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Karoline Leavitt, the 28-year-old firebrand who became the nation’s youngest-ever press secretary in 2024, is stepping down to “spend more time with her beautiful young children.”

President Donald Trump announced the news on Wednesday night in a Truth Social post, adding that Leavitt would remain an adviser and “an influential voice within the Republican Party.”

It feels fitting that Leavitt — whose public persona required her to perform both her job and her role as a wife and mom — is stepping down to parent. In MAGA’s conception of womanhood, there can be no higher calling. Not even serving the president. 

For more than two years, however, Leavitt made a show of trying to do both. She returned to work on Trump’s reelection campaign only days after the birth of her first child and regularly shared photos of herself working while holding her son. 

Leavitt also welcomed a daughter over the spring, amid what Fox News dubbed a White House “baby boom.” Officials and conservative media quickly turned the new mothers into advertisements for the pro-natalist movement: Proof that women could, and should, have both careers and children. 

Leavitt is still being held up that way, even — perhaps especially — as she departs. “She’s been a role model to millions and millions of young women,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told Fox News on Wednesday. “A mother, a family woman, a press secretary, a patriot.”

MAGA’s rules for women

The MAGA movement tends to glorify traditional female roles — wife, mother, homemaker — while simultaneously (and confusingly) elevating ambitious, career-driven women like Leavitt. 

At first glance, her prominence — and that of other women in Trump’s administration — would seem to rebut the charge that the movement is misogynist. In fact, that’s a line of defense that Trump himself has advanced. 

But look a little closer, and you’ll see the structural contradiction at the heart of MAGA femininity: Female power is only legitimate when it’s exercised on behalf of Trump, and by women who conform to traditional expectations around gender, marriage, motherhood, and physical appearance.

To Trump, a female White House correspondent was a “piggy,” for instance. But a female press secretary who defended the slur was “knocking them dead.” 

A female employee at a Trump golf course was asked to sign an NDA after reporting harassment. But the female attorney who allegedly pressured her to sign it was, according to Trump, “a rocket ship.”

A female politician rose to prominence championing the president’s deportation agenda. But to get there, she had to find her “Mar-a-Lago face” — and she was ousted after showing signs of personal ambition. (In fairness, she was also very bad at her job.) 

It’s a very tricky little tightrope to walk. And lately, that strain has begun to show. While Trump began his second term with an unusually high number of female Cabinet members for a Republican president, women now hold only four of 23 Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions. 

Trump’s support is also down among young women. In Congress, a bloc of prominent conservative female lawmakers recently broke from their party to censure Republicans accused of misconduct. Now, the MAGA movement is losing one of its fiercest female proxies in Leavitt. 

Even at the height of her powers, however, Leavitt never really got her due. The luxurious office traditionally reserved for the White House press secretary instead went to another White House staffer. A dude.

One link for later

➨ Meet the latest and greatest exercise cult. It’s called HYROX — yes, in all caps — and it’s an eight-round agility and strength competition. Participants spend thousands of dollars on training, registration, and travel for these events, which tend to “subsume your entire existence.” That’s a very hard no for me, personally…but a lot of very fit and competitive people are apparently into it. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the US attempted to assassinate longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro by poisoning his ice cream? And that’s somehow not even the weirdest or most far-fetched Castro assassination scheme. 
• Today’s trivia: Who was the first woman to perform hip hop at the White House? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the German philosopher who wrote Critique of Practical Reason. That would be Immanuel Kant, whose work also arguably inspired one of the core conflicts in the Avengers films.

Many restaurants in Japan put a small plastic device on tables. When you press it, a chime rings at the waitstaff station or in the kitchen, and a server comes to your table. 

Algis Tamosaitis writes the newsletter Japan or Die, and he explained the table call button for travelers. — Read the rest

The post In Japan, press the button on your table and a server appears appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you’re also a pop culture obsessive, it was probably around early 2025 when alarming photos of Ariana Grande began rolling up in your text messages and DMs; images of the star looking particularly gaunt, shoulder bones and clavicle protruding. With the recent release of her new music video for “Petal,” those messages intensified to establish a troubling refrain: “Is Ariana Grande OK?”

That was a total vibe shift from the tedious “extreme theater kid energy” discourse that popped up whenever Grande and her “Wicked” co-star, Cynthia Erivo, so much as breathed in the same room together throughout the film and its sequel’s exhausting two-year press tour. The new messages carry with them a deep sense of concern and bewilderment, because they come from people who are mere spectators with neither the medical degree, language, nor relationship with Grande to perform the appropriate wellness check. Still, what comes across is the sincere questioning of the health of celebrities like Grande and, more recently, Kaia Gerber and Jenna Ortega, both of whom have also raised alarm bells with their extremely thin bodies. Potentially, this questioning is a call for an intervention.

Attempts to bring concern from intimate settings to social media are too often met with accusations from masses of strangers, some who even call themselves fans, of body shaming replete with suggestions that these women celebrities are just “petite” and other accompanying body positivity platitudes. 

It’s hard to tell when, exactly, raising legitimate concern about a woman celebrity’s appearance became synonymous with your run-of-the-mill misogyny or bullying. But somewhere between the “you go, girl” and #MeToo eras emerged a dishonesty around how we discuss women’s bodies at a time when there’s been a frightening return of the ‘90s “heroin chic” look and amid an increasingly worrying dependence on GLP-1s. Consider it an overcorrection of hypercritical commentary that has historically targeted female stars throughout Hollywood history. 

On one hand, the impulse to protect women in the public eye who have been especially vulnerable to criticism that too often ties their physical appearances to their success and, sometimes consequently, their self-worth is fair. On the other hand? The urge to deflect from difficult conversations, distorting concern for something ugly or otherwise pejorative, is misleading and unproductive. 

That kind of response too often is more about proving a sense of standom than actual concern for a fave. 

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The silence, and silencing, of what may or may not be a serious issue that these young celebrities are experiencing feels reminiscent of the kind of culture that women such as Karen Carpenter were immersed in several decades ago. The kind that shrouded The Carpenters’ silky-voiced singer’s emaciated appearance in a quiet shame until her death in 1983 at age 32. 

