years as an audiophile, I've come across articles in magazines and online talking about hobbyist "aspirations". At audio shows, and seemingly each new issue of magazine we read, we're introduced to the latest and greatest piece or gear, the next "must have" item to consider in this never-ending path of upgrade to satisfy luxury consumeristic appetites.Given that it's "Summer Musings"
It was the Peanut Butter heist that won me over. Everyone watching “Cape Fear” knows what I’m talking about – it’s the sixth-episode confrontation in which Max Cady, played by Javier Bardem, tangles yet again with his nightmare neighbors Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson).
Some of you may be thinking I’ve mischaracterized the Bowdens since past versions of “Cape Fear” establish Max as the nightmare. But for all of Tom and Anna’s trepidation toward Max, they do little to thwart him from being all up in their business.
In one scene, Anna discovers Max in her kitchen making a sandwich for her son Zack (Joe Anders). In another, her daughter Natalie (Lily Collias) hitches a ride with him. Anna carpools with him too, and Tom joins Max for a few drinks at a local bar. The Bowdens spend more time with their local tormentor than I have ever spent with my neighbors, whom I like quite a bit.
All this happens after Zack turns up with a missing toe, which Anna suspects Max orchestrated. Just like she and Tom strongly suspect Max spiked the family’s iced tea with Tom’s stash of LSD. Why does Tom have a stash of LSD? For microdosing, because Tom is a yuppie who hates his life.
(Apple TV) Patrick Wilson and Amy Adams in “Cape Fear.”
Anyway, when the couple angrily strides across the street to confront Max, we’re supposed to be in their corner. But Max’s door is open to them, and inside they find him preparing a luxurious meal. Before Tom gives the hardened ex-con an earful of what for, he and Anna are shocked silent when their cat strolls into Max’s kitchen.
“You took Peanut Butter?” Tom yelps in a way that halts Max in his tracks. He walks over to the cat and picks him up, and in previous adaptations of this story, this might signal that a disturbing act of animal cruelty is about to happen.
But Bardem’s Max is a different breed of psychopath from those previously embodied by Roberts DeNiro and Mitchum. “Peanut Butter? Really?” he says. “You’re calling this majestic creature . . . Peanut Butter?” Then he kisses kitty on the cheek and reintroduces him as Maní – the Spanish word for peanut.
“Maní will come home when he’s ready,” he says later. “You can’t force a cat.”
“Cape Fear” has now inspired three screen adaptations – two of them feature-length films that last about as long as the endurance limit most people have for its brand of sadism. In adapting the premise for TV, series creator Nick Antosca dilutes the movies’ naked menace by pouring reasonable doubt into both Max’s profile and that of the Bowdens, the married lawyers behind his downfall.
That doesn’t save “Cape Fear” from being a 10-hour slog set to an imitation of Bernard Herrmann’s anxiety-inducing score, but it does lend a little intrigue to Antosca and Bardem’s interpretation of Max.
Everyone in this series is some shade of awful.
The TV variation of Max Cady is where the classic prestige drama Difficult Man shakes hands with a manosphere cultist’s pent-up aggression. Bardem’s villain is built more like an aughts-edition antihero. He was once a respected celebrity chef who loved his wife even though he cheated on her, and exudes a kind of danger that brings out a touch of Bonnie and Clyde syndrome in horny strangers.
Meanwhile, Anna and Tom Bowden are a split version of the attorney previously played by Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte, Sam Bowden. Their relationship with Max is also much more personal: Anna was Max’s pregnant lawyer in the trial where Max stood accused of killing his expectant wife, while Tom was the prosecutor.
(Apple TV) Patrick Wilson and Javier Bardem in “Cape Fear.”
At some point, Anna persuaded Max to plead guilty even though he maintained his innocence. Shortly after Max’s trial ended, Anna and Tom got married, Anna got sober, and both buried a few secrets. While Max spent 17 years in prison, Anna built a reputation for freeing wrongfully convicted inmates, while Tom went to work for a fancy law firm.
It’s hard not to feel some kind of sympathy for Max, who sustained a severe brain injury while he was incarcerated that required surgeons to install a metal plate in his skull. As he tells a fellow prisoner in a flashback, he’d never murdered anyone before he killed the men who attacked him. Who knows if that’s true? Then again, Anna and Tom aren’t exactly paragons of honesty either.
Everyone in this series is some shade of awful. Anna’s boss, Noa (CCH Pounder), thinks Max is just the greatest, to the point of gaslighting her unnerved colleague. An unhinged girl who turns out to be his secret daughter, Nevaeh (Malia Pyles), has been living in the walls of the Bowdens’ house and messing with their kids. Max even has his own stalker played by Juliette Lewis, who also starred in the 1991 movie.
Still, there’s no getting around Max’s demonic impulses or the Bowdens’ clumsy game of FAFO mixed with “You Started It.” As Anna and Tom keep saying, Max was going to come after them no matter what. But good lord, they are bad at this.
I’ve always understood Max Cady to be a poisonous extension of the male ego, dating back to “The Executioners,” John D. MacDonald’s 1957 book that started it all. Max Cady either validates the paranoia of upstanding men obsessed with protecting or dominating women, or the disdain felt by those whom such men look down upon.
(Apple TV) Javier Bardem in “Cape Fear.”
Relatedly, his cinematic incarnations have evolved over the years: In the 1962 film, Mitchum’s Cady is a straight-up unrepentant criminal terrorizing Peck’s Sam Bowden by threatening to rape his wife and virginal teenage daughter. DeNiro’s take in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake amplifies Max’s barbarism and Lewis’ Lolita vibe as Sam Bowden’s daughter, establishing her teenage curiosity about Max by sucking on his fingers. (Scorsese is also listed as an executive producer on the series, along with Steven Spielberg.)
Antosca’s choice to leave rape out of the equation in the TV show, then, is a smart one. Instead, he falls back on a tried-and-true fridging: Not only was Max’s wife brutalized to a degree that there were knife marks on her bones, but the killer also cut his unborn child out of her belly.
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By the rule of Difficult Men, if Max does bad things, he has his reasons. And if he does those things to terrible people, they probably have it coming. Unfortunately, one of the people who paid the ultimate price in this feud is Anna’s coworker, whom she couldn’t leave out of her personal problems. He’s currently resting in pieces, poor guy.
The plot of “Cape Fear” dictates that this sporting tale of homicidal pettiness can only end one way. Until that inevitable conclusion, I’ll be rooting for Max Cady’s campaign against the Bowdens’ vortex of selfishness, which is entirely OK to do. None of these people is real, but the irritations they represent – NIMBYism, narcissism and the compulsion to destroy others to build ourselves up – are quite familiar. If the Bowdens were better written, I wouldn’t wish them ill. But I always trust the instincts of a good cat.
When news of Sam Neill’s death at the age of 78 broke earlier this week, much of the public sentiment for the late New Zealand actor revolved around his humor and charm. Neill was a consummate character actor, hard-working and driven by a love for his craft, with a filmography spanning decades and roles that touched countless lives. And as such, Neill was a fount of fascinating stories and notable quotables — products of keeping his eyes open to all of the world’s strange beauty.
The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan reminisced on an interview with Neill from 2022, promoting his return to the “Jurassic” franchise alongside former costars Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, in which Neill spun a truly incredible anecdote about his son farting in front of Princess Diana. On X, a user posted a magazine clipping in which Neill revealed how he’d commit a murder. (At the time, he was making the rounds for the BBC miniseries adaptation of “And Then There Were None.”) “I’d use a steamroller,” Neill confessed. “There’s a couple of people I’d put under a steamroller, but I won’t say who they are; otherwise, when they see a steamroller coming their way, they’ll be on full alert. And steamrollers don’t go very fast.”
(Universal/Getty Images) Sam Neill in “Jurassic Park III”
Few performers could make your blood run cold one minute and have you laughing the next. And Neill relished that ability, returning time and again to characters whose unpredictability mirrored life’s, creating an oeuvre that is both grotesque and supremely human.
Beyond making us laugh, Neill’s wit was one of those special traits that enhanced all the other aspects that made him so lovable as both an actor and a person. His real-life geniality provides a stark contrast to some of his most famous roles as monstrous men committing equally hideous deeds. His best work tunneled into life’s darkest spaces to excavate ideas about our fears and obsessions, often reflected through dazzling practical effects that matched the naturalism of his greatest feature: a singularly expressive, malleable face. The mixture of satisfaction, excitement and sheer bewilderment that Neill wore in the first dinosaur scene in “Jurassic Park” was so effective that it made viewers feel like they, too, were witnessing something beyond imagination. To convey so much using nothing but the God-given tools in your arsenal is the mark of a truly great actor.
