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.

The post Your magical burnout cure is in this Miyazaki film appeared first on Salon.com.

Lenny Kaye is one of rock ’n’ roll’s national treasures. He’s the guy who never has to pay for his drinks in bars from Stockholm to Shanghai, thanks to “Nuggets,” his now-essential compilation of what were obscure garage rock classics that became the foundation of punk rock and a lingua franca for the spirit of DIY. He’s the kind of guy who should have been given a Guggenheim Fellowship because of his galactic range of interests, knowledge and influences and for his input and his contributions to rock ‘n’ roll as an art form. 

Kaye was writing about music — for publications like Rock Scene, Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone — when the discipline was still nascent. If you read his early writing, which is well worth your time to hunt down (like this review of The Rolling Stones’ “Exile On Main Street,” in 1972), he brought knowledge and curiosity and genuine enthusiasm; even if he didn’t like something, he still gave it his serious consideration. 

It was that exact spirit of inquiry, within an article about the history of the doo-wop revival, that caught the attention of another doo-wop aficionado from South Jersey. She tracked him down and they became friends, hanging out and listening to music. One night, she asked him if he thought he could make a guitar sound like a car crash for an upcoming poetry reading she was doing, and that’s how Kaye joined forces with Patti Smith.

Lenny was at Patti’s side until she bowed out of public life and rejoined her when she returned — but he’s never sat still. Across the years, he put together a band (The Lenny Kaye Connection), accompanied Jim Carroll as he tried to work out his rock ‘n’ roll form, wrote Waylon Jennings’ biography, produced Suzanne Vega’s first two solo albums (among others), has a country and western alter ego, wrote introductions and liner notes and seemingly offered and participated in hundreds of other contributions across the decades. Lenny Kaye was the kind of cool, level-headed rock ‘n’ roll maven who was both important to and part of our history. His openness and curiosity — still, turning 80 later this year! — makes him the music fan’s music fan. 

The only thing Lenny Kaye somehow hadn’t done was release a solo record, which he rectified in July of 2026 with the release of “Goin’ Local,” out on Yep Roc on July 17. “Goin’ Local” is a collection of deliberate compositions across a range of styles, whether straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll (the title track), ballads (“This Love,” “Let’s Make A Memory”), folk rock (“The Things You Leave Behind”) and sweet ditties (“World Book Night,” “Pennsylvania Girls”) that might seem light until you find yourself humming them later after only listening to them once. There are bulletproof pop melodies, gentle riffs, solid construction, and engaging stories. And that’s the result of a formidable quantity of skills acquired over half a century immersed in the rock ‘n’ roll trenches, whether as a listener, critic, producer, or active participant. 

“Goin’ Local” was assembled both from songs he started 15 years ago with friend and bandmate Tony Shanahan (who has a co-production credit and also plays on half the tracks), and another half dozen that were written over the last few years. “I don’t write a lot of songs,” Kaye told Salon, “I believe a song has to need to be written, if only for one to figure out a situation or to understand the dynamic of a relationship, or something occurs to me that needs framing as if in a picture. So if I write one or two songs a year, I’m happy with that, and I bring them to fruition. But I just continue to sit there with the guitar, and come up with something that is meaningful to me and hopefully, whoever listens.”

The title track is a perfectly crunchy, rock ‘n’ roll number about haunting the East Village’s watering holes and the people you meet (and the challenges of maintaining a cross-borough relationship). Emphasizing the ‘local’ point, the album’s cover is a black-and-white historical photograph from the early 1900s, taken from the New York Public Library’s historical collection, with Kaye imposed into the frame, standing under elevated train tracks. Look closer and you can just make out the street number of the Lyceum Concert Garden (“Follies of the Day!”), which was located on the Bowery at number 302. That’s across the street and about half a block away from where CBGB’s would find itself decades later, and also just happens to be adjacent to another landmark: “If you stand in front of CBGB and look in the 10:00 position, that’s where I lived,” Kaye confirmed.

One of the record’s highlights is a co-write with the musician who stood to Kaye’s right onstage for more than 50 years. “Solstice,” where he shares writing credits with Patti Smith, possesses the same kind of metaphysical shimmer that’s often intrinsic to a Patti Smith composition (think “Ghost Dance” or “Beneath the Southern Cross” to name two other relevant co-writes from the pair). As to how the song ended up on “Goin’ Local,” Kaye said, “As the song developed, Patti thought it certainly suited my new persona,” he told Salon, “and she urged me to sing it. I mean, she could have sung it quite well, but she urged me to take it under my wing and express it. And she felt it appealed to a certain sense of the celestial that I have in my solo persona.”

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Then there’s the delightful “World Book Night,” a song that Kaye performed live via livestream from Electric Lady with Smith during the days of the COVID-19 lockdown, on the anniversary of their first performance together at St. Marks On The Bowery in 1971. “I wrote it originally when there was a kind of strange day set aside called ‘World Book Night.’ Publishers would give books to people and they would spread out all over the city or wherever they were and just hand them out for free, at subway stations or on the beach, and I thought that was a beautiful thing,” Kaye explained. “. . . It’s just my tribute to the written word, how it feels putting those words one after another after another, and the readers out there who find them and find something of themselves within the pages of a book.”

On the note of physical media, there’s “The Things You Leave Behind,” a song that Kaye’s been playing at the occasional solo show for a while now. It’s a wistful, country-folk paean that offers both a wry yet realistic assessment of the disposition of collections someone leaves the planet. “Gonna pick up the pieces and your life and theirs/who gets what and why/we all cart around a whole lot of baggage/that would better be left/by the side of the road/books and records, old clothes and photos. . .” and of course, in Kaye’s case, guitars.

Even at 79 — he’ll hit octogenarian status in December — Kaye confesses he hasn’t slowed down as a collector. “I haven’t cut myself off yet, but I’ve been more discerning,” he tells Salon. “That said, I always come home from being on the road with a few well-chosen records and a few well-chosen books that I will read one of these days.”

Does he still have a holy grail?

Kaye laughs. “Absolutely not. At this point my holy grails are things I have yet to discover. I found most of the things I really needed to have, but every once in a while you’re exposed to a new record, and sometimes it’s not that great to just be able to go on eBay and poke the bid. You want to find it. You want to find it in context.”

He’s on a roll now: “The other day I was in the East Village and I went past a store on E. 2nd Street called Ergot and I walked in and they had 12 Umm Kulthum 45s from the ’60s and I just put my money down, came home with them, and they’re all fascinating. I have certain genres that I always check out: I’m particularly into Jamaican gospel now, which is kind of primitive and not reggae, very illuminated, great singers. I’m into Egyptian music too; I really like the music of the Middle East. And of course then there’s the rock band that I’ve never heard of that really needs to be part of my collection.” He pauses. “I always think, like the song, about cleaning it up or at least culling it so I could get all the records off the floor and onto the shelves.” 

Kaye was good friends with Tom Verlaine, the late Television guitarist whose epic collections of books are still being distributed and caused hour-long lines when they were first put up for sale, and whose music equipment is next for dissemination. Salon asked Kaye if he had any clue to the extent of his friend’s collection, or its future plans for disposition? 

“No, but I’m very excited because it’s kind of a way for me to perhaps move my accumulations into the world at large,” he said. “I knew that Tom loved records, books, all of the above, and often would find the weirdest, which is of course great. I think it’s wonderful that his legacy of intellectual curiosity is being moved into the world at large so other people can be illuminated by his quest for the unusual.”

On the subject of holy grails, there’s the first recording by Lenny Kaye, “Crazy Like A Fox,” released under the nom de guerre Link Cromwell. That was the result of Kaye’s uncle Larry Kusik, who was a working film songwriter (his credits include the love themes from both “The Godfather” and “Romeo and Juliet”), trying to get in on the burgeoning protest music movement in the 1960s. He recruited his nephew to sing the vocals and although the song didn’t chart (it got re-released a decade later under the auspices of Ork Records, the label that launched in order to release the first Television single), it did give the young hopeful Kaye the conviction that he could find a way in the music business. And decades later, that’s Uncle Larry’s lyrics behind the plaintive and gorgeously intricate “Yes I Will,” the album’s closer. 

So while “Goin’ Local” is technically Kaye’s first solo record, back in 1984, there was another project, the Lenny Kaye Connection, a quartet which gigged around New York City and environs. They released one album, “I’ve Got A Right,” not on a major label but instead on Giorno Poetry Systems, a record label started by downtown poet John Giorno. The Connection reunited back in 2022 for a show in honor of Kaye’s 75th birthday, but the record’s been out of print for some time. Salon asked Kaye if there were any plans to reissue it, even just on streaming. 

“Well, you never know,” Kaye said. “Right now I’m kind of pointed to the future. I’ve listened to that record recently and I do songs from it. I still do ‘I’ve Got A Right’ and ‘Record Collector,’ which I often play when I appear at record stores, but at this point I’m future-oriented. I mean, it came out 42 years ago. It represents a much younger version of myself, and right now I’m more in tune with who I am today. That doesn’t mean that it might not see a reissue along with some of the bonus tracks that got left by the wayside in those days, but right now I’m really moving into the future.”

He continued, “I have studio time booked and Dennis Dyken from the Smithereens is going to come up and play on a couple of songs that I have under construction, and that to me is where my fascination is. I think the Lenny Kaye Connection has merit. It is kind of my debut solo album, even though it was within a group context. But to be honest, I’m more about the future. I mean, Patti has that great quote, ‘Progress isn’t the future, it’s keeping up with the present,’ and my present is unfolding at actually quite an unexpectedly rapid rate, so today, I’m just gonna ride that pony.”

In 2022, Kaye’s book “Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock ‘n’ Roll” was published. It wasn’t the long-awaited memoir folks might have hoped for, but it was a sterling example of the kind of careful scholarship Kaye excels at, where he can maintain a 30,000-foot view over music history while diving deep into specifics and individual historical moments. This was Kaye’s fourth book, along with the other considerable inches of print he’s logged over the decades. Salon asked Kaye if there were any plans for more long-form writing.