At the height of her fame and success in 1981, Carpenter weighed about 80 pounds. Her fans, some “who knew something was terribly wrong but assumed she had cancer or some other disease,” were aghast at her appearance whenever she took the stage. Few people then, not even Carpenter’s closest confidantes, knew how to talk about what was actually an eating disorder, much less manage it. “If this had happened in today’s world, I think Karen would have lived,” Frenda Franklin, Carpenter’s friend, said in a 2010 interview with The Guardian. “I think we would have had a good shot. They know so much more. We were dancing in the dark.”

While Grande has not publicly confirmed either way, Gerber recently opened up about her own “disordered eating,” as reported by People, and a clip of Ortega has been circulating in which she looks back on her struggles as a child actor, saying, “I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody.”

The truth is even with constant access to information about medical breakthroughs, counseling on how to support or approach someone who may be experiencing a health crisis, people aren’t much more equipped to confront female body issues today, including their own, than in the ‘80s. It might actually be worse. Not only do people still struggle with how, if, and when to talk about it, but whether that concern is wrapped up in their own self-image in a social media era that too often normalizes untenable and outright unrealistic female bodies.

To that end, when Grande recently said “that sh*t is not mine to carry,” following a statement from her team that she is planning a break from the public eye after the “Petal” tour due, in part, to public scrutiny, she has a point. Hopefully her personal circle gives her the love and support that she deserves during that time. She has become the latest poster child for body issues, who the masses have decided to stack a mountain of (some of their own) baggage on top of. 

In the last several years, Grande has been ubiquitous. She’s been on virtually every major red carpet, nominated for an Oscar, released a new album, launched a new tour, was cast in one project after the next, and appeared in countless social media and magazine interviews. During that time, people from every corner of the world online seemed to take every opportunity to scrutinize every contour of her frail frame.  

But, as she also said, “many things can be true at the same time.” 

It’s true that this article will undoubtedly bring even more unwanted attention to Grande’s body, but hopefully in a way that compels people to engage in more honest conversations about body image and their own complicity in female body issues. The discourse around these celebrities shouldn’t center, for instance, on whatever message their body image might be sending to young people who look up to them. To Grande’s point, and to be especially frank, that is more on those people and how their support systems help them better understand those images than her. 

This is about how people express concern for young women whose bodies we’ve witnessed deteriorate on screen — and that they do at all. 

The post In protecting women from body-shaming, we lost something important appeared first on Salon.com.

The woman whose son brought terror to Berlin is sitting on a worn red leather couch in a three-room apartment in Berlin’s Tiergarten district. It is Thursday afternoon, and she is pointing to the several missed calls on her phone screen.

They are all from the evening of July 25. They are all from the same person: Abdul Ballout, her son.

“He was terribly afraid for me,” she says quietly, her voice trembling. “I didn’t know why.”

She scrolls through the call log — the last traces of her child from the day of the attack, the day the unknown 21-year-old became the most wanted man in Germany.

She wants the public to get to know him — the son, the brother, the young man that she knew. “I find the way people talk about him incredibly painful, to be honest,” she says. “He was a good person.”

These are the subjective recollections of a mother who cannot and will not accept what her son did — and whose account is difficult to reconcile with what authorities established about him both before and after the attack.

She asks that her name not be published, nor any photograph or recording of her voice.

“I have two other children I have to think about,” she says.

* * *

On the evening of July 25, Ballout drove a rented van into a crowd on the fringes of Berlin’s Christopher Street Day parade.

After coming to a stop, he got out of the car and, according to authorities, began attacking people with a machete before fleeing on foot. One person was killed, and at least 29 were injured.

Around 20 hours later, special forces tracked Ballout to a garden in suburban Spandau, where he allegedly attempted to attack officers with a knife when they tried to arrest him. Police opened fire, and Ballout was shot dead. Nine days later, he was buried at Gatow Cemetery in Berlin.

The person killed in Ballout’s attack was a 65-year-old woman from Poland who had traveled to Berlin with her daughter specifically for Christopher Street Day.

Not far away, a gay refugee from Iraq was celebrating at an electronic music event when panic spread through the streets. He had fled a country where being openly gay could put his life at risk. Germany was supposed to be different.

Granted anonymity to speak openly, he said: “For many people, freedom is something they never have to think about. For me, it means being able to love someone, to leave the house in the morning without wondering whether I could be attacked or killed for who I am.”

After the attack, he said, that feeling of safety cracked. “That old fear was suddenly back.”

Sitting across from me just weeks later, Ballout’s mother is dressed in all black, her headscarf framing a face that looks exhausted. There are deep shadows beneath her eyes. She speaks so quietly that at times I have to lean in to hear. The only other sound in the room is the monotonous hum of a fan.

On the coffee table lay empty coffee cups, an open packet of TUC crackers and a box of iron tablets. Propped between them is a framed photograph of Ballout, a faint grin on his face.

She doesn’t want to begin our conversation with the attack; she wants to start with her son. She reaches for her phone and starts showing me videos. In one, he is a little boy in swim trunks, running along a beach and laughing. In another, he is an adult, dancing exuberantly through the living room with his family. He jumps onto the couch and pulls his sisters along, making everyone laugh.

His mother talks of evenings spent together watching television or playing Monopoly, how he would sometimes cheat if he were about to lose. As she speaks, her smiles give way to tears, and her tears give way to smiles.

The contrast with the image of the terrorist could hardly be greater.

* * *

Four days before our interview, I visited the neighborhood where Ballout grew up. Children were crisscrossing a courtyard, neighbors leaning out of windows or standing outside doorways. I asked them about him.

All their answers were strikingly similar: “He always said hello;” “he was polite;” “he was helpful.”

No one disputed what Ballout did. No one tried to excuse it. And yet, no one could explain how the young man they knew was capable of such an act.

Sitting in his mother’s living room a few days later, her phone rings, and for a brief moment, Arabic singing fills the room. “That’s his voice,” she says. Her ringtone is a recording of her son reciting an Islamic prayer.

But is it just an innocuous recording?

