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 have been many changes in America’s political system in the last decade or so, but some things are perennial. If you would have told me in August 2015 that we would be in the middle of Donald Trump’s second term, in which he’s slapping his name on buildings all over Washington, building monuments to himself and declaring that the country is under attack by communists, I would have laughed out loud. But if you had told me instead that the media would be framing the upcoming midterm elections as a referendum on the Democrats going too far left and alienating the rock-ribbed Americans who matter, I would have shrugged and said, “What else is new?” 

If there is one thing we have been able to count on for the last 30 years, if not longer, it is that it doesn’t matter how extreme the right wing might become or how far down the conspiratorial rabbit hole they go. The media interprets all political events in this polarized environment as validation of the belief that conservatives are always more in touch with Real America, and therefore more deserving of positions of leadership. According to this thesis, if Democrats want to win power, they will have to radically change their positions. 

That’s the conventional wisdom when it comes to the Michigan Senate race. After Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s win on August 4 in the Democratic primary, an avalanche of articles, editorials and op-eds — not to mention analysis by television pundits and social media influencers — have appeared claiming that he is too far left for Michigan’s general election voters. Practically no one is doing the same for his GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, who has tacked so far right that he has become a Midwestern hologram of the president.

This pattern is fascinating, especially considering the fact that in the last 35 years, Democrats have won the presidency five times to the Republicans’ four, a number that includes the two times (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016) the party lost the popular vote but won the anachronistic Electoral College. Coupled with the fact that control of Congress has been evenly split, it’s not as though the GOP has had their fingers on the American pulse this whole time. Instead, they have built a massive partisan media infrastructure and stolen Supreme Court seats to further put their thumbs on the scale of the electoral system with big money and voter suppression. 

With the deep unfairness of the Senate giving far more power to small, rural (and conservative) states, the institutional advantage held by Republicans is profound. And yet, according to conventional wisdom and the predictable knee-jerk reactions by too many establishment Democrats, when Republicans win it’s because conservative ideas have won over the people, and when the Democrats win it’s also because conservative ideas have won over the people. 

This dynamic was on full display Sunday when CNN’s Fareed Zakaria analyzed the Michigan Senate race by saying that working class voters have abandoned Democrats as the party has moved left — even as they have tried to appeal to people on economic grounds and offer ideas that will help them materially. “The lesson is not that economics don’t matter,” he said, “but the Democratic Party’s problem is not that it is seen as too centrist on economics. Democrats routinely lead Republicans on issues like healthcare, and even now, the cost of living. Their liabilities are cultural and social issues — crime, immigration, the border and the so-called woke agenda.” In other words, Democrats must move right on cultural issues to win elections. 

When Republicans lose — which, as we’ve seen, happens at least half the time — they aren’t harangued to take up diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, open the borders or clamp down on excess policing, even though their excesses on those issues could just as easily be seen as dispositive. The press will blame Trump or individual candidates for a lack of character, but they rarely apply the kind of analysis that Zakaria does, which essentially demands that Republicans abandon elements of their base to pander to Democrats. 

The result is that only Democrats have agency to break the impasse. 

When Bill Clinton won the presidency 34 years ago, Democrats had been in the presidential wilderness for 12 years. Their last two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson, had left office under the clouds of the Iran hostage crisis, in the case of the former, and Vietnam with the latter. The party decided to do just as Zakaria suggested, and Clinton won a plurality of voters in the 1992 general election on a platform of fiscal and personal responsibility, challenging the Democratic base on, you guessed it, culture war issues. Two years later, the GOP won the House majority for the first time in 42 years. So, that worked out well. 

According to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, over the past 35 years, the public has actually moved left on culture war issues, following a progressive shift among Democrats, while the right has clung to its prejudices. (Republicans’ cult worship of Trump and conspiratorial thinking is hard to measure in these terms, but there is no doubt they have changed dramatically in this regard.) 

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It should come as no surprise then that Democrats, feeling their strength in opposition to the extremely unpopular Trump, would see an opportunity to more explicitly push their message. Generally speaking, midterm elections are seen as a referendum on the party in power, and with the economy in an ongoing slump and Trump more polarizing than ever, you cannot blame them. As the New York Times reported, the party’s left wing has been energetically organizing all over the country, and it’s paid dividends in primaries in blue and purple states alike in the upper Midwest. And, once again, the media is falling back on the same old fear-mongering about the left alienating the Real Americans. 

We have article after article hand-wringing over El-Sayed’s primary win because he supports issues they consider beyond the pale, such as Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ending unlimited support for Israel, even though each of these issues have majority support. His primary opponents are now holding unity rallies to bring the various factions of the party together after the bruising campaign, and the national party has mobilized in support of his candidacy, including former President Barack Obama and former Transportation Secretary — and current Michigan resident — Pete Buttigieg, both of whom carry serious clout among more conservative members of the Democratic base and independent voters. In other words, Democrats are doing everything they can to reach out to the broad middle of the state.

Rogers, meanwhile, is doing the opposite, tacking hard to the right and even going so far as to join the most noxious, destructive conspiracy theory of all: election denialism. 

As a member of Congress between 2001 and 2015, Rogers was a standard conservative in the George W. Bush mold, voting for tax cuts and deregulation, and later chairing the powerful House intelligence committee in the last four years of his term. When he retired from the House, Rogers worked as a talk radio host and commentator for CNN. Although he supported Trump after he won the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, he refused to go down the road of the Big Lie following Joe Biden’s win in 2020. In an op-ed for the Washington Post — published the day before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — Rogers called Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he urged the secretary to find him additional votes, “more gangster than presidential.” Rogers wrote, “This trend of refusing to accept free and fair elections, without any proof of fraud, must end for the sake of our democratic republic.” A year later, he said Trump’s political career was over.

But times have changed. 

In 2024, when Rogers ran for the Senate against Elissa Slotkin, who would go on to win the race, he needed Trump’s endorsement. He gave his in return. Rogers has also adopted the president’s Big Lie, which should be disqualifying among thinking people everywhere.

I’m not seeing a lot of hand-wringing among the pundits about how Rogers is losing Real Americans with his extreme views; that criticism is being reserved for El-Sayed. Likewise, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is locked in a close Senate race against Democrat state Rep. James Talarico, isn’t being browbeaten to moderate his views. 

The Democrats may very well lose those races. But in this closely divided electorate, they might have lost them anyway with more moderate candidates. After all, Republicans have been running on racism and left-wing hippies for decades, no matter what their views were. The very centrist Clinton was vilified 35 years ago because he played the saxophone with sunglasses on “The Arsenio Hall Show.” Barack Obama’s middle name — Hussein — remains an Islamophobic meme all these years later. So, it’s not as if Republicans wouldn’t deploy the same insults to other candidates, no matter their positions.

This year, Democrats are talking straight and taking it right to the people, and both El-Sayed and Talarico, with their populist messages, are powerful communicators. Maybe it won’t work. But it’s long past time for the Democratic Party to stop allowing candidates to be harassed by the conventional wisdom that says the only way to win is to run to the right.

The post Mike Rogers is the real radical in the Michigan Senate race appeared first on Salon.com.

The road to Democratic control of the Senate remains steep, but Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity, the misbegotten war in Iran and a wobbly economy have opened a slender path.

The thinking goes that if Democrats can hold every blue seat, prevail in North Carolina and defeat Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, then they must take any two from a list of red states that could well be in some semblance of play: Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa or Nebraska.

Imagine that almost everything goes right. Democrats hold Georgia and New Hampshire. They claim North Carolina, vanquish Collins, and spring upsets in Texas and Alaska. But the chamber remains in GOP hands because Michigan Democrats could not reunify after a bruising primary. Kick away a winnable race in Michigan and, in this scenario, Ohio, Iowa or Nebraska also becomes a must. 

So don’t lose Michigan. 

On Tuesday, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens to claim the Democratic nomination. All the instant analysis is true: This was a political earthquake and one of the biggest wins progressives have scored. Stevens was better funded and the candidate of the Democratic establishment. El-Sayed’s win is a sign of the importance of Gaza inside the Democratic coalition, and of shrinking support for Israel. Now, his ability to close the deal this fall will be a crucial test of progressive electability ahead of the 2028 presidential election. 

The race was also closer than expected. With a small number of votes outstanding, El-Sayed’s lead is just under 16,000. He fell short of a clear majority, winning with 48.5%. And while both candidates continue to say all the right things about coming together for what will be a very close battle against an old-school conservative in former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers this fall, the tight margin, El-Sayed’s failure to secure a true majority and the nastiness of the race could make that difficult.

After all, El-Sayed recently had to plead with his backers not to take personal shots at Stevens and her accent online. The airwaves were filled with millions of dollars in negative ads, many of them determined to paint El-Sayed as unelectable in the general. He called Stevens “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.” She retorted that “Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.” A unity breakfast might not be enough to paper all that over in a matter of weeks, especially if the super PACs that backed Stevens continue to spend millions to fan the flames against El-Sayed in the general election. 

This race could have been run in a far different and more positive manner. If it had, both progressives and Democrats as a party would be in a much stronger position heading into what will likely be a very competitive general election that decides control of the chamber. The stakes are high and will determine, among other things, whether Trump can confirm Supreme Court justices over the next two years.

Imagine the difference that ranked choice voting would have had in the primary. A third Democrat, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, won over 4% of the vote despite dropping out of the race several weeks ago. She won 61,000-plus votes, almost four times the difference between El-Sayed and Stevens. If Michigan used RCV in its primaries — like Maine, New York City and dozens of cities nationwide — the winner would have been able to claim a majority, and an easier path to unifying the party.

Some $60 million of negative ads flooded Michigan’s airwaves over this primary. Ranked choice voting wouldn’t have stopped that entirely; important, contentious issues were at stake. Outside dollars were a given. Yet RCV has been proven to lower the temperature in races like this and encourage conversation, coalition-building and respect. 

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It’s entirely likely that an RCV race would have looked quite different. McMorrow and other challengers — forced out to provide voters with a binary, two candidate contest without spoilers — would have been able to stay in the race. Then, El-Sayed, Stevens and the others would have had every incentive to build a coalition through second choices to reach 50%. That comes from finding common ground, not from scare ads and nasty attacks. The winner of a race like that would be in far stronger shape, and ready to focus on the Republicans. Instead, El-Sayed is stuck trying to rebuild an intra-party coalition after the primary.

