Since the first season of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” we’ve watched Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban) grow from an eccentric child preoccupied with insects and murmurings of dreams — shrugged off as nothing more than oddities by the adults who occupy the Red Keep in King’s Landing — to becoming an adult with a tremendous power that she was wise to mainly keep to herself.

The only daughter of Viserys (Paddy Considine) and Alicent (Olivia Cooke), Helaena was a dreamer in more than just the flibbertigibbet sense, receiving flashes of things to come — her brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) losing an eye, Rhaenys’ (Eve Best) dragon Meleys crashing her brother/husband Aegon’s (Tom Glynn-Carney) coronation, hired assassins posing as rat-catchers breaking in to kill her baby son — and though these premonitions could have been a considerable help to those around her, they mainly fell on deaf ears until she herself fell to her death in the Season 3 finale, at which point it was too late. But the joke’s on everyone but Helaena because in taking her undervalued gifts and goodness with her, she’s removed herself from the fray as the only one with the knowledge that power is an ugly thing to die for, but an even uglier thing to live for.

In the fight for the Iron Throne, the Targaryens and anyone from the Hightower line with a drop of lineage blood in the game are neck and neck in a battle to out-dragon and out-incest the other. Helaena, having a Hightower mother but a Targaryen last name, has empathy for both sides, as she does for any of the other tools and pawns of war; the dragons killed in battle, the horses destroyed by enemies, the caterpillars outside the castle that feed on toxic plants but are not toxic themselves.

“They eat the leaves of the nightshade, but that would be death for you or me . . . It’s a puzzle,” she warns her daughter Jaehaera in a Season 3 episode. And Jaehaera, who actually listened to Helaena’s warnings when few others did, has at least this to remember her mother by: feasting on poison may fortify you, for a while, but it will only bring harm to everyone around you. Dark-mode Rhaenyra would have been wise to heed this warning when it was delivered the second time.

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In the Season 3 finale, held prisoner by Rhaenyra and refusing to eat, despite being pregnant with what’s presumed to be her brother/husband’s child, Helaena talks of a rare beetle which can only be seen in the summer, which she’ll never see again.

“There’s a beetle that emerges on the cusp of summer. It has lots of colors. Blue, gold, purple. It looks like a turtle,” she tells a befuddled Rhaenyra. “You can only find it in King’s Landing. It sustains itself on the waste of other creatures. It’s beautiful.”

Hearing this, Rhaenyra is, once again, just sitting there thinking this lady is nuts and very much not picking up on the “you’re trash” goodbye speech that her half-sister is delivering, so Helaena makes it clearer.

“All the things you care about are ugly. This place is ugly. You, yourself . . . ugly.”

Having already made up her “F this” mind that she’d rather throw herself out of a window than live one more day as Rhaenyra’s pawn, Helaena drives the sentiment home with: “You think life is nothing more than not being dead?”

Removing herself from the game board, Helaena is free. No more subsisting on poison. No more having her warnings be ignored. The Targaryens F’d around, but now they’re gonna find out. Sometimes dreams do come true.

Like the fragile butterflies that flitter around Alicent after Helaena’s death, she was too good for all of this nonsense. Too pure for endless battles over a damn chair. 

Amid struggles for dominion, making the choice to pack it up and take her power with her — a truly useful power, at that, even more so than dragonfire, I’d argue — Helaena’s “no thanks” refusal to participate exhibits a level of nobleness and bravery the others will never live to even come close to. Refusing to fight is, often, the biggest fight.

During a press conference for “House of the Dragon” reported on by Variety, Emma D’Arcy spoke of the character Helaena, saying, “She’s maybe the only character who has a proximity to power, but remains kind of uncontaminated . . . I think her death condemns Rhaenyra to the path she’s chosen. There’s no way back after that.”

Loyal, love to be steered. Allegiance to suffer, only to serve. Helaena saw through all of it, and what she saw but had yet to say, well, she took that to her grave.

The post Helaena was too good for “House of the Dragon” appeared first on Salon.com.

There’s some good news for American lifespans: In July, preliminary CDC data suggested that life expectancy in the U.S. is on track to reach a record high while death rates hit a historic low. 

According to the report, there were about 689 deaths for every 100,000 people in 2025 — the lowest rate recorded since mortality rate tracking began. The news comes at a time when the buzzword “longevity” has become synonymous with wellness, and as the U.S. centenarian population is expected to explode over the next few decades. At first glance, this news might sound encouraging after years of headlines highlighting the reverse trend, that life expectancy was falling. But public health experts who have been studying mortality rates over the last couple of decades aren’t exactly optimistic this trend reflects any positive health advancements in American public health — or that these numbers can be sustained.

“This is welcome news, but should be taken with a grain of salt,” Steven Woolf, a physician and a professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, told Salon. One reason, Woolf pointed out, is that the current estimates are only “slightly better” than in 2019, when there were an estimated 715.2 deaths per 100,000 people. “Although this signals that the U.S. has rebounded from the devastating losses that occurred during the pandemic, returning to 2019 conditions hardly puts us out of the woods.” 

Death rates, particularly among young Americans, remain high. According to research published earlier this year, “excess deaths” have surged among people between the ages of 25 and 44 when compared to mortality trends of young people from the early 2000s. The overall death rate of children has increased, too. “This means that children in the U.S. today are less likely to survive to adulthood and young adults are less likely to reach middle age than in prior years,” Woolf said.

A third reason for tempering our enthusiasm about the data is that U.S. life expectancy remains far below that of other high-income countries. 

“Yes, we have rebounded from the pandemic, but other countries rebounded earlier and have since achieved greater gains in life expectancy,” Woolf said. “Even before the pandemic, more than 60 countries had achieved higher life expectancy than the United States.”

A recently published study in JAMA Health Forum found that 46 percent of all U.S. deaths among people under the age of 65 would not have occurred if the U.S. had the age-specific death rates of its peer countries. That means that one out of every two U.S. deaths under 65 is likely avoidable. One of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Jacob Bor, called the lack of willingness to address this issue “a national scandal.”

Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a person might live based on a country’s mortality rates. As it stands, the 2025 life expectancy calculation wasn’t included in the report since it’s still technically provisional data. But in 2024, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. was 79.0 years — a historic high, compared to 78.4 years in 2023. But compared to other Western democracies, as researchers have emphasized, there’s room to catch up. For example, in Italy, life expectancy at birth has increased from 79.6 in 2000 to 83.4 years in 2019. In Switzerland, life expectancy has increased from the late ‘70s in the mid-2000s to an average of 84.3 years today.

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“It does not surprise me that we’re starting to see some improvements,” Marc Cohen, co-director of the LeadingAge LTSS Center at UMass Boston, told Salon. “But we’re surely still falling short of other Western democracies.”

Cohen said one notable difference between the U.S. and how Western European countries approach health and wellness is how governments spend their money. The United States spends much more on actual medical care, Cohen said, in terms of curing illnesses — but much less on preventative care. 

“The Europeans end up spending more on social care and less on medical care,” he said. Many social determinants of health influence longevity, he added, such as access to food, housing, and transportation. In Western European countries, those services are frequently part of the social safety net. “So they don’t need to spend as much on curing illness; they spend a lot more on getting services in place to prevent illness,” he said. The United States, he said, is the exact opposite. 

Another reason, Cohen said, the U.S. has a lower life expectancy is because of access to health insurance. “When people have access to medical care through insurance, they tend to undertake activities that can help longevity, like better preventive care, better management of chronic and disabling conditions,” Cohen said. He added that due to recent Medicaid cuts, which is the primary health insurance program for low-income Americans, he’s concerned life expectancy rates will decline again in the future. “Once all of these cuts kick in, you’ll see a turnaround going in the wrong direction again, even if everything else stays the same, and that is the only major change; you will see declines.” 

That’s in part because there is a strong correlation between wealth and longevity in America. 

“It has always been the case that the poor, on average, live shorter lives than the rich, but the gap has widened over time,” Woolf said. “Income inequality and the wealth divide in America have widened dramatically, and so has the gap in longevity and health between rich and poor.”

One of the most stark examples is longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, a tech millionaire who has reportedly spent $2 million per year trying to reverse aging. Johnson recently made headlines announcing he was diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis. While the disease itself isn’t fatal, as STAT News reported, it is linked to an increased risk of stomach cancer.

“For proof that better health is possible, look to the 60 countries that are outperforming the United States; they have shown that a better way exists to protect the health of their populations,” Woolf said. “The problem in the United States is not a lack of solutions but a lack of political will.”

One recent report estimated that working-class Americans can expect to die seven years earlier than wealthy ones. In an era of pay-to-access wellness, it checks out. A 2022 report by the Global Wellness Institute found that greater consumer spending on wellness is associated with a slight increase in life expectancy. Still, wealth doesn’t always guarantee a longer life.

“Rich Americans die earlier than rich people in other countries, because systemic problems affecting the health of Americans affect us all,” Woolf said. “Your bank account can’t protect you if you are breathing polluted air or rely on a dysfunctional health care system.” 

The post Rising US life expectancy isn’t what it seems appeared first on Salon.com.

Seven years ago today, Jeffrey Epstein was found hanging in a Manhattan jail, and the usual reactions to a sudden, violent death were reversed.

It was the people who abhorred the convicted sex offender — his victims and all who sympathized with them — who were stricken with sadness and anger. Now, they feared, the full truth about this man and his odious life would never come out.

It was Epstein’s friends and far-reaching galaxy of influential associates who surely allowed themselves a quiet moment of relief back in 2019. Now, they had reason to hope, the full truth about this man and his odious life would never come out.

The anniversary of Epstein’s demise is occasion to note two paradoxes that have emerged over those seven years — and most vividly in recent months, as it has become clear Epstein was a more consequential figure, and more emblematic of a sordid age, even than we knew at the time. Both paradoxes come courtesy, however grudgingly or unintentionally, of Epstein’s one-time friend, President Donald Trump.

The first is the surprising degree to which the truth did indeed come out, and answers were not left hanging with Epstein in Cell 220 on the ninth floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Yes, there are important matters of detail that remain clouded by mystery. These include the precise details of how Epstein killed himself, in a supposedly secure facility, according to the official medical examiner’s conclusion (which some still doubt), as well as a full illumination of his relationship with Trump and why it apparently dissolved early in the 2000s. Many of the survivors of Epstein’s crimes also remain distraught and hungry for more answers.

But the nature of Epstein’s monstrously manipulative character, and the ease with which he ensnared some of the planet’s wealthiest and in many cases most accomplished people is now commonly understood — in a way that it almost certainly would not be if he had lived. Perhaps he would have reached a settlement with prosecutors, or gone to trial under rules of evidence focused narrowly on a few crimes rather than receiving scrutiny over the broad contours of his life. Any Epstein associates who exhaled in gratitude at his passing in 2019 had it exactly wrong — the ruin of reputations caused by this scandal was only beginning.

That we know the back-scratching and bawdy badinage, with cringe-inducing specificity, that was the essence of how Epstein nurtured his elite relationships is a gift to posterity. It comes of course because of the documentary goldmine of his massive trove of emails. These were released under an act of Congress, largely because important voices in the MAGA movement, later joined by Democrats, defied Trump’s reluctance and insisted they be released.

That gift to posterity as it happens, was central to the second paradox of the Epstein anniversary — and it is an uncomfortable one. At the time, his death looked like a cowardly end to a despicable life of con artistry and sexual predation that could mercifully soon be forgotten. Cowardly and despicable remain true. “Soon be forgotten” is not happening. Epstein’s life, it seems probable, will be known and studied and written about 100 years from now. He’s dead, but the narcissist in Epstein might perversely appreciate that his historical persona will outlive all but a few of his contemporaries’.

The primary reason is because his web of relationships, we now know, is deeply revealing of how an age that produced vast power and wealth became unhinged, at least in some elite precincts, from self-restraint, judgment, or simple decency.

Not everyone whose reputation was besmirched by disclosure of their Epstein interactions was an intimate of his, or necessarily knew the details of his criminal procurement and exploitation of underage girls. But in most instances that have come to light they knew of his reputation as a lothario who, as Trump said in 2002, liked women “on the younger side.” Just like Trump, many of them concluded this contributed, rather than detracted, from an appraisal that he was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” Likely in nearly every case these people were attracted to Epstein because of his wealth, his access to others with wealth, his airplanes and his island, and his self-fashioned aura as an intellectual savant who used his bespoke brain to make money in ways that ordinary mortals couldn’t understand.

If someone early in the 22nd century is curious about what the top levels of American life were like early in the 21st century, it will be hard to avert their gaze from someone whose career intersected in ways that echoed damagingly with two presidents (Trump and Clinton); royalty (the former Prince Andrew); the foremost technologist of the 20th century and the foremost philanthropist of the 21st (Bill Gates); a one-time prince of Wall Street (Jes Staley of JPMorgan Chase and later CEO of Barclays in the United Kingdom); a star of academia and government (former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers), and a long roster of the wealthiest people in the world (such as Epstein confidant Leon Black, the private-equity titan) as well as some of its most prominent intellectuals (like linguist Noam Chomsky, Nobel laureate and molecular biologist Richard Axel, and computer scientist and Unabomber victim David Gelernter).

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Weaknesses of the flesh, the bottle, and the purse are not a recent phenomenon. Nor will people studying this era a century from now be startled to learn that lust and greed can lure people to bad places. But there are three distinct signatures of the Epstein scandal that will surely cause them to wonder: What were those friends and associates of Epstein thinking?

A notable feature of Epstein emails is the intense hunger for connection revealed by many of the people caught up in the scandal. Recall that almost all of the famous examples involve people who already had amassed large achievements and presumably had lots of friends who did not have previous sex-crime convictions (as Epstein did from 2008 onward.) But they were hypnotized by Epstein’s flame even so.

Jes Staley, who traded emails with Epstein filled with suggestive references to women using Disney characters (“Say hi to Snow White”), in 2009 opened himself up to the man who would later destroy his career: “I owe you much. I appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound.” Summers was seeking dating advice from Epstein (Summers wanted to know what to do about a woman who was treating him as a “friend without benefits”) just before Epstein was arrested again in 2019. You might suppose that one benefit of being Bill Gates is that you would no longer be thirsty for anything. But that’s not the case. In 2011, he emailed a colleague about Epstein: “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.” It definitely didn’t work for Melinda French Gates, who reportedly dissolved their marriage in part because of disgust with her husband’s intersection with the Epstein scandal.

Another signature of the Epstein files merits a nod to Hannah Arendt: the banality of creepishness. The notorious collection of tributes assembled for Epstein’s 50th birthday is a good example. These purported friends and high achievers toasted Epstein with page after page of double-entendres and chortling sexual references of the sort early adolescents might scribble in a middle-school yearbook. There was the apparent drawing from Trump (he denies it) of a naked woman with his name signed where pubic hair would be. Notably, at mid-life, there were not notes from people recalling the time they helped each other through the illness of a parent, or even the time they stayed up til 3 a.m. talking about politics and sports at an all-night diner. This is life at the top? The superficiality of Epstein and his horny, rich friends was a revelation.

One more reality unveiled by the Epstein files is arguably (without overdoing it) more appealing: The remarkable social fluidity reflected in the modern elite. In an earlier era, inherited social class was a powerful force — facilitating the careers of people to the manner born, but an infuriating limitation for many other talented people. Epstein’s circle included privileged kids like Staley, whose father was a CEO and who went to Bowdoin before Wall Street. But it also included Epstein’s most important patron, Leslie Wexner, the billionaire retail investor, who grew up as a middle-class son of a Russian immigrant and went to Ohio State. Epstein himself grew up near Coney Island and dropped out of college. It turns out modern social mores — which reward networking, scene-making and showy displays of wealth no matter whether new or old — are a more potent force than the previous generation’s old-chum country club culture. This was a phenomenon that had already been established earlier this century by the Bernie Madoff scandal.