Court records show Ballout repeatedly posted videos containing Islamic State propaganda dating back to 2024, before starting to circulate recordings of his own. In some of the audio files obtained by WELT, which is — like POLITICO — part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters network, he recited the Quran; in others, he appeared to preach. He had hundreds of followers on TikTok and Telegram, with comments praising his voice.

But Ballout’s online messages were radical, speaking of “unbelievers,” God’s “agonizing punishment,” and his rejection of democracy and the German legal system.

Online, he went by the name Abu Muawiyah — a reference to the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty who emerged victorious over the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali and his followers, from which Shiite Islam later emerged. It is also a signal of his shifting faith, as Ballout converted from Shiite to Sunni Islam in 2021.

Was this also a break with his family? His mother gives no indication it was.

She speaks calmly about religion, and without hesitation. She says she was born in Beirut and grew up in Germany. She can neither read nor write Arabic and has therefore never read the Quran in its original language.

“I’m not particularly strict about religion,” she says. But her son was different.

For the last several years, he had increasingly been trying to push her toward stricter observance, urging her to pray regularly, to take her religious obligations more seriously and to engage more deeply with Islam.

“He told me every single day how important it was to pray and that it was my duty.”

* * *

Speaking about the days leading up to the attack, one word keeps coming up in our conversation: fear.

Her son had changed, she says. He seemed more nervous, more tense, more restless. He had started changing his phone number constantly — at least five times in 10 days.

“Why are you changing your number again?” she had asked him. But his answer was always roughly the same. Some people kept calling him; he felt followed, harassed and no longer safe.

To this day, it makes no sense to his mother. But to investigators, this is the behavior of someone who had realized he was on their radar — and was planning something big.

In late May 2026, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office classified Ballout as a high-risk individual capable of committing a serious act of politically motivated violence. And the reasons for this are documented across dozens of pages of case files.

In 2021, Ballout took part in street dawah events organized by a Salafist group in Berlin, where Islamists seek new followers and often distribute copies of the Quran. This is where Berlin’s State Criminal Police Office first took an interest in him.

From 2023 onward, he increasingly frequented mosques influenced by Salafist ideology — which espouses an ultraconservative, fundamentalist view of Sunni Islam — while investigators noted he began openly expressing his rejection of Germany’s free democratic order.

In the summer of 2024, he repeatedly posted propaganda from the Islamic State organization, and in May 2025, attempted to join the terrorist group in Africa but was refused entry into Mauritania. Shortly after, he tried to travel to Syria via Lebanon to receive weapons training, communicating with IS members through Telegram.

Lebanese authorities arrested Ballout in July 2025, and a military court sentenced him to three months in prison for incitement to religious conflict. In court, he spoke of two cousins on his father’s side who had died fighting in Syria.

Returning to Germany in November 2025, Ballout was then arrested at Berlin airport and taken into custody on suspicion of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state. According to the case files, he presented himself as a preacher in prison. His religious fervor intensified, and his appearance changed. Ballout’s father later told Der Spiegel that he had argued with his son over his long hair and beard, which he regarded as a sign of religious extremism.

Finally, in May of this year, Ballout was sentenced to one year and 10 months in prison but was initially released under the supervision of a probation officer while the court deferred its verdict on whether to suspend the sentence. This judicial decision is now at the center of a heated debate in Germany over how the country handles high-risk Islamist offenders.

From then on, police kept him under surveillance.

Did his mother know any of this? She shakes her head.

* * *

There is only one incident Ballout’s mother is willing to discuss: July 2 this year, his birthday. That day, she says, showed just how closely her son was being monitored.

Ballout had been playing outside with his sister, spraying her with a water gun, she says. Shortly afterward, officers from the State Criminal Police Office appeared. They had assessed the situation as a possible threat.

But investigators describe the scene differently.

It was already dark, and Ballout had stepped outside for just a few seconds, holding what appeared to be a handgun but was difficult to identify, they said. He tucked it into his waistband and went back inside. When officers eventually searched the apartment, they found only a toy gun.

Investigators believe the 21-year-old was testing whether he was under surveillance — and how much time he had before police would intervene.

And while his mother insists she noticed nothing that would suggest Ballout was preparing an attack, she does not rule out the possibility that others knew of her son’s plans. However, she gives no names.

He spent most of his time with family, she says. He had few friends, at least no one she knew particularly well.

* * *

The day of the attack began, in her memory, just like any other. Both mother and son slept in late, then ran errands. Ballout was unemployed and had no particular obligations, she says. In the late afternoon, he left the apartment before a family gathering that evening.

Then, suddenly, the calls started piling up.

At 5:10 p.m., Ballout called his mother. An hour later, he called again. Then again. Each time, she says, the conversation revolved around the same question: “Are you okay?” He had never done that before.

Then, after one of the calls, she received a short message: “Take care of yourself.”

The words still haunt her today.

At 7:05 p.m., Ballout called again. He asked that his mother inform her partner of over two years that he had a new phone number again. Ballout’s parents have been divorced for three years, but Ballout continued to see and speak with his father regularly, she says. And as the family prepared for the evening, the phone kept ringing. 

They were supposed to have dinner at his sister’s place. Schnitzel, his favorite meal, was on the menu. Ballout loved these family gatherings, his mother says. “They always made him happy.” That is precisely why so much of what happened next is incomprehensible to her.

“He wanted to live,” she says, her voice rough.

He had spoken of the future, about having a family of his own, about all the things that still lay ahead of him. Nothing had suggested this might be a farewell.

Shortly before 10 p.m., her partner received one more call. They were the last words Ballout deliberately addressed to his family: “Get my mother to safety.”

Minutes later, the van drove into the crowd.

* * *

By the time Ballout’s mother was driven home by her partner that night, the first reports of the attack had started to circulate. At that point, she still didn’t know exactly what had taken place. But when she entered the apartment, she says, something immediately caught her attention.

A key was still in the door.

And right beside it, on the hallway shoe cabinet, were documents that seemed to be deliberately placed where they could not be overlooked. It was the rental agreement for a small van. It listed Ballout as the renter.

“That was when I knew immediately that it couldn’t mean anything good,” she says.

That same night, she took the documents to the police. And as she was questioned, a picture slowly started to emerge — one she initially refused to accept.