Instead, as McMorrow faded, party leaders and donors leaned on the state senator, a promising, charismatic politician, to exit and reduce the field to two. But this strategy didn’t produce a majority winner. It just limited choices before voters, and the winner still fell short of a majority. Democrats look less unified in a must-win race as a result.

Ranked-choice voting doesn’t fix everything that’s wrong with our politics. It’s not a silver bullet that cures polarization, settles complicated policy debates or ensures that everyone gets along. But it’s such an obviously useful tool in races like this that it makes zero sense not to use it. 

Win or lose, progressives and centrists will debate the meaning of this race for some time to come. That’s fine. In some form, the party is endlessly re-fighting 2016 over and over again. The more immediate issue is that primaries like this are going to continue to be contentious. Democrats would be in a better position to win races they absolutely must win if they adopted ranked choice voting in primaries like Michigan’s this. (Republican primaries would benefit from this nonpartisan tool too). 

This is a lesson that Democrats absolutely must learn ahead of the 2028 presidential primaries. Then, it won’t simply be a schism between centrists and the left, but between multiple candidates within each lane and others representing different perspectives, backgrounds and parts of the country.

It will be painful for Democrats if they fail to take the Senate because they lost Michigan. But if that happens, it might not be because El-Sayed was too progressive for a swing state — but because Democrats chose their nominee through a process that bloodied and embittered everyone with no hope of consensus, and no easy path to reconciliation. In Michigan, and in other bitter primaries to come, they are going to need one.

The post Ranked choice voting could have saved Michigan appeared first on Salon.com.

Indiana is in many ways a liminal state, the place you pass through between scruffy Cleveland and business-like Chicago, with little to inspire romantic odes to home. Its glacial flatness doesn’t lend itself to crusades, or to impressive scenes like a man on horseback silhouetted against the sunset. But Sophie Cunningham has let the state turn her into a combination of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, willing to joust with a windmill. 

The reserve for the WNBA’s Indiana Fever comes off the bench for the latter-day contenders, spelling for star Caitlin Clark and averaging a respectable eight points per game. When then-Connecticut Sun guard Jacy Sheldon poked Clark in the eye during a particularly physical play in 2025, Cunningham avenged the perceived slight with a headlock during a later play. Her reputation as Clark’s right-hand and enforcer spread along with the viral clip.  

Since Clark’s days as a national college basketball player for the Iowa Hawkeyes, the right-wing grievance machine has tried to make Clark their Great White Hope. This seemed to accelerate in 2024 after she joined the WNBA, a league in which over 81% of the players are women of color. Clark, an inveterate trash-talker and hyper-competitive athlete, has seemed completely uninterested in courting controversy away from the hardwood. She’s avoided joining any conservative crusades and has done little to stoke the support of her most MAGA fans.

Enter Cunningham. In wide-ranging ESPN profile, she said she was concerned about the idea of trans women participating in women’s sports and wanted to “protect young girls in the locker room.” The Fever enforcer also worried that the next generation would have to “go against biological men.”

Cunningham doubled down in a press conference the next day, adding that her views were “common sense.”

“I said what I said,” she told reporters.

Republicans have spent years building a trans panic in the United States. When they heard their own talking points out of the mouth of a popular professional athlete, they pounced. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz rushed to applaud Cunningham. Fox News has spent the weeks since her inflammatory interview dissecting every questionable call against the second-stringer, as protests and counterprotests became a regular fixture at Fever games. Earlier this week, Vice President JD Vance encouraged her to keep up the fight.

“Sometimes when you’re courageous in this country, some of the worst people in the world try to attack you,” he shared with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “You are inspiring a dozen people for every person that criticizes you.” 

It’s not hard to see why conservatives raised their banners for Cunningham. In the tall, slight and blonde athlete, they had found a noble hero to fight against the tides of modernity in service of some older ideal. It doesn’t hurt that she could easily slot into Fox News’ afternoon lineup.

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The calculation from Cunningham’s end, if there is one, is also not difficult to understand. She wouldn’t be the first athlete who took a hard look at the calendar and their pocketbook and decided to get onboard the right-wing gravy train before they aged out of the league. Former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines and former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom have fashioned second acts out of their willingness to say what MAGA wants to hear. ESPN reshaped their entire network around Pat McAffee, sort of the Joe Rogan of former punters. 

For Cunningham’s supporters, it doesn’t matter that her opponents, as in “Don Quixote,” are not fierce giants but windmills posing no threat. Transgender people are a remarkably small share of the population, and the portion of them who chose to participate in organized sports is even smaller still. Frequently, when states pass laws barring transgender athletes from competition, the result can feel overwhelmingly personal to those affected, since the number of people excluded in a given state can be counted on your fingers. A West Virginia law barring public schools from allowing trans athletes to compete alongside students of the same gender was upheld by the Supreme Court this year. It applied to exactly one teenager. 

Cunningham’s fears are of her own making. There are no trans athletes competing in the top-tier of any major professional sport in the United States. The stories that anti-trans legislators and commentators tell are always hypothetical. Cunningham proclaims herself as a warrior for “common sense” by fighting off a scourge that no one can see. 

On the bright side, it looks like Cunningham might not have the fortitude for the life of a crusader. On Wednesday, she told reporters that she wants “to get back to basketball.” Whether that decision to “shut up and dribble” will hold as she enters the back half of her career remains to be seen. 

The post Conservatives find their fighter in Sophie Cunningham appeared first on Salon.com.

Former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently posted an odd picture on social media. A group of people were gathered around a large dining table beneath a massive chandelier of antler, a tableau that evoked some kind of Viking summit. Tucker Carlson sat at the head of the table like a preppy Ragnar Lothbrok, and he was surrounded by fellow Trumpist apostates Greene, former Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Joe Kent — the former MAGA cultist who resigned as Donald Trump’s director of counterterrorism — and their respective spouses. “The movement has begun,” Greene captioned the picture.

Their new political movement began to take shape on Wednesday when he revealed the 10-point manifesto during a livestream. While he was vague about the specific form he expected this movement to take, it was later reported that Greene, Massie and Kent had visited Carlson’s Maine estate to urge him to run for president in 2028. The manifesto would seem to be the first step toward a third-party bid, since all these people are persona non grata with the GOP establishment, and have attempted to seize the MAGA mantle with varying degrees of success. 

Considering the split in the Republican Party these days between the MAGA cultists, the MAGA populists and what is now a rump establishment, the timing does seem ripe for a third-party to form from the right, and Carlson is a likely candidate to lead it. After having debased himself for years by behaving as a Trump toady while trying desperately to maintain something of an original persona, Fox News fired him in ignominious fashion in 2023. Shortly after, he retreated to Maine to reinvent himself as a podcaster and the leader of the populist, isolationist right.

Carlson has had quite a bit of success in that role, which was massively enhanced when Trump went to war with Iran and tightened the already symbiotic relationship with Israel. The opening is here, and Carlson seems ready to seize the opportunity. 

The problem, of course, is that third-party presidential bids in American politics never win, and they often end up being spoilers for one of the two main parties, although they can have quite a lot of influence on the agendas of both. The most successful — those that earned the largest shares of the popular vote — signal a discontent with one or both parties that can serve as a wake-up call that the country is looking for change. 

Four third-party campaigns have resulted in double-digit vote counts, starting with Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party in 1912. By then a former president after passing the baton to William Howard Taft, a decision he came to regret, Roosevelt got 27.4% of the vote, showing that progressive ideas around workers’ rights, business regulation, constitutional reform and conservation, among other things, were potent political issues among voters who had been buffeted by an unregulated financial system and exploited by the Gilded Age barons. Roosevelt’s campaign shook the system, earning 88 electoral votes and dooming Taft’s reelection campaign in favor of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

Twelve years later, although he received 16.6% of the popular vote, the third-party run of progressive Robert LaFollette was less consequential; he only carried Wisconsin and its 13 electoral votes. In 1968, George Wallace, the Southern populist, racist and former governor of Alabama, received 13.5% of the popular vote and 48 election votes, carrying all five states of the Deep South. 

In 1992, wealthy businessman Ross Perot seized the public imagination with his economic nationalism — “that giant sucking sound of jobs going overseas” — and fiscal conservatism seemed to speak to disaffected members of both parties who felt that the country had abandoned the average worker. Despite his great wealth, Perot had a homespun approach and used the media very effectively. When he ran in 1992, he received 18.9% of the popular vote, support that most pollsters said came equally from both parties, but garnered no electoral votes. Four years later, Perot garnered a respectable 8.4%, and his Reform Party lasted until 2000, when Donald Trump made a brief attempt at a run under its banner. 

Third-party presidential bids have perversely had the greatest impact in moments where the country has been closely divided between the two parties.

The 2000 election comes to mind. The national popular vote was almost equally divided, with Vice President Al Gore receiving 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush, the Republican governor of Texas, but the presidency was decided by a series of events in Florida, where the tally ended up being 537 votes for Bush, giving him the state’s 25 electoral votes. But without the presence of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, Gore would have won Florida — and the presidency. Nader’s 97,488 votes in the Sunshine State, which would have likely been cast for Gore had he not been in the race, made sure it went for Bush, and consigned the country to years of war and economic distress. 

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In the lead-up to 2028, you can already see the influence of Carlson’s faction of the right putting pressure on the GOP. His manifesto is an eccentric amalgam of populist right-wing nationalism, woo-woo Make America Healthy Again anti-science beliefs, isolationism, anti-elitism, natalism, degrading education and xenophobia, and ideas of “beautifying” the country and rebuilding manufacturing and farming. Carlson side-stepped the issues of abortion, religion, and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which is surprising since he’s been in the middle of those culture war issues for years.

At the same time, Vice President JD Vance has been laying the groundwork for his own run by releasing “Communion,” a book focused on his religious faith and conversion to Catholicism. He has also been trying to thread the needle between the anti-elite message, which is at the center of the present populist movement, and his devotion to Trump, the most corrupt president in American history. Vance seems to be trying out a strategy in which he will portray himself as the great crusader against fraud in day care centers and hospice care, for which he blames the so-called scourge of immigrant labor. 

The vice president is coming to the defense of those who are economically disadvantaged in this economy, which he has said shows that “40 years of bipartisan economic policy has failed.” (The Trump years, which the president insists have been the greatest economy the world has ever known, evidently don’t count.) Vance has even taken to social media to position himself against a Trump-supporting elite. Responding to right-wing columnist Marc Theissen’s rude “cry me a river” response to a college kid lamenting that “a burrito shouldn’t cost $20,” Vance responded with a Trumpian insult, saying, “I’m surprised to hear Mark say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.” I guess this is supposed to endear him to the MAGA folks while subtly acknowledging that the affordability crisis is real.

