JD Vance sees himself in a former president. In a recent on-stage conversation about his memoir “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” the vice president was apparently inspired when talking about how this politician was a “political genius” and “peacemaker” who pulled America out of an unpopular war. “Young senator, writes some bestselling books,” he said, ticking off a number of shared qualities. “It kinda sounds like JD Vance.”

The vice president was talking about Richard Nixon. But it’s understandable if readers first imagined the face of Barack Obama. As Vance gears up to run for president in 2028, he’s clearly trying to position himself as the GOP’s answer to the 44th president, who remains the most popular political figure in the country.

Vance will likely never say this out loud. It’s possible, though unlikely, that he’s unconscious of it. But following his recent book tour, it’s hard to ignore how much the vice president fancies himself to have the charisma, demeanor and even the wife required to be the GOP’s answer to Obama. 

Vance’s public arrogance certainly suggests he believes himself equal to the former president in both intellect and charm. In this, he’s utterly deluded, nor it is it clear that Republican voters, despite the persistent bitterness over Obama’s continued popularity, would even want a candidate who possesses these traits. Vance may well end up bumbling his way into the Republican nomination, giving him a real shot at the White House, but it would only be because the GOP has a dearth of contenders to replace Donald Trump.

Between his camera-hogging and social media addiction, Vance is ubiquitous. This serves to conceal how thinness of his political resume. Besides his victory as Trump’s running mate, he has won only a single election: the 2022 Ohio Senate race, an easy victory in a mostly-red state. He skipped the line of career politicians, not by beguiling ordinary Republican voters, who aren’t impressed with Ivy League degrees or his tendency to pontificate like a wannabe philosopher-king instead of a baby-kissing politico. It was because of money from tech billionaire investor Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley types who seem to equate being rich with being learned. 

For tech bosses like Thiel, having a Barack Obama of their very own is an appealing prospect. On paper, Vance seems to check all the boxes. Humble background but an Ivy League education? Check. Gorgeous, accomplished wife who was induced to set her career aside for her husband’s ambitions? Check. A talented wordsmith who writes his own books, and with a bestselling memoir penned before he considered running for office? Check. Youth appeal, down to listening to actual pop music and an agility with 21st century slang? Check. 

Sadly for Vance, in politics, as in art and sex, it’s less about your stat block and more about your ability to execute. Like any cheap knock-off, with Vance the ruse becomes clear at even a cursory examination. The vice president’s long list of Obama-esque attributes read like ill-fated attempts at parody in the real world.  

When it was published in 2016, Vance’s first book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” got a similar glowing reception to the one Obama received when his debut, “Dreams from My Father,” was published in 1995. Although both authors were only 32, they had lived unusual enough lives to justify memoirs. But while Obama’s tome remains beloved for its nuance and grace, Vance’s book has soured with time as many critics and readers come to recognize the shallow Appalachian stereotypes and conservative agenda it contains. “Hillbilly Elegy” was turned into a 2020 film by Ron Howard, but it is mostly remembered as an embarrassment. 

The contrasts become worse in looking at Vance and Obama’s second books, both of which were more obviously written with an eye toward running for higher office. Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope,” released in 2006 less than four months before he announced his candidacy for president, is an exemplar of the form, with authentic autobiographical details that remind readers the book was not primarily the work of a ghostwriter. Vance’s “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” released in June, has mostly raised questions about whether the vice president cares for anything but his own ambition. His high-minded rhetoric about his conversion to Catholicism sounds hollow in light of his willingness to spread racist lies about immigrants and rebuke Pope Leo for opposing war. In a passage a more compassionate editor might have removed, Vance reveals the higher power he seems to actually worship. Of hearing Thiel speak for the first time in 2011, Vance writes he saw the man who would become his patron as “[p]ossibly the smartest person I’d ever met.” 

Obama endeared himself to voters, especially younger ones, by coming off as the cool college professor who manages to sound erudite without being condescending. A former community organizer, he used youthful slang and pop culture references with the same ease he played pick-up basketball games. Vance’s efforts to seem hip come across as forced, as if he has never met a fellow millennial and can only approximate their lingo and cadence from reading old magazine reviews of movies like “Clueless.” 

When it comes to relatability and authenticity, perhaps no better example of the differences between the two men can be seen in their marriages. Both have beautiful wives with impressive careers of their own. Michelle Obama and Usha Vance were arguably more accomplished than their husbands were at the start of their political careers. Both women were openly wistful about having to leave that behind for one spent supporting their husbands in Washington, D.C.

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The difference is that the Obamas appear to like each other and, especially in the early years of his presidency, had palpable chemistry that induced romantic fantasies. The Vances, however, can’t seem to shake off suspicions that they loathe each other, no matter how many smiles they flash at the camera. It doesn’t help that the vice presidents constantly runs down his wife in speeches, comments he tries to play off as jokes, but which are too hard-edged to sell as jovial. 

Vance has admittedly been getting better in interviews and speeches in recent months. He managed to get through his entire book tour, including a stint on “The View,” without clips of his awkward behavior going viral. That may seem like a low bar, but this is the man whose time on the campaign trail in 2024 is mostly remembered for his angry “cat lady” obsession and an unfortunate incident in which he attempted to seem normal (and failed) while ordering donuts.

Vance will never have Obama’s easy charm. But if he keeps practicing, he might start being read by Republican voters as person-shaped enough to shrug his way into the nomination. 

Ultimately, Vance has erred in a way Obama was smart enough to avoid. The vice president tied himself to another politician whose stink rubs off on everyone around him. Obama’s political talents helped him rise quickly through the Democratic ranks, but his best asset was that he was able to plausibly run as an anti-war candidate, while his opponent for the 2008 Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, couldn’t escape her early support for the Iraq War.

Nearly two decades later, the public is yearning even more for an outsider uncorrupted by the failings of the Washington political establishment. Vance, however, didn’t have the foresight to see what should have been obvious: that Trump would make easily avoidable mistakes, like the Iran war, which has resulted in historic disapproval numbers that could well taint everyone who associates with him.

No amount of slang or smug chuckling will be able to get Trump’s stank off the vice president. 

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The new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit will soon allow parents, including parents earning $500,000 a year or more, to send their children to private schools at public expense. In fact, many of them already send their children to private schools, and they will now be reimbursed by federal tax dollars.

According to the Department of Education, students “from a household with income not greater than 300% of the area’s median gross income qualify.” The EFTC, part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in 2025, defines “area” as any county, including those with median incomes upwards of $200,000. This encompasses an estimated 18 million school-aged children. EFTC funds will come from donations repaid in full by federal tax credits — money that would have been paid to the federal government in taxes but will now be diverted.

What will this taxpayer money be buying? In North Carolina, which has had a program broadly similar to the EFTC since 2014, 74% of the 143,998 private school students receiving state-funded scholarships had already been attending private schools. A Rand Corporation study of a similar Arizona program found that, just like North Carolina, nearly 75% of the 64,000 students who were awarded money had already been enrolled in private school, or were already being home-schooled, before participating in the program. According to the Brookings Institution, under Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, “more advantaged communities are securing a highly disproportionate share of the funds” while “families in the poorest communities are the least likely” to get them.

Over the past five years, the number of states implementing some form of voucher or ESA program has swelled. A 2025 Brookings Institution analysis of six of them found that the problematic enrollment patterns prevalent in North Carolina and Arizona hold true for state programs in general.

Supporters see the EFTC as a remedy for what they often refer to as “failing public schools.” Conservative syndicated columnist Star Parker recently asserted that teachers unions have a “vice grip” on public schools and parents need the opportunity to get their children out of them. As evidence of America’s failures, she pointed to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment, an examination in reading, science and math given annually to 15-year-olds in 80 countries. “The US, she wrote, “ranks 18th behind Poland, Czechia, and Denmark.”

The statistics Parker cites put U.S. students in the top quantile. In 2022, out of 37 OECD countries, American students ranked sixth in reading, 13th in science and 28th in math. 

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While America’s education system has problems, these scores are hardly indicative of “failing public schools.” This is particularly true since, unlike most of the countries ranked by the OECD, the student body in major American school districts is overwhelmingly low-income and heavily immigrant. Moreover, our students have to contend with high levels of crime and violence in their neighborhoods; the U.S. has the seventh highest murder rate among the OECD countries. All of these problems inevitably drag down students’ test scores. 

Proponents of the EFTC assure concerned lawmakers and parents the move won’t harm public schools. Yet schools have many fixed costs, such as maintaining, repairing, heating and cooling school buildings, operating cafeterias and managing many administrative functions that cannot easily be scaled down when enrollment declines inevitably reduce funding. 

In 2018, one detailed study of the Los Angeles Unified School District found that 55% of its costs were fixed. While that figure is higher than most, school districts’ fixed costs have been found to be a third of overall district costs at minimum, and generally higher. Moreover, when students leave public schools for private academies, the students left behind are disproportionately special needs students who cost more to educate.

The EFTC’s supporters are correct that schools’ variable expenses — which is primarily the cost of educators and administrators — can be adjusted downward. But they often make this process sound simple and painless. At the Los Angeles Unified School District high school where I teach, this exact type of “adjustment” is happening for the 2026-2027 school year because of declining enrollment. The students’ process of losing teachers they had bonded with, come to trust and looked forward to having again is anything but painless. There were a lot of tears at my school on June 10, the last day of school, not just from students but from many teachers as well.

With messianic zeal, conservatives have long sold school choice programs as a way to liberate low-income and minority children from “failing” public schools. But state school choice programs have turned out just as teachers unions and other critics predicted — as little more than a way to subsidize well-off families whose kids are already in private schools, or who seek to place them there. 

For opponents of public education and teachers unions, these programs come with the added benefit of undermining public schools. The EFTC threatens to expand and accelerate this destructive process.

The post Trump’s great private school handout appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk recently made headlines over an issue we don’t typically associate with this president of the United States and a tech CEO: history. 

On July 22, Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, that his generative artificial intelligence model Grok would produce, by year’s end, a feature-length movie of “The Odyssey” that is “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” Two days later, Trump issued an executive order mandating that signage be placed on the exterior of Smithsonian Institution museums, alerting visitors to the “inaccurate information” conveyed in the displays within, and directing them to “locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history.” Striking in these two apparently unrelated episodes is one word in particular — accuracy — and important lessons museums and historians can learn to combat these attacks on the integrity of historical research.

There is an important, material connection between these incidents: AI. While frenemies Trump and Musk have a complicated relationship, both continue to be involved in a large-scale transformation of government by means of its fusion with corporate interests, and particularly with corporate investment in AI.

In the same week that the pair were ranting over historical “accuracy,” Michael Kratsios, the president’s science adviser, proposed overhauling the government’s approach to funding the sciences. His plan would leave that role to corporations and private philanthropists instead. Kratsios is not a scientist; his previous experience includes working at an investment fund run by Peter Thiel and for the Department of Government Efficiency under Musk. Among the priority areas Kratsios promotes for this new funding model are AI, quantum computing and robotics. And on the same day he introduced his proposal, Kratsios announced the winners of research grants from the Genesis Mission, the administration’s AI initiative.

While this push to redirect the country’s scientific research has incited alarm, reactions to interventions in the historical humanities have been more muted. Yet attacks on public museums and on creative retellings of historical narratives are just as dangerous to the health of this country’s democracy.

When he testified on July 21 before the Republican-led House Oversight Subcommittee on the perils of government intervention in the Smithsonian’s activities, David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University, offered a righteous defense of his profession. Besides highlighting the need for close engagement with history to lead to richer understandings of the past, Blight said it was necessary to disturb the questionable stories — those supposedly incontestable truths that the Trump administration insists are more “accurate” — that have been ingrained in our cultural memory. “If we’re not careful,” he warned, “we will end up with what the great writer Toni Morrison called ‘statist history.’ And it will create what she called ‘sanctioned ignorance.’”

AI has become a blunt instrument in the enterprise to impose precisely this form of sanctioned ignorance about America’s past. The signs Trump proposed for the outside of the Smithsonian suggest vaguely that there is another, more “accurate” history to be found elsewhere, and generative AI is exactly what Musk is proposing to provide this. Taken together, their plans amount to a one-two punch, history in the hands of the corporate state. 

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The federal government’s prospective disinvestment in the sciences has long been the status quo for the humanities, with corporate foundations and private philanthropy providing the main funding sources. Media outlets have recently been reporting on partnerships between museums, historical image collections and AI firms. A recent Financial Times article pointed to the prevalence of AI companies throwing struggling museums a “lifeline” by promising to bring in new audiences attracted by the prospect of chatbot-led “personalized” tours, along with other glitzy experiments. 