Though “Jurassic Park” may be Neill’s most loved work, it’s far from his most impressive. To quantify a career like Neill’s is impossible, but “Jurassic Park” points to a trend that spanned his filmography, even defined it. Throughout his career, Neill pitted himself against creatures both real and imagined — or, even more often, somewhere in-between — to reveal humanity’s foibles in the face of the freakish and fantastic. Neill’s penchant for the weird and abstract allowed him to use his unique features and distinct, gravelly voice to create characters who were as devilishly memorable as the beasts they went up against. Few performers could make your blood run cold one minute and have you laughing the next. And Neill relished that ability, returning time and again to characters whose unpredictability mirrored life’s, creating an oeuvre that is both grotesque and supremely human.
It’s telling that Neill’s first major film role outside of a few sleepy Australian movies was as a grown-up version of “The Omen” antichrist Damien Thorne in 1981’s “The Final Conflict.” With his slick black hair and steely gaze, he was practically born for the part. But those features were on far more chilling display — and for a significantly better film — in Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession,” which debuted the same year, making for a pair of roles that supply a sturdy outline for Neill’s career. In Żuławski’s famously imposing psychological horror film, Neill stars alongside Isabelle Adjani as Mark, a young man whose life and marriage are falling apart at the seams after his wife, Anna (Adjani), has an affair and begins to exhibit strange behavior. As the first person the viewer sees in the film, Neill has the responsibility of setting the tone — a nearly inconceivable task for a movie that twists itself into a knot before consuming and regurgitating itself 10 more times. But Neill is up to the task, creating an atmosphere of sheer bleakness with little more than a look that is, somehow, both vacant and teeming with emotion.
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Though many critics and historians have tried, it’s impossible to get to the true root of a work as oblique as “Possession.” There are 100 feasible readings of Żuławski’s film, and just when those all seem to make sense, you could conjure up a 101st. What’s certain is that watching Adjani give herself over to Anna — and the gurgling, tentacled creature that may or may not be a figment of her fractured reality — is one of the most terror-inducing experiences you could have with a movie. But it’s important to note that “Possession” is a two-hander; Adjani’s performance needs Neill’s to sing, or perhaps, screech. He rises and falls at the same pace as his companion in this nightmare, laying the groundwork on which Adjani can create something so enormous. Neill’s performance is as flailing and furious as hers, and together, they turn “Possession” into a radical piece of filmmaking that has deservedly earned its cult following and late reverence. It’s really no wonder that Neill would go on to play characters who echoed Mark’s descent into madness, splitting off into equally extraordinary works of spine-tingling creature feature dread.
(URLI/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neil at the premiere of “Possession”
While some might cry sacrilege at comparing a filmmaker like Żuławski to Paul W.S. Anderson, the man behind such cinematic triumphs as the “Resident Evil” film franchise and “Alien vs. Predator,” both directors knew exactly how to push Neill to his most frightening limits. Like “Possession,” Anderson’s 1997 space horror, “Event Horizon,” took its time becoming a cult classic. Though the film was initially a critical and box office flop, it contains some of the most captivating sequences of outer-space terror you’ll find in any film, largely thanks to Neill’s petrifying turn as Dr. William Weir, a spaceship designer driven mad by mysterious visions. Weir and a small crew are sent on a recovery mission after the lost spaceship, the Event Horizon, suddenly reappears in orbit around Neptune, issuing a distress signal. When they arrive, they discover an inexplicable massacre has occurred, potentially the result of the ship’s ability, engineered by Weir, to fold space-time and travel great distances in a flash.
“Event Horizon” demonstrates a major theme in Neill’s most gruesome creature feature performances: the slow, onscreen transition from good to evil. Though Neill had more than a lifetime’s experience playing characters who were solely benevolent or entirely wicked, he was remarkably adept at navigating the journey back and forth between these two polarities. Even when they were written simply, his characters were never one-note. Neill seemed to savor the chance to go deeper, to look more closely at our innate capacity for acts both moral and depraved. Often, it’s trauma that changes us, that pushes us past the confines of what we know to be righteous and toward something cruel and unusual — a picture of ourselves that looks unfamiliar.
Dr. Weir, trying to do good for the world while still grappling with his wife’s suicide, reaches that threshold with unnerving speed (and even a bit of camp). But in “Event Horizon,” Neill avoids hokeyness in what could otherwise be an extremely hokey film, finding the emotional center in a character whose inner demons become real-life manifestations of Hell. It’s rare that an audience will sympathize with a character who is almost too nightmarish to bear, but Neill’s ability to consistently humanize the inhuman is precisely the kind of quality that we go to the movies for.
(Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Sam Neill
Even when they were written simply, Neill’s characters were never one-note. He seemed to savor the chance to go deeper, to look more closely at our innate capacity for acts both moral and depraved.
Of course, we also go for stories that are larger than life, that traverse beyond this realm into a place that only movies can go. One may argue that “Jurassic Park” is Neill’s perfect example of such a power. But my personal favorite will always be John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness,” a film that, by its title alone, is so fitting for Neill’s career that it’s almost comical. If you watch any film of Neill’s to pay tribute to a life well-lived and a career well-balanced, let it be this one: a hauntingly prescient, brilliant work of horror that perfectly encapsulates Neill’s most notable characters.
In the film, Neill stars as insurance investigator John Trent, who has been hired by the book publisher Arcane to track down their missing horror author, Sutter Kane, whose next book is hotly anticipated by the adoring, obsessed public. John’s work leads him to Hobb’s End, the fictional town in all of Kane’s novels come to life, where a series of strange occurrences that seem to lead back to Kane are happening more and more frequently. But John believes all of it to be an elaborate publicity stunt concocted by Arcane — or, at least, that’s what he tells himself.
Riffing on the public’s fanatical response to Stephen King’s work with a culty, Lovecraftian spin, Carpenter and screenwriter Michael De Luca craft a fascinating tale of how idol worship alters our collective consciousness, in which Neill is an essential component. As an ordinary man thrust into a world of monsters and maniacs, Neill is inherently playing with ideas about art and celebrity that reflect his own career. “In the Mouth of Madness” ponders just how powerful media — and our relationship to it — can be, and Neill gives an electrifying turn as a man caught up in a myth made real.
Neill said that, in filming “Possession,” he “only just escaped with his sanity barely intact.” And with “In the Mouth of Madness,” he once again evaluates the price of making great art, but this time from a safer distance. One could easily read the film as a meta examination of Neill’s work, of the kinds of characters he was drawn to, the ones that no audience member could soon forget. These men were striking figures, as intimidating as they were irresistible. They were characters who made us remember why we look to certain actors for specific things, and how important it can be to pay attention to the feelings they conjure within us. For Neill, it was the passion for complex, wily characters, and how those types of people reacted in situations that were equally complicated. His performances reminded us how easy it is for a person to lose their senses when they come face-to-face with something spectacular and indescribable. And what is life if not spectacular and indescribable? Through Neill’s work, we could explore our fears about what we can’t always understand. He wore the terror for us, making life’s big mysteries seem just a little less daunting — even if they, like Neill, will always be unpredictable.
Aubry Bracco eventually won Survivor, but did Kalshi and predictive markets spoil her win months in advance? | CBS via Getty Images
We live in an era where you can bet on anything: sports, elections, wars, the temperature in Los Angeles tomorrow, company profits, and everything in between.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that people are spending millions of dollars on online prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket to bet on reality TV. Right now, you could place a bet as to who’s getting eliminated on Big Brother or whether former New York City Mayor Eric Adams will be cast on the upcoming season of Dancing With the Stars. What is shocking is how confident and accurate the calls have been — in the neighborhood of 90 percent and above — on the winners and losers of some of the biggest television shows.
But who is making these bets and how are they doing it so accurately?
The obvious answer is that people are trading on these prediction markets with insider information, which is easy to do when shows like Survivor and its results are taped months in advance. Thanks to the gambling regulation gray area that prediction markets currently occupy and the limits of NDAs, there’s plenty of money to be made with very little consequence for anyone who knows how a season of Survivor played out.
And now that spoiling a TV show has become so profitable so quickly, and because Kalshi and Polymarket are so culturally enmeshed, the show’s biggest fans are paying the price.
How Polymarket and Kalshi made betting on TV a reality
As long as there have been reality TV finales and winners, prognosticators have always had some odds-on favorites. Back in 2000, in the first season of Survivor, Vegas oddsmakers thought Sue Hawk — not eventual champion Richard Hatch — was going to win. Similarly, in 2002, Vegas (again incorrectly) placed the odds on Justin Guarini beating out Kelly Clarkson in the American Idol season finale. Since then, linemakers and bookies have sized up shows like The Bachelor (and all of its permutations), Big Brother, The Voice, Amazing Race, Top Chef, and sorted out the favorites and winners.
But despite the betting lines, you couldn’t legally put money on them. To this day, many states only allow gambling on lotteries, sports events, racing, and in commercial casinos. Only a few allow betting on entertainment awards shows like the Oscars.