“I think I mostly got it out of my system for ‘Lightning Striking,’ that seemed to cover all the bases, though I just did a foreword for a Led Zeppelin biography called ‘When Giants Walk The Earth’ by Nick Walls. So I still write. I have some vague ideas, but right now more on the musical side of my personality,” Kaye said. “You know, writing is time-consuming and very solitary and I’m enjoying making music and following that inclination in my personality. I’m not ruling out another piece of writing. But again, you go into any bookstore and there’s millions of volumes, so just like a song, it has to mean something.”

But he’s not saying no. “I would like to assemble a collection of some of my writings. But that means I have to go into the file cabinet and be shocked by some of my early attempts at explicating rock ‘n’ roll . . . when I finish this next solo record, and see the Adrift project (his “goth psych jam band, a power trio”) through to its record, perhaps I’ll feel like I’ve done that and I can return to the one word after another, after another, after another. I do believe that in writing, there is a rhythm and melody within a sentence, just like there’s a narrative arc in a guitar solo.”

Across the last 60 years or so, Kaye has toured the globe, worked with amazing musicians, and witnessed multiple incredible moments. Salon asked if he had one favorite thing that he’d gotten to do because he was Lenny Kaye.

“It’s really hard for me to say ‘favorite things,’” he explained. “My favorite thing is, I like to go and hang out, and see what the serendipity and pinball of the night shows me. I mean, I’ve done incredible things as a musician. The Dalai Lama put a scarf around my neck at Glastonbury, and I’ve also stayed up till four o’clock in the morning with Tom Clark singing songs at the Treehouse at 2A. To me, they’re all kind of a thing. But what my favorite thing to do is see what my inclination is in terms of the next sentence or the next song or the next guitar part. The fact that I can continue to do that is really my favorite thing.”

Kaye’s always had an optimistic, positive attitude, and that has not changed. “Right now I’m a solo artist, which is kind of fun. I’m up there like a folk troubadour, singing the songs, reading from the book, and making some well-timed joke,” he told Salon. “It’s portable and there’s a certain sense of being able to control the song. I do like the power of a band behind me, but I’ll see how that begins to reveal itself. I’m having a good time.”

He continued, “I feel good. I’m a new artist! That’s what cracks me up. I feel whatever I’ve done in the past, this is a new mode of presentation for me. And it feels very much at one with who I am at this moment, drawing on the experience of, at this point, sixty years of playing that guitar, and yet I feel an excitement because I’m entering uncharted territory. And that, to me, is what makes life exciting and revelatory.”

“Goin’ Local” is out now via Yep Roc and Bandcamp; you can keep up with him on YouTube and Instagram.

The post How Patti Smith helped Lenny Kaye find his solo voice appeared first on Salon.com.

Organic chicken costs on average more than twice as much as conventional chicken, and people buy it in part because they believe that the animals are given a much better life. 

If you’re one of those people, maybe you envision a small farm where flocks of healthy birds split their time between green pastures and spacious barns. When a chicken gets sick or injured, you might picture a veterinarian tending to them, and if they can’t be saved, they’re humanely euthanized. While the chickens aren’t pets, you’d assume that they’re at least not abused.

These are reasonable expectations, given how organic farming is marketed. And organic chicken certification does, on paper, legally require better animal welfare than conventional rearing: more space, fresh air, outdoor access, and other improvements.  

But a new undercover investigation reveals that these expectations may often be far from reality.

Earlier this year, an investigator with the nonprofit Mercy for Animals worked at an organic North Carolina farm that raises chickens for Pilgrim’s Pride, a major supplier of conventional and organic chicken. Pilgrim’s Pride then slaughters the chickens and sells them to Costco and other brands. The farm is also certified as humane by the nonprofit American Humane Society. (Disclosure: I worked at Mercy for Animals prior to joining Vox in 2020.) 

During his roughly 2.5-month stint at the farm, the investigator documented unsanitary living conditions, along with severe neglect — like birds with twisted necks and open wounds — and disturbing cases of outright abuse, including the farm manager leaving birds to die slowly in deadpiles, and euthanizing birds by bludgeoning them with PVC pipes and rakes.

“It was every day that the manager would be bludgeoning chickens to death or burying them alive,” the investigator, who goes by the pseudonym Sam due to the covert nature of his work, told me. 

But many of those in the industry don’t seem to want to talk about it. The farm could not be reached for comment. Hiland Global Certifications, a certifier of organic foods that audits the farm, declined an interview request for this story and did not respond to detailed questions. Costco didn’t respond to an interview request and detailed questions. Pilgrim’s Pride declined an interview request and didn’t answer specific questions. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for Pilgrim’s Pride said that it is “deeply disturbed by the conduct” at the farm, that it has dropped it as a supplier, and that it will initiate additional third-party audits at its supplier farms. 

However, when chicken companies — or supermarkets, for that matter — drop farms as suppliers, they shouldn’t expect that whatever farm they supply from instead will be extraordinarily different; such cruelty has been found over and over and over again in the US poultry industry, including numerous past investigations of farms that supply Pilgrim’s Pride.

What’s notable about this new investigation is that it exposes problems within two beloved, and supposedly more ethical, institutions in American life: Costco — with its higher employee wages and stated commitments to progressive causes — and organic farming, which has long been perceived as a more moral sector of the food industry. 

The investigation also reveals the immense shortcomings of governmental oversight, corporate animal welfare guidelines, and third-party inspectors, because at each step of the supply chain — from the farm, to the chicken supplier, to the organic certifiers and American Humane Society auditors, and finally, to Costco and other corporate buyers — severe animal cruelty appeared to slip through the cracks. 

Organic may not mean what you think (for animals)

The USDA launched its organic certification program in the early 2000s, a time when consumers were increasingly hungry for alternatives to America’s highly industrialized food system. 

When it comes to crops, organic farms can’t grow genetically modified plants or spray their crops with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Organic livestock operations must give their animals organic feed and are also required to give them outdoor access, more barn space, cleaner air, and other higher welfare standards than conventionally raised animals. Euthanasia must also be humane.

The investigated farm at the center of this latest Mercy for Animals investigation has about 100,000 or so live chickens on its premises at any given time, and it does give the birds more room in their barns than a conventional farm.  

Among the main welfare requirements in the USDA organic program, though, this was the only one it appeared to follow. Mercy for Animals alleges that it uncovered numerous organic standard violations at the farm, including:

• Outdoor access: While the farm did have outdoor space for the birds, Sam said he never saw them have access to it. (He said the manager told him Pilgrim’s Pride had a temporary exemption on this rule for farms in the area due to inclement weather that winter and spring, though “there were no major weather events during my employment,” Sam told me.) 
• Safe ammonia levels: Chicken waste emits a lot of ammonia, which at high enough levels can cause respiratory issues and even blindness for the birds. Levels must remain below 25 parts per million, but Sam recorded it reaching up to at least 100 ppm in one barn, which was the highest his reader went.
• Darkness: Organically raised chickens must be given a minimum of eight hours of continuous darkness per day so they can sleep. However, the manager said she only gives them three to four hours (she also told Sam she planned to increase it to eight hours on the day an employee from Pilgrim’s Pride was scheduled to arrive). Chicken producers restrict darkness in order to increase profits, as more light makes the birds eat more and grow faster.

Sam said he documented more than 70 incidences of improper euthanasia, with the farm manager regularly euthanizing sick and injured chickens by bludgeoning them with PVC pipes and rakes. In one instance, the farm manager crushed a bird with a bucket, and in another, slammed a chicken against a wall.

Sam also recorded instances of chickens kicked and thrown. Many birds suffered from severe injuries, like torticollis (twisted neck), leg deformities, and lesions on their bodies and feet, while others were too weak and sick to even stand and walk. 

The investigation illustrates that organic and even basic welfare standards are only as good as their enforcement. The USDA requires organic farms to be inspected yearly, which means that for the vast majority of a given year, farms that flout the rules likely won’t have any meaningful repercussions.  

A spokesperson with the USDA said it is unable to comment on investigations. “Upholding organic integrity and protecting organic producers and consumers is a core mission of NOP [the National Organic Program],” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox. “Part of that mission includes providing due process under the law and allowing certified organic farms to come into compliance when problems occur.” 

Investigations into other organic-certified animal farms have also found organic standard violations and animal neglect and abuse.

The farm is also certified as humane by the nonprofit American Humane Society, which is known to have relatively low standards that are similar to the industry’s own general guidelines. The American Humane Society declined an interview request for this story and didn’t respond to detailed questions. “We have zero tolerance for animal cruelty and abuse,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox. “We are aware of the video and have launched an independent investigation.”

How to make organic chicken better

Mercy for Animals alleges that the farm in question violated several USDA organic standards. But it’s also important to look at what organic standards don’t include in the first place, like more humane slaughter methods and better breeding. 

Breeding may sound dull and unimportant, but it’s by far the most pressing welfare issue in chicken farming, including on organic farms. The modern chicken has been bred to have abnormally large breasts, which consumers most prize. That makes it hard for their tiny legs to support their top-heavy bodies, and as a result, many have trouble walking and standing, as Sam documented. 

They also grow incredibly fast, which causes some chickens to die prematurely on the farm from painful lung and heart conditions; some die from dehydration or starvation because they can’t stand and walk to reach food and water. Even the president of the World’s Poultry Science Association has acknowledged that chickens’ “existence is painful.”

So many chickens die prematurely on farms that collecting and disposing of them is a primary responsibility for chicken farmhands. “My main job duty was mostly collecting the dead,” Sam told me.

In the wake of these investigations, it’s not uncommon for companies to condemn the cruelty and drop the farm as a supplier. Similarly, many consumers vow to boycott the companies affiliated with an investigated farm.