It may be tempting to see value in projects such as the Schmidt Foundation — that’s Eric Schmidt of Google — funding a fellowship in AI at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Musk Foundation’s support of the Scroll Prize to use AI in reconstructing ancient texts in the burnt scrolls of Herculaneum. But these projects are simply two among countless others that have been seeding AI into museums and historical research for well over a decade. Even more egregious is the case of AI companies buying  and destroying rare books en masse in the process of scanning them for data. In the context of the dire austerity we are witnessing, the juggernaut of tech money seems impossible to resist. But the public should know the dangers of ceding the precious work of peering into the past to those whose chief aims are to exploit it for data and build visions of our collective history to their own liking. 

It is a fact that AI is inherently incapable of producing an accurate image of the past. The data on which image recognition and generative models are based rely on statistics and probability to arbitrate the truth. Algorithmic mediation of the past means that the greatest weight will be given to what privileged institutions have already been able to preserve in the greatest numbers. 

In other words, AI is unable to treat evidence — or people — equally with context and knowledge of how that evidence relates to the inequities built into museums and image archives themselves. Yet the more space we grant to Big AI, in partnership with an authoritarian state, into institutions of historical research and public communication about history, the less able we will be to find our way toward historical accounts that have fallen into the cracks of algorithmic data sets. 

No amount of feeding them more data will make them better able to offer a vision of history that is more accurate to the past and an essential part of our striving toward a more equitable future. That fact alone threatens the future of democracy.

The post Trump and Musk both want to control America’s history appeared first on Salon.com.

Emma Waters was first introduced to readers of The New York Times in an April 2025 report titled “Trump’s White House assesses ways to persuade women to have more children.” The piece’s hero image is Waters, sitting on a couch with what appears to be a toddler while, blurred in the foreground, a pair of baby feet dangle into the frame. There is no getting around the fact that she looks incredibly smug. Perhaps any of us would be too if we were being funded and groomed as the next big policy star by the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025.

More than a year later, Waters is the subject of her very own New York Times profile. Mrs. Waters (she’s emphatic that the outlet identify her with this title; it normally goes with a default Ms.) has a lot of confident prescriptions for raising the birth rate without the use of assisted reproductive technology like in vitro fertilization. But when the piece was published, Waters was offended that its writer zeroed in on her domestic aptitude: “The profile made sure to note my homemade raw milk butter — a ‘MAHA elixir,’ as they called it — alongside our sourdough, Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons,’ and my request to be called ‘Mrs. Waters,’ Mrs. Waters wrote in a peevish Daily Wire editorial. “My actual work promoting root-cause care for infertility received less airtime.” 

It’s infuriating when a woman’s accomplishments outside the home are overlooked in favor of her homemaking bona fides. But what if that woman’s work, the work she believes was overlooked by The New York Times, is telling women like her that they should not work outside the home? Well, that is a conundrum that Mrs. Waters, in the interest of avoiding confrontation with her life’s cognitive dissonance, should probably learn to live with.

Waters’ new book, “Lead Like Jael: 7 Timeless Principles for Today’s Women of Faith,” published last March, is not the kind of book that The New York Times considers serious: self-helpish, sentimental, and authored by someone whose policy prescriptions are backed by very little real-world experience. But The Heritage Foundation is investing in Waters, offering a platform for her book, a new podcast, a salary on which to support her husband (currently in his last year of seminary school) and 2 — soon to be 3 — young daughters. 

Being anointed the new standard bearer for young woman conservatives might have been a really great gig 5 or 10 years ago, before young women conservatives realized that they are convenient smoke screens for a Republican agenda that no longer bothers to hide its anti-woman agenda. Before antifeminist tradwives and grandstanding edgelords alike began publicly sharing stories of what happened when they signed on as handmaidens for a regressive, misogynist worldview and then realized, little by little and then all at once, that they weren’t exempt from the regressive misogyny.

Canadian YouTuber Lauren Southern, for instance, was an early adopter of pick-me conservatism whose first video, posted when she was 19, was titled “Why I’m not a feminist.” Southern identified with the irreverent shock tactics that originated in online gaming before taking shape as a culture-war agenda; after her videos began spreading like norovirus, she was hired by Tenet Media, which was later revealed to be a Russian influence operation. 

Southern’s second act was tradwife. “I figured if I just follow the manual of look pretty, wear the right dress, quit my job, have babies, serve my husband, then I will be able to have this happy family life that so many people crave,” she told “On Point” host Meghna Chakrabarti in early 2026, when her memoir, “This is Not Real Life,” was published. Southern was one of the first high-profile women to try and square the circle of being both a godly wife and helpmeet, and the internet’s loudmouthed, outrageous Nazi queen. Her book is disarmingly honest — if not exactly remorseful — about the bleak results, which included drug addiction, mental-health breaks, and an alleged sexual assault involving Andrew Tate. 

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Then there’s former influencer Alice Llani, who started her channel, Alice and Fern, as a peek into the life of an earthy-crunchy, freebirthing, shoe-shunning tradwife. Via TikTok, Llani disseminated conspiracy-coded proto-MAHA fearmongering about sunscreen and vaccines; she shamed women who didn’t or couldn’t breastfeed; she proclaimed that no mother should take their children for pediatrician visits because pediatricians are all pedophiles. Married at 19, Llani was, by age 25, divorced from her controlling and allegedly abusive husband. She also had full custody of her baby and toddler and limited job prospects. “If any woman is considering being a tradwife and dedicating herself to a man,” she told Newsweek in 2024, “I would beg her not to and tell her she is worthy of achieving her own dreams and goals.” 

And there’s 27-year-old Ashley St. Clair, the former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and Elon Musk baby mama, who appeared on Fox News to fret about the declining birth rate and wrote a children’s book, “Elephants Are Not Birds,” with a clear anti-trans message. Since leaving MAGA, St. Clair has admitted on social media that she regrets her previous demonizing of the trans community and that Musk has slashed child-support payments, happily let his fanboys on X create deepfake porn images of her, and has little apparent interest in being a presence in his youngest child’s life. 

In many cases, these women aligned themselves with conservatism because they reveled in being loudly and proudly politically incorrect. “I was in love with the frisson of transgression,” said Anna, one of the disillusioned former believers profiled in Sam Adler-Bell’s March 2026 investigation “The women leaving the new right.” Anna’s thirst to luxuriate in racism, bigotry and woman hating meant supporting the flaccid alpha cope of JD Vance and Tucker Carlson who never missed a chance to paint women as crazy cat ladies who, by suffocating their true feminine nature, made themselves miserable; she told Adler-Bell that she believed she would be grandfathered into this thrillingly transgressive movement in exchange for a chunk of her dignity and self-respect. Instead she found herself biting her tongue around male peers with open contempt for women, existing conditionally in a space where sexism was no longer dressed up in the language of chivalry, protection and life-giving. 

Former podcaster Alex Kaschuta, who hosted a wealth of reactionary thought leaders on her show “Subversive,” told Adler-Bell that she saw her role as dispensing “this insider perspective on the dark side of female nature from . . . the rare self-aware member of the female sex.” It took the grave mistake of objecting to rank misogyny from her peers to confirm that whatever she wrote, whatever her accomplishments, whatever high-profile New Right icons she platformed on “Subversive” were not enough to overcome being a woman in a movement that believes women are property who must be reminded of their place, lest they forget.

For all these women, it took having terrible, even traumatizing experiences in these movements to make them realize that perhaps it’s not feminist claptrap to believe in equal rights and bodily autonomy. Waters has the confidence — if not the audience — of someone certain that her policy-wonk rigor is insurance against the fate of so many other conservative women thrown under the bus as soon as they became inconvenient.

Waters has taken comparisons to antifeminist activist Phyllis Schlafly as a compliment: After all, Schlafly was brilliant and confident and media savvy too. She was the most prominent antifeminist of her era, yet Schlafly couldn’t outmaneuver her core contradiction: A working mother famous for dissuading other women from working; an ambitious politico who told women that they should strive only to be good wives and mothers. It will be interesting to see what happens when Waters is no longer her family’s de facto breadwinner — when her husband, who is currently in seminary, graduates and assumes his rightful place as head of the family.

And though Waters is one of the Heritage Foundation’s current stars, she is also at odds with the organization’s increasingly radical flank, which includes president Kevin Roberts, chief economist E.J. Antoni, and Senior Research Fellow Scott Yenor, all of whom represent an ideological rift between classical conservatism and wingnut zealotry. In 2025, Roberts defended Tucker Carlson’s chummy interview with pocket Nazi Nick Fuentes and did not expect the pushback he received. Antoni’s nomination to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics was withdrawn in 2025 amid protest from both conservative and liberal economists, a history of sexually demeaning social-media insinuations, and a presence at the January 6 Capitol riots.

And Yenor is a well-known misogynist who has called professional women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome,” believes employers need to stop emasculating workplaces with consequences for sexual harassment or gender discrimination, and hopes to help repeal women’s suffrage. The Heritage Foundation’s growing tendency toward mask-off extremism threatens to expose its own fraudulence; the think tank’s “original scam,” wrote Paul Krugman, “was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts.” 

That’s not great news for a woman like Waters who hopes, probably sincerely, that men and women can get past differences in the interest of getting that birth rate up. “At the center of every problem, there is a woman with too much power,” wrote Adler-Bell. And the more prominent Waters becomes, the more of a problem she’ll be.

Which is unfortunate, because there are moments in which Waters gets very close to some revelations about when and why women are valued. One of the 7 principles outlined in “Lead Like Jael” is that women seek out the wisdom and counsel of older women on marriage, children, and the Biblical feminine, which bucks the complementarian expectation that husbands guide women’s most important decisions. Elsewhere, she comes tantalizingly close to recognizing the sexism of expecting women alone to bear the brunt of managing reproduction.

Discussing the development of hormonal birth control for men, Waters points out that a study on men receiving regular injections had to be shelved due to the number of men who dropped out after experiencing side effects like acne, moodiness, and weight gain. Her conclusion is a little bizarre: For Waters, the fact that men could not handle the kind of side effects that women regularly experience on hormonal birth control was proof positive that hormonal birth control is inherently bad for women. (Rather than, say, proof of medicine’s prioritizing of men’s physical comfort.)

The platform given to Waters by the Heritage Foundation is prominent, but despite the efforts of The New York Times, her intended audience doesn’t seem to be interested. Or perhaps they’ve simply seen this show before, and already know how it ends. 

Schlafly, were she around today, would probably not be the wise mentor Waters conjures in “Lead Like Jael.” She would not tell Waters that the game she’s playing is rigged, or reveal that a woman can be a bright star in the conservative firmament only with the permission of men. It’s unlikely she’d talk about the cabinet appointment Ronald Reagan dangled in front of her as she worked tirelessly to get him elected, the cabinet appointment she never got. She would believe that Waters has to find out the hard way, just as she did.  

The post The conservative movement’s sporadic anointment of Gen-Z spokeswomen appeared first on Salon.com.

On July 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio led a gathering of over 60 nations to discuss “political terrorism” by leftist organizations. Rubio, whom every Democratic senator voted to confirm, used dehumanizing language to describe the left, deeming them “enemies of civilization.” 

This was followed, on July 20, by the State Department issuing a 100-page report on Cuba’s connection to American leftists in an alleged “campaign of subversion against the United States.” As activists, artists and politicians in the U.S. begin to face increasing charges of communism and even terrorism by the current administration, there are lessons to be gleaned from mid-20th century America, and they are not solely confined to the McCarthy era.

One set of lessons comes from the life of Lillian Smith, the white Southern civil rights activist and best-selling author of “Strange Fruit,” who was the subject of a multi-decade surveillance project conducted by the FBI beginning in the early 1940s. Accused by agents of being a communist or at least a “fellow traveler,” the FBI compiled a 134-page file on Smith — longer than its file on Ernest Hemingway, and nearly as long as the one on John Steinbeck. 

Like many of the artists and activists being targeted today, Smith’s writings advocating peace and equality for all people made her a primary target of the state. From the pro-integration magazine South Today she edited in the 1930s and 1940s to her column in the Black-owned Chicago Defender to her seven books, both fiction and nonfiction, dealing with white supremacy and colonization, Smith challenged the status quo her entire life. 

Smith’s response when her friends and colleagues were threatened by the government offers us a model for our own actions now. Putting her career and reputation on the line, and risking more surveillance, Smith chose to place the safety and well-being of others first, and often paid the price: In addition to book bans and professional blackballing, she lost everything to arsonists in a 1955 fire, and dealt with frequent death threats and other attempted arsons.

In 1942, when one of the leaders of the House Un-American Activities Committee baselessly accused the famous educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune of being a communist, Smith sprang into action. She crafted a letter to Congress defending her longtime friend. Bethune believed the letter helped exonerate her from the allegations for which no charges were formally brought, and she wrote to Smith personally to thank her, generously offering to set up an in-person meeting with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. 