That’s where Polymarket and Kalshi come in.
Because they’re categorized as federally regulated prediction markets, these apps allow users to wager on “outcomes” that do not officially fall under the umbrella of gaming or gambling, which would be governed by state authorities (Kalshi is currently in a legal battle with New York State over gambling regulation). And so predicting the winners, losers, eliminations and plot developments of reality shows and TV programs for money is — technically — totally legal. At least right now.
In addition to betting on who’s taking home the prize on shows like Survivor and Top Chef, Polymarket users can also bet on which Big Brother houseguest will get eliminated in week one or whether or notTraitors winnerand former Love Islander Rob Rausch will be cast on the 35th season of Dancing With the Stars. Over on Kalshi, there are bets on whether or not Ariana Madix, who was just nominated for an Emmy, will host the next season of Love Island.
Why betting on reality TV winners is shockingly accurate
Because reality competition shows are typically shot a few months before they are released to the public, and because they feature a lot of cast members, crew members, and production team members, it’s possible — and easy — for insider information to trickle out before the biggest reveals are aired.
The networks’ goal is to prevent leaks and spoilers, which would ultimately make the season less exciting to watch and hurt ratings. They do that through NDAs. According to TMZ, Survivor’s contract reportedly has a $5 million penalty for leaks, while shows like The Bachelor, according to former participants, have NDAs that stipulate contestants cannot even reveal they’ve been cast. Ultimately, the goal is to make sure no one knows who won or how far anyone on the show got.
But even the strictest measures come with gray areas.
Even though a contestant might be bound by NDAs and contractual agreements, their neighbors, co-workers and acquaintances aren’t. Those people might notice that their neighbor, co-worker, or acquaintance went on a lengthy “vacation” and might be aware that a show like The Traitors or The Bachelor — which they happen to know their buddy applied for — was filming at the same time. If all these pieces fell into place, they could ostensibly put two and two together, figure out if the person in question was cast and how long they were away, and not be subject to any sort of NDA.
How to protect your viewing bliss
The easiest, no-fail way to make sure the internet and betting markets don’t spoil your favorite reality TV show is to make sure you never fall in love with a reality TV show. But if you do, maybe choose something off the Betting Beaten Path: For example, my current obsession is Peacock’s The Five Star Weekend. Jennifer Garner plays an Ina Garten-like fancy rich white woman, who invites four friends to have a girl’s weekend to mourn her dead husband. There are no Kalshi bets surrounding that show (that I’m aware of).
If you can’t help but love competitive reality TV and loathe spoilers, fans told me that you have to keep that interest as casual as possible. Don’t go on social media, don’t go to message boards, don’t follow Kalshi on social media, don’t even talk about it in person! They also told me that a live ongoing reality show like Big Brother or Love Island, where episodes are turned around quickly (usually daily) are less prone to spoilers.
This type of casual investigation is common in reality TV fandoms; aficionados triangulate social media presences, production dates, rumors, and gossip to pinpoint possible future contestants and learn everything about them.
Opening up Kalshi or Polymarket with this type of information could lead to more informed bets and better winnings.
And there’s increasing suspicion — though no proof — that people with advance knowledge of the outcomes are using it on prediction markets.
As Ben Blatt pointed out in The New York Times earlier this year, “enough bets are being placed to move the markets in very clear directions,” noting that two players — “Q” Burdette and Mike White were voted off with 98 percent odds the day their episodes aired. Kalshi even tabbed eventual champion Aubry Bracco as one of its favorites all season — way before Aubry became a player to watch closely — and had her at over 90 percent odds of winning leading up to the finale.
The accuracy of these bets, along with Survivor being pre-taped, raises the possibility that people with at least some knowledge of how the season played out, were making bets. That doesn’t rule out insider trading or other contractual violations. But it’s also possible that many of these bets came from a legal gray area, with people simply acting on information pieced together from obsessive fan forums and online sleuthing.
In May, Robert Denault, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, wrote on X, “so far, no traders with large positions seem to have a relationship to the show or to the network. Thousands of traders took early positions consistent with the outcome, likely because of public rumors. And public rumors don’t equal insider information.”
How betting is ruining the best parts of Survivor
Obviously, people placing bets are deeply interested in reality TV winners, but so are these shows’ devout fans. To many of them, especially those who have never been interested in putting down money, the online gambling aspect is yet another way the internet has significantly altered, if not ruined, their favorite pastimes.
To really understand the tension, you have to know that any episode of reality TV — whether it’s Big Brother, TheTraitors, or The Bachelor, etc. — is just one part of the experience. There’s joy in speculation, discussing episodes, favorite players, clues, power rankings, and strategy on social media and message boards. For these fans, the important stuff may not be who wins and who gets eliminated, but the way the story unfolds. Griffin Nathaniel Brown, a Survivor aficionado who runs a Survivor and Big Brother fan account, believes Kalshi and Polymarket have trashed this integral component of reality TV.
“The huge problem with being in these spaces online is that you cannot escape seeing people post about the Kalshi projections,” Brown told me. “Sometimes, I’ll post something speculative about the show, and somebody will just put in the comments who wins. It’s so annoying, and I feel as though I can’t be surprised by the outcomes anymore.”
When it comes to reality TV, Survivor feels like it was built in a lab to satiate predictive markets. Every episode features someone winning immunity, someone getting kicked off, and a vote. There’s also a champion at the end of the season and (usually) a final three. These are all things you can bet on. And unlike shows like Love Island or Big Brother that air their results live, it’s all been taped months before.
“It’s wild to me that it’s allowed to happen because you’re literally betting on a predetermined outcome. It is a thing that has fully already happened,” said Joe Reid, a senior writer at Vulture, podcaster, and Survivor enthusiast.
Reid explained that while the show takes steps like the aforementioned NDAs and a live finale, secrecy is brittle because people love to talk. That’s why, he says, the show has always had spoilers about elimination order floating on the internet. But prediction markets and the opportunity to make a profit with little to no consequences have fully weaponized them.
“The easiest money to be made is if you are one of the 10 people who know who won a season of Survivor,” Reid said. “Aubry has the incentive to not tell anybody because she could lose her prize money. But it’s [spoilers] probably not coming from Aubry. It’s probably coming from somebody who knows somebody who finished 12th that season or something like that.”
Reid told me that he was spoiled on the most recent season while browsing Kalshi for Oscar odds earlier in the year, before any episode had aired. Once he saw Aubry’s odds flying sky high, it was essentially confirmed for him. But other fans I spoke to said that they’re not even on Kalshi and Polymarket, but because those two platforms have become such big cultural forces, the Kalshi and Polymarket spoilers are impossible to avoid.
“It would spread all over social media who was being voted out that night,” Zachary Flick, a Survivor watcher, told me. Flick explained that betting would shift the day of an episode airing, and everyone would start talking about the repositioning and irregularities online.
“I had Dee, Emily, and Ozzy’s boots spoiled for me that way,” he added.
Polymarket or Kalshi executives are probably not up at night, worried about ruining everyone’s favorite shows when millions of dollars are being traded on reality TV. Neither is the person making thousands (if not more) spoiling each episode. They, like the Survivor winners they’re betting on, have already won.
Plenty of people who saw the video of a 65-year-old grandfather being tossed in the air like a rag doll by a bison in Yellowstone National Park last weekend assumed that the man must have gotten close enough to the animal to piss it off. At Yellowstone, which has the largest population of the majestic animals, bison attacks are rare relative to the number of park visitors overall. But the animals often called fluffy cows have also racked up the most human-involved injuries of any Yellowstone resident — and last weekend’s attack was the second this summer.
But Carl McDaniel and his 13-year-old grandson, who visit Yellowstone every year, were abiding by the park’s guidance and giving the animal plenty of space, according to Mike MacLeod, a professional wildlife photographer who witnessed the incident. The same bison had charged through the campground minutes before, sending tourists scrambling, and was resting on a patch of ground when the man and his grandson came into view. “They were walking along the road, quite a ways away from the bison, and it started running at them,” MacLeod told Cowboy State Daily, theorizing that a pickup truck driving into the bison’s sightline at the same moment might have agitated it.
Despite common-sense warnings to avoid approaching or interacting with animals in the wild, humans continue to press their luck and, in many cases, suffer exactly the consequences you’d expect.
McDaniel told CNN that as he lay on the ground after being flipped by the bison, it stood over him. “He could have stomped on me, he could have gored me, he could have done almost anything to take my life, but he did not do so.” Instead, MacLeod and a group of other campers made enough noise to make the bison leave. With one leg broken in 4 places, McDaniel was rushed to the hospital and into surgery. According to MacLeod, McDaniel’s grandson said that his grandfather wanted to see the video to make sure he hadn’t done anything to cause the attack. MacLeod is certain he didn’t. “You can tell in the video it’s not his fault. You can tell from the very beginning.”