These instincts are understandable, but they ultimately won’t result in much change for animals. That’s because 80 percent of all chickens in the US are factory-farmed by just 10 companies, they all generally use the same fast-growing chicken breeds and management practices, and most have been investigated only to find cruel treatment and abysmal living conditions. 

To reinforce that point, Sam said that what he witnessed wasn’t exclusive to this one farm or meat company but is rather emblematic of the overall industry’s culture: “Every time we go into a [farm], we find the same things; it’s always animal abuse, animal cruelty.”

In a formal complaint, supported by an affidavit with photo and video evidence, Mercy for Animals is demanding the sheriff’s department in Lee County, North Carolina, to investigate and pursue criminal charges against the farm’s manager for animal cruelty and false advertising based on the many documented organic violations. But the organization’s bigger goal is to push large companies like Costco and its competitors to adopt higher animal welfare standards — and make sure they stick to them.

“This isn’t really about one investigation. … It’s about whether companies with enormous influence are willing to take responsibility for the systems that they create,” Arash Yomtobian, president and CEO of Mercy for Animals, told me. “Costco has the power to reduce suffering for more than [an estimated] 250 million chickens annually through proven reforms, like slower-growing breeds and improved living conditions, yet the company continues to choose profit over accountability.” 

In 2021, Mercy for Animals released an investigation into Costco’s conventional chicken line that found many of the same welfare problems as the latest investigation. Months later, Costco said it gives its birds a little more space than the industry standard and that it was experimenting in giving birds environmental enrichment. The company didn’t follow the group’s urging to use slower-growing breeds that have less painful existences by way of fewer leg deformities and fractures, and lower rates of metabolic disorders. 

Several European countries are moving away from fast-growing chicken breeds, though the US poultry and grocery sectors have largely resisted activist pressure.

Costco says animal welfare is a “moral and ethical obligation.” Pilgrim’s Pride says providing safe and high-quality chicken housing is a priority. The American Humane Society says its standards ensure humane treatment. The USDA says its organic standards strive to align with consumer expectations on animal welfare. These are the nice things companies that sell meat, and the institutions that certify the meat, say. But Sam’s investigation — and more than 200 other ones — prove that reality rarely matches corporate platitudes. 

The most foolproof solution to this systemic cruelty is for consumers to simply eat fewer animal products. But animal advocates and organic food proponents have also proposed a number of solutions to reduce animal suffering on farms, which include:

• Setting higher organic animal welfare standards.
• Passing basic federal welfare laws for conventionally raised livestock (currently there are none for animals on farms and ranches).
• Unannounced, frequent, and thorough organic farm audits; stricter penalties for violators; and making audits free (currently, farms pay certifier companies, which could incentivize certifiers to minimize violations and penalties in order to maintain their clientele).
• Installing CCTV cameras on farms and inside slaughterhouses.

Some groups even want to see the federal government create a dedicated animal welfare agency.  

There is no shortage of ideas on the table to reduce animal suffering on farms and bring more integrity to the many “humane” claims on meat, milk, and egg packages. The question is whether lawmakers and regulators have the courage to implement them.  

Punk in the Big Apple is a subject that has been exhaustively—and some might say exhaustingly—documented over the years, yet a new reissue by the venerable Chicago crate diggers Numero Group accomplishes the mighty task of finding a fresh angle on the late 1970s scene. The set gathers the entire catalog of the short-lived boutique label Ork Records, founded in 1975 by the Warhol cohort, film buff and would-be impresario Terry Ork. It was primarily a vehicle for a band he was managing called Television, but he soon released foundational punk and postpunk singles by Television, Richard Hell and Alex Chilton with compelling obscurities by the Erasers, the Revelons and Prix. Spread across two CDs or five LPs, this modest catalog totaling 49 songs reveals a scene as it was coalescing and figuring out a new set of rules for rock ‘n’ roll. It’s easily one of the best reissues of 2015.

So what is this guy Link Cromwell doing on here? His pair of tunes stands out among the gritty, grotty punk anthems: “Crazy Like a Fox” is a folksy protest song about rejecting workaday conformity, more “Eve of Destruction” than “Blitzkrieg Bop.” And “Shock Me” is a jittery volt of garage rock energy, much rawer than the A-side but still not exactly the sound you associate with CBGB. Their inclusion on this set, however, is crucial. Both songs were recorded in the mid 1960s by a musician who would later have a profound impact on punk rock and in fact on all subsequent rock. Link Cromwell was actually the stage name of Lenny Kaye, who is one of the most influential men in rock history, even though most people have never heard the name.

Kaye recorded those two songs for his uncle Larry Kusik, who had written “Crazy Like a Fox” with Ritchie Adams. Both were professional songwriters and musicians, the former penning “Speak Softly Love” from “The Godfather” and the latter a member of the Fireflies and later the Archies. Link Cromwell was their attempt to cash in on the popularity of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” although “Crazy” barely sold a handful of copies. Kaye continued making music, forming a band called the Zoo and writing for “Rolling Stone,” “Crawdaddy” and “Fusion,” among other publications.

In the early 1970s he started playing electric guitar while his friend Patti Smith recited poetry. Eventually, the project cohered into the Patti Smith Group, which self-released its first single, “Piss Factory,” on their own Mer Records. It not only inspired the music of New York but also the business by which that music would be disseminated. Power to the people, indeed.

Perhaps even more crucially, in 1972 Kaye assembled a collection of garage-rock tunes from the 1960s, tightly wound rock anthems full of bristly defiance and angst and attitude by bands like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, the Count Five, the Standells and the Electric Prunes. The psych explorations and hippie noodling of the late 1960s rendered that sound obsolete, but Kaye still heard something explosive and timeless in those Fuzztone guitar riffs and Farfisa organ rave-ups. He called his compilation “Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968,” and while its initial pressing wasn’t what you would call a blockbuster, the right bands heard it.

“Nuggets” was the foundation for punk rock in New York City and college rock in Athens. It was expanded in the late 1990s and fomented the garage rock revival that gave us the White Stripes, the Hives and Reigning Sound. Even today acts like Ty Segall, Royal Headache, Thee Oh Sees and Total Control owe a debt to “Nuggets.” It’s impossible to overstate the influence of that compilation, which arguably invented the concept of the reissue and possibly even the mixtape. Punk wouldn’t have existed without garage rock, and “New York, New York” wouldn’t exist without “Nuggets.”

Link Cromwell ended up on Ork because Terry Ork asked if he could reissue it—a request that reveals the influence of ‘60s garage rock on ‘70s punk.

Recently Kaye related the story to Salon: “One day Charles [Ball, who ran the business side of Ork Records] said to me, Can we put out your old ‘Crazy Like a Fox’ single? And I thought, why not? That’s how I got included in their great discography. My song is an anomaly because it’s not really from the time covered by the new Ork set.”

That certainly makes the song stand out. It connects this new punk scene with an older sound and style.

Absolutely. They all listened to “Nuggets.” In a weird way, “Nuggets” was a philosophical throwback to a time when rock ‘n’ roll was pretty open-ended and was still figuring itself out. I think that’s a good comparison to what was happening at CBGB at the time. Both were these interim periods when there are a lot of different stylistic things coming into the music and everybody’s having a good time putting them together in odd ways. So the bands that clustered around CBGB looked at the “Nuggets” album as a role model, I think. I grew up in that garage rock era, so I partook of that sense of experimentalism and excitement.

Were you surprised that “Nuggets” had so much resonance?

Well, the thing sold so few copies on its initial release! But it’s found a home among people who appreciated the spirit of the music. I suppose it was one of the templates of a kind of feeling within rock ‘n’ roll at the time that bands needed to rediscover their original motivations—why you make music in the first place. It’s not really to be professional musicians or to have a career, but to find a voice. Surely the bands on “Nuggets” and the bands at GBGB had that same spirit and were trying to return to what I call the original sin of rock ‘n’ roll. They were trying to find their own way.

Every generation seems to find “Nuggets” at a certain point, even now with the current wave of garage rock bands.

Two things about “Nuggets.” One, there is a sense of innovation and rediscovery within it. Second, it’s just great records. It’s not so much about the Fuzztone guitars and Farfisa organ as it is about these incredibly well-crafted and well-performed records. Even though they have a veneer of primitivism, they’re not as simple as they look. They’re unique. They come out of your speakers and they transcend genre. One of the things that I love about the Ork set is that it’s not as genre specific as people these days think of punk rock as being. When you say punk rock, the Ramones template comes to mind. But to me the bands on “Nuggets” were all over the place stylistically, and I think that’s true of the earlier bands at CBGB and the ones that Terry collected for his label. There are a lot of different kinds of music at work—a lot of people discovering themselves. And that’s what makes it worthy of its lavish presentation.

The Ork set definitely conveys a sense of community centered around Terry Ork, all of these bands orbiting around this very charismatic character.

It was a community. It was an underground collection of individuals who got to know each other and encouraged each other. That’s one of the things Terry was so good at—helping people become themselves. He certainly had that role in Television. He wasn’t much of a musician. He wasn’t even much of a businessman. For him to run a label was a stretch of his talent. But he took care of some of the practicalities, from finding his bands places to play to encouraging them once they got there. He was a good soul, a merry cherubic human. I never think of him as serious. When I think of him, I think of him as being somewhat mischievous.

And that seems to come through on the Ork set, even though he doesn’t play a note on it.

There was a certain playfulness, a sense of being far enough from the mainstream that you had no choice but to find your own path. All of these bands were essentially misfits, and that’s why the scene at CBGB could grow and develop unnoticed. No one was paying much attention, so people could take their time figuring out whatever new direction they wanted to follow or whatever new idiosyncrasies they wanted to adopt.

The focus is on these really intriguing bands, some of whom were caught in motion going on to the majors and some of whom would not be documented at all, like the Erasers. I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the Erasers had it not been for Ork. It’s great to hear “Little Johnny Jewel” and “Blank Generation” and to hear Richard Hell moving away from Television to his solo vision. It’s great to hear Alex Chilton between incarnations. But really, for me, hearing some of these other bands is a great thing, because otherwise they might be forgotten by rock history.