The following year the FBI opened a file on Smith, keeping tabs on her travel, her friends and colleagues, and her publications. On the very first page, a memorandum addressed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover expressed concern over “a friend of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt” who was known to be “a social uplifter in favor of the Negroes.” That was Smith.

By 1945, the bureau flagged news articles announcing that Smith had joined the Committee for Equal Justice for Recy Taylor, the Black woman whose white rapists were acquitted — twice — in Alabama. In further memos, agents seemed particularly interested in Smith’s association with the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, a group that promoted New Deal-like reforms, likely due to the unfounded allegations of SCHW serving as a communist front.

In August 1949, four years after the end of World War II, HUAC accused Paul Robeson, the artist and activist who was another of Smith’s longtime friends, of being a communist after he stated that Black Americans would not fight the Soviet Union in yet another war. Smith published one of the most empathetic pleas from any white writer of the time: “I cannot see how any white person who has a grain of sportsmanship in him can criticize any Negro, who, in confusion, has turned to communism for the answer that democracy has not yet given.” Communism may not have been the best answer, Smith continued, “but we white folks have not yet given Negroes in the South a better one. Until we do, I wish we had the grace to keep our mouths shut.”

Perhaps a testament to the persistence and power of her work, when the revised edition of Smith’s book “Killers of the Dream” was published in 1962, the FBI clipped an article from the Atlanta Journal announcing she would “be an honored guest at an autograph tea” for the book’s release. The column’s last sentence was undoubtedly the reason for its inclusion in the bureau’s files: “Mrs. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., was listed as one of the hostesses of the affair.”

The targeting of Smith — who herself was never a communist, and did not support the party — shows that in times of questionable politics, anyone can be put on a government list by simply advocating for basic human rights, equality and peace. The allegations rarely have anything to do with communism; the term is merely a scare tactic Republicans use when they begin to worry their power is in peril.

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The Trump administration isn’t being shy about naming names. Rubio’s own “enemies list,” which was included in the State Department report, targeted individuals and groups such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (for not denouncing the Democratic Socialists of America’s tribute to Assata Shakur, who was convicted of killing a police office in 1973 before escaping to Cuba), journalist Amy Goodman (for attending the wedding of CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans to Neville Roy Singham, the tech tycoon and nonprofit funder who has been accused of financing Chinese propaganda), the Amazon Labor Union, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America and the People’s Forum, a community center located in Manhattan. (Full disclosure: I have spoken at the People’s Forum, and I’m scheduled to speak there again this fall). 

As Rubio and the State Department try to dehumanize people who support human rights while ramping up programs to take legal actions against them, Americans with the most power and privilege must act by fighting on behalf of the persecuted, just like Lillian Smith did. 

Smith was committed to fighting hate, in all its forms, with art. Creativity helps form and inspire social movements, and Smith believed that art serves as spiritual and psychological nourishment for activists. She also believed in fighting oppression at the local level, knowing that small actions in our own communities are not only effective and immediate, but they also shut out the despair that often arises in the face of a seemingly unconquerable task. Much like her friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Smith considered love as a generative force essential to overcoming hatred, and believed that the more each of us cultivate relationships based on loving kindness, the harder it would be for hate to prevail.

Noting both the profound sadness and farcical tragedy ahead “if those who are gifted stay silent,” Lillian Smith in 1951 hoped for a better future. It “seems to me a fine time to be alive, in this age of falling walls,” she asserted. “It is an age full of risks but the stakes are high and worth the risk.” 

The same holds true today.

The post A former FBI target has the playbook to fight Rubio’s enemies list appeared first on Salon.com.

The starkest contrast between two summertime TV hits about women navigating midlife’s challenges shows up in the way its leading ladies handle themselves in the kitchen. For Jennifer Garner’s Hollis Shaw, the influencer around whom “The Five-Star Weekend” revolves, the kitchen is her happy place and moneymaker. Within moments of the series’ opening, she’s sliding a pie in the oven and futzing over tiny tarts and meringue kisses to photograph for her Hungry with Hollis followers.  

Hannah Waddingham’s “Ride or Die” assassin, Judith Burton, earns her pay quite differently: She kills the world’s worst people. To her, the kitchen is an arsenal; in the premiere, she beats two men silly with a stock pot, a skillet and several dinner plates. Later, her best friend, Debbie Claybourne (Octavia Spencer), is shocked to discover that Judith stores a submachine gun in her oven.

Both series meet a cultural moment many middle-aged women would call miraculous, and pharmaceutical and cosmetic corporations would describe as profitable. No generation of 40- and 50-somethings has been as extensively catered to as Gen Xers and geriatric Millennial ladies, for whom hormone replacement therapy, along with the secret ways of retinol, hyaluronic acid serum and collagen therapies, have been normalized.

There comes a point at which a woman realizes she’s a lot closer in age to Diane Keaton in “Something’s Gotta Give” than Amanda Peet, and she’s OK with that. Remember which one got to smash Keanu Reeves’ doctor?

In this economy, though, not many people can afford a house in the Hamptons or Nantucket. But we can vacation vicariously with Hollis and her friends Dru-Ann (Regina Hall), Brooke (D’Arcy Carden), Tatum (Chloë Sevigny) and Gigi (Gemma Chan) to the place Dru-Ann virally nicknames “white person clam island.”

“The Five-Star Weekend,” based on Elin Hilderbrand’s novel, is currently topping Peacock’s list of most popular series because of its breezy familiarity; we’ve spent time with these women in past summers, dating all the way back to “Big Little Lies.” You should know the formula by now. They have enviable wealth and careers, except for one who’s relatively less well-off than the rest. A tragedy or a mystery that brings everyone to a seaside locale; here, the sudden death of Hollis’ husband sends her sailing off to her family home on Nantucket, where all the interiors are as creamy and dreamy as a Nancy Meyers film. And there must be romance, represented in Hollis’ conveniently single high school sweetheart, played by the perennially foxy Timothy Olyphant.

Everybody’s hiding something from themselves and their host, who has planned all their fun with a pathological degree of anal retentiveness. There is a spa trip and fancy dinner at a restaurant and behind it all, lurking silently, a cancer scare.

If the “Five-Star” crew were to meet “Ride or Die” duo Debbie and Judith at a pub, they’d have war stories to swap. Debbie is a politician’s wife who sidelined her career aspirations to support his ambition to be Prime Minister. She gets him within spitting distance of Downing Street just in time for her husband to dump her.

You think that’s bad? How about this: Hours before that happens, Judith’s younger handler Sam (Calam Lynch) invites her to retire over lunch, suggesting that her recent 50th birthday might have made her a little psychologically unstable. “My mum turned 50 last year,” he shares, “and she went absolutely insane!”

The funniest part of that conversation is when Sam labels Judith a WOACA, a Woman of a Certain Age, pronouncing it as if he were Fozzie Bear punctuating a joke in an old-timey stand-up set. Only the real joke, it seems, is that Judith assumed her mission-completion rate and dedication were enough to maintain the respect of Sam and their boss, played by Bill Nighy. Not so.

(Courtesy of Prime Video)

There’s an additional slathering of irony in Garner, the woman behind “Alias” superspy Sydney Bristow, playing the happy homemaker. Meanwhile “Ride or Die,” created by Tessa Coates, introduces Waddingham, the elegant and proper boss lady from “Ted Lasso,” by showing Judith trading an easy assassination by distant sniping for an up-close-and-personal stabbing. Just for the fun of it.

I’d say that’s a pretty good representation of the gap between the long-shot fantasy of midlife and an intimate understanding of how it actually turns out.  

 

Every TV show is selling us something: “Five-Star Weekend” markets the expectation of how women should age well and politely, which is to propose we seek respite from all the heartbreak, ageism and our creeping fear of obsolescence and decrepitude by leaning on our nearest friends. That, and sitting in salt rooms and mud baths or gazing at the bottom of our stand mixer’s bowl. Expressing our rage at all that, however, is still frowned upon.

That makes Debbie and Judith relatable and extraordinary figures, in that they are 50-something women, played by 50-something women headlining a high-velocity espionage thriller, linked to developments each is entitled to be angry about. Instead of proposing Waddingham as a Bond co-star, she’s the expertly skilled agent flanked by a best friend with an equally formidable intellect – the Moneypenny to her 007.

With the scrape Debbie and Judith find themselves in, a beach holiday is out of the question. Besides, as every perimenopausal woman knows, it’s really hard to relax when so many people in the world deserve to be punched.

“Ride or Die” reminds us that our local multiplexes used to be dominated by buddy action blockbusters in past summers, most of which starred men.

An exception was “Thelma & Louise,” which became the talk of the season and then year when it landed in theaters 35 years ago in May. Susan Sarandon’s Louise and Geena Davis’ Thelma spurred debates about what it meant that this film, written by a woman, created two female folk heroes out of the cold-blooded killing of a would-be rapist. Feminists loved it, but plenty of other women viewed it as improper.

It only occurred to me recently that Sarandon was 44 years old when she played Louise, the pal who pulled the trigger. I wasn’t thinking about that when I first saw “Thelma & Louise” because my 40s were far away enough to not even consider that detail. Now I know how much it matters.

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Ultimately, what sisterhood there is between “Five-Star Weekend” and “Ride or Die” can be seen in the way they consider the resources a woman has as she enters middle age. If we are “Five-Star”-fortunate, we can hire assistance to handle the inevitable difficulties associated with this time of life, whether that means groundskeepers or divorce lawyers. Would that were possible for all of us.

“Ride or Die,” for all its fanciful twists, ultimately has more realistic counsel for all the WOACAs watching: Bank on yourself and your extensively earned skills. You don’t need to be rich to burn the road behind you to the point of no return, just confident enough to keep barreling forward. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll have a trustworthy person riding shotgun in your getaway car.

The post The small-screen seduction of the middle-aged woman appeared first on Salon.com.

It’s tough to find any semblance of a silver lining in the humiliating implosion of Donald Trump’s foreign policy over the last year, especially after a week that has brought us another escalation of the war no one supports, a recycled trade war with Canada, an out-of-nowhere nuclear deal with a country that should never have access to nuclear weapons, and yet more threats against a small nation that poses no threat to the United States. 

But here’s the upside, just maybe: The tiny and perverse cadre of “anti-anti-Trump leftists” has been decisively silenced. If you find that phrase baffling, consider yourself fortunate. You evidently haven’t wasted any of your one wild and precious life arguing with renegade Marxists about whether the Trump-Putin alliance, in world-historical terms, was “objectively” superior to neoliberal internationalism on the Clinton-Obama model. 

If this is a safe space, I will admit here that at one time I was around one-third vulnerable to such arguments. I don’t mean the part about Trump being a force for progressive change in any sense, even if entirely by accident, since that was obviously and hilariously wrong, not to mention based on the same “enemy of my enemy” pretzel logic that produced the disastrous Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. But on the level of a sophomore-seminar intellectual exercise, I could understand why self-appointed contrarians like Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald saw Trump as a disruptive force who might upend the softcore imperialism of the previous three or four decades, which had led to the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global hegemony of corporate capital. 

You didn’t have to be an unregenerate Leninist or an online troll or a Pat Buchanan-style paleoconservative (or all three at once!) to be momentarily seduced by Trump’s “America First” nonsense. Disgruntled Americans of all varieties voted for Trump by the millions, based in large part on his populist, isolationist rhetoric. Maureen Dowd’s notorious “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk” column from 2016 should be inscribed above the gates of one of the lower circles of hell as a permanent warning to know-it-all media commentators. 

It was, of course, immensely helpful to Trump’s agenda of fabrications, exaggerations and outright lies that we experienced the failings of mainstream U.S. foreign policy all over again during the strange interregnum of Joe Biden’s presidency, with its pious invocation of a “rules-based order” — where the rules are set by America, of course — and its theological commitment to a now-entirely-imaginary “two-state solution” in the Middle East. Several things can be said in retrospect about Biden’s fateful embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu on the Tel Aviv tarmac after the Oct. 7 attacks: It was an authentic and heartfelt gesture, it was a grievous political error and it paved the way for a humanitarian catastrophe now widely perceived as genocidal. 

Trump’s return to power has, at the very least, finally confounded all the doofuses who ever took anything he said at face value, and has also dispensed with the contradictory or two-faced rhetoric of the Biden years. There’s no more talk of universal human rights or the spread of democracy. The fundamental logic of Trumpian policy is cynicism all the way down: We don’t care about any of those things and we never did. To paraphrase Stephen Miller, surely the most instrumental figure in the Trump White House, the only thing that matters is power. 