Assumptions that the man had breached the bison’s personal space are understandable, given that bison in natural parks are frequently underestimated by visitors attempting to interact with them. A 2024 tweet from the National Parks Service referenced the danger with a message that read, “Believe in yourself like visitors who believe they can pet a bison.”
But despite common-sense warnings to avoid approaching or interacting with animals in the wild, humans continue to press their luck and, in many cases, suffer exactly the consequences you’d expect. In January, a skier in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region was mauled by a snow leopard while trying to take a selfie from an estimated 10 feet away; visitors had been warned the previous day about a leopard sighting.
In February 2025, a Canadian visitor to Turks and Caicos attempted a similar stunt with a shark and suffered so much damage to her hands that both had to be amputated. A few months later, a diver and father of four strapped on a GoPro, jumped into the shark-filled water off the coast of Israel and never returned. Not long after that, a Florida man with no permit for shark fishing posed with a recently caught lemon shark and was way too surprised when the fish whipped around and chomped his leg.
And with each visit to the beach town of Hobart, Tasmania’s unofficial ambassador Neil the Seal draws a bigger audience that includes a handful of people approaching him for selfies. The 5-year-old, 2,000-pound elephant seal should be learning how to play-fight with other juvenile males; instead, in their absence, he fights fences and traffic bollards. The people getting within a few yards of him for action shots have Tasmanian wildlife officials bracing for tragedy every time the seal hauls himself ashore. (Neil flerped back out to sea last weekend, presumably to find a less stressful place to molt).
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“Generally, if an animal is alert to your presence, you’re already too close,” says Shervin Hess, conservation manager at Portland’s Oregon Zoo. And because humans have grown comfortable — perhaps too comfortable — around wild animals in the age of social media and smartphones, more often than not it’s the animals who wind up paying for our heedlessness. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you cross paths in the wild.
They’ve already had enough of us
This week, the president of the United States announced a change in the wording of the Endangered Species Act, which was signed into law in 1973. Its original wording defines the word “harm” as “an act which actually kills or injures wildlife. Such an act may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering.”
There have been previous efforts to downgrade “significant habitat modification or degradation,” removing it from the category of “harm” and putting it into more of a “sucks for you” category. But as of July 14, the definition has been altered, and previously protected wildlife habitats are now fair game for developers — which means, among other things, that species and habitat-recovery programs are now in jeopardy. A statement from Bart Melton of the Conservation Association of National Parks noted that the change “defies common sense, science, and paves the way for mining, oil and gas drilling, logging, and development in areas that are crucial to the survival of some of our most vulnerable species. This rule ignores decades of conservation science and could undermine recovery efforts for more than 600 species.”
“Generally, if an animal is alert to your presence, you’re already too close,” says Shervin Hess, conservation manager at Portland’s Oregon Zoo.
Infrastructure development, deforestation, pollution and urban sprawl have already caused rampant global habitat loss. Research from the Environmental Protection Agency found that in the United States alone, hundreds of species have gone extinct in the last century. Changes to habitats don’t need to be huge or systemic to have disruptive effects on wildlife, Hess says; in 2021 an illegal drone that crashed into a protected seabird nesting ground in Southern California caused panicked adult birds to flee, abandoning an estimated 2,000 eggs.
It’s important to consider our conservation footprint in addition to our carbon footprint, and part of this just requires paying attention to the wildlife around us in the places we live, and the human impact on it.
Remember you’re on their turf
Golfers at an 18-hole course in my neighborhood regularly find themselves teeing off in the company of coyotes who live in the area, and there’s a tacit agreement between the animals and humans to keep a respectful distance so that both can use the space as they do. When I asked one golfer if he’d ever been tempted to take a selfie with a coyote, he said, “No, because that would be really stupid.”
Human-wildlife coexistence is necessary for maintaining biodiversity, but there’s reason to worry that some animals’ ability to tolerate humans makes too many of the latter confuse coexistence with ownership. Earlier this week, birding podcasters Victor and Ruben Stoll posted video taken in Belize’s Mountain Pine Ridge of one of them chasing and petting a jaguar cub. The tiny Central American country, home to a number of protected species, has dealt with an increase in tourist harassment of its wildlife in recent years. Speaking to a news outlet, Belize Zoo executive director Celso Poot noted that even brief handling by humans can cause long-term physiological harm to wild animals. (“It builds up stress hormones. The muscles lock up, and over time that animal can be affected.”)
Human-wildlife coexistence is necessary for maintaining biodiversity, but there’s reason to worry that some animals’ ability to tolerate humans makes too many of the latter confuse coexistence with ownership.
These incidents aren’t isolated. The black bear cub pulled from a tree next to an apartment complex by residents who wanted a selfie; the freshwater crocodile grabbed by a Canadian influencer who mocked its cries of protest; the baby wombat pulled screaming from its mother by an American influencer all occurred in pursuit of content and social-media clout. And none of the humans involved, at least so far, have faced consequences severe enough to deter others from doing the same.
“Humans have to remember that we are on their turf,” says Hess, who works with global species-recovery and wildlife-restoration organizations in his capacity as a conservation expert. “When there’s a baby seal sitting alone on a beach, it’s not because it’s stranded, but because the mother has parked it there while she goes fishing.” In other words, just because it’s there doesn’t mean you’re entitled to pet it.
Seriously, put your phone away.
It’s alarming that this no longer goes without saying, but here we are. To be clear, it is perfectly understandable that you want to take selfies with wild animals. “Animals are amazing. Seeing one in the wild is like seeing a celebrity,” says Hess. “And that can make people lose their common sense.”
This is an understatement. The number of people who either take or attempt to take selfies with wild animals grew so rapidly on Instagram in the 2010s that World Animal Protection introduced 2017’s Wildlife Selfie Code, which delivers a pop-up message (“You are searching for a topic that may be associated with posts that encourage harmful behavior to animals and the environment”) to anyone searching the app for hashtags like #slothselfie.
The demand for wild-animal selfies fuels illegal operations like the exotic-pet trade and exploitative tourism-focused practices like Thailand’s tiger-selfie industry. These, in turn, make abuse of the animals themselves routine (tigers are often beaten, starved and drugged to make them docile and photo-ready), but also impede broader conservation projects. “It can be really hard when you see so many other people doing it,” says Hess. “But you can be the person who says, ‘Hey guys, let’s back up, let’s put away the phones.’”
Even when human-wildlife interactions don’t result in catastrophe, the desire to own or claim animals to prove that we have done so isn’t the same thing as loving them. And giving animals space, not demanding their attention and not treating them like props isn’t just respectful coexistence — it can save would-be action photographers hurt and embarrassment. The woman whose hands were bitten off in Turks and Caicos wanted a unique snapshot for social media; instead, she will always be known as the woman who tried to take a selfie with a shark, and there’s no coming back from that.
For Hess, simply being in the presence of a polar bear in the Arctic or an orangutan in Borneo means much more than capturing them in photos. “Wild animals are so awe-inspiring,” he says. “Maybe people should take something from that.”
F1 races are exhilarating. While racing alongside 21 other cars, an F1 driver can reach speeds of up to 231 mph, making it one of the world’s most dangerous sports.
And F1 drivers need to be physically prepared to prevent disaster. Over the course of a single race, they experience hundreds of pounds of force, temperatures up to 130°F, and risk extreme dehydration that can lead to lowered brain function. In order to stay on the road and not pass out, F1 drivers have to be in peak physical condition.
In order to find out how F1 drivers can survive a sport that is so physically demanding, I hit the gym. Since F1 is such an international sport, there aren’t many specialized trainers in the US. So with the help of an F1 performance expert currently based in the United Arab Emirates, I worked out with David Dunlop, a strength and conditioning coach who works with NFL players. And it turns out that training for F1 is surprisingly similar to training to be a linebacker.
Read more about the fitness required to drive in an F1 race:
Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as Athena in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. | Universal Pictures
After the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of The Odyssey dropped, a wave of conversation followed, part amused, part outraged: Why were all the actors, even the British ones, doing American accents? And why did the dialogue sound so contemporary?
“My dad is coming home,” declares Tom Holland as Odysseus’s son Telemachus, with tight-mouthed American vowels despite Holland’s natural English accent.
“You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know,” returns Robert Pattinson, another British actor hitting hard American r’s.
“Let’s gooooooo!” yells Matt Damon’s Odysseus as he leads his men to battle, Boston o’s in their full splendor.
“Dude,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote. “Everybody sounds like they’re from Ohio.” The comments section below the trailer is filled with jokes about seeing Odysseus waiting outside Starbucks.