One thing about “Nuggets” is that it’s not your top-shelf groups. Maybe some of them became big, like the Standells. But a lot of them were the also-rans. That’s where I like my rock ‘n’ roll arrow of interest points—toward those bands that are off to the side. In a way they tell the tale of the scene much more than the successful bands.

I think that’s what “Nuggets” instilled in me: this idea that you didn’t have to be the Beatles to make good or important music. You could be nobodies and still have an amazing song.

Exactly. The Beatles are at such a level, they’re just the Beatles. In a weird way they’re disconnected from their times. But you listen to some of those Merseybeat bands and you get a real sense of what it was like in Liverpool at a certain moment in time. As a rock historian, I like to see the oddballs. I’m doing a little investigating into New Orleans in the late ‘50s, and I know Little Richard and Fats Domino and all those guys. But when I find a piano player like Archibald or this guy I’m really into now, Roy Montell, who has a song called “That Mellow Saxophone,” that’s really the fun stuff. In some ways they’re more revelatory and insightful that the major players in the scene.

You were in Patti Smith’s band at the time, and her first single, “Hey Joe”/”Piss Factory,” was massively influential, even from a business standpoint. Releasing it on your own Mer Records label showed that you could do this on your own and on a smaller scale.

I understood how to do it. I loved the a cappella doo wop labels that record stores in the tri-state area were doing at the time. That was where independent labels began. You don’t have a route to the major labels, so you might as well put it out yourself. It’s not so different from today when people are making their own CDs and selling them at gigs. You can see what you sound like and figure yourself out. Out little Mer Records didn’t have any other releases, because we weren’t businesspeople. It was an experiment to try to create, if nothing else, a rare record of the future.

You’ve talked about artists coming into their own at CBGB, but it sounds like you had come into your own a bit earlier than most of the people on Ork Records. Did that give you a different perspective on punk?

I was probably four or five years older than most of those people, which is enough for a generation. I did serve my rock ‘n’ roll apprenticeship in the ‘60s. I was in what would be known as a garage band, and it was called the Zoo. I played mostly on the fraternity circuit, which stretched across Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. If you saw “Animal House,” then you saw the type of band I was in. We were playing “Shout” for 20 minutes while the fraternity brothers swam in beer. You played four sets a night. I remember when I played the Delta Kappa Epsilon house—the D Kaps, which was the football players’ house at Rutgers, where I went to school—they would give us an extra $25 if we didn’t take a break. So we were up to $125! It’s a great way to learn your craft and a good way to go through college. I always think of rock ‘n’ roll as my true major.

To play in the ‘60s, when the whole playing field was changing so radically, was amazing. My first band started at the end of ’64, and when the Zoo broke up in around ’67, there had already been quite an evolution in how the music was regarded. I think the same can be said for the early ‘70s into the late ‘70s. The whole sensibility of what rock ‘n’ roll could be and who could play it changed radically. I have to laugh when I remember when the Zoo started. There were a couple of British Invasion songs in our repertoire, but mostly it was songs like “What’d I Say” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’.” By the time we broke up, we were sitting on the floor cross-legged playing raga rock. That’s a pretty large leap. I never thought I would be continuing it after college, which is why my subsequent career is so amazing to me.

Was there a moment when you realized that you could make a career out of music?

Yeah, about a year ago. You just keep doing it until you realize you’ve made a life of it. It’s really something to have this Ork box come out. You realize what a long life it’s been. It’s quite a commemoration. I certainly didn’t see Ork Records as such a thing. It’s like somebody putting out records with your friends, people helping themselves. But now you look back and it’s really quite a body of work.

When Ork put the “Crazy Like a Fox” single out, how did it do? Did it sell particularly well?

The single has been released on so many compilation albums and has been rereleased many times, so it’s just amazing how little impact it ever makes. It’s a cool single, though. I just performed at the Ponderosa Stomp under the name Link Cromwell, and it was his first appearance in 49-and-a-half years. I’m pretty amazed by his longevity. The single has never been a hit, but it continues on. In a weird way, it’s my own tale. It’s the theme song that tells the story of my life. “While they’re working on the inside, I’m having fun on the outside.” The song gave me a sense of myself as a musician, as a performer, as someone who could be that “Crazy Like a Fox” person. And I’m grateful that Terry and Charles helped move it along its lifeline. And in retrospect, I think it’s just a good song—a tribute to my Uncle Larry, who was a great songwriter. “Speak Softly Love,” the theme from “The Godfather.” “A Time for Us” from “Romeo & Juliet.” He was a great encourager of me at a time when I needed a little bit of encouragement.

Did you ever consider “Crazy Like a Fox” for “Nuggets”?

No. I never would have been so self-serving as to put it on. In a way it’s not really a Nuggets-y song. It’s not a band coming out of nowhere. It hasn’t got a great Fuzztone guitar solo, which is probably de rigueur for “Nuggets.” But it’s still a very hooky song. I especially have an affection for the flip side, “Shock Me,” since the bass playing on it is my first instrumental appearance on record. I didn’t play on the A side, but I played bass on the B side while my uncle tootled along on harp. It ‘s just a great little slice of folk protest.

Now that you’ve dusted off Link Cromwell for Ponderosa Stomp, do you have any further plans for him?

I have no idea. Sometimes in my imagination I invent a little lifeline that Link Cromwell might have had, had that song been a hit. There would have been the lost years in the desert, and then he would have tried to stage a comeback and re-create that hit. But to be perfectly honest, I’m happy with the way things have turned out. If the song had been a chart success, my whole life would have been written differently. Everything happens for a reason.

The post Punk pioneer Lenny Kaye reflects back on “the original sin of rock ‘n’ roll” appeared first on Salon.com.

Sri Lankan poet-turned-author Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel “The English Patient” is a lyrical, highly detailed exploration of love across the decades and how its sacred qualities overcome time and geography. Written in a fragmented, poetic style by Ondaatje, the novel tells the story of a World War II nurse named Hana (Juliette Binoche in the movie) caring for a severely burned man (played by Ralph Fiennes in the adaptation) suffering from amnesia. With the help of a thief named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) who has lost his thumbs, and a Sikh bomb expert (Naveen Andrews), the trio learn about the burned man, dubbed “the English patient,” and his past, which includes an affair with the beautiful and wealthy Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Because of Ondaatje’s specific writing style, director Anthony Minghella found the task of adapting the novel daunting: “Its gifts, in a way, are very elusive and are very much connected with the beauty of language, which is probably the thing that the film is least good at conveying.” Ondaatje worked on the script with Minghella, sharing the belief that most people seeing the movie never read the book in the first place. The book’s events happen over several years, and rather than focus on complex themes of national identity and the fluid connections between time and history, it made more sense for the movie to situate the love story between the English patient and Katharine as the primary narrative, with a parallel romance between nurse Hana and bomb expert Kip.

The film (which turns 30 this year) parcels out the mystery of the English patient’s identity over a near three-hour run time, whereas the book has no chronological structure and alternates between the past and the present, telling the patient’s story backward. The reader is an outside observer and learns about things in a realistic manner. No one can predict when a life-changing moment will happen in their lives and the same goes for Hana, the patient, and everyone else. Information is given to them and it takes several chapters for the reader, and the character, to understand the significance of that information.

Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan man living in Canada, makes multi­culturalism and the history of exoticizing the desert key themes in “The English Patient.” This is evident in the depiction of Kip, a Sikh man finding his way in the English world of colonialism. In the book, Kip loves the English and the West — so much so that he sings their songs and wears their clothes. The movie touches on these themes here and there, but in the book Kip is, at times, more important than the English patient himself.

Unlike the movie, where Kip meets Hana as he tries to defuse a minefield on the road she’s traveling, the novel shows him accidentally stumble upon her playing the piano at the villa where she’s been holed up since the novel’s first page. As the two grow closer, he tells her about his family and how he was expected to become a doctor but instead decided to enter the army and, through the mentorship of Lord Suffolk (a real-life person), became a bomb expert.

Several chapters are devoted to Kip’s stories of defusing bombs and saving English lives, all aided by Lord Suffolk’s encouragement. As Kip says, Lord Suffolk is the first person to treat him like a fellow Englishman and not a foreigner. However, when the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima—illustrating how much time passes in the book compared to the movie— Kip becomes so wild with rage that he plans to shoot the patient, believing the unnamed man represents every evil the English and the West have committed against Asia. Kip feels that if Japan were a white country, those in charge would not have been so hasty to drop the bomb. The patient welcomes death, but Kip can’t pull the trigger. With the explosion of the atomic bomb, Kip’s belief system is literally shattered, leaving him to find a new path in life that, sadly, doesn’t include Hana.

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Kip is such a large part of the narrative that the novel even ends on his character. The movie ends with Hana and Kip parting because his job takes him to other areas of the country. They agree to meet again, but Kip completely discards his Western life. Years pass and Kip becomes the doctor his family wanted him to be. He is married and has two children. He says he received letters from Hana for a year, but never responded to them.

This bittersweet ending is paralleled alongside the story of the patient and Katharine. The love affair between the English patient, revealed as Hungarian cartographer László Almásy, and Katharine Clifton is told on-screen similarly to how it presents on the page, albeit in chronological order and as the overarching story. The pair meet and engage in a powerfully charged romance despite Katharine being married. Almásy and Katharine have a highly sexual affair with moments of extreme toxicity, trying to repel each other because of their awareness that outside forces are pulling them apart. Katharine takes her frustration out on Almásy in the novel by not only hitting him (also seen on screen), but throwing plates and stabbing him with forks. When people notice his plentiful bruises, Almásy makes up excuses, leading them to think he’s a klutz.

The couple’s affair is eventually discovered by Katharine’s jealous husband, Geoffrey (Colin Firth), who has been spying on her. Geoffrey, accompanied by his wife in a biplane, travels to Cairo in order to kill his competition and commit a murder/ suicide by crashing the airplane into the desert sand where Almásy, preparing to leave, is waiting. The crash kills Geoffrey and leaves Katharine severely wounded. Almásy shelters Katharine in a cave and goes off to get help, eventually evading arrest and stealing an airplane to rescue her.

Geoffrey is British Intelligence in the book and works as an aerial photographer. Because the intelligence agency knows of Almásy’s affair with Katharine, they assume Geoffrey’s death is suspicious and imprison Almásy as he tries to get help. His story then jumps ahead three months as he returns to the cave and finds Katharine dead. The movie shows this discovery as a tender moment, with only a few days passing and Almásy lying next to Katharine’s recently deceased body, stroking her hair. The book is more macabre, with Almásy making love to Katharine’s body, a final blending of life and death, love and sex, body and mind.

“The English Patient” was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won nine, including Best Picture. The movie’s sweeping visuals and romantic love story evoked a sentiment similar to 1940s war romances. It was highly praised upon release, though contemporary audiences today place the moment in the “when Oscar gets it wrong” category due to a perceived lack of staying power and quality compared to fellow nominee “Fargo” (1996). Regardless, Minghella’s film is an utterly beautiful and roman­tic story, a daunting feat considering how equally beautiful, though different, its source material is.

Excerpted from “But Have You Read the Book? Romance Edition: 40 Love Stories That Inspired Our Favorite Films” by Kristen Lopez. Copyright © 2026. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The post The colonial reckoning “The English Patient” adaptation couldn’t capture appeared first on Salon.com.

English writer and director Anthony Minghella has died at age 54, according to various news reports. It’s a sad and early departure for one of the best-loved figures in the British film industry. Minghella was chairman of the British Film Institute, where he had vowed to stem the outflow of British talent to the United States. He won the 1997 best-director Oscar for “The English Patient,” an international hit that launched a new wave of high-gloss, star-studded literary adaptations. His other films as a director included “Truly Madly Deeply” in 1990, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in 1999 and “Cold Mountain” in 2003. Minghella apparently underwent surgery for a growth in his neck last week at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He had seemed to be recovering normally, but suffered a fatal hemorrhage early on Tuesday morning.

Minghella had recently completed a 90-minute pilot episode of “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency,” a planned television series based on Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling novels about a Botswanan female detective. The program is scheduled to premiere this weekend on BBC One in Britain, and has been acquired for U.S. broadcast by HBO. He was reportedly close to beginning production on his next film, “The Ninth Life of Louis Drax,” which he had adapted from Liz Jensen’s novel and was planning to shoot in California. It’s too early to know whether that film will be scrapped, or possibly made with another director.

I’ll set aside my own mixed assessment of Minghella’s work and observe that he had an unerring eye for projects that combined big-screen cinematic spectacle, a literary pedigree and wide appeal among upscale audiences. He saw himself first and foremost as a storyteller, and had few artistic pretensions. Unlike so many people in his trade, Minghella was universally well liked on both sides of the Atlantic. Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who worked with Minghella on a 1995 campaign video and became his friend, told the BBC: “Anthony Minghella was a wonderful human being, creative and brilliant, but still humble, gentle and a joy to be with. Whatever I did with him, personally or professionally, left me with complete admiration for him, as a character and as an artist of the highest caliber.”

The son of Italian immigrants who owned an ice cream factory, Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight in 1954. His brother Dominic and sister Edana both work as writers for British television. He is survived by his wife, the choreographer Carolyn Choa, and two children, one of them the actor Max Minghella, who appeared in “Syriana” and “Art School Confidential” and is now a student at Columbia University in New York.

The post Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008 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.

The comical charm of Meta’s new AI-enhanced, smart glasses is that they’re seemingly made for someone unimpressed, perhaps thoroughly, with the way they’re experiencing life. 

Being unhappy with life in its current state is, of course, intrinsically human and a problem that is as old as time. In fairy tales and folklore, the motif ends with a lesson — sometimes with the aid of magic, divine punishment, and maybe a witch or two — to be thankful for the things you have. More contemporary interpretations involve time travel and alternate realities, and perhaps some kind of Christmas theme.

Now, in 2026, we have glasses imbued with technological magic. The $300 Meta glasses are equipped with dual cameras as well as multiple microphones and tiny speakers that connect to an AI-powered app on your phone. This allows you to understand languages you can’t speak, command music to be played, perhaps even identify people you don’t know, and record anything you want and keep it, should you desire, forever. Having the ability to do these things, according to Meta, could make life a little better. 

The problem with Meta’s pitch is that the improvements the glasses promise come at a price. These super-powered spectacles run the risk of annoying or offending or creeping out the people around you. 

And worst of all, even if you’re just plainly wearing the glasses, they’re killing the vibe for everyone else.

Wear Meta glasses at your own risk

The major takeaway from Meta’s advertisements and overall promotional strategy for its glasses is that you’re supposed to wear them everywhere: Japanese restaurants, nights out at bars and clubs, on escalators (possibly to somewhere cool), backstage at concerts, at Kardashian houses, in Miami Beach, skydiving, and everywhere in between. 

What these stylish commercials and dynamic morsels of marketing do not tell you is that at all these places there will likely be people who do not want to see you wearing these glasses at all. 

“For a few weeks there was a trainer at the gym I noticed wearing glasses — black Ray-Bans — and he had never worn glasses before. It took me a few days but I realized they were Meta,” Sean, a non-Meta glasses wearer in DC, told me. Vox agreed to let Sean and other people interviewed for this article to go by their first name or pseudonym to let them speak freely about these spectacles. 

 “I almost said something to a manager, but then he stopped wearing them before I could say anything,” he added. 

Sean explained his unease. All around this country, people film in the gym all the time — to the point where it’s obnoxious and gets in everyone’s way. This trainer could just be following the trend, using the glasses (which are less cumbersome than an entire tripod setup) to film his clients’ form or creating content for a YouTube channel. But not knowing what the glasses are for, what the trainer is recording, or where he’s recording is what bothered Sean. 

“I don’t want to be in the background of videos all over the internet or on TikTok,” he said. 

There’s a little bit of social absurdity here in that we’ve been encouraged to post and have so many platforms — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc. — to do so. Meta has continually emphasized that not only do these glasses allow people to share their points of view but also that everyone’s point of view is so important that it needs to be shared. At the same time, more people posting more than ever has made people aware of being a background character in someone else’s content. And it turns out that real-life, regular people are not particularly invested in how the stranger next to them in Meta glasses sees the world. 

Patrick, a writer living in New York, told me about a wedding he’d recently attended, where he saw an old friend wearing a pair. His group of friends told their pal that they wouldn’t talk to him until he took them off. 

As someone who aspires to be the kind of person you want to sit next to at a wedding, this is understandable. A wedding is theoretically two people sharing the most romantic day of their lives, but it is also a well of gossip, judgment, inside jokes, and lore that’s shared by the people who are watching said couple share the most romantic day of their lives. There’s also the possibility that, depending on the wedding, the spirit might move oneself to partake in the erotic violence known as the “chicken dance” and would not want any of that recorded. 

“One person screamed, ‘Ew the Kylie glasses, gross.’ It felt so cathartic,” Patrick said, referencing Meta glasses spokesmodel Kylie Jenner who, in her personal life, may or may not wear the glasses she advertises.  

In addition to weddings and the gym, people also told me that they don’t want to see the glasses at restaurants, not on dance floors or at parties, and definitely not in an immersive theater setting. I even spoke to someone who started a petition to ban them from bars. 

“I’m staunchly anti-photographs at good parties — the best parties in the world ban photography from the dancefloor,” said Vee, a nightlife aficionado who has owned but does not use his pair of Meta glasses anymore. “When people know there’s a camera on them, they behave differently. They start to monitor their own behavior. They become self-conscious and they start to think, Well, what will the people watching this video think I’m doing? Am I being cringe?” 

Going out partying is a completely different experience from lifting weights at the gym, and both are obviously very different from attending a wedding with friends. Yet, the critique of wearing Meta glasses at all these places is the same. No matter the vibe, Meta glasses will kill it and flatten the mood. People can’t enjoy the moment because the moment is being intrinsically changed by a person who might be recording. 

One of the rather unfortunate terms that Meta glasses have acquired is “pervert glasses.” This is largely due to the trend of pickup artists, pranksters, and yes, perverts, who are using the glasses to film others without their consent. Vee, the dance enthusiast, told me that it’s one more reason why he doesn’t believe that these specs have any place in nightlife.

“There’s a very significant community of people who trade videos that they’ve taken: candid videos of women who are in various states of undress. It’s just this kind of seedy underground,” Vee said, pointing out that Reddit had to ban entire forums dedicated to sharing nonconsensual videos and pictures of women at festivals and clubs. 

As Vee explained, people at festivals and nightlife events are often partaking in drugs and alcohol. He has no problem with that. What he does take issue with is that no one doing these things should have to think about being someone else’s content. Intoxicated people aren’t in the state of mind where they can consent to being in someone’s video or are even aware that someone’s Meta glasses have their recording light on. 

“There’s this whole kind of creeper contingent of folks who are trying to learn how to disable the recording light,” Vee said. “It’s not everybody who owns these glasses obviously, but there is a significant number of creepers who are giving the hardware a very bad name.”

Are we being too mean to pervert glasses?

The indicator light has since become a major flashpoint. The light is part of the glasses’ vibe-kill persona as it makes clear to everyone that can see that recording is taking place, and it’s especially vibrant in dimly lit places. The effect, I imagine, is like when the toys in Toy Story collapse when they see a human. That’s led to a contingent of glasses-wearers who want to disable the feature. 

While it’s understandable that someone might not want to draw even more attention to these glasses, hacking the light source is something a creeper would also do. Hence the “pervert glasses” moniker. These privacy concerns are why Meta is now rolling out an update that will disable the spectacles’ recording feature if said light is tampered with. 

“I think if you tamper with that, they should just break,” Jason, a 28-year-old Meta glasses owner, told me. “It’s the thin veil that makes it like, ‘Okay, at least you’re telling me you’re filming me.’ So the idea that if you tamper with it? No, your product should be bricked.” 

Jason bought a pair of Meta glasses in November with the idea that he would use them to film food content and post reviews. He had even picked out a name, “Sandwich Digest,” and dreamt of its success. But on his first wear, he took them to a Japanese sandwich shop and quickly realized that his future as a Meta glasses-wearing food critic was not a fun one. 

“I felt so uncomfortable,” Jason said, noting that the obviousness of his Meta glasses and their recording light spiked his self-consciousness. “But I also felt like the people I was interacting with were also uncomfortable. And I felt like they were feeling like, Okay, we both know this is weird, but I can’t say that because you’re actively filming me.” 

The strange interaction Jason described is a version of the panopticon effect, the idea that being recorded makes people alter their baseline behavior, perhaps to the point where people self-regulate even when they’re not being recorded. For Jason, there was no “real” restaurant experience to be filmed because everyone was so uncomfortable with being recorded. 

Therein is the conundrum: Even if you’re not using these glasses to be a creep, people still think you’re a creep, and you know that they think you’re a creep. 

Therein is the conundrum: Even if you’re not using these glasses to be a creep, people still think you’re a creep, and you know that they think you’re a creep. 

Since that initial encounter, Jason tells me that he’s only ever used the filming feature to capture a zipline experience he had in Mexico at the beginning of the year. He thinks he might also use them to capture hikes or excursions on an upcoming vacation, but he won’t use them in the vicinity of or  to film other people — especially since they’ve been dubbed pervert glasses.

“People’s perception of these glasses now is not what it was when I bought them in November,” he told me. “And had it been then, and if I knew what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have bought them.” 

Max, a Meta glasses wearer based in Australia, is a bit more keen on them but still shares some of Jason’s sentiment about their not-so-great reputation. Max explained to me that he has two pairs and wears them around 40 hours per week, mainly when he’s working, or walking and driving from place to place. Though he says he’s never had a negative interaction when wearing his glasses, he understands the backlash. 

“While we’re constantly being recorded when in public anyway, there’s a big difference between mass surveillance and one random weirdo recording you for their own purposes,” Max said, making the point that the indicator light, as awkward and obnoxious as it is, could be the accessory’s most important feature. 

“It’s really the only defense wearers have against the ‘pervert glasses’ remarks,” he added. “If the firmware update is successful, and the marketing around the update is widespread, I think we can slowly turn the public in their favor again.”

To be clear, many Meta glasses owners like Max pointed out that the glasses do have extremely useful features, like hands-free calling or the ability to translate foreign languages in real time. Meta also touts the glasses’ accessibility features, including those for people with reduced vision or hearing. They also offer sun protection. 

These are all ostensibly helpful gizmos, and their existence seems to indicate that Meta and its tech cohort are trying to figure out how to make these glasses as essential to our everyday lives as smartphones. Perhaps, when these features become more innovative or exciting or if the glasses become so popular, the narrative around why people buy them may change. 

But for now, the singularly intriguing thing about these specs is simultaneously their most publicly maligned feature: the filming. 

“There are probably a million things to film with them that are probably not weird,” Jason, the one-time Meta glasses food critic, told me. “But like if you’re wearing them at the beach, I would probably be side-eyeing you because you’re wearing ‘pervert glasses’ at the beach — fork found in kitchen.”

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.

Years ago on “Rick and Morty,” President Andre Curtis fumed that he can’t coexist with Rick Sanchez, a living god who won’t submit to his will. Giving the man his own spinoff is one way to fix that.

In “President Curtis,” America’s POTUS is an egomaniacal ’80s-vintage superhero who treats the White House as his lair. That’s not too far removed from the real commander-in-chief’s mindset, but any suspicions that co-creators Dan Harmon and James Siciliano are parodying Trump 2.0 are off base. The show’s only satirical tool is Curtis himself, a myopic blowhard (voiced by the charismatic Keith David) who, to paraphrase one skeptic, uses taxpayer dollars to play Batman. Flanked by his cyborg chief of staff (Stephanie Beatriz) and a half-leprechaun special agent (Jim Rash), Curtis would rather police America than govern it. (To that end, the show’s “Hill Street Blues”-adjacent theme is another genius grace note.)

But “President Curtis” is only as strong as the viewer’s affection for “Rick and Morty.” If you can’t get enough of that show’s visual irony, metatextual references and winking at entertainment tropes, here’s 10 more episodes of the same feeling, only Earthbound. Not that I’m complaining. There’s something about David, the mellifluous voice of Ken Burns’ America, committing to every expletive-laced punchline that makes me absolutely giddy.

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Sealing this TV candidate’s victory are all the ways Curtis shows himself to be more effective and dangerous than real politicians, in that he gets the job done. As he brags about singlehandedly ending Paul Bunyan, “I’ll say this much to anyone who thinks they’re taller than the law: ‘Timber, b***h.’”

“President Curtis” premieres at 11:30 p.m. Sunday, July 26 on Adult Swim and streams the next day on HBO Max.

 

The post “President Curtis” is a “Rick and Morty” spinoff to believe in 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.

Not since “Once More with Feeling” — the 2001 musical episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” wisely released on vinyl by Mondo in 2019 — have I taken the genre of music best described as “TV songs” as seriously as I am, right this very second, listening to Lestat de Lioncourt‘s debut album, “The Failures,” released on Spotify and elsewhere just days after the finale of AMC’s “The Vampire Lestat.”

Confronted with pondering just how good or “valid” rock songs written for a show about vampires could be, you may be tempted to take on a “what in the Dingoes Ate My Baby is this now,” attitude about the whole deal, but factor in that each original song was written by Daniel Hart — who not only wrote the music for both previous seasons of “Interview with the Vampire,” but has also written music for “A Ghost Story,” “Mother Mary” plus countless other projects — and that these songs are sung by Lestat himself (Sam Reid), and it shakes out to the album as a whole being worthy of not just respect as a body of music, but heavy rotation for being actually . . . well . . . good.

Out of the 23 tracks on “The Failures,” which include demos, remixes and alternate versions of songs featured in “The Vampire Lestat,” the stand-outs and repeat plays, for me, can be found in the Sisters of Mercy-esque “When I Call Out Your Name,” along with powerballads from the show such as “The Loneliness,” “Stained Glass Eyes,” and “Brutal Love” — all of which would not seem out of place on a late-career Peter Murphy album. 

“I actually found it much easier than writing songs about myself. Having the permission to be silly and bratty was so freeing,” Hart said to The Quietus, discussing composing from Lestat’s perspective. 

Silly and bratty as the songs can sometimes be, they’re also beautiful, fun and worth a serious listen.

The post Lestat’s debut album is no mere TV soundtrack 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.

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.

If you’re looking to wean yourself off social media and replace it with a more productive habit — and who among us isn’t — a lot of the common advice can sound like it’s coming from a drill instructor: Go outside and touch grass. Routine is key. Get your butt in the chair and don’t get up until you’ve done the work. They might as well be telling you to do a hundred pushups while they’re at it.

As valuable as that advice may be when you need a kick in the pants, these imperatives create an uneasy tension between leisure and labor. It’s all well and good to try to turn away from the siren song of your phone, but how likely are you to stick with the alternatives — reading books, drawing, meditating — if they feel like homework? 

It’s a lot more fun, and a lot less arduous, to try to beat social media at its own game instead, and harness your curiosity. 

Social media apps work in part by playing off our natural curiosity. Every time we refresh the endless scroll, they promise to give us new information, capturing the parts of our brains that always wonder what’s about to happen next. But they rarely actually satisfy that curiosity. They just repeat it endlessly: What’s going to happen when I scroll this far? Or this far? Or this far? The answer is almost always: the same thing as last time.

Away from social media, however, the world works differently. If you get curious about a question off the algorithm, it can lead you somewhere new and interesting. 

Even when we begin with a utilitarian goal, curiosity can take us in surprising directions. A few years ago, I got interested in running. At first I would just lace up my shoes, do a few perfunctory stretches, and jog straight out of my front door. But I gradually became curious about the mechanics of what I was trying to do. I began investigating running form, which led me to theories about how you should be doing different kinds of running every week. From there I learned about how strength training was important to support running, and then weight lifting led me to nutrition. I’m still not a particularly fast runner, but I am a data bank on all the ways there are for a person to make themselves just a little bit faster, and I know there’s more for me to keep looking into.

The goal here should be to get away from simple goals (running more, as in my example) to a more open and adventurous experience of what interests and engages us (understanding how I can support my body when I’m running). The experience is simple: Find something that fascinates you, learn a little more about that — whether from your friends, a documentary, or even an old-school internet search — then try to figure out what new questions that opens up and keep asking them. It’s a process that allows us to become our guides, whether we know where we’re headed or not.

In a recent essay, the writer John Paul Brammer explains that that’s exactly how he got himself to read more. 

“Curiosity is a child,” Brammer writes. “When it wants something, when it truly wants something, it’s nearly impossible to keep its hands away.” Brammer found his way to reading by getting curious about David Foster Wallace, which in turn led him to Wallace’s influences: from Donald Barthelme to Thomas Pynchon to Clarice Lispector.

“I read out of strict obedience to curiosity, the desire to know what these words in this sequence might hold,” Brammer writes. “I had to make it fun at first. This was messy. I sipped from this book, then that one. It wasn’t formal or rigorous. I read whenever I felt like it.”

Where habits are mindless and rote, curiosity is something to be indulged: It’s fun, even hedonistic. Embracing curiosity means finding ways to play with art and ideas, as if they’re clay, instead of chipping away at them, as if they’re solid stone.

“The relevant science isn’t something I’m qualified to parse,” Brammer writes in his essay. But when I looked into that very science, I found that his experience aligned with it quite well.  

“If you link curiosity to the accumulation of knowledge, you can actually self-boost your curiosity over time, with the end result of more continued interest.”