At the same time, she kept trying to reach her son, sending message after message. But there was no reply. She only learned the truth the next day, when her daughters called and told her about the reports on the news.

Her son was dead.

Since then, she has spent hour after hour in her Berlin apartment searching for explanations, her thoughts circling endlessly around her son’s last words, his fear and whether there may have been something in those calls that she failed to recognize. She cannot let go of the distorted image she has of her son, of the good boy who wanted to start a family.

Asked what she would say to the victims of the terrorist attack, she thinks for a long time. She is sorry, she eventually says.

“I would also tell them that wasn’t my son.”

Additional reporting by Lennart Pfahler.

Julia Zabert is a trainee journalist with the Global Reporters Network at the Axel Springer Academy. The Academy trains the next generation of leading journalists through hands-on, innovative work with a clear focus on the future of journalism. More information at axelspringeracademy.com.

Ukraine’s normally copious grain exports are stuck in the country — caught between Russian attacks in the Black Sea, drought on the Danube and distrust among Kyiv’s closest allies. 

It’s bad news for global food prices.

“If it keeps going like this, you’ll have once again a global price increase of at least 25, 30 percent, with all the consequences we had in 2022 for world food inflation,” Ukraine’s Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said.

With missile strikes keeping cargo ships away from its ports, Kyiv is scrambling, yet again, for a way out via Europe. But its fallback routes run overland through EU countries, including Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, where previous waves of Ukrainian grain left governments facing a fierce domestic backlash.

The last surge of Ukrainian agricultural exports through Eastern Europe unleashed mass protests from farmers, particularly in Poland, who complained that cheap Ukrainian produce that was meant to merely pass through the region was instead ending up on their domestic markets. Poland imposed a ban on Ukrainian grain in 2023, alongside similar measures in Hungary and Slovakia, defying EU trade rules and souring relations with Ukraine.

Kyiv’s fresh pleas — and insistence that the grain would only transit through its EU neighbors — have prompted Warsaw to reassure its own farmers that none of it will end up in Poland. 

“We are doing everything to keep the embargo,” Polish Agriculture Minister Stefan Krajewski told Radio ZET on Monday, referring to Poland’s ban on Ukrainian grain imports.

Blocked bounty

One of the world’s largest grain producers, Ukraine typically sends more than 90 percent of its agricultural exports by sea. The disruption of that trade after Russia’s 2022 invasion helped drive global food prices to record highs. This summer, Russia and Ukraine have intensified attacks on each other’s ports and shipping across the Black Sea. 

Ukraine exported just 463,000 metric tons of grain in the first nine days of August — about one-third of the usual pace, said Vysotskyi. By November, when the new harvest comes in, the country risks running out of storage for grain it cannot export.

Kyiv asked the European Commission for €220 million last week to help its farmers weather the disruption.

The non-repayable grant would subsidize bank loans, allowing small- and medium-sized farms to hold on to their grain until shipping resumes rather than sell at a loss. A Commission spokesperson confirmed receiving the request but did not say whether Brussels would provide the money.

But money can only buy time. The bigger problem is getting ships back into Ukraine’s ports.

No grain vessel has entered the ports around Odesa since late July, even though they remain open. That month, a Russian missile struck a corn carrier leaving port, killing 10 people aboard. The vessel sank a week later.

Since the attack, crews have refused to sail, and shipping companies have suspended service.

“Ship owners and crews are just afraid. They are not ready to send the ships at all,” said Vysotskyi. “It’s not that it’s impossible to make it. They are just not ready to.”

Back to the border

With the Black Sea route stalled, Ukraine is negotiating with Romania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Moldova to move more grain overland.

But those routes cannot simply replace maritime exports.

Moving grain by rail and road costs $50 to $70 more per ton, said Vysotskyi. When grain prices soared after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, exporters could absorb that premium. At today’s prices, they cannot.

“It’s nonprofitable,” said Vysotskyi.

Ukraine’s main alternative route, through Romania, is also running into constraints. Low water levels on the Danube are limiting the amount of cargo that can reach the Black Sea port of Constanța.

And moving more grain overland revives another problem for Kyiv: the political backlash in its EU neighbors.

Polish farmers blockaded crossings with Ukraine in 2023 and 2024, turning agricultural trade into one of the most politically explosive issues between Kyiv and one of its strongest wartime supporters.

But Ukraine, said Vysotskyi, is not asking for greater access to the EU market.

EU quotas now cap Ukrainian wheat sales to the bloc at 1.3 million tons a year, which, according to Vysotskyi, makes a repeat of the earlier influx “legally impossible.” Kyiv would seek a larger quota only if the EU itself proposed one, he added.

“There should be consensus inside the EU, with EU farmers,” he said.

Warsaw has been adamant that its grain embargo will stay. But while Ukrainian grain can’t be sold in Poland, the government has been working with Kyiv to help pass it through.

Talks with Kyiv “concern exclusively the smooth transport of Ukrainian grain to third countries, not its export or admission to the Polish market,” said Polish Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maciej Wewiór, adding that Ukrainian grain remains critical for many countries in Asia and Africa.

Trust deficit

For Polish farmers, assurances that the grain will pass through the country uninterrupted are not enough, with farm groups arguing that some shipments supposedly bound for other countries never actually leave Poland.

Gustaw Jędrejek, head of the Lublin Chamber of Agriculture and one of the leaders of the border blockades, alleged that shipments are recorded electronically as delivered abroad while the grain itself is sold inside Poland.

“Documents travel to Lithuania, the Czech Republic or Slovakia — and the grain stays in Poland,” he said. The Polish government has consistently denied such allegations.

Asked whether he trusted assurances that additional Ukrainian grain would simply pass through the country, Jędrejek was unequivocal.

“I absolutely don’t believe it.”

Debate over the true villain in Obsession is raging again after Universal Studios announced the movie’s female lead will be featured at an upcoming Halloween event.

Eurovision has changed its rules to block countries involved in armed conflict or any other “sensitive geopolitical situation” from hosting the annual song contest.

The change comes as the last two years of the contest have been overshadowed by controversy surrounding Israel’s participation.

Five countries staged an unprecedented boycott of the 2026 contest rather than compete alongside Israel. They pointed to the country’s war in Gaza — sparked by the October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas militants — and the resulting humanitarian crisis it triggered.