Maybe we should be grateful for the epic and reckless corruption of this administration, since Miller’s ambitious schemes to reshape America and the world as a white-supremacist wonderland are consistently undercut by the enormous levels of graft surrounding him. (Miller strikes me as a true believer whose corruption is moral rather than financial, one of many traits he appears to share with Joseph Goebbels.)

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As the Trump administration veers unsteadily into its lame-duck phase and a likely midterm wipeout, its quest for a legacy achievement becomes increasingly pathetic, not to mention increasingly dangerous. Trump’s dance of death with the Iranian regime might have a comical aspect if the lives of many thousands of people and the future of the global order were not at stake. By goading the president into restarting the war for the third time (by my count), the new roster of hardline leaders in Tehran, at least for now, have strengthened both their domestic control and their international reputation. It’s difficult to imagine, in fact, how Trump and his ludicrous cast of advisers could possibly have screwed this up worse than they did. (D.C. rumors suggest that high-testosterone “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth will ultimately be compelled to walk the plank over this fiasco.)

Meanwhile, the search for something that can be pitched to last-ditch MAGA loyalists as a victory, no matter how petty and insignificant, continues. Trump has never given up on his dream of seizing or annexing Greenland, but it was always more like an extortion scheme or a real estate scam than a military threat. Roughly the same applies to his improvised plan to rebuild Gaza as a Trumpified new Riviera, which took even Netanyahu by surprise and was never likely to escape the uncanny valley of AI fantasy. 

I’m inclined to feel similar about this week’s reports that Seb Gorka, an unhinged far-right free radical with some sort of roving-ninja role in the Trump White House, is urging a military assault against Islamist militia groups in Mali, a West African nation with complicated internal dynamics and no relationship whatever to U.S. national security. Again, this might be amusing if real human lives weren’t at stake, and if billions in taxpayer dollars appropriated by Congress for aid to impoverished countries like Mali weren’t being diverted to right-wing nationalists, white supremacists and anti-LGBTQ groups instead of humanitarian and healthcare NGOs. (Read this ProPublica report for more on that.)

Things have truly gotten dark if we’re looking to JD Vance and Marco Rubio as the proverbial adults in the room, managing the worst impulses of their increasingly disinhibited and incapacitated boss. I don’t know which of those two geniuses signed off on the reported nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which may fall apart, goddess willing, under the weight of its impromptu idiocy and the fact that literally no one thinks it’s a good idea. Mohammed bin Salman, that kingdom’s journalist-murdering leader, is roughly the last person in the world who should have access to nuclear materials. If this deal goes through, it could rank among the very worst of Trump’s foreign policy blunders. Of course there’s still time for more. 

The post Trump’s foreign policy enters its decadent, desperate end stage appeared first on Salon.com.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a busy man. When he isn’t working out with fellow Cabinet members and denying promotions to Black and female officers, he’s making videos ordering the troops to take testosterone tests to prove they are manly enough to serve their country. He’s fighting the culture war morning, noon and night. When he can find the extra time, he’s also running the Pentagon as it wages war in Iran, commits murder on the high seas in the Caribbean and prepares to invade Cuba — and possibly Mali and Greenland. Hegseth has a lot on his plate. 

That includes demanding a $454 billion increase in the 2027 Pentagon budget, which brings the total request to nearly $1.5 trillion — a 44% increase from the previous year. Hegseth has called this a “generational investment” that comes out roughly to all of U.S. military spending in World War II. You might think that it’s because of Donald Trump’s war in Iran and all the munitions the military is going through, but you would be wrong because, like most wars, it is paid for separately from the Pentagon budget through emergency supplemental requests.

During a combative appearance on Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hegseth asked for another $67 billion in supplemental funding for the rest of the budget year. But the shock of that request paled in comparison to another number. Hegseth estimated that the Iran war has cost $37.5 billion so far, far higher than the $30 billion figure the Pentagon only recently gave to lawmakers. 

That number is astounding on its own, but according to most sources and experts, it significantly lowballs the war’s true cost, which continues to mount. NBC News reported that, according to internal estimates by the Defense Department peg the amount at $80 billion to $100 billion. 

It’s not unusual for administrations of both parties to bulk up the Pentagon budget, although the Republicans have always been the most passionate about it. But this is beyond the wildest dreams of Pentagons past. With all the cuts the Trump administration has made to everything else in the government, you’d think they would be a little less greedy. But that’s not how they roll. In Trump’s first term, military spending was profligate, and this time it’s a free-for-all.

Hegseth is basically asking for an unlimited supply of money to finance an extremely unpopular war and such “generational investments” like the “Trump-class battleships,” otherwise known as the Golden Fleet. We needn’t worry that they are being irresponsible, though. They are committed to rooting out “woke” wherever they find it, and that will surely save a few bucks somewhere down the road.

When the senators asked him why the Pentagon needed all this extra money, Hegseth fell back on the Trump administration’s catch-all explanation: “Joe Biden did it.” In this the secretary was correct. Biden requested military funding for Ukraine through emergency supplemental requests. But the Trump administration has created an unprecedented innovation. In partnership with MAGA allies on Capitol Hill, they are trying to get it passed through the reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered but is subject to ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, who can strip the provision if it is determined to be non-budgetary.

The U.S. is running through its supplies of expensive precision-guided munitions and air-defense interceptors at record pace in the Iran war, and there are concerns that reduced inventories are going to affect readiness in case the country is drawn into a war it didn’t choose. Hegseth, though, would not cop to that, insisting instead that all was well — and that the Pentagon just needed more cash to fix up the depleted military Biden left them.

House Republicans have proven more pliant. On Wednesday, by a margin of 216 to 212, they passed a $1.15 trillion defense bill to cover some of what the White House is requesting, adding some juicy extras for artificial intelligence and other tech-bro projects led by the private-equity types who are running much of the Pentagon these days. According to Guardian, one of them, former Uber executive Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering who is an aggressive promoter of AI, made a profit of up to $24 million by selling a private investment he held in xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, earlier this year. (In March 2025, Michael declared the value of his stake at between $500,000 and $1 million.) Since the company isn’t public, no one is quite sure how he came to own the shares or who he sold them to, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the defense department entered into two separate contracts with xAI before Michael sold his shares. 

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He’s not the only one who appears to be milking the military-industrial complex. The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the president’s eldest sons, have a portfolio of tech companies that are raking in billions from the Pentagon. These are not businesses with which the Trumps have any experience, and the partnerships and investments have all been initiated since their father became president the second time. Don Jr. has said publicly that he works with Hegseth to steer more contracts to drone manufacturers, of which he is a beneficiary. Both brothers are heavily involved with firms that have contracts all over the Pentagon. They insist, though, there’s no conflict of interest and no one in the department has even considered favoritism.

As usual, Hegseth behaved like a teenage bully during the Senate hearing. He argued with senators, blamed Biden and insisted that America has won the war in Iran while simultaneously requesting many more billions to win it. Since the GOP is attempting to push this supplemental package through using reconciliation, they won’t need Democrats to pass it, so one can probably expect that he’ll get what he wants. The firehose of money flowing to the Pentagon and all the insiders who are making massive bank from it isn’t going to dry up any time soon. 

 

Hegseth ended the week with a gratuitous gesture to his commander in chief, who spent a good part of his time explaining that the 18 deaths in the Iran war are nothing compared to all the deaths in previous wars. To make Trump feel better, Hegseth removed from the tally four troops who were killed in renewed fighting, bringing the official death toll back down to 14. Military officials told the New York Times that “one reason behind the change was . . . because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”

Nonetheless, Trump attended the dignified transfer of the four fallen soldiers’ remains and concocted a story to burnish his war lust. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’”

Sure they did.

The post Pete Hegseth’s Iran war math doesn’t add up appeared first on Salon.com.

Somewhere in the halcyon years of internet writing, I read — or, at least, I remember reading — a piece titled “Holden Caulfield was the first millennial dipsh*t.” I’m almost positive this piece existed, and the fact that I couldn’t find any mention of it in the sad, hollowed-out husk of the 2026 internet offers no proof that it didn’t. What did turn up are a newer generation’s takes on Holden, many of them unexpectedly harsh: He’s “the most insufferable character ever written,” “an entitled brat,” the “original ‘needs to touch grass’ guy,” a “clueless rich kid who’s never had to try,” a “self-important, spoiled and worthless little sh*t,” and “an emo narcissist with an inflated sense of his own self-worth.” 

Millennials were the first generation to anoint old Holden as “problematic” — a 2009 New York Times piece titled “Get a life, Holden Caulfield,” quoted educators who still taught “The Catcher in the Rye,” a book that turns 75 this year, and was once a standard in the English curriculum for grades 9–11. One educator said that, when she taught at a public charter school, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’” A teacher who taught the book over 3 decades noted that “Holden’s passivity is especially galling and perplexing to many present-day students . . . “[T]hey do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes.” And one recalled a boy telling her, “We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’”

Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews suggest that Gen Z has similar smoke for Holden, which makes sense when you consider that for these kids, active-shooter drills are as much a part of grade school as multiplication tables, and creepy full-grown adults are sliding into their DMs asking for nudes. You can’t really blame them if their response to the self-absorbed internal monologues of an unreliable narrator is, Oh, boo hoo. Get some real problems. 

But they’ve got another bone to pick with Holden Caulfield: He is being used as a prop by performative men to impress those around him. “Among Gen Z, books have become a symbol not of intelligence but of ‘hotness,’ an accessory to be worn with a good outfit, wedged in the bottom of a designer bag or pretentious tote,” wrote one young woman in a piece for the Times of London. And she has some pitiless words for the callow young men toting “The Catcher in the Rye” pretentiously around: The book, she writes, “has become a go-to summer read for incel types who overly identify with the petulant protagonist Holden Caulfield . . . [W]henever [my friend] sees a man with J. D. Salinger in hand, she assumes he must still be at school: ‘It screams English literature A-level.’” Another piece, this one written by two Gen-Z women, posits that Holden himself is “the ultimate performative male.” 

This take is ungenerous but not surprising, given that one of the timeworn accusations against Holden Caulfield is hypocrisy: This guy calls everyone else phony, but he’s just as phony! It did make me wonder, though, whether Gen-Z readers who are assigned “The Catcher in the Rye” still get the same decontextualized introduction to the book as I and the rest of Gen X did. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I read the book, but each time I’ve returned to it as an adult, and there have been a few, I reach the end thoroughly baffled. Are students still introduced to “Catcher” as a novel about disaffection and anomie rather than one about grief, trauma and other things that were absolutely not talked about in Salinger’s day and rarely talked about in mine? And if so, why? 

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The idea that the art can be separated from the artist has never made sense to me — and the way it was foregrounded within the cultural discourse of #MeToo too often felt like a disingenuous avoidance of the clear reality that great art has been made by people who cause profound harm to others. “The Catcher in the Rye” is a text that is flatly impossible to decouple from its author: A book about trauma written in the midst of trauma by a traumatized man. This doesn’t mean that anyone reading the book needs to know Salinger’s whole deal, but both its creation (much of it was written during World War II, when Salinger served as a counterintelligence agent and was one of the first G.I.s to see the human toll at Dachau) and its wild commercial success (which repelled the author and led to his withdrawal from public life.)

As Mikki Halpin noted in these virtual pages following his death in 2010 at the age of 91, Salinger’s quasi-hermithood, among other things, gave cover to his relationships with inappropriately young women; his desire for privacy was inflated into mythology by a “literary establishment,” Halpin wrote, whose collective investment “in the fictional, reclusive Salinger . . . is a convenient cudgel with which to silence any discussion of Salinger’s personal life, particularly any revelation of unsavory truths.”

I would add that the Salinger myth also delayed a reckoning with his most famous character’s mental health. Gen Z men are not the first to use “The Catcher in the Rye” as a prop, after all: Years before I read it, I knew it only as the book Mark David Chapman was carrying when he assassinated John Lennon in 1980 and that, in 1981, was left in the hotel room of John Hinckley Jr. shortly before he attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. (In 1989, it resurfaced in another high-profile shooting when Robert John Bardo murdered actor Rebecca Schaeffer, dropping his copy as he fled her Hollywood home.) There’s been plenty of skepticism about whether the latter two were Chapman copycats rather than murders actually inspired by the book. Either way, reluctance to associate either Salinger or his most indelible creation with crazed murderers meant keeping their own wounds at arms’ length. 

This is, in part, why I’m surprised at Gen Z’s dismissal of Holden Caulfield as a whiny white rich-kid hypocrite. This cohort has come of age having open conversations about mental health that were unthinkable as recently as 4 decades ago; they understand the way formative traumas burrow into the minds and bodies of those affected and eventually grow unmanageable. I can definitely understand why there might not be, let’s say, a surplus of empathy for a privileged young man carelessly and repeatedly squandering his expensive education. But brushing by consequential facts of Holden’s life — parents who treat him as an out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem, the death of his brother, the suicide of his classmate, a history of being molested by older men — to call him performative feels awfully heartless for a generation this conversant with how trauma works. 