Kou Murayama, University of Tübingen

“People have likened the state of being curious about something to an aversive state,” says Celeste Kidd, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. “It’s unpleasant, akin to something like an itch. When you have that aversive state, when you really want some piece of information, it feels very satisfying to scratch it. There’s all sorts of positive feelings that come with satisfying specific curiosity.” 

The endless scroll of our phone apps can function like a hydrocortisone cream, offering a balm for the irritation without really dealing with the cause. It’s not actually scratching the itch. To do that, you have to get curious about a question that can guide you through an idiosyncratic and looping itinerary that is never fully determined in advance. 

Writer and tech designer Celine Nguyen has written about letting her curiosity guide her down rabbit holes in her essay on “research as leisure activity,” a phrase she borrowed from librarian Karly Wildenhaus. Speaking to me, Nguyen describes getting interested in the way the rise of vibe coding is affecting app design. 

“This idea around shifting design processes made me think of this art historian Claire Bishop,” Nguyen says. Bishop’s most recent book deals with the way technology changes our response to contemporary art, and Nguyen says that “after reading that, I was like, ‘I really like reading about contemporary art and performance. What else can I read in this vein?’” 

Nguyen followed her new interest in dance to a fixation on choreographer Pina Bausch, and soon found herself scouring the internet for still images from Bausch dances. 

“It’s sort of like this pleasantly fizzy, almost like ADHD brain thing,” Nguyen says. “It sort of feels like I’m wandering around this massive information landscape and I’m just coming off all these images or all these reference points or quotes that speak to me, and maybe at the end of this process I can sum up what it is I’m interested in.”

The point at which you satisfy your curiosity can be dangerous. Once the itch is gone, the desire to learn can disappear completely — even if you don’t know as much as you think. 

Kidd describes a study in which she tried to motivate people to learn a new fact about something they thought they already completely understood, but were actually wrong about.

“When we paid them to look up the right answer, they weren’t motivated to seek out more information,” she says. “They did it, but it was like they were out to lunch. They were thinking about something else. That information did not go in.” 

According to Kou Murayama, a professor of psychology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, the best way to maintain your momentum is to marshal your ephemeral curiosity into long-term interest by letting the answer to one question prompt a new one, as if you were figuring out where to eat each meal in a new city by asking your waiters where they like to eat. 

“If you link curiosity to the accumulation of knowledge, you can actually self-boost your curiosity over time, with the end result of more continued interest,” Murayama says. “Curiosity is basically short-lived, but if it’s linked to accumulating knowledge, or if you can link it to your self identity or importance, then you can self-booster interest.”

The trick is to, like Brammer and Nguyen, guide your curiosity toward a topic that can keep surprising you over time. What that usually means is to look for a topic that you already know a little bit about that can keep surprising you.

“We’ve done studies with 7-month-old babies, and they’re seeking out particular kinds of things in the world that violate their expectations, just a little bit but not too much,” Kidd says. “It tends to be the case that people want to elaborate on knowledge they already have as opposed to going into other domains. If there’s some way to relate a desired new set of expertise to something that you already have some background in, that’s a thing that you could absolutely do intentionally.”

So if you want to find some creative outlet for your time — or even if you just want to read more — there are straightforward steps to take: Look for something that excites your curiosity. Look for something that you are uncertain about, something so maddeningly unclear that you can’t help but itch at it. 

This mystery doesn’t have to be about science or philosophy. It could be about what happens to a character in a particular thriller, or how to capture a likeness in charcoal, or what a certain part of your city looks like. The point is that it should be the kind of question that you can’t let go of.

Then indulge in finding the answer — and let that question prompt another one. Then another. Then another. 

Julian Fellowes and “Downton Abbey” really did a number on our common understanding of the upstairs-downstairs social dynamic. It isn’t entirely their fault, to be fair; Fellowes simply had the good luck to meet a historic moment, the end of the Great Recession, with a fable proposing that old-money British aristocrats might also be kind and generous to their happy servants.

Fellowes carries this ideal into “The Gilded Age” while also creating an aspirational couple, George and Bertha Russell, who came from nothing to conquer old Manhattan society with their wealth and a marriage connection to British nobility.

“A Woman of Substance,” based on Barbara Taylor Bradford’s 1979 bestseller, is being sold to an American audience as a “Downton Abbey” replacement. That’s not quite accurate. Think of it more as an inversion, with a bottom-up view of its heroine Emma Harte’s life viewed through parallel timelines.

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.

Have you noticed there are a lot of professional basketball players named Jalen? Well, it’s not just the NBA: There are a plethora of Jalens in the NFL, and even the NHL has one. How did this name get so popular? Did all their parents watch basketball in the 1990s and fall for Jalen Rose?

There are many ways names come about, and according to Cleveland Kent Evans, there is something unique about naming traditions in the United States. Evans is the former president of the American Names American Name Society, and he writes a column for the Omaha World Herald nabout what names are popular, and why.

“In American culture, individualism is so strong. What I hear most often from parents is we want to find a name which is different, but not too different,” he told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.  “A lot of people are picking names which are unusual to them because they don’t know anybody their own age or their parents’ age with the name.” 

So what makes some names go mainstream, and what outside factors play a role in what parents choose? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Evans, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

So we have this very American individualized outlook when it comes to names. I would love to get into how other social factors shape how we name people. How does race shape our names?

The African American community has had a very different experience with naming since the 1960s. If you go back before the 1960s, unfortunately prejudiced racist people, one of the things they used to see about Black people was that they have funny names.

Statistically, before 1960, that wasn’t really true. It was like Black people had names that were like 1 or 2 percent more unusual than white people. It was very small. What happened in the ’60s as part of [the] Black Power [Movement], they turned what had been a negative into a positive. Many Black people said, “We are the people who give our children unique names to show how much we love them, to show how valued they are.” And that’s when you got the tradition of creating new names. Instead of the individual names necessarily being what went through fashions, it was the syllables they were made out of. In the ’60s and ’70s for girls, the most common prefix was law. And so you had Lakeisha, Latasha, Latoya. Then in the ’90s, the most popular prefix was Sha. And so you had Shanisha, Shaquita.

“Just like there is no such thing as the perfect parent or the perfect child, there’s no such thing as the perfect name.”

How does class show up in the way we pick names?

People who are highly educated want new names for their kids, but for them, they have to find something that has a history in the culture. They’re the ones that go back and revive the old names, while blue-collar people are more interested in stuff which is new — things which are newly invented or things which have not been girls or children’s names until recently. 

How do names become popular?

Things do not go from zero to top 10 overnight. But what happens is you often have what I call the Hollywood feedback loop. Screenwriters in Hollywood tend to be college educated. They often are going to give their characters names which are too young for them because they name their characters like they would name a kid. The screenwriters name characters and that presents the name to the whole population. Then all of a sudden it shoots up. An example of something changing social class that way was Tristan. Tristan sort of first came up among more educated people. There was a character in the original All Creatures Great and Small. Then you have the movie Legends of the Fall, which comes out with Brad Pitt playing the character Tristan. All of a sudden the name shoots up. It was not just the educated people who were naming their son Tristan anymore very suddenly at that point. 

Are there any other examples?

One of the hugest increases just because of television was a few years ago. About 2008 there was a program on one of the cable TV networks called 16 and Pregnant. One of the first babies born on that show was a boy named Bentley. The name Bentley for baby boys was one of the fastest growing boys’ names ever. It went from almost nothing to within about three years being the 75th most common name for boys in the US.

Do people ever see naming their children as a way to break from their past or from their culture? 

If you look at the immigrant groups that came from Europe in the 19th and the early 20th century, it was very common for the immigrants to want to give their kids quote “American” names. They would tend to pick things which they heard in the neighborhood. Then as the ethnic groups become assimilated, one of the ironies of that is that the grandchildren or great grandchildren of the immigrants go back and they say, “Well we want to revive our ethnic names.”

The first group that did that was the Irish. A lot of Irish people came over and they quit naming their kids things like Bridget. Then a lot of them wanted to bring back Irish names like Kevin. And then because they were doing it, those names started spreading to the whole whole country. So today Kevin is not an especially Irish American name. There are many, many Americans who have no Irish ancestry who are named Kevin. 

What advice do you have for people out there who are like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to name this kid. What am I going to do?” How should people be approaching it? How should they be thinking about it?

Well, I think first of all, they shouldn’t worry about it too much. I got a communication from a woman who had an uncle who she really loved and really admired, whose name was Floyd. She said, “Can I really name my son Floyd? Won’t he be teased too much?” I told her, “Look, you really love this uncle. What you do is you name your son Floyd, but then from the very beginning, you tell him why you named him that and why his great Uncle Floyd was a marvelous person and why you loved him so much and make him proud of it to protect him from the teasing.”

Just like there is no such thing as the perfect parent or the perfect child, there’s no such thing as the perfect name. There are lots of different names that would work equally well for your child and you shouldn’t think that you have ruined their life by giving them the wrong name. 

Just a few weeks ago, Americans were able to eat salad without the fear of liquid feces and breathe in air that didn’t taste like campfire ash.

And — we were just really excited to watch some soccer. 

One major concern at the outset was whether America’s foreign and strict immigration policies would impact the levity of the games, and, at worst, deny entry to people, and perhaps even athletes and officials, from countries at odds with the current administration (it did). 

But in the early days of the World Cup, Americans and fans across the globe were surprised by how much of the world embraced coming here — and vice versa. Visiting international fans shared their astonishment at the sublime oddities this massive country has to offer, posting about: ranch dressing (in bowls if you ask nicely), unlimited refills in towering glasses, dairy products, air conditioning, Tex-Mex, ammunition displays, chicken tenders, cowboy hats, and, among other things, the Cheesecake Factory. Oh, how we all rejoiced in seeing the rest of the world experience the Byzantine beauty of our chain restaurants for the first time, and how craggy we enjoy our fried chicken strips!