What is true in 2026 that was not true in 2019 is that Jeffrey Epstein’s name is going to live in national memory for as long as people are curious about the Trump era. Those emails will find an audience for decades to come.

German commentators are calling it a modern-day “miracle.”

Hundreds of thousands of worshippers in the country are walking away from their churches each year. The money, however, keeps rolling in.

Some 660,000 people formally quit the country’s Catholic and Protestant churches in 2025, freeing them from a levy automatically charged to registered members as a percentage of their income tax bill.

Despite the exodus, the two institutions collected more than €12.5 billion through the church tax for the 2025 fiscal year, up from around €12.4 billion in 2024.

The apparent miracle has a decidedly earthly explanation: Rising wages and Germany’s progressive tax system mean the shrinking pool of members is paying more.

“At first glance, the development may seem contradictory,” a spokesperson for the Evangelical Church in Germany — the umbrella organization representing Germany’s regional Protestant churches — said. “The reason is that church tax is calculated based on individual income tax.”

Members of Germany’s Catholic and Protestant churches and some Jewish communities pay an additional religious tax equal to 8 or 9 percent of their income tax liability, even if they don’t attend services.

In 2021, the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available, more than 29 million people paid church tax in Germany, amounting to almost half of all income taxpayers in Europe’s largest economy.

The German Finance Ministry’s 2025 payroll tax tables suggests that a single employee without children earning €50,000 gross a year pays approximately €600 in church tax annually on top of income tax, depending on the federal state. Someone earning €70,000 per year pays more than €1,000.

People are registered as part of their religious community at birth or at local government offices. To stop paying the church tax, they must formally leave through a process known as Kirchenaustritt, or “church exit.”

The procedure varies across Germany’s federal states but typically requires appearing in person at a registry office or local court to submit a declaration. Most states also charge an administrative fee.

While those who deregister can still attend services as a visitor and access some church services, they are not allowed to have a church wedding, be a godparent or be guaranteed a church burial.

In 2025, some 310,000 left the Catholic Church, while around 350,000 left one of Germany’s regional Protestant churches.

Church exit

The reasons people give for formally leaving their religious communities range from feeling less connected to the church to simply wanting to save money.

“People are leaving the Church because they feel it no longer plays a role in their lives,” said Matthias Kopp, director of communications for the German Bishops’ Conference.

“Added to this are the scandals of recent years, which have called the Church’s credibility into question,” he added. “There are also people — though this is by no means the primary reason — who leave the Church because of the church tax.” 

“These are processes of alienation to which we must respond,” said Kopp.

For Jana Keil, a 33-year-old accountant from Berlin, the decision was both financial and moral. “I no longer wanted to support the system with church tax in light of the [child sex] abuse scandals,” she said.

Lukas Heinich, a 23-year-old working student, said he formally left after completing his apprenticeship because he “didn’t feel like paying the tax or supporting the church.”

That church tax revenues continue to rise despite the exodus is down to the types of taxpayers choosing to remain church members.

Those who are still paying church tax in Germany are “probably the higher earners,” said Zareh Asatryan, professor of empirical economics at the University of Münster. “Those that stay will naturally earn more income because of inflation plus real wage growth, and they will just generate more revenue.”

A miracle with an end date?

But the continued rise in church tax revenue masks significant long-term challenges — and raises questions about how long the trend can last. 

While those revenues are going up, they are “relatively sluggish” and “haven’t been increasing by a lot,” said Asatryan.

The increase in revenue from the church tax is considerably lower than the increase in revenue from income tax. State revenue from wage and income taxes rose by 6.65 percent in 2025, said Kopp, whereas church tax revenue increased by 1.93 percent.

“Long-term projections indicate that church tax revenue will decline significantly over the coming decades as church membership continues to decrease,” said the spokesperson for the Evangelical Church in Germany.

Protestant churches are already preparing for their income to decrease “through long-term planning processes,” said the spokesperson. “Without this system, the church’s religious, social and charitable work would not be possible on its current scale.”  

50 years ago, the Ramones released their self-titled debut LP. Adorned with a black-and-white photo of the faux brotherhood against a brick wall at the back of CBGB (taken by photographer and CB’s door person, Roberta Bayley), Johnny, Tommy, Joey and Dee Dee stood somewhat awkwardly wearing jeans in various stages of destruction, T-shirts (shoutout to drummer Tommy for going with the belly shirt), leather jackets and sneakers. 

It’s important to remember that it was 1976, so this particular fashion choice was not yet au courant, because they had just codified it. The outfits that they’d wear walking around were the same outfits they’d wear onstage. They standardized on this particular uniform because everyone had different ideas of what they wanted to wear onstage and they didn’t want audiences to think they were a glam band or, worse. “I mean, these guys were not hippies,” said Legs McNeil, co-creator of “PUNK” magazine. No, they weren’t.

“Ramones” features 14 songs in total, seven songs on each side, because Ramones songs come in around two minutes and change. The album opens with one of the best opening tracks of any debut album: “Blitzkrieg Bop.” That wall of sound barrage of guitars and then: “Hey, ho, let’s go!” It never fails to sound like a call to arms. As an introduction to this band, they couldn’t have chosen a better song; it precisely conveyed exactly who the band was and what they were about. 

Fifty years later, “Blitzkrieg Bop” feels ubiquitous. The intro gets blasted at sporting events to raise energy or when something good happens, and it never fails to rally a crowd. That opening track has been featured in at least one video game and a wide selection of TV commercials for a long line of different product offerings: airlines, car brands, fast food, exercise equipment, financial products, mobile phone networks, vaccinations, a cartoon movie, and perhaps most memorably, diet soda, featuring animated pogoing soda cans. 

But in 1976, and in fact the entire duration of the band’s existence (they officially ceased operations in 1996), the Ramones did not achieve chart positions of any note. “Ramones” went to #111 on the Billboard 200, and their highest charting album was 1980’s Phil Spector-produced “End of the Century,” which reached #44 in the U.S. and got as high as #11 in the U.K. “It’s crazy when Phil Spector produces your record and you still don’t have a top ten record,” Eddie Vedder mentioned when he inducted the Ramones into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Their singles didn’t do much better. Only three Ramones songs ever made it to the Billboard Hot 100 — “Rockaway Beach,” “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker,” and “Do You Wanna Dance,” all absolute bangers that should be enshrined in the culture. “Rockaway Beach” did the best out of the three, and by “best” we’re still talking #66 (and it took a year to get there); the other two only got as high as the 80s. The numerous post-breakup compilations and live albums didn’t fare any better, and not even an appearance on “The Simpsons” in 1993 or numerous other mainstream cinema placements (like the title track for a Stephen King movie, “Pet Sematary”) moved the needle in any meaningful direction from a sales or chart or airplay perspective.

With that information in hand, it won’t be surprising to learn that none of the singles released from the 14 albums put out during the band’s existence (or again, afterwards) garnered any radio airplay on commercial radio (college radio is of course another story), and outside of places like Brazil (and towards the end of their career), the Ramones could not get arrested, much less sell out arenas or anything much larger than a theater. (In Brazil, however, they sold out stadiums and their tour bus was mobbed with crowds that made Beatlemania look like nursery school.) 

“Ramones” also featured such hits as “Beat on the Brat,” “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You,” and “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World.” Of course that statement is inaccurate, because the Ramones didn’t have any hits, not in 1976 and not ever. That wasn’t the plan — no one in the Ramones, their management or their record company was pretending that commercial success wasn’t important to them. It just eluded them.

To quote Legs McNeil in “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones”: “Those songs are classic American pop songs. Why weren’t they played on the radio?” 

Two words: punk rock. 

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The Ramones were the second band from downtown NYC’s Class of 1975 to be signed to a major label (Patti Smith was first). They had the full support of Sire Records and a great manager in Danny Fields (who would become the subject of the band’s song “Danny Says” later). The band toured the U.S., playing anywhere that would have them; there was no touring circuit for original bands starting out back then. Danny Fields later explained, “Every place we went to, there were bands that did not exist when the Ramones first played there, and when they came back, they did.” (They’re not the only band that can make that claim, but that doesn’t make it untrue or irrelevant.)

A show the band played in London on July 4th, 1976 is considered by the people involved to be a major impetus to the formation of U.K. punk rock, with members of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Damned (and more) in the audience that night. No less than Joe Strummer would later say, “If that Ramones record hadn’t existed, I don’t know that we could have built a scene here. Because it filled a vital gap between the death of the old pub rocking scene and the advent of punk.”

But it would be precisely that historical moment that would be the band’s downfall. When the Sex Pistols’ record came out, initially the Stateside reaction was positive, at least from people in the Ramones’ camp. “Not only did Malcolm [McLaren, Sex Pistols’ manager] steal the scene and repackage it, but the music was good,” Legs McNeil was quoted as saying. “We kind of felt us and the Sex Pistols would become almost like The Beatles and the Stones; we were the new revolution,” Joey said. 

And that might have happened, if the Sex Pistols had booked their first U.S. tour through the kinds of major, music-friendly cities that most bands visit. Instead, Malcolm McLaren wanted the tour routing to go through more authentic, working-class cities, so it opened in Atlanta and traipsed through the Southwest, visiting places like Memphis, San Antonio and Tulsa before finishing up (and breaking up) in San Francisco. 

The Sex Pistols headlining the Palladium in New York City or the Agora in Cleveland wouldn’t have made splashy headlines. But when you play smaller cities that don’t usually get international touring acts, and when everything you hear about the band and the movement they represent is exaggerated and sensationalized, and the band are absolutely willing to play into all of that for the sake of headlines, it’s not going to end up well for anybody. The Sex Pistols arriving in Memphis was the kind of news story that would show up on your local news station at 6 p.m., and once one station ran with it, the rest followed. 

“It was getting such a negative feeling of . . . it was going to destroy the whole thing, which is what happened; it scared everyone else off, scared off the music industry, scared off the radio,” Joey remembered. And then there was the episode of NBC’s “Weekend” news magazine, which would run in place of “Saturday Night Live” one weekend a month. In June of 1977, “Weekend” ran an episode about U.K. punk. Years later, Joey Ramone offered, “One day on 60 Minutes was a thing about the Sex Pistols and the safety pins and everybody gouging each other’s eyeballs out and strangulation, and everybody flipped out, and things changed radically. It really kind of screwed things up for ourselves.”

Danny Fields explained how the view of the Sex Pistols as 100% representative of “punk rock” ended up impacting the Ramones: “. . .when their records went around to radio stations, they intuitively say, ‘What do I know about them? They’re trouble. They throw up, and if we play it, we’ll have to have them here, and they’ll throw up on the console in the recording studio, and we don’t want them. Don’t play their records; it’s easier.’ It’s always easier not to do something than to do it.”

It wasn’t just the Ramones. Blondie’s Debbie Harry complained that the radio stations would tell her, “We like you. Give us something to play,” when they’d just released their version of “Denis,” a surefire pop hit if there was one. Blondie would eventually break through into actual pop stardom, but also had to fight back against the “punk” label.

This explanation is going to feel thoroughly anodyne in 2026, when you can walk into places like Hot Topic or Target and buy merchandise from bands that at least once upon a time were considered “punk.” If you could even find a Ramones T-shirt in the ’70s or ’80s, you weren’t going to wear it anywhere besides a Ramones concert unless you wanted to find yourself in an argument, or worse. Musician Jesse Malin lived in Queens, a subway ride away from CBGB, and yet he tells endless stories about getting hassled by random passersby or having stuff thrown at him from car windows just for dressing differently. 

The Ramones eventually retired because of interpersonal issues: Johnny stole Joey’s girlfriend. And it would probably be a lot easier to deal with all of that if your band had achieved the kind of commercial success you deserved and weren’t still touring in an Econoline van. (When they were inducted into the Rock Hall, Eddie Vedder commended them for still touring in a van, but a tour bus might have kept them around a while longer.) The Ramones wrote songs and played music because it was the only thing they wanted to do, the only thing they could do, the only thing that made sense to them. 

Countless bands have given them their props — Pearl Jam took them out on tour, they were asked to play Lollapalooza in 1996, U2 wrote a song about them, among many others  — and the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, their second year of eligibility, but not early enough for Joey to have seen it happen; he died in 2001, and would be followed by Dee Dee (2002), Johnny (2004) and Tommy in 2014. (Later, Ramones CJ and Marky are still carrying the torch.) 

The records are still there and still sound great, even if they didn’t earn their creators the kind of money and lifestyle that they deserved. And the Ramones are still inspiring kids all over the world to write a song, pick up a guitar, and go out and play, no matter how bad they might think they are, because that’s exactly what the Ramones did. 

The post 50 years later, the Ramones’ debut still defines punk appeared first on Salon.com.

Exercise can be a humbling experience. 

A simple push-up can debase the most dignified humans, transforming them into helpless little halibuts, unable to unmoor their bellies from the floor. Squats and lunges can leave their victims crouching like tiny goblins or trembling against gravity’s will. Have you ever willingly watched yourself run at full speed? Only if you have self-esteem of steel.

But for certain people, the most physically demanding experience of their lives is not something they want to avoid, but an alluring temptation: a challenge too impossible to ignore, an irresistible dare that must be completed day after day. And they quench this desire — as well as the thirst for friendship and community; some vanity muscles; and mini vacations to the likes of Oslo, Brisbane, and Bangkok — in the sweaty, grunty, made-for-TikTok $200 million world known as Hyrox. 

What is Hyrox and why is everyone doing it without me?

HYROX is stylized in all caps. Capitalization makes it seem as if it’s a word that only exists to be yelled, an apt choice for an experience that seems to take inspiration from military training and/or the PE class you hated growing up.  

Since launching in Germany in 2017, Hyrox has become a worldwide phenomenon. As CNBC reported in June, it initially started with just 650 people and now is projected to capture roughly 1.5 million participants across 121 events in 34 countries around the world. Revenue, which comes from a combination of contest entry fees, sponsorships, merch, licensing for Hyrox-affiliated gyms, and other avenues, is expected to reach $270 million in 2026. This year, 42,000 tickets were sold to the New York City race in the event’s first 24 hours. In 2025, there were roughly 12,700 athletes registered for the event.     

Technically speaking, Hyrox is a timed competition that spans eight rounds; the person or team — athletes can compete as individuals, as doubles with a partner, or as part of a relay — with the fastest overall time wins.

Each round consists of a 1-kilometer run followed by a more “functional” strength-based move, often done using a machine. These exercises include: 1,000 meters on a SkiErg; a weighted 50-meter sled push; a weighted 50-meter sled pull; 80-meter burpee broad jumps; a 1,000-meter row; a 200-meter Farmers Carry (lugging around two heavy weights at your side while walking); 100 meters of lunges with a sandbag on your back; and 100 wall balls (squat thrusts that involve launching a medicine ball into the air as you stand). It’s run-exercise-run-exercise-run-exercise until all eight kilometers and all eight movements are completed.

But Hyrox is also, Hyroxers say, a lifestyle. Because the best way to succeed at Hyrox — and for many participants, winning or at least finishing with a decent time is the goal — is to train for it. That likely means going to Hyrox-affiliated gyms that prepare you for the different exercises, and training alongside other people who also plan to run the race. And that’s where it can get all-consuming.    