Vance seems to know that such a magic trick will be difficult, if not impossible, to pull off in 2028. He will have to defend Trump’s economy, which will be necessary to attract the hard-core cultists who still love the president despite the nation’s sluggish economy. 

Carlson, meanwhile, sitting outside the administration, has a much better chance of snagging this populist right-wing movement that’s evolved from Trump’s original “America First” movement, which could serve as a way for many disillusioned Trump voters to maintain the fiction that they really only cared about policy all along. 

This fissure has every chance of splitting the GOP and helping Democrats take back the White House. Go, Tucker, go.

The post Tucker Carlson could derail the GOP’s 2028 plans 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.

Donald Trump showed up at a Las Vegas rally on Wednesday night singing the same out-of-tune song he has belched out ever since he got his revenge over the Democrats in 2024 and clawed his way back into the White House. During that time, he has waged illegal wars, killed innocent people and committed war crimes against enemies real and imagined. 

Since his return Trump has consistently alienated and enraged U.S. allies while going out of his way to coddle and occasionally enrage nations more often viewed as enemies. Except for Iran, of course, which he alternately bombs, demonizes and flatters. He invaded Venezuela to serve  a warrant. He has ordered missile attacks on boats at sea without cause, evidence or due process. Hey, the crews have to stay sharp, right? 

Here at home, Trump has destroyed the East Wing, the South Lawn, the Kennedy Center and the Rose Garden, while crowding the city with young National Guard troops who have little or no desire to be there. Trump doesn’t care. Those men and women in uniform are just props used to exercise control so he can crow about how safe the city is. If he decides to call for martial law, he’ll conveniently already have boots on the ground in D.C. 

While preparing for the country’s planned celebration of its 250th birthday, Trump decided to do a little housecleaning and update the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, vowing  to make it better than ever. As usual with this guy, we got a lot less than he promised, though he continues to tell us how “big and beautiful” the pool is — or rather was, until “vandals” destroyed it. 

He issued a no-bid contract to a company that botched the renovation, according to staunch Trump loyalist Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. That revelation came out only after former Olympic canoeist Jeff Hearn got hit with a felony charge, apparently for picking up a piece of the pool’s peeling paint from the renovation. 

Immediately after his arrest, Pirro and Trump claimed they had definitive proof Hearn had caused more than $1,000 in damage. He was then indicted. Only after that did Pirro bother to review the evidence and conclude the renovation was at fault.

Wake up, kids: I’ve seen this behavior before.

When I was just a little boy, standing to my daddy’s knee, my pop took me to visit my Aunt Bill and Uncle Beverly on their farm outside Bardstown, Kentucky.

Yes, Aunt Bill and Uncle Beverly. I thought they’d gotten named backward when I first met them. They were great people and it was a great place to live. Their farmhouse was already old when I first saw it in 1966, complete with a chicken coop out back.

It also featured what we’d now call a “vintage” kitchen, featuring antique appliances. The end of the Great Depression was just 25 years in our rearview mirror, but the stains were still easily seen throughout rural Kentucky. 

A few minutes after I met Aunt Bill for the first time, she said something that struck me funny. I may have heard this expression before, but to this day, I hear Aunt Bill’s voice in my head saying, “Honey, quit running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” I heard that as I fled a pursuing bumblebee, with an emphasis on “quit” that sounded like a meat cleaver going through a chicken’s neck. 

I laughed trying to visualize what she said. The only thing I could think of was a Bugs Bunny cartoon. My parents assured me that Aunt Bill’s description was every bit as accurate as she was colorful. I refused to believe them, and must have been strident enough that my aunt asked my mom if she’d allow me to witness her prepare the chicken casserole she planned to serve that night. I was a bit suspicious of the use of the word “witness” instead of the more familiar “watch.”

What was this all about? I soon found out. My aunt took me out to the chicken coop and demonstrated, with a large cleaver, not only the origination of the saying but how one “prepared” an appropriately sized hen for the family dinner.

What I felt in that moment is exactly how I feel about American politics in 2026.You could make the argument that most of what passes for culture on this planet resembles a headless chicken spewing blood everywhere as it stumbles around aimlessly for a few minutes before falling over dead and becoming food for something else.

On the surface, things seem deceptively quiet, even normal, if you ignore the mass shootings, the war, the cyclosporiasis, the Trump “sports curse” and the hole that used to be the East Wing. Congress still meets. The president does whatever the hell he does. The Supreme Court hears cases. Wall Street keeps moving upward. Large media companies produce endless amounts of entertainment and news.

But look below the surface and you see a Supreme Court bought and sold to a cause that isn’t the Constitution. You see unending greed. Congress is paralyzed, brain-dead and greedy, a political zombie. 

Just consider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And his brain worm. 

The HHS secretary recently and proudly told a reporter he had no gag reflex. While that may explain his affiliation with Trump, Kennedy also said he could literally pick up anything dead along the side of the road and eat it. 

Once again, I have to circle around to the movie “Idiocracy.” I have previously compared Trump’s administration to the fictional world of that movie, while noting that it wasn’t supposed to be a documentary. In fact, I’ve made a huge error. The world “Idiocracy” is much less stupid than our reality. Remember that this president suggested treating COVID by injecting bleach. His two terms as president will likely serve as textbook examples of extreme government corruption. His name is destined to become a rude punchline or be completely forgotten. Either will do.

If there are still ratings to be gained from reporting on his nonsense, the corporate media will continuously keep doing that until a more profitable scandal comes along. 

Still, I must insist that the existential angst of the United States is much larger than Donald Trump, though we apparently love hearing about him. So does he, I assure you. Cheer him, mock him or despise him; he’ll be here all week, so try the veal. He thrives on the attention. 

Unless the Democrats win decisive control of both the House and the Senate this fall, or miraculously find a boatload of Trump supporters to vote for impeachment and convict him — and both seem unlikely — Trump will be president until he dies or his term ends. In  both cases, we can’t be sure he won’t stick around. If Mitch McConnell can disappear for weeks and still hold office, there’s nothing keeping Trump from doing the same. 

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Are we Rome after the empire has fallen? Would we even know it if we were? Many Romans didn’t know that at first. Will it take years to recognize our current situation for what it really is?

We have a president who does commercial breaks in his own public speeches for corporations that make him money. He loves insider trading, and engages in it based on decisions he makes as president. He should really be wearing a NASCAR jumpsuit with  his corporate sponsors displayed on his back and sleeves. Make it brilliant white, with gold piping and epaulets, and I guarantee he’d wear it.

There are no principles in this administration beyond the principle of making money. There are no values that can’t be counted in dollars. If you don’t like it, you get to meet the muscle. At least until we run out of bullets, or Pete Hegseth quits staring at himself longingly in his full-length mirror.

Just as the Reflecting Pool debacle exposes Trump, it also exposes the real existential threat to America. We have abandoned many of the ideals that founded the country. We exercise no caution. We don’t respect our institutions, even the good ones. Many ignore the Constitution. Some want to gut it. Some openly embrace bigotry, deny science, despise free enterprise and hate the contributions made by immigrants — one of the coolest aspects of our national narrative. 

We have literally and metaphorically tried to erase our actual history in favor of a mythical past that never existed — even in bad LSD trips.

What we’re left with is an intolerant society where might makes right, the ends justify the means and Anthony Fauci is thought to be guilty of corruption, greed and crimes against humanity, with no more evidence than was presented in the Reflecting Pool case. 

That case has a singular importance because it displays Trump’s heartless and vindictive nature over the smallest issues. Indict before you investigate. Threaten the world, including your own U.S. attorney when the corruption is exposed. Rinse and repeat. Keep lying about everything.

There’s no case against the canoeist. There’s no case against Fauci. We can’t trust Trump on anything. He runs around like a chicken with his head cut off, trying to avoid questions about Jeffrey Epstein, his long list of no-bid contracts, and a wealth of other misdeeds. The press and the public also have that headless-chicken quality, running about reporting and consuming the latest outrages, while missing the larger point: Our government doesn’t work when we are at cross purposes. Of course being headless chickens we can’t think much. 

In other words, we cannot deal with the problems we face if we can’t face the fact that we have created most of our problems. Until we do that, all I see is my Aunt Bill “preparing” the chicken for dinner. And we’re the chicken.

The post Reflecting on Trump’s bottomless pool of corruption appeared first on Salon.com.

For Rep. Max Miller, shaking off allegations of domestic violence and child abuse should be an easy lift. The 43-year-old Ohio Republican benefits from a base that treats violence against women as a non-issue at best. In many cases, credible accusations against a GOP politician only bolsters his popularity with the MAGA base, who view men as the real victims of uppity women who should learn to keep their mouths shut. But as he aggressively attacks his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, and her father, Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller’s behavior is as bizarre as it is unsettling. Even Republicans are starting to squirm. 

Miller faces an overwhelming number of accusations from Emily Moreno, including claims that he threw hot water at his ex-wife and held a gun to her head when they were married, and that he broke his two-year-old daughter’s collarbone. An in-depth investigation from Mother Jones revealed an apparent pattern of behavior that dates back to high school, when a fellow student said Miller threw her down a flight of stairs when she refused his sexual advances. He has also been accused of violence by a college classmate and his ex-girlfriend, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who filed for a temporary restraining order against him on Monday. (In 2021, after Grisham published an op-ed in the Washington Post detailing abuse by her boyfriend, whom she did not name but described as a White House staffer, Miller sued her for defamation. He later dropped his suit, and the pair signed a nondisclosure agreement.)

In the past, Republicans — especially Donald Trump — have successfully weathered accusations of sexual or physical violence, regardless of how many or how well-evidenced the claims, by leaning on stereotypes that paint women as petty liars. As he once did with Grisham, Miller is following the same playbook against Moreno, but he is running into a serious problem: He is so off-putting that even the president seems a little annoyed about defending him.

But Miller is also confronting a party that seems increasingly weary of dealing with the alleged sex pests and predators that have flooded the Republican ranks, welcomed by a president with boundless sympathy for men who, like himself, face credible accusations of violence against women. 