It makes sense that audiences were so surprised at Nolan’s choice. We’re used to seeing actors in period pieces and fantasy epics speak with British accents, a trope sometimes called “The Queen’s Latin.” But there’s no logical reason that characters who, in-universe, are speaking ancient Greek should sound to us like they’re talking in mannered BBC English, says Erik Singer, the dialect coach who helped Austin Butler nail his Elvis accent. The Odyssey is nearly 3,000 years old, and on that scale, contemporary American English is just as close to Homer’s language as the elevated old-timey English diction we often see in period films.
“Accents do not in fact inherently mean anything,” Singer says, “but we really think that they do.”
To understand why the accents in The Odyssey sound so strange to so many people, you first have to understand why British accents became the default for any period piece. The answer has a surprising amount to do with what American audiences think power sounds like.
“Why is the empire British when we’re in outer space and there is no Britain?”
As the Hollywood epic emerged starting in the 1930s and evolved in the 1950s, Singer says, studios developed a convention of coding the past in different accents. In films like Spartacus and Ben-Hur, the villainous elites were mostly played by British theater actors in Received Pronunciation English, whereas the heroic peasant protagonists were played by Americans with American accents.
“I do think that it is not an accident that…there still was a British Empire in the ’30s and ’40s,” Singer tells Vox. “There’s something [there] that makes sense…the popular conception of the Roman Empire bestriding the world, like the British Empire.”
“British accents have been closely associated with imperialism for a very long time for obvious reasons,” says Mike Walsh, a dialect coach who worked with Brian Geraghty for 1923: A Yellowstone Origin Story. “When you’re dealing with some sort of war effort that takes place in something that feels like fantasy, most often the characters become British.”
Over time, this practice calcified into a convention. In fantasy worlds based on medieval Britain, like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, the American and Australian actors speak in British accents. They also speak in British accents in period films that are supposed to take place in France (Ever After, Les Miserables), Russia (Anna Karenina), and the ancient past (Gladiator, 300). In The Borgias, the Italians have British accents, but the French have French accents.
Even in Star Wars, the Empire uses the Queen’s English, while the scrappy resistance army has American accents. “Why is the empire always the British one when we’re in outer space and there is no Britain?” Walsh asks. “Britain has become associated with this high-fantasy war conqueror image.”
Avoiding “British period movie accent”
When Hollywood avoids a British accent in a period or fantasy film, it’s usually for a specific reason. Often, it has to do with which characters the audience is supposed to perceive as powerful, and which ones they are supposed to relate to.
In the 1984 film Amadeus, director Miloš Forman had Tom Hulce use his usual American accent to play Mozart. Forman “wanted the Mozarts to feel like out-of-place Americans in Vienna,” Hulce explained in 2023. F. Murray Abraham also kept his American accent to play Salieri, but the Viennese characters around them were primarily played by Brits in their natural accents.
In 2005, Sofia Coppola directed the cast of Marie Antoinette to use their natural accents. “We weren’t going to do the movie in 18th-century French, so it didn’t make sense to have them do British period movie accent,” she said at the time, adding that she was influenced by the way the natural accents in Amadeus made the characters feel “like real people.” As in the old Hollywood epics, Coppola cast British theater actors as the old guard of Versailles and young Americans as Marie Antoinette and her friends, so that Kirsten Dunst’s California drawl became another anachronism, bringing Marie Antoinette’s youth and modernity to life.
In the 2017 film The Death of Stalin, each character in 1950s Russia has a different accent. Director Armando Iannucci told most of the cast to speak as they normally would, so that Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev keeps Buscemi’s Brooklyn intonations, while Adrian McLoughlin’s Stalin is Cockney. (The exception is Jason Isaacs, who tweaks his Liverpool accent into something more Yorkshire). Iannucci told Metro in 2017 that he considered having the cast perform in Russian accents, but ended up feeling it would detract from the comedy. “I thought it would just kill the pace and spontaneity of it,” he said. “I wanted a range of English accents, to indicate the geographic spread of this Empire.”
Nolan’s Odyssey, however, does not appear to be aiming for the shocking anachronism of Marie Antoinette, the fish-out-of-water humor of Amadeus, or the black comedy of The Death of Stalin. Whatever Nolan’s doing with his accent work, it’s something else entirely.
“Language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people”
Nolan has said he was inspired by Emily Wilson’s portrait of Odysseus in her radically stripped down 2017 translation. While most English translations of The Odyssey use heightened, highly poetic language, Wilson’s is severe in its simplicity. She rejects any flowery invocations of “the muse” at the beginning of her translation, rendering the first line starkly as “Tell me about a complicated man.”
“The notion that the Homeric epic must be rendered in grand, ornate, rhetorically elevated English has been with us since the time of Alexander Pope,” Wilson writes in her introduction to The Odyssey, referring to Pope’s grandiloquent 1725 translation. “It is past time, I believe, to reject this assumption.” Her argument is that the original Greek is “not difficult or ostentatious,” and she wants to honor the fact that “stylistic pomposity is entirely un-Homeric.”
Following suit, Nolan told the Los Angeles Times that he wanted “an earthy narrative” for his Odyssey, and that he prioritized “language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people.”
“He’s attempting to go closer to that idea of what would have been colloquial for the time,” Walsh says. “Though it is a heightened story told in song, that doesn’t mean that it was told with a filter or a distance applied to it, or that it was only meant to apply to smart people.”
What seems to be jarring to people, though, is that while Nolan’s characters might sound relatable, they are still powerful classical figures: kings and queens and gods and goddesses.
We’re used to thinking that power sounds like the British Empire. Nolan’s Odyssey shows that might not hold true anymore.
“If it’s changing…it could well be because for folks, maybe Americans younger than 40, those associations between [Received Pronunciation] and Empire aren’t really there anymore strongly,” Singer says. “Or even between RP and high falutin’ fanciness or something aren’t there as much anymore.”
The British Empire is passing out of living memory now, and the American empire is here. In Nolan’s Odyssey, if not for the rest of Hollywood, power sounds like a guy from Boston, loitering outside a Starbucks.
Throughout July, The Swell is celebrating the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.
We don’t value peace enough. By “we” I mean Americans, connoisseurs of bareknuckle fight nights and gunplay and blowing things up, just to show the world we’re happy.
But that sweeping generality about serenity’s devaluation could easily apply to any culture, Hayao Miyazaki might say. I’m just guessing this based on what happened when he and producer Toshio Suzuki tried to sell “My Neighbor Totoro” back in 1987. Studio suits rebuffed them. Why? Because who would watch a movie about two little girls who befriend a gentle forest creature and . . . that’s it? No perils or tragedies? No thanks.
So Suzuki struck a deal with Shinchosha Publishing Co. to release “Totoro” in a double feature with a Studio Ghibli adaptation of “Grave of the Fireflies,” which follows struggling survivors of World War II’s fire bombings. What an upbeat lead-in, right?
Suzuki wagered schools would bring history classes to view “Fireflies,” a story where Something Happens, then stay to watch “Totoro” as a kind of palate cleanser. All these decades later, I understand the calculus but remain baffled by that reasoning. Depression triggers are terrible bait regardless of whether there’s candy after the tears. Sure enough, Suzuki said in a DVD feature interview, “My Neighbor Totoro” ended up with the worst box office of all of Studio Ghibli’s films.
Totoro’s real launch into pop culture’s stratosphere came a year later, when NTV brought his namesake movie to a broader audience, exploding its fandom beyond Japan. Even that was remarkable. Although Japanese popular culture had a mainstream presence in the U.S., most of us associated it with, say, Nintendo games or after-school cartoons like “Voltron” and all their associated ruckus.
Miyazaki designed “Totoro” as a contrast to all that. First, he insisted that 10-year-old Satsuki and 4-year-old Mei have loving relationships with the adults in their lives – especially their father, a university professor who brings them to a crumbling house in the countryside to be closer to their hospitalized mother.
As they acclimate to rural life, they’re embraced by a community that takes care of each other and the world around them, including the kind, furry giant who Mei names Totoro.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Since its expansion into original content, Netflix has made it clear that its sole priority is Netflix, not its customers, and certainly not art. For a platform like Letterboxd, which has built its brand on reverence for film and all those who love it, selling to a company like Netflix would be a cold act of back-stabbing betrayal.
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.
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.
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.
World Cup fans en route to a Scotland vs. Haiti match in Boston. | Erin Clark/The Boston Globe
Much like its indifference toward soccer, America’s aversion to public transport has made it a global anomaly, an oddity encapsulated by the nation’s sacred pregame pastime: the tailgate.
Here in the US, celebrating sports means driving your big car to a colossal suburban gridiron football stadium, where you’ll grill, baby, grill until the smoky scents of burgers and bratwurst float across vast plains of asphalt. So entrenched is the nation’s car culture that the average American spends about half a month sitting behind the wheel every year. In fact, while the US has tens of millions more cars than it has people to drive them, even its largest cities have far fewer trains or buses per capita than our global peers.
