Students returning to a Kentucky middle school this year learned something surprising on their first day of class: They don’t live in Kentucky.

Apparently, they live in “Venecky.”

The bizarre geography lesson appeared in student agendas distributed at Farnsley Middle School, part of Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville. A U.S. map in the planner transformed Kentucky into “Venecky,” Louisiana into “Lookoong,” Alabama into “Alotome,” Illinois into “Vitoiis” and South Carolina into “Sorth Cuanto.”

The mistakes didn’t stop at state lines. The agendas also contained a distorted periodic table, unreadable phases of the moon and other garbled educational material that parents suspect may have been created using artificial intelligence.

JCPS has not confirmed whether AI was used or identified who produced the agendas.

It took a student just one day to notice.

“Mom, did you know that we live in Venecky?” Stacey Morris recalled her son joking after school, according to Louisville’s WDRB.

Morris contacted the school about the errors. Administrators later warned teachers there were a “LOT of mistakes” on pages 19 through 36 and instructed students to tear the pages out of their planners before taking them home.

For parents, however, the problem goes beyond bad geography. Families pay a $10 annual instructional fee for the agendas.

“Someone did not look at what they were handing out to the students,” Morris told WDRB.

The mishap also comes at an awkward moment for Kentucky’s largest school district.

A nearly 500-page special examination released by Kentucky State Auditor Allison Ball in June raised broader concerns about JCPS’s management and finances. The audit found the district lacked a cohesive strategic plan, had begun spending more than it brought in despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in federal COVID relief and suffered from a workplace culture in which employees reported fear of retaliation.

The report also identified gaps in financial and budgeting knowledge among district leaders and school board members.

New Superintendent Brian Yearwood, who took over JCPS last year, has said the district is taking the findings seriously and called the audit an opportunity to strengthen the system.

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Against problems of that scale, a $10 student planner is a tiny expense. But for families already questioning how their school district is managed, an educational resource riddled with errors obvious enough for a middle schooler to catch on his first day has become another highly visible example of failed oversight.

Whether artificial intelligence created the mangled pages remains unanswered.

The students, at least, appear to have learned one useful lesson from them: Always check the source — even when the adults hand it to you.

The post Welcome to Venecky? appeared first on Salon.com.

In the dog days of summer, there’s no better place to escape the heat than inside the air-conditioned paradise of a movie theater. Perhaps you’ll even find yourself there with a romantic companion, their uncovered leg grazing against yours as you both tuck your feet in to make room for the annoying person who came in late and is now trying to find their seat in the dark. Your skin touches theirs, trading the dewy moisture of perspiration. How electric; erotic, even. For just a second, the spark between you two is so powerful that it melts away every care outside of that place and time. 

And then, your film — a romantic comedy or dramedy that seems like the perfect date movie — begins, and you’re quickly reminded that no amount of desire can remove you from the context of the world you exist in. The fantasy comes crashing down. Even the fluffy rom-coms are steeped in real life’s anxieties about the social and political, the wars and the wages. But the passion was there; it was real. Maybe the moment was even more charged by the knowledge, somewhere in the back of your head, that these unexpected, carnal joys arrive far less often when so much of our time is spent just trying to make it from one day to the next. Sex, even just the lingering thought of it, can feel like an extravagance. I’d wager that’s a big part of why this summer’s theatrical slate has been so overtly horny: Everyone is trying to figure out how sex fits into this strange modern life.

No film makes that more clear than Will Gluck’s new romantic comedy, “One Night Only,” where, brace yourself here, premarital sex has been outlawed except for one outrageous annual holiday. Think “The Purge,” but for sex — “The Urge” was right there, but whatever — and just as dystopian, though with quite a bit more charm and fewer dead bodies. In the movie, unlucky-in-love strangers Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie (Monica Barbaro) find their paths repeatedly crossing during the 12-hour sex purge window, as both of them seek partners to get it on with. We know the pair will inevitably end up together. But it’s their journey and all the bizarre autocratic municipal rules they have to dance around that make “One Night Only” a clever, peculiar and head-scratching standout from the rom-com crowd.

“One Night Only” also happens to be the discourse darling du jour, with some suggesting that its unusual fusion of genre tropes and political overtones is an insidious embrace of our backslide toward fascism. Indeed, Owen and Allie quibble less about living under a punitive abstinence edict than one might expect, and the film doesn’t have nearly as much fun with, or fury for, the civic regime as it should. 