Abby Roskind, a 35-year-old project manager living in Washington, DC, who has finished two races, told me that Hyrox sort of subsumes your entire existence. Training for Hyrox, she said, involved 5:30 am workouts, an excruciating amount of time learning how to properly broad jump, daily soreness, and lots of complaining. 

“Because you are always with other people doing these things, it becomes a little bit of a hostile takeover of your life where you meet up with your ‘fitness’ friends, and then they become your actual friends, and all you end up doing when you’re not training for Hyrox is talking about Hyrox,” she said. 

Roskind and other Hyroxers told me that people who are very serious about wanting to do well in competition may go on a diet, cut alcohol before the race, or squeeze in extra workouts, which naturally leads to less dinners out, less meeting up for drinks, and, ultimately, less socializing. It makes sense that people going through this experience will want to talk about Hyrox since so much of their life centers on it, and that the best audience for a discussion on Hyrox strategy would be other people doing Hyrox. 

“It definitely didn’t come across as culty where it’s like, ‘Oh, welcome to my Scientology of Exercise and you’re going to do this,’” said LJ, a 34-year-old with one Hyrox under his belt. (LJ told me he was afraid of being “canceled” by fellow Hyroxers and maybe his friends for talking to Vox, so we agreed to let him use his first initials to maintain some anonymity.) LJ said that one of his friends had run races in Europe and talked him and a small group of others in their circle into competing this past year. They generally approach it as a fun, casual thing to do together.  

@sotrue.kristin

just a spectator, speculating😌 #hyrox #chicago #fyp #foryoupage #spectator

♬ WHERE IS MY HUSBAND! – RAYE

“But then when I got to the actual venue day of the race, I felt like Hillary Clinton walking through that apartment like, What the hell is going on here?” he said. “Because there are a lot of people where this is a big chunk of their life. I saw people walking around — I guess they [Hyrox] give out badges — showing all the badges that they had from all the different cities that they competed in.” 

The idea of someone, ostensibly with a day job, going from city to city to compete in Hyrox and then showing off commemorative brooches is what signaled to LJ that the workout he enjoyed could be experienced in a different, more serious way. In that moment, LJ saw Hyrox the way outsiders might. Still, for him, the positives of Hyrox — being in better shape; experiencing runner’s highs, friendships, and the rush of competition — outweighed the possible cult-by-association.

A lot of people want to feel like an elite athlete, and now we can pay for the experience

If you make a Hyroxer feel comfortable enough, you will find that they all love to talk about the parts of the race they hate the most. It’s the feeling of thick death rushing through their lungs as they stare down the number of meters left in the burpee broad jump section. It’s the judges who are there to make sure participants are getting low enough during the wall balls. It’s seemingly everything about the race. 

There’s a bottomless chasm between how much people love Hyrox and how much they love to talk about how much it actually sucks to do. The bridge that connects the two is getting to feel like an elite athlete.  

“Once you become an adult, how many times are you going to get a sticker?” James McMillian, a trainer and the president at Tone House, a strength and conditioning facility in New York City, asked me. “How many times are you going to get a reward? How many times are you going to get a medal? People just want to be part of something. They want to feel close to greatness.”

McMillian, who has completed six Hyrox races, said that the vast majority of us will never ever know what it’s like to be a GOAT like A’ja Wilson or Lionel Messi, but Hyrox lets racers microdose it: the discipline sticking to a training schedule (as opposed to just working out day after day), the adrenaline of competing on game day, and the high of thousands of people cheering for you. 

“They turned working out into an athletic sport,” McMillian said. “Making everyday people feel like an athlete and giving them that opportunity to compete like one — that’s a smart business.”

Because it turns out that people are more than willing to pay for that athlete feeling. 

While participants aren’t required to work out at Hyrox-affiliated gyms to run the race, Hyrox-specific classes can cost more than regular group fitness packages. One Hyroxer told me that their 10-class package was around $600. There’s also a microindustry developing around getting better times. You might, for example, purchase Hyrox-branded fitness trackers and training apps, Hyrox shoes, and Hyrox equipment for your home gym (like a Hyrox Official Competition Power Rope, $275; Official Competition Sandbag, $87; or HYROX Perform Turf, starting at $1,799).     

The actual competition varies in price depending on the race and location, but can cost upward of $200. Racers can also opt in for a $35 photo package, which means a professional will take shots of themselves looking muscular and sweaty during the race.

You don’t have to beat anyone else better or qualify to compete in Hyrox — you just have to buy a ticket in.

Then there’s Hyrox’s travel aspect. Hyrox is a benchmark and a goal, and race day is the culmination of all the training and sacrifice. It’s also where you get an official time. More competitive racers are training not just for their home city’s Hyrox, but to go to other races on the Hyrox calendar. 

The races are often in desirable destinations like Rome, Berlin, and Miami Beach, which can make Hyrox seem like vacation or, I guess, make a vacation seem more like Hyrox. If you’re traveling for Hyrox, that may mean paying for a plane or train ticket, or gasoline, and lodging. One Hyroxer I spoke to said that he spent roughly $1,500 on airfare and a hotel in addition to the official entry fees and photo options. Another said they spent roughly $500 in travel, saving money by splitting a hotel with a fellow racer. 

“Look, it’s the fitness space’s Eras Tour,” Bobby McMullen, a trainer and founder of the fitness app Adonis, told me. McMullen has completed four Hyrox races. “If you don’t get to do as well as you think, you’re like, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Vegas, I’ll go to Vegas,’” McMullen said. “Or if maybe you do really well and you’re like, ‘Oh, I want to go do that again.’”

“If you travel for Hyrox, just like if you travel for Taylor or if you travel for Disney, that’s fine,” McMullen added. “But the thing I learned about Disney adults is they’re rich. It’s so expensive. Same with Hyrox.” 

Hyrox is easy, sort of 

Here is a secret to the success of Hyrox that you may not believe: Despite its HARDCORE exterior and all of its supposed brutality, Hyrox is fairly accessible for a certain type of person, particularly millennials who have made fitness a part of their life for a couple of decades now, and who’ve dabbled in intense workout trends that included Tae Bo, CrossFit, Orange Theory, and Peloton. Think about it: Hyrox couldn’t do $270 million in business if it was too difficult for people with injuries, or if participants couldn’t finish, let alone do it over and over again.

Adherents claim there’s less injury risk compared to CrossFit because Hyrox exercises are relatively lower impact and don’t involve lifting heavy weights in complicated ways. Hyrox requires less training than preparing for something like a marathon, coaches and trainers told me. Unlike a triathlon, you don’t need to find access to water or risk drowning. The same cannot be said of an IRONMAN (another race, stylized in capitalizations that just feel very aggressive).

“For the New York marathon, I would have to start training right now,” McMillian, the coach and president at Tone House said. “I could start training a month and a half before and be able to finish.” 

To be clear, McMillian makes his living being fit. Though we did not put this to the test, I’m pretty sure he could squat two of me. McMillian competes in the pro division, the competition’s advanced tier. His definition of what’s physically doable is relative because McMillian looks like he could physically do anything. 

Still, he assured me that Hyrox’s barrier to entry is lower than it might seem. While prospective Hyrox racers also have the option of taking uniquely tailored classes at Hyrox-affiliated gyms (over 15,000 across the world) and group fitness studios, McMillian said you can do most of the race’s strength-based exercises or variations of them on your own, at any basic modern gym, making it somewhat more accessible. 

“What we noticed with our clients was that these are movements they’re already doing,” McMillian said. “All we have to do is make you better at those movements and teach you how to breathe during the movements, teach you the actual metrics on the rowers to be more efficient, teach you how to be a better runner instead of teaching you a whole new style of training. We’re already teaching you what you know how to do.”

Essentially, people already working out — and there are plenty of them — are well equipped to try Hyrox. Part of Hyrox’s appeal is that it’s a bigger, bolder version of the popular, grueling luxury fitness classes that already exist, or a more competitive version of what everyone’s already doing at Equinox. “It’s a little like, how good can you gym?” says Roskind, the DC-based project manager who’s competed in two Hyrox races. 

She wryly pointed out that being good at Hyrox is a little different than winning a tournament in a skill-based sport (e.g., tennis, soccer, basketball) or getting a qualifying time into a speed-based race like swimming or running. You don’t have to beat anyone else better or qualify to compete — you just have to buy a ticket in.

Being so good at the gym and spending money to compete against other people who are good at the gym is perhaps why some racers I spoke to seemed to temper their love of Hyrox with a scrim of self-deprecation. It’s as if they’re slightly embarrassed that this race may be a millennial-targeted fake Olympics, and it’s scored a direct hit with them. In mixed company, they might not want to say why they’re really going to Athens, Mexico City, or Dublin.

This may be the most relatable thing about Hyrox and the people who love it: Even when you’re really good at exercise, it can still find a way to be, at least, a little humbling.    

MIRROR, ALBERTA — Nestled within a sleepy community campground and roadside cafe, hundreds of Canadians are gathered to imagine a new country of their own.

It’s July 1, and they’re hosting a family-friendly event that looks like a typical Canada Day celebration. Live music, a farmers’ market, hamburgers on the grill. Except there isn’t a Maple Leaf in sight.

Instead, people have wrapped themselves in Alberta’s flag, wave “we’re done” banners and wear “Trump 2024” and MAGA — Make Alberta Great Again — ball caps. This is an “Albertans’ Day” gathering at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which gained notoriety for bucking pandemic-era rules and which former Alberta premier Jason Kenney calls “ground zero” for the province’s fast-growing separatist movement.

Instead, people have wrapped themselves in Alberta’s flag, wave “we’re done” banners and wear “Trump 2024” and MAGA — Make Alberta Great Again — ball caps. This is an “Albertans’ Day” gathering at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which gained notoriety for bucking pandemic-era rules and which former Alberta premier Jason Kenney calls “ground zero” for the province’s fast-growing separatist movement.

And until Alberta separates, Moore places her faith not in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — whom she views as part of a Davos “cabal” — but in U.S. President Donald Trump.

“I kept thinking this: Trump is the only one that can save us.”

Moore’s affinity for conspiracy theories is shared by many, though certainly not all, of the separatists. Resentment toward the federal government in Ottawa is longstanding in Alberta. But a surprising new ingredient has turbocharged the separatist push: Trump and the increasingly toxic U.S.-Canada relationship. The separatists are furious about Carney’s friction with Trump and the fraying ties to their southern neighbor. Some even hope the Trump administration might help their cause.

Many separatists believe Trump’s presidency makes Alberta’s independence possible, with the United States a ready customer for its oil and gas should they split from Canada. One group, the Alberta Prosperity Project, is trying to seek a C$500-billion U.S. government loan to fund the province’s “seamless departure” from Canada.

“This isn’t your grandfather’s independence movement,” says Jeffrey Rath, a co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project and a longtime separatist activist who has sought to court the Trump administration.

Many separatists see a cultural kinship with the United States. They proudly share fake newspaper clippings that highlight the province’s history of early American settlers allegedly helping to shape a self-reliant, frontier culture that remains in Alberta today. They argue the Eastern provinces are more associated with European traditions than American ones.

While some object to Trump’s idea of making Canada the 51st American state, others embrace the idea.

“I like freedom and less taxes,” says Casey Phillips from Edmonton, Alberta.

Carney and his government are now working hard to convince skeptical Albertans their best prospects lie with a united Canada. He and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who called the Oct. 19 vote, are touting a new pipeline agreement to send western oil abroad. The effort may work with some swing voters, but the hard-core separatists aren’t likely to buy it.

“It will never happen because Canada’s a communist country and there will be 24 years of paperwork,” Phillips says of the pipeline project. “It’s all lies.”

The separatists have good reason to think the Trump administration could be an ally. In January, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Alberta a “natural partner for the U.S.” while referencing the province’s “great resources.”

“People are talking,” Bessent told conservative podcaster Jack Posobiec, nodding to the separatist movement. “People want sovereignty. They want what the U.S. has got.”

Rath says he has requested introductions to the U.S. Treasury Department and major financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs to build a day one feasibility plan for Albertan independence, though it’s unclear if he has had any such conversations.

The Alberta Prosperity Project, however, has taken three trips to Washington, D.C., and Rath insists the group has met with “very senior level” officials, who he says have taken their information directly to the White House.

A State Department spokesperson said the department “regularly meets with a wide range of representatives. We do not anticipate any future meetings, and all department engagements are at our sole discretion.”

“As Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra has said, the vote is a decision for the people of Alberta,” the spokesperson added.

Bessent made his comments amid heightened U.S.-Canada tensions; days earlier Carney had argued at Davos that middle powers needed to form new coalitions after the Trump-fueled “rupture” in the global order.

That episode inflamed the pro-America separatists, as did Carney’s subsequent use of the phrase “new world order” during a January trip to China to sign new energy and trade agreements. That phrase is catnip to those who fear the creation of a global government, and more conspiracy theories quickly seeped into Alberta’s separatist movement through Facebook groups and YouTube videos claiming Carney is steering the country toward communism and against the U.S.

But it’s also true that Alberta’s grievances with Ottawa began long before Carney jostled with Trump. They have been passed down for generations, rooted in a belief that the federal government has ignored, exploited or misunderstood the province since its founding.

Today, that resentment has become deeply personal. Separatists point to what they see as federal overreach and clean energy policies that have made life more expensive and undermined their economy.

Federalists, meanwhile, are alarmed that neighbors, friends, family, and sometimes even spouses, are “willing to betray their country,” in Kenney’s words.

Former Conservative MP Damien Kurek cautions against dismissing separatists as traitors. Instead, he argues, politicians should ask why so many Albertans feel abandoned by the federation.

For Kurek, one of the defining moments of Albertan anger came in 2021, when U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office by revoking its cross-border permit.

The ripple effects spread throughout Kurek’s riding. He says mechanics had fewer oilfield trucks to repair and restaurants served fewer meals, while roadside motels sat empty and young families put off buying homes.

But what many Albertans remember most isn’t Biden’s decision. It’s the belief that Ottawa, under then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, failed to fight it.

“I was very frustrated with the Liberals, including many Liberals that told me that I just needed to accept it, that are still on the Liberal Cabinet benches today,” says Kurek, whose riding included Hardisty, Canada’s largest oil pipeline hub.

That moment reinforced a deeper belief among many of his constituents, he says: If our national leader won’t stand up for us when we need him most, the very “promise of Canada” was in question.

Many in rural Alberta feel like their communities live or die by decisions made thousands of miles away in Ottawa. But this was just another chapter in a much longer story.

Kenney, the former Alberta premier, traces Western alienation back to the province’s creation in 1905. He says Ottawa initially treated Alberta more like a colony than an equal partner, including delaying provincial control over its natural resources.

The modern separatist movement then took shape in the 1980s after former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced the National Energy Program, which raised taxes on oil companies and oil exports and shifted more of the industry’s profits from Alberta to Ottawa. The unpopular program was dismantled five years later, but Albertans didn’t forget.

When Trudeau’s son, Justin, became prime minister in 2015, his government introduced environmental policies that Alberta’s oil industry argued made it more difficult and expensive to build pipelines, expand production and attract investment.

Albertans’ sense of alienation also extends beyond energy policy. Many feel their votes carry less weight than those cast in vote-rich Ontario and Quebec, since that’s where federal elections are often decided. After repeatedly electing Conservative MPs only to see Liberal governments take power in Ottawa, some have concluded federal elections have little effect on Alberta’s fortunes.

That frustration is compounded by Canada’s equalization program, enshrined in the Constitution, which redistributes federal tax revenue to help less wealthy provinces fund public services. Because Alberta’s oil-rich economy is one of the country’s wealthiest, it has never qualified for those payments. At the same time, Ottawa collects more in federal taxes from Albertans than it spends in the province, which reinforces a decades-old belief that Alberta bankrolls the rest of the country while getting too little in return.