Listen, I don’t know anyone who liked Holden Caulfield the first time they read the book, probably because he is not supposed to be particularly likable; Salinger wrote the book for adults, not teens. But reading “The Catcher in the Rye” as an adult, and again as the parent of a Holden-aged boy, has made me realize that if the circumstances in which young readers meet the character have been slow to change, and the lens on him informed largely by a calcified reputation of youth in revolt, that’s on the adults in the room who, like the adults in his life, can’t hear everything he’s telling us.   

The post How Holden Caulfield became a performative male appeared first on Salon.com.

Early in his extraordinary new documentary, “Remake,” seasoned filmmaker Ross McElwee reminisces with his young son, Adrian, about their travels together, presenting McElwee’s films at various festivals around the world. “What’s your favorite place that we’ve been to, Adrian?” McElwee asks his son in the archival footage. Adrian recalls a snafu from the Munich Film Festival, but can’t quite remember the details. McElwee explains that the numbers on his film reels were mislabeled, causing extended confusion as they tried to put the footage back in the correct, chronological order. Still a child, Adrian looks off into the distance, biting his gelato spoon while registering the information.

Then the footage burns out, replaced by shots of Adrian across his youth, preserved in celluloid amber: raking leaves on an autumn afternoon, waving a sparkler around in the summertime, looking at himself in the mirror as a baby. McElwee’s voice, more mature and stoic than before, fades in. “The story I thought I was telling with my filmmaking, the stories of lives lived over decades, is now disjointed, confused — the reels are all out of order,” he says. “First there is a father, and he has a son: me. But then it starts all over. I am now father, and I have a son: you. But something goes awry. Something goes off-script. And then, suddenly, you’re gone.”

“Remake” is McElwee’s first film in 15 years, appearing like a jewel out of a mountain of life’s rubble. His extended absence from filmmaking was necessitated by Adrian’s death in 2016 and the monumental torrent of confusion and emotional displacement that followed. McElwee’s last documentary, 2011’s “Photographic Memory,” saw Adrian as a young adult, trying to come into his own and figure out his place in life amid a shifting social landscape riddled with digital black holes. 

In that film, McElwee set out to reconcile his somewhat fractured relationship with Adrian, who’d become distant and disillusioned compared to his spritely, curious youth, by traveling back to France, where he worked as a photographer’s assistant in his early 20s. In retracing his steps, McElwee sought to understand Adrian better, to comprehend the grasp digital media had on his son in contrast to his own fascination with the analog film camera he frequently used to capture his family, both for his own memories and for his documentaries. In “Remake,” McElwee laments the hope that making “Photographic Memory” gave him, an aspiration that he was depicting his son on the cusp of finding his way through the dark. “The film might’ve been shot as a documentary,” McElwee says, “but now it’s fiction.”

“Remake” may be the story and study of a tragedy. But McElwee’s nonlinear construction and brusque, confessional narration slowly transform the film into something much deeper, a poignant work of art that instantly yet subtly aligns itself with the great stories of our time. His mission is unassuming. This is a film McElwee feels compelled to make, as if it were something living inside of him that had to be excised by any means necessary. 

Like all grieving, it is complicated and disordered, and beautifully so. McElwee stitches together the past and present to find new meaning in their seams, a jagged line that runs through time and points toward the future. To call his latest film a contemporary masterwork would be true, but there’s also no quantifying the magic McElwee conjures here, no comparing it to anything else. “Remake” is a truly singular piece of art, a self-reflexive rumination on life and the result of all its passions. It is memory embodied.

Sometime in the 2010s, McElwee received a call from director and producer Steve Carr, who wanted to explore remaking his breakthrough documentary, 1986’s “Sherman’s March,” into a narrative film. “Sherman’s March” loosely explored McElwee’s hapless search for love during a trip to his native South, where he planned on making a film about a Civil War campaign through the area. Along the way, the movie became less about American history and more about McElwee’s family and his experiences with religion and relationships. 

Carr, the director of fun-for-the-whole-family crowdpleasers like “Daddy Day Care” and “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” didn’t exactly seem like the best candidate to take on something as intricate as “Sherman’s March.” But at the time, a teenage Adrian, hoping to break into the more commercial side of the film business, was vexed by his father’s reluctance to pursue Hollywood money-makers. So, in hopes that a remake might bring the two of them together in some way, McElwee signed the rights to “Sherman’s March” over to Carr, with a condition: McElwee would be granted access to produce a making-of documentary about the new film. McElwee set up his camera to film himself the day he signed the contract. He preferred an easygoing static tripod shot — a point Adrian contested, as is shown in the film. After some back and forth, McElwee relented, letting Adrian try his slow zooms and dynamic shots. The final product in “Remake” is a combination of the two styles, with the loving squabble between a father and his son left in the middle. 

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“Remake” is often startingly honest in this way. McElwee refuses to scrub the truth from his personal histories, choosing instead to confront his own regrets head-on. His regret lingers alongside his grief, allowing the viewer to understand his complex feelings of remorse. Occasionally, McElwee will verbalize his paternal contrition. But most of the time, his choices in archival footage do the talking, asking silent questions. Was he too hard on his son? Did he push him in the wrong direction by trying to reorient his path? Did the fun of the film festival circuit eventually become a blinding limelight, through which Adrian couldn’t see past as he got older? None of these questions have answers. Still, McElwee seeks meaning that may be embedded somewhere in the film grain, revisiting the footage he compiled during the documentary for a remake that never came to fruition, and measuring its tenor against his finished films.

In the process, McElwee creates a patchwork tapestry, comprised of vignettes across time. This one heartwarming, that one agonizing. Together, they form a rich yet incomplete portrait of an existence cut short, which McElwee hopes to broaden by weaving in meaning from before and after Adrian’s life, all captured by McElwee’s omnipresent camera. 

But even that begins to feel disingenuous. There’s an elephant in the room in every scene, and its lens follows the subject everywhere. “Remake” stars McElwee, his son and the camera — that one simple tool that connects Adrian and his father through space and time, life and death. What forged McElwee’s passion and helped him establish his life’s work now reveals its dual nature as the wedge that kept him and Adrian apart. For McElwee, the revelation presents a new crisis. Was he so concerned with capturing his son’s malaise as Adrian became an adult that he missed details he might’ve seen if one eye weren’t looking through the viewfinder? Set against the backdrop of our modern culture, where we’re filming everything but listening to no one, McElwee finds himself trapped in irony’s clutches. In his desire to portray Adrian’s immersion in parasocial worlds filled with shadowy, destructive figures, McElwee’s own perspective was equally one-sided. 

Of course, this is a film about life, and nothing in life is ever so simple. Alongside his regret, McElwee wears compassion for himself and even more for his son, bravely journeying into Adrian’s own archives, including footage from a film Adrian was making about his addiction and recovery. McElwee finds images both startling and serene; videos that fill in gaps he couldn’t on his own. He lovingly omits most graphic footage, but commits to approaching his and Adrian’s shared story from a different viewpoint — a remake.

Throughout the film, alongside the contemplation on the sacrifices he’s made for his work, McElwee repeatedly revisits the importance of filmmaking from different angles: as a tool for preservation, for storytelling, for survival. A film, especially a documentary film, can often tell the story of our lives more succinctly than we ever could. It can also distort that same story into something untruthful. It’s both fact and fiction, and the meaning changes depending on your vantage point.

This idea got me thinking about a class I took in college about ethnographic filmmaking, after an extended break from school following some of my own issues that took me off-track and made my life listless. Searching for direction, I found guidance in professor and documentary filmmaker Carolyn Strachan, whose average RateMyProfessor score hovered somewhere around 2.1. She was a stickler for analysis, whose intensive assignments were the bane of many classmates. But her thorough coursework and off-the-beaten-path syllabus of films opened my eyes to countless new ideas and perspectives. Her class reignited my passion for both writing and film, and pushed me back toward a version of myself that I recognized. 

It took some time to realize how fundamental this course was. But when I understood the connection last year, I tried to get in touch with Professor Strachan to thank her, only to find out that, in 2022, she died after a long battle with cancer. It was a personal matter that never came up in class, but almost certainly influenced her passion for her work and her teaching. Immediately, I thought of how many of my peers complained that her assignments were too difficult, and her film choices were too unconventional to analyze easily, even for college-level writers. She wanted too much from us, they thought. Now I see that she simply wanted us to work a little harder to see how truly beautiful and varied life can be. 

I was upset that I’d never be able to thank her, to laud her for pushing students out of their comfort zones by showing them documentaries that were not easily palatable. There was nowhere to put my grief. So, I’m putting some of it here. As McElwee’s film reminded me, there’s no easy way of making sense of life. But art is our foremost way of working through it, of trying to understand who we are, who we become and how. There’s no better way to honor someone than through art, even if it’s imperfect, even if it can’t reflect their substantial impact, no matter how brief.

Shortly after he and Adrian reminisce about the mishap in Munich, McElwee continues his narration. “So, yes, you’re gone,” he says. “But you’re not gone, not entirely. Because I still have all these moments with you I captured on film.”

The post “Remake” will shift your perspective on grief appeared first on Salon.com.

If you live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle or any city with a high population of Burning Man devotees, it’s nigh impossible for “The Man Will Burn” to be a prejudice-free viewing experience.

If you don’t, the extent of what you know about Burning Man is likely based on the breathless cable news coverage of 2023’s Mudpocalypse, or headlines like this: “Burning Man’s Orgy Dome asks for help.” I assure you that it did not originate in The Onion.

No counterculture event is more shrouded in hype than this annual gathering of thrill-seekers, Instagram influencers, billionaires and whichever artists can still afford to attend. People from some walks of life, ranging from the upper middle class to the .001%, shed their social divisions and come together in the Nevada desert to party and screw and inhale art and drugs and open all their chakra holes or whatever.

Then they bring that energy home with them. You will know these beings, called Burners, by their love of neon fake fur, white girl box braids and disconium stretch pants. They may also insist on being called by their Playa name, something like “Dirty Rizz,” even though their driver’s license identifies them as Derwin.

Hence my interest in Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi’s four-part docuseries. I was genuinely searching for real answers in “The Man Will Burn” to lingering questions like, what’s up with these clowns and why do so many people despise them? Noujaim and Gandhi don’t provide answers. Not intentionally, anyway. What we can surmise is purely based on who they feature over its four hours and who’s left out.

Like The Orgy Dome, for instance.

Three episodes of “The Man Will Burn” have aired with very little interrogation of how well it lives up to its hallowed 10 Principles, one of which is Radical Inclusion. In a docuseries about an overwhelmingly white community, a Black artist’s camp receives the briefest drive-by. Granted, one of the people the series follows, Ray Christian, is a Black veteran from North Carolina who finds community with a welcoming camp from his area.

Overall, though, Noujaim and Gandhi would rather build their drama around Burning Man Project CEO Marian Goodell, a nice lady struggling to keep this hipster hootenanny alive.

Goodell and the senior members of The Org, as everyone calls the BMP, are the last connection to its late founder Larry Harvey, who died in 2018. Harvey’s dream began with a beach burn in San Francisco in the mid ‘80s. When the crowds grew too big, he and his fellow artists moved the festivities into the Nevada desert. Then, within the last few years, Elon Musk’s brother sailed into the chat on a raft of cash.

If “The Man Will Burn” has a villain, it is Kimbal Musk, the avatar for all the billionaires who changed Burning Man and the world for the worse after arriving on the scene a few years ago. It helps that he’s dressed as the Worst Guy at the Sex Jamboree, down to his cowboy hat – the modern safarist’s pith helmet.

Seattleites, however, can attest that Burning Man’s ruin began long ago, pretty much since Microsofties and Amazonians invaded it in the early aughts. Along with turning local party conversations into Olympic games for the obnoxious, these folks had the same gentrifying impact on The Playa as they did in historically non-white neighborhoods and overall affordability.  The hagiographic tone of “The Man Will Burn” obscures that.

 

But it does make one wonder what Burning Man would be without tech bros. Indeed, where would all of us be?

“The Man Will Burn” has a similar value to Burning Man itself, in that you can either afford to care about its nonsense or continue living life like a person with bills to pay. Then again, for those of us who enjoy reading certain entertainment like tea leaves, even slight efforts like this provide a colorful gaze at how economic stratification upends systems originally meant to level the field for creative people, including ones intended purely for play.

It’s also obvious to any critical thinker that the idiot rich aren’t the only plagues on Black Rock City. Like any religion, to use the term Harvey drops in an audio clip, the problem isn’t the concept. It’s the people. A notion that blossomed from an idealistic vision was Martinized into a cult-like excursion for the privileged. Some make one week-long party into their whole identity. Those people are some of Burning Man’s worst PR reps, contorting the meaning of its principles to suit themselves.