As a result, Americans are more than twice as likely to die in a car accident as Europeans, and nearly five times as likely to die in a car crash as someone in train-happy Germany. While many transit projects carry similar price tags, the US still boasts many dozens more college football stadiums than it does rapid transit systems or subway networks.
So, it’s no wonder that critics doubted that US cities hosting this year’s World Cup, the largest single sporting event in human history, could effectively find ways to schlep visiting fans around. After abandoning its initial pledges to shepherd fans for free, New Jersey earned scorn for trying to sell $150 round-trip train tickets to MetLife Stadium, prompting journalists to test how difficult it would be to reach it by foot, bike, or canoe. Kansas City’s shiny new pop-up World Cup buses got caught in hours of ensnarled traffic on their way to their city’s very first game between Algeria and Argentina.
And yet, on the precipice of the tournament’s final stage, the nation’s widely expected World Cup public transit meltdown has simply not materialized. To the surprise of pretty much everyone, US cities have managed to absorb the influx of fans with relative ease, even under the pressure of record ridership en route to stadiums, watch parties, and fan zones.
Eli Lipmen, executive director of the advocacy group MoveLA, said that he had “actually been pleasantly surprised and quite impressed” with how the Los Angeles transit system performed amid the World Cup. As he explained, that notoriously gridlocked city is in the midst of a “major cultural shift” around public transit. As Angelenos spend less time in their cars, the city has gotten quieter, he said. “People are happier. There’s more of a sense of community,” Lipmen said.
A renewed commitment to public transit infrastructure has played a part in that shift — and not just in Southern California. In the lead-up to the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, Los Angeles unveiled three new subway stations in May, its first new stations to open in over two decades. Meanwhile, Seattle’s Sound Transit shuttled a record-shattering 309,000 riders when Team USA faced Team Belgium, thanks in part to its completion of a light rail extension that had been in the works for nearly two decades. Atlanta overhauled its bus network, Miami made use of a new rapid transit line, and Kansas City spent millions to expand its tram service and rolled out pop-up shuttles.
As it turns out, US cities can build new buses, trams, and trains much faster than they may think. The harder question now is whether they can keep up that momentum when it serves locals, and not just visitors. Just hours after Kansas City’s final World Cup match — Argentina 3, Switzerland 2 — its cash-strapped transit authority shut down its extended tram service with plans to slash a quarter of its regular bus routes by the end of this summer.
Many host cities “are still not building [transit] as a serious modal shift” away from cars, said Eric Goldwyn, director of the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. “They’re building it as a cutesy-patootsie complement.”
Americans learned to love soccer. Can they learn to love transit too?
LA is among the exceptions, and not only because of its looming Olympics host gig. The city has made a concerted effort over the past couple of years to invest in and rebrand its transit system, which had long had a reputation for grime and danger. “If you’d spoken to me two and a half years ago, this conversation would be about safety and security on the metro system,” said Lipmen, referencing a bus that was taken hostage in 2024, one of several “really horrible, very high-profile incidents” that left many Angelenos feeling unsafe on the system. “Now, the conversation is about joy and celebration.”
What changed?
LA began investing heavily in building more trains, buses, and subway stations, and overhauled its public safety approach, which led to a 6.7 percent drop in violent crime on transit and a 33 percent drop in incidents like drug use and weapons possession. For Lipmen, the real shift came when the metro system opened its three new stations along the D line in May, and released a raunchy “Ride the D” shirt to celebrate it. Almost immediately, the Metro’s cheeky merchandise sold out, and would continue to sell out every time it was restocked for months to follow.
It might sound silly, but the hype genuinely helped dull some of the stigma associated with taking the train. “People who were quietly riding transit all of a sudden felt comfortable in their own skin as a transit-rider, and proud to be a transit-rider,” Lipmen said.
Overall, LA’s big bet appears to be slowly working. “LA is a transit city,” Jennifer Vides, Metro Los Angeles’s chief customer experience officer, told the Associated Press last week. “People want to try to say that it’s not. Obviously, we have a lot more expansion to do and we’re working on it. But people really want transit.”
Beyond adding new train lines or bus fleets, normalizing public transit requires “a dramatic recast of how people get around and travel,” Goldwyn said. Cities need a vision that ensures that there is an actual “destination on the other end” of their new transit line, like offices or the kind of housing California’s new bill aims to get built near transit hubs. Most cities will need a mixture of “carrots and sticks” to help people who are used to driving everywhere see the value in hopping on a bus or tram as part of their everyday commute, not just to get to the airport or the stadium. “If your transit is not connecting you to places you want to go, you’re not going to use it,” Goldwyn said.
A single tournament, like a single train line, will never be enough to change how Americans move. But if this nation of football fans can learn to love soccer, then surely they can learn to love the train a little bit more too. At the very least, with LA28 precisely two years away, Los Angeles just got closer to making its car-free summer Olympic dreams come true.
Like embellished denim and indie sleaze, frozen yogurt is back. | Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images
Like embellished denim and indie sleaze, frozen yogurt is back.
The signs of the froyo renaissance are everywhere. First, like any food trend worth its mettle, acquiring the treat at a hip purveyor might include a long line. In New York City, wait times could be upwardof an hour and might include hairstyling or a DJ while you cool your heels. Meanwhile, ice cream upstarts like Van Leeuwen have started introducing their own froyo offerings. And then there are the many wellness influencers freezing their beloved yogurt at home with a few dollops of chocolate or peanut butter for a DIY “indulgence.”
The third wave of froyo resembles the previous crazes in one key way: The dessert is still marketed and perceived as a healthier choice than other treats. Every time it comes out of hibernation, frozen yogurt has revealed something about the diet culture of the moment, and this resurgence is no different.
This go-round, the emphasis is on froyo’s super ingredients — namely, the probiotics and protein in each bite. Mythos Greek Frozen Yogurt, for instance, promises “godly probiotics in every bite…supporting gut health and overall wellness,” as well as “prebiotics, probiotics, postbiotics, and enzymes to support your digestive, metabolic, mental, and cognitive health.” It’s all about highlighting what the treat does have, whereas previous froyo fads differentiated the dessert by underscoring what it lacked, namely: fat, lots of calories.
On the surface, today’s wellness culture focuses on being additive as opposed to depriving yourself and counting calories, which we saw in previous iterations. The idea is balance: balanced diet, balanced gut. The word “holistic” gets thrown around a lot. But the same motivation — a desire for thinness — underpins it, even if the language has become less explicit. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in every swirl of the latest froyo renaissance.
Where froyo went and why it came back
Liz Moskow, who predicts food trends as a principal at consultancy Bread and Circus, didn’t have to strain her third eye to foresee the resurgence of frozen yogurt. “The buzzwords in the wellness realm — longevity, gut health, bone health, high protein — all lead back to yogurt,” she told Vox. She described frozen yogurt in particular as “that permissible indulgent way to get more protein in a dessert moment.”
Frozen yogurt first took off in the 1980s, as Americans obsessed over health and exercise — including President Ronald Reagan, who set up a gym at the White House. It was the heyday of fitness stars like Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons. The treat promised all the enjoyment of “naughty” frozen desserts, like ice cream, without the fat. Imagine: a guilty pleasure sans guilt. TCBY (full name: The Country’s Best Yogurt) was the standard bearer of the era.
But the collapse of the low-fat diet trend, and consumers’ desire for overall low-calorie treats as opposed to just low-fat ones, brought an end to froyo’s first wave. “When you remove fat, you have to add flavor, typically with sugar,” Moskow said. Froyo’s status as the healthy alternative lost credibility once overall calorie counts came into play.
When froyo reemerged in the 2000s and broke wide in the early 2010s, tabloids and Tumblr were awash in a toxic sea of body shaming. This time, the flavor du jour was “tart,” which played up the natural taste of the yogurt and gave it another veneer of health. After all, it wasn’t sweet and rich like ice cream. At destinations like Pinkberry and Menchies, you self-served your yogurt and piled on toppings from a well-stocked buffet of options. And sure, you could opt for a mountain of fresh fruit, but you could also select gummy bears, Reese’s Pieces, and other confections. So, yet again, froyo receded “when vilification of sugar started happening,” Moskow said.
Great froyo moments in pop culture history
Look no further than television for a sign that frozen yogurt has played a starring role in our culture over the years.
Seinfeld, “The Non-Fat Yogurt” — Seinfeld. Jerry, George, and Elaine become obsessed with Kramer’s new frozen yogurt shop. “How could this not have any fat? It’s too good!” George says. They keep going back for more. Then, they all experience a weight gain and realize that the treat is full of fat after all. The store hits the skids when it sells froyo that’s actually fat free, because it tastes bad. This episode also features a cameo by then-newly elected New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Sex and the City, multiple episodes. Charlotte York, the uptight romantic of the show’s main foursome, favored froyo from New York chain Tasti D-Lite as her own permissive indulgence during the show’s run.