But like this summer’s “The Invite” and “I Want Your Sex,” Gluck’s film encourages a compelling and multilayered dialogue about the role of sex and intimacy amid terrifying political fury. How can we find the joy in all of this? Is, say, one hour of fleeting sexual pleasure enough to combat the 14-some others that we spend in waking dread? The solutions won’t, ahem, come easily, but there’s really no more appropriate time to ask these questions and search for their answers than summer, when the heat makes us alternate between f*cking furiously and f*cking furious.

Curiously, “One Night Only” is more of the former than the latter. As the film’s title card tells viewers, the movie takes place three years into “the mandate,” as the characters refer to it. “It’s been . . . a lot,” the card continues. Opaque and jokey as it is, this is the only bit of tangible backstory the film provides about the average American’s response to the forbiddance of fornication. Though a few ideological asides do provide some additional color as the night goes on. Owen’s mother (Molly Ringwald) and her partner (LeVar Burton) get into a spat about the mandate’s legislation — “That’s what happens with single-issue voters!”; “No one voted for it, it was passed by Congress!” — that soon turns hot and heavy. 

It’s a silly but reasonably shrewd way to depict how many of us have landed at some level of complacency in a political atmosphere where, most of the time, we have little direct control and negligible impact over the laws that dictate our lives, no matter how oppressive. We bicker about them, but the majority of Americans aren’t in the streets protesting. As neo-fascist as the country’s become, we still live under capitalism, and the ability to regularly protest is somewhat a luxury. But, then again, so is living in America at all (at least to some extent), even when it’s awful. 

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I realize I’m probably giving Gluck and screenwriter Travis Braun too much credit when I say these are the kinds of questions they wanted viewers to ask. But I find “One Night Only” to be a far more interesting film because it doesn’t answer everything up front or take the blanket optimist’s route. These characters know that the mandate is awful, but they’ve found screwed-up ways to live with it. Anyone who says that doesn’t reflect the modern American way has their head in the sand. And frankly, a film as pleasant but ephemeral as this isn’t going to push democracy any further into the dark.

What “One Night Only” makes so apparent is that our personal pleasure is at stake in this environment. Constant federal surveillance and deeply rooted institutional corruption are simply not sexy, even if being cognizant and fearful of them absolutely is. (Caring is still hot!) And I’ve always said that there is no better place to work out thorny, complex ideas — the kind that are sometimes difficult to devote time and energy to amid the stress of our day-to-day lives — than at the movies. 

Gluck’s film arrives on the heels of a pair of sweltering summer peers that already laid quite a bit of thematic groundwork in the sex space for audiences to traverse. The stickiest of them all, Olivia Wilde’s terrific chamber dramedy, “The Invite,” just landed on VOD after steadily working its way up from limited to wide theatrical engagements — sort of like cinematic release-schedule foreplay. The film navigates ideas large and small, moving between the casual intimacies, or lack thereof, that make up long-term relationships, and the baseline human carnality that points us toward sex even when those relationships aren’t working. 

Put simply: It’s more difficult to maintain the true intimacy than it’s ever been. The prevalence of dating apps and our ability to follow someone else’s every move on social media have zapped the honeymoon period’s lifespan. Throw in demanding jobs, expensive rugs, rapidly changing social mores, the desire to start or maintain a healthy relationship with your neighbors, and the nagging feeling that everyone in the world is having sex but you, and life gets overwhelming fast. Sex shuffles to the back burner. But though the flame might be small, it remains lit. And “The Invite” attests that it’s never too late to dial up the heat, so long as we’re honest about what we want and what we need from our partners. 

“The Invite” is all about communication and open conversation. And that’s a critical strength in both relationships and in the ways we watch and digest art. That this summer has been replete with dialogues not only about our sexual neuroses and compulsions, but real, steadfast love in all its forms, is a sure sign that love and sex are on our minds more than they have been in a few decades. Much like the influx of grief-laden horror movies that followed the 2016 election, one can trace our preoccupation with intimacy back to political rot. Our government directs so much of our lives that it’s impossible to remove its influence completely. Now, we’ve moved past grieving the lost hope and have the chance to create our own using the spark of romance and physical connection.