Miller has been racking up a series of unsettling on-camera appearances in which his attempts at defending himself instead reveal a deep well of dishonesty. In his initial livestream denying the allegations, he not only exhibited an odd demeanor, but he also falsely insisted that every accusation could be “traced back to a single source, my former wife.” While the police opted not to file charges in the child abuse case, a specialist during the investigation said the bruising on the former couple’s daughter looked hand-shaped. Miller has also cited an October 2024 statement from Moreno that he had never harmed their daughter, which is especially dishonest, since the collarbone incident happened more than a year later, in February 2026. In an apparent effort to minimize throwing hot water on Moreno, he released an audio recording in which he blames her — “I told you before that not to come over to me and start screwing around,” he says — and accuses her of “weaponing this because of my previous allegation.”

It got worse when Miller was interviewed Tuesday by CNN’s Jake Tapper, an appearance deemed “strange” by Michael Grynbaum of the New York Times, and the equivalent of “tweeting through it.” One especially noteworthy moment in the 23-minute segment came when Tapper asked if Miller had held his daughter’s blue bunny — which she needs to sleep — hostage. After attempting to dodge the question several times, he said “no.” On Thursday, Mother Jones published a series of text messages allegedly showing both Emily and Bernie Moreno pleading, over the course of months, for Miller to return the stuffed animal, only to be rebuffed, even after a family friend and then a lawyer got involved. Eventually, a parenting coordinator texted Emily Moreno: “l’ve suggested you keep the bunny at your house . . . in a high conflict divorce these situations blow up.”

The situation is so bad that many in the Republican professional class have declined to defend Miller. “I mean what the absolute f**k was that,” an anonymous GOP strategist told a CNN reporter right after the interview. Scott Jennings, a Republican pundit under contract with the network, went even further: He begged Miller to resign, saying he can’t keep “litigating this on national TV day after day.” 

Bernie Moreno, albeit belatedly, reacted to Miller’s behavior by defending his daughter, telling reporters he sent her, his granddaughter and his wife to a “secure place” out of state for their own safety. Some of his GOP colleagues in the Senate are joining him in condemning his former son-in-law. Ohio Sen. Jon Husted called on Miller to resign on Thursday. Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy was even more forceful, tweeting that Miller is “a degenerate sociopath” and asking “What kind of person would treat their daughter this way?”

For the record: Adult women do not deserve abuse either. But hey, defending a toddler is a good start. 

For his part, Trump kept up his long history of robust public support for men accused of violence against women, saying Miller is “a good person” and portraying the allegations as a mere family dispute. But according to an Axios report, the president privately called Miller and said “things aren’t looking good.”

While most Republican leaders are trying to avoid the situation, many are starting to express doubts about Miller to reporters. Although the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Miller this week, they only did so after he publicly demanded it, which means there is good reason to believe Miller thinks very little effort will go into discovering the truth. House Speaker Mike Johnson has been dodging the issue with mealy-mouthed language about allowing “this process to play out.” 

The ambivalence sadly makes sense from a political perspective, even though the moral failure is damning. After all, this is the same party that unquestioningly supports Trump, who has been credibly accused of sexual harassment and abuse by at least 18 women, including the writer E. Jean Carroll, who sued Trump twice and won in both cases.

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Miller is clinging to Trump’s example, recalling how Trump “stayed in the fight” despite “dozens” of allegations of “nasty criminal misconduct,” and it may pay off. According to the Washington Post, many Republican voters are standing firm in their decision to back Miller. Most seemed to think he’s guilty, even as they used minimizing language. They told the Post they prefer a man they believe beats women to any Democrat.

Still, there are some intriguing signs that Republicans are growing weary of standing by gross and terrible men. Earlier this week, North Carolina Rep. Chuck Edwards agreed not to run for re-election, after the House Ethics Committee found “substantial reason to believe” he had “engaged in sexual harassment” of two young women on his staff. This follows the decision earlier this year by Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas to step down after a staffer he was having an affair with died by suicide.

Florida Rep. Cory Mills managed to hold onto his seat after police came to his house in 2025 to investigate an alleged assault, which was followed a few months later with a restraining order to protect his ex-girlfriend based on a series of alleged threatening text messages. More recently, things have been going poorly for Mills; in July, the Justice Department opened an investigation into his conduct. Two of his fellow Sunshine State Republicans jumped ship in August when they endorsed his opponent, Ryan Elijah, in the August 18 GOP primary.

The most prominent creep rejection, though, might be from outside Congress. In July, right-wing influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate were detained in the U.S. last month and look likely to be extradited to the United Kingdom to stand trial for rape and sex trafficking. In 2025, the Tates thought they were going to escape justice by coming to the U.S., having cultivated friendships with Trump’s sons and various White House officials, one of whom, diplomatic envoy Richard Grenell, spoke with Romanian officials mere days before their government reversed course and let the brothers leave the country, despite pending sex abuse charges. But after their most recent arrest, it appears the Trump White House has decided to hang the Tates out to dry, even as they have pled for help in avoiding the British justice system.

After Andrew Tate’s most recent detention, the Guardian’s Moira Donegan wrote that his “style of masculinity is popular on the right,” before observing that that fact “does not mean that it is popular with the public.” With November’s midterms looming, that seems to be an increasing source of discomfort with Republicans. Loyal MAGA voters don’t mind gendered violence and, in many cases, hold men in higher esteem if they hate and abuse women.

But Republicans can’t win with base voters alone. They need to convince swing voters that the left’s accusations of misogyny are overblown and that accusations are false, rooted in political conspiracy and women’s alleged tendency towards hysteria. That’s getting a lot harder when the men claiming to be victims of lies make themselves impossible to take seriously. 

The post Max Miller tests GOP tolerance of terrible men appeared first on Salon.com.

Most of Donald Trump’s success in politics has stemmed from his reputation as a savvy dealmaker. But in his 11 years on the national political scene, that has been exposed as a fiction — a persona invented by Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for the president’s bestselling book “The Art of The Deal,” who followed him around for 18 months and realized in the process that no one would want to read a book about the real Trump. 

After Trump announced his run for president in 2015, Schwartz told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer he felt deep remorse for creating this erroneous image of Trump, saying if he wrote the book today, he would call it “The Sociopath.” He said, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

His words were startling, to say the least, but Schwartz’s description of the president’s true personality was revelatory. The man who touted himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker was a pathologically dishonest hype artist with the attention span of a four-year-old, described by Schwartz as having “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance” who seemed “driven entirely by a need for public attention.” His alleged negotiation prowess was actually nonexistent, as the multiple failures of his businesses should have made clear. 

In Trump’s first administration, it became obvious that his idea of dealmaking consisted of willingly succumbing to flattery by malevolent actors and ineffectually bellowing at allies. Professional diplomatic and national security advisers managed to steer him away from most disasters, although he commonly embarrassed the nation on the world stage by displaying his ignorance and fondness for sucking up to adversaries. 

Trump’s second term is a whole other story. 

The president has confused his “Art of the Deal” with the art of diplomacy, and they are most definitely not the same thing. Even if he were actually talented at the former, which he is not, it would have no bearing on the latter, and the consequences of that are turning out to be substantial and damaging. By this point, it’s a cliché that Trump is “transactional,” which many (if not most) people understand to mean he is negotiating on behalf of the American people, bringing riches and security to the nation. In reality, Trump’s often self-serving deals are gravely harming the national interest. 

Diplomacy isn’t just signing a particular agreement between two countries. That may be the culmination of negotiations or just the beginning, but it isn’t actually the goal, especially for a superpower. The aim is to manage relations between countries over the long term to maintain stability and predictability; it’s not a “winner take all” proposition. Credibility is everything for a country like the United States, and now, without it, we are unleashing powerful forces that will be very hard to control.

Trump is a pathological liar. Schwartz discovered that from the very beginning. He was attached to Trump at the hip for many months, listening in on every phone call, observing his conversations and racking his brain to figure out how to present the man as a lovable rogue rather than the damaged personality he really is. The whole world has seen this up close for the past decade. 

At first, allies depended upon the professional diplomatic and national security apparatus to continue to run things in spite of Trump’s erratic behavior and belligerence. They understood early on he loved pomp and circumstance, and that he was easily flattered by obsequious compliments, so they played along, giving him the pageantry of over-the-top state visits and paying homage to him at his properties and the White House. But for the most part, they were just trying to wait out the term, expecting that the American people would realize the error of their ways and revert to being a serious nation. 

This time around is different. A recent report in the Washington Post by Steve Hendrix and Anthony Faiola revealed that the world is no longer taking the U.S. seriously, leaving the government with no credibility. As a result, international relations are unstable and dangerous. 

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When Trump regained office the second time, the world quaked at his swagger, backed up by a bizarre tariff regime that seemed to be put together by Mad Libs. The markets dropped, recriminations flowed, and it looked as if Trump had finally been completely unleashed. To some extent, he had been. He and his close circle had decided to do whatever they wanted and see what they could get away with. But it soon became evident there wasn’t really any strategy or even any particular goals, despite the apparent participation of people like Elon Musk and the authors of Project 2025. In the end, it was all about Trump’s whims, which changed from minute to minute. 

The short attention span Schwartz described is now even more pronounced. The president’s obsession with building monuments to himself notwithstanding, he flits from subject to subject, bellowing threats to all who oppose him and rewarding his cronies with ever more obvious modes of corruption. 

The world has decided to stop paying attention. “[M]ost consequently,” Hendrix and Faiola wrote, “Iran refuses to bend under American bombs and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and Russian President Vladimir Putin persists in his war in Ukraine. Europe met Trump’s recently renewed demands for Greenland with a collective sigh, and trading partners have shrugged off the latest tariffs.” 

Over the years, world leaders have had varying reactions to American presidents of both parties. But the country’s leaders have never been disregarded. 

Jeremy Shapiro, director of the U.S. program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the Post he was surprised at how long Trump’s bluffs and bellicosity had worked, crediting it to the “awesome power and deep, long-stored-up diplomatic capital of the United States” that Trump has “finally started to blow through.”

The president’s threats are now seen as empty, and his so-called deals aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. This was most recently on display in mid-July when he made a big, splashy announcement of a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. Within a day, Trump added a poison-pill requirement by way of a Truth Social post that left the Saudis reeling. His threats to annihilate Iran are now falling on deaf ears because he’s all over the place, usually lying about the progress of diplomatic talks, showing that he’s full of bluster and bombast but lacks a strategy to win and ideas about how to get out. 

America’s political dynamics have us all just trying to hold on until he’s out of office so we can try to rebuild from the rubble. But the loss of credibility, the exposure of the nation’s weaknesses and the people’s willingness to put such a man in charge will not be easily repaired. The long-term damage to our international reputation, coupled with the weakness we are demonstrating in any number of areas, will leave us vulnerable for a long time to come.

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“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.

Writing something is a bit like polishing rocks. You start with an ugly hunk of something, a phrase or an idea you’ve tripped over. It rattles against the hard edges of your brain until it gets polished and smooth. Moving the rock through finer and finer grits is time-consuming, strenuous and not always rewarding. Sometimes, the lump becomes a slightly smaller and shinier lump, marginally less ugly than it was on the ground. But like exercise and tough conversations, the process is the point. You feel better for having gone through the ritual yourself.

Boy George didn’t get the memo. 

The former Culture Club frontman, whose voice adorned New Wave pop hits like “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” in the 1980s, had artificial intelligence spew out an unfortunate reggae song last week that turned out to be a statement of support for Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. “You say genocide, I say war,” the song, titled “We Will Dance Again,” starts, and the lyrics seem to revel in the ugliness of the ongoing violence in Gaza. The tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, the song claims, are “what the military’s for.” 

Obvious AI tells throughout this track make clear that Boy George hasn’t just gotten lazy, he’s also lost the quality of discernment. The song’s meter is odd, and its lines are overstuffed. There are no interesting choices, no glimpses of an artist’s vision. It’s a hollow provocation over a royalty-free riddim. 

Since Hamas militants attacked Israeli military installations and civilians on October 7, 2023, the ensuing war in Gaza has left more than 73,000 Palestinians dead. The United Nations has called Israel’s campaign a genocide. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing the Israeli prime minister of crimes against humanity. Attacks on Gaza continue despite a ceasefire deal. Against that backdrop, a song defending and celebrating the Israeli military is nasty work, no matter who made it. The fact that no one made it, that it’s the creation of a machine that hallucinates in exchange for electricity, only intensifies the sick, empty feeling the track leaves behind. 

The track’s release has been a disaster for George. He split acrimoniously from Tony Pontius, the long-time manager of his record label BGP, because of Pontius’ refusal to release the song. A planned role as King Herod in a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” was put on ice. Spotify pulled the track down for violating its restrictions around AI-generated music. Bandcamp followed soon thereafter. Boy George has dug in his heels in recent days, calling the platforms a “bunch of c**ts” as part of a steady stream of Instagram posts. His doggedness would be almost admirable, if “We Will Dance Again” wasn’t so lazy. 

In releasing the track, Boy George presumably wanted to turn heads, to make a statement. But he didn’t want to do any work. He didn’t want to record multiple vocal takes of lines he supposedly wrote and believes in. He didn’t want to arrange actual instruments to better emphasize his lyrics and pro-war stance. He didn’t want to mix the track carefully to refine his statement. He could have made something that shimmers, a piece of true pop that expresses repellent ideals. It wouldn’t have been the first. 

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Merle Haggard’s iconoclastic “Okie From Muskogee” is considered a country classic, even though the sentiment is about as far from mainstream American thought in 2026 as can be imagined. When even right-wing commentators are pushing microdosing as a path to self-betterment, his disparaging remarks about longhairs taking LSD come off as impossibly square. But you can hear the heart in Haggard’s leathery vocals, buoyed by the sweet harmonies of his backing band. Haggard waffled over the years on whether the anti-hippie hardliner anthem was a satire  of the crew cut set or a genuine tribute to his conservative father. Either way, Haggard sounds like he believes what he’s saying, regardless of whether that’s true, because of the time and effort he spent working out the song.

With 2013’s “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke and Pharrell set out to make a groovy single in the vein of Marvin Gaye. Though the song has been relegated to the dustbin following a widespread critical backlash and later allegations of sexual assault against Thicke by model and actress Emily Ratajowksi, who appeared in the song’s video, they were extremely successful. The song itself, creepiness aside, is a Swiss watch of a partystarter. Pharrell’s ad-libs and inserts interrupting the groove at perfect intervals to wake up the dancefloor. They arguably did too good a job recreating the shuffling, glass-clinking percussion of 1970s cocktail party classics, as they lost almost everything they’d made from the song in a subsequent — and successful — lawsuit from Gaye’s estate.  

“We Will Dance Again” does none of that. It warrants no qualifiers, no deeper thought, because Boy George clearly didn’t think too hard about it himself before spitting it out into the world. He asked a machine to build him a song to support what many consider to be an ongoing genocide. When it offered him half a song, he said, “Good enough” — without even bothering to run it through a few rounds of polishing. I regret to inform you that, in 2026, Boy George won’t even tumble for us.  

The post Sorry, Boy George. AI can’t even make bad art appeared first on Salon.com.

When Netflix announced the first-ever Chef’s Table Food Festival, bringing 70 internationally acclaimed chefs to Park City for four days of dinners, demonstrations and excursions, I felt something between excitement and apprehension.

The series changed the way I understood food. I wasn’t yet sure whether a festival built around it could preserve the reason why.

If you asked me to name the greatest piece of modern food media, I would hesitate. Without missing a beat, I would say Season 1 Episode 1 of “Chef’s Table.” 

And that answer has been the same for a decade. 

It’s not because I think Massimo Bottura is the greatest chef alive. It wasn’t only the breathtaking cinematography or the immediate fantasy of booking a flight to Modena and a table at Osteria Francescana. 

I’ve returned to it so many times because it permanently changed the way I think about food.

Yes, food media should make you hungry. But the very best examples also make you care about something greater than what’s on the plate. 

I was initially drawn in by Italy. Like so many Italian Americans, I grew up seeing pieces of my family’s history reflected in its food and had an insatiable desire to learn as much as I could about the country my grandparents grew up in. Watching Bottura reinterpret the flavors of Emilia-Romagna felt familiar, even comforting, but that’s not why the episode stayed with me. 

I still think about it and watch it over and over again because it beautifully articulates something I’ve always believed but struggle to find the words to explain.

“Chef’s Table” showed me that food could be a lens through which to understand culture, grief, resilience, identity, and community. It showed me that restaurants weren’t simply places to eat. They were living institutions capable of preserving history, supporting entire local communities, and bringing people together in moments of crisis.

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Looking back now, I can trace so much of my own career back to that realization.

For years, I’ve found myself gravitating towards stories about neighborhood restaurants, family businesses, local farmers, and food traditions — not because they’re quaint or nostalgic, but because they’re windows into something larger. These people have tangible passion and intoxicating energy for what they do. “Chef’s Table” helped open my eyes to the fact that that’s the story. Not the rare ingredients or celebrity guests, the pure, genuine joy for cooking and sharing that with others. 

One moment from Bottura’s episode has lingered most. 

After earthquakes struck Emilia-Romagna in 2012, warehouses collapsed around hundreds of thousands of wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano, threatening the livelihoods of the cheesemakers who depended on them. Bottura responded by creating a recipe for riso cacio e pepe and inviting people around the world to cook it with him. Nearly 40,000 participated, and all 360,000 damaged wheels were sold.

In Bottura’s hands, Parmigiano was never merely an ingredient. It represented years of labor, centuries of knowledge and an entire community’s economic survival.

One of Bottura’s most famous dishes from his three-star Michelin restaurant is the Five Ages of Parmigiano Reggiano, featuring the PDO product at five distinct aging points (24, 30, 36, 40, and 50 months). He manipulates the physical form of the ingredient to showcase different temperatures and textures: souffle, cream, biscuit, foam, and air. 

The dish isn’t about the cheese. It’s about tradition and craftsmanship and protecting your community. 

As Bottura says in the episode, “Cooking is an act of love.” 

It’s not a love expressed through expensive ingredients or elaborate techniques just for the sake of it. It’s expressed through responsibility — to your producers, neighbors, and the place you call home. 

Years after I first watched Bottura’s episode, I read Ruth Reichl’s “Why Food Writing Matters” and felt the shock of recognition. Food writing has been dismissed as frivolous or shallow — as if writing about restaurants somehow exists outside the realm of “real” journalism. Reichl had found the language for something I had understood only emotionally: food journalism belonged in the larger conversation about labor, politics, culture and power. Every person needs to eat, which means every person has a relationship with food that extends beyond the plate.

“Food touches everything we do. And that it is definitely a political issue,” she says, “Every election analyst has pointed to rising food costs as a major concern for voters. Yet despite the evolution of food writing over the last thirty years, consumers still have very little understanding of the forces that drive those costs.”

For the first time, I felt as though I had discovered the tradition I wanted to join.

A cohort of people who pursued and brought light to all genres of food stories. That feeling has become harder to find these days. 

In today’s media, there is simply so much food content competing for our attention. Social media has democratized food storytelling in remarkable ways, but it has also created an endless stream of restaurant rankings, viral menu hacks and “must-try” lists that reward speed over substance. 

Thankfully, there are still creators proving that audiences are hungry for something deeper. Nicholas Nuvan reminds me that thoughtful food storytelling hasn’t disappeared—it has simply adapted. His videos don’t stop at recommending where to eat. They introduce viewers to the people, histories and communities behind a dish, proving what the best food journalists have always known: people don’t just fall in love with dishes, they fall in love with stories.

When Reichl first took over the food section at the LA Times, she got a lot of pushback for covering international restaurants and including recipes for things like goat soup, sea slugs, and eel. She received dozens of letters lamenting the “good old days” of “American” recipes like cola-soaked pork chops, but she didn’t listen.

And isn’t that really what it’s all about? Reichl had the courage to dig deeper and show people a different side of food writing in a time when most people only read the food section for the ads. Not only were readers interested in what she had to say, she helped show people and restaurants of all cultures and styles that their food and their story matters just as much as any Michelin restaurant.  

That’s why I felt a genuine sense of cautious optimism when Netflix announced the Chef’s Table Food Festival. On paper, it’s easy to dismiss it as another celebrity chef event, many of which have become exercises in exclusivity — expensive tickets, buzzy names and Instagrammable bites. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it isn’t what made “Chef’s Table” resonate in the first place.

The series never asked us to admire chefs simply because they were famous. It asked us to understand them. To understand why they cooked, where they came from and what they were trying to preserve. Fame was a byproduct of that curiosity, not the goal.

“I see [the festival] as a celebration of why we come together to eat, why we go to restaurants,” “Chef’s Table” creator David Gelb told Bon Appetit, “That’s paramount and one of the most important things that makes us human. We come together around a hearth, we tell stories, and we eat.”