Nathan For You, “Yogurt Shop / Pizzeria.” In his show’s debut episode, Nathan Fielder proposes saving struggling froyo shop Yogurt Haven by introducing a “crazy new flavor that will get people talking.” The flavor? Poo.
Broad City, “Wisdom Teeth.” Jaime, Ilana’s roommate, goes to “42 Squirts,” a play on self-serve frozen yogurt chain 16 Handles (where the scene was filmed). He becomes so overwhelmed by the many, many flavors (which include Surf & Turf, Patchouli, Sizzurp, and the Fielder-coded Brown Town) and toppings (“What is gorp?” he asks) that he ultimately has a panic attack that shuts down the shop.
And now, we’re back in the ring with froyo for another round, amid an intense cultural focus on GLP-1s, proteinmaxxing, and gut health. This time, there are a lot of scientific terms getting thrown around. The website for Culture An American Yogurt Company, which has two outposts in New York City, cites the World Health Organization and Harvard Medical School to vaunt the benefits of its probiotic cultures and names the specific bacteria strains they use (Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus, Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Bifidobacterium lactis, in case you were curious). The toppings on offer at many of these shops — fresh fruit, manuka honey, organic dates, and granola — also provide a halo of health. They seem “better for you, and even a little more posh,” Moskow said.
While probiotics definitely take center stage this time, other ingredients are also getting their moment. For example, Meli Frozen Yogurt, in Miami Shores, promises six grams of protein per serving (and “zero regrets”). Yogurt Club in Manhattan briefly sold a banana milk-flavored froyo with collagen, which the company claimed in a social media post “improves skin/nail/hair health.”
Will eating froyo actually improve your digestive tract and confer all of these other health benefits? It depends. Dietary probiotics are generally good for you, and yogurt with live cultures is considered a high-quality source. But it’s not clear if having froyo every so often will do a ton for your microbiome. (Poppi, a soda that promised it was “gut healthy,” settled a lawsuit last year; the plaintiffs argued that the company improperly labeled and marketed its products, and that merely drinking one can wouldn’t benefit the gut.) As for collagen, however, studies about its effectiveness when ingested have been inconclusive or simply haven’t occurred. “There isn’t enough proof that taking collagen pills or consuming collagen drinks will make a difference in skin, hair, or nails,” Dr. Payal Patel and Dr. Maryanne Makredes Senna wrote for Harvard Health’s blog in 2023. And things weren’t looking much better as of 2025.
Still, the focus on hair, skin, and nails isn’t surprising in our current moment.
“It’s a lot easier to say, ‘Well, I’m eating this for gut health’ instead of ‘I’m eating this because this whole cup has 80 calories,’” Mikala Jamison, writer of the Body Type newsletter and the forthcoming book The Forever Project, told Vox. The current iteration of froyo is intertwined with the broader trend of “clean” living and the “clean girl.” Take Mimi’s Frozen Yogurt, which is located near New York University and regularly has lines around the block. Mimi’s describes itself as “Clean & Natural Froyo…Light as air, full of care.” But “clean” is similar to “plant-based” or “natural” in that it doesn’t really have an agreed upon definition in the food world. It’s mostly vibes-based and can be as much about morality as much as it is about nutrition.
Meanwhile, “light as air” isn’t particularly subtle. Mimi’s has collaborated with Shark Beauty to style people’s hair as they wait in line, further connecting frozen yogurt to a specific aesthetic. Mikono, which just went from pop-up to brick-and-mortar in Chicago, was part of a Porsche & Pilates event, tagging the Instagram post about it “#healthy.” Myka, a growing chain in more than 20 cities with long lines at its Paris outpost, says its product “is more than frozen yogurt: it is a way of understanding life. A way to enjoy what is simple, natural, and effortlessly beautiful.”
Jamison coined the term “luxe lean” to refer to the current cultural moment: “Your body needs to be lean, not fat, look like you work out a little bit. But also, you pair that with these luxury signifiers. You have a blowout, you have the expensive workout set, you have the nails, you have the glowing skin.” As she sees it, it’s a body type that is also a class and status signifier. You want to look good without implying that you tried to look good, while still communicating that looking this good costs money.
She wonders about the legacy of the body positivity movement. While some people have given up the pursuit of thinness and are making a concerted effort to build a world where women aren’t constantly denigrated for their weight, there is also an active cadre of people publicly advocating for being as skinny as possible, at the same time that GLP-1s are impacting every aspect of American life. And then, there are the people caught in the middle. “Maybe they do want to lose weight, but they don’t want to admit it because that doesn’t seem like the correct, feminist, progressive, body positivity whatever thing to do,” Jamison said.
And that’s where the current froyo trend stands: promising “wellness” while letting the impetus for it remain unsaid.
But if you simply love frozen yogurt, enjoy this renaissance while you can. Moskow expects it to “wax and wane” as it has in the past and, especially, as studies emerge that show the health benefits of ice cream: “I think we might be at peak yogurt.”
President Donald Trump shakes hands with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a bilateral meeting as part of the G7 summit, in Evian, France, on June 17, 2026. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
In 2023, the Indian director Honey Trehan was on the verge of a breakthrough. His film Punjab ’95, which told the story of a human rights activist murdered for investigating mass killings of Sikhs in the state of Punjab, had been given a prominent slot at the Toronto International Film Festival. Trehan was convinced the film would be big; its star, Sikh Bollywood A-lister Diljit Dosangh, believed in the project so much that he didn’t even ask for a salary.
Key takeaways
The recent censorship of the Indian film Satluj has drawn new attention to the way that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has attacked free expression in Bollywood.
Over the course of more than a decade in power, Modi has used a mix of punishment and incentives to push the massive industry away from producing themes that challenge his government — and turned propaganda films into box office successes.
There’s a lesson here for the United States. Though protections for free speech in Hollywood are far more robust, Trump has made several moves that resemble Modi’s — suggesting that Americans need to be vigilant about protecting free speech here.
But the premiere never happened. According to Trehan, his producer got a threatening call from someone affiliated with the Indian government, saying that if the film screened in Toronto, it would never appear at home. Trehan and his producer agreed, but the approval never came. India’s ratings agency, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), demanded 127 cuts — including cutting the word “Punjab” from a film about the state.If implemented, they would have left the film (in Trehan’s words) as little more than a “trailer.”
After years of court cases and failed wrangling, Trehan and his producer gave up on a theatrical release. They signed an agreement with Zee5, an Indian streaming service, to premiere the film exclusively on their platform in July under the new name Satluj.
But just two days after the film’s release on July 3, Zee5 removed Satluj for Indian viewers at the request of the government, which claimed the film threatened public order and national security. This weekend, it was removed from Zee5’s international service as well, meaning the film was no longer legally accessible anywhere on the planet.
When we spoke on Monday, Trehan was still unsure why the government had gone to such great lengths to suppress his film. He claims to have heard nothing beyond vague public claims about the film threatening public safety and Indian sovereignty. But it’s clear that the events had rocked his faith in his country.
“When all these kinds of things happen,” he says, “you are bound to ask this question to yourself: Are we still living in a democracy?”
Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, the Indian film industry — which has a cultural footprint that rivals Hollywood and even surpasses it in some regions — has undergone a transformation. Once seen as a bastion of Indian multiculturalism and secularism, the kind of business where Muslims and even Pakistanis could be stars, the Indian film industry has increasingly been remade in its right-wing government’s image. Films that celebrate Hindus and demonize Muslims make up an ever-growing share of industry output; films that take up politically difficult topics, like Satluj, are becoming scarcer.
This is by design. As part of its broader assault on democratic freedoms, the Modi government has taken a series of very visible steps to reward ideologically simpatico filmmakers — and punish dissidents. The industry has gotten the message, and shifted its output accordingly. Those filmmakers willing to speak publicly, like Trehan, describe a widespread climate of self-censorship, painting a portrait of an industry that has chosen compliance over courage.
“There are so many things I want to make and I get told, ‘No one will touch it,’” the Indian director Shruti Ganguly tells me. “Actors who speak out against the government — they don’t get work.”
Understanding how this happened matters to Indians — but not only them. The Trump administration has, in several ways, laid the groundwork for a similar attack on cinematic free speech. While the American version is vastly less developed than what’s happening in India, the subordination of Bollywood has exposed the general means through which a powerful and seemingly liberal entertainment industry can be brought to heel by a determined government.
In today’s America, “you can see an [early stage] of what happened to allow institutions to be captured and politicized” in India, says Sadanand Dhume, an expert on Indian politics at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
The fall of Bollywood
Censorship in Indian film is hardly new. The CBFC, created in 1951, is empowered not just to rate movies but to block their release outright if it finds a film contrary to any of the sweeping categories in Section 5B of the Cinematograph Act: the sovereignty of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign countries, public order, decency, or morality.