As Gregg Araki’s playful comedy “I Want Your Sex” asserts, crafting the transient delights of the flesh into something stable and meaningful will take some trial and error, perhaps even some sacrifice. We’re living in a moment where people can easily choose to void sex from their lives or pursue it as a ritualistic part of their existence, and the space in the middle is murky and treacherous. If you have questions about sex and where it fits into your life, Araki’s ardent message is to explore them. The answers may come with regret or heartbreak, but they may also come with glorious satisfaction and unbelievable revelations. More often, the resulting discoveries will sit somewhere in between those two emotional polarities. We can’t live our lives to the extreme all the time, but we can do ourselves a favor and become better acquainted with exactly what we want and how to get it. 

That’s the glorious thing about going to the cinema: You’re bound to leave any movie with both questions and answers. Occasionally, one such question might be, “Does this movie covertly support fascism by making totalitarian sex mandates cute and manageable?” And those are queries that must be addressed because, whether we like it or not, even dystopian rom-coms might point us in the right — or even new — direction. The federal government certainly isn’t trying to orient us toward a brighter, more consistently pleasurable future. Why not take matters into our own hands? Or better yet, put those hands on someone we love and care for, even if only for a night.

The post “One Night Only” and the summer of rom-com sex talk appeared first on Salon.com.

A new Apple documentary explores the life of Aziz “Zyzz” Shavershian, who rocketed to internet fame in an age before influencers, then died at age 22 in 2011.

Avatar Aang, Heartstopper Forever, and Exit 8 are among the films deserving of your eyeballs this month.

If and when you find yourself in need of music that will meet you at the intersection of I love you more than oxygen and I hope you become a ghost in a house that I can burn to the ground and then build and burn again, Phoebe Bridgers will most certainly have something for you.

On “Lost Weekend,” Bridgers’ third full-length solo release and her first major release of original material since wrapping up her work with boygenius, the musician’s name is one of many in the stacked liner notes that include everyone from her partner Bo Burnham (who co-wrote seven of the album’s 16 tracks) and Maya Hawke (co-writer of two tracks) to Jack Antonoff (who produced the album), American Football’s Mike Kinsella, boygenius bandmates Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus and Conor Oberst, who adds harmonica to the song “I Can’t Wait” — but it’s still all her.

While standout tracks “I Can’t Wait,” “Kill Me” and “Haunted” are different in tone than the album’s main single, “Lost Boys,” that’s to be expected on an album that isn’t just about heartbreak or grief or the persistent search for joy, but all of that and more. In this one album, Bridgers not only mourns the loss of her father (who died in 2022) and the end of her highly publicized relationship with Paul Mescal, she sings of the everyday pain and pleasure that comes with just living. 

“I have no secrets, only feelings/And I know those go away/There is a difference/Between lying and deciding what not to say,” she sings on “Haunted,” and that just hits so hard, as her songs are known to do and do especially well here, regardless of what mood you need them to help you through, which is the sign of a musical success. 

The post Phoebe Bridgers has a song for every feeling appeared first on Salon.com.

Before we glimpse the opening title card for “Lanterns,” co-creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King establish the stark disparity between what qualifies Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) to wear the Green Lantern’s ring versus what’s expected of John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). As with every comic book superhero, it’s all in their origin stories.

Hal Jordan, who became Earth’s first Green Lantern decades ago, exudes the confidence and charisma of a white man whose exceptionalism has been validated by the universe. Back when Hal was still a novelty to the public, we see 10-year-old John disobeying his father’s TV ban to watch the hero’s first-ever interview on “60 Minutes.” And Hal knows how to play to his audience – especially kids like John and his brothers.

“I’m a regular person, like you,” Hal says, gazing directly through the fourth wall at the tiny people he assumes are worshipping him from afar.

“In many ways, Hal Jordan was born for the role he would eventually play,” says his interviewer in a voiceover, listing all boxes of American heroism that he checks: Hal is an Air Force veteran. A test pilot. He’s fearless.

Then John’s father gets home, takes him outside to the family’s garage and shows us, most shockingly, that fearlessness is not inborn. It’s forged.

“Lanterns,” which unfolds across two timelines, is the boldest entry so far in James Gunn’s remade DC Universe. That must be a relief for longtime DC Comics fans, given its emergence on the heels of the lukewarm critical and audience reception for “Supergirl.” But out of all the co-creators and producers’ names listed in the drama’s credits, it’s Lindelof’s that heightens our expectations, owing to his outstanding success with his 2019 reinterpretation of “Watchmen.”

Where “Watchmen” indicted America’s addiction to white supremacy, “Lanterns” skeptically spotlights the durability of our meritocracy myth.

Lindelof’s involvement, along with that of “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow” series author Tom King, signals a seriousness of intent amplified by the placing the series’ showrunner stewardship under “True Detective” and “Ozark” producer Chris Mundy.

And as Lindelof did with “Watchmen,” he and his co-creators place this fable in the universally recognizable framework of a cop drama, casting Chandler’s Hal Jordan as the grizzled veteran reluctantly training Pierre’s John Stewart to succeed him eventually.

Those familiar with this mythology know this trainee dynamic isn’t how the Green Lantern’s succession usually works. Those who trust these writers’ capabilities with using comic book properties as springboards to examine thornier issues can probably deduce that “Lanterns” is employing it for a specific reason.

Galactic power and privilege literally placed themselves on Hal’s finger simply because he answered one question correctly.  Meanwhile, John was raised knowing he must be three times as good as everyone else to get a foot in opportunity’s door, let alone a place in the front passenger seat of every vehicle Hal insists on driving. John is an ex-Marine with a reputation as one of the top snipers in the world – the best of the best. But as Hal arrogantly reminds his trainee, John won’t be ready until the ring says he is. Even then, Hal says, he doesn’t plan on giving up that piece of jewelry any time soon. And Hal taunts John about his second-class status every chance he gets.

But John knows he doesn’t have the luxury to reveal his frustrations. As his father reminds John during a venting session that occurs after Hal nonchalantly almost kills him, “They’re allowed to have tantrums. We’re not.” So it goes, even when Hal uses his ring to zip into the sky at supersonic speed from California to Rushville, Nebraska, leaving John to fly coach and rent a car to meet him there.

In Rushville —  population 1,001, says the sign on its city limits — Hal and John find a mystery that seems to be out of their jurisdiction as intergalactic law enforcers, the town’s sheriff, Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), testily reminds them. But the present and possibly future Green Lanterns were summoned there for a reason best left unsaid here, and in keeping with HBO’s extensive spoiler embargo.

In Chandler and Pierre, “Lanterns” has an extraordinary pairing that sustains enough frustration, humor, passion and regret to keep us rapt through the episodes provided for review. Chandler flexes the charisma that made his “Friday Night Lights” father figure Coach Taylor such an indelible figure, while Pierre’s buttoned-down smolder slowly simmers the tension between them.

Teaming them up as a testy odd couple allows “Lanterns” to both highlight Hal’s insecurity and use the Green Lantern universe’s rules to interrogate systemic imbalances. Even when intergalactic forces take pains to make the Lantern Corps’ selection process fair, Earth’s unspoken dictates about worthiness make that impossible.

Exhibit A is Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner, who also appears in this season. Guy is probably the worst human to be granted the Green Lantern’s powers: He’s pompous, ill-mannered and insecure. But since the rings select their bearers by asking whether they’re afraid during an ambush designed to create dread, the test favors those for whom life never presents anything to fear.

By keeping the action and themes largely Earthbound and removing the interstellar glamour associated with flying supes and suits, “Lanterns” reignites our consideration of a superhero long written off in the live-action realm.  Among comic book readers, the Green Lantern is on par with his Justice League peers Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman and The Flash, each of whom has anchored culturally significant live-action films and TV shows over the last 50 years or so.

In contrast, Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern was immortalized on the big screen in 2011 by way of a laughable debacle that’s considered one of the worst career decisions Ryan Reynolds ever made. John Stewart’s legend fared better in the animated “Justice League” and “Justice League Unlimited” series, which established him as a favorite among newcomers to the franchise.

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Pierre’s Stewart holds the gravitas of that portrayal while also capturing the original intent of his character’s co-creator, Neal Adams, to have him evoke a young Sidney Poitier. While he’s a terrific scene partner with Chandler, he also shares a torrid chemistry with Poorna Jagannathan’s Zoe, one of the very few nonwhite Rushville residents who’s immediately drawn to John. Once we meet Rushville’s unofficial power broker, William Macon (Garret Dillahunt), we understand why. Dillahunt’s Macon embodies the sinister darkness lurking beneath the surface of any American small town, especially for outsiders.