It wasn’t Bottura’s technical brilliance that changed me. It was his belief that food could be an act of service. That a restaurant could strengthen a community. That a wheel of Parmigiano could represent thousands of livelihoods. And that writing about those things wasn’t frivolous at all.

“Chef’s Table” didn’t convince me to become a food writer, but it convinced me that food could be the vehicle through which I wrote about everything else. 

If the festival can capture even a fraction of that spirit — if it asks us to understand not only famous chefs, but the farmers, artisans, workers and communities behind them — it will be more than another stop on the culinary calendar. It will be a reminder of what food media can offer when it chooses to nourish more than our appetites.

 

 

The post Why “Chef’s Table” still matters 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.

When Graham Platner ran for Senate, he came with an irresistible, dream candidate profile: a plainspoken veteran and man of the people who was ready to change careers from oyster farmer to politician. Platner, who turned 40 during the campaign, found immense support from other male Democrats close to his age who saw his campaign as the breath of fresh air the party needed to stay relevant. Even when his many skeletons came tumbling out of the closet — the Nazi tattoo, the Reddit posts, retweeting far-right podcaster Stew Peters and others — they only doubled down in their support. Each scandal was followed by another high-profile endorsement from a senator or influencer. Only when women accused him of rape and sexual assault did they finally drop their support, leading to his exit from the race in July.

The Platner fiasco revealed how a subset of male Democrats show symptoms of a midlife crisis. Typically, a man’s mid-life crisis occurs between his 40s and 50s when, having achieved a stable economic and sociopolitical status, a new generation emerges that threatens to replace him. He becomes depressed, irritable and restless. The cultural stereotype is that rather than accept this as a natural consequence of aging, he seeks to recapture his youth with rash impulsivity by purchasing an expensive red sports car, or having an affair with a younger woman, or changing careers on a dime without any idea of the scrutiny that comes with those who make such a shift — i.e., from oyster farmer to senator.

Politically, the midlife crisis expresses itself as an attraction to ideological extremes, represented by the trope of men growing more conservative with age. Sen. John Fetterman, once a darling of the progressive elite who embraced him as the leftier-than-thou alternative to center-left Rep. Conor Lamb in the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate primary, has become every Democrats’ face on the dartboard for embodying this exact stereotype. Fetterman’s conservative shift could have stemmed from how his staunch support of Israel amid rising sentiment toward Palestine within portions of the Democratic base pushed him further away from the party, leaving him susceptible to Republican overtures. But given that he had already displayed signs of an erratic and hostile personality before arriving in the Senate, his change feels of a piece with his past behavior. 

However, in today’s political climate, Fetterman’s rightward drift makes him something of an outlier, as the Democratic midlife crisis now expresses itself as a shift toward the far-left, even if it means compromising one’s previous positions and alienating the audience that brought them to prominence. 

The most public examples of this are the “Pod Save America” hosts Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer — a.k.a. the “Pod Bros” — who first jumped on this bandwagon in November 2024 when they interviewed far-left streamer Hasan Piker on their podcast. Bringing on Piker — who, by coincidence, is the same age the Pod Bros were when they founded their parent company, Crooked Media — got people talking about them again, even if the talk was that the podcast had jumped the ideological shark by hosting someone who has been accused of caping for communists and terrorists. 

Since his first “Pod Save America” appearance, Piker has traveled to China and Cuba to defend their regimes, and he recently deployed Vladimir Putin-like language when he called the Soviet Union’s collapse “a catastrophe” at a Yale political union meeting in April. But the Pod Bros have interviewed him multiple times, even inviting him to Crooked Con, their Washington, D.C., convention, in November 2025, where he appeared on a panel alongside MS NOW’s Symone Sanders-Townsend and Fox News’ Jessica Tarlov. 

Given their embrace of Piker, it’s no surprise the Pod Bros were also among the most ardent backers of Platner, defending him like an expensive red sports car. When the news broke about his Nazi tattoo, they invited him on the show to explain himself. Ben Rhodes, the former Obama aide and host of the Crooked Media podcast “Pod Save the World,” even penned a lengthy New York Times op-ed on Platner’s rise, lauding him as a voice of the anti-war movement. In the wake of the rape allegations, Favreau issued an apology for his defense of Platner; Rhodes, as of this writing, has not. (Rhodes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Other elected officials within this age bracket have dunked their big toes in populist waters despite being elected as moderates in red states, such as Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, or as so-called center-left “Normie Democrats” in blue states, such as Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. Both men have been mentioned as contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination, but absent a campaign announcement, their leftward shifts are the equivalent of focus group testing on a national scale. Granted, neither Gallego nor Murphy have alienated their constituencies with these ideas, but it’s a far cry from their personas when they were first elected.  

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Since arriving in the Senate in 2025, Gallego has gone on the lash against big corporations and monopolies. In a speech for the American Economic Liberties Project, a left-wing think tank, in September 2025, Gallego said “anything that empowers the consumer, the everyday person, is going to be a very popular message . . . It can win in any cycle, in almost any state, or environment.” He has continued this crusade, recently endorsing a $20 minimum wage and speaking out against the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

Murphy, who entered the Senate only a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, made a name for himself as one of the body’s most outspoken gun control advocates. But in a May 2025 interview with “The Atlantic,” he seemed a bit sheepish over this, arguing that by emphasizing social issues over economic ones, Democrats risk losing voters who might be more receptive to economic messaging. “I own part of that responsibility,” he said. 

In addition to being spoken of as a potential 2028 contender, speculation is rampant that Murphy is positioning himself to lead the Democratic caucus after the midterms. Once known as a bipartisan negotiator, he has pivoted to a harder line, telling the Connecticut Mirror in November 2025, “I just don’t think that’s the job right now . . . I think I would be committing sort of political malpractice if I was operating this year like I’ve operated in the past.”

The psychological phenomenon of the midlife crisis masquerading as populism does not occur in a vacuum. Social media has exacerbated it, with algorithms making it easier to gain popularity by taking extreme viewpoints, as Piker has, than to represent the center-left, as the “Pod Save America” crew did for years. Moving toward extremes also has the potential to produce rewards. For pundits and influencers, that could mean boosting their voices and incomes. For politicians, it means the chance to swell their campaign coffers — even though he isn’t up for reelection until 2030, Murphy’s campaign PAC, Friends of Chris Murphy, had $11.5 million cash on hand as of June 30 — and, better yet, position themselves for future elections, regardless of whether the shift is sincere.

However, the less sincere that shift is, the greater the fallout when it turns out to be for naught. Watching Graham Platner’s campaign implode was like watching that expensive red sports car get totaled. You felt bad for anyone who got harmed. But if you’re honest, you also loved watching the guy dumb enough to buy it fume over the futility of his impulses. But the harder you laugh, the more you have a responsibility to not do what he did. Otherwise you could wind up behind the wheel.

The post The Democratic male’s midlife crisis appeared first on Salon.com.

For folks who spend the majority of their waking hours contemplating the music of The Beatles — and there are probably vastly more of us than you might think — “Revolver” (released on August 5, 1966, in the United Kingdom) sure checks a lot of boxes. For one thing, the album’s 14 tracks are a tour de force, a masterpiece of inspired songwriting and musicianship. The LP is also a whirlwind of competing genres in which John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr flex their muscles and prove that they’re at home in virtually any genre.

But when it comes to The Beatles’ unparalleled legacy, “Revolver” finds the bandmates on an unimpeded trajectory towards greatness. Released the previous year, “Rubber Soul” set things into motion — arguably rock’s first cohesive LP. The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson later recalled being mesmerized by the album, the first record, to his mind, that didn’t have any filler. Just one study in pop-music mastery after another.

In terms of the album’s reception history, “Revolver” has enjoyed a strange odyssey in the United States. For many critics, it served as the tantalizing appetizer before the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967, a dazzling entrée if ever there were one.

And for years, “Sgt. Pepper” reigned supreme, routinely topping “best of” lists as the finest album ever recorded. In the decades since the release of The Beatles’ masterworks on compact disc in 1987, when the group’s American LPs were deleted in favor of their canonical UK counterparts, the “Revolver” album has slowly but surely gained momentum — particularly among Stateside listeners, who had no idea what they’d been missing.

As we celebrate “Revolver”’s 60th anniversary, I have come to see the album as The Beatles’ thrilling turning point — in many ways, a continuation of their virtuosic performances on “Rubber Soul.” George Harrison seemed to agree. In later years, he would describe the records as parts one and two of the same album. In one sense, he was selling himself short: “Revolver” featured three Harrison compositions, a glut of new material that included “Taxman,” “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You.”

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Harrison, of course, was by no means alone. Paul McCartney and John Lennon, too, rose fully to the occasion, reeling off such masterworks as “Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” not to mention a bravura single’s release featuring “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.” All told, The Beatles and their magisterial producer George Martin loosed 16 amazing new songs into the world in August 1966, an incredible bounty, by any measure.

Ultimately, “Revolver” exists as a weigh-station, of sorts. First, it was the culmination of the most profound demographic growth in the history of entertainment. During their early years, the band appealed to a narrow swathe of teens and young adults. But all of that changed with “Yesterday,” which Martin adorned with a string quartet. Not only did “Yesterday” emerge as a chart-topping American hit, but the groundbreaking song also saw the band growing their demographic to include the highly desirable world of working adults, ages 25-54, who longed for something more sophisticated.

And then there was “Revolver”’s “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yellow Submarine.” In one fell swoop, The Beatles penetrated two more demographics. “Eleanor Rigby” attracted a post-55 audience in droves, while the good-natured storyline and nautical sound effects inherent in “Yellow Submarine” drew children and pre-teens into The Beatles’ camp. Quite suddenly — and scarcely more than two years after their triumphant American debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — the group dominated nearly every quadrant of the consumer age range.

Yet feats of demography are only part of what “Revolver” bequeathed. The LP served as a runway — or perhaps more accurately, a launching pad — for the more experimental and challenging efforts to follow. There they are, in quick succession: “Sgt. Pepper,” “Magical Mystery Tour” (1967), “The White Album” (1968), the “Get Back” project (1969, released the following year as the “Let It Be” album), and “Abbey Road” (1969).

And then they were gone, leaving a sense of wonder and mystique in their wake that remains unparalleled in the annals of popular music — perhaps even for the whole of Western art. But first, there was “Revolver” — a glittering array of musical chestnuts that we’re only just beginning to appreciate.