The episode witnessing the Renegade Burn, a bootstrapped Burning Man that took place while the COVID pandemic was still raging, exemplifies this. Those howling weekend barbarians hail their ability to pull it off as evidence of their Radical Self-Reliance and dedication to community.

Meanwhile, the locals in the nearby town of Gerlach, Nevada, worried about where all those people planned to defecate. In their bushes? Their yards? An enterprising shopkeeper stocks makeshift potties. That is the last we see or hear of that dirty business, which might as well be a visual metaphor for this docuseries’ shortcomings.

( Courtesy of HBO)

Much about the grimy parts of Burning Man is left unmentioned, leaving it up to Redditors to gripe about sanitation pile-ups departing Burners leave in nearby towns. If “The Man Will Burn” can’t be honest about where all the trash goes, we can’t be surprised at how little it goes into the underreported crimes linked to the event or its dire toll on seasonal laborers.

Burning Man turns 40 this year. If it were a person, that threshold might mark the start of some serious self-examination. Alternately, that’s a classic age to light the fuse on a midlife crisis by, say, divorcing, cashing out a 401K account and running off to Nevada in August to get blasted on psilocybin and ketamine while dancing nude in the middle of a dust storm. Who are we to judge?

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For those very delights — oh, and the art too, yeah, sure — are why many people still want to go, a desire that watching “The Man Will Burn” will only strengthen. But you’re urged to also peek at the views beyond this pretty thing right in front of you, starting with the price tag. In 2026, tickets start at $550 per person plus $165 for a parking pass. That’s before calculating expenses for gear, food, water and other vital supplies.

No wonder the Orgy Dome’s keepers are fundraising. I’d rather not picture them doing that naked, but it’s fun to imagine some sparkly-faced busker on some corner in the Haight, singing an a cappella version of Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” and passing the hat to pay for lube. But that can happen any place on any day, and nobody has to mess up an arid ecosystem to enjoy it.

“The Man Will Burn” streams new episodes over the course of four weeks, starting July 9 and ending July 30.

 

The post “The Man Will Burn” accidentally shows why people despise Burning Man appeared first on Salon.com.

Your chances of running into a marketer at a neighborhood bar are slim but never zero. Given the remote-capable nature of the work and the continued growth of their economic sector, marketers have spread across the U.S., making the most of their relatively high salaries by moving away from the more expensive coastal centers of industry.

By and large, they’re lovely people. But I live in fear of the moment when the conversation takes that dreaded turn toward the last redoubt of small talk: What do you do? Posed with that question, any halfway enthusiastic marketer is likely to let loose a litany of acronyms and jargon that cause a physiological response in listeners, or at least in me — a glazing over of the eyes that is instant and unavoidable. As with Microsoft Outlook, the board game CATAN and the rules of hurling, there’s something there I can’t bring myself to grasp, a Lovecraftian boredom that lies just beyond the borders of what I can perceive.   

I’m not one of those rubes who thinks a job is unimportant just because I can’t make sense of it. My lack of understanding of aircraft engineering doesn’t make the people who design them any less valuable, and the same goes for marketers. I’m sure these people act on the world and see it changed in ways that bring them fulfillment. Their employers presumably think it’s a fair trade. It might all sound like gibberish to me, but that doesn’t mean it’s fake. Sometimes, you just have to accept that you’re talking to an expert who is speaking in terms beyond your ken.

But this is not how the modern conservative movement operates. From the “What is a woman?” wing of YouTube provocateurs to the snowball-holding, climate change deniers on the floor of Congress, Republicans reject the idea that experts might know more than them. You see it in the pushback against the medical consensus on how to treat trans youth. It’s there in the Trump administration’s constant attacks on institutions of higher learning. To the GOP, any discussion of U.S. history that doesn’t reach the same conclusion as a Ram truck ad is nothing more than woke nonsense.

That’s the pretense that brought Anthea Hartig, an historian and the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, before a House committee on Tuesday. Hartig’s grilling was a chance for Republicans to score points with simple, black-and-white questions about the past that no historian could answer succinctly.

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Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, interrogated Hartig over the museum’s assertion that Mickey Mouse drew inspiration from blackface minstrelsy. Reducing the idea to the point of absurdism, Gill asked Hartig if the cartoon character on countless children’s backpacks was “racist.”

“It’s rooted in minstrelsy,” she replied.

Any close examination of the design of Walt Disney’s most famous creation makes it obvious. The white gloves are an obvious tell, even before you even get to early film shorts that the House of Mouse would rather you forget or overlook altogether. There’s a direct line between much of American pop culture and the minstrel show, and pointing that out doesn’t mean that the country or the character are irredeemable. 

Hartig pointed this out in her testimony. “We tell the truth about the times that the country fell short of its own founding ideals,” she said. “Telling our story fully is a form of respect for the American people and a commitment to constantly being in pursuit of a more perfect union.” 

Explaining history is all about context; nothing happens in a vacuum. You could say that the United States lost its mind and elected a game show host in 2016, and that might even be satisfying. An historian would likely recommend a deeper dive into the backlash against former president Barack Obama and the uneven recovery from the global financial crisis that he oversaw. Other historians might place Trump in the context of white rage and anti-immigrant sentiment. Hartig defended that drive to put moments in context because it’s what gets her up in the morning. It’s what she and countless other historians set out to do when they first started studying the past. They want to tell a good story, but with the added benefit of it being the truth. Republicans’ inability to grasp that, like my befuddlement at marketing-speak, doesn’t make what Hartig does any less real.

Of course, the more complicated view of the past advocated by the people who study it for a living will never fly with conservatives. They’re dead-set on excising any shagginess that doesn’t fit their hidebound worldview, attacking textbooks and museums that dare to push beyond a straightforward explanation. They want simple answers to simple questions, which is not what the true study of history — and America — offers.

The post Republicans want a Smithsonian that skips history’s hard parts appeared first on Salon.com.

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. 

It’s a turning point similar to what we face now.

“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.

(©1997 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli)

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.

(©1997 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli)

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.

“Princess Mononoke” is streaming on HBO Max.

 

The post “Princess Mononoke” is a warning we didn’t heed appeared first on Salon.com.

The most-quoted line from Al Franken’s 2003 bestseller “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” attempts to draw a distinction between conservative and liberal forms of patriotism. 

“Conservatives love America like a four-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups,” wrote Franken, a comedian who would, only five years later, would be elected U.S. senator from Minnesota as a Democrat. “To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.” 

Twenty-three years on, the right still has that infantile view of America. Under the thumb of Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda, it has grown even more petulant. Conservatives won’t tolerate any information that complicates their desire for flag-waving. The United States is a one-of-a-kind nation, and its history one of uninterrupted excellence. There’s no room for nuance and no time for reflection. Any mention of the perverse institution of slavery or of the many bloody, pointless conflicts the nation has led or joined, particularly in the last 50 years, is treated by the right like a “Yo Momma” joke, an intentionally offensive attack on a saintly figure that could not and cannot do wrong.   

The difference between liberals and conservatives on this issue can be seen, oddly enough, in Franken’s disappearance from the national stage. Following accusations of sexual harassment, the former “Saturday Night Live” star and constant presence in left-of-center media was quickly pushed aside. Liberals could still enjoy Stuart Smalley skits and support Franken’s political positions, but many felt guilty about their past support for a man who arguably didn’t deserve it. In a word, they felt shame.  

You’ll find no such contrition on the other side of the aisle. On Monday, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan cemented his lackey status with the president when he told reporters that Americans shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in recent months got what was coming to them. Karl Rove, the man who helped cook up the lies used to justify a war that left more than a million Iraqis dead, still makes regular appearances on Fox News. He’s joined on the network by Oliver North who, as a National Security council staff member during the Reagan administration, illegally provided arms to Contra groups that carried out atrocities against civilians in Nicaragua. Henry Kissinger’s misdeeds in Cambodia couldn’t keep the College of William and Mary from appointing him chancellor. 

To the conservative mind, these men were working in service of American interests. Because America is great, their actions must be great, ipso facto, Q.E.D.

That sort of black-and-white thinking was always going to clash with the shades of gray in Christopher Nolan’s smash-hit adaptation of “The Odyssey.” In his retelling of Homer’s epic poem, Nolan imagines Odysseus as a man haunted by the sacking of Troy. His covert operation to sneak within the city walls was a betrayal of bedrock beliefs about honor and civility, a shameful act that brought humanity into a darker age. The king of Ithaca’s pride in his ingenious trick is steadily sapped by a series of cosmic punishments. He returns home in beggar’s clothes with a plan to pay penance to the scores of souls he unjustly sent to the underworld. 

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In true originalist fashion, conservatives spent the months leading up to the release of “The Odyssey” raging about Nolan’s decision to cast nonwhite actors in starring roles. Like the originalists on the Supreme Court, they’re largely making up their argument out of whole cloth and using the imagined thoughts of long-dead people as a fig leaf for their own prejudices.  

For these pseudo-historians, complicating Odysseus was another liberal assault on Homer’s tale. As a great king from a mythical age, at least in their view, any suggestion that Odysseus might feel a genuinely human reaction is heretical to the right-wing mind, a slight against their preferred bedtime stories. 

In a review for Fox News subsidiary OutKick that might as well have been written in crayon, Jon Root described Odysseus’ lingering guilt as “character assassination.”

“The new stories being told in this film mostly feel like . . . a complete betrayal of the source material that made so many of these characters worth investing in,” he wrote.    

At the end of the film, Matt Damon’s haggard Odysseus sails toward the unknown, accepting that he doesn’t deserve the comfort of a king. He’s uniquely responsible for ushering in an age of barbarism and will spend the rest of his life making amends in the fallen world he helped create. 

Kissinger, in contrast, defended the bombing of Cambodia until he died peacefully at the age of 100. In its obituary,  the William F. Buckley-founded National Review praised the former secretary of state as a man who spent his life tamping down turmoil. 

Sing to them, muse, of an uncomplicated man.

The post The real reason conservatives hate Nolan’s “Odyssey” appeared first on Salon.com.

According to a Pew Research Center survey released in October 2025, large majorities of Americans are unhappy with both political parties. Three-quarters were frustrated with the Democrats, and almost as many felt the same about the GOP. Half said they are downright angry with both parties. Partisanship is responsible for some of it, of course. But despite all the talk from Donald Trump about the “golden age” of America being upon us — symbolized by the gaudy, gilded gew-gaws all over the White House and Washington — just over a third of Republicans said their party makes them feel hopeful, and far fewer noted it makes them feel proud. Democratic voters were even less hopeful and proud than their rivals. This is not a healthy political system. 

The loathing for the parties doesn’t just come from the high-profile national campaigns. Republicans and Democrats alike have been taken over in recent years by a populist uprising coming from within. From the Tea Party on the right to Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders-led democratic socialist movement on the left, there has been a large shift away from the traditional politics of party leaders and ideological conformity to a more grassroots-oriented politics. 

Both sides have at least one thing in common: They loathe the political and media elites who, they believe, have lost touch with ordinary people and run the country for their own interests. This should not surprise anyone who has observed politics for the past 30 years or so. Those elites have shown their tone deafness toward the concerns of the average American for decades, and the rise of cable television and the 24-hour news cycle, conservative talk radio television, the internet and social media have successively given people a front-row view of their pretentious arrogance. 

One person in Washington perfectly illustrates this phenomenon: Sally Quinn, the longtime columnist and doyenne of what remains of the Georgetown set. Married to the legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee until his death in 2014, Quinn has functioned, at least since the 1980s, as the self-appointed spokeswoman of the nation’s permanent political establishment. 

In 1998 she wrote the seminal essay on official Washington’s state of mind during Ken Starr’s investigation into Bill Clinton. The day of that year’s midterm elections, the Post published “Not in their back yard: in Washington, that letdown feeling,” which quoted numerous political and media denizens expressing their shock and horror at Clinton’s inappropriate behavior with Monica Lewinsky. Those interviewed insisted their disgust wasn’t about the unseemly power differential between the president and the former White House intern, and they insisted it wasn’t about the sex. Rather, they were apparently upset that Clinton had lied to them about the affair, as if they thought that it all would have been fine if he had just shared it with them privately at a glittering, intimate dinner party. 

The quotes were unbelievable. “There is a small-town quality to the grief that is being felt,” said journalist Andrea Mitchell, “an overwhelming sadness at the waste of the nation’s time and attention, at the opportunities lost.” Muffie Cabot, Nancy Reagan’s former White House social secretary, mourned, “This is a demoralized little village . . . the emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn’t quite as sordid as this.” 

But the piece de resistance came from the then-dean of the Washington press corps, Post columnist David Broder, who lamented, “He came in here and he trashed the place — and it’s not his place,” as if the nation’s capital belonged to him and Quinn and their kind, rather than the American people. 

Quinn vapidly observed in passing, “For reasons they cannot understand, Washington insiders come across to the public as judgmental puritans, shocked and horrified by the president’s sexual misconduct,” which was completely off the mark because contemporary polling showed that people saw the non-stop, six-year crusade against Clinton by the GOP and media establishment as over-the-top and hypocritical, not that it excused Clinton’s conduct. 

As the election results trickled in later that night, it emerged that Republicans had unexpectedly lost seats. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was forced to resign his seat, and just a few months later, on the very day he was impeached by the House, Clinton’s approval rating reached 73%. The number was not an endorsement of the president’s behavior; it was a reaction against the hypocrisy of the GOP and the elitism of the same establishment elites Quinn portrayed as the nation’s moral conscience.

One might have thought Quinn and her fellow Washingtonians would have taken a beat to question whether they were actually qualified to be the voice of American democracy when they were so clearly out of touch with the people. But that didn’t happen. 

Now, nearly 30 years later, Quinn is at it again, this time railing against Donald Trump in the same tone she deployed against Clinton. 

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No longer writing for the Post after it acquiesced to Trump and MAGA after the president’s return to office, Quinn instead contributed an op-ed to the New York Times called “Watergate-Era Washington Was Less Toxic Than This” that described how vulgar and frightening D.C. has become under the second Trump administration. She claimed that everyone is terrified, even Republicans, and waxed nostalgic for the days when she and the “charming, funny, bright, thoughtful” Lindsey Graham, the late Republican senator from South Carolina, could talk about throwing bipartisan dinner parties together. Sadly, those days are over, and the barbarians have trashed the gates — again. The crude Trumpers are having too much fun with their vulgar galas and economic excess. 

Evoking the Watergate crisis, Quinn seemed to have no recollection of eagerly joining that earlier GOP crusade against Clinton, despite the widespread understanding of its cynical partisan nature — and how that marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s descent into the ruthless partisan warfare that resulted in Trump’s election and non-consecutive reelection. 

On Sunday, Quinn wrote another essay for the Times announcing “It’s No Longer So Much Fun to Be MAGA in Washington.” Apparently, the inhabitants of the village have noticed that the GOP, under strain from the relentless failure of Trump’s policies, isn’t feeling its oats so much these days. She describes a “popular annual cocktail buffet at the Hay Adams Hotel on the rooftop overlooking the White House” on the night of Trump’s UFC cage fight on the White House lawn. The party’s attendees laughed and scoffed at the “garish,” “grotesque” and “bizarre” scene below, much relieved they were suddenly feeling the return of “bipartisan” revulsion at the spectacle of a usurper “trashing the place.”

I confess that I, too, was appalled at the grotesque display that night. And I, too, have nothing but revulsion for everything Trump stands for. But when I read those words coming from the likes of Quinn and her elitist comrades, I actually felt some sympathy for Trump’s MAGA followers. Quinn’s description of this soi disant aristocracy literally looking down on the plebes who refuse to know their place was almost enough to make me don a red cap and burst into a rousing rendition of “YMCA.” 

Nothing provides a boost to Trump’s MAGA agenda like the brand of Washington snobbery Quinn’s writing chronicles, and it’s this kind of thing that’s driving both parties to populism. If Republicans and Democrats could come out of their corners and recognize their common foe, we might actually get a little of that vaunted bipartisanship for which Quinn and her fellow travelers are so nostalgic. 

Unfortunately, it might not work out so well for them if that happens.

The post Nothing helps MAGA like Washington snobbery appeared first on Salon.com.

When progressive political commentator Keith Edwards recently turned the New York City Pride March into a two-hour livestream of queer joy, he put a name on what he was doing. The GLAAD-backed broadcast was built, in part, for people watching alone in states where Pride can feel dangerous. “One of the most radical things you can do in a moment of extreme fear and a moment of authoritarianism,” he told The Advocate, “is to experience joy and happiness.”

Weeks earlier, RuPaul had posted that the only response to fascism was to party and dance, and was sharply criticized for it. Two moments, weeks apart, but the same uneasy question beneath both of them: Is joy resistance? Or is it what we call avoidance when we want avoidance to sound principled?

In a country where LGBTQ+ people are watching their rights stripped away in statehouses, drag performers turned into political targets and trans people used as campaign-season fuel, “go dance” can sound almost heartless. But queer people have had this argument before.

In a 2013 Washington Blade essay about coming out during the AIDS crisis, Dave Purdy remembered older gay men telling him it was wrong for his generation to dance, party or enjoy themselves while their gay brothers were sick and dying. He and his friends rejected that view. For them, the dance floor was not an affront. It was survival, self-love and something close to church.

During the AIDS crisis, gay nightclubs were not merely places to escape. They were informal mutual-aid networks, grief rooms and information exchanges. They were places where bodies marked by fear could breathe, move, touch and feel alive again. When the state was slow to act, conservative preachers’ sermons were cruel and much of the country looked away, these spaces helped people endure.

I know because, in the early 1990s, I ran one of those clubs on Long Island.

The club was loud, crowded and alive in the way only a queer room can be when the world outside has made everyone inside feel disposable. People arrived carrying the private weight of family rejection, HIV panic, religious shame, police harassment and the everyday terror of being seen too clearly in the wrong place.

Then the bass would start. The lights would move. Someone would laugh loudly near the bar. A drag queen would cut through the room like a flare. For a few hours, fear did not vanish. It changed shape. It became bearable.

To outsiders, nightlife often looks like escape. Sometimes it is. There are worse things than needing to escape a world trying to crush you. But queer clubs were never only about forgetting. They were places where people remembered each other: who was sick, who had disappeared, who had a new doctor, who was pretending to be fine.

I saw that attention at work every night. Power did not only sit in the office or behind the bar. It lived in the queens who could read a face from across the room, the regulars who noticed an absence and the staff who could feel the room change before anyone else did. That was vigilance. Not paranoia. Not panic. A communal intelligence.

The dance floor was not where the crisis disappeared. It was where the living found one another inside it. That is the part America often forgets. Survival is not only the refusal to die. It is the insistence on remaining human while threatened.

Bars hosted fundraisers. Drag performers passed hats. DJs, bartenders, door people, lovers, ex-lovers, activists and friends formed networks that were not always formal but were often lifesaving. In Orlando, the Parliament House Motor Inn, a gay resort and nightclub, became a common site for AIDS fundraisers in the 1980s and 1990s. This detail matters because it collapses the false divide between pleasure and care. A place outsiders might dismiss as decadent was also where money was raised, grief was gathered and a frightened community turned nightlife into a lifeline. Chosen family was not a slogan. It was logistics.

Research has linked synchronized movement with social bonding and increased pain thresholds, while studies of dance and movement therapy have found benefits for depression, anxiety and interpersonal functioning. What outsiders now call resilience was, for us, simply the nightly practice of keeping one another going. 

That is why the word “joy” can be misleading if we make it too soft. Joy in queer nightlife was and is sweaty, sexual, improvised, defiant, sometimes reckless, sometimes holy. It did not erase grief. It gave grief somewhere to go.

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None of this means dancing is enough. A party will not stop authoritarianism. A drag show will not repeal anti-LGBTQ legislation. A nightclub cannot replace courts, organizing, voting, or protest. Joy without vigilance can become anesthesia. Joy without community can become branding. Joy without politics can become escape for those privileged enough to leave others behind.

But the answer is not to dismiss joy. It is to understand what kind of joy has power — a lesson America needs now.

The country is confronting a crisis. We are politically exhausted, increasingly isolated, distrustful of institutions and surrounded by reasons to be afraid. More people are discovering that they can follow every headline, understand every threat and still have nowhere to put the fear.

Queer nightlife offered one answer, imperfect but profound: Put the fear in a room. Let it breathe alongside other people’s fear. Let the body remember that it is more than a battleground.

The joy created in queer nightlife was collective. It required a room. It required witnesses. It required people watching the door, watching each other and noticing when the mood shifted before trouble arrived. Pleasure and protection had to coexist.

That was the real survival infrastructure; not joy by itself, but joy attached to community and vigilance.

To survive a hostile world, people need pleasure and community, yes — but they also need history. They need to know what they are up against and what others survived before them. They need to care for each other while they watch the door. They need to build systems that do not depend on the benevolence of institutions that may never come.

The pushback against “party and dance” landed because it sounded like the whole plan. It cannot be the whole plan. But it can be part of one.

We did not dance through the AIDS crisis because things were fine. We danced because everything was not fine, because the body needed proof it still belonged to the living. We danced because grief without community becomes isolation, and isolation is where despair does its best work.

Dancing didn’t solve the crisis, but it helped us survive long enough to keep fighting.

This is not nostalgia. It is instruction.

The post When joy was resistance on the dance floor appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair was widely mocked as a great American flop: overpriced, uncomfortable and, above all, dull.

Well, bad news for fans of fun: Trump’s billionaire buddies, Larry and David Ellison, are about to bring MAGA-ified misery to the rest of entertainment with their proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which will likely make movie theaters, cable TV and other entertainment products a lot more MAGA — and a lot more boring. 

Larry and David Ellison are the father-and-son duo behind Paramount’s attempted purchase of Warner Bros., a move that would consolidate most of Hollywood into a few hands and dramatically reduce free market competition in the entertainment industry. The two often present, especially in court documents, as simple businessmen just trying to make money. But in reality, Larry Ellison was called a “shadow president” by a Trump adviser speaking to Wired last year. The Ellisons aren’t just in this for money. They are in it for power — and their vision of remaking the country and even world in their MAGA-centric image.

Whether they succeed in the long run remains to be seen, but in the process, they are going to make your movie-going and likely TV-viewing experiences more tiresome. Above all, MAGA is bad at culture, too strapped to their narrow interests and bigotries to understand what makes entertainment actually entertaining.

Last week, the attorneys general of a dozen states, along with the Writers Guild of America West and East, filed suit to stop the merger, which has unsurprisingly been approved by Trump’s corrupt Justice Department. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of WGAE.) Labor and economic concerns fuel these lawsuits, but the consumer experience is front and center. On Monday afternoon, the merger was frozen by a federal judge’s temporary restraining order. 

“The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference on Wednesday.

On the podcast “The Town with Matthew Belloni,” he argued that the quality of movie theaters themselves will decline even more if the merger goes through. “You won’t have comfortable seating,” Bonta said. “You won’t have the same quality and variety at concession stands.”

Under the Ellisons, the future of the movies stands to echo the Great American State Fair, where consumers had the pleasure of paying $25 for an overcooked drumstick while they stood in an empty plaza on the National Mall in Washington waiting for the elderly Lee Greenwood to sing “God Bless the USA” for the billionth time.

Experts I talked to explained that such decline is the economic result of consolidation, which reduces competition and therefore removes incentives for movie studios to take creative risks. Miranda Banks, a professor at Loyola Marymount University who has conducted extensive research on media mergers, contrasted this low-competition era with the 1970s, when Hollywood was full of “creative workers” and “a lot of independent companies,” which created “an open market of bidding for good quality programming.” Now companies avoid originality in favor of “churning out more films within franchises,” which is cheaper and easier than developing original products with independent creators. 

But it is also about power and political ideology, explained James Schamus, a screenwriter who once ran Focus Features and is now a Columbia University professor. He argued that the Ellisons are building a “techno fascist project” that is far more interested in waging “war on democracy” than old school Hollywood concerns like selling movie tickets. “Short-term profit is happily sacrificed to long-term domination,” Schamus said.

Chief among these goals is mass surveillance of the population through many means, which includes making sure people can’t watch a movie or TV show without having to hand all their data over to Oracle, the another Larry Ellison-owned company. The elder Ellison isn’t exactly coy about his dystopian scheme: At an Oracle financial analyst meeting in 2024, he promised his company would pave the path to mass social control.

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” he said. Unsurprisingly, both Larry and David Ellison are big fans of artificial intelligence, seeing it as a way to streamline their surveillance operations, and for what David Ellison euphemistically calls “cost efficiencies and synergies.” 

That’s just code for “firing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of creative people,” Schamus said, and replacing good work with dreck “made for the cheapest price” for the “lowest common denominator.” 

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Anyone who spends time on X or Truth Social knows that, while most Americans loathe empty A.I. slop, there is one audience that eats it up: MAGA folks. Trump himself loves it. He constantly posts A.I. videos that are as tedious as they are uncanny, and his cultural tastes are mirrored by the bulk of right-wing audiences, who artistic discernment is too clouded by bitterness and ideological obsession to engage with the more human emotions that make movies, TV and music engaging to other people. The MAGA capture of Hollywood behemoths like Paramount and Warner Bros. threatens to gut the ability of smart, creative people to make good things, and replace it with mind-numbing rubbish.