But the writers don’t paint Macon as a simple villain, or anyone else as a cut-and-dried protagonist. Not John, certainly not Hal and not even the Guardian of the Universe tasked with watching them (played with a sunny headmistress’ formality by Laura Linney).

The world of “Lanterns” prefers to be bracingly honest about our false assumptions about heroism and whether the people we deem to be noble really are. One unquestionable element is its success in raising the low estimation of Green Lantern created by a particularly clumsy movie, simply by imagining possibilities in much bigger terms. That is what makes a Lantern a hero, and this adaptation one of the best of its kind in a long time.

“Lanterns” premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 16 on HBO and HBO Max.

 

 

The post HBO’s “Lanterns” questions what makes a hero—and who gets to be one appeared first on Salon.com.

I like Bright Eyes. There, I said it.

That’s no small confession for someone who prides herself on listening to serious music. I’ve evolved from preteen grunge aficionado to high school punk fan to college indie rocker and finally become a somewhat omnivorous 20-something with ears for everything from noise-rock to tropicalia. As a woman who writes about music, I’ve worked extra hard to distance myself from teeny-boppers and groupies and drippy sentimentality.

This is all to say that nothing embarrasses me more than my secret love of Bright Eyes, once the drippiest act in all of indiedom. Primarily a vehicle for singer-songwriter Conor Oberst, whose new album, “Conor Oberst,” came out this week, the ever-rotating group of musicians known as Bright Eyes formed when he was only 15. Unlike most celebrities who are supposed to have “grown up in the public eye” — child actors, teenage pop stars, offspring of the rich and famous — Oberst was the rare young artist who wrote his own songs and found a sizable audience while still in high school.

Much of that audience was made up of teenage girls. A few years younger than the now 28-year-old Oberst, I fit right into that demographic, catching on to Bright Eyes around the turn of the millennium. It wasn’t his musical talent — which consisted at the time of some rudimentary guitar arrangements — that attracted me. And while I’ll concede that Oberst’s brooding, elfin good looks didn’t hurt, it was his unmediated laments on loneliness and heartbreak that won me over. I reveled in Bright Eyes’ earliest material, “A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997,” “Letting Off the Happiness” (1998), “Fevers and Mirrors” (2000) and a raft of singles and EPs.

Even then I recognized Oberst’s melodramatics for what they were, but couldn’t deny that they affected me. When he feebly insisted, on “Kathy With a K’s Song,” “Love is real/ It is not just in long distance commercials,” he vocalized my own desperation to believe it was true. The summer I turned 18, I sublet a sleeping loft in midtown Manhattan and his phrase “the coffin you call your apartment,” from “Something Vague,” permeated the space. The teenage Oberst, who attended a private high school just like I did, perfectly articulated the sorrow and angst that seem trivial to the adult world but feel epic to adolescents blessed with intact, financially comfortable families.

Of course, serious indie-rock fans — a group I would have liked to belong to — dismissed Oberst as a pretentious whiner, and cooler-than-thou critics at publications like Pitchfork grouped Bright Eyes among the most syrupy and hackneyed of emo bands. At first, even I joined in trashing him, so ashamed was I to admit to my male music-nerd friends that I was yet another girl who had fallen for Bright Eyes’ self-pitying histrionics.

Around the same time, Oberst must have started to feel as embarrassed by his reputation as I was. Too smart and self-aware to stagnate among mediocre acts like Dashboard Confessional, he did some serious growing up between “Fevers and Mirrors” and his 2002 breakthrough, “Lifted, or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ears to the Ground.” Less emotionally assaultive but just as personal as his earlier albums, “Lifted” embraced American roots music with an instrumental sophistication Bright Eyes had never even hinted at before. Songs like “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” and “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and Be Loved)” diluted the extremes of emotion with the college-age apathy and detachment that I was also growing into. Oberst had learned how to stop being a teenage train wreck and start becoming a flawed but functional human being.

With its toned-down theatrics and newfound songwriting chops, “Lifted” launched Oberst’s career. His audience widened beyond disgruntled high schoolers, and he delved deeper into country, folk and blues, expanded his lyrical repertoire to include politics (a move that earned him premature comparisons to Bob Dylan), and even unsuccessfully experimented with electronic music on 2005’s “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn.”