It is a power that certainly had been abused prior to Modi’s premiership. Aman Bhargava, a data scientist based in Bangalore, recently examined data on over 8,000 Indian films censored by the CBFC between its founding and the end of the 20th century. His investigation found extremely high levels of censorship in the board’s first three decades, focusing primarily on depictions of sex and violence. But political censorship was hardly unheard of. During the Emergency, a two-year period from 1975 to 1977 where Prime Minister Indira Gandhi assumed essentially dictatorial powers, censors literally burned the prints of a film satirizing her leadership.
“There are so many filmmakers whose film is stuck. But they are not ready to speak out of fear.”
Honey Trehan, director
By the 1990s, instances of CBFC censorship had declined dramatically. Modi has not only revived it, but significantly expanded its scope — creating a new censorial regime even worse than what came before. “The past was problematic. The present is worse,” Dhume says.
This judgment is backed by extensive evidence, published in boththeIndianandAmerican press, demonstrating the government’s increasingly tight grip over Hindi-language filmmaking.
The most obvious mechanism has been politicization of the CBFC. The current chair — a poet named Prasoon Joshi — is a vocal ally of the prime minister; in a phone call, the Indian film critic Sucharita Tyagi described him as a government “stooge.” Trehan, similarly, says the body is working “hand-in-glove” with Modi’s Ministry of Information “to control the narrative” on politically sensitive topics.
Over time, the Modi government has moved to remove checks on its allies’ power. In 2021, it eliminated a decades-old special appellate board that allowed filmmakers to contest CBFC rulings — forcing them instead to go through regular litigation for relief. But India’s justice system is slow and expensive, often an unrealistic option for movies that need to make their budgets back in a timely fashion. Trehan’s Satluj shows how difficult it is to fight the censor, and why so few in Bollywood are willing to do it.
“Over the past decade, the CBFC has become less a certifying body and more an arm of state-sponsored and sentiment-driven censorship,” journalist Saurav Das wrote last year in Frontline, an English-language Indian magazine published by The Hindu newspaper. “With every decision, every inexplicable demand for cuts, and every instance of folded resistance in the face of fringe protests, the Board has revealed what it truly is: a morality police in disguise.”
Nor is the CBFC Modi’s only weapon. “The tax authority,” Dhume says, “is basically completely politicized in India” — and can be wielded against filmmakers and studios who step out of line. So can the police: Five years ago, Indian police arrested the son of Muslim megastar Shah Rukh Khan on drug charges. The move was widely interpreted as retaliation for Khan’s outspokenness on violence against Muslims. Khan’s son was detained for three weeks and released on bail; prosecutors dropped the charges seven months after his arrest, ultimately admitting he never had possessed drugs in the first place.
Modi’s BJP party also has something no prior Indian government possessed: a fervent online cadre that directs waves of threats and harassment at dissident directors, actors, and even film critics. In January 2021, a Muslim supporting actor in an Amazon-hosted streaming show called Tandav — a soapy political drama that took shots at life under the BJP — became deluged by online hate. Angry Modi fans repeatedly reported him to the police for alleged insults to Hinduism; Amazon eventually cut one of his scenes to try and appease the mob.
But the Modi government hasn’t been satisfied with only punishing critical filmmakers. It has also provided ample incentives to studios who wish to make ideological propaganda.
This began with 2022’s The Kashmir Files, a movie about very real killings of Hindus in the contested territory of Jammu and Kashmir that exaggerated the scope and severity of the situation to demonize Muslims. Widely panned by critics as dishonest shlock, the film received a huge promotional push from the ruling party. Modi personally endorsed it, and at least eight BJP-governed states gave it a special exemption from entertainment taxes to lower ticket prices. BJP states also gave government employees time off from work to go see the film, and even hosted screenings. As a result, it was one of the best-performing movies of the year.
The success of The Kashmir Files showed that there was a real audience for aggressively nationalist films — as makes sense in a country that has elected Modi to the premiership three times, and where he currently enjoys a roughly 70 percent approval rating. As such, it has spawned more sophisticated imitators.
In 2025, a film called Dhurandhar — a slick action movie about an Indian sleeper agent killing his way through mafia and terror networks in Pakistan — dominated the box office, becoming the third-highest grossing Hindi film of all time. Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge premiered this year, and is more nakedly propagandistic: Variety’s reviewer wrote that it “practically features Modi as a supporting character through endless news snippets.” It has already surpassed the box office total of its predecessor.
The end result is a kind of profit-minded self-censorship. Increasingly, Indian film studios shy away from financing movies with controversial themes and shovel money at jingoistic fare like Dhurandhar. An 11-month investigation by the Indian publication Article 14 concluded that this has effectively transformed the most prominent sector of the Indian film industry.
“Barring a minuscule minority, Hindi filmdom has collectively capitulated before the BJP government, thus handing a virtual cakewalk to the right-wing in India’s most high-profile film industry,” Article 14’s Anna M M Vetticad writes.
To be clear: It’s not that critical voices in the film industry have been silenced entirely. Independent-minded films still get made — like 2023’s Jawan and Pathaan, Shah Rukh Khan-led action films that The Atlantic described as“littered with subversive commentary on India under Modi.” The environment is markedly freer outside Hindi-language cinema; the Malayam and Tamil film industries have been more resistant to government pressure.
But the Hindi industry is the biggest and most influential: The term “Bollywood” itself generally refers only to Hindi studios. And it’s clear that the balance is off there — leading the government’s anti-Muslim narrative to dominate in one of India’s most important cultural spheres.
“There are so many filmmakers whose film is stuck,” Trehan says. “But they are not ready to speak out of fear.”
The future of Hollywood?
What Modi has done to Indian film carries clear lessons for other backsliding democracies — most notably, the United States.
The first lesson is that free expression in major industries depends, in large part, on preserving nonpartisan leadership and norms in powerful government agencies.
India’s CBFC, tax agencies, and law enforcement have long had problems, including abusive political interventions. But Modi has made these problems considerably worse, to the point where it is less a change in degree than in kind. Today, key agencies have become staffed by political cronies who act like extensions of ruling parties. This capture of nominally nonpartisan institutions is what enabled him to bring so much political pressure on studios, producers, and actors.
The second lesson is that big cultural industries — whatever their professed political values — are first and foremost profit-seeking entities. Bollywood has a reputation as a more culturally progressive space, even casting Pakistani actors in prominent roles during the early Modi years. But when it became clear that the balance of financial power favored the government, that critical films might never see the light of day and propagandistic ones would make bank, Indian film studios shifted accordingly.
“Movie-making is an expensive business, so you understand where they’re coming from.” Dhume says. One film critic, granted anonymity by Indian journalist Kaashif Hajee, was even blunter: “The only God is the box office.”
We have seen both of these mechanisms at work in the second Trump administration.
President Donald Trump has famously demolished the independence of agencies like the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, and even tried to weaponize them against its enemies in the entertainment industry — most notably when it tried to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air earlier this year.
That effort failed. But there are also many examples of American conglomerates seeming to bow to government pressure, like CBS’s decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s show while its parent company awaited FCC approval for its merger.
There’s even a handful of examples of studios pushing out films nakedly bidding for the president’s favor, like Amazon’s Melania documentary. While that film was a box office dud — it made just $16.7 million on a $75 million budget — it was widely seen as an effort to win favor with the administration on other regulatory matters. Ted Hope, one of the founders of Amazon’s studio arm, called the film “an outright bribe” in an interview with the New York Times.
Overall, however, these cases remain exceptional. There is no evidence that the American entertainment industry is shifting toward MAGA propagandain any mass way; Trump critical-fare (like the Star Wars series Andor or the superhero satire The Boys) remains vastly more popular with critics and audiences.
This owes partly to structural dissimilarities between the United States and India. The American ratings board has long been far weaker than the CBFC, and the First Amendment is far stronger than India’s constitutional speech protections. We are less than two years into Trump’s second term; Modi has been in power continuously since 2014. It would be very surprising to do in a year and a half what Modi accomplished over a decade.
The lesson of India’s film industry is not, then, that Trump is on the verge of conquering Hollywood. Rather, it’s that he has identified the right mechanisms for pressuring the entertainment industry: using politicized agencies to both raise the costs of free speech and create incentives for companies to toe a state-friendly line.
That these lines of attack are at present underdeveloped in the United States does not mean they could not, eventually, become something more serious. Any effort to future-proof American democracy, to safeguard its foundations from further assault, requires serious study of how these tactics worked in places like India and identifying means of blocking them.
“The situation with a film like Satluj…is a warning call — not just for Indians, but other countries around the world when it comes to how governments are going to control the creative business,” Ganguly says.
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(©1997 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli)