For folks who spend the majority of their waking hours contemplating the music of The Beatles — and there are probably vastly more of us than you might think — “Revolver” (released on August 5, 1966, in the United Kingdom) sure checks a lot of boxes. For one thing, the album’s 14 tracks are a tour de force, a masterpiece of inspired songwriting and musicianship. The LP is also a whirlwind of competing genres in which John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr flex their muscles and prove that they’re at home in virtually any genre.
But when it comes to The Beatles’ unparalleled legacy, “Revolver” finds the bandmates on an unimpeded trajectory towards greatness. Released the previous year, “Rubber Soul” set things into motion — arguably rock’s first cohesive LP. The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson later recalled being mesmerized by the album, the first record, to his mind, that didn’t have any filler. Just one study in pop-music mastery after another.
In terms of the album’s reception history, “Revolver” has enjoyed a strange odyssey in the United States. For many critics, it served as the tantalizing appetizer before the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967, a dazzling entrée if ever there were one.
And for years, “Sgt. Pepper” reigned supreme, routinely topping “best of” lists as the finest album ever recorded. In the decades since the release of The Beatles’ masterworks on compact disc in 1987, when the group’s American LPs were deleted in favor of their canonical UK counterparts, the “Revolver” album has slowly but surely gained momentum — particularly among Stateside listeners, who had no idea what they’d been missing.
As we celebrate “Revolver”’s 60th anniversary, I have come to see the album as The Beatles’ thrilling turning point — in many ways, a continuation of their virtuosic performances on “Rubber Soul.” George Harrison seemed to agree. In later years, he would describe the records as parts one and two of the same album. In one sense, he was selling himself short: “Revolver” featured three Harrison compositions, a glut of new material that included “Taxman,” “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You.”
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Harrison, of course, was by no means alone. Paul McCartney and John Lennon, too, rose fully to the occasion, reeling off such masterworks as “Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” not to mention a bravura single’s release featuring “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.” All told, The Beatles and their magisterial producer George Martin loosed 16 amazing new songs into the world in August 1966, an incredible bounty, by any measure.
Ultimately, “Revolver” exists as a weigh-station, of sorts. First, it was the culmination of the most profound demographic growth in the history of entertainment. During their early years, the band appealed to a narrow swathe of teens and young adults. But all of that changed with “Yesterday,” which Martin adorned with a string quartet. Not only did “Yesterday” emerge as a chart-topping American hit, but the groundbreaking song also saw the band growing their demographic to include the highly desirable world of working adults, ages 25-54, who longed for something more sophisticated.
And then there was “Revolver”’s “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yellow Submarine.” In one fell swoop, The Beatles penetrated two more demographics. “Eleanor Rigby” attracted a post-55 audience in droves, while the good-natured storyline and nautical sound effects inherent in “Yellow Submarine” drew children and pre-teens into The Beatles’ camp. Quite suddenly — and scarcely more than two years after their triumphant American debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — the group dominated nearly every quadrant of the consumer age range.
(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) The Beatles’ “Revolver” album cover, designed by artist Klaus Voormann
Yet feats of demography are only part of what “Revolver” bequeathed. The LP served as a runway — or perhaps more accurately, a launching pad — for the more experimental and challenging efforts to follow. There they are, in quick succession: “Sgt. Pepper,” “Magical Mystery Tour” (1967), “The White Album” (1968), the “Get Back” project (1969, released the following year as the “Let It Be” album), and “Abbey Road” (1969).
And then they were gone, leaving a sense of wonder and mystique in their wake that remains unparalleled in the annals of popular music — perhaps even for the whole of Western art. But first, there was “Revolver” — a glittering array of musical chestnuts that we’re only just beginning to appreciate.
This year’s “Everything Fab Four” Fest, taking place November 5-8 at Monmouth University in New Jersey in conjunction with the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, will be a celebration of the 60th anniversary of “Revolver.” Please watch for more details and ticket information soon.
Ariana Grande has been concerningly thin for years now, but the online discourse about her body exploded this week after she released the music video for “Petal,” the title track of her most recent album. The video’s storyline, in which the 33-year-old pop singer gets “Carrie”-style revenge for men’s misogynist judgments, was completely overshadowed by fan alarm at Grande’s apparent emaciation. Set in the 1960s, the colorful retro fashions hang off her skeletal frame.
“I can’t even enjoy the video without thinking she looks sickly every second she is on the screen,” one person posted on YouTube.
“At this point, im [sic] judging her team, friends, and family,” the video’s top commenter said. “This is insane.”
“She’s is surrounded by enablers,” another wrote. “Eating disorders are not a joke.”
These comments aren’t outliers. To the contrary, the entire discussion on YouTube was about Grande’s body, not the video’s visuals or the music, a lovely torch song where she compares herself to a “petal in the pavement.” While she likely intended the lyric to be empowering, instead it feels more like a metaphor for her apparent physical fragility.
Grande’s public relations team responded to the furor with denial, announcing that the singer would be “taking a step back from visibility” after finishing her tour, insisting that she’s living “both healthily and happily,” while blaming “endless, ongoing public scrutiny” for the move. Her retreat includes a withdrawal from a highly anticipated West End stage production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Sunday in the Park with George,” alongside her “Wicked” co-star Jonathan Bailey. The announcement also follows previous comments from Grande scolding people to “be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies.”
In response to the news, the famously outspoken actress Jameela Jamil posted an Instagram story in which she argued that the calls of Grande’s team for privacy are missing the point. Jamil, who says she nearly died from her own eating disorder, pointed to Grande’s impressionable fans, “[m]any who have no support system equipped to handle the deadly clutches of anorexia.” Jamil later defended her post, pointing to the “young girls” who are watching the situation unfold, adding, “We don’t have to pretend we are blind because it’s a pop star.”
The ongoing battle over health, thinness and women’s bodies has become more political in recent years, as MAGA and MAHA influencers have turned weight into a culture war battlefield.
Jamil may be blunt, but her point is truer now than ever. The ongoing battle over health, thinness and women’s bodies has become more political in recent years, as MAGA and MAHA influencers have turned weight into a culture war battlefield. Many right-wing figures have become increasingly vocal in their belief that women shouldn’t only be skinny, they should also look weak. Conservatives aren’t just anti-fat anymore. Even building muscle is viewed as suspiciously feminist. Instead, women — and girls — are being told to strive to look frail instead.
Fueled by access to illicit use of GLP-1 appetite suppressants, recent years have seen a surge of online influencers who explicitly push starvation over health — and especially over strength — as a feminine ideal. On TikTok, the trend was even called “SkinnyTok,” where influencers like Liv Schmidt build a fanbase with videos highlighting their perilously meager diets. Most of this content is not explicitly political. But as The Atlantic’s Annie Joy Williams chronicled in June 2025, the right-wing politics aren’t far below the trend’s surface.
As soon as she started looking at SkinnyTok content, Williams wrote, “the tradwife content began to sneak in” to her algorithm. Soon she was being served videos not just about being super-thin, but also geared toward “embracing my divine femininity” and “my natural role.” Experts she spoke with noted this is a common right-wing recruitment tactic of grabbing people with seemingly apolitical content — such as “diet tips” — and then steering them toward far-right propaganda.
This is most clearly evident in the way that Evie Magazine, a far-right Christian magazine that sells its message using the aesthetics of popular women’s magazines like Vogue or Cosmopolitan, has embraced SkinnyTok influencers. In 2025 the publication profiled Schmidt, insisting that she’s merely “being honest” when telling followers that the only pathway to romantic and professional success is to eat as little as possible. Carmen Schober, the profile’s author, ignored the way members of Schmidt’s online forum, Skinni Société, commiserated about their hair loss and inability to stand without getting dizzy. The magazine also raved about “skinny queen” influencer Amanda Dobler for “not apologizing” after coaching followers to avoid even wasabi and soy sauce, because their negligible calorie counts are deemed excessive.
When I purchased a copy of Evie’s print magazine in May, I was alarmed at how the magazine not only promoted radical skinniness but also discouraged women from healthy habits like exercise. The issue explicitly told women to avoid exercise that builds muscle in “quads, hamstrings, and thighs,” on the grounds that it allegedly alienates men. The editors also discouraged women from cardio exercise, falsely claiming it will “throw your hormones off.”
“A woman who is sample size looks great in virtually everything she puts on,” Evie advised, implying throughout the issue that failure to maintain a size zero could ruin your marriage, or even drive your husband to cheat.
This hostility to women exercising has been accompanied by MAGA valorizing fitness as rightfully a masculine endeavor. Even members of Donald Trump’s administration, such as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, regularly post workout videos that frame exercise as men’s work, all about grunting and showing off muscles. While it’s rare they explicitly exclude women, the lack of female bodies becomes notable if you watch enough of the videos.
There is one form of exercise Evie and other right-wing influencers tacitly allow women: Pilates, a low-impact exercise similar to yoga. Pilates has a lot of benefits, but it’s not known for being especially sweaty or for building larger muscles. As The 19th reported in March, this has led to right-wing influencers extolling the “Pilates girl” as the ideal, since both strength and sweat are deemed too unfeminine. As a bonus, some on the right even claim there are no men in Pilates classes, a false claim that serves to protect fragile male egos from the possibility that a wife or girlfriend might speak to another man without supervision. But as any woman could tell you, Pilates isn’t exactly a calorie-burner. A woman who limits her exercise to Pilates will still have to subsist on very little food to get the delicate, bone-thin look these men conjure with the “Pilates girl” image.
Ariana Grande is an outspoken progressive who incorporates feminist themes in her music, and she would no doubt be horrified by the way the right is using the idea of thinness to bully women into submission and self-loathing. Indeed, Grande seems distressed by the discourse around her body, and she has said she wants people to leave her alone.
But this is where Jamil, perhaps in an impolitic way, is making a point that is both true and uncomfortable. Romanticizing extreme thinness contributes to eating disorders, which can do serious damage to the health of sufferers. In many cases, it might even kill them. That’s been true for decades, but now, as the issue has taken on political salience, the situation is even more alarming.
Women already have an uphill battle trying to maintain a healthy body image. It’s harder now that taking basic care of yourself is demonized as being “woke.”
The news came the way it always comes in my family, sideways, through a phone. I was in my living room, sunk into the chaise lounge I retreat to, comfortable in a way that now embarrasses me, when I heard my mother’s voice in the other room calling my father. Something in her tone. You learn your parents’ registers the way you learn weather, and this was the register of bad news from far away.
Greece was burning again. Crete worst of all, in the south, where a fire near Rethymno had driven some 8,000 people from their homes in a single night. Fires on Paros and Andros, scattered across the Aegean. And then the name I had been bracing against: Lesbos. A blaze near Plomari, the old ouzo town on the island’s south coast, was eating coastal homes while roughly 100 firefighters fought it, and a seaside resort emptied into the dark.
The fires are not a freak event, and no one in Greece pretends they are. They began in early July and have barely paused since; this is the second week of a major outbreak, dozens of fronts at once, fed by a record European heat wave, a spring of too little rain and the Meltemi, the dry seasonal winds that come screaming down the Aegean in July and August at up to 100 kilometers an hour and turn a spark into a wall. Scientists have said it plainly: Climate change is loading the dice, the Mediterranean’s pine and olive and dry scrub catch faster and burn hotter than they used to, and summers like this one are becoming the rule, not the exception. Greece has always burned in August. It has not always burned like this.
My father is from Lesbos. My mother’s people are from there too, further back, so the island runs down both sides of me like a watermark you only see when the light hits it right. It is where my family’s houses stand, where a portion of my life is already promised, where I know I will one day go to live for a while, because the pull has never once loosened. It is, if I am honest, where I come from in the deepest sense, not only the blood but the making. My love of poetry, my hunger for art — I trace all of it back to that island, to Sappho, who sang there 26 centuries ago and somehow reached a Greek-American boy in Pennsylvania and told him what he was.
I have not set foot on Lesbos in 10 years.
That is the sentence, the amount of time, I keep circling. Now I watch it burn on a screen from a soft chair, an ocean and a lifetime away, useless.
There is a particular helplessness to diaspora I have never quite found the words for, though I keep trying. You love a place you are not in. You grieve a fire you cannot smell.
There is a particular helplessness to diaspora I have never quite found the words for, though I keep trying. You love a place you are not in. You grieve a fire you cannot smell. You refresh a feed for news of a village whose name your relatives say with their whole mouths and you say with an accent that gives you away. The distance is not only miles. It is the knowledge that everyone there is living what you are merely watching, and that watching, from comfort, is its own small shame.
I was made by that island’s water. They tell me that as a baby, I would not leave the sea. I would stay in the Aegean until I cried at being carried out, submerging myself again and again until, the family story goes, I matched the sea, my skin gone the temperature of it, indistinguishable, a small animal that had already decided where it belonged. Even now, when I step into that water, something in me resets. The sun on it, the salt, the particular blue no postcard has ever gotten right — it reconnects me to my own being, returns me to whatever I was before the world got complicated.
There was a year, when I was barely one, that the island nearly kept me for good: a lost passport, a wary government that took an American baby for a Greek one, and a U.S. congressman who finally untangled it and got me home. It is a longer story than this essay can hold, but its shape has never left me. The point is this: That island has been trying to keep me since before I could speak, and I have spent a decade letting the ocean between us win.
And here is the thing I cannot hold simply, what kept me on the chaise longer than the news required. That same sea that baptized me is, for thousands of others, a grave.
Lesbos is not only my father’s Eden. For more than a decade it has been a frontline, the first Greek soil that exhausted, terrified people touch when they cross from Turkey in boats that were never built for open water. My sacred water is someone else’s last water. My homeland is a stranger’s checkpoint and, if they are lucky, their refuge.
I don’t know how to make those facts, that awful juxtaposition, clean, and I have stopped trying. Both experiences are true. The island is sacred to me for what it gave me, and it is sacred to the fleeing for what it offers them, which is the oldest thing land can offer: safety, ground, a place to stop running.
When the fires come, they do not check anyone’s passport. They take the olive groves and the goats and the summer houses, and they take the makeshift shelters and the fragile new footing of people who had already lost everything once. In Crete, the deadliest front this week, three firefighters have already died trying to hold the line against the blaze. That is what steadies me and breaks me in the same breath, that a land this rich in what it gives, in shade and figs and refuge and myth, keeps burning while the world half-watches.
A Mediterranean summer on fire has become a genre now, a seasonal rerun we thumb past on the way to something else. This year’s footage looks like last year’s, and that of the year before, a sameness that is its own quiet violence. Repetition sands horror down into wallpaper. But it is not wallpaper to the family loading a car in the dark, or to a firefighter’s widow, or to a man in Pennsylvania watching his one island go up in flames on a screen. Familiar is not the same as bearable.
What the fire has done, strangely, is make me want to go back not to take but to give. To help. To stand on the ground instead of scrolling past it. I have spent ten years loving Lesbos as an inheritance, a thing I own from a distance, and the smoke on my screen has shamed that love into something more useful. My mother’s ancestors and my father’s boyhood and Sappho’s fragments and the sea that raised me are all still there, waiting, under a sky the color of alarm. My uncle is in Athens. My family’s houses are still standing, for now. And I am here, finally understanding that loving a place from afar is not the same as loving it.
I think I will go to Lesbos this year. Not because the fire is out, but because it isn’t. The sea is still there. It is still the color no one can name. And it is still, for me and for the strangers arriving on its shore, the difference between drowning and being born.
Throughout July, The Swell celebrated 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.
While I would never deign to speak for all critics — I’ve been around enough to know I don’t need that smoke — we’re not generally fans of inscrutability. A little layered mystery is just fine. Many of us appreciate artistic execution that leaves plenty of openings for wild interpretations. But once we’re venturing into the territory of “What in the hell was that?” the knives tend to come out.
That’s part of the reason I left “Howl’s Moving Castle,” adapted from British author Diana Wynne Jones’ novel, for the last flight in our monthlong look at Hayao Miyazaki. The plots of “Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service” are as lucid and pure as spring water, relatively speaking. “Howl’s Moving Castle,” on the other hand, is an unconventional love story wrapped inside an anti-war plot about a prince who gave his heart to a demon and a young girl turned into an old woman by a jealous witch. It’s also about curses and a giant house that moves around on chicken legs and a turnip-headed scarecrow and pollution and . . . see what I mean?
It’s nice to know I was never alone in my befuddlement. “There’s much to admire in ‘Howl’s Moving Castle,’ which is precisely the problem,” remarked film critic Stephanie Zacharek in her 2005 review for Salon. “Its whimsical grandiosity practically invites us to use the passive voice, a kind of verbal genuflection.”
“Howl’s” champions the bravery of embracing maturity with a young heart.
The benefit of returning to a story like this 20 years after a first viewing is that presumably, time has softened us. For “Howl’s Moving Castle,” that matters since its heroine, Sophie Hatter (initially voiced in the English dubbed version by Emily Mortimer), spends much of the film waxing and waning between young and elderly selves. When she’s youthful, Sophie catches the eye of a handsome, richly dressed stranger who gallantly escorts her away from two men harassing her on the street. He introduces himself as Howl (Christian Bale), a flamboyant wizard who whisks her across rooftops on her way home.
But Sophie, an introverted milliner, never asked for anyone’s attention and is convinced she’s plain and unattractive. The Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall) echoes her insecurities back at her when she strides into Sophie’s shop, insults her, and with a wave of her hand, transforms Sophie into a hunched-over dowager (with Jean Simmons taking over the role).
I could easily hail “Howl’s Moving Castle” as a tribute to maturity, especially when placed against other Miyazaki stories starring young heroines setting out on adventures. That feel especially valid at a time when we have plenty of shoppable salves to soothe midlife crisis ego death in whatever forms that it takes. (I have no idea what the Turnip Scarecrow’s significance is in all this, other than to be this fairy tale’s frog prince.)
But when viewed in one way of many, “Howl’s Moving Castle” is an encouragement to look inward and see the truth about ourselves honestly and kindly. Most of us aren’t the same person on the inside as we seem to be on the outside — including Sophie, a woman in the early bloom of her life whose dedication to work has shriveled her vitality.
Trapping Sophie in a crone’s body and making her realize how much harder it is to cross rolling hills and climb stairs gives her a new appreciation for everything she’s been taking for granted. But more than this, as an old woman Sophie abandons her insecurities about taking up space in the world — especially when she crosses paths with the Witch of the Waste again, and a more powerful wizard’s magic deflates said Witch into an enfeebled pile of skin.
Instead of taking pleasure in the Witch’s undoing, Sophie tenderly cares for her. She understands what it’s like to be unloved and ignored more than most, after all. Eventually, Sophie’s demonstrated empathy makes Howl fall more deeply in love with her.
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That’s one strand in this tale’s tangle. When following “Howl’s Moving Castle” as the story of Calcifer (voiced by Billy Crystal), the fire demon who holds Howl’s heart and fuels the castle, the movie becomes a fable about nurturing and destruction as two sides of the same coin. When Howl loses himself to a beastly form after attacking opposing forces in the war into which he’s drawn, it’s an allegory about how armed conflict robs us of our humanity. Its complexity makes the movie a treasure.
Ultimately, though, this vision of Miyazaki’s comes down to a lesson about the chameleonic nature of the human heart and soul, how we change to adapt to every situation and interaction, and how the those who love us must love every version. It champions the bravery of embracing maturity with a young heart.
But that’s just my take. Zacharek accurately referred to Miyazaki’s narratives as “wriggly, noodle-shaped things,” and not in offering her compliments to the chef. I get it. I’ve also come to understand that some of Miyazaki’s offerings are tastes worth acquiring through a few tries, even for skeptics. His filmography is as vast and varied as this bizarre castle’s meanderings, with life lessons for anyone.
On July 26 in Pennsylvania, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries introduced the party’s Fighting for an Affordable America agenda to mark 100 days until November’s midterm elections. The plan, according to the Associated Press, calls for “restoring healthcare cuts, bringing the cost of living down and ending the war in Iran to beat Republicans and hold President Donald Trump accountable.”
Democrats always want to run on kitchen table issues, and this time they have an opening you could drive the Titanic through. Even among Trump’s most fervent followers, the war in Iran is unusually unpopular; it’s the first time I can ever remember Republicans not rallying around a war started by a GOP president. In fact, the party used to rally around so-called “Democrat wars” too, at least most of the time, even as they condemned them for being mistakes. Trump, though, seems to have broken that knee-jerk reaction, which, if it lasts, may end up being one of the only things he has done right, even if it was by accident.
After Trump and the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, there are no Democrats — and vanishingly few independents — who are clamoring for a “return to normal,” if anyone can even remember what that looks like.
“Holding Donald Trump accountable” is obviously a necessary goal, and we can only hope that if they take back the House, and perhaps the Senate, Democrats will spend the next two years hammering Republicans on corruption, malfeasance, criminality and incompetence, pounding as many nails into the MAGA coffin as possible in anticipation of a hard-fought 2028 campaign. After Trump and the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, there are no Democrats — and vanishingly few independents — who are clamoring for a “return to normal,” if anyone can even remember what that looks like.
As we get further into Trump’s second term, the rise of the progressive left, generated at least in part by the desperate need for generational change, is bringing some longstanding issues to the surface. Younger Democrats aren’t talking about politics in technocratic terms, as the party’s politicians have been doing for the last 30 years, offering up 10-point economic plans and telling the public how they can work the system more efficiently. They see politics in largely moral terms, and they are ready to address some of the thorniest moral issues we face.
Oligarchy is at the top of the list, an issue that has animated the left since at least the Occupy Wall Street movement began in 2011. Fifteen years later, a global backlash against billionaires who have outsize influence over politics — and who do not pay their fair share — is taking shape.
The left also rejects America’s global role as security guarantor, particularly in light of the tragedy taking place in Gaza, which has been aided and abetted by the U.S. government. The party’s mainstream has moved substantially in their direction, leading to an unprecedented split in the House caucus in July that saw over a hundred House members vote to cut off aid to Israel. Whether it was done out of genuine desire to end the blank check or simply to allow members a symbolic vote going into the midterms, it’s clear that the intense opposition to Israel’s actions have made a difference, despite the ongoing debate about the scope of the policy.
These moral issues are animating a significant faction of the party, and they are having an impact. But I find myself wondering why another moral issue, much closer to home and shocking almost beyond comprehension, isn’t getting much play on the campaign trail.
The treatment of immigrants of all statuses, and sometimes American citizens who happen to look “foreign,” is an abomination. But aside from perfunctory nods to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it seems to have become background noise.
Masked federal agents are killing people with impunity. They are splitting up families without compunction, throwing people in camps and deporting them to countries they have never even visited. Now, with the permission of the MAGA-compliant Supreme Court, the Trump administration is in the process of deporting Haitians who have been here legally for decades by forcing them to leave immediately or wear an ankle bracelet in anticipation of being sent to a country which our own State Department says is too dangerous to visit. These are people who own property and businesses, and many of them have American-born children. They also happen to be Black.
This is not a popular policy. While most congressional Republicans still approve of Trump’s immigration agenda, many of them aren’t thrilled with the administration’s deportation policy. According to Strength in Numbers, most Americans are appalled and prefer a path to citizenship for non-criminals. Trump’s cruel priorities clearly work for many rank-and-file Republicans, and this seems to have some timorous Democrats spooked. But if there has ever been an issue that the left should be screaming about every single day, it’s this.
Many Americans are out in the streets protesting and putting themselves on the line. In fact, average voters may be more up in arms than Democratic politicians. If the progressive left wants to consolidate the party behind a more virtuous set of values, this is the issue that will rally the entire spectrum of ideologies. Jeffries and party leaders should move it to the very top of the agenda, and make Trump’s abuses a rallying cry across the country.
The Democratic Party should not play politics with this; the president’s abuses are happening right here on our own streets, in our own communities. It is the moral issue of our time.
For a time, John F. Kennedy Jr. was one of the most famous boys in America. He was three years old when a photographer captured him saluting his father’s casket, and for many years, that was how most of America pictured him. Until the 1990s, that is, when relentless tabloid coverage reinvented him as New York City’s Adonis.
“Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette,” which stars newcomer Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn, hangs its justification on that faint memory and his Cinderella-style courtship with Bessette. Next to exes like Madonna and Daryl Hannah, she was a commoner, a Calvin Klein stylist who somehow snared the heart of an American prince.
After a courtship that unfurled in fits and starts, they married in 1996. Three years later, they died together in a plane crash. Given that these details are the extent of what most people know about the couple, one assumes “Love Story” has so much more to give.
Since this is another Ryan Murphy product — this one created by Connor Hines — we should not be surprised to discover that most of the blanks are filled in with squabbling, private anguish and stretches of scenery that could double as feature-length ads for a designer perfume. CK One, perhaps?
As long as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. retains his starring role in the current administration, “Love Story” won’t be the worst thing to happen to the Kennedy clan or America. This first installment of Murphy’s latest anthology franchise is a serviceable romance in a time when such stories rarely receive even modest studio budgets, let alone wide theatrical release. Remember those? Some were better than others; a few defined for a generation what true love could look like, albeit inaccurately.
But this one stretches a basic courtship that could be covered in about 90 minutes, tops, over nine episodes and a total runtime landing between seven and eight hours. In comparison, “Ghost,” one of the genre’s standard-bearers, got it done in two hours and seven minutes. And neither of those characters is a Kennedy.
However, the “Love Story” forebear that matters most in this discussion is not John F. Kennedy or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, played here by “Feud” star Naomi Watts. It’s O.J. Simpson.
Ten years ago this month, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” became the first and still best entry of a Murphy-produced franchise to seriously engage with the anesthetizing myth Americans like to tell themselves about themselves.
Recreating the theatricality of Simpson’s eight-month-long murder trial using extremely famous actors as bait — John Travolta, Cuba Gooding Jr., David Schwimmer and Courtney B. Vance, among them — persuaded us to sit with one of the most famous and broadly televised examples of the unresolved racism baked into our supposedly liberal society.
That it came to TV more than two decades afterward aided in our understanding of the phenomenon less as a murder trial than an unscripted soap opera playing out in front of our eyes, casting otherwise anonymous prosecutors Christopher Darden and Marcia Clark as either heroes or villains.
Some people wanted to see Simpson punished, while others viewed his acquittal as vindication, however meager, for decades’ worth of societal abuse. Either way, the limited series catapulted the careers of Sterling K. Brown, who played Darden, and Sarah Paulson, already a repeat Murphy trouper via “American Horror Story,” to stratospheric heights thanks to their Emmy-winning performances.
(FX) Paul Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in “Love Story”
The “Love Story” forebear that matters most in this discussion is not John F. Kennedy or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It’s O.J. Simpson.
It also proved Murphy’s glossy approach could coax viewers into considerate contemplation about systemic ills by wrapping them in celebrity skin.
But eventually, style overwhelmed substance. “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” tried to examine institutionalized homophobia by following the trails of missed opportunities to halt Andrew Cunanan’s escalating malevolence until he appeared on the fashion designer’s doorstep with a loaded gun in 1997. Only this time, its star power (by way of a cast toplined by Oscar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin) distracted from the narrative critique.
“Impeachment” was a step-by-step drill-down on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that strayed wildly from its original intent. Murphy meant this third “American Crime Story” to be a clear-eyed analysis of abusive power differentials in politics and the workplace. Instead, its parade of latex prosthetics and wigs pulled the spotlight, especially the Linda Tripp fat suit that wore Paulson instead of the other way around.
Murphy had better success in creating a more obvious political parable with the “Cult” season of “American Horror Story” in 2017. But in matters of conversation-shifting achievement, “Pose” represents his post-O.J. apex.
Not only was “Pose” a celebratory masterpiece told from the perspective of trans and queer people at the center of the 1980s ballroom scene, but it also provided a keenly intimate view of life on the margins during the AIDS epidemic while never forgetting its dedication to beauty and joy.
Many of these high-profile attempts to foster serious conversation through art drowned it in vanity. Think of “Ratched,” the pretty and pointless “Halston” and his recent ludicrous, gorgeous disaster “All’s Fair.” (As for “The Beauty,” the jury’s still out on its lasting effects.) Others are frustratingly inconsistent — “Feud: Bette and Joan” wasn’t perfect, but Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon’s work boosted its excellence more than the superstar cast of “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” could for that project.
Great performances hide within even the worst of Murphy’s shows, nevertheless. Murphy gave Niecy Nash-Betts enough space and material in “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” for her to deliver an award-winning performance that muscled to the fore.
Watts’ take on Jackie O doesn’t hit such heights, but the actor does, in some scenes, achieve a gracious splendor that does justice to her subject’s memory.
And this returns us to “Love Story.” If Murphy’s work can be divided between pulp like “American Horror Story” and prestige, “John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” aspires to the latter.
Is there an urgent lesson in their story for us to ponder? Not really, but even lacking that, the series fails its obligation to entertain.
Regardless of how promising the conceit may seem — it’s based on a book titled “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” after all — this is American history for fashion influencers. There isn’t much holding it together, but the looks are on point. Kelly closely resembles JFK Jr., while Pidgeon has Bessette’s fragile, elven bearing. Both photograph well.
But the story reminds me less of any supposed fairy tale than the memory that Murphy once intended to devote a limited series treatment to Prince Charles and Princess Diana of Wales’ bad romance under his “Feud” umbrella. “The Crown” beat him to it, so we got “Capote vs. The Swans” along with its greatest accomplishment: Bowen Yang’s Truman Capote impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.”
Theoretically, the romantic journey of JFK Jr. and Bessette should hold an equivalent pull on us as Charles and Di once did. JKF Jr. was the scion of American political royalty, and Bessette was the commoner who won his heart by side-eyeing his fame. But when two of her Calvin Klein coworkers gush, “You’re going to be the American people’s princess!” my inner narrator countered, “No. Not so much.”
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The difference between what Charles and Diana — or Diana, specifically — meant to the world and the legacy that JFK Jr. left behind is vaster than the span of ocean between Britain and New York. Prince Charles is now England’s king, and Diana devoted herself to a life of service that helped her triumph in the international court of opinion before her untimely death.
America’s “royal” couple didn’t live long enough to make such a definitive mark. The iconic president’s son failed the New York bar exam twice and co-founded George magazine, a glossy devoted to waltzing at the intersection of politics and popular people.
Bessette was lovely and statuesque. For the public’s purposes, she was a cipher onto which we were urged to project our romantic fantasies. Beyond that, the main point of similarity between Bessette and Diana is that the paparazzi hounded both – Diana to death, and Bessette to resentful exhaustion. Is there an urgent lesson in their story for us to ponder? Not really, but even lacking that, the series fails its obligation to entertain. Watts’ Jackie delivers a moving speech or two about what families like the Kennedys owe to the public, but beyond that, the only turn that took me by surprise within the first two episodes is the unexpected death of a pet.
Every producer wants to achieve ubiquity, and Murphy is one of the few that’s done it. But while his influence has certainly grown mightier over the decade since “The People v. O.J. Simpson” conquered the 2016 TV season, the quality and memorability of most of his work since has fallen. This does not mean he isn’t still a reliable viewership magnet; he’s one of the few auteurs whose work commands conversation regardless of its quality. But to paraphrase Norma Desmond, it’s his ambition to say something meaningful that’s gotten small.
“Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” premieres with three episodes at 9 p.m. ET/ 6 p.m. PT Thursday, Feb. 12 on FX, Hulu and Disney+.
No popular music genre despises the present as much as country music. Through quirks of form and function, all other radio-ready music is incredibly focused on its immediate surroundings. Pop has trendiness in its very bones, and its songwriters’ striving for universality tends to create songs focused on broad, current feelings: the sharp sting of a fresh heartbreak, the effervescence of new heartbreak, the joy of dancing in this club right now.
Rap is usually made quickly by impossibly young stars for an equally young audience, so it tends toward today’s fashion. Micro-trends in production, slang and topics come and go quickly. Last month was another era. Last year might as well be prehistoric.
Country music, though, is a different animal, born out of the urban migration of the 1930s as a way to sell a slice of an idealized past on wax to newly minted city-dwellers longing for home. Sonic trends — from the slick countrypolitan in the 1970s to the neo-traditionalist 1990s and on through the trap-indebted 2010s — have come and gone. Demographics on the dial have shifted. Stars are younger and more male than they’ve ever been. But that focus on greener pastures is as persistent as the apparent blood feud between Texas and Tennessee.
The average country listener wants to have their past misremembered for them, whether it’s the Judds asking Grandpa about the good old days or Tim McGraw missing the nebulous “back when.” The biggest hits sand down the rough-hewn edges of Mama’s metaphorical front porch to up their resale value, perhaps never funnier than Luke Bryan’s bullet-point summer vacation on “Fish, Hunt, Golf, Drink.” All that cornpone Luddism floating around made Gillian Welch’s “Everything Is Free” feel remarkable upon its release 25 years ago.
The concerns of the track from 2001’s “Time (The Revelator)” are topical and immediate. Welch responds to the then-new phenomenon of online music piracy with practical concerns. How am I going to pay my bills if no one wants to pay me for my music? How do I put gas in the car right now? Nearly a decade before the launch of Spotify, Welch saw clearly that someone was bound to “hit the big score” off of the new model — it just wouldn’t be her.
“Everything is free now, that’s what they say. Everything I’ve ever done, gonna give it away,” she sings, before immediately shifting toward plans to make money elsewhere so that she can keep performing.
A quarter century on from the song’s release, the U.S. economy is overrun with people who believe that nothing should come with a price tag.
A quarter century on from the song’s release, the U.S. economy is overrun with people who believe that nothing should come with a price tag. The finance industry is dominated by private equity firms that offload the debt of their corporate acquisitions onto other companies, the better to walk away clean when those companies collapse. The biggest players in Silicon Valley are building data centers to more efficiently run copyright-infringement machines built on terabytes of pirated material.
The journalism industry was hollowed out by the same forces that sliced up Welch’s catalog, leaving few journalists to report on the graft and theft this post-payment class of billionaires are carrying out across the country. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, once a world-class newspaper, has turned into a shell of its former self following a conservative reorientation of its opinion pages and a corporate downsizing that saw over 300 of newsroom journalists laid off in February, representing about 30% of its total staff.
More recently, Louisiana officials recently inked a secret agreement with Meta to build a five-mile-long data center in the state. The New York Times eventually sniffed out the backroom deal. The local papers were too busy covering the hors d’oeuvres at Mark Zuckerberg’s celebratory luncheon.
At the same time, the ham-fisted hollowing out of regulatory agencies by the Trump administration has had predictable results. Outbreaks of new livestock diseases, parasitic produce and slower responses to global crises followed the Department of Government Efficiency’s wild budget-slashing even as Elon Musk, the man who helmed that project, is richer than anyone else in the history of earth — and he’s gearing up to throw millions into the 2028 presidential and congressional elections.
It would be a stretch to say that Gillian Welch saw all this coming. But listening back now, it’s hard not to marvel at how timeless this timely track feels. You can’t help but sympathize with her desire to skip the coming crisis in her industry. She “never minded working hard,” she sings, but she had a lot of concern about “who I’m working for.” Seeing into the future that she’d soon be asked to work for pennies while someone else got obscenely rich, she passed.
“If there’s anything you want to hear,” she says, “you can sing it yourself.”
If only we all could have opted out in a similar fashion.
For a good portion of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” we watch all versions of the film’s namesake arachnid-juiced hero (Tom Holland) — full leotard, half leotard, sans leotard —cyberstalking Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya), his best friend and love interest, respectively, who now have no memory of him at all since the last time Spidey put them both in harm’s way, in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”
Romantic threads are a standard given annoyance in these films, put in so there’s something for everyone, to advance the plot when there is no more plot to be had, and to give me the opportunity to jump into the debate of: “They’re just men when they’re not saving the world, they should be allowed to date” with an emphatic: No they shouldn’t!
If you’re new to the Spider-verse, or you’ve forgotten the details of what took place in “No Way Home,” Spider-Man called upon Doctor Strange to wipe the memories of MJ, Ned and the rest of the world during a tear in the multiverse in which Peter Parker’s identity was made known, which was obviously bad news for him and everyone around him. Shortly before this spell is cast, Parker makes a promise to MJ that once things stabilize and there’s no longer the threat of a dimensional collapse, he’ll find her and make her remember not only who he is, but that she’s in love with him. At the end of the film, we see Parker pay a visit to a donut shop MJ is working at and make the choice to leave her be, rather than tip her for his coffee and cruller by backflipping onto the counter and throwing a posterboard with “YOU LOVE ME” written on it in her face.
But flash forward just short of five years, and here he comes again, putting the woman he claims to love in harm’s way just as she’s gotten settled into a relatively danger-free life without him, newly graduated from MIT and nuzzled up with a boyfriend who, while considerably less exciting, will almost definitely not get her killed.
(Sony Pictures) Tom Holland in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”
What is the plot of “Brand New Day?” You may be asking yourself this regardless of whether you’ve already seen the film or not. Well, given the amount of Marvel Cinematic Universe hooey thrown into this thing . . . what isn’t the plot? But don’t worry, amidst all of the flippin’ and swingin’ and jizzy web-shootin ‘, MJ and other women characters such as a movie-saving Jean Grey (Sadie Sink) and Black Widow (Florence Pugh) are given a few lines so that, regardless of what’s going on, men in the audience will receive flashes of someone to fantasize about saving or showing their pepperoni nipples to.
Sometimes the best way to love someone is by leaving them the hell alone.
The fact that superhero movies always cram in a love story element is both annoying and ridiculous, but it makes sense. Big-budget films of the “Superman,” “Batman,” “Spider-Man” variety need to make sure they turn a profit by getting butts in seats, and that means layering on whatever (and however) they’ve determined each and every one of those butts will be expecting to see in order to make it seem worth tapping their cards for the price of admission and concessions. Romantic threads are a standard given annoyance in these films, put in so there’s something for everyone, to advance the plot when there is no more plot to be had, and to give me the opportunity to jump into the debate of: “They’re just men when they’re not saving the world, they should be allowed to date” with an emphatic: No they shouldn’t!
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Batman has a crush on someone? Cool! She’s probably gonna die. Superman has been in love with Lois Lane for years? Awesome, she’s never gonna be safe again because every one of his enemies is going to try and throw her off a building. Spider-Man finds time to haunt MJ’s Instagram stories amidst all manner of chaos breaking out in the streets of New York and beyond? Well, sure, let’s just do whatever, at this point. Just like the average moviegoer likes to chuck some Reese’s Pieces in their tub of popcorn to get that salty and sweet action going, most people like for their eyeballs to get breaks from the stomach kicking and face punching by watching implied or actual grab-ass. We’re a simple species. And that’s OK. Still ridiculous though.
(Sony Pictures) Zendaya and Tom Holland in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”
In “Brand New Day,” as Spider-Man is dealing with his genes mutating in a way that increases his powers, gives him migraines and makes it so that he no longer needs the use of synthetic webs because real (real gross) ones now shoot from his wrists, there’s so much else going on in this still, somehow, pretty boring movie.
Extras are flash-mobbing in the background as Jean Grey telepathically hops from body to body to do a mixed-bag of whatever she wants: infiltrate the Department of Damage Control, mess with Spider-Man, look for her sister who’s dead. The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) is grunting and groaning around, helping Spidey and providing elbow-jab opportunities for guys in the audience to turn to their dates and loudly whisper: That’s me. Black Widow is holding meetings in a Russian bath. The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) is like, “Did I kill anyone?” And where’s Spider-Man? Putting flowers on Aunt May’s grave each day and pouting when MJ is finally like “Thanks for saying you love me . . . I don’t know you.”
How about this? Maybe in the next Spider-Man movie, and every superhero movie to follow, we put to rest this shoehorned lovey-dovey nonsense and leave viewers with the big takeaway that sometimes the best way to love someone is by leaving them the hell alone and that, in certain circumstances — especially if you’re tasked with saving the world on a daily basis — your job actually is more important.
They must have hoped the photos would dispel conspiracy theories that he’s dead, or at least incapacitated. But the two proof-of-life pictures taken of Sen. Mitch McConnell and his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, purportedly from his room at a rehabilitation center, have only generated more speculation about what has really happened to the 84-year-old Kentucky Republican, who hasn’t been seen or spoken in public since being hospitalized in mid-June. In both pictures, the typically sharp-minded senator is staring with a vacant smile at the camera, while the 73-year-old Chao has a firm grip on his arm that reads less as affection and more like direction.
In the first, taken July 12, McConnell holds the day’s newspaper, a tradition familiar more commonly seen in hostage photos. Even that pretext was dropped from the second picture, released July 27, which was accompanied by a note from the Senate attending physician insisting that McConnell is working “to rebuild strength and reduce the risk of future falls.” This followed the senator’s continued refusal to say much about what happened besides that he fell down and was “briefly unconscious.”
McConnell has a long history of dirty tricks — culminating in functionally stealing a Supreme Court nomination from then-President Barack Obama and holding it for Donald Trump — so it’s not surprising that many progressives suspect the former Senate Majority Leader has sinister motives in refusing to step down from his seat. There has also been boundless speculation that he’s using this to gain some illicit power for Republicans. The rumors have gotten so bad that Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s Democratic governor, publicly demanded that McConnell “directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.”
Despite the chatter, it’s almost certain that McConnell isn’t doing this to benefit Republicans in the Senate. In commentary for MS NOW, independent journalist Lindsay Beyerstein pointed out the senator’s absence means “the GOP is down a vote in a closely divided Senate.” Trump’s struggle to get his attorney general nominee Todd Blanche across the finish line is a reminder of how every vote counts for the party.
But it’s hard to fault conspiracy theorists when it really does seem that McConnell — or whoever is making decisions for him — is hiding something. Efforts to convince the public that he is communicative backfired when people noticed that the Republicans claiming to have spoken with him appeared to be working from the same script. As Beshear noted last week, even McConnell’s doctor noticeably avoided addressing whether the senator can “speak, reason, or carry out” his duties. Already set to retire at the end of the year, it’s becoming clear that McConnell is never coming back to the Senate chambers.
Despite the conspiracy theories, the likeliest reason to conceal McConnell’s condition is more pathetic than calculating: It’s hard for these powerful old men and their families to let go of power.
Despite the conspiracy theories, the likeliest reason to conceal McConnell’s condition is more pathetic than calculating: It’s hard for these powerful old men and their families to let go of power.
In their controversial book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” Jake Tapper and Alex Johnson examined the role that ego and status play in keeping politicians in office long after they’re capable of doing the job. The writers uncovered evidence that Biden’s delusions were bolstered by both his family and his top staff, who seemed loathe to give up the elevated status and power that comes from being close to the president. This impression has only deepened in recent weeks, as Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has been on a bizarre media tour for no other apparent purpose than squeezing his famous last name for one more bout of attention.
This is why there’s been such a focus on Chao’s role in her husband’s health drama, starting with the clothes she’s wearing in the proof-of-life photos which are being examined and analyzed for clues.
“I can’t imagine Elaine, one of the most put-together people in existence, releasing a pic wearing a thin shirt over a visible black bra, UNTUCKED,” writer Jeff Yang, who claims to know the Chao family, argued on Bluesky about the second photo taken from McConnell’s hospital room. Others argued that the shirt is too cheap-looking to be something Chao, who is every inch the wealthy socialite, would wear.
To be fair to Chao, she is a private person; most of our perception of her fashion comes from glimpses of her at public events. In the real world, people don’t typically dress to visit a medical facility the same way they do for work. Nonetheless, internet sleuths sussed out that the shirt Chao is wearing on the July 26 photo appears to be the same one she was seen wearing on July 15. But whatever her level of responsibility, it’s not surprising that McConnell’s wife is the center of many conspiracy theories. It wasn’t that long ago that then-First Lady Jill Biden was engaged in ham-fisted efforts to deny and downplay her husband’s inability to do his job.
Like the aging politicians themselves, family members often benefit from the status and power they get through their famous relatives. Chao is no different. Not only did she serve in the Cabinets of Trump, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, Chao was also appointed to government positions by Ronald Reagan, and she continues to engage in power-brokering around the world. When McConnell was rushed to the hospital in June, she was in China having meetings with high-ranking officials, including the country’s vice president Han Zheng. The trip was so important that she didn’t cut it short to return to her husband’s side. Whatever dealings she has with foreign leaders, she surely gains leverage from her connection to such a powerful man.
We don’t have any specifics on what McConnell and Chao are hiding or why, but after the Biden debacle, it’s silly to pretend such these cover-ups are implausible. If anything, they’re starting to feel like the norm. The late Dianne Feinstein, who served as senator from California for 31 years, faced intense scrutiny and accusations about her obviously failing health before her death in September 2023. The following year, it was revealed that GOP Texas Rep. Kay Granger had been absent from Congress and living in a dementia ward for months. Earlier this year, Rep. Tom Kean Jr, R-N.J., disappeared for months with no explanation, and when he returned, he only shared vague details about a mental health episode after the growing outrage became impossible to ignore. In the past year, six members of Congress have died in office, and while a couple were surprises, most of them had health issues they minimized or ignored until it was too late.
It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for these politicians, and even for McConnell, who has long been especially private and, as reporter Andrew Egger noted on a recent Bulwark podcast, “had a very stage-managed political presence even when things were doing great.” Rare is the person who faces impending mortality with total grace and humility, and being in denial about it, at least some of the time, is a normal part of aging. But McConnell, like Biden and others before him, has a level of presumption that is not acceptable in what is supposed to be a democratic system. Politicians on both sides of the aisle get so accustomed to the power and privilege of their office that they seem to forget it doesn’t actually belong to them, but to the people they are elected to serve.
This is especially troubling when we have an 80-year-old president who is clearly in decline but yearns to be regarded as a king or even a god, and apparently to serve an illegal third term in office. The Trump situation is not helped when so many other politicians, including the previous president, have acted entitled to hold office well beyond what’s reasonable. Dying in office should be a rare and surprise occurrence, not a norm that our authoritarian president can exploit.
Allow me to sing, o Muse, of a recent dinner conversation about “The Odyssey.” The setting was not a Greek restaurant but a Vietnamese joint. My friend Sharon and I had just settled at our table and ordered our dinner and drinks when she steered our conversation toward Christopher Nolan’s latest opus.
Have I seen it? she asked. Of course. What did I think? It was fine, I said. A little too long, definitely overhyped. I think I described it as Nolan’s baroque reward for “Oppenheimer.”
Then, like Odysseus himself, she aimed at her main target of derision: Matt Damon. What on Earth possessed Nolan, a notoriously detail-oriented director, to tap the all-purpose flour of movie stars to portray one of the most storied heroes in literature?
“What, was Leo not available?” she asked, as if petitioning the gods. But divine entities stopped intervening in man’s affairs long ago; besides, I had the answer drawn and nocked since I’d walked out of the theater days before.
Why not Leo? Because nobody would believe Leonardo DiCaprio could string that bow.
I can only imagine that at this point, restaurant waitstaffs across the world have picked up crumbs and slices of chatter about Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 2,700-year-old blockbuster. Nolan’s work is designed to bring out everyone’s inner critic and professor, but his execution of “The Odyssey” tosses us plenty of bones to pick.
By now the distinctiveness of Nolan’s cinematic ruminations is common knowledge. Whether we’re talking about “Oppenheimer,” “Interstellar” or his “Batman” trilogy, Nolan is a seasoned explorer in the realm of man’s hubris and its relationship with personal history, time and memory, especially the selective variety, among many touchstones. The nonlinear nature of Homer’s epic poem lends itself to his style.
But perhaps the least appreciated aspect of Nolan’s approach is his conscious use of modern celebrities in his version of one of the earliest stories to question the human compulsion to reach for fabled immortality at the cost of the people beside us. In essence, Nolan chose a superstar cast to drive home the interpretation of Homer’s saga as a legend about fame.
Spinning that lore for a modern audience, then, calls for fronting the cast with a star whose popular persona is outsized compared to his dramatic proficiency. Damon is the simplest and most reliable vehicle to tell us about a complicated man, as the highly lauded translator Emily Wilson describes Odysseus.
By this, I don’t mean to call Damon a bad actor. I’m just saying that his “Odyssey” performance is workmanlike. Wilson, for her part, walked away from the film with an impression of Nolan’s efforts that makes a person picture the Muse Calliope whispering in her ear, “Drag him.” Thus inspired, she wrote a long and brutal essay for the London Review of Books.
Damon’s Odysseus captures all the heroic arrogance, bravery and selfish stupidity of an action-flick brawler who would shoot a giant cyclops in the eye as he’s making his escape, just because.
In my view, though, if the idea is to position Odysseus as an everyman hero swept up in a maelstrom of ordeals too vast for him to conquer, Damon was always going to be Nolan’s guy.
Which brings us back to the hero’s mythical recurve. Odysseus’ bow is an extension of his valorous identity. It is his Excalibur, his Andúril, the vaunted weapon only he can string and use to hit a bullseye through a row of twelve crossed axes. The fact that none of Penelope’s suitors could do that marked them as unfit to take his place as Ithaca’s king.
And while my friend made very good points about Hollywood personal trainers and physics and how, through creatine, all things are possible, the simple fact is that we’re more likely to buy that the man synonymous with Jason Bourne would be the only one who can bend that buster, string it, and make it sing.
It might seem strange to look this deeply into the why of Matt Damon as Odysseus, since his casting didn’t agitate right-wing trolls. The MAGA crowd whined early and loudly when the trades announced Lupita Nyong’o’s selection to play Helen of Troy, a fuss only slightly outdone by the news of Elliot Page’s casting as a Greek soldier named Sinon. When the rumor mills incorrectly assumed Page was playing Achilles, heads exploded.
But Nyong’o’s Helen, admirably performed though it was, contained few of the metatextual implications of Nolan’s other casting choices.
Tapping Travis Scott to play the Bard singing the tales of Odysseus’ exploits, for example, doesn’t merely reframe the role of ancient storytellers and poets as that age’s rappers. Scott is a 10-time Grammy nominee whose ability to combine spectacle with his lyrical craft has gained him a significantly passionate following. He is a brand unto himself and a sought-after corporate ambassador. If a queen like Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) desired to send a message to her unworthy suitors about their inadequacy, she’d choose a rhapsodist with that kind of pull who also blends in with a boisterous crowd.
Then we have Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, whom Odysseus follows to Troy and, ultimately, his cursed fate. Placing famous directors in front of the camera is a classic auteur filmmaker flourish, and Safdie is both an actor and a director mainly associated with indie films.
Notably, unlike Damon’s Odysseus, Safdie’s Agamemnon is not jacked. But his intimidating onyx armor obscures all that, much in the way Darth Vader’s helmet and cloak overcompensate for his shriveled form. We don’t see Agamemnon’s face for most of the movie until the end, when his wife and Helen’s twin Clytemnestra (also Nyong’o) murders him in the bathtub as revenge for sacrificing their daughter. Only then do we see this dark colossus for the slight creature he always was.
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Admittedly, that’s a lot more flexible interpretation than the obvious reasoning behind Damon’s selection. Yes, Nolan has worked with some of the most distinguished actors of our time, including Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy and Leo.
But when reading the famous opener of one longstanding translation — “Speak, memory, of the cunning hero/The wanderer, blown off course time and again” — few broadly popular A-list actors besides Damon live up to that picture.
Damon’s Odysseus captures all the heroic arrogance, bravery and selfish stupidity of an action-flick brawler who would shoot a giant cyclops in the eye as he’s making his escape, just because. Moves like that make it easy to comprehend that his ill-fated meanders could have been avoided if he’d followed the same directions that got everyone else home sooner.
But really, it all comes back to that bow. Only a true and blustery hero can string it, much as we believe that only Damon can win a knife fight by wielding a pen. And if we’re being honest, DiCaprio may have earned an Oscar for his performance in “The Revenant,” but he does not have the biceps to take on that CGI grizzly.
By most objective standards, the 2026 FIFA World Cup tournament — which concluded two weeks ago in New Jersey with Spain’s grueling 1-0 victory over Argentina — was a major success. Despite global anxiety over the collision between the world’s largest sporting event and Donald Trump’s “America First” regime, stadiums were mostly full across North America, fans and players from all sorts of large and small countries seemed to enjoy themselves (and tried to smuggle home large quantities of ranch dressing) and, of course, something like $15 billion flowed into FIFA’s coffers.
Just below the surface, however, the soccer world was seething with discontent. That erupted into all-out rebellion this week, which could finally bring down Gianni Infantino, the Swiss administrator who has served as FIFA chief executive for the last decade. Unpacking the byzantine history of alleged or actual corruption within FIFA and the numerous regional and national federations under its purview would be a dissertation-length project. But it’s definitely not wrong to say there’s a Trump angle, and that Infantino’s marriage of convenience and shared sensibility with the U.S. president may bring his downfall.
Even before this year’s tournament, Infantino stood accused of commercializing or “Americanizing” world soccer — a process he did not start but has certainly accelerated — and of shamelessly cozying up to Trump, whom he presented with the newly-invented FIFA Peace Prize, aka the “Temu Nobel,” last December. That was all inarguably true, and the guy has form, as they say on British cop shows. Back in 2022, while seeking to justify holding the World Cup in Qatar, an autocratic monarchy with a famously dreadful human rights record, Infantino launched a thousand memes with this memorable monologue:
“Today I have very strong feelings, I can tell you. Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.”
If it seems extraordinary that a major executive of any enterprise, anywhere in the world, could say stuff like that and still have a job four years later, you are beginning to appreciate the hallucinatory Infantino experience. Anyway, in 2026 Infantino seems to have swapped all those intersectional identities for an adjunct MAGA membership, and this year’s World Cup pushed the soccer world’s bizarre love-hate relationship with its leader into overdrive.
Even before this tournament, Infantino stood accused of “Americanizing” world soccer — a process he did not start but has certainly accelerated — and shamelessly cozying up to the current occupant of the White House. This was inarguably true.
Tom Burrows of the Athletic did a nice job this week of summarizing the indictment: Infantino drove World Cup ticket prices to previously unimagined levels, introduced “commercial breaks in each half [of matches] dressed up as hydration breaks” — a network-friendly innovation that global football had resisted for decades — capitulated to Trump in reversing a red-card suspension for U.S. star striker Folarin Balogun, and introduced a “surreal halftime show” featuring Madonna, BTS and Justin Bieber in the final match, in obvious (and inept) imitation of the Super Bowl.
All of that, mind you, came before Infantino’s big surprise this past week: Apparently without consulting any relevant stakeholders, he announced a plan to spin off commercial rights to the World Cup into a new for-profit company (FIFA is a nonprofit, like other international sporting federations) and then sell off a big chunk of that company to an investment consortium led by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. So it’s not entirely accurate to say that Infantino wanted to sell world soccer’s biggest brand to the Trump family. But it’s not exactly false either.
To coin a phrase, you can’t make this stuff up. But the good news, or the kind-of good news, or the “why in God’s name did this take so long” news, is that Infantino has finally choked on an overdose of hubris. His proposal collapsed within 48 hours and as of this weekend has been abandoned completely. (Soccer fans will discern unmistakable echoes of the European Super League, a proposed NFL-style closed competition for Europe’s top club teams that was announced in 2021 and imploded within a few weeks.)
UEFA, the federation that governs European soccer and is by far the most powerful of FIFA’s regional subsidiaries, wasted no time in rejecting Infantino’s scheme and announcing that none of its 55 national teams would participate in any FIFA competitions until the proposal was ditched. That was almost certainly enough to torpedo this galaxy-brain plan, and other regional confederations — most notably Concacaf, which represents North America, Central America and the Caribbean, and therefore includes the U.S. — soon followed UEFA’s lead, if not as aggressively.
Donald Trump did not pick up the phone on this occasion. (“Johnny who? Really, I barely know the guy.”) Only the Confederation of African Football — whose member nations, fairly or otherwise, are perceived as Infantino supporters — remained silent. More on that shortly.
Anyone who follows world soccer already knows that UEFA has its own extensive history of political intrigue and internal scandal, and is not well positioned to play populist hero in this drama. But as is so often the case in world affairs, there are no good guys in the story and you have to pick your poison. One could draw a rough analogy with the European Union, a deeply flawed entity that nonetheless represents some degree of ideological or economic counterweight to Trump’s America. In this particular confrontation, Europe held nearly all the cards.
If Infantino somehow pushes through his scheme to sell shares in the World Cup, he will do so — believe it or not — by casting himself as a defender of the downtrodden and underprivileged. He feels gay and African and disabled, remember?
While the next men’s World Cup, FIFA’s biggest golden goose, is still four years away, the consequences of a European boycott would have been felt immediately. The under-20 Women’s World Cup begins in Poland about a month from now, and qualifying playoffs for FIFA’s second-biggest event, the Women’s World Cup (to be held next summer in Brazil) are set for October. Given his avowed commitments to promoting the women’s game and youth soccer at all levels, Infantino simply couldn’t afford to play chicken with UEFA and risk losing those tournaments. Joshua Kushner and his family, one imagines, will not starve.
This may be stretching the point, but there’s a thematic resemblance at work here to the worldwide pushback against Big Tech data centers, and against the opaque government processes that gets them built, as well as to the popular and legal resistance that has stalled the $110 billion merger between Warner Bros. and Paramount. It’s also true that Infantino is now understood, both to soccer fans and the world at large, as a proxy for Donald Trump, which looks like a much worse bet than it did a year ago. Infantino was cruising to likely re-election as FIFA president next year, but right now it’s an even-money bet that he can survive the next month.
Like his White House buddy, Infantino has thrived on a remarkable ability to weaponize greed and cynicism, both on an epic scale and at ground level. He fully intended to push through his scheme to sell shares in the World Cup by casting himself, believe it or not, as a defender of the downtrodden and underprivileged. He feels gay and African and disabled, remember? The uncomfortable truth is that he has ruled over a vast global sports and merchandising empire largely by fulfilling his promises to channel lots of money into regional and national federations in the Global South that have historically had few resources.
Under Infantino’s proposed plan, each of FIFA’s 211 federations — at least the ones who supported him! — would have received an immediate cash infusion of $40 million, with further annual installments to follow. That sum would barely make a difference to the football gods in England, Spain or France, but would been enormous in Malawi or Madagascar. Affluent European nations don’t need infusions of private equity capital to build new stadiums and support younger players, and can afford to stand up to Infantino’s Trump-flavored bribery scheme. For players, parents, coaches and local officials in sub-Saharan Africa, the equation might have looked very different. Why should they care where the money comes from? This particular grift may have failed, but in a world built on massive structural inequality, grifters tend to prosper.
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from Andrew O’Hehir on our wonderful and terrifying world
The trouble with Diarra Brickland is she can’t let things go.
“Diarra From Detroit” presents this as the schoolteacher-turned-detective’s greatest asset and her biggest flaw. If it weren’t for her stubborn insistence on finding out why a great guy, Chris (Shannon Wallace), ghosted her after an incredible first date, she might be happier. Then again, nobody would have noticed that Chris had been kidnapped.
But Diarra’s tendency to fixate on small details and slights eventually cracked the case. They also brought to light a broader conspiracy, starting with the twist that this wasn’t Chris’ first kidnapping.
As Season 2 begins, Chris and Diarra have settled into coupledom, which is precisely what Diarra thought she wanted, but nothing like she pictured it would be. Chris is a mess. Diarra would love to dump him, but her nearest and dearest friends Aja (DomiNque Perry) and Tea (Bryan Terrell Clark) warn her that would damage her reputation. The single bright spot and mixed blessing to come out of all this is that her neighbors see Diarra as the go-to person for fixing lost causes and finding lost people. Hence her latest caper, which begins with a mission to track down a vintage desk and turns on a dime into a heist tied to a cache of gold.
But wait, as our hard-boiled citizen investigator is fond of saying. I should go back. You see, these latest episodes of “Diarra From Detroit,” created by its star, Diarra Kilpatrick, have been cooking for more than two years. Three, if you count the series’ debut at the 2023 Tribeca Festival before its 2024 premiere on BET+. From there, it sat in limbo until Paramount renewed it in 2025.
But limbo is better than canceled, which is more likely to happen if the proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery goes through.
Like Diarra and Chris’ relationship status, the case of Paramount’s proposed marriage to Warner Bros. is complicated. Hollywood all but accepted that the merger was a done deal until mid-July, when a dozen state attorneys general and along with the Writers Guild of America West and Eastfiled a lawsuit to stop the merger and California U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a restraining order to temporarily halt the proceedings. (Salon’s unionized employees are represented by the WGA East.)
On July 24, Paramount’s legal team agreed to postpone the merger pending the outcome of the states’ antitrust case. That could potentially delay the transaction for more than a year, since the opposing sides can’t agree on when they want the trial to begin. The states would prefer a 2027 start while Paramount wants to kick it off this fall. If the AGs win, Paramount’s inevitable appeal could keep the $110 billion deal backburnered well into late 2027.
The states argue that this merger would leave consumers paying more for less diverse news and entertainment options if finalized.
The continued existence of shows like “Diarra From Detroit” — shows by female, non-white creators about a place and people rarely depicted in the fullness of their humanity on television — is a miracle under normal circumstances.
What this means is that as tough as it already was for a TV series created by a Black woman to be picked up by a major platform, it could be nearly impossible in a universe in which Paramount has swallowed HBO, CNN and other prime Warner Bros. channels. Even in a scenario where BET+ still existed — it officially shut down on July 22 — making original stories like “Diarra” requires resources and a level of corporate will that a megacorporation’s smaller brands don’t tend to be afforded. In a contracted media landscape with fewer places to pitch, its odds of landing in front of audiences on a major platform decline even further. And they weren’t all that high to begin with.
Meanwhile, Paramount is urging us to pay no attention to the Ellisonsbehind the curtain. “This merger is lawful, pro-competitive, and will benefit consumers, creators, workers, and the entertainment industry,” a Paramount spokesperson said in a statement.
“All four categories of diversity—ownership, representation, viewpoint, and outlet—are threatened by this merger, reducing the forms of diversity the public depends upon in cinemas, over the airwaves, and across online platforms,” they warn in a recently published paper. Previous findings by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative back this conclusion.
Among those paying attention to The Mystery of the Media Merger, the survival of TV’s Diarra Bricklands is not the top concern. All eyes are on CNN, as Sharon Waxman, the founder and editor-in-chief of The Wrap, explained in a recent New York Times column.
If what’s happening to CBS News under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is a sign of things to come, that’s another assault on our already besieged democracy. A greater one, even, since CNN is a global news brand.
Consider that only days ago, “60 Minutes” announced that former New York Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat is joining its ranks. Douthat, if you’ve forgotten, is the guy who proposed in a 2018 column that the solution to placating incel violence may be between the legs of hypothetical charitable women who feel sorry for them. Or sexbots.
Corporate media traded insightful journalism for ragebait like this years ago, which is what makes figures like Diarra Brickland and her creator ever more valuable. They’re Black women excelling in roles not often associated with (or awarded to) people of color.
And to specifically bring it back to Douthat’s dubious query, Diarra — either of them — is precisely the kind of woman who puts the lie to fantasies about female submissiveness. Season 2 starts with her realizing she’s probably better off free of her mystery prize.
But for now, Chris and Diarra are in counseling. Part of their unofficial relationship homework involves field missions that spark heated conversations about masculine insecurity and Diarra’s conflicted desires about motherhood.
One topic she’s absolutely clear about, however, is being in control of every aspect of her life — including but not limited to Chris’ access to the part of her body she describes as “the Cadillac of the human anatomy: Gorgeous interior, impeccable design, not to mention the portal for all of humanity.”
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Writing like this ensures that “Diarra From Detroit” remains nimble from start to finish of each episode. That alone isn’t why this show and others like it need to be championed and protected. Television history is littered with the bodies of terrific shows denied more than a few seasons, or even a full order of one.
Citizen detectives like Diarra Brickland, who arranges her messy life around ensuring that the people and prizes typically overlooked or quietly erased by the mainstream keep being seen, are even less common. The continued existence of shows like “Diarra From Detroit” — shows by female, non-white creators about a place and people rarely depicted in the fullness of their humanity on television — is a miracle under normal circumstances. With that in mind, both the show and the merger are cases worth tracking right now and in the months to come, as if the quality of our lives depends on it.
New episodes of “Diarra From Detroit” stream Wednesdays through Sept. 9 on Paramount +.
Six years ago, Match.com released an ad in which the devil met his true love: 2020. The couple spent their courtship sharing fun Covid-era activities, like stealing toilet paper, enjoying empty cinemas and stadiums, and taking selfies in front of dumpster fires, all to the tune of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” In a memorable tagline, Satan said, “I just don’t want this year to end.” Released in December, only weeks after the presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, it reflected the national mood perfectly: horror at what we’d all been through, and vast relief that it was almost over.
Sadly, it seems we are destined to live in that damned year until the end of our days.
The year ended on a high note. Biden was elected president, the new Covid-19 vaccines were about to become available and we felt we could look forward to a day in the not-so-distant future when going to the grocery store didn’t come with a potential death sentence. Many people were back at work in one way or another, and the government had managed to get the American people through the crisis without suffering economic ruin. But it soon became clear Trump was unable to admit he had lost his reelection bid, and by January he and his army of surrogates and influencers had worked his MAGA followers into such a frenzy that they stormed the Capitol to stop certification of the election results.
At the same time, the MAGA faithful at home, which had, with the president’s help, pushed snake oil cures and conspiracy theories about the virus for months, were unwilling to move on from their various obsessions. They were set to turn the anti-vaccine movement into a juggernaut that would be ready to take on the entire American public health system and challenge medical science in general. The “do-your-own-research” crowd had felt their power, and they liked it.
Still, most of the country eventually moved on. Things had changed in some ways. Working from home is now a regular feature of the work world, Zoom calls are an everyday thing, and digital learning and telehealth have become mainstream.
Imagine my surprise, then, to awaken on Wednesday to a Senate hearing featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci in which he was being asked about hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. I had to check to make sure I wasn’t accidentally watching a documentary about the pandemic. But no: Rand Paul, Kentucky’s GOP senator had decided to scrape off the scab yet again by calling Fauci to face a grilling by Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Fauci looked the same. Paul looked the same. The daft conspiracy theories sounded the same. It was as if the last six years never happened. Déjà vu all over again.
Before leaving office, Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci — and for good reason. The doctor had become the whipping boy of the MAGA right, commonly accused of personally creating Covid-19 (in cahoots with Chinese communists, naturally) and then making a vaccine that they insist killed more people than the virus. It’s all nonsense, of course. There are still debates about the origins of the virus, but the idea that Fauci created or enabled it in some way is ridiculous. The hearing, ostensibly called to get to the bottom of all this, is actually just the latest step in Rand Paul’s petty vendetta against Fauci that began when they sparred in a series of confrontations during the crisis.
Despite being a doctor, Paul has always had, shall we say, an eccentric view of medical science, and he could never get the better of Fauci in their meetings. But the senator wanted the last word, and he got it.
Despite being a doctor, Paul has always had, shall we say, an eccentric view of medical science, and he could never get the better of Fauci in their meetings. But the senator wanted the last word, and he got it. Ignoring Biden’s pardon, Paul threatened Fauci with perjury if he “lied” during this latest hearing, a charge he claimed would not be covered by the pardon. In fact, the whole hearing was obviously a perjury trap.
Paul had released Fauci’s 1,000-page private pandemic diaries — helpfully provided to him by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — which had been stored on government servers. The senator knew there would likely be inconsistencies between Fauci’s memory and what he wrote at the time. Fauci’s attorney wisely told him to assert his Fifth Amendment rights, which he did. Paul threw that attorney out of the hearing for attempting to explain why.
The senator’s Republican colleagues piled on in their questioning of Fauci. Ohio’s Bernie Moreno was especially grotesque, bellowing “Who the f**k do you think you were?” at the 85-year-old scientist. Even Trump was less harsh in his commentary about the hearing, merely saying that he stopped listening to Fauci after a while.
But the hearing wasn’t the only recent time warp. Trump has spent the last six years attempting to rewrite the 2020 election, and apparently it’s not enough that he made one of the greatest political comebacks in history. He needs to erase the fact that he ever lost in the first place, so he has deployed the intelligence community to find proof that he didn’t. and decided to give a primetime presidential address on July 16 to reveal the findings.
To no one’s surprise, it was a dud. The information he presented was mostly old news, and he failed to provide any proof that domestic or foreign actors had any impact on the election that year — because they didn’t. Even his MAGA media ecosystem was left unimpressed.
But Trump remains undaunted. He’s been willing to completely blow up the legislative session going into November’s midterms unless he gets his way with the SAVE America Act, legislation designed to suppress the vote, which Senate Republicans have so far refused to pass. (It will suppress their own voters too.)
For Trump and Republicans, the worst year in living memory will never end, and it’s easy to see why. Like the devil in that famous ad, it’s their idea of a good time.
These days, there are a million different possible answers to either question. Our culture has confused sex — a relatively uncomplicated, biological thing — with desire, which is an entirely different, much more complex can of worms just waiting to be opened. While the two frequently meet one another on the bed, on the floor or in a back alleyway behind that dive bar on Cherry Street after a few well-tequilas, both of these things are their own animals. It’s act versus thought, performance versus feeling. And yet, sex and desire have become irrevocably intertwined in our modern age, like two sweaty bodies, tangled together, realizing halfway through the deed that they don’t actually have as much in common as they initially thought.
In his first feature film in 12 years, “I Want Your Sex,” veteran counterculture director and perennial cool guy Gregg Araki is looking to have some fun in the technicolor midpoint where sex and desire meet. Sex has played a major role throughout Araki’s filmography, but never in quite such explicit terms as this. His characters — impulsive adolescents and young adults, slicing through their disaffection with sharp bursts of hormonal momentum — typically experience sex as a product of their furious youth. In their eyes, it’s an act of heady rebellion, more in line with the drugs and crime that permeate these underground, nihilistic worlds than it is with true romantic intimacy. So for Araki to dispose of all that to home in on sex itself, rather than building his characters and their worlds around it, there must be a good reason.
(Magnolia Pictures) Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman in “I Want Your Sex”
By steeping his film in modern hypersexuality, Araki fashions a humorous how-to guide on how to find real, memorable sexual connection in a world where everything is designed to be sexy, but isn’t actually stimulating.
In short: There are plenty. The ’90s-era nihilism that threaded so many of Araki’s films has taken a hard slant toward technological despondency. Many young people act as though life begins and ends with the digital ecosystem. And even if that fact might make you depressed, scrolling will deplete one’s cynicism until it’s replaced by another attention-grabbing post. The simple fact of the matter is that, with so much time spent solitary and online, there’s less time for sex — or even the possibility of it.
And yet, sex (or at least the implication of it) is everywhere. OnlyFans is its own viable economy, with some users raking in millions per year from people who want to live the fantasy through a screen. Manufactured eroticism not only pays the bills but stops the scroll. And, of course, there’s the fact that anyone in the world can access hundreds of terabytes of porn in two measly seconds. It used to be that, if you wanted sex, you had to be forward about it, seek it out to some degree. Now, the proliferation of sex and sexuality has resulted in an ironic prudishness among digital natives, who, as a result of growing up with sex quite literally in the palm of their hands, abstain from intercourse and all the lessons and joy it has to offer. And it’s that reserve that Araki aims at with “I Want Your Sex.”
Yet, for a film with such a bold, George Michael-ripping title, “I Want Your Sex” is curiously unerotic. The characters have sex, sure, but their coitus is so instantly excessive it veers on silly. But that’s also the kind of frisky fun Araki wants his viewers to remember, the outrageous sexual dynamics that are the byproduct of our wildest adventures — exploits that don’t always begin with carnal intentions. By steeping his film in modern hypersexuality, Araki fashions a humorous how-to guide on finding real, memorable sexual connection in a world where everything is designed to be sexy, but isn’t actually stimulating.
And if anyone knows stimulating, it’s hotshot mixed media artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde, in her second hoot-and-holler role this summer), who’s made a name for herself in the Los Angeles art scene with a dedication to provocation. Her work is suggestive and boundary-pushing, and she’s exactly the kind of person that neurotic Gen Z art scene sycophant Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) would love to work for. After a chemistry-rich interview in her office, Erika hires Elliot on the spot — strange, considering his complete lack of experience and the spate of promising applicants that preceded him in the interview process. But Elliot doesn’t question it. Only later, when he’s tasked with chewing gum to stick onto the outline of a massive portrait of a vulva, does he learn that Erika has a habit of sleeping with her interns.
This piece of gossip soon begins to cloud Elliot’s life and better judgement. His girlfriend, the uptight med student Minerva (Charli xcx, speaking in an accent no one’s ever heard before, with a name no one’s had in 60 years — brilliant), is as cold in the bedroom as she is in the operating room. But Elliot also has no idea how to verbalize his desires. He’s of a generation that overthinks and underperforms. That is, until a wide-ranging chat with Erika in her home results in a proposition: Erika would like to enter into a consensual, primarily physical boss-employee relationship with her inferior, and use their inverse power dynamic to rock Elliot’s world: leashes, S&M, dildos, spanking, the works. But Erika calls the shots. If she says it’s over, it’s over. And there’s nothing like a suspicious, sudden disappearance to pull the plug on a burgeoning sexual connection.
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Araki’s screenplay, written alongside his “Now Apocalypse” series co-writer Karley Sciortino, hops back and forth between the time before Erika’s vanishing and immediately after. Her disappearance is mystifying and arousing — for both Elliot and the police. Elliot is abruptly without his sensual supervisor, and his loss is seismic. Left to his own devices with a new sexual skillset, yet still pining for his boss, Elliot is unsure of how to move forward. And it’s this impasse where Araki fleshes out his clever, if not entirely unique, ideas about the innate limits of the libido.
For as much handwringing as there has been about Gen Z’s attitudes toward sex — and whether they’re having it at all, which is debatable — Araki is careful not to indict the youth. He is, after all, famously still babyfaced at 66, a physical spriteliness mirrored in his bright visual aesthetics and effervescent directorial tone. Araki is very much in touch with what young people enjoy and how they operate. He simply wants more for them. Youth is wasted on the young, after all, and Araki’s mission with “I Want Your Sex” is to make it patently clear that the clock will continue to tick whether they choose to get physical or not. So why not give it a try?
(Magnolia Pictures) Charli xcx and Cooper Hoffman in “I Want Your Sex”
Sex is great, but what we remember most is what led up to it. We recall the excitement of shared energy, the potency of possibility, the spark so palpable it culminated in something intimate and naked. That’s the kind of animal electricity that points us toward our purest selves.
Araki posits that it’s fear holding people back; not just the fear of rejection, but a broader fear of the unknown. As much as I hate to parrot the sentiments of irritable older people who grumble about every kid getting a participation trophy, it is true that we live in a world that caters to our fragile egos. Every possible result for any conceivable situation is spelled out for us via a few quick internet searches. In a time when explainers and how-to guides exist for everything, influencers tell you how to dress and what to buy, and making a phone call has become a Herculean task for many, the margin for error has grown so slim it’s invisible. That also means the potential for surprise has dwindled, too. Humans have adopted an aversion to the casual risks that used to be a part of everyday life. Hazarding heartbreak and embarrassment is too dangerous. But the alternative, as Araki suggests, is an utterly boring existence, where, either way, you’ll always wonder “what if?”
(Magnolia Pictures) Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville in “I Want Your Sex”
But just depicting the pleasures of sex wouldn’t be enough to quell all that fear. Members of Gen Z might just fast forward through those scenes anyway, given that they want to see less sex onscreen as it is. Though Erika and Elliot’s intercourse is raucous and sultry, it’s their unpredictable relationship outside of the bedroom that keeps their fire — and the film’s madcap pacing — fueled. Elliot runs around LA doing Erika’s menial tasks until he drops everything at her beck and call. He upends his relationship with Minerva and screws up his best friendship with his roommate, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). And he demolishes his own ego by throwing himself into something wild and capricious headfirst. He’s chasing the spark and expanding his horizons in the process. Great sex is no longer the goal, but rather a nice bonus.
To some, it may feel like Araki is flattening complex social mores and misunderstanding the anxieties behind this era of semi-celibacy. And at times, “I Want Your Sex” does sorely miss the sharp, scrappy bite of Araki’s early films, which had far more to say than his one-track-minded latest. But there’s an amiable flair to the way Araki conveys an old adage in a new way. It’s not the destination; it’s the journey — and if anyone knows this, it’s someone whose youth was spent pursuing sex, art and feeling at risk of mistake and failure. Sex is great, but what we remember most is what led up to it. We recall the excitement of shared energy, the potency of possibility, the spark so palpable it culminated in something intimate and naked. That’s the kind of animal electricity that points us toward our purest selves. When we fear the act of sex, we don’t experience the desire that leads up to it. And when we don’t have desire, we don’t truly live.
I walked up to the wizard and asked him, “What do they call you?” He clearly got the reference.
“Some would call me Tim.” he said with a smile.
I turned around to see a man dressed as a World War II aviator. “Hey, Amelia Earhart, how you doing?” I asked.
That “Caddyshack” reference got a laugh. I hope I made that joke my own.
I certainly wasn’t in Washington, D.C., anymore, Toto. No, I had abandoned the freakshow capital of the world and was in the exhibit hall at the San Diego Convention Center, watching thousands of people walk by dressed as their favorite character from comics, sci-fi, fantasy or video games. One guy I noticed looked like Alex Jones as an Ewok. I turned to my left and saw another guy who looked like Stephen Miller dressed as Lord Voldemort. To my right was a woman who looked like Karoline Leavitt dressed as Dolores Umbridge. Behind her? A guy who looked like Tom Homan dressed as the Kingpin.
It was certainly more enjoyable than seeing the real people in D.C. Hey, if you can’t enjoy yourself at Comic Con, the most famous fan convention in several worlds (if the fans are to be believed), then your ability to have fun is even below that of the religious zealots spouting biblical quotes who gather on the streets outside the convention center every year to protest the event, while becoming part of it. Who looked sillier, the guy wearing a crown of thorns or the guy dressed as the Green Lantern? Actually, I still think that was Pete Hegseth — no matter what he’s wearing.
As a political reporter, I came away from Comic Con with one overriding impression: If world politics were more like the comic book world, reality would be a safer, saner and healthier place. Who wouldn’t enjoy watching world leaders cosplaying their favorite sci-fi or fantasy characters at U.N. meetings, peace-treaty negotiations and other staged events? True peace in the Middle East could one day come with the headline; “Batman and the Joker have signed a historic agreement in Beirut. Details at 11.”
Comedian Bill Hicks famously once said that he not only supported the legalization of marijuana but thought its use should be mandatory. “Shut up and smoke this. It’s the law,” he said, imagining a peaceful world where people stopped taking life “too seriously.” Walking around Comic Con, I couldn’t help thinking that dressing up in gaudy costumes wouldn’t be a bad idea either. Doing both? Well, that’s up to you.
If politics were more like the comic book world, reality would be a safer, saner and healthier place. Who wouldn’t enjoy watching world leaders cosplaying sci-fi or fantasy characters at U.N. meetings, treaty negotiations and other staged events?
If you think that’s an absurd idea, I will say that it’s less absurd than what we see in the White House every day, and it would be a lot more enjoyable. Donald Trump has long since lost his appeal, whatever that was. He offers never-ending reruns of the same speech, and at this point it fails to entertain, enlighten or move anyone. How many more times do we have to hear about how “hot” the country is, how only losers support wind power, how 2% of the people commit 90% of crimes, or how prescription medication is now 600 percent cheaper?
Trump is dull and lackluster. He looks somnambulant. He is about as entertaining as a stale powdered donut and even less nutritious.
In a Comic Con panel discussion with a “Superman historian” — a man who has relentlessly tracked down every salient fact about Superman co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster — I learned that the two comic book innovators met in their Cleveland high school in the late 1920s and first proposed Superman as a newspaper comic strip in 1933, during the Great Depression. One was a ladies’ man and one was a partier. They sold the rights to their creation to DC Comics and much controversy ensued. Siegel apparently wrote letters putting “curses” on people and telling the world he got screwed. Shuster was once found on a park bench and thought to be a vagrant. He told the police he was the original Superman artist, and to prove it he drew the Man of Steel convincingly enough to stay out of jail.
I loved these stories, but the most fascinating thing I learned that night was that I knew far more about the creation of the comic strip that became a billion-dollar empire after listening to a single historian for one hour than I know right now about the Iran war or the condition of Mitch McConnell, the senior U.S. senator from Kentucky, whom I have covered since the 1980s and who disappeared on June 14 into the back of a D.C. ambulance and hasn’t been seen in public since.
Future historians may make their living trying to figure out what happened to McConnell — hell, that story might become a comic book, though not one as popular as Superman. But right now, McConnell and Trump are at the heart of the loathsome divisiveness that defines American politics, makes it so disreputable and nowhere near as much fun as Comic Con.
“United we stand. Divided we fall.” Believe it or not, that’s the state motto of Kentucky. No one in politics today seems to care about our divided nature. They seem to nurture it.
Comic Con, on the other hand, was the embodiment of the Kentucky motto.
The panels featured lengthy, often in-depth discussions. Sometimes they featured celebrities recounting past glories or promoting their newest releases. Only one panel I encountered, featuring action star Alan Ritchson of “Reacher,” ventured directly into politics. Ritchson said that Trump was “raping the world” and that he chose to speak out because “I want to live a life that feels meaningful.”
It appears Trump was not pleased. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast, “Alan Ritchson is a talentless hack who clearly suffers from a severe and incurable disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has completely rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
Keep it classy, Trump people.
Inside the exhibit hall I ran into actor Sam J. Jones, the former football player who played Flash Gordon back in 1980. Younger fans may remember him playing himself in “Ted,” conducting the wedding ceremony and doing the “Flash” jump at the end of the movie. He was signing autographs and handing out football cards showing him, as Flash Gordon, wearing legendary quarterback Johnny Unitas’ old number 19.
“I recognize you,” he told me.
I said I recognized him too. We talked a bit about politics and he offered this observation: “I’ve worked a lot of these Comic Cons. These are the best people you’ll ever meet. They’re genuine and they are here to enjoy themselves. The world needs more of that.”
All day on Saturday I walked through a world I rarely get to visit and didn’t know I wanted to. From the panels to the exhibit hall, I was floored by the number of artists, the collectibles and the displays. It was like a theme park. Outside in the streets, the cosplayers enjoyed mugging for the cameras or taking selfies and laughing at themselves and others while interacting with their favorite celebrities.
As I walked out of a restaurant, I passed a guy who had the most authentic Deadpool costume I’d ever seen. He was prancing about and really getting into it. Hey, I’m sorry for elbowing you, Ryan Reynolds. I didn’t know it was you. But you did step on my arthritic foot.
As Saturday afternoon turned into Saturday night, I felt like I was detoxing from the Friday night debacle back in D.C. — the rescheduled White House correspondents’ dinner. Late on Friday, my phone started buzzing with alarms from the speech. I feared the worst. But if anything, it was worse. The president was on stage, trolling reporters, insulting his own speechwriters and questioning why he was even there.
I’m sorry for elbowing you, Ryan Reynolds. I didn’t know it was you. But you did step on my arthritic foot.
For an hour, Trump meandered through a variety of subjects in a freak-show appearance, always landing with an insult aimed at the press. He stood in front of a backdrop celebrating free speech, something no one in his administration actually celebrates. Hegseth has tried to kick reporters out of the Pentagon. Trump has subpoenaed reporters, ejected them from the White House press (or tried to), and never mentions us without saying “fake news.”
“This is so toxic. I’m leaving,” a friend of mine texted me from the event. “I didn’t even want to go.” Well, I didn’t either. But unlike my friend, I don’t have a boss who insisted that I do so.
Instead, I was in San Diego at an event that was nothing like anything in politics. I’ve been to a dozen of those dinners. None were nearly as much fun as Comic Con. And that’s coming from a guy who never read comic books as a kid. The closest I got was Mad Magazine. Oh, yeah: I think I saw a guy who looked like Kevin Hassett dressed as Alfred E. Neuman. “What? Me Worry?”
I’m genuinely sick and tired of today’s politics, and I know I’m not alone. I can only take so much of Trump’s nonsense and divisiveness. “I hate some people,” he said on stage Friday night. My friend called it “toxic,” but I would call it corrosive. It destroys the ties that bind and encourages anger and petulance. It is a modern plague on humanity.
Instead of suffering through that, I watched people of every imaginable race, creed, sexual orientation and color enjoying life. Some of them were dressed as aliens. Some of them might have been aliens. Nobody cared. Nobody judged.
Saturday night ended with some friends at a barbecue place across from the convention center, a spot made famous by the movie “Top Gun.”
The weather was amenable and the company was great. I listened as people sitting at a nearby table spoke about who made “the best Batman” with all the fervor and passion I hear from those involved in politics in D.C., but none of the vitriol. After a while they laughed, changed the subject and found something they could agree upon. Their biggest area of agreement was that Ewoks were horrible, just an effort “to give the kids something,” and that while “Stargate” was a terrific movie, “Stargate SG1” was an even better series.
Other stuff that Comic Con people seemed to agree upon, in no particular order: Grogu is cool, “Rogue One” is the best Star Wars movie and “The Wrath of Khan” is quintessential “Star Trek.” Furthermore, if anyone asks you the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, the proper answer is “African or European?”
I looked up from my table, and thought I saw a guy who looked like Hegseth dressed as the surgeon general of Beverly Hills from “Escape from L.A.” kissing his husband, who looked like Josh Hawley dressed up as Mr. Poopybutthole from “Rick and Morty.”
I hadn’t even been drinking but, boy, I felt buzzed.
Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, promises Americans that he has no intention of going forward with a $1.8 billion slush fund designed to funnel money out of the Treasury and into the pockets of right-wing attorneys. The outcry that followed the Justice Department’s May 19 announcement of the fund, which would pay the legal bills of political allies charged with crimes ranging from fraud to storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, was deafening. In addition to blowback from many congressional Republicans, a federal judge halted the administration’s disbursement of the money, which was created as part of Trump’s agreement with the federal government stemming from his lawsuit for the leak of his tax returns. Blanche, in his role as acting attorney general, claimed the administration would voluntarily walk away from using the money.
Now, months later, he has resolutely avoided putting this promise in writing, and his failure to formally give up the slush fund is putting at risk his Senate confirmation to permanently head the Justice Department.
The reason behind Blanche’s refusal is obvious: He and Trump want to keep the option to re-open the fund at a later date, along with the ability to write fat checks, paid for with taxpayer money, to the lawyers working on behalf of unsavory right-wing figures.
Blanche knows that world quite well; he has become personally wealthy doing exactly this kind of work.
Blanche knows that world quite well; he has become personally wealthy doing exactly this kind of work. Before taking his job at the Justice Department, first as Pam Bondi’s deputy attorney general, and then as her replacement, Blanche was making millions representing Trump in everything from a civil rape case to criminal fraud. Blanche also knows how such funds pay for that type of work. According to ABC News, between March 2023 and December 2024, his law firm was paid almost $10 million, not by Trump personally, but by a political action committee that was supposed to be funding Republican campaigns.
Blanche’s nomination is imperiled by his refusal to let go of the chance to flood the coffers of right-wing lawyers defending shady characters like his former client and current boss. Thursday’s vote to approve his nomination by the Senate Judiciary Committee was delayed. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex. and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., both who are leaving the Senate at the end of the year, are threatening to vote no unless Blanche formally commits to rolling back the deal that created this slush fund and also gave Trump and his family eternal immunity from IRS audits.
“This is not popular,” Tillis told the New York Times. “It is killing some of our candidates because they can’t explain it. And now it looks like they weren’t being honest when they said it was inoperative.”
It’s not just a “looks like” issue. Anyone who said the fund was inoperative because of Blanche’s informal say-so is either ignorant or lying. As the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote in June, Blanche and Trump remain committed to funding a “pipeline of taxpayer-funded payouts to political allies and convicted criminals.” Even the conservative National Review’s Andrew McCarthy agrees, writing on Wednesday that “Blanche has resisted memorializing in writing his claim that the fund is kaput, because President Trump wants the fund.”
The White House has already been funneling taxpayer funds to these bad actors through a slightly different but related process. As the Washington Post reported in June, the Justice Department has paid out millions to Trump allies who claim victimization because they were investigated or even convicted of crimes. The family of Ashli Babbitt got a nearly $5 million check over baseless claims that her shooting death during the Jan. 6 riot was unwarranted, even though video footage clearly showed her climbing through a window in an apparent attempt to chase down congressional members and staff fleeing in fear. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported on a seven-figure check written to Paul Vaughn, who was convicted of a federal crime in 2024 for conspiring to blockade an abortion clinic before being pardoned by Trump last year.
Vaughn’s legal representation by the Thomas More Society is a reminder of who really benefits if Blanche and Trump succeed in reviving the fund after the midterm elections: right-wing lawyers, who started licking their lips within moments of the Justice Department’s announcement.
“Everybody’s very excited about it,” Mark McCloskey, a lawyer representing Jan. 6 defendants, told the Washington Post. Even though his clients have been pardoned by Trump, he has been lobbying for the fund, hoping to see a big payday by claiming wrongful prosecution. Such a claim would be all but certain to fall apart in a court of law. But as the existing track record shows, the goal is to get the Justice Department to “settle” these claims by writing checks to people who otherwise wouldn’t see a dime. Clients would get money, but so would the lawyers — especially those who, like McCloskey, would get a cut of check after check.
At this point, it’s unclear if Blanche would be able to personally benefit from various schemes to pay off Trump’s political allies with government money. He could return to private practice and start taking on those kinds of clients after leaving the Justice Department. By then, though, it’s possible a Democrat will be in the White House again, and will have either shut down the fund or started blocking payments for phony claims made by right-wing operatives. But, as someone who was on a similar gravy train not that long ago, Blanche knows full well how rich his fellow right-wing lawyers could get from this.
And it’s not just private practice lawyers, either. Groups like the Thomas More Society, Alliance Defending Freedom and other far-right legal nonprofits need funding for their legal crusades, as seen by the lawsuit that overturned Roe v. Wade, or the ongoing cases meant to curtail voting rights or LGBTQ+ equality. Taking on right-wing clients with baseless claims of victimization could be an easy way to get money, which could then be used to fund cases attacking reproductive rights or religious freedom.
That Cornyn and Tillis are taking this stand is surprising. The pair have a long history of supporting the right-wing legal organizations that could find themselves flush with slush money. As Tillis’s comments about the midterm campaigns show, it may not be anything deeper than a sense that this is politically toxic. Trump’s consideration of withdrawing Blanche’s nomination would be nothing more than a pause until after the midterm elections, when he is banking on new Republican senators to replace Cornyn and Tillis — and put his payola scheme back into action.
It may not even come to that. On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., was assuring reporters that Blanche’s nomination would be back as soon as next week, after “a resolution on the issues that Senators Cornyn and Tillis raised.” Thune’s comments suggest that as long as Trump does a slightly better job at deflecting attention from the fund, the two senators can claim victory and give Blanche their support.
Or perhaps this will really be the moment that Republicans, two of them at least, stand up to Trump for real, instead of just doing so as quickly-dispatched political theater. If so, it’s a hopeful sign that Republicans can read a poll and see his corruption is starting to wear thin, especially for a public struggling to make ends meet while the president enriches himself and his cronies.
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.
Writing about culture means thinking about the world in magical terms. Or maybe it’s just me. I frequently struggle to find the right words to describe the elements weaving together the concrete and the conceptual, so I find it simpler to sum up all that as magic. All of us understand magic. Not everyone believes they have the capacity to express it, which is a shame. That’s why I think everybody needs a little “Kiki’s Delivery Service” in their lives.
Out of all of Miyazaki’s movies, “Kiki’s Delivery Service” may be his most timeless. It’s made for young hearts but also has a way of growing up with us, taking on new meaning when viewed at different life stages.
“Kiki’s Delivery Service” is not a Hayao Miyazaki original. He adapted it from Eiko Kadono’s 1985 children’s novel about a half-witch who strikes out on her own to fulfill a tradition established by her kind.
Kiki’s willingness to help others conveys a more important teaching about interdependence as an integral part of independence. Her efforts are acts of caring, moving others to do the same for her.
But “Kiki” holds several themes that recur in Miyazaki’s work. Our titular heroine is only 13 years old when her escapade begins – a little more mature than most of the director’s protagonists, but still innocent enough not to be jaded. Miyazaki’s tales also tend to immerse us in supernatural domains existing parallel to our own, as if reality masks more ethereal, life-affirming realms. Kiki, however, lives in a world that sees magic as part of the natural order, which plunges her into an existential crisis when she loses hers.
To young children, Kiki’s adventure is a simple fantasy about a kid who can fly on her mother’s broom and launches a business with the same enthusiasm that elementary schoolers radiate while running a lemonade stand.
Once Kiki leaves her village with her constant companion Jiji, a talking cat, she sails through the skies, albeit insecurely. She’s uncertain about her flight capabilities, and even less sure of herself when she encounters a more experienced and stuck-up witch who’s around her age, and who brushes her off instead of propping up her confidence.
Eventually Kiki ends up in a bustling seaside city that hasn’t had a witch in its midst in many years. After a rough start, including a run-in with an irritating policeman, she lands at the home of a baker, Osono, who gives her a place to stay in exchange for labor and her delivery services.
Since Kiki’s abilities allow her to defy gravity, she runs packages across town, avoiding auto traffic and pedestrian crowds. Her world looks and operates like ours, and that means there are no free lunches.
Osono’s kindness is part of the fantasy, in that she takes in a strange little girl and lets her live in her extra room without asking many questions. But even when Kiki botches a delivery by dropping a toy mid-air, sending it tumbling into a nearby forest, a bit of reciprocal effort solves the problem. Ursula, the artist who lives there, finds it broken and has Kiki scrub her floors in exchange for repairing it.
I’ve read a few interpretations of the narrative’s emphasis on labor exchange that assume these moments are meant to teach children that labor has value. Maybe. As I see it, Kiki’s willingness to help others conveys a more important teaching about interdependence as an integral part of independence. Her efforts are acts of caring, moving others to do the same for her.
While Kiki’s coming-of-age year as a witch requires her to live on her own, she’s never alone and can’t succeed without other people. That part of the story appeals to the restless adolescent versions of ourselves that can’t wait to find our place in the world.
The third act, however, hits hardest when you’ve lived long enough to lose your mojo and doubt yourself. Kiki meets a boy, Tombo, who is obsessed with flight and, specifically, Kiki’s marvelous ability to fly without the help of a machine. Initially she pushes him away, but Tombo is persistent. Eventually they become friends. And it’s to him that she admits, “Flying used to be fun until I started doing it for a living.”
Soon after that, Kiki wakes up to find her magic is absent. She’s expended so much of it on others that she has none left for herself. She can’t even understand Jiji anymore.
(1989 Eiko Kadono/Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli, N) A still from “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”
If every Miyazaki movie has a whiff of biographical relevance, one might see “Kiki’s Delivery Service” as his statement of creative purpose and motivation. Who can help a witch who’s lost her flight? A woman who lives alone in a house in the woods, of course – although she’s an artist, not a witch. Ursula’s advice to Kiki is the same as any career coach or mental health professional counseling someone through a crisis of confidence: Stop working so hard, take a walk and look at the world for a while.
“We each need to find our own inspiration, Kiki,” says Ursula. “Sometimes it’s not easy.”
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I can’t think of a person who makes a living from their talent that doesn’t feel that way at some point. We call it burnout. To Miyazaki, Kiki’s depletion is a sign that she’s leaving childhood behind. She regains her ability to fly but is never able to communicate with Jiji again. So maybe she doesn’t quite regain her magic but taps into a new version of it.
Magic is a five-letter word that does so much heavy lifting when it comes to describing the essence of what makes something special. Thinking of it that way makes life sweeter, too. Science can explain the world around us, but magic helps us appreciate the wonder in the atomic arrangement of nature, chance meetings with open-hearted souls and kindness without expectation of anything in return. “Kiki’s Delivery Service” has been telling us that since the very first time we saw it, and in new ways with each repeat viewing.
“Kiki’s Delivery Service” is streaming on HBO Max.
After the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Alex Pretti, Ruben Ray Martinez, Renee Good and too many others, a familiar scene is unfolding in Madison, Wisconsin. Following yet another fatal shooting by law enforcement in broad daylight, the streets are full of protesters while social media is aflame with horrifying videos.
The difference is that this time, those responsible are local police — not Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Being overlooked is the violence being brought by local law enforcement. On July 22, four police officers in Madison held down Corey Ruiz, a 38-year-old Black man, and shot him three times during an attempted arrest. Tens of thousands have now seen the videos circulating on social media platforms: bystanders screaming in the background, the attempted arrest turning violent within seconds, another person killed by police.
Ruiz’s killing is a painful reminder that state and local police have been left out of the conversation about violence and accountability.
This is nothing new. Ruiz’s killing is a painful reminder that state and local police have been left out of the conversation about violence and accountability. Much of the country has moved on from the mass protests in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer.