“It’s very scary to see what they’re trying to take from us, what they’re trying to control,” says Trina, a Red Deer resident who volunteers with a separatist group and who did not give her last name. “It leaves us with a lot of uncertainty. Nothing feels secure.”

Carney is aware of the challenge ahead. Even as he has warned Alberta against stumbling into its own Brexit disaster, he has sought to address the province’s most tangible concerns.

Last November, Carney signed an agreement with Alberta to work toward a new oil pipeline and soon after, delivered a sobering wake-up call to his Liberal caucus behind closed doors.

To the surprise of MPs in the room, Carney opened his remarks by addressing the specter of Alberta separatism, framing the pipeline deal not just as an economic win, but as a strategic necessity to keep the country together.

“He was emotional,” a Liberal MP, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal party matters, told POLITICO at the time. “You could hear a pin drop.”

It was a clear sign from the prime minister that the separatist movement was shaping his thinking — and federal policy.

“This was a no-BS kind of thing,” the Liberal lawmaker said. “This was coming from someone who grew up in that province, who understands that province, and who was very worried about the feelings of alienation.”

The speech also marked Carney’s first step in persuading Liberal supporters — many of whom had embraced Justin Trudeau’s aggressive climate agenda — that pipelines, increased oil production and energy exports were essential to Canada’s economic and geopolitical future.

Carney has made a similar pitch to the broader public.

“In Canada, we are strongest when we are united — when we look out for each other and ensure that no child, no family, no one is left behind,” Carney said in a speech to Canadians and his Cabinet in January. “This spirit of solidarity and generosity helps define us as a nation.”

Nine months later, Carney has backed up that message with action. Since taking office, he has rolled back several Trudeau-era environmental policies despite pushback from some Liberal MPs, including former environment minister Steven Guilbeault, who is leaving politics after accusing his party of “backsliding” on climate action. Last month, the West Coast oil pipeline got closer to fruition, after Carney’s government announced its partnership with Alberta would amount to a C$35 billion project in a bid to boost the province’s energy sector.

The policy shift is part of Ottawa’s effort to encourage federalists to send a strong message on Oct. 19, that they want to remain in Canada. In July, Carney made three trips to Alberta, two of which included photo-ops with Smith, Alberta’s premier. Both have been framing their pipeline pact as proof that Canada still works, for all its people, even as many separatists argue it comes a decade too late.

Federalists say the biggest risk in the vote isn’t necessarily that Alberta endorses moving toward separation; polls show about 30 percent of Albertans want independence. It’s that federalists don’t show up to vote since they assume victory. If turnout is low, a highly motivated separatist base could post an unexpectedly strong result, giving the movement new legitimacy and driving away private investment in the province.

“We can all think that the worst isn’t going to happen. We could put signs on our lawn and write poetry about Canadian unity. But honestly, unless people show up at the polls on Oct. 19, we could lose this referendum question,” says Eleanor Olszewski, a federal Liberal cabinet minister from Alberta.

Back outside the Whistle Stop Cafe, the conversations at Albertans’ Day drift from claims Carney wasn’t democratically elected, to beliefs the pandemic was orchestrated by global elites, to how a federal ban on assault-style firearms is meant to stop Canadians from rising up against the federal government.

One vendor sells knives, stun batons, tactical shovels, night-vision glasses and body shields, encouraging Albertans to protect themselves. Pickup trucks and SUVs are modified to look like sheriff’s vehicles with “Republic of Alberta” decals. Some separatists show off homemade T-shirts that read “skid mark Carney” or “pure-blood warriors” showcasing a white baby in the paws of a lion.

The antipathy toward Carney and enthusiasm for Trump even has some separatists ready to defend Trump’s wave of tariffs against Canadian goods.

Keith Walker, who is from a small farming community in southern Alberta, believes the only thing preventing Canada from becoming a communist country under Carney is Trump’s trade war.

Canada, in his view, is part of a group of governments that Trump is trying to dismantle alongside Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. “That’s why that’s happening,” Walker says of Trump’s tariffs; he and a friend are both wearing Trump 2024 hats.

The separatists’ longstanding grievances with Ottawa aren’t occurring in a vacuum. Populist forces have reshaped the globe over the last decade, amid Brexit and Trump and the pandemic, and they are now converging in Alberta.

Separatism has become a right-wing uni-cause.

“It is a perfect umbrella,” Kenney says, “for every obsession, paranoia and anxiety on the right.”

A fashion label called Fecal Matter is having a moment.

Matières Fécales — literally French for “fecal matter” — has gone from an intentionally provocative outsider project to dressing some of the world’s biggest celebrities, including Zendaya, Lady Gaga, Demi Moore and Kylie Jenner.

And yes, the name is intentional.

Canadian designers Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran founded the label after meeting as fashion students in Montreal. Frustrated with an industry they viewed as wasteful, exclusionary and obsessed with consumption, the pair wanted a name that reflected their criticism of it.

They landed on Matières Fécales — not the more familiar French “merde,” or “caca,” but the considerably more clinical term for fecal matter.

The designers initially became known for an intentionally unsettling aesthetic that included shaved eyebrows, extreme makeup, alien-like silhouettes and their infamous “skin heels,” footwear designed to appear as though a human foot had been stretched into a high heel.

Now, Fecal Matter has gone decidedly mainstream.

Zendaya recently wore an enormous white winged creation from the label to the premiere of “The Odyssey,” styled by longtime collaborator Law Roach. Lady Gaga wore the designers to the Grammys, while Demi Moore appeared in Matières Fécales at Cannes.

Kylie Jenner has even worn the brand in a Dunkin’ campaign.

The label’s growing popularity presents a certain irony for a project founded partly as a critique of fashion’s excesses: Matières Fécales is now luxury fashion itself.

Pieces from the label can sell for hundreds or even more than $1,000 through luxury retailers, while the designers have moved from selling early creations online to appearing on some of fashion’s most prominent stages.

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And perhaps that’s also the point.

Fashion has a long history of turning provocation, rebellion and even criticism of the industry itself into something desirable — and expensive. Matières Fécales set out to confront a fashion industry they believed was full of excess and waste.

So, the fashion industry responded by making Fecal Matter chic.

The post “Fecal Matter” mocked luxury fashion. Then luxury fashion bought it appeared first on Salon.com.

Cornell University has clarified that its dorm kitchens are for cooking food — not butchering bears.

The upstate New York university has now banned students from processing wild animals in shared residential kitchens after two students brought a legally hunted black bear into a dorm last fall and skinned it in a communal cooking space.

The incident occurred in September 2025, when students living in Ganędagǫ Hall reported seeing two classmates processing a black bear in the residence hall’s communal kitchen. Photos circulated among students and eventually reached Cornell University Police.

The students at the Ivy league university had legally hunted the bear off campus and brought it back to the dorm to process the meat, according to the Cornell Daily Sun. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation investigated but determined that no hunting laws had been violated, and no charges were filed.

The legality of the hunt, however, wasn’t the only issue.

Cornell temporarily closed the kitchen following the incident and had the space professionally cleaned before allowing students to use it again. Handling wild game can pose food-safety risks: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that raw or undercooked wild game, including bear meat, can carry trichinella parasites, which cause trichinellosis.

Nearly a year later, Cornell has made its position considerably clearer.

Under updated housing rules, students are prohibited from “skinning, butchering, or otherwise processing wild game animals” inside residential buildings. However, the policy still allows students to store and cook legally obtained game meat.

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The bear incident became something of campus legend in the months afterward. The Cornell Daily Sun even published a satirical guide in April titled “How To Skin a Bear in Your Dorm’s Kitchen” and an sardonic commentary how people have “spotted the ghost of a bear” haunting campus.

There is one final bit of irony: Cornell’s longtime unofficial mascot is Touchdown the Big Red Bear, a tradition dating to 1915, when the football team once adopted a live black bear. Its current incarnation is a student in a big red bear costume performing at sporting games.

More than a century later, Cornell apparently still has bears turning up on campus — though university officials would now prefer students not butcher them in the dorm kitchen.

Cornell’s new dorm policy means students hoping to recreate the episode will now have to take their bear elsewhere. For everyone else sharing the kitchen, that’s probably one less thing to worry about when making dinner.

The post Cornell has a new dorm rule: Don’t butcher bears appeared first on Salon.com.

In the music video for Ariana Grande’s latest single, “Petal” — the title track off her eighth album, released last week — viewer discretion is advised. A parental advisory opens the clip, warning of the video’s explicit content and depictions of graphic violence, which culminate in Grande taking a chainsaw to the heads of four cigar-smoking, whiskey-chugging record execs. Earlier in the video, Grande’s character, Pepper, receives their written notes, including one that pointedly contains the critique, “Boring on the eyes, a little homely, couldn’t hurt to lose a few pounds.” The power tool to their throats is supposed to be a moment of personal and artistic triumph, echoed by the raucous cheers from the other women waiting to audition outside the blood-splattered boardroom. 

But when Grande emerges from the audition, fake blood glistening from the visible curvature of her sternum beneath her skin, the jubilant, almost extreme response from the rest of the women feels as insidious as the criticisms from the men. They’re blindly screaming their heads off, bolstered by the person who stopped molding herself in someone else’s image, who refused to cater to how the world or the industry thought she should appear. Grande’s defiant self-control over her image is something for them to celebrate, even worship. Her restraint is the commendable trait on which the women hang their devotion. As the chorus of “Petal” puts it, “It’s such a f*cked situation.”

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Shortly after the video was released, the internet exploded with concern about Grande’s noticeably svelte appearance, and the scenes in the clip that seemed intended to exploit it. Grande’s stanbase quickly retaliated, saying that those commenting on her weight were bringing back body-shaming and tabloid-era hypercriticism. Detractors responded in turn, worrying that Grande’s ardent fans were enabling the singer’s unhealthy behavior and speculated eating disorder. The worry over Grande’s visible emaciation rendered the video itself moot. Whatever the message was — a self-aware nod to Grande’s own struggles, a defensive reply to those saying she’s too thin, a criticism of blind idol worship — it was quickly lost. A couple of days later, Grande’s team announced that she’d be taking a break from “public-facing work” following the conclusion of her Eternal Sunshine Tour in September. And while Grande later insisted the break was pre-planned and not “reactive or impulsive,” there’s no doubt the announcement was timed to dull the cacophony of both the jeers and cheers.

Watching the veneer slip from Grande’s grasp during a pivotal moment in her life is eerily reminiscent of the events in John Early’s wonderful film “Maddie’s Secret,” which coincidentally had its digital release the same day “Petal” hit shelves. In the film, Early plays Maddie Ralph, an aspiring test-kitchen chef at a hip food publication. With a major career milestone within her reach and increased appearances in front of the camera, the sudden pressures on Maddie trigger long-hidden patterns of disordered eating: bingeing and purging, secrets and lies. 

And though Early’s film is a melodramatic comedy, it gets patently serious when it comes to the grim realities of eating disorders, taking an unrestrained and, at times, uncomfortable look at the harm enabling can do, and the tragedies it can engender. In a moment when no one can quite agree on how to properly address what’s so clearly happening before our eyes with Grande, a film like “Maddie’s Secret” opens a dialogue. It’s not pretty or easy. But then again, movies tend to make the most sense out of the aspects of life that are neither pretty nor easy.

It helps that Early’s vision of our media-steeped contemporary lives sees through the shiny, digital facade. The company Maddie works for, GourMaybe, functions somewhat like the pre-cancellation “Bon Appétit” test kitchen. It’s so intentionally inclusive and ambitious that it turns right back around to feel limiting, pigeonholing Maddie into a place where she feels in constant competition with her colleagues and herself. While waiting for two of her coworkers to leave a bathroom so she can purge, Maddie hears them discussing an app where you “input all your trauma and it links you up with a therapist, all over FaceTime.” The dance class Maddie attends with her best friend, Deena (Kate Berlant), is “radically inclusive, none of that toxic gym bro stuff.” All of the regimens surrounding Maddie and her illness are purportedly designed to be easily accessible for healthy, honest living. But they’re the same old systems in different clothes. And when Maddie’s disorder tells her she needs to stay in control, she contorts all of this trendy pastel-colored, serif-typefaced wellness to her favor, using it to fuel her harmful compulsions.

Grande moves in a similar space, but without the satire to easily delineate the difference between healthy and unhealthy behaviors. Like Maddie, she can easily cloak compulsions under the blanket of modern body positivity. When her noticeably smaller appearance began to concern people in 2023, Grande took to TikTok, urging the public to be “gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies . . . [even if you] think it’s good or well-intentioned.” She continued to say this would “keep each other safer” and that “you never know what someone is going through.” Fans have reiterated this messaging as her already thin frame became measurably smaller in the years since. But to turn the other cheek at this point, or even to chalk these changes up to healthful new habits, would be to ignore the obvious. Grande’s music would go on to parrot her sentiments, building a fan-fortified transparent wall between herself and the public — a barrier that would allow us to watch her grow thinner, while blocking every genuine concern. 

“Maddie’s Secret” does an impressive job of highlighting the dangers of this kind of enabling. Deena has an almost stan-like preoccupation with Maddie. Her relationship frequently crosses boundaries, but Maddie permits it because the attention makes her feel good and motivates her disorder. When Deena finds Maddie hunched over the toilet one evening, vomit strewn across her lips, Maddie swears that she’s taking steps to get it under control, and Deena assures Maddie that her secret is safe without providing her friend with the necessary action to actually help her. Deena wants to watch Maddie soar, to see her climb the echelons into food media superstardom.

Like Grande to her adoring fans, Maddie is Deena’s idol, and Deena measures Maddie’s success by her work benchmarks and public visibility. If, God forbid, Maddie should disappear — if Grande departed public life, as she’s now planning on — there would be a hole in Deena’s life. She would have to admit that she’s being wickedly selfish. So instead, Deena keeps an eye out in bathrooms and at dumpsters while Maddie purges. She shrugs off Maddie getting faint at dance class because she threw up her lunch. And then, Maddie collapses.

This is where the film becomes its most prickly. Early is interested in the sickly vanity of eating disorders and conceptual femininity, and he explores the danger of these illnesses through a lens that is both uneasy and unique to his film. The stakes are higher and more honest here than in most of the TV movies that “Maddie’s Secret” draws from. Maddie winds up in the hospital after cardiac arrest, a condition she’s far too young for. Her gums are bleeding, her jaw is swollen and there are teeth marks on her knuckles. A hospital psychiatrist, Dr. Kronenfield (Chris Bauer), tells Maddie that she’s at immediate risk of rupturing her stomach or esophagus and dying. “I’ll get it under control,” she tells him. “I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.” It’s the same language Maddie sold to Deena, but a view Dr. Kronenfield won’t buy. “You relapsed before, and you’ll relapse again,” he replies, urging Maddie into inpatient treatment.

Here, “Maddie’s Secret” fully diverges from its semi-parodic path, following Maddie to treatment, which, like many people who end up in mandatory care facilities, she doesn’t take seriously, believing she knows her body best. Her flippancy is only exacerbated by Deena, who fakes a bulimic health scare to join treatment and jailbreak Maddie so she can prepare for a major interview that will dictate her future at GourMaybe. But as Dr. Kronenfield warned, impulsion begets compulsion, and the decision causes Maddie’s horrific relapse and leaves Maddie’s rehab roommate (Vanessa Bayer) alone and vulnerable to her own illness.

That’s the kind of ripple effect that such wanton enabling can have, even if it’s not intentional. Perpetuating these kinds of gravely serious illnesses extends the sickness past the confines of our own bodies, and into the world around us. For someone like Ariana Grande, who has millions of eyes on her at all times, the potential for harm is astronomically magnified. Surely she understands that. But when a fair portion of those millions are telling her that she looks perfect and encouraging her to keep going, keep performing, keep working, all for their entertainment, of course it becomes harder to see that the only thing they really want is for her to keep running herself ragged.

The health of millions of people doesn’t fall entirely on Grande’s shoulders. There are plenty of other ways that our culture has disguised unhealthy behaviors, as “Maddie’s Secret” so cunningly stresses. But Grande does perpetuate a silence, complacency, and enabling by painting genuine concern as gossipy chatter. 

Pro-anorexia and pro-ED content has exploded over the last decade. What was once tucked into corners of the internet is now visible just beneath the sheen of any social media algorithm. A film like “Maddie’s Secret” accurately portrays idolization and enabling with as much horror as it should. Early plays Maddie’s lowest moments with raw sincerity and expressions of utter helplessness — visible cries for help, acted out with total concern and love for the feminine. In its own special way, the film provides an accessible entry point to discussing these matters, one that crashes through the transparent walls Grande, her fans, and the well-intentioned body positivity movement have built around her. If talking about a woman’s body is so radioactive that we can’t even begin to address the issue, leave it to Early — a man channelling his love for headstrong women who get so swept up in the world’s expectations that they risk losing it all — to speak out of turn.

The post Ariana Grande fans need to see “Maddie’s Secret” appeared first on Salon.com.

Six years ago, “Ted Lasso” reminded us that many winning TV shows are the result of the right sentiment landing at the right time — or, in this case, a terrible time. In 2020, the weight of pandemic lockdowns and an especially rancorous presidential election made life feel mean.

Enter Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis’ folksy Missourian loaded with cornpone wisdom, positivity and kindness. Against all good sense, Ted, an American football coach, moves to England to coach the AFC Richmond Greyhounds, a men’s soccer team, despite knowing nothing about the sport.

That suited Greyhounds owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) since she intended Ted, his assistant coach, Willis Beard (Brendan Hunt), and her team’s players to fail. Instead, Ted’s emphasis on personal growth and camaraderie rebuilds the Greyhounds from their league’s demoralized joke into its comeback kings, powered by their yearning to Believe.

In 2020, “Ted Lasso” made us feel like that motto, “Believe,” was all we needed.  In 2026, introducing a women’s football team changes that pitch. The fourth season sees Ted, Rebecca, AFC Richmond’s PR specialist Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) and the organization’s Director of Football Operations Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) attempting to transfer their proven winning methods over to the women’s team and are blocked by the sexism baked into professional sports at every step.

Data-backed analyses predict the Lady Greyhounds’ doom before they’ve even begun to race. Keeping the sponsors’ faith is challenging for Rebecca, who reminds one that a company that backs military actions shouldn’t hesitate to support a women’s football club.

“Wars are profitable,” her skeptic replies coldly. Women’s sports, not so much. So instead, Rebecca rewrites the call to “Believe” into a prayer for a chance.

“That’s what sport is. That’s what life is, isn’t it? A series of chances,” she says.  “We took a chance, creating this team. Yes, for little girls to see amazing, athletic women doing incredible things on the pitch. But equally important, so that little boys . . . can grow up in a world where they don’t know any different. And to do that, we need to be given a chance. By you.”

 

 

To me, speeches like this have a dual purpose: Rebecca is obviously speaking to a specific character, but Waddingham’s passionate delivery makes an effective case to viewers. Even in the wide world of sports movies and shows, men and women are treated differently. For the reasons Rebecca spells out, they shouldn’t be.

As a recent story on Togethxr.com delineates, the heyday of movies about women in sports ended by the close of the aughts – pretty much spanning the time between the first film in the “Bring It On” franchise in 2000 and the fifth in 2009.

On TV, actors Rob Mac and Ryan Reynolds’ excursion into the wild world of British Premier football, “Welcome to Wrexham,” recently expanded to include a women’s team, the Red Dragons. In the 2023-24 season, with their star owners’ backing, the Dragons became the first Welsh women’s club to operate on a semi-professional basis.

And Netflix recently greenlighted “The 99’ers,” a biographical drama about the U.S. Women’s National Team’s victory over China at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of films and shows about male sports icons and legendary men’s team. Recently, a new season of “Hard Knocks” premiered, HBO’s behind-the-scenes journey through one American pro football team’s pre-season training camp. This run of episodes features the Seattle Seahawks—my home team—which I find less compelling than the prospect of seeing where the Lady Greyhounds end up.

I assure you this is less about sisterly solidarity or my lingering affection for “Ted Lasso” or even a love of soccer – er, football. Sports and I are largely incompatible, sorry to say. I am, however, the kind of curious and not judgmental person who wants to see what has and hasn’t changed about these stories since “Bend It Like Beckham” became a sensation in 2002. That movie’s heroines Jess (Parminder Nagra) and Jules (Keira Knightley) saw the opportunity to play at the university level in America as the ultimate dream. America, they thought, took women’s football seriously.

 

The diminishment of Title IX protections tells another story. Disparities in pay and resources are still a battle in both women’s professional sports and at the collegiate and Olympic levels, as publicized advocacy by athletes such as Megan Rapinoe has revealed.

More recently, the Trump administration’s snubbing of the gold-medal-winning women’s hockey squad at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan broadcast a shameful message about the common disregard for female athletes and their achievements.

And in Britain, Ted’s adopted stomping grounds, the BBC recently published a collection of anecdotes from women in football, whether they be professionals or fans, describing a strain of misogyny so brutish that one woman stopped taking her daughter to live men’s matches. “I wouldn’t feel safe and I certainly wouldn’t want to expose my daughter to sexism,” she told the BBC.

The fourth season of “Ted Lasso” doesn’t entirely frost those bad vibes with its happiness and hopium. The Lady Greyhounds confront doubts about their talent in pubs, from the stands and in the media.

This being “Ted Lasso,” every determined push downfield strides on a turf green with optimism. That starts in the fourth season’s kickoff, when Rebecca, Keeley and Higgins journey to Kansas City to re-recruit Ted.

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One of my favorite moments in their adventure shows Higgins finding his way to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. He enters reluctantly, since he knows nothing about baseball, and leaves fired up by the heroism of men like Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson.

“You know, their story is quite similar to how women in England weren’t allowed to play football for years,” observed Higgins, netting a doubtful reaction from the museum’s forbearing docent. This sends the oh-so-polite Higgins into a stammering fit: “Not similar. Sorry. What happened here was much worse. Much, much worse. Much, much, much, much, much, I can’t stop saying much for some reason.”

But when Higgins explains that women weren’t allowed in England’s professional leagues until 1971, even the museum guide couldn’t help blurting, “Damn – that’s recent as hell.”

Yes. It’s still new enough for us to understand that getting the Lady Greyhounds to believe in themselves was always going to be the easy part. Getting a nation and a world to believe in the women of AFC Richmond and female athletes in general? That’s always been the whole game.

New episodes of “Ted Lasso” stream Wednesdays on Apple TV.

 

 

The post What the Ted Lasso Way doesn’t get about women in sports appeared first on Salon.com.

Those anticipating HBO’s series adaptation of “Watchmen,” the classic comic book series co-created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, may have divided opinions of the 2019 version conceived by Damon Lindelof, co-creator of “Lost” and “The Leftovers.”

The first episode, the only part of the nine-episode season HBO made available to critics,  introduces the story’s ostensible protagonists: Tulsa’s Police Force. And the enemy? It’s a white supremacist organization whose members wear masks inspired by the iconic “Watchmen” character Rorschach.

“What, in 2019, is the equivalent of the nuclear standoff between the Russians and the United States?” Lindelof posited Wednesday during a press conference, referring to one of the key political flashpoints examined in the original comic. He answered, “It just felt like it was undeniably race and policing in America.”

Until now HBO has kept the details of “Watchmen” cloaked in mystery, teasing audiences with disconnected snippets. Reporters assembled for HBO’s press conferences at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour screened a preview of the first episode on the condition that we refrain from posting reviews until the drama’s scheduled premiere in October.

You won’t find smartphones or references to social media in the story, either — a thoughtful detail from Lindelof, the man who quit Twitter after he’d weathered enough vitriol over the “Lost” finale.  Also absent, at least initially, are direct descendants of The Comedian, Nite Owl or other familiar heroes from the original’s 12-issue arc. Jeremy Irons has apparently taken on the mantle of Ozymandias, although HBO’s press notes only describe him as “the aging and imperious Lord of a British Manor.”

We can, however, describe Oscar winner Regina King’s role. She plays Angela Abar, a devoted wife, mother of three and bakery owner who ostensibly has retired from the Tulsa Police Force. But in this new world, cops hide their faces for their own protection (with the beat cops outfitted in colors associated with Silk Spectre) making Angela’s job as a lead detective a secret identity.

This aligns with the alternate history of Moore’s original “Watchmen” comics, released between 1986 and 1987, in which people with superhuman abilities emerged between World War II and the 1960s, changing the trajectory of history and granting the United States the upper hand during the Cold War.

Vigilantes and unaffiliated heroes are outlawed, and a few superheroes that haven’t retired go to work for the government. In Moore’s reality, America wins the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon was never forced out of office. Term limits are abolished, in fact, allowing Nixon’s presidency to last well into the 1980s.

In presenting white supremacy as the main antagonist of these new chapters, Lindelof told the industry reporters assembled for HBO’s presentations at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour, currently underway in Los Angeles, that he’s selected a crisis to which there is no simple answer or grandiose solution.

“In a traditional superhero movie the bad guys are fighting aliens. And when they beat the aliens, the aliens go back to their planet and everybody wins,” Lindelof said. “There’s no defeating white supremacy. It’s not going anywhere. But it felt like it was pretty formidable foe.”

The Watchmen are an inversion of Golden and Silver Age archetypes, revised to fit a dystopian extreme of what Moore and Gibbons imagined America could become with but a few minor tweaks to the timeline. It’s an incisive vision of unchecked imperialism that questions our culture’s reverence of might.

Lindelof stressed that the new “Watchmen” will not alter the original series in any way: “We explore the past…but it’s canon,” he said. “Everything that happened in those 12 issues could not be messed with.”

Instead, he contemplated how the history kicked off in those comics might have progressed from where the story leaves off. Lindelof explained that he was inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ story in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” which lead him to read about Black Wall Street and the massacre of black families by white racist mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921.

As a result, he connected Moore and Gibbons’ “Watchmen” past to his version of that world’s present. He explained to critics  that Nixon remained president through the late ‘80s and died in office. Then Gerald Ford assumed the presidency, only to be defeated in ’92 by Robert Redford, who remains in office in alt-2019.

“One of the things that we’re interested in exploring is what would happen if a very well-intentioned white man, a liberal white man, was president for way too long?” Lindelof said, referring to the fictional Redford presidency.

As Lindelof explained to critics, racism isn’t presented as a simplistic evil in “’Watchmen” but rather as a strain of white supremacy born out of a white liberal version of good intentions. Later in a conversation with a small group of reporters, Lindelof put a finer point on it.

“Watchmen” isn’t merely interested in flaming racists, he said.  “This show is trolling the white savior.”

For these reasons and others, it probably goes without saying that a segment of viewers will be predisposed against embracing his vision.  Foremost among them would be Moore, but that’s to be expected. Moore has a reputation for being against any adaptations of his work, and not even Lindelof’s reverence for the source material enables him to win an exception.

“I have made personal overtures to connect with [Moore] and explain to him a little bit of what we were doing, and he made it clear that he didn’t want that to happen. And I want to respect that as well,” Lindelof said.  “… So, the wrestling match will continue.”

Lindelof added that he admires Moore’s “punk rock spirit,” saying that he imagines that “if you told Alan Moore in 1984 or ’85 or ’86, ‘You’re not allowed to do this because Superman’s creator or Swamp Thing’s creator doesn’t want you to do it,’ he would say, ‘F**k you, I’m doing it anyway.’”

He added in conclusion, “And so I’m channeling the spirit of Alan Moore to tell Alan Moore, ‘F**k you, I’m doing it anyway.’”

The post HBO’s “Watchmen” takes on white supremacy — Damon Lindelof promises to “troll the white savior” appeared first on Salon.com.

The influencers have started to promise me that they know how to get me to stop shopping: I just have to enter every garment of clothing I own into an app, one by one. “I digitally cataloged my ENTIRE wardrobe,” they swear on videos, routinely pulling in hundreds of thousands of views. 

The selling point of these apps (Indyx, Whering, ACloset, OpenWardrobe, and many more) is seductive; they promise to help users understand exactly what they already own so that they shop less. In theory, that means saving money — and slowing the steady damage the fashion industry is wrecking on our planet.

“Collectively, we are buying and then throwing away more than ever before,” Indyx warned on its website, before reciting dire statistics about how many clothes are produced now and how many of them end up in landfills. Luckily, it said, “We’re here to break the cycle.” 

That idea appealed to me. I am not a fashionista, but I enjoy clothes enough to buy more than I really need, despite what I know about fashion’s impact on the planet. My intellectual understanding of climate change can’t always stop me from clicking “add to cart” when I see a dashing pair of wide-legged trousers, even though there’s a hard limit on the number of times a person can wear wide-legged trousers in one week. 

Still, to make these apps work, you have to individually enter photos of everything you own now and everything you buy in the future, which sounds like a tedious, laborious process. (You can take the photos yourself or hunt down product pictures from the brand.) And because so many influencers are pushing this, it’s hard to tell how life-changing it really is and how much is just marketing speak and hype. So, I decided to test one of these apps — Indyx — for you. I also talked to wardrobe cataloging enthusiasts and experts on sustainable consumption to see what I could learn from them. I wanted to know: Could cataloging our wardrobes actually make us shop less? And, if it can, would it be worth the effort? 

“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less”

Wardrobe cataloging apps did not always advertise themselves as being good for the planet. 

In 2023, the journalist Avery Trufelman investigated the nascent wardrobe cataloging app industry for her podcast series Articles of Interest. She found that a lot of the apps flopped. The issue was the business model, which was based on revenue generated from affiliate links. The idea was that people would click to purchase items they saw within the apps, and the company would take a cut of each sale. But when the apps were well designed, Trufelman reported, users felt less of a need to buy more clothes.

The current generation of wardrobe cataloging app developers has turned this from a bug into a feature. They now market their wares as the solution to overshopping, and they make their money by charging for either the app itself or for its extra content. (Indyx itself is free, but you have to pay a $75 yearly subscription for its enhanced features.)

What the marketing gets right is that the fast fashion problem is real. “Anywhere from two to 10 percent of our global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with fashion,” said Brie Berry, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.

Fashion’s emissions are generated by the factories that manufacture clothing (the water and the fertilizers for growing cotton, the oil for developing synthetics) and the consumers who wear these garments (the slow shed of microplastics from yoga pants, the water and the energy consumed by washing and drying). When we get rid of old clothes, much of it ends up in landfills or incinerated. By some estimates, the fashion industry contributes more to climate change than the aviation industry. 

“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less,” said Katia Dayan Vladimirova, a researcher whose consulting firm Post Growth Fashion focuses on alternatives to growth in the fashion system. 

To buy less, it helps most people to know what they already own, said Alyssa Beltempo, a slow-fashion content creator and educator. Beltempo makes videos guiding viewers through the process of “shopping their own closets” to help them buy less stuff, but she’s found in her work that a lot of people aren’t clear on the contents of those closets. Because of that confusion, they end up buying stuff they don’t need.