This year’s “Everything Fab Four” Fest, taking place November 5-8 at Monmouth University in New Jersey in conjunction with the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, will be a celebration of the 60th anniversary of “Revolver.” Please watch for more details and ticket information soon.

The post At 60, The Beatles’ “Revolver” is still unfolding its secrets appeared first on Salon.com.

Ariana Grande has been concerningly thin for years now, but the online discourse about her body exploded this week after she released the music video for “Petal,” the title track of her most recent album. The video’s storyline, in which the 33-year-old pop singer gets “Carrie”-style revenge for men’s misogynist judgments, was completely overshadowed by fan alarm at Grande’s apparent emaciation. Set in the 1960s, the colorful retro fashions hang off her skeletal frame.

“I can’t even enjoy the video without thinking she looks sickly every second she is on the screen,” one person posted on YouTube. 

“At this point, im [sic] judging her team, friends, and family,” the video’s top commenter said. “This is insane.”

“She’s is surrounded by enablers,” another wrote. “Eating disorders are not a joke.”

These comments aren’t outliers. To the contrary, the entire discussion on YouTube was about Grande’s body, not the video’s visuals or the music, a lovely torch song where she compares herself to a “petal in the pavement.” While she likely intended the lyric to be empowering, instead it feels more like a metaphor for her apparent physical fragility.

Grande’s public relations team responded to the furor with denial, announcing that the singer would be “taking a step back from visibility” after finishing her tour, insisting that she’s living “both healthily and happily,” while blaming “endless, ongoing public scrutiny” for the move. Her retreat includes a withdrawal from a highly anticipated West End stage production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Sunday in the Park with George,” alongside her “Wicked” co-star Jonathan Bailey. The announcement also follows previous comments from Grande scolding people to “be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies.”

In response to the news, the famously outspoken actress Jameela Jamil posted an Instagram story in which she argued that the calls of Grande’s team for privacy are missing the point. Jamil, who says she nearly died from her own eating disorder, pointed to Grande’s impressionable fans, “[m]any who have no support system equipped to handle the deadly clutches of anorexia.” Jamil later defended her post, pointing to the “young girls” who are watching the situation unfold, adding, “We don’t have to pretend we are blind because it’s a pop star.” 

Jamil may be blunt, but her point is truer now than ever. The ongoing battle over health, thinness and women’s bodies has become more political in recent years, as MAGA and MAHA influencers have turned weight into a culture war battlefield. Many right-wing figures have become increasingly vocal in their belief that women shouldn’t only be skinny, they should also look weak. Conservatives aren’t just anti-fat anymore. Even building muscle is viewed as suspiciously feminist. Instead, women — and girls — are being told to strive to look frail instead. 

Fueled by access to illicit use of GLP-1 appetite suppressants, recent years have seen a surge of online influencers who explicitly push starvation over health — and especially over strength — as a feminine ideal. On TikTok, the trend was even called “SkinnyTok,” where influencers like Liv Schmidt build a fanbase with videos highlighting their perilously meager diets. Most of this content is not explicitly political. But as The Atlantic’s Annie Joy Williams chronicled in June 2025, the right-wing politics aren’t far below the trend’s surface. 

As soon as she started looking at SkinnyTok content, Williams wrote, “the tradwife content began to sneak in” to her algorithm. Soon she was being served videos not just about being super-thin, but also geared toward “embracing my divine femininity” and “my natural role.” Experts she spoke with noted this is a common right-wing recruitment tactic of grabbing people with seemingly apolitical content — such as “diet tips” — and then steering them toward far-right propaganda. 

This is most clearly evident in the way that Evie Magazine, a far-right Christian magazine that sells its message using the aesthetics of popular women’s magazines like Vogue or Cosmopolitan, has embraced SkinnyTok influencers. In 2025 the publication profiled Schmidt, insisting that she’s merely “being honest” when telling followers that the only pathway to romantic and professional success is to eat as little as possible. Carmen Schober, the profile’s author, ignored the way members of Schmidt’s online forum, Skinni Société, commiserated about their hair loss and inability to stand without getting dizzy. The magazine also raved about “skinny queen” influencer Amanda Dobler for “not apologizing” after coaching followers to avoid even wasabi and soy sauce, because their negligible calorie counts are deemed excessive. 

When I purchased a copy of Evie’s print magazine in May, I was alarmed at how the magazine not only promoted radical skinniness but also discouraged women from healthy habits like exercise. The issue explicitly told women to avoid exercise that builds muscle in “quads, hamstrings, and thighs,” on the grounds that it allegedly alienates men. The editors also discouraged women from cardio exercise, falsely claiming it will “throw your hormones off.” 

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“A woman who is sample size looks great in virtually everything she puts on,” Evie advised, implying throughout the issue that failure to maintain a size zero could ruin your marriage, or even drive your husband to cheat. 

This hostility to women exercising has been accompanied by MAGA valorizing fitness as rightfully a masculine endeavor. Even members of Donald Trump’s administration, such as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, regularly post workout videos that frame exercise as men’s work, all about grunting and showing off muscles. While it’s rare they explicitly exclude women, the lack of female bodies becomes notable if you watch enough of the videos. 

There is one form of exercise Evie and other right-wing influencers tacitly allow women: Pilates, a low-impact exercise similar to yoga. Pilates has a lot of benefits, but it’s not known for being especially sweaty or for building larger muscles. As The 19th reported in March, this has led to right-wing influencers extolling the “Pilates girl” as the ideal, since both strength and sweat are deemed too unfeminine. As a bonus, some on the right even claim there are no men in Pilates classes, a false claim that serves to protect fragile male egos from the possibility that a wife or girlfriend might speak to another man without supervision. But as any woman could tell you, Pilates isn’t exactly a calorie-burner. A woman who limits her exercise to Pilates will still have to subsist on very little food to get the delicate, bone-thin look these men conjure with the “Pilates girl” image. 

Ariana Grande is an outspoken progressive who incorporates feminist themes in her music, and she would no doubt be horrified by the way the right is using the idea of thinness to bully women into submission and self-loathing. Indeed, Grande seems distressed by the discourse around her body, and she has said she wants people to leave her alone.

But this is where Jamil, perhaps in an impolitic way, is making a point that is both true and uncomfortable. Romanticizing extreme thinness contributes to eating disorders, which can do serious damage to the health of sufferers. In many cases, it might even kill them. That’s been true for decades, but now, as the issue has taken on political salience, the situation is even more alarming.

Women already have an uphill battle trying to maintain a healthy body image. It’s harder now that taking basic care of yourself is demonized as being “woke.” 

The post How Ariana Grande’s body became political appeared first on Salon.com.

The news came the way it always comes in my family, sideways, through a phone. I was in my living room, sunk into the chaise lounge I retreat to, comfortable in a way that now embarrasses me, when I heard my mother’s voice in the other room calling my father. Something in her tone. You learn your parents’ registers the way you learn weather, and this was the register of bad news from far away. 

Greece was burning again. Crete worst of all, in the south, where a fire near Rethymno had driven some 8,000 people from their homes in a single night. Fires on Paros and Andros, scattered across the Aegean. And then the name I had been bracing against: Lesbos. A blaze near Plomari, the old ouzo town on the island’s south coast, was eating coastal homes while roughly 100 firefighters fought it, and a seaside resort emptied into the dark. 

The fires are not a freak event, and no one in Greece pretends they are. They began in early July and have barely paused since; this is the second week of a major outbreak, dozens of fronts at once, fed by a record European heat wave, a spring of too little rain and the Meltemi, the dry seasonal winds that come screaming down the Aegean in July and August at up to 100 kilometers an hour and turn a spark into a wall. Scientists have said it plainly: Climate change is loading the dice, the Mediterranean’s pine and olive and dry scrub catch faster and burn hotter than they used to, and summers like this one are becoming the rule, not the exception. Greece has always burned in August. It has not always burned like this. 

My father is from Lesbos. My mother’s people are from there too, further back, so the island runs down both sides of me like a watermark you only see when the light hits it right. It is where my family’s houses stand, where a portion of my life is already promised, where I know I will one day go to live for a while, because the pull has never once loosened. It is, if I am honest, where I come from in the deepest sense, not only the blood but the making. My love of poetry, my hunger for art — I trace all of it back to that island, to Sappho, who sang there 26 centuries ago and somehow reached a Greek-American boy in Pennsylvania and told him what he was.

I have not set foot on Lesbos in 10 years.

That is the sentence, the amount of time, I keep circling. Now I watch it burn on a screen from a soft chair, an ocean and a lifetime away, useless. 

There is a particular helplessness to diaspora I have never quite found the words for, though I keep trying. You love a place you are not in. You grieve a fire you cannot smell. You refresh a feed for news of a village whose name your relatives say with their whole mouths and you say with an accent that gives you away. The distance is not only miles. It is the knowledge that everyone there is living what you are merely watching, and that watching, from comfort, is its own small shame.

I was made by that island’s water. They tell me that as a baby, I would not leave the sea. I would stay in the Aegean until I cried at being carried out, submerging myself again and again until, the family story goes, I matched the sea, my skin gone the temperature of it, indistinguishable, a small animal that had already decided where it belonged. Even now, when I step into that water, something in me resets. The sun on it, the salt, the particular blue no postcard has ever gotten right — it reconnects me to my own being, returns me to whatever I was before the world got complicated. 

There was a year, when I was barely one, that the island nearly kept me for good: a lost passport, a wary government that took an American baby for a Greek one, and a U.S. congressman who finally untangled it and got me home. It is a longer story than this essay can hold, but its shape has never left me. The point is this: That island has been trying to keep me since before I could speak, and I have spent a decade letting the ocean between us win.

And here is the thing I cannot hold simply, what kept me on the chaise longer than the news required. That same sea that baptized me is, for thousands of others, a grave. 

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Lesbos is not only my father’s Eden. For more than a decade it has been a frontline, the first Greek soil that exhausted, terrified people touch when they cross from Turkey in boats that were never built for open water. My sacred water is someone else’s last water. My homeland is a stranger’s checkpoint and, if they are lucky, their refuge.

I don’t know how to make those facts, that awful juxtaposition, clean, and I have stopped trying. Both experiences are true. The island is sacred to me for what it gave me, and it is sacred to the fleeing for what it offers them, which is the oldest thing land can offer: safety, ground, a place to stop running. 