But police violence has never slowed.
Police continue to kill around 1,300 people every year, with at least 689 killings in 2026 already. Much media attention has gone to ICE’s traffic stops, but far less to the 93 people killed by police in traffic stops this year. While the enthusiasm behind police accountability in 2020 resulted in some important changes — including state bans on chokeholds and no-knock warrants — we never saw the “major changes” 58% of Americans called for, including reforms that would protect everyday people from police brutality. Congress failed to pass even modest police accountability legislation in George Floyd’s name after bipartisan negotiations broke down, and most federal lawmakers have shown little interest in returning to the issue.
Under the Biden administration, the federal government remained an important force for police reform, including executive orders that increased accountability and prioritized deescalation and alternatives to use of force. These orders quickly fell after Donald Trump returned to office, alongside consent decrees designed to curb police violence, leaving communities to fend for themselves.
Part of the reason the issue has fallen off the national radar has to do with a (perverse) relative comparison. ICE has made local police look astonishingly well-trained, well-behaved and accountable, leading Senate Democrats to take action. In January, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto introduced a bill to redirect $75 billion in federal funding from ICE to local police. Her colleague and fellow Nevadan, Sen. Jacky Rosen, said, “It’s simple: ICE should be held to the same standards as our local police departments.” Rosen and Cortez Masto, and their colleagues like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are correct, but we should hold ICE and police to a significantly higher standard of accountability.
A majority of voters agree. Extensive polling by Vera Action has found that the most popular position on policing is “supporting police who put their lives on the line for us everyday and holding those who use excessive force or abuse their power accountable.” This message consistently ranks far above simply adding more police officers or funding. The majority position on policing is one of support and accountability — better policing, not simply more policing.
Six years ago, the country’s demand for police accountability was subsumed by a muddled debate over “defunding the police” and valid concerns about rising crime. In 2026, we are past that conversation. The country is in the middle of a quiet public safety revolution, in which police departments, despite having fewer officers, are working with partners like mental health crisis response and community violence intervention to drive record-low crime rates.
Many people have become numb or indifferent to — or even defensive of — police violence. But ICE violence continues to shock us. The killing of Ruiz is a reminder that both problems persist — and can be solved with similar measures. As lawmakers propose accountability measures for ICE like better use-of-force standards, ending qualified immunity, improved training and more budgetary oversight, these same accountability measures should apply to police. We should also demand more than the tools, like body cameras, that have failed to stem police violence.
The officers who killed Corey Ruiz should and may face accountability. Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said, “Our community deserves full transparency and accountability,” and the killing is being investigated as a homicide.
But it will be a rare exception. One ICE officer recently told a reporter that the Trump administration has empowered aggressive behavior by officers because they know “they’re going to be protected.” Until accountability becomes the norm across all levels of law enforcement, this violence will continue.
The message should be clear: If America wants accountability from federal law enforcement, it is time to demand real accountability for police as well.
As The New School’s 2026 class of performing arts graduates enters the workforce and we face the beginning of a new school year, we are reminded of what our students will take into the world. Viola Spolin, one of the great acting teachers of the 20th century, put it simply: “being part of the whole generates trust and frees the player for playing, the many then acting as one.”
That lesson — how to genuinely inhabit a shared world with others — has never felt more urgent.
Our nation is divided on everything from food safety to our country’s future, and there are numbers to back this schism. Half of Americans report feeling divided from one another; a recent Stanford study gives this fracture a sharper name: the “empathy perception gap.” People have not stopped caring about others, but they believe that no one else does. This misperception carries profound consequences and is currently rippling through our world, eroding trust, deepening isolation and creating a social environment in which empathy is swiftly becoming an atrophied muscle in desperate need of exercise.
We are living through a crisis of empathy and, more precisely, of empathy not being learned. We live saturated in opinion, reaction and digital noise, a culture that turns other people into content: flattened, accelerated, easy to dismiss. We’re quick to cut off those we disagree with, and the conditions that might allow for empathy to flourish — time, attention, presence and vulnerability — are increasingly scarce. Empathy becomes something we endorse in principle but rarely practice. There is one place, however, where these conditions not only still exist, but are required: the stage.
Actors, musicians and performers train to inhabit perspectives not their own, to remain present through discomfort, and to sustain attention across time. In rehearsal and performance, they develop the capacity to hold another’s reality without collapsing it into their own. Crucially, they do so in the presence of others — before audiences who are themselves engaged in the rare act of collective attention.
Empathy, on stage, becomes a cornerstone of experiencing live performance that pulls heartstrings, inspires raucous laughter or elicits a collective groan when a poorly-hatched plan falters. For example, in “Hadestown,” the moment Hades allows Orpheus to lead Eurydice back to the land of the living on one impossible condition — he can’t look back to make sure she’s there — converts a moment of positive surprise when the song lands into a dark swell of tension, anxiety and doom. It’s felt between the actors on stage and from the orchestra pit to the last row of balcony seats.
What the ancients understood, and what remains true now, is that empathy can be taught through the sustained act of attending to another’s experience in the presence of others.
Of course, this is not a new function of the stage. When audiences gathered in ancient Athens to watch plays by Sophocles, they were confronting a shared reality together. Theater operated as a civic technology, a structured environment in which a society could examine itself in public. What the ancients understood, and what remains true now, is that empathy can be taught through the sustained act of attending to another’s experience in the presence of others.
The stage has always taught this, and the evidence of its impact is no longer anecdotal. Participation in the arts has been shown to reduce isolation, improve mental health and strengthen social bonds.
Broadway is home to several plays that address these issues head-on while bringing deeply human experiences to life in creative, even comedic ways. For example, in “Every Brilliant Thing,” the lone person on stage, currently played by Tracee Ellis Ross, is tasked with cheering up a deeply depressed mom by making a list of things that make life worth living. The answer: bring the second cast member — the theater audience — into the brainstorming session to help them understand and connect more deeply to the very human situation the main character finds himself in.
Programs in social prescribing — the act of doctors prescribing non-medical care — are now expanding from their origins in the United Kingdom to states like Massachusetts and New Jersey — recognize that engagement in shared cultural activity can be a meaningful complement to clinical care. Medical schools, too, have long incorporated the study of performance to develop empathy and observational acuity in future doctors. These practices point to something central: The ability to encounter another person’s experience with care and attention is a skill, and it can be taught.
That skill is cultivated through education in the performing arts. Actors and musicians learn to exist and create out of tension without rushing to resolve it. They learn to inhabit perspectives that are not their own, and to recognize the humanity within them. They practice sustaining tension, navigating uncertainty and responding in real-time to others.
Playwrights from Shakespeare to Sondheim to Manuel-Miranda, meanwhile, write around human emotion while infusing relatability to enrich the audience’s theater experience. But it’s the actors who execute their vision by playing off of each other and leaning into creative impulse when the scripted scene or real-time audience reaction calls for it.
The ability to hold another person’s reality alongside one’s own, without reducing it or rewriting it, requires training, repetition and exposure. Studies have even shown that inhabiting a character increases one’s ability to see from others’ perspectives. And crucially, they do so in the presence of others—before audiences who are themselves engaged in the rare act of collective attention.
At its best, the performing arts create a space for shared witnessing. Audiences experience a story alongside others, in real time, aware of each other’s presence. Faces clench before pivotal moments of conflict on stage. Eyes tear up when unrequited love leads to isolation or forbidden love leads to death. Our bodies experience excitement and anticipation when hearing musical tension or suspension. Outside the theatre, this collective attention is increasingly rare and necessary. In a society shaped by fragmentation and misperception, the capacity to remain present with complexity is one of the most urgent skills we can cultivate.
A performing arts education does more than train artists to perform. It prepares individuals — actors as well as audience members — to live with tension rather than flee from it, to participate in spaces of collective witnessing and to build communities grounded in attention, responsiveness and critical reflection. It offers a structured, repeatable method for developing empathy as a lived, practiced capacity. At a time when our social contract with each other is fraying, and we speak to Claude or ChatGPT as much as we chat with friends or family, we need more spaces where this work can happen, and more people trained to do it.
The stage is one of the last places where we learn, together, how to be with one another. It may be the most important classroom we have left.
JD Vance sees himself in a former president. In a recent on-stage conversation about his memoir “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” the vice president was apparently inspired when talking about how this politician was a “political genius” and “peacemaker” who pulled America out of an unpopular war. “Young senator, writes some bestselling books,” he said, ticking off a number of shared qualities. “It kinda sounds like JD Vance.”
Vance will likely never say this out loud. It’s possible, though unlikely, that he’s unconscious of it. But following his recent book tour, it’s hard to ignore how much the vice president fancies himself to have the charisma, demeanor and even the wife required to be the GOP’s answer to Obama.
Vance’s public arrogance certainly suggests he believes himself equal to the former president in both intellect and charm. In this, he’s utterly deluded, nor it is it clear that Republican voters, despite the persistent bitterness over Obama’s continued popularity, would even want a candidate who possesses these traits. Vance may well end up bumbling his way into the Republican nomination, giving him a real shot at the White House, but it would only be because the GOP has a dearth of contenders to replace Donald Trump.
Between his camera-hogging and social media addiction, Vance is ubiquitous. This serves to conceal how thinness of his political resume. Besides his victory as Trump’s running mate, he has won only a single election: the 2022 Ohio Senate race, an easy victory in a mostly-red state. He skipped the line of career politicians, not by beguiling ordinary Republican voters, who aren’t impressed with Ivy League degrees or his tendency to pontificate like a wannabe philosopher-king instead of a baby-kissing politico. It was because of money from tech billionaire investor Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley types who seem to equate being rich with being learned.
For tech bosses like Thiel, having a Barack Obama of their very own is an appealing prospect. On paper, Vance seems to check all the boxes. Humble background but an Ivy League education? Check. Gorgeous, accomplished wife who was induced to set her career aside for her husband’s ambitions? Check. A talented wordsmith who writes his own books, and with a bestselling memoir penned before he considered running for office? Check. Youth appeal, down to listening to actual pop music and an agility with 21st century slang? Check.
Like any cheap knock-off, with Vance the ruse becomes clear at even a cursory examination. The vice president’s long list of Obama-esque attributes read like ill-fated attempts at parody in the real world.
Sadly for Vance, in politics, as in art and sex, it’s less about your stat block and more about your ability to execute. Like any cheap knock-off, with Vance the ruse becomes clear at even a cursory examination. The vice president’s long list of Obama-esque attributes read like ill-fated attempts at parody in the real world.
When it was published in 2016, Vance’s first book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” got a similar glowing reception to the one Obama received when his debut, “Dreams from My Father,” was published in 1995. Although both authors were only 32, they had lived unusual enough lives to justify memoirs. But while Obama’s tome remains beloved for its nuance and grace, Vance’s book has soured with time as many critics and readers come to recognize the shallow Appalachian stereotypes and conservative agenda it contains. “Hillbilly Elegy” was turned into a 2020 film by Ron Howard, but it is mostly remembered as an embarrassment.
The contrasts become worse in looking at Vance and Obama’s second books, both of which were more obviously written with an eye toward running for higher office. Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope,” released in 2006 less than four months before he announced his candidacy for president, is an exemplar of the form, with authentic autobiographical details that remind readers the book was not primarily the work of a ghostwriter. Vance’s “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” released in June, has mostly raised questions about whether the vice president cares for anything but his own ambition. His high-minded rhetoric about his conversion to Catholicism sounds hollow in light of his willingness to spread racist lies about immigrants and rebuke Pope Leo for opposing war. In a passage a more compassionate editor might have removed, Vance reveals the higher power he seems to actually worship. Of hearing Thiel speak for the first time in 2011, Vance writes he saw the man who would become his patron as “[p]ossibly the smartest person I’d ever met.”
Obama endeared himself to voters, especially younger ones, by coming off as the cool college professor who manages to sound erudite without being condescending. A former community organizer, he used youthful slang and pop culture references with the same ease he played pick-up basketball games. Vance’s efforts to seem hip come across as forced, as if he has never met a fellow millennial and can only approximate their lingo and cadence from reading old magazine reviews of movies like “Clueless.”
When it comes to relatability and authenticity, perhaps no better example of the differences between the two men can be seen in their marriages. Both have beautiful wives with impressive careers of their own. Michelle Obama and Usha Vance were arguably more accomplished than their husbands were at the start of their political careers. Both women were openly wistful about having to leave that behind for one spent supporting their husbands in Washington, D.C.
The difference is that the Obamas appear to like each other and, especially in the early years of his presidency, had palpable chemistry that induced romantic fantasies. The Vances, however, can’t seem to shake off suspicions that they loathe each other, no matter how many smiles they flash at the camera. It doesn’t help that the vice presidents constantly runs down his wife in speeches, comments he tries to play off as jokes, but which are too hard-edged to sell as jovial.
Vance has admittedly been getting better in interviews and speeches in recent months. He managed to get through his entire book tour, including a stint on “The View,” without clips of his awkward behavior going viral. That may seem like a low bar, but this is the man whose time on the campaign trail in 2024 is mostly remembered for his angry “cat lady” obsession and an unfortunate incident in which he attempted to seem normal (and failed) while ordering donuts.
Vance will never have Obama’s easy charm. But if he keeps practicing, he might start being read by Republican voters as person-shaped enough to shrug his way into the nomination.
Ultimately, Vance has erred in a way Obama was smart enough to avoid. The vice president tied himself to another politician whose stink rubs off on everyone around him. Obama’s political talents helped him rise quickly through the Democratic ranks, but his best asset was that he was able to plausibly run as an anti-war candidate, while his opponent for the 2008 Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, couldn’t escape her early support for the Iraq War.
Nearly two decades later, the public is yearning even more for an outsider uncorrupted by the failings of the Washington political establishment. Vance, however, didn’t have the foresight to see what should have been obvious: that Trump would make easily avoidable mistakes, like the Iran war, which has resulted in historic disapproval numbers that could well taint everyone who associates with him.
No amount of slang or smug chuckling will be able to get Trump’s stank off the vice president.
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