Despite this, Israel has come close to winning the 2025 and 2026 editions of the competition, garnering a strong public vote. Israel’s pubic broadcaster KAN has denied claims that results were unfairly influenced by mass voting campaigns.

Eurovision is organized by the European Broadcasting Union, an alliance of 113 public service media organizations across 56 countries. Typically, the national broadcaster that wins the competition hosts the following edition in their home country.

There have been some exceptions. When Ukraine won the 2022 contest, the organizers said the country could not host the following year’s contest due to Russia’s ongoing invasion raising safety concerns.

The new rules would make a winning broadcaster automatically ineligible to host “if an armed conflict, a sensitive geopolitical situation, or any other situation materially affects the security, safety or stability of their state or immediate region.”

The organizers could still commission an independent security assessment to determine whether a winner can safely host the contest. If a winner is deemed unable to host, the broadcasting union has the power to choose an alternative.

Organizers said the rule change follows “feedback from participating broadcasters” after the 2026 contest in Vienna. They will apply from next year, when the contest takes place in Bulgaria.

“These changes are about giving everyone involved greater clarity, protecting artists and ensuring the Contest continues to provide a safe and welcoming environment, while preserving the spirit and integrity that make the Eurovision Song Contest so special,” said Eurovision director Martin Green.

Ten years after Star Wars joined Marvel at Disney, and just in time for the 50th anniversary of A New Hope, the two franchises will get their first-ever crossover, in comic form.

Kevin Smith, who made us consider the fates of the independent contractors on the second Death Star, has been tasked with writing the five-issue series. — Read the rest

The post Kevin Smith writes first Star Wars/Marvel comic crossover appeared first on Boing Boing.

Director Matt Johnson’s latest feature, “Tony” — a biopic following a young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) through his first kitchen experience, slinging cheap fish in a Provincetown greasy spoon — exists inside a quote. The film opens with a pull from Bourdain’s beloved pseudo-memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” in which Bourdain reminisces about his 19-year-old self, trolling around Cape Cod trying to impress a girl and become a writer, with zero experience doing either. “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain writes early in the book. 

From the jump, it’s hard to shake the feeling that “Tony” is mistakenly aligning itself with the public’s idea of Bourdain rather than the man’s reality. When I think of Anthony Bourdain, I think of two people. The first is the enigmatic yet ultimately unknowable chef, whose charm and good nature sometimes dulled a cloud of unmistakable darkness to the eyes of the public; the second is the idealistic version of Bourdain, who exists in half-remembered citations and GIFs of his many travel shows removed from their context — rosy, nostalgic tributes to an image, rather than a person. 

Regrettably, “Tony” operates in the latter state: all sentiment and little practical truth, different from the ways Bourdain’s effusive, colorful work and writing make people feel when they really dive into it. It’s part biopic, part coming-of-age story and all gung-ho idealism, battered and fried until golden and palatable, before being spritzed with a fresh splash of lemon, providing the film a brief, compelling tartness that fades all too quickly. Like a lobster roll made with imitation crab meat — or a guy who lists Bourdain as his biggest inspiration in a prompt on his Hinge profile — “Tony” is economical and satiating, but far less satisfying than the real thing. 

What’s more, the film is bizarrely undercooked when it comes to Bourdain’s experiences in the kitchen. To be fair, Johnson has his work cut out for him. “Tony” is adapted from only the first 50 pages or so of “Kitchen Confidential,” meaning Johnson and his co-writer Matthew Miller (working from a screenplay originally written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe) essentially had to flesh out a pitch draft’s worth of detail into a feature-length film. And for those who like their biopic by-the-numbers, the finished product is a perfectly serviceable entry into the canon. 

But I get the sense that, in comparing Bourdain’s writing to the film, true die-hards will long for his quippy, evocative storytelling that’s absent from “Tony.” Bourdain gave fellow outsiders an insider’s view of the kitchen. He made people fall in love with food, its rituals and its culture. And though “Tony” doesn’t entirely lack that heady romanticization, its choice to amplify its introductory quote — making Bourdain an even more insufferable lout for dramatic effect — feels antithetical to Bourdain’s raw candor.

Now, I’m not exactly a stickler for precise detail. All book adaptations, whether from novels or memoirs, could stand to embellish the facts here and there, or go ahead and reinvent the wheel when possible. This irks literature purists. But cinema is a different medium, and as such, changes must be made. It did strike me as odd, however, that “Tony” is forged on a factual alteration that diverts Tony from the kitchen far too often — the movie’s cardinal sin. 

After pitching a bogus novel to the Vassar English department in hopes of scoring a writing fellowship that will provide his summer with a sizeable goofing-off stipend, Tony’s sure he’s got the prize in the bag. At a college bar, he drunkenly peacocks for his high school crush and fellow Vassar student, Nancy (Emilia Jones). Tony tells her that he’s going to be a famous writer, before challenging her comprehension of a few five-dollar words. Repelled, Nancy replies that she will be happily spending her summer slinging pizzas in Provincetown.

Surprise, surprise: Tony doesn’t get the fellowship, and instead, flees his childhood home early in the morning to catch a bus and a ferry to Provincetown. With no money but plenty of blind devotion to Nancy — whose character, it’s worth mentioning, has subzero charm and nuance, making Tony’s staunch affection feel like a ruse to the viewer — Tony arrives hapless and hopeless. It turns out Nancy’s got a pizza-slinging beau, so Tony drowns his sorrows in fried fish and cheap beers at the ramshackle clam shack The Flagship. When he can’t pay for his meal, Tony’s tossed out by the head Chef (Antonio Banderas) and his flighty kitchen cohort, Sal (Leo Woodall). Long story short: Tony wants to stay and pursue Nancy, Chef lets Tony sleep on his hammock in exchange for washing dishes at the restaurant, and the film can never decide which narrative to give more time to.