When the fires come, they do not check anyone’s passport. They take the olive groves and the goats and the summer houses, and they take the makeshift shelters and the fragile new footing of people who had already lost everything once. In Crete, the deadliest front this week, three firefighters have already died trying to hold the line against the blaze. That is what steadies me and breaks me in the same breath, that a land this rich in what it gives, in shade and figs and refuge and myth, keeps burning while the world half-watches. 

A Mediterranean summer on fire has become a genre now, a seasonal rerun we thumb past on the way to something else. This year’s footage looks like last year’s, and that of the year before, a sameness that is its own quiet violence. Repetition sands horror down into wallpaper. But it is not wallpaper to the family loading a car in the dark, or to a firefighter’s widow, or to a man in Pennsylvania watching his one island go up in flames on a screen. Familiar is not the same as bearable.

What the fire has done, strangely, is make me want to go back not to take but to give. To help. To stand on the ground instead of scrolling past it. I have spent ten years loving Lesbos as an inheritance, a thing I own from a distance, and the smoke on my screen has shamed that love into something more useful. My mother’s ancestors and my father’s boyhood and Sappho’s fragments and the sea that raised me are all still there, waiting, under a sky the color of alarm. My uncle is in Athens. My family’s houses are still standing, for now. And I am here, finally understanding that loving a place from afar is not the same as loving it.

I think I will go to Lesbos this year. Not because the fire is out, but because it isn’t. The sea is still there. It is still the color no one can name. And it is still, for me and for the strangers arriving on its shore, the difference between drowning and being born.

The post Lesbos is burning. I’m not there appeared first on Salon.com.

Throughout July, The Swell celebrated the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.

While I would never deign to speak for all critics — I’ve been around enough to know I don’t need that smoke — we’re not generally fans of inscrutability. A little layered mystery is just fine. Many of us appreciate artistic execution that leaves plenty of openings for wild interpretations. But once we’re venturing into the territory of “What in the hell was that?” the knives tend to come out.

That’s part of the reason I left “Howl’s Moving Castle,” adapted from British author Diana Wynne Jones’ novel, for the last flight in our monthlong look at Hayao Miyazaki. The plots of “Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service” are as lucid and pure as spring water, relatively speaking. “Howl’s Moving Castle,” on the other hand, is an unconventional love story wrapped inside an anti-war plot about a prince who gave his heart to a demon and a young girl turned into an old woman by a jealous witch. It’s also about curses and a giant house that moves around on chicken legs and a turnip-headed scarecrow and pollution and . . . see what I mean?

 

 

It’s nice to know I was never alone in my befuddlement. “There’s much to admire in ‘Howl’s Moving Castle,’ which is precisely the problem,” remarked film critic Stephanie Zacharek in her 2005 review for Salon. “Its whimsical grandiosity practically invites us to use the passive voice, a kind of verbal genuflection.”

The benefit of returning to a story like this 20 years after a first viewing is that presumably, time has softened us. For “Howl’s Moving Castle,” that matters since its heroine, Sophie Hatter (initially voiced in the English dubbed version by Emily Mortimer), spends much of the film waxing and waning between young and elderly selves. When she’s youthful, Sophie catches the eye of a handsome, richly dressed stranger who gallantly escorts her away from two men harassing her on the street. He introduces himself as Howl (Christian Bale), a flamboyant wizard who whisks her across rooftops on her way home.

But Sophie, an introverted milliner, never asked for anyone’s attention and is convinced she’s plain and unattractive. The Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall) echoes her insecurities back at her when she strides into Sophie’s shop, insults her, and with a wave of her hand, transforms Sophie into a hunched-over dowager (with Jean Simmons taking over the role).

I could easily hail “Howl’s Moving Castle” as a tribute to maturity, especially when placed against other Miyazaki stories starring young heroines setting out on adventures. That feel especially valid at a time when we have plenty of shoppable salves to soothe midlife crisis ego death in whatever forms that it takes. (I have no idea what the Turnip Scarecrow’s significance is in all this, other than to be this fairy tale’s frog prince.)

 

But when viewed in one way of many, “Howl’s Moving Castle” is an encouragement to look inward and see the truth about ourselves honestly and kindly. Most of us aren’t the same person on the inside as we seem to be on the outside — including Sophie, a woman in the early bloom of her life whose dedication to work has shriveled her vitality.

(© 2004 Diana Wynne Jones/Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli, NDDMT)

Trapping Sophie in a crone’s body and making her realize how much harder it is to cross rolling hills and climb stairs gives her a new appreciation for everything she’s been taking for granted. But more than this, as an old woman Sophie abandons her insecurities about taking up space in the world — especially when she crosses paths with the Witch of the Waste again, and a more powerful wizard’s magic deflates said Witch into an enfeebled pile of skin.

Instead of taking pleasure in the Witch’s undoing, Sophie tenderly cares for her. She understands what it’s like to be unloved and ignored more than most, after all. Eventually, Sophie’s demonstrated empathy makes Howl fall more deeply in love with her.

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That’s one strand in this tale’s tangle. When following “Howl’s Moving Castle” as the story of Calcifer (voiced by Billy Crystal), the fire demon who holds Howl’s heart and fuels the castle, the movie becomes a fable about nurturing and destruction as two sides of the same coin. When Howl loses himself to a beastly form after attacking opposing forces in the war into which he’s drawn, it’s an allegory about how armed conflict robs us of our humanity. Its complexity makes the movie a treasure.

Ultimately, though, this vision of Miyazaki’s comes down to a lesson about the chameleonic nature of the human heart and soul, how we change to adapt to every situation and interaction, and how the those who love us must love every version. It champions the bravery of embracing maturity with a young heart.

But that’s just my take. Zacharek accurately referred to Miyazaki’s narratives as “wriggly, noodle-shaped things,” and not in offering her compliments to the chef. I get it. I’ve also come to understand that some of Miyazaki’s offerings are tastes worth acquiring through a few tries, even for skeptics. His filmography is as vast and varied as this bizarre castle’s meanderings, with life lessons for anyone.

 

 

The post This Miyazaki film sees who we really are at heart appeared first on Salon.com.

On July 26 in Pennsylvania, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries introduced the party’s Fighting for an Affordable America agenda to mark 100 days until November’s midterm elections. The plan, according to the Associated Press, calls for “restoring healthcare cuts, bringing the cost of living down and ending the war in Iran to beat Republicans and hold President Donald Trump accountable.” 

Democrats always want to run on kitchen table issues, and this time they have an opening you could drive the Titanic through. Even among Trump’s most fervent followers, the war in Iran is unusually unpopular; it’s the first time I can ever remember Republicans not rallying around a war started by a GOP president. In fact, the party used to rally around so-called “Democrat wars” too, at least most of the time, even as they condemned them for being mistakes. Trump, though, seems to have broken that knee-jerk reaction, which, if it lasts, may end up being one of the only things he has done right, even if it was by accident. 

“Holding Donald Trump accountable” is obviously a necessary goal, and we can only hope that if they take back the House, and perhaps the Senate, Democrats will spend the next two years hammering Republicans on corruption, malfeasance, criminality and incompetence, pounding as many nails into the MAGA coffin as possible in anticipation of a hard-fought 2028 campaign. After Trump and the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, there are no Democrats — and vanishingly few independents — who are clamoring for a “return to normal,” if anyone can even remember what that looks like.

As we get further into Trump’s second term, the rise of the progressive left, generated at least in part by the desperate need for generational change, is bringing some longstanding issues to the surface. Younger Democrats aren’t talking about politics in technocratic terms, as the party’s politicians have been doing for the last 30 years, offering up 10-point economic plans and telling the public how they can work the system more efficiently. They see politics in largely moral terms, and they are ready to address some of the thorniest moral issues we face. 

Oligarchy is at the top of the list, an issue that has animated the left since at least the Occupy Wall Street movement began in 2011. Fifteen years later, a global backlash against billionaires who have outsize influence over politics — and who do not pay their fair share — is taking shape.

The left also rejects America’s global role as security guarantor, particularly in light of the tragedy taking place in Gaza, which has been aided and abetted by the U.S. government. The party’s mainstream has moved substantially in their direction, leading to an unprecedented split in the House caucus in July that saw over a hundred House members vote to cut off aid to Israel. Whether it was done out of genuine desire to end the blank check or simply to allow members a symbolic vote going into the midterms, it’s clear that the intense opposition to Israel’s actions have made a difference, despite the ongoing debate about the scope of the policy. 

These moral issues are animating a significant faction of the party, and they are having an impact. But I find myself wondering why another moral issue, much closer to home and shocking almost beyond comprehension, isn’t getting much play on the campaign trail. 

We are witnessing a fascist crusade taking place on the streets of America every single day that has seen federal immigration officers shoot and kill at least eight people since January. Over the weekend, a Salvadoran immigrant being held at the notorious Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey died after experiencing a medical emergency, the second death the facility has seen since December.

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The treatment of immigrants of all statuses, and sometimes American citizens who happen to look “foreign,” is an abomination. But aside from perfunctory nods to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it seems to have become background noise.

Masked federal agents are killing people with impunity. They are splitting up families without compunction, throwing people in camps and deporting them to countries they have never even visited. Now, with the permission of the MAGA-compliant Supreme Court, the Trump administration is in the process of deporting Haitians who have been here legally for decades by forcing them to leave immediately or wear an ankle bracelet in anticipation of being sent to a country which our own State Department says is too dangerous to visit. These are people who own property and businesses, and many of them have American-born children. They also happen to be Black. 

This is not a popular policy. While most congressional Republicans still approve of Trump’s immigration agenda, many of them aren’t thrilled with the administration’s deportation policy. According to Strength in Numbers, most Americans are appalled and prefer a path to citizenship for non-criminals. Trump’s cruel priorities clearly work for many rank-and-file Republicans, and this seems to have some timorous Democrats spooked. But if there has ever been an issue that the left should be screaming about every single day, it’s this.

Many Americans are out in the streets protesting and putting themselves on the line. In fact, average voters may be more up in arms than Democratic politicians. If the progressive left wants to consolidate the party behind a more virtuous set of values, this is the issue that will rally the entire spectrum of ideologies. Jeffries and party leaders should move it to the very top of the agenda, and make Trump’s abuses a rallying cry across the country.

The Democratic Party should not play politics with this; the president’s abuses are happening right here on our own streets, in our own communities. It is the moral issue of our time.

The post Democrats’ missed opportunity on Trump’s immigration cruelty appeared first on Salon.com.