That’s where cataloging can be helpful, Beltempo said. “These apps reduce that hurdle of not seeing the clothes you have,” she said.

Personally, what I was looking for wasn’t enhanced clarity so much as a barrier. I wanted to erect a wall between my desire to own a new piece of clothing and the click of the buy button. A searchable, scannable lookbook of everything I owned, I thought, might well do the trick. 

How to catalog every piece of clothing you own

Indyx has been hyping up its new AI feature, which transforms a picture of a garment hanging limply off a hanger into a neat flat lay photo. It sped the process up, but it was also buggy; it garbled text on the front of T-shirts, misread colors, and had a tendency to interpret loose threads as ornamental bows while leaving wrinkles (I am not an ironer) untouched. 

I was also concerned that the process inserted AI, with its insatiable need for water and energy, into a project sold as a way of reducing my environmental impact. But the sustainability experts I spoke to were both skeptical that this sort of light AI use was such a big deal. 

“Taking photos and then asking an app to think about how to arrange your clothing into outfits is probably one of the lighter uses of AI that I could imagine,” Berry said. Vladimirova agreed that using AI for this task is unlikely to be as bad for the planet as buying even one new garment. “But then, there is also no proven causality between using this app and reducing overconsumption,” she added as a caveat.

It’s possible to input your clothes into Indyx without using the AI feature, but the truth is: I don’t know that I could have made myself go through with the whole rigamarole without it. I ran out of free AI processing about 80 percent of the way through and, overwhelmed at the thought of having to do my own flat lays, paid $75 to buy more without hesitating.

All told, it took me about five hours and many old episodes of Top Chef to photograph my summer clothes, not including shoes, jewelry, or accessories. My time spent cataloging did not include the process of entering additional data about each garment (including its initial cost, its fiber composition, where I bought it), a herculean task that I have been tackling much more slowly than the initial entry process.

Doing the shoot properly would have taken longer. Angela Goodman, a 51-year-old marketer from Seattle with a background in product photography, says she ran her own cataloging session like a pro shoot, using art lights and folding and refolding each garment to lie perfectly. It took her 10 hours spread out over multiple weeks. 

As an exercise, photographing every piece of clothing I owned was clarifying, although not significantly more clarifying than going through it Marie Kondo-style. It left me with a small donation pile of items I no longer wanted and a fretful awareness that I own too many white T-shirts. In theory, that’s the kind of insight a wardrobe cataloging app produces by the spade.

“I’m not shopping. I’m building.”

Vladimirova, the sustainability consultant, said that, even though she has a better idea than most of how destructive the fashion industry is, she struggles with over-shopping. She thinks a lot about why people buy so many clothes; her best guess is that it’s a way to self-soothe. 

“A lot of consumption happens in the evening when we feel vulnerable and tired, and we’re trying to reward ourselves with this shot of dopamine,” she said. For some people, these apps can replace the dopamine hit that comes from scrolling through other people’s outfit photos with the dopamine hit of scrolling through your own clothes, neatly folded and filtered until they look like aspirational fashion inspo. 

Part of the satisfaction here is the infographics. After you’ve given Indyx all your fashion data, the app crunches your numbers and tells users how much you’ve bought new versus secondhand, as well as the share of natural fibers as opposed to synthetics in your closet, so that you can track the environmental impact of your shopping habits. (Synthetics tend to have a higher carbon footprint than natural fibers.) It tells you what their cost per wear is on each item to help you track which expensive garment was worth the splurge and which was a waste of money. Users can also plan outfits. You can share your wardrobe with stylists who will plan the outfits for you (on Indyx, the service ranges from $25 a month to “the low hundreds”). It’s like playing paper dolls with your own wardrobe. 

For Goodman, the former product photographer, all this data takes the place of recreational shopping. She describes getting a marketing email from one of her favorite brands about a sale. After a quick scroll through their offerings, she found that she felt no urge to buy. 

“I was like, ‘I do not need more clothes. I’m going to go update my Indyx, because I’m a couple of weeks behind,’” she said. She started inputting the last few outfits she’d worn into one of the Indyx services that is supposed to allow users to track their patterns and see which clothes they actually wear and what they like in an outfit. “I’m playing with clothes,” she said. “But, like, I’m not shopping. I’m, you know, building.”

Over time, all this data is supposed to inform future shopping choices. “There is something very clear about seeing two pieces that you’ve owned for the same amount of time — one that you’ve worn 57 times and one that you’ve worn twice,” said Alexandra, a 29-year-old consultant in Northern Virginia who requested her last name be withheld. She thinks tracking her clothes has given her “a little bit less buyer’s remorse.”

Cataloging your wardrobe can’t prevent a compulsive need to buy, though.

“I don’t think it cured me of my undiagnosed shopping addiction,” Alexandra said. “You can very quickly go from ‘I’m cataloging what I have’ to ‘I’m seeing a bunch of gaps in my wardrobe that I should fill immediately.’” 

“There just wasn’t incentive anymore”

The main question I had about these apps was whether, with such a labor-intensive process, there comes a time when the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. 

Alexandra says that she gradually stopped using her wardrobe app last year, after she moved out of her own apartment and back into her family’s suburban house in the midst of a career transition. 

“I was separated from a lot of my belongings for a very long time, and then, as I started to get things back, it didn’t feel worth the effort anymore,” she said. Who was she going to see in one of her curated outfits? “My job’s on a computer. When I leave the house, I go to the grocery store and the pharmacy and the bookstore,” she said. “There just wasn’t incentive anymore, compared to when I was closer to the city and doing things more regularly.”

Beltempo, the slow fashion content creator, said she doesn’t bother to add every new purchase to her own catalog. 

“I really use it more for my packing,” she said. Before she travels, she makes a list of likely candidates for her suitcase and enters them into the app. “And then, I’ll play, and I’ll make outfits,” she says. 

Vladimirova, the sustainable consumption researcher struggling with overshopping, gave the apps a spin. She tried three of them and found that she was only able to stick with each one for a matter of months. “In the beginning, when the novelty of the app is there, it’s very satisfying,” she said. “It records your outfits in vivid colors. It can crop out the ugly background and keep it very neat, create fancy capsules. They look so lovely.”

But over time, they all began to bore her. “And now, I forget to update when I buy something new — usually from secondhand sources — and it kind of lost its meaning for me,” she said. “But the premise is good!” 

My own experience seems to be closest to Vladimirova’s. I keep having to remind myself to enter my outfits into Indyx. Every time I put on a piece of clothing, I think with dread, “Oh god, if I don’t look up how much I paid for this, I’ll never know my cost per wear and, then, what’s the point?” I keep giving my shoes guilty looks and thinking about how I should really photograph and catalog them — if I’m doing this right. 

“It’s a project,” said Lauren Ludwig, a 41-year-old who has been using her wardrobe apps for the past three years. “But it’s a fun one for someone who enjoys clothing.”

Indyx and its brethren are slick, and their infographics are beautiful. For dedicated wardrobe hobbyists, they’re probably a great option. But for most people who just want to cut down on their clothes shopping, it’s hard to say that the $75 annual subscription is worth it. The free version will give you the same paper doll effect if you are willing to do your own flat lays, or you can recreate it by dragging phone camera pictures of your clothes onto a Google Slides deck. 

If you find, as Vladimirova theorized, that you shop when you don’t feel good, you can try replacing that habit with a “dopamine menu” of small acts that bring you joy, like hugging a pet, doing a puzzle, or going for a walk. And if your closet is filled with brand new clothes you never wear, you’re racking up debt buying clothes, or you just have the nagging sense that your shopping has spiraled completely out of control, therapy is not a bad idea. 

Personally, I found that Indyx could not give me what I really crave when I want to play with clothes: the understanding of the way fabric drapes against my body, the knowledge of its texture against my skin. There is no substitution for the slow analog process of walking into my closet, touching my clothes with my human hands, and learning with my five senses that what I have is already enough.

If you live in America in 2026, and you’re not so wealthy as to be absolutely shielded from daily life, you’re probably aware that everything is really expensive now. Gas and milk are both above $4 a gallon. Fresh vegetables are up almost 10 percent over this time last year, even though they will maybe give you explosive diarrhea. The median home in this country now costs almost half a million dollars. 

A lot of people — even those with relatively high-paying jobs — are very, very stressed about money.

In some ways, our current unaffordable era is starting to evoke the years right after the Great Recession. Unemployment was high, the economy was bleak, and a lot of Americans, myself included, were searching for ways to do more with less. 

One distinctive product of these harsh conditions was an entire blogosphere that emerged to give readers chatty, relatable advice on saving money. 

It was a kind of the golden age for personal writing on the internet, and these writers melded advice and personal narrative in a way that foreshadowed today’s influencers, but with a more lo-fi, DIY aesthetic. Starting in about 2008 and continuing for the next decade, these authors reached thousands of readers a day with tips on how to spend less and sock more away. There was Mr. Money Mustache, a brash “financial magician” who had retired at age 30 and believed ordinary people could save half or even 75 percent of their income. There was Trent Hamm of the Simple Dollar, an Iowa dad who shared his story of getting out of debt alongside recipes for cheap meals and homemade laundry detergent. There was my niche favorite, An English Major’s Money, by a young woman who shared my less-than-lucrative career path but who was nonetheless determined to achieve financial stability.

It wasn’t just old-school personal finance advice, it was a whole philosophical universe dedicated to the idea that by living on less, you could liberate yourself from the uncertainties of the economy and experience true freedom.

Collectively, I like to think of these writers as the frugalsphere.

Today, most of them are no longer blogging about saving money — some have gotten jobs in traditional media, while others have gone on to other careers entirely (or are simply enjoying early retirement). But their movement feels newly relevant today, as Americans struggle to afford necessities and face mounting anxiety over their economic future. So I decided to track down a bunch of frugality writers from that time, and see what they had to say about 2026.

One thing I wanted to know was why I wasn’t seeing the same outpouring of money-saving advice I’d seen in the wake of the 2008 crash. But I was also curious for bigger insights: What, if anything, is the equivalent of the frugalsphere in today’s inflationary era? And could the ethos of those optimistic coupon-clippers give us smarter ways to think about the unsettling new place we find ourselves in 2026?

What I found is that the frugalsphere still has lessons to teach us, but they’re not about reheating leftovers or washing out Ziploc bags. Instead, they’re about how to claim a sense of autonomy, even when our lives are buffeted by forces beyond our control.

The short, influential arc of the frugalsphere

The idea that you can achieve prosperity by carefully watching your spending is far from revolutionary, and self-help authors were extolling the virtues of frugality long before the Web 2.0 era. In the 1990s, for example, editor Amy Dacyczyn published a print newsletter called the Tightwad Gazette, teaching readers frugal tricks (Dacyczyn herself favored reusing aluminum foil) for the low price of $12 per year. 

But amid the upheaval of the Great Recession, when more than 15 million Americans found themselves unemployed in the worst crisis since the 1930s, a new generation of bloggers started offering advice about saving money, often directed at millennials starting their careers in a decimated job market.

“People were looking for something they could do,” Nicole Dieker Finley told me recently.

What Finley did was to start posting all her earnings and expenses on Tumblr around 2012, when she was trying to make it as an independent musician in Los Angeles. She soon caught the attention of the editors of The Billfold, a website launched the same year to cover money with a personal, relatable tone befitting the times. Billfold editors Logan Sachon and Mike Dang shared their student loan and credit card debt; Finley tracked her net worth and spending and wrote about her quest for financial independence. She later went on to a freelance career writing about money (including for Vox).

Kara Stevens, meanwhile, started the website the Frugal Feminista around 2012 while facing down student loans, credit card debt, and a tanking credit score: “It clicked to me that if I didn’t do something about it, I would be in this position of not being able to move forward in my life,” she told me.

Based in New York City, she shared tips for finding free events, cheaper dupes of popular brands, and deals on fancy hotels. “It was like, how am I living my Sex and the City life on a budget?” Stevens recalled.

As time went on, more bloggers joined the space, some of them already starting from a position of financial freedom. Kristy Shen and her husband Bryce Leung started the site Millennial Revolution after retiring in 2015 at age 31 with a seven-figure investment portfolio. 

“After 2008, people started freaking out and thinking that no job is safe,” Shen told me. “I think that’s when people started being more interested in finance.”

The message of the frugalsphere was that if you could leave cheaply enough and save enough money, you could weather any layoff — and eventually, not have to work at all. The bloggers of the era — many of them millennials aiming their advice at other millennials — tended to share a can-do attitude, a sense that with the right mix of care and planning, almost anyone could improve their financial situation.

Also, they wanted to stick it to the man

The frugalsphere also had a tinge of rebellion about it. “Americans tend to have a very up-down relationship with consumption,” said Helaine Olen, a longtime financial journalist and the managing editor at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly think tank. After 2008, the pendulum started swinging against buying stuff, and the frugality bloggers were leading the swing.

Their implicit message was often that by refusing to buy expensive things, you were pushing back against corporations that wanted to control you. Frugality was, at least to some degree, about sticking it to the man.

At their peak, some personal finance blogs were reaching thousands of readers a day and breaking through into mainstream media. Shen told me that Millennial Revolution got 15,000 page views the day after a post about the virtues of renting a home was picked up by the CBC. Shen and Leung, as well as Trent Hamm and other bloggers, got book deals and started to reach a broader audience.

But the culture soon began to shift. The written personal blog began to die out, replaced by more visually driven social media – and an influencer ethos that rewarded the acquisition of new possessions, rather than showcasing ways to do without. Today, social media is much more about celebrating consumption than questioning it. 

On TikTok and Instagram, “it becomes about showing perfection and showing a good life,” Olen said. “And part of a good life, as we define it in the United States, is spending money.”

How frugality lost its shine

Today, some frugality influencers have found a home on TikTok, and the deinfluencing trend of a few years ago shows there’s still an appetite for anti-capitalism, even in the age of short-form video. But overall, the cultural and economic winds have blown against frugality, frugalsphere writers and observers told me. 

As inflation rose in the 2020s, necessities cost more, but saving also became less attractive. More people made the calculation that “if I don’t take this trip this month, it’ll be more expensive next year,” Olen said.

Upheavals like the Covid pandemic gave some Americans “a grim outlook on money,” Stevens said. Their feeling was, “there’s no chance that any of us can be wealthy. What’s the point of saving anything?”

Today, tips like making all your coffee at home instead of going out for a little treat don’t resonate the way they once did. This time is fundamentally different from 2008: The economy is nominally “good” now, and unemployment is low, but everything from eggs to real estate feels more unaffordable than ever. 

“People say, The cost of living is so high, I need some joy,” Stevens said. “Like, You can’t deny me everything.”

What the frugalsphere can teach us now

When I talked to frugalsphere writers about today’s situation, I ended up realizing that even if some of their specific tips are no longer as applicable, their mindset still is.

At its best, frugality advice was always about adapting to your situation, whatever that might be. When rice is cheap, buy in bulk. When basil is expensive, use the leftover pesto you froze in an ice-cube tray. Nothing is cheap right now — and, to be honest, I have never had the energy to freeze pesto — but the basic idea stands.

“Frugality to me means intentionality.”

Kara Stevens

“Be flexible,” Shen says. Millennial Americans once worried about their jobs being outsourced. Now workers all over the world are worried about getting replaced by AI. No matter what, though, “you have to change with the times.”

For Gen Z, that might look like entrepreneurship and investing rather than a traditional career and saving for a home, Shen said. I can’t yet imagine what it will look like for Gen Alpha, but there’s something reassuring about the idea that flexibility is a skill we can learn, one that can help carry us through even the most macro of macroeconomic shocks. 