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In “Kitchen Confidential,” Bourdain describes his decision to head to Provincetown as an impulse motivated less by romantic desire than by general apathy. “I went in with some friends on a summer share in Cape Cod. It was what my friends were doing, and that was enough for me,” he writes. A brief mention of a pizza-spinning girlfriend is tossed off immediately after, replaced by vivid stories about his first summer working at the real-life Flagship, given the pseudonym The Dreadnaught. Each member of the kitchen crew in Johnson’s film is as scraggly and unpredictable as Bourdain describes them in the book, teaching him as much about sex and drugs as they did broiling lobsters and frying up clams.

Here, “Tony” is in its element as Johnson crafts the intimidating yet irresistible camaraderie of a kitchen, and all of the misfits who work inside it. But when Tony leaves for the day and is left to his own devices in Provincetown, the movie falls hard into all of the trite trappings of your average biopic. Tony and Sal get into all kinds of trouble, snorting coke and banging broads, but these things often happen in freewheeling montages with little consequence. It’s nearly impossible to get a sense of how Tony himself is actually feeling. Watching this version of him is akin to seeing Sessa bang his hands against the confines of that Bourdain quote, desperately trying to make something substantial out of this thin rendering of a very significant persona.

All of the men who idolize Bourdain for their imagined notions of who he was — who model themselves after the image of him sitting in a leather jacket and tiny sunglasses, with a pack of cigarettes on the table of a Parisian cafe — will love it. Under a clip of Bourdain sitting at this cafe, one person commented (before Bourdain’s death), “When I grow up I am going to be just like Anthony Bourdain.” That’s the perfect summation of the toothless film Johnson has crafted.

“Tony” tries to distance itself from the public’s quixotic version of Bourdain by making the younger depiction casually unbearable, the kind of person you wouldn’t enjoy working with — and especially not mentoring — in a kitchen. But these attempts largely come off as cloying, even silly. There’s one moment where Tony witnesses Sal score drugs before watching him shoot up on the boardwalk, as if to say, “We may not show it here, but Anthony Bourdain will later struggle with heroin use!” The dope is dopey, and it’s unfortunately only a foray into mushier territory. Banderas provides his mentor figure with a delightful vigor, but Johnson can’t quite figure out what to do with him, or how to make Chef feel like a real person. (How fitting we never learn his real name.) Even a few flowery sentences in “Kitchen Confidential” about lessons learned working at The Dreadnaught dwarf “Tony” in comparison. For a film about the origins of a foul-mouthed culinary renegade, beloved for his thoughtful musings on food and life, there’s bafflingly little interiority.

One could argue that’s Johnson’s point: Tony hadn’t yet become Anthony. Bourdain’s singular reflections could only come from a life well-lived and filled with mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that this version of Bourdain has to lack depth. Johnson is so concerned with conforming to the auspicious, nostalgic idea of who Bourdain was that he makes his biopic far too safe. He reduces Bourdain to a zygote who simply needed enough nurturing to become his older, cooler self, when he could, instead, read between the lines to find what makes young Tony special. Bourdain’s writing is far more tender and interested in other people than “Tony” ever is. And as intent on vivifying culture as Bourdain was, I think he’d watch this movie and feel that there’s an authenticity that is deeply missed. But we’ll never know that for sure. If “Tony” must open with a quote and confine Bourdain to his words, as he so often is posthumously, I’ll close with one that appears just a few sentences before it: “The less said about that part of my life, the better.”

The post Anthony Bourdain would have hated his own biopic appeared first on Salon.com.

From pessimism around dating to AI reshaping culture, cyber-ethnographer Ruby J. Thelot tells WIRED why people are putting too much stock into things that go viral.

Fancy a morning coffee, orange juice or blueberry pancakes for your Sunday brunch? Prepare to fork out more for those items if Brussels’ plan to get foreign growers to align with the bloc’s pesticide rules holds.

An analysis by the European Commission’s in-house researchers confirms what non-EU farmers have been saying for months: A plan to prohibit any trace of some of the “most hazardous” pesticides banned in the EU for health and environmental reasons would lead to fewer and more expensive products.

Under a worst-case, hypothetical scenario — in which the non-EU producers don’t adjust to the rules — you’d have to pay 332 percent more for coffee and 82 percent more for citrus fruit, the Joint Research Centre said in an analysis published on Tuesday. The EU’s agricultural imports would decline by 41 percent and livestock farmers would also be hit with higher feed costs.

Even under more plausible scenarios envisioned by the researchers, in which external growers get on board to varying degrees, consumer prices would rise and EU agricultural imports decline. Though that would in turn boost domestic production, with exact numbers depending on producers’ willingness to adapt.

The findings lay out an unpalatable political choice for Brussels: Keep angry farmers’ tractors off the streets, or hit consumers’ wallets as they fulfill basic needs at the grocery store.

The proposed residue ban, which is part of the food and feed safety simplification package, is popular with European farmers seeking a level playing field with foreign growers — after all, it was partly designed to appease their ire over the EU’s trade deal with the Mercosur bloc of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. In order to avoid leaving any residue on fruits and vegetables, producers would essentially have to stop using the substance in question.

However, critics say it clashes with global trade rules, as it essentially imposes EU rules on foreign producers, which is known as a mirror clause.

A wide range of international producer groups argue that the proposed ban goes beyond existing health protections in order to push a one-size-fits-all approach, ignoring the reality that growers around the world face different pests, climates and farming conditions.

“The choice is between berries that are available all year round — healthy, safe and at a fair price — or limited production at a high price,” said Amine Bennani, president of the Moroccan Association of Red Fruit Producers.

What Brussels calls an “alignment of standards,” he said in an emailed statement, amounts in practice to “a trade barrier.” Bennani also complained that the association has never been consulted, even though the legislation will affect 250,000 Moroccans working in the sector.

The concerns are not unique to Moroccan berry growers. South African fruit farmer association Hortgro and the South African Table Grape Industry argued that country’s grape exports are critical to livelihoods of thousands of people working in the sector.

Similar points were also raised by other producers, including the Canadian grains and pulse sector, Honduran melon agro-export sector,  Brazilian livestock and agriculture union and California’s almond sector.

The Commission said its aim is to prevent the most hazardous substances — banned for use in the bloc — from re-entering the EU through imports altogether by lowering their residue limits to a technical zero.