But just when it became socially acceptable to like Bright Eyes, I found myself falling out of love with him. Though Oberst’s intimate lyrics couldn’t have been more nuanced, surprising and uncannily accurate, his political stuff was painfully literal and disappointingly simplistic. His most famous protest song, “When the President Talks to God,” sounds more childish than even his most narcissistic teenage material. “Does he ask to rape our women’s rights and send poor farm kids off to die? … Does he ever smell his own bullshit, when the president talks to God? I doubt it,” Oberst rasps, in an obvious and futile attempt to evoke Dylan, who would surely shudder at such graceless lyrics. By the time “Cassadaga,” another foray into lefty dogma, came out last year, I could barely bring myself to listen to it.

As the first widely distributed album he has recorded under his own name, “Conor Oberst” must be yet another stab at a new beginning. I had hoped it would herald a return to introspection — a close-up portrait of the artist post-“Lifted.” Though Oberst thankfully obscures or dispenses with the grating political appeals, the persona he replaces them with is almost as annoying.

Oberst’s rootsy style has begun to bleed into his lyrics, an affectation that doesn’t work for someone who wrote an entire song (“Loose Leaves”) about prep-school summer vacation. His compositions are about what they’ve always been about (isolation, memory, love and lack thereof, fear of death), only Oberst isn’t singing in his own voice anymore — he’s weaving together scraps of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Johnny Cash. He’s trying to sound as old as the hills when the main virtue of his lyrics has always been their youthfulness.

It isn’t that I always crave confessional music. Some of my favorite artists, such as David Bowie, have made entire careers on assuming and casting off personas. Bowie’s kind of artifice works, though, because he’s aware of it, and his talents have more to do with character creation than introspection. And at a moment when the indie buzz band of the year, Vampire Weekend, is both exploiting its upper-crust image and disguising it under layers of filched African pop, it’s easy to see why Oberst may be ambivalent about his own, privileged voice. But nothing reeks of entitlement like the unearned authenticity he attempts to assume in lines like, “And it’s such a long way back/ To all the fun I had/ When nothing ever seemed to bother me/ But what can you do?/ Sleep ‘neath the stars and toil in the sun” and “There’s nothing the road cannot heal.”

Oberst is so determined to show us that he’s no longer a self-pitying teenager that he has replaced all semblance of self with the image of a smooth-talking drifter who dispenses cowboy clichés. Only at rare moments — such as on “Danny Callahan,” a song about a boy who dies of cancer, and “Lenders in the Temple,” which pleads, “I’d give a fortune to your infomercial/ If somebody would just take my call” — does the sensitive, perceptive lyricist make an appearance.

This is frustrating because, musically, the new album may be Oberst’s best. Backed by the Mystic Valley Band, which includes several Bright Eyes alums, he balances an impressive variety of moods and styles, from sad, tranquil guitar ballad (“Milk Thistle”) to carefree foot stomper (“NYC-Gone, Gone”) to loud-quiet-loud singalong (“Get-Well-Cards”). In fact, I was so enchanted by Oberst’s melodies it took me a few listens to realize how shallow I found his lyrics. And though I’m not about to throw “Conor Oberst” out the window, it won’t join his early releases in the relatively large canon of records that have personally impacted me.

For a few years Conor Oberst was the older brother I never had — he experienced everything first and left me a detailed map of the empty apartments, serious breakups and unquenchable longings that define late adolescence. These days, my anxieties involve repaying school loans, carving out a professional life and fitting all of my responsibilties into roughly 17 wakeful hours a day. While these concerns are surely less romantic than what preceded them, I can’t help wondering what Oberst would have to say about early adulthood. If he has half the insight and descriptive power at 28 that he had at 16, I can only hope the dust and tumbleweeds clear so we can hear what’s really on his mind.

The post Turn around, Bright Eyes appeared first on Salon.com.

Tim O’Reilly built a publishing empire that AI is helping to destroy. Yet he loves AI—as long as it’s open source.

Joi AI hired 10 people to masturbate using AI companions as part of a monthlong “wellness” study. The company claims the practice could help “solve male loneliness.”

Human-AI marriages are not currently recognized by US law. Some Republican state policymakers are drafting legislation to keep it that way.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

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.

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