One big thing that’s changed since 2008 is the politics of personal finance. In the 2010s and 2020s, many critics of the frugality approach began to point out that without systemic change to lower the costs of housing, health care, and education, all the coupons in the world weren’t going to make much difference. Today, affordability isn’t just an individual concern — it’s the cornerstone of a lot of political debates.

But even as we look to systemic solutions, there’s another big lesson Americans today can take from the frugalsphere: Control what you can.

For Stevens, that looks like acknowledging that “within any system that has a bias toward corporations or the wealthy, we understand that things may not be fair,” she said. “That also doesn’t mean that you don’t have personal agency.”

Exercising that agency might mean being more mindful around retail therapy rather than cutting it out entirely, Stevens said: “If I know that I need these little quick boosts to make me feel good because work is stressing me out, can I carve out a part of my budget that allows me to do that without completely disrupting my financial goals?”

Stevens, for instance, cares a lot about her skin, so she spends money on skincare products that really work for her, and cuts back on things like purses that don’t matter as much.

“Frugality to me means intentionality,” Stevens told me. It’s about “living more aligned with your values.”

In today’s era of polycrisis, it feels downright insensitive to promulgate the idea that anyone can get rich with the right combination of tips and tricks. But most Americans make at least a few choices every week about where our money is going.

If we can make whatever choices we do have in a way that’s intentional, in line with our larger goals for ourselves and the world — maybe that’s a 2026 version of financial independence.

If you’re Gen Z and it feels like something is different this summer, you’re not alone. 

I’ve spent my career documenting — and living — this generation’s coming of age through reporting, focus groups, and surveys. More than anything else, and especially for younger Zoomers, it’s been characterized by the experience of the pandemic, which left many still feeling bitter and isolated even years later.

But lately, the vibes are very different. Performative pessimism is out. The summer of 2026 has been called a “Great American Sleepover” that will be known decades from now as “the good ole days” and “the best of times.” 

After years of post-pandemic malaise that saw young people’s mental health plummet as they opted for online engagement over offline opportunities, embraced a politics of doubt, and channeled their frustration into nostalgia for simpler times, nature is finally healing. A cohort whose coming of age was stunted by the chaos of 2020 is finally coming out of its shell. 

We’ve seen it packed movie theaters and record-smashing ticket sales for Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. We’ve seen it in sports, especially in New York City, where joyous people filled the streets for weeks shoulder to shoulder, first for the New York Knicks’ championship run and later for the World Cup that concluded just across the river. For the young adults whose defining life experience to this point was being trapped inside, the images of impromptu mass gatherings and fan celebrations resonated far beyond the five boroughs. 

But sports aren’t the only thing that has communities coming together in person as of late. Doves of young people have been lining up for froyo on any given night of the week, Love Island-obsessed observers have gathered in bars to watch the dating show, and despite dwindling patriotism, communities nationwide celebrated the country’s 250th birthday with hot dogs, fireworks, and fanfare. 

As one 25-year-old from Illinois told me, it’s the season of “summer-maxxing,” which means “enjoying every bit of summer and the perks that come with it.” 

In my own conversations and research, there’s a burgeoning sense that — for the first time in their lives — young people are driving the cultural moment themselves rather than having it inflicted upon them by older adults and events outside of their control. Some of the comments in this piece were shared in focus groups. Others came from a qualitative survey sent out to Gen Z-ers.

And while hope is a fragile thing, the implications could be profound. Through my work, I’ve tracked Gen Z’s loneliness and the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic for years — examining how the damage has shown up in school, work, and politics, and even split my generation in two. The national conversation about young people has been just as dark, featuring stories overwhelmingly about what they aren’t doing: Hanging out with friends, hooking up, taking risks. 

A generation dismissed as terminally online is taking its politics offline as well, making their presence loudly known in primaries by walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors, and turning out voters.

In recent years, post-pandemic trauma expressed itself in a craving for simpler times that fueled Gen Z’s nostalgia era. Young adults daydreamed about how good things must have been back in the 1990s, or in the early 2000s, or even within their own lifetime, before the pandemic, before the 2016 election, and especially before smartphones, social media, and AI took over the world. This nostalgia even helped power some young voters’ rightward shift in 2024, as they embraced a candidate who ran on a campaign to bring back the pre-pandemic past. 

But this summer, the summer of 2026, is a moment of its own, and it involves engaging with the present rather than wishing we were somewhere else. 

Take the movies, an industry that doomsayers warned was in danger of extinction after the pandemic trained a generation to stay inside with streaming devices.

Instead, this summer has seen two massive box-office hits — Obsession and Backrooms — that were made by young people, for young people, and saw young audiences turn out in droves for repeat in-person viewings. Obsession, directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, drew on Gen Z’s anxieties about dating and intimacy. Backrooms, directed by 21-year-old Kane Parsons, drafted off a YouTube horror meme about people trapped in (generational metaphor alert) a never-ending indoor space. 

It’s probably not a coincidence that these movies came out at a time Gen Z was confronting their post-pandemic fears of isolation head-on. Again and again in focus group conversations across the country, I’ve heard from young people who are looking to log off their devices and spend time together in-person. 

“People seem a lot more interested in experiences rather than just like going out to go out,” a 17-year-old girl from Arkansas said. “People want to go…to concerts, go play pickleball, go to farmers market[s], go thrifting, go hiking, go on a coffee run. I think it’s just kind of more looking for community as opposed to entertainment.”

There are other signs of behavioral shifts. After years of data showing Gen Z drinking less than their adult peers, they are now keeping up with older generations: 74 percent of Gen Z reported drinking alcohol in March 2026, almost on par with the 76 percent rate for boomers, according to an IWSR report released in July. The report also found something very telling — rather than drinking to unwind, as has been the case for older generations, Gen Z is drinking more to socialize and to be with others.

In cultural events around the country, you can see this appetite for in-person gatherings that force young adults to unplug. The generationally beloved Phoebe Bridgers hosted phone-free concerts where she required her fans to put their devices in Yondr pouches. And there are impromptu “lie down” gatherings meant to encourage a collective, communal pause that are happening in Central Park. To keep up with this shift, Tinder — the epitome of online dating — will launch in-person dating events in 26 cities by the end of September, signaling that any business interested in capturing Gen Z must now have an in-person component. 

A generation dismissed as terminally online is taking its politics offline as well, making their presence loudly known in primaries by walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors, and turning out voters. When I ask focus groups about which politicians catch their attention, they’ve brought up figures like James Talarico, Jon Ossoff, and Marco Rubio, who they identify as having a more energetic and optimistic approach. Young people have often mentioned New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a model politician, and one of the traits I hear consistently that they like about him is that he is out in the street and easy to bump into. His online videos also emphasize him out in the world, interacting with constituents, or walking down the entire island of Manhattan.

“I think there’s a stronger presence of people coming together, whether it is for their favorite sports team with the NBA Finals and World Cup (let’s go Knicks!), stronger political activism, especially with primaries coming up in states like New York, and simply attending events like Pride parades,” one 30-year-old man from Brooklyn said. 

There’s no doubt that we’re experiencing something new. The question then becomes whether it’s a momentary trend: Where does the IRL energy go when it gets cold, dark, and college kids are back in school? 

As the reality of fall intrudes, the vibes could certainly shift. And it will take time to see whether these nascent cultural trends show up in hard data — one thing I’ll be watching is whether Gen Z’s trademark self-reported anxiety, unhappiness, and loneliness start finally reversing.

But I do see a world in which some of the Gen Z summer trends persist — perhaps we’ll see more in-person NFL watch parties or fantasy football drafts, community organizing for midterm election candidates, and more energy around in-person celebrations for Halloween or Friendsgiving.  

My bet is the post-nostalgia era is here to stay. Just as Boomers were permanently changed by the “Summer of Love” — a period some history-minded young people have compared this season to — this is going to be a core memory going forward. It’s our time now, and we’re not going back inside.

White drugs. Underage drinking. Absentee parents. Nonstop parties. Oh, to be a rich teenager in the 1980s, says “The Shards” in so many words. Too many, I’d say, but slapping droning voiceovers atop expository visuals isn’t for me. Piling too much on too much is both Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis’ signature, however, as seen in this TV collaboration between auteur and author.

“The Shards,” an adaptation of Ellis’ 2023 autobiographical novel, rewinds to his pre-“Less Than Zero” adolescence, when he was just Bret (Igby Rigney), a high school senior in lockstep with his hedonistic friends. When they aren’t snorting narcotics, everyone but Bret ignores evidence that a serial killer is circling ever closer.

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Ellis’ eroded faith in the safety of adults is a recurring theme in his work, but “The Shards” cynically wraps that in horror, celebrity, luxury brands and needle drops like the Pretenders’ “Bad Boys Get Spanked.” Pop singer Hayes Warner portrays Bret’s girlfriend Debbie, whose father and mother (Wes Bentley and Evan Rachel Wood) share their loveless relationship with a psychosexual lich (Broadway producer Jordan Roth).

That two of Bret’s other pals are played by Cindy Crawford’s daughter, Kaia Gerber, and Richard Gere’s son, Homer Gere, is also a classic Murphy move: The offspring of previously married ‘80s icons starring in a story about the era their parents ruled? Fabulous! So what if Gerber looks like she’s repeating 12th grade for the tenth time? Realism is not the point.

Instead, think of “The Shards” as a View-Master reel designed to give Gen Z a glimpse at the lost age of excess they’re pining for. Cocaine and smoking are back, after all, along with outsize glamour. Bret may lament childhood’s demise, but if you had helicopter parents, these throes probably look less like trash than fire.

New episodes of “The Shards”  premiere Wednesdays on FX and Hulu.

 

The post “The Shards” is oozing with Bret Easton Ellis vibes appeared first on Salon.com.

“This is not a story about a woman who made the best of traditional skills . . . This is the ‘woman’s pluck’ story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story, the I-will-never-go-hungry-again story, the Mildred Pierce story, the story about how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail, show the men; the story that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men.”

That prose could describe Lorraine Lyon, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s indomitable Queen of Debt and the true showstopper of “Fargo.” She seems the type, descending her spiral staircase into our lives (which she’d describe as “sad,” “little” or both) with an imperious purr of “I’m here,” before demanding a do-over when her lawyer on call ruins her entrance.

Lorraine makes the men around her nervous because she has little use for them. For what use are men to a woman with billions in the bank, six governors on speed dial and a personal liaison at the Federal Trade Commission? Her son and husband might as well be pets. She wears her power like a second skin and speaks a mid-Atlantic accent similar to the one Leigh used in “The Hudsucker Proxy,” only mellowed by casks of rare scotch and impatience with unrefined dullards.

Lorraine is not a hero, nor a pure villain, but one of the rarest forces in nature – a woman billionaire who can afford to buy respect or purchase punishments for those who don’t show her a healthy fear when she fires a warning shot.

One also gets the sense that Lorraine had to earn a good share of that influence, though. Maybe she was born rich, but not with the type of money she has. Her multibillion-dollar debt consolidation company is cruelly named Redemption Services. Redemption implies salvation or forgiveness, two graces Lorraine lacks for strangers and barely bestows on loved ones. Looming behind her office desk is a behemoth of a painting bellowing what we presume to be her motto: “No.”

By now you may have deduced that the passage quoted above is not about Lorraine. Joan Didion wrote that for The New Yorker about Martha Stewart, although the line that comes next in that paragraph could have easily been written about Lorraine’s Bisquick-mixing daughter-in-law Dorothy (Juno Temple). “The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power,” Didion writes, “of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”

Assuming Lorraine is around the same age as the actor playing her, she would have learned plenty from the example set by Stewart’s public rise and fall, and her precarious choice to make her identity and image her brand. Didion’s essay was published four years before Stewart’s pristine if prickly image was undone by her implication in an insider trading scandal, in which she was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying to investigators.

Stewart’s empire was built on elevating the art of homemaking, winning the gratitude and millions of dollars of support from of underappreciated women everywhere. As many have written since, Stewart’s main sin was being a successful older woman. She was around 63 when she was sentenced to five months in prison.

Lorraine would have vowed to never go out like Stewart did, making her money by becoming the person who takes the good life for granted instead of toiling to create it.

She barely tolerates Dorothy until trouble comes knocking, threatening her son and her granddaughter, an intentional friction constructed by series creator Noah Hawley. Their rivalry continues the “Fargo” tradition of burdening women with having to constantly fight for every inch of the life they’ve won and the slightest esteem of the men surrounding them.

Lorraine’s battle readiness is the type one learns by competing against men – and it is mostly men in the billionaires’ club – and not only winning but routing them every single time. It’s the arrogance of a woman who never received respect or sympathy and therefore appears to have none to give.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Richa Moorjani in “Fargo” (FX)One of the most satisfying subplots of the season involved a sexist pair of bank executives with whom Lorraine sits down, only for them to initially refuse to deal with her until she sets them straight by informing the two that she intends to buy their bank.

Even then, the bank’s top executive fears Jon Hamm’s sheriff Roy Tillman more than Lorraine, because what’s the worst a woman can do? Roy threatens the man to stop him from making the sale to Lorraine, simply because he doesn’t want “that woman” to profit on his territory.

And that makes Scandia police officer Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) braver and more stalwart than she realizes.

When Lorraine first meets Indira, several episodes before she sits down with those good old boys, all she can see is a civil servant in debt up to her eyeballs.

“What is your function?” Lorraine asks Indira when they first meet in her office. “The police. I mean, why do we need you? . . . You’re gatekeepers standing outside the walls, keeping the rabble from getting in. But in here, inside these walls, you have no function. You should remember that.”

Women like Lorraine pride themselves on rarely being surprised, which works in Indira’s favor. She’s also constantly underestimated, leaving her with nothing to push back with except for her anger. So when Lorraine tries to shut her up by saying, “I don’t like your tone,” Indira replies, “Tough s**t. Some of us work for a living and go home to empty houses. Or houses that should be empty bedrooms filled with the dirty underpants of our man-child spouses. Your problem is you think that you’re rich because you’re better than me.”

Then Indira lists all the ways the two women are alike – more to the point, how alike Lorraine and Dorothy are, despite Lorraine’s dismissive refusal to look at her daughter-in-law’s police file showing the harrowing abuse she survived. In a single conversation Indira moves Lorraine from the conservative “People claiming to be victims are the downfall of this country” to offering Indira the job of heading her security team.

Moments after Indira walks out of Lorraine’s office, Dot’s mother-in-law gets on the phone with that banker who thought denying her was the safer choice. She opens that conversation with, “Are your balls in your belly looking for a safe place to hide? Good.” Mrs. Lyon then opens her devouring maw, listing all the ways she’s arranged to destroy the man’s life. These are not empty words but actions that have already been set in motion. “You want to know what your mistake was? It was thinking death is the worst thing that could happen to you.”

Lorraine’s epic chilliness contributes mightily to the delectability of this season of “Fargo,” offsetting its grim themes of spousal abuse and marriage as a chain of indebtedness. But her relative warming to Indira and Dorothy in the season’s second half makes her more compelling, moving what starts as a pair of adversarial relationships toward a team of women who understand each other, with one offering others a chance to succeed where bureaucracy and lazy men have failed them.

Helpfully we can see some version of this in reality. As Taraji P. Henson spills the details of how poorly treated the cast of “The Color Purple” were, she’s returned to mentioning that Oprah Winfrey’s intervention helped her get better pay and other benefits casts of primarily white productions receive, like drivers to the set.