Both the Commission and the global producers agree on one point: Residue limits are already set to ensure safe levels of consumption for human health. Critics argue, though, that the EU executive wants to go well beyond existing safeguards for human health as it looks to block traces of substances banned for broader health and environmental threats.

Europe’s “very high standards” for safety “need to be adequately controlled,” said Elisabeth Werner, director-general of DG AGRI, at the POLITICO Sustainable Futures Summit just ahead of the proposal’s debut last year.

Adding further uncertainty for growers, the Commission has yet to specify which banned pesticides would be covered by the measure. The JRC study identified 18 active substances that could be subject to the residue ban, affecting 235 commodities and 86 countries.

The EU will make those decisions case-by-case, using impact assessments, said Commission spokesperson Eva Hrnčířová.

In an emailed statement, Hrnčířová did not directly address concerns about higher prices or reduced availability. Yet she stressed that any action “would take into account the importance of preserving the EU’s food security and possible international implications.”

The EU has reason to be concerned about international implications. Several countries, including Australia, Canada, Paraguay and the U.S., have challenged the measure at the World Trade Organization level, while the International Fresh Produce Association argues that existing global food safety standards already protect consumers while facilitating trade.

Some EU countries support mirror clauses as a way to be more fair to European farmers, who fear free trade deals like Mercosur allow competition from abroad that isn’t subject to the same restrictions. Paris has been especially vocal, already imposing national-level bans earlier this year on products with residual levels of some pesticides whose use is forbidden in the EU — restricting some potatoes and avocados from entering the country. So much for avocado toast.

Last month, Paramount Skydance CEO and Trump ally David Ellison threatened to relocate the company out of California in response to his ongoing legal battle with California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is suing, along with 12 other states, aiming to block the $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover. The threat was first reported by Semafor. Now, Bonta has responded.

“Paramount agreed to halt the merger until a court decision or until June 2027, asked for a November trial, and is now back with another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through,” Bonta wrote on X. “Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose in court. It didn’t work the first time … and it won’t work this time.”

If Paramount were to move its HQ, it would likely happen before Oct. 1, when “Paramount will start accruing a $7-million-per-day ‘ticking fee’ payable to WBD shareholders until the deal closes,” according to Variety. Which state will it be? That’s not clear yet, but presumably it wouldn’t be any of the dozen states suing the company, which include Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington. Ellison’s shortlist reportedly includes Georgia, Texas and Tennessee.

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The Warner Bros. Discovery takeover has been steeped in controversy since the beginning. Recently, a pair of government watchdog groups demanded investigations into whether Paramount gifted luxury gala tickets to Federal Communications Commission members, thus violating ethics requirements, while the company sought approval for its acquisition. 

In a span of weeks, Paramount agreed to halt the merger until a court decision or until June 2027, asked for a November trial, and is now back with another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through.

Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose…

— Rob Bonta (@AGRobBonta) August 11, 2026

Ellison has been a major Trump acolyte in the president’s second term. After the Trump administration approved Skydance’s takeover of Paramount in 2025, Ellison hand-picked political commentator Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, sparking months of controversy as viewership has cratered and stories related to the Epstein files and immigration were spiked.

The post Paramount CEO threatens to relocate company from California appeared first on Salon.com.

Just personally speaking, if it were alleged in court documents that I abused my family in an alcohol-fueled tirade that culminated in my children seeing me pour a drink all over their mother’s head, I would not be so cavalier about parting with my very public sobriety. But I’m not Brad Pitt, and no one is doing sycophantic cover stories on me in Esquire.

In the recently published profile, Pitt admitted to getting “back off the wagon,” but “in a more restrained manner,” admitting he can have a few glasses of wine. If he overindulges, he risks losing a morning to a hangover, and thus, the beautiful morning views outside his luxurious Los Angeles home. The piece continues to fawn over Pitt and his generous hospitality, with some observations on his legacy and a quote from Pitt calling AI “an interesting experiment” — which he interrupts to admire the hawks outside his window, a fluffy moment of color kept in the profile.

In a sane world, Pitt would be challenged more, asked about his ongoing legal battles with Angelina Jolie, his children dropping the last name “Pitt,” the substance abuse — even a question about Pitt not having a good film role since before the pandemic would do. 

But we live in a world where sanity is swapped for starry-eyed adulation, where celebrity culture often mirrors the blind devotion for MAGA politicians. Fame absolves stars like Pitt in the way popular politics protects men like Max Miller, who also faces a slew of credible abuse allegations. As long as they stay the course, maintain manhood and weaponize nostalgia, the public will forget and the challenges will stop coming. When a brooding Pitt admits he’s had trouble with “family stuff,” the writer lets the sentiment disintegrate. “We’ll leave it at that,” Pitt concludes.

The post Brad Pitt’s sobriety story deserves more scrutiny appeared first on Salon.com.

In an Oscars season rife with controversies, shutouts and disappointments, the one seemingly surefire, feel-good figure this year has been Brad Pitt. Nearly 30 years into his Hollywood career, the hardworking leading man has created some of our most iconic movie moments and developed an uncanny instinct for creative, audience-pleasing parts. Now, he seems a lock to take home his first acting Academy Award (he has one under his belt as a producer on “12 Years a Slave”) for his supporting role as good-natured, possibly wife-killing, history-changing stunt double and righthand man Cliff Booth. But if ever there were a classic case of someone being the odds-on favorite based on overall industry goodwill than a singular performance, Pitt would be our greatest recent example. If merit alone earned awards, would Pitt really take it this year? Or to put it another way, can Brad Pitt act?

At 56, the Oklahoma native has entered a career stage where he seems at last to be forgiven for being so really, really, really, ridiculously good looking. Yet perhaps his best trick all along has been making his critics feel they shouldn’t dismiss him as a so-so performer just because he’s handsome, when in fact he might actually be just a so-so performer.

From the beginning, Pitt’s always been clever about how he leverages his physical appeal, using it as an instrument to create his characters rather than a diversion from his efforts. Even in his breakout role, as a smooth talking grifter in 1991’s “Thelma & Louise,” Pitt seemed in on the joke that as long as he kept his shirt off, he could tell a woman point blank that he was a robber — and then effortlessly rob her.