“Once upon a time, in Hollywood,” Banks said, movie studios were run by people whose “goal was to get people into the theater.” They were “not good guys or kind guys,” she explained, but ultimately, they saw their job as “making money to make more movies.” However cynical — and largely straight, white and male — some old-school operators were, they helped to build a Hollywood that was centered around giving the people what they wanted. This seems like paradise compared to what the Ellisons and their kind envision.

“For these guys,” Banks said, the goal “is extraction,” and “what they’re extracting is not just our money, but our data.” For years, movie ticket sales have been declining, because of this shift from seeing the consumer not as a customer to please, but a mark to suck dry. In some ways, the Ellisons don’t care that much if you ever go back to the movies.

“They all think they should be the techno-fascist philosopher king at the end of the day,” Schamus said, referring not just to the Ellisons, but also to similar megalomaniacal MAGA billionaires like tech investors Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (who recently lost his trillionaire status). At a certain point, these men have amassed so much money that it’s meaningless. The next hill to conquer is social control.

Making media more MAGA will make it dumber, but that’s by design. Truly creative and inspiring art undermines that goal, because it provokes responses like empathy and critical thinking in audiences — which gets in the way of authoritarian domination.

UPDATE: This article has been updating to reflect a federal judge’s temporary restraining order against the merger on July 20.

The post The MAGA-fication of Hollywood is going to be so boring appeared first on Salon.com.

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.

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.

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.

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 post “A Woman of Substance” is a fiercely old-fashioned revenge saga appeared first on Salon.com.

For a man who considers himself the greatest builder the world has ever known — move over, Pharaoh Khufu! — Donald Trump has managed vanishingly little of it in either of his presidential terms. What his administrations have done is show an impressive talent for tearing things down. 

From the East Wing of the White House to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and public health, Trump has demonstrated a clear aptitude for demolition. Among his most successful accomplishments has been his assault on the international institutions that were created in response to the worst catastrophes of the 20th century. 

During his first campaign and administration, Trump constantly attacked NATO, the military and political alliance formed in 1949 in response to Soviet aggression that operates on the principle of collective security. He also withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords and ripped up the Iran nuclear agreement, cornerstones of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. But Trump didn’t stop there. He withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the U.N. Human Rights Council. Since he returned to office in January 2025, he has continued to attacks on NATO and signed an executive order withdrawing from 66 additional international organizations. 

To be fair, Republicans have never really trusted international institutions. This tendency stretches back at least a century to the League of Nations. While the GOP has tended to back alliances like NATO, which they felt they could control, the party has been deeply suspicious of organizations like the United Nations, which they believe threaten national sovereignty — and impede America’s ability to act with impunity anywhere in the world. Since 1998, this has especially included the International Criminal Court, which is now coming under assault by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on behalf of the Trump administration.

Since its creation, the I.C.C. has been the bête noire of the American right. At first glance, one might have thought such an organization would have been championed by the U.S. After all, the country pioneered the idea of such a tribunal after World War II when it ran the Nuremberg trials to hold Nazi leaders accountable for crimes against humanity, while also pointedly declaring that waging a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime,” containing within itself “the accumulated evil of the whole.” The idea of holding individuals responsible for such violations was forged in that process and became the basis of international criminal law. 

In 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted and established four crimes over which it could take jurisdiction if the party state refused use its own legal system: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. The statute was immediately decried by Republicans (and some conservative Democrats) as a threat to U.S. sovereignty on the basis that Americans could be subject to political prosecutions. But that wasn’t all of the story. It’s clear they also wanted to maintain the impunity conferred by America’s superpower status. 

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One hundred twenty-five countries are parties to the agreement. The U.S., under Bill Clinton, was a signatory to the treaty, but it was never ratified, and in 2002 it was officially withdrawn by George W. Bush. Israel, Sudan, Burundi, the Philippines and Russia have also withdrawn. 29 countries have signed but not ratified the agreement, while 41 others, including China and India, have neither signed nor acceded to it. 

Since then, the I.C.C. has tried war criminals and has a number of active cases, although few leaders have faced charges while in office. In November 2024, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became an exception for his conduct in Israel’s war against Gaza following the attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, joining the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. 

Even after Bush withdrew from the treaty, it was assumed the I.C.C. could grow its legitimacy among the holdouts — including the U.S., which has used the body itself when it was advantageous. But that is not to be. 

Project 2025, the plan for a MAGA overhaul of the entire federal government produced by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, explicitly demanded that the U.S. to “must end blind support for international organizations,” only using them to the extent that they help the country achieve its own goals regardless of the effect on other nations.

Now, in his quest to be the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, Rubio has launched a full-blown assault on the I.C.C. with the support of Trump. The move is part of a variety of crusades the secretary is leading to establish his MAGA bona fides, and comes in addition to his international “far left terrorist crusade,” which I recently chronicled. Not content just to refuse to participate in the process and pledge to rely on our own justice system, as Republicans have done in the past, Rubio wants the I.C.C. destroyed completely. 

The administration has already sanctioned eight of the court’s judges, including its chief prosecutor, banning their travel to the U.S. On July 13, Rubio took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to declare that the I.C.C. “threatens every aspect of our political and legal system.” Using the usual sophomoric language of the MAGA movement, such as referring to “smug globalists,” he declared that the U.S. will now lead a “diplomatic campaign” against the Court, which will include penalties on countries that continue to cooperate with it, including by withdrawing foreign assistance. This is a tried and true Trump tactic that the president has even deployed on the home front against blue states that disagree with him. Now, it looks like the GOP establishment, of which Rubio has long been a representative, has signed on to the president’s mob-like coercion tactics against all rivals foreign and domestic.

According to Stewart Patrick of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the administration’s goal is to destroy multilateralism altogether using what he called “four basic behaviors: defection, rebellion, substitution, and conditional cooperation.” Trump has quit some institutions, attempted to sabotage others and even tried to establish his own, such as the “Board of Peace” and the “Shield of the Americas,” both of which the administration believes it can dominate — and no doubt profit from. It has reengaged with others, such as the World Bank and the G20, but on a conditional basis: They are expected to do as they are told. But, as Patrick observed, “the administration’s campaign to dismantle the ICC is a campaign of pure destruction, a coercive attempt to impose the United States’s will on the rest of the world.”

The world has reacted in horror to Rubio’s moves, as we might expect. Patrick wrote, “Given the voluble reaction from America’s closest allies, the full-bore attempt by the administration to destroy the ICC would seem to be both imprudent and futile, an effort in symbolic politics that will further cement the reputation of the United States as an unhinged, domineering hegemon, rather than a benevolent and farsighted global leader.”

I’m afraid that ship has sailed.

This policy is Marco Rubio’s baby. He owns it. The secretary has established himself as the would-be statesman who took Donald Trump’s wrecking ball and made it his own. In doing so, his remake of himself in the Dear Leader’s image is complete.

The post Marco Rubio’s quest to destroy the International Criminal Court appeared first on Salon.com.

Imagine this conversation with your spouse or roommate: “Dude, what is that smell? It stinks like burning diapers. Did you forget to pay the air?” Sounds like something from a knockoff episode of “Black Mirror,” right? Canned air was actually used as a bit in “Spaceballs,” with the joke being how absurd it is to pay for something we breathe freely.

While I claim no clairvoyant skills, given the ever-diminishing quality of the air we breathe, purified air could definitely become a commodity someday. Air subscription probably wouldn’t work exactly like other utilities, such as internet service or natural gas, where it gets pumped directly into your house, but then again, who is to say? The future could be as weird as the present and when it comes to air quality, things are changing fast.

At the moment, a new front in the endless culture wars concerns whether air conditioning is ethical or even necessary. That comes in the wake of yet another record-breaking heat wave that has pummeled the Northern Hemisphere. Europeans aren’t big fans of AC, it turns out, but things have gotten so hot that many people are now making the switch. It’s become a selling point for far-right figures like French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who has promised to blanket Europe in cool air, while British conservatives want to deregulate building codes that restrict AC.

Most forms of air conditioning are highly energy-intensive and, depending on its power source, can belch even more carbon into the atmosphere, trapping more of the sun’s heat and causing more intense heat waves. That feedback loop is likely part of the reason why temperatures previously considered extreme or impossible are now becoming the norm all over the world — but the suffering might be too great to ignore the benefits of AC.

The June heat wave carried a death toll of more than 10,000 people across 27 countries, according to data from ‌EuroMOMO, a mortality monitoring network with backing from the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Over 9,000 of those deaths were people aged 65 and older. Such extreme heat usually kills people via heatstroke, or by inflaming heart and lung diseases. Whatever the specific causes of death, this was a mass casualty event, on par with the earthquakes that hit Venezuela a few weeks ago. Climate scientists universally agree that this summer’s heat waves would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.

On this side of the ocean, the U.S. is sweltering under its own heat domes, which have been made worse by more than 100 wildfires in Canada and Minnesota that are smothering the East Coast in toxic, deadly smoke, turning the July skies an earwax yellow. Dramatic videos of members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in Ontario fleeing their homes by boat have flooded the internet because the images are truly apocalyptic.

Views of just one of the wildfires ripping across Ontario, Canada yesterday. Similar fire behavior is expected today.

Fires in Minnesota and Canada have made air quality across the east coast of the United States “unsuitable for everyone.”

Hundreds of thousands of acres have… pic.twitter.com/Bxb92JXQTi

— The Hotshot Wake Up (@HotshotWake) July 15, 2026

At least 18 states have issued air quality alerts, as they should, because wildfire smoke wreaks havoc on the body, from the brain to the heart and lungs to the kidneys. The small particles in wildfire smoke are an escalating threat to global health, increasing risks of other diseases like COVID. As noted in a recent review in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health, these effects are not evenly distributed. Poor folks, immigrants, women, children, the elderly and ethnic and racial minorities are disproportionately exposed to these hazards.

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But we’re all kind of used to this by now, right? And that’s a big problem. We now deal with wildfire smoke every year, in a “season” that stretches longer and longer each year thanks to warmer and drier conditions. Air pollution, wildfire smoke, industrial disasters like the East Palestine, Ohio train wreck and extended pollen seasons are all reasons why people are increasingly concerned with making their indoor environments actually breathable. The result is that air itself is increasingly becoming a luxury item.

The World Health Organization estimates that around 7 million people die from air pollution annually, while 99% of the world’s population lives somewhere that is exposed to air pollution levels above WHO health guidelines. So we stock up on air purifiers, now an $18 billion industry, along with indoor air quality monitors and subscription air filter services. While AC seems ubiquitous to middle-class Americans, approximately 34 million people in the U.S. struggle to afford it, which doesn’t account for the high-tech HVAC systems the ultra-rich indulge in. The issue of quality air access is increasingly linked privilege and wealth. Startups with names like Air Factory and FreshAir are already starting to crop up aiming to fill this growing market demand.

So what will the future really look like? Will people start wearing N95 masks indoors, or have breathing apparatuses hooked up to their chests like fighter pilots? Will air become a municipal service, or a luxury commodity like canned kombucha? If you miss your monthly payment to Amazon Oxygen, will you choke to death? Given the way things are trending, none of that would be entirely surprising. Summer 2026 is already on track to be the hottest in recorded human history, topping 2024, which edged out 2023’s record. (We saw a slight dip in average temperatures in 2025; it didn’t last.) This might well be the hottest summer of your lifetime, and also might be the coolest summer of the rest of your life. Read that sentence again: If you think things are bad now, wait a year. Or five.

My imaginary scenario could still be decades in the future, but a reality where people pay for air doesn’t seem like a joke anymore. We could decide to treat this sci-fi possibility seriously right now by working to cut down air pollution at the source. That would mean, at the very least, sharply reducing the use of fossil fuels — indeed, ending it, sooner rather than later — and choosing to protect forests instead of chopping them down for toilet paper, which is a big factor in why so much of Canada is burning in the first place.

The good news here — and there is some, believe it or not — is that we’re still in the middle of a global green energy revolution, even if it’s being diminished or undercut by the out-of-control AI industry. As much as the Trump administration denies the reality of climate change while catering to the fossil fuel industry, the Iran war and its resulting spike in energy prices are accelerating the transition to renewable energy. We can’t be sure if that’s happening rapidly enough to make a difference, but it remains true that every decision we make now to lower emissions will help to create a more livable future. Of course it’s absurd to imagine breathable air as something you can put a price tag on. The same could be said about food, water and healthcare. We can at least keep air in the realm of absurdity by fighting for a greener future, which we can still see ahead, even through the smoke.

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