@bob.travel6

First meal back in Dallas and it did not disappoint! Every single dish was amazing!! #dallas #texas #usa

♬ オリジナル楽曲 – Bob(SEA→LA→MIA→NY) with $0🇺🇸 – Bob(SEA→LA→MIA→NY) with $0🇺🇸

Adding to the cultural exchange on the sidelines, fans were also pleasantly surprised by how well the United States — historically a country that’s been bad at soccer — showed up. 

We were high off the US team’s 2-0 win over Bosnia-Herzegovina. We looked like a team with guts! Malik Tillman scored a goal down a man after star striker Folarin Balogun was sent off with a (questionable — experts said) red card. Many players on the US team have immigrant parents, are army brats, or are American by birthright citizenship (a constitutional privilege that the Trump administration has sought to dissolve). Though Belgium, in the next round, was going to be a difficult matchup, you couldn’t count out toughness. 

Even though many Americans root for the underdog, and many see themselves as underdogs, it’s rare that America is ever actually the underdog. 

But in the context of the World Cup, one of the rare things that American men will never win because soccer is one of those rare sports that no American man has ever been the best at, the stars aligned for Americans to have the scrappy longshot team of our dreams. 

But it didn’t take long for the illusion to shatter.

As the Fourth of July weekend finished, FIFA announced that it had reversed Balogun’s red card and that he would, in an exception to the rules, be allowed to play against the Belgians. The move was unprecedented and fishy. 

That red-card reversal also ripped open a portal into a nightmare realm. 

Acting like a person who can’t keep a surprise party a surprise, President Donald Trump began insinuating that he might have had something to do with the decision. Then, on the morning of the match against Belgium, Trump said that he had placed a call to FIFA president Gianni Infantino about the red card and implicitly took credit for its reversal. Infantino not only confirmed the call but said that he takes calls from important and rich people all the time — a cartoonishly suspicious response from an organization that’s historically famous for corruption. 

Trump on Balogun: "I saw the play, and I'm a person that loves sports … that wasn't a foul. That wasn't even an infraction … this referee, who is a little bit suspect if you check his past. He made a call that nobody could believe … he's our best player, or one of our best… pic.twitter.com/YfIqb1JA4u

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 6, 2026

Some fans, upon learning that the laws had been bent for the host country, reacted with astonishment, if not fury. Ethically, FIFA’s bar is on the floor, and this blatant move to help the United States somehow seemed to confirm onlookers’ worst fears.

In that moment, it was clear the US was no longer an underdog. Underdogs aren’t supposed to be able to put their thumb on the scale. They surely aren’t supposed to have their papa call favors. Perhaps all that talk of guts and toughness and how the team was a band of overlooked outsiders was just a mirage — and all that ranch dressing merely a charm offensive.

Whether you’re a soccer fan or someone who is ambivalent about soccer but loved the vibes, the shift was palpable. We’re all experiencing a collective whiplash and perhaps a sports-affected melancholy. 

And now that the Cup is ending, Americans are now living in a country where vegetables, famously healthy, and good for you, carry the risk of “explosive” diarrhea. Diarrhea itself is something many would not consider a calm experience, so the idea that this is not just diarrhea but somehow a special, even worse diarrhea, one akin to detonation, feels especially terrifying. 

This week also saw swaths of the US living under a plume of wildfire smoke — the dirtiest air in the world. Breathing outside is, according to scientists, the equivalent of smoking 10 cigarettes. Breathing in smoke-laced air and worrying about the looming spectre of diarrhea with every meal puts the shared cultural joy we had in perspective. But even without these extreme plagues, it’s worth mourning how fleeting those moments can be. 

Being born a twin comes with certain expectations. To speak or act in tandem. To share belongings, space and birthdays. To exhibit a closeness that comes from a ready-made bond since birth. But what happens when the very existence of your twin is a lie?

In “Daemons of the Shadow Realm,” based on the manga by acclaimed “Fullmetal Alchemist” creator Hiromu Arakawa, Yuru leads a simple life in the premodern Edo-style Higashi Village. With his trusty bow and arrow, he hunts game and safeguards his twin sister Asa – who, for unexplained reasons, resides behind bars in a dark cell. One fateful day mysterious interlopers massacre the villagers, including Asa. One of the intruders – a tall, dark-haired young woman – claims that she’s the real Asa, not the body in the cell, and that Yuru is in danger if he stays.

“When Yuru is faced with that situation, and everything he thought he knew about Asa was fake, and there happens to be another Asa, I think he’s in this state of shock,” Kensho Ono, the voice actor for Yuru, told Salon at Anime Expo via interpreter Mike McNamara. “He’s unable to process what’s happening in front of him.”

According to the real Asa, their parents had smuggled her out of the village at a young age but weren’t able to take Yuru with them. Although not quite a situation of being separated at birth, this Asa still poses a similar challenge for Yuru. Not only is the eyepatch-wearing young woman taller, stronger and more aggressive than the Asa he once knew, she grew up with their parents in the modern world. How could he embrace this stranger as his twin?

“I think in ‘Daemons of the Shadow Realm,’ when you see the real Asa appear, there’s some kind of connection. There’s a lot of time apart, but that time you spent together that can’t be denied,” said Ono. “That introduces an interesting relationship between the twins. In the show we haven’t gotten to see much of the twin component yet, so I think that’s something that will definitely be unique as we start to draw more of those connections between each other going forward.”

All this time, he had hardened his heart against his parents, believing they had abandoned him and Asa. In truth, his parents had wanted to save him from the same villagers who deceived him with the False Asa. But just as he found hope in reuniting with them, he also learned that they had mysteriously disappeared mid-flight en route to Okinawa. Now, he has to contend with replacing the memories of the other Asa with the reality of this badass sibling and accepting that he still may never see his parents ever again.

 

In contrast, Asa has had the benefit of their parents’ love and still feels affection for her brother whose absence she felt keenly. Once he enters the modern world to search for their missing parents, she tries to make up for lost time. Asa delights in sharing mundane activities like eating a meal together or taking his picture with her phone.

“Despite the similarities that twins have, there’s still this dynamic of like an older and a younger,” said Yume Miyamoto, who voices Asa. “In our case it feels like an older brother and me the younger sister in the relationship, and I think there’s this idea that he has to protect me in some way, so there’s a dynamic there.”

In spite of the characters’ separate upbringing, Miyamoto still wanted to convey their bond in her vocal performance.

“For example, if Kensho-san says something in the character Yuru, and I hear that, I actually adjust my performance a little bit to match some of his tempo or timing,” she said. “It’s something that might be very subtle, and maybe most viewers won’t even notice it, but for me it feels like we’ve closed the distance between the characters.”

Ono added, “I had no idea until she told me that.”

As if their unconventional childhoods weren’t troubled enough, Asa and Yuru’s twinship comes with another heavy burden: saving the world. (This is shonen anime after all.) According the legend, boy and girl twins born in Higashi Village on a day with equal parts day and night herald a cataclysm that only they can mend.

They’ll have help of course. The prophecy states that they’ll acquire the powers of “Break” – to dismantle or undo something – and “Seal” to contain, reconstruct or suppress something. At this time, only Asa has unlocked the power to break and essentially died to do so, which partly explains her rakish eye patch. This weighty destiny also explains why the Higashi villagers went out of their way to keep Yuru close.

As with anyone who’s been manipulated by others, Yuru isn’t sure he wants to cooperate with anyone at the moment. He’s still trying to grasp who he is in this world and in relation to the real Asa.

“I think [the theme of] identity for me resonates because you look at our character Yuru and how he must feel like he’s been betrayed by the villagers and the people around him,” said Ono. “They hid a very big truth from him, so I think trying to understand what he wants to do and the source of his actions and motivation, there’s a lot of trust issues for sure that that he’s going to have. How he faces reality in his own right is something he has to think really, really hard about.”

The prophecy also claims that the fated twins have the power to command daemons, supernatural beings with unearthly abilities. Before leaving the village for the modern world, Yuru awakens Left and Right, two statues that have marked the entrance to the village. Resembling oni, hulking entities with superhuman strength, Left and Right are only too happy to be free of their stone confinement and explore the strange new world of speeding palanquins (cars) and hand-held smoke signal devices (cellphones).

In fact, daemons of all stripes populate the series – and always in pairs. Much like the twins, their abilities appear predicated on a complementary duality to assist their masters. A sampling of daemons Yuru encounters are, in no particular order, the cat and dog Kotetsu and Jiro; the Tenaga-Ashinaga known as (and for having) Long Arms and Long Legs; and a ponderous tortoise named Torty and speedy hare named Bunbun. And most recently, Yuru learned about the child spirits Zashiki-Warashi, who had disguised themselves as the False Asa and his childhood friend Danji for many years.

With each new set of daemons Yuru meets, the more he becomes aware that he and Asa are also part of this ecosystem of balanced pairs. Whether he chooses to fulfill his destiny alongside his twin remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Yuru is happy to utilize Left and Right to investigate his parents’ mysterious disappearance. Whether it’s vanquishing assailants or surreptitiously surveilling enemies, daemons provide significant advantages for their masters. This led Salon to ask the series’ voice stars how they’d command their own daemons.

“My focus is more on mundane daily life,” said Ono. “Within the anime, there are daemons that help and assist the chores of daily life, and that to me I find quite attractive. Like folding the laundry.”

Miyamoto has a similar humble but thankless task she’d want help with. “I’d love to have a daemon that can blow dry my hair for me,” she said. “My hair is quite long, and it takes a long time [to dry], and by the end of it, I’m usually sweating. So if someone can do it for me, that’d be amazing.”

For some of us, it’s just enough to get by with a little help from our daemons. Not everyone is fated to save the world with their prophecy-fulfilling twin.

“Daemons of the Shadow Realm” releases new episodes on Saturdays on Crunchyroll.

 

The post “Daemons of the Shadow Realm”: When twins have an identity crisis appeared first on Salon.com.