“They [Warner Bros.] gave us rental cars, and I was like, ‘I can’t drive myself to set in Atlanta,’” the Oscar-and Emmy nominee told The New York Times.  “This is insurance liability, it’s dangerous. Now they robbing people. What do I look like, taking myself to work by myself in a rental car? So I was like, “Can I get a driver or security to take me?” I’m not asking for the moon. They’re like, ‘Well, if we do it for you, we got to do it for everybody.’ Well, do it for everybody!”

Since Henson first went public with her career-long struggles to get paid what she’s worth and treated with the same respect as her white peers, people have reverted to blaming Winfrey for failing her, playing into the classic tendency to pit high-profile women against each other. 

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But of Winfrey, one of the movie’s main executive producers, Henson posted on her Instagram, “She told me personally to reach out to her for ANYTHING I needed, and I did! It took ONE CALL . . . ONE CONVERSATION . . . and ONE DECISION-MAKING BLACK WOMAN to make me feel heard.”

Richa Moorjani in “Fargo” (FX)Who doesn’t love an aspirational power figure and fairy godmother who can make a few calls to reduce your problems if not make them entirely vanish? Hence the satisfaction of witnessing Lorraine’s steady shift from Mommy Dearest to vindictive she-dragon protecting what’s hers, including the two women she views as equals in gladiatorial terms if not financially.

Even so, Lorraine is a dangerous type of savior, playing into our culture’s poisonous trust of oligarchs and corporate titans hailed for their innovations and insufficiently questioned for their wrongdoing. And that may be intentional on the writers’ part, since presenting society as it is and not necessarily as we wish it were is the “Fargo” way.

Indira accepts Lorraine’s offer because it’s better pay than what the Scandia police can offer and a job with actual power and resources to save Dorothy – another woman who, like her, never asked for a handout and fought for the meager life she wants.

Indira achieves that by hitching her career to someone who benefits from the common person’s suffering, and that should not be lost on us. Neither should the new power she may wield as Lorraine’s new right hand, functioning as the single commodity the Queen of Debt needs but lacks: a conscience.

 

The post Power, respect and conscience: How the women of “Fargo” manage (up) in a man’s world appeared first on Salon.com.

In 2020 the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts picked up a one-star review that read "worst aquarium ever." It is a museum about the history of whaling, and it keeps no live whales. Six years later, the museum has printed the line on hoodies, T-shirts, crew necks, and bags, according to Boston 25 News. — Read the rest

The post A whaling museum printed its worst review on a hoodie. It sold out appeared first on Boing Boing.

On May 31, 1921, an armed white mob poured into Tulsa, Oklahoma’s majority African-American Greenwood district and began setting it ablaze. Families were driven out of their homes at gunpoint as their neighbors looted their belongings and burned their property to the ground. The lucky ones escaped the city with their lives, the less fortunate were rounded up and detained by law enforcement, and scores of men, women, and children were simply gunned down in the street.

Within the space of 48 hours Greenwood, a beacon of prosperity previously nicknamed the Black Wall Street, was wiped from the face of the earth. More than 10,000 black families were left homeless, and the death toll, tallied at 36 in 1921, is now estimated to be upwards of 300.

In all likelihood, most people who tune in to Sunday’s highly anticipated premiere of “Watchmen” (9 p.m. ET, HBO) will have never heard of this bloody, racist massacre that occurred almost a century ago on American soil.

The thought that such a crime could happen at all beggars belief to those of us who cling to the version of the American story that draws the place as heroic and just, where our greatest wrongs are made right. But nearly two weeks ago came the headlines that scientists and forensic anthropologists have begun the process of searching for the mass graves where untold numbers of murdered Tulsans may be buried.

And this is why series creator Damon Lindelof opens his part of the story with a re-enactment of that massacre that includes historically accurate eyewitness details from the thick of the nightmare. The vision of planes swooping down and dropping bombs on the screaming, unarmed citizens below, and the Klan openly hunting them, might appear to be heightened elements tossed in for dramatic effect, just part of the story that differentiates reality from fictionalized alternate history.

Except, according to records, that is actually what occurred. By air and on the ground, American citizens waged war on other American citizens, and made sure the survivors were frightened enough to stop talking about it, thereby keeping this account out of the history books.

The Tulsa massacre is the origin story of Lindelof’s “Watchmen,” an inspired, riveting continuation of the seminal comic book series co-created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons first published between 1986 and 1987.

In the original series Moore and Gibbons presented an interrogation of our relationship with superheroes and the popular notion of heroism itself with its story of people with purported superhuman abilities emerging between World War II and the 1960s and changing the trajectory of history itself.

In Moore’s and Gibbons’ history, these heroes gave the United States political and military advantage, allowing America to win the war in Vietnam, making it a state in the process, and gain the upper hand during the Cold War.

Within that history, too, are the effects of things that never came to be. Richard Nixon was never forced out of office, and term limits were abolished, allowing him to remain president well into the 1980s. After that, he was replaced by our first celebrity president, Robert Redford. It is against the law for freelance masked vigilantes to operate, and those that remain either work for the government or have gone into retirement.

The looming threat of World War III serves as the backdrop to the A-plot, a story comprised of many smaller tales and plots told from various points of view. But this overarching anxiety pitting the United States against the Soviet Union is annihilated when a gigantic squid reported to be from another dimension drops on Manhattan, immediately killing millions.

Lindelof’s continuation is intimately informed by that game-changing climax, only not in any way that the fly-by comic book consumer might immediately connect. The threat in the “Watchmen” comics mirrors the overriding fear hanging over the Reagan era, which is that of nuclear annihilation. Twenty-seven years later, in the alternate and actual histories of 2019, the all-destructive threat assumes the form of violence driven by white supremacy.

Only in this new “Watchmen,” the cops in Tulsa are the ones wearing masks, yellow face coverings for the uniformed beat cops, and more elaborate, fully immersed get-ups for its detectives.  Nominally this protocol allowing the police to remain anonymous was enacted to keep officers safe; only Tulsa’s Chief of Police Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) allows his face to be seen while he is on duty.

In practice, as is quickly evidenced, this inability to be identified allows the cops to operate with near-impunity and intimidate any population it deems a threat – mainly poor whites suspected of making up the ranks of the racist Seventh Kavalry, branded a terrorist organization.

Second in the chain of command is the fearsome cloaked Sister Night, the alter ego of Angela Abar (Regina King), a devoted wife, mother of three, and bakery owner. Angela claims to be retired; a hideaway under her bakery proves otherwise.

And her costume is the sleekest and most intimidating of her band of law-enforcement besides that of her colleague Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson), a severe by-the-book soldier whose engulfing reflective mask renders him featureless, and hints at a streak that is equally skeptical and paranoiac.

I suspect each will inspire a few Halloween costumes, maybe and hopefully replacing the popularity of Rorschach’s mask following Zack Snyder’s 2009 theatrical adaptation. In alt-2019, the Rorschach mask is the uniform of the Seventh Cavalry, making it the equivalent of a Klansman’s hood. He’s not around to critique this appropriation of his mantle, but other original characters are, including Doctor Manhattan (referenced but not seen),  the former Silk Spectre, who now just goes Laurie Blake (Jean Smart), and Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons), now the lord of a manor and still very much an arrogant tinkerer.

What Lindelof has achieved in the six episodes of “Watchmen” provided for review is extraordinary for its execution alone. It is dark, but it’s also exciting; grim, but also invigorating. The action sequences are stunning, as are the performances. King is a mesmerizing presence, as is Louis Gossett, Jr. as the mysterious Will Reeves, a figure who seems designed to irritate Angela at first but, owing to his age, is obviously there to give her clues as to how modern-day Tulsa connects to its past.

For all of its fantastical details, elements of “Watchmen” resemble the real 2019 too closely to be thought of as comfortable escapism. But the viewers that it hooks will be as fascinated, inquisitive, and passionate as its haters are rabid. If that isn’t a hallmark of inventive, provocative television, I’m not sure what is.

As I stated earlier, Lindelof’s “Watchmen” is not a divergence from the original story but an extrapolation – and a brutally intelligent one – of the original comic’s theories about our blind trust in authority, our misplaced reliance and trust in power, and even our concept of identity, shared and individual.

And yes, part of this has to do with the title itself, and Lindelof’s signature creative approach. The audience that knows him via “Lost” may have been flummoxed by “The Leftovers” and its insistent, unsettling interpretation of the mystery surrounding grief and loss.

What’s funny is that “Watchmen” is more straightforward than “The Leftovers” but will nevertheless confuse anyone who tunes in expecting a straightforward superhero tale, or even an obvious sequel to the comic.

“Watchmen” is very true to the original mythology – so much, in fact, that at the very least I’d advise reading a few summaries about the comic’s plot before diving into the show. This is because Lindelof intentionally steeps “Watchmen” in history: its own, and ours, and the version that answers the various “what if” questions that hold the potential to tweak the trajectory of an entire culture.

On the page, “Watchmen” liberally toys with the meaning of story and the power of perspective, but it also forces the question of whether the systems and structures we presume to be good or working for us actually are. The HBO series also does this in obvious ways, but makes answering that question more complicated and foggier as the series progresses.

But where Lindelof’s take finds the strongest and more fertile common ground with Moore’s is in the examination of history, and the difference between what actually happened and the so-called official record.

What “Watchmen” posits throughout its story is that history is only as accurate as the honesty in the edit and of the editor. In large part, history is a means of asking a culture to adopt an identity by remembering the past in a prescribed way. At its most aggressive, it demands we accept a particular point of view to the erasure of others that may blemish that perspective – essentially asking an entire nation of people to live in the heads of a select few.

That the series begins with an actual historic account that’s been intentionally kept out of the books is part of the trick, one that dares the viewer to simultaneously believe and distrust everything we see afterward. That’s very much in keeping with 2019, both the version in “Watchmen” and the one we’re living through. After all, if hate can wipe an entire town off the face of the earth in two days, an event that tens of millions never knew about, then why couldn’t squid rain down from the sky?

“Watchmen” premieres on HBO at 9 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 20. 

The post “Watchmen” is a brutally provocative reckoning of alternate history appeared first on Salon.com.

Perez Hilton always wanted to be famous. This is a statement of fact and not meant to make light of his self-harming incident broadcast via TikTok livestream on Tuesday—quite the opposite. Videos and images of Hilton, 48, covered in blood and cutting himself with a knife should be interpreted as a cry for help, not attention. A person can understand that much without seeing the footage.

But many who watched didn’t have a choice. Although Perez’s livestream proceeded for around 15 minutes before it was shut down, screenshots and clips rocketed across the internet, invading countless social media feeds. Some saw those disturbing images simply by picking up their mobile devices.

Fortunately, Hilton was transported from his Miami home to a hospital to receive medical attention, according to the local sheriff’s office. But such incidents have become increasingly commonplace to the point of numbing us.

While Wednesday morning Google search trends data showed that people were hunting for images of Hilton, I went to YouTube to see what he was up to in 2002. That year, he starred in a short film called “Dating Up,” which is not listed under his IMDb or Wikipedia filmographies.

He describes it in the video summary as “A short film about gay dating. In a world before Grindr!” It’s also a glimpse of the time before YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and before the man born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. launched PerezHilton.com in 2004 and quickly became one of the world’s most popular, controversial and despised gossip bloggers. 

I chose 2002 because that year’s most famous video captured the Feb. 1 execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Footage of his beheading circulated in the bowels of the internet for months, until the now-defunct Boston Phoenix published a link to it on its website, igniting furious debates about the morality and journalistic ethics of that decision.

Such discussions seem quaint in an age in which the video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was posted to social media moments after it happened, and a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed his killing of 51 worshippers at two mosques on Facebook.

An age, it bears adding, when X and Meta—Facebook and Instagram’s corporate owner—no longer emphasize stalwart moderation guardrails in the name of reducing “censorship” on their platforms.

The circumstances leading to Hilton’s distressing livestream and Pearl’s filmed execution are entirely dissimilar. But what brought the 2002 video to mind was that it marked the first time in modern history, at least that I can remember, that the public questioned what purpose watching something too horrible to fathom ultimately serves. Such discussions helped establish the difference between witnessing as a matter of civic responsibility and leering voyeurism.

Images of Sept. 11, 2001, were still fresh and traumatizing for millions who watched the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers collapse on live TV when Pearl was murdered.

But his death was an intimate injury to his loved ones first and foremost. Making it public, therefore, was viewed as a ghoulish act by many, including Salon’s former national correspondent Bruce Shapiro. “The idea that tossing the desires of Pearl’s family into the ashcan is ‘just what journalists do’ is only a cover for indiscriminate National Enquirer logic,” he said in a June 2002 column.

Months after that, the Phoenix’s media critic Dan Kennedy contended that it is our obligation to watch such difficult accounts in an essay for Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. “We turn away from such evil at our own peril,” Kennedy maintained.

Somewhere in the middle, the rest of us wondered how absorbing such horror would change us, whether as individuals or as a society.

Twenty-four years ago, it was very easy to turn away from something you had to go digging for in the first place. YouTube would not exist until 2005. Instagram’s founding happened five years after that. TikTok turns 10 this year.

In the years between those companies’ founding and now, social media has given us plenty of opportunities to take up those debates again. But when such content is widely available, and we have so little choice as to whether we can avoid it, conversations about the ethics of it all seem like a luxury.

In exceptional cases, disseminating footage that’s hard to stomach serves a noble objective. Graphically violent video pouring out of 2011’s Arab Spring uprisings opened the world’s eyes to the deadly state violence people suffered under the repressive regimes of Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Arab nations.

In the United States, bystander videography has been bringing incidents of police brutality into American living rooms since at least 1991, when Los Angeles resident George Holliday captured cops viciously beating Rodney King on videotape. But the first cellphone equivalents to go viral were the 2009 videos of a police officer fatally shooting 22-year-old Oscar Grant III in the back at Fruitvale Station in Oakland.

And the list of people whose last living, breathing moments were captured on cellphone videos and shared with the world has only gotten longer. In 2014, the nation watched Eric Garner suffocate to death as a New York City police officer subdued him using a prohibited chokehold. In 2016, Diamond Reynolds filmed the moment that a police officer shot her boyfriend Philando Castile to death during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and posted it to Facebook Live.

In 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. And earlier this year, multiple bystanders recorded the shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, footage that contradicted Trump administration officials’ claims that Good was a “domestic terrorist” and Pretti was an “assassin.”

In all those incidents, bearing witness galvanized the public. The international furor over Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests and briefly mainstreamed the Movement for Black Lives. Videos of Good and Pretti’s killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents turned all eyes to Minnesota, leading to the ouster of Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security.

At the same time, our social media algorithms were not as loosely regulated a decade ago as they are now. Teams of human moderators once employed by all the major platforms have been gutted. Nobody should be shocked to know that the easiest place to find Hilton’s self-harm videos is X.  As for TikTok, a spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, the platform relies on automated moderation systems. They flagged Hilton’s alarming livestream within minutes, closed other live streams within 90 seconds and banned the account, the spokesperson said, but its removal was delayed by what was characterized as “a moderator error.” (TikTok previously banned Hilton in 2020 for violating its community guidelines. At the time, his account had 1.6 million followers and averaged 10 million views per week.)

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The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.

Knowing this, the fact that the top search terms on Wednesday morning indicated that people were looking for images of Hilton’s self-harm instead of contextualizing reporting is telling but, sadly, not surprising.

Lurid real-world footage of people harming others or themselves is being served directly to us whether we want to see it or not. What we might debate, as we did 24 years ago, is what that’s doing to us.

The post The end of looking away from violence on social media appeared first on Salon.com.