His rise was instantaneous after that. It was as if the factory that had created ruggedly beautiful stars like Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck had suddenly spit out one special new edition just for the ’90s. Campy starring roles followed in forgettable films like “Johnny Suede” and “Cool World,” parts that played off Pitt’s throwback appeal. Yet he also played the long game shrewdly, refusing to settle as simply agreeable beefcake. He sought out darker work in movies like “Kalifornia” (a film I still have to remind myself is not “Natural Born Killers”), “A River Runs Through It” and “Interview with a Vampire.” He appeared in his first Tarantino-penned film, “True Romance,” where he played a blissfully clueless stoner. And he had a knack for picking instant cult classics  like “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” a movie that should have inspired a special Oscar category for Best Performance By a Pelvis just so Pitt could have won.

Yet when I think of the Brad Pitt of that era — the actor, not the celebrity he was in the World’s Sexiest Man, Mr. Jennifer Anniston, name-checked in a Shania Twain song years — I remember his performance in the lesser known “The Devil’s Own,” in which he plays an IRA member and says things like, “Oi need dat mooney, Tum.” He may not yet have an acting Oscar, but for this role, Pitt is widely regarded as delivering one of the worst Northern Irish accents ever committed in cinema. A few years later, in Guy Ritchie’s “Snatch,” Pitt played an Irish Traveller, and while he memorably delivered a comically unintelligible performance, it was not exactly a method actor’s one. Ritchie reportedly made the character a Traveller because Pitt couldn’t pull off a London accent, and Pitt recently revealed he based his character’s dialect on a minor character on “Father Ted.” Then there’s his unfortunate “Everyting gwarn be iree” moment in “Meet Joe Black,” an attempt that I assure you was cringeworthy two decades ago, and has since aged like milk. Even as he’s filled up his IMDb page, his technical abilities have remained limited. 

Admirably, Pitt could have spent his career doing the big superhero parts, instead of skewering that image in “Megamind” and “Deadpool 2.” He could have done some lucrative spy series and be 20 years into the role by now. That’s what movie stars do, right? He’s consistently gravitated toward odder, more challenging work like “Burn After Reading.” His previous acting nominations have all been for more idiosyncratic films — “Twelve Monkeys,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Moneyball.” Yet the impression he gives is not that of some weird, English arteeeste who disappears into his characters. He’s just a hard-working regular guy who gets the job done. This is not without appeal. 

And then there are those Tarantino movies. In “Inglorious Basterds” he carves up Nazis and helps rewrite a history where Hitler doesn’t weasel out in a bunker suicide. (Surely there’s a Tarantino-Pitt collaboration on the Jeffrey Epstein story somewhere in our collective future.) He also delivers another accent that gets a little shaky. Now, in his Oscar-nominated performance in “Once Upon a Time . . .  in Hollywood,” Pitt plays a man who is seasoned, heroic, a little sinister, and still looks insanely good shirtless. In other words, he’s a Hollywood executive’s wet dream of himself.

Is “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” any good? I side with my colleague Matt Rozsa and say, it decidedly is not. It’s a meandering mess, from a filmmaker whose works increasingly play into the classic “If I was there, things would have gone a lot differently, let me tell you” fantasy. (Take that, hippies.)

Though there is not much to see in Pitt’s performance that he hasn’t already delivered in at least a dozen other eccentric-and-manly-but-the-ladies-like-him-too performances, critics loved it. The New York Times praised Pitt’s “down-to-the-bone minimalism” and the star has already picked up a shelf of prizes, earning goodwill at each stop on the road to Oscar for his charming acceptance speeches.

Though the Oscar is only supposed to be for one performance, Pitt’s awards trajectory this year has no doubt been boosted by “Ad Astra,” another acclaimed movie with an appeal that entirely eluded me. As astronaut Roy McBride, Pitt is a middle-aged man searching the solar system for his daddy. It’s desperately tedious and doesn’t make sense, and I would like a refund for those hours of my life. Pitt’s stoic performance doesn’t help matters, but he does get to well up with emotion at times, which does technically constitute acting.

Writing in the New York Times recently, critic Manohla Dargis observed that earlier in Pitt’s career, “It became a favorite cliché to write that he was a character actor trapped in the body of a star . . .  Some of this, I think, stems from a suspicion of beauty, that it can’t be trusted.” Yet the “character actor in a movie star’s body” designation seems more fitting for Pitt’s costar and fellow Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio, who from his earliest roles in “This Boy’s Life” and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” has always displayed serious native talent. Or look at another of his “Once Upon a Time . . . ” costars, Oscar nominee (for “Bombshell”) Margot Robbie, who in the last six months skillfully has played Sharon Tate, Harley Quinn, and an ambitious Fox News employee, and among other laudable elements, delivered a different (and believable) accent for each.

In contrast, Pitt seems to dazzle by sticking to similar characters in very different movies, a neat bit of acting sleight-of-hand. If he is indeed a character actor, he sure likes to stick to the same character — unselfconsciously virile, easy to imagine chewing on a toothpick.   

I happen to enjoy plenty of Pitt’s movies and even his performances. I could watch him eat his way through “Ocean’s 11” all day, and I can’t imagine any other actor delivering the immortal line, “What’s in the box?” But his seemingly locked-down Oscars juggernaut is not a reward for a meticulous performance in a stellar movie. That is absolutely not what is happening here. It’s a prize for consistency, charm and charisma over several decades.

This shining moment also happens to come at one when the industry is still clearly not ready to fully reckon with itself. It’s been only two years since the real Sharon Tate’s famed widower, Roman Polanski, was removed from the Academy. And this year’s crop of Oscar nominees once again conspicuously fell short on honoring more diverse and deserving contenders. That’s not Brad Pitt’s fault. But it’s easy to see how his role represents a certain nostalgia for a certain era, when being a movie star didn’t mean you had to be an actor too.

The post Should Brad Pitt really win an Oscar for acting? appeared first on Salon.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Church exit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A miracle with an end date?

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

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

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

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

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

Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he'd told about this poster. "You know, it's funny," he said to me. "No one ever says anything about it."

I have been thinking about this now for several days. There's a sort of turducken of things that I find off-puttin …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two words: punk rock. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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