The top U.S. military commander in the Middle East visited the USS Abraham Lincoln on Saturday as the aircraft carrier’s exhausted crew nears the end of a nearly nine-month deployment marked by reports of deteriorating living conditions and mental health concerns.
Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, spent several hours aboard the Lincoln meeting with sailors and Marines during a 10-day tour of the region. It was the only ship Cooper visited during the trip.
The visit comes as scrutiny grows over conditions aboard the carrier, which left San Diego in November and has now been deployed for more than 260 days. The Lincoln has gone more than 200 days without a port call while supporting U.S. operations in the war with Iran.
Families have reported food shortages, problems with drinking water, broken showers and laundry facilities and growing psychological strain among the roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard. Reports of sailors attempting to go overboard have further raised concerns about the crew’s mental health. The Navy has acknowledged mental health cases but disputed reports that the ship is experiencing a broader crisis.
The administration has largely dismissed the criticism.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said reports about conditions aboard the Lincoln have been misrepresented. President Donald Trump went further Friday, telling reporters that the carrier’s record-setting stretch at sea was “not nearly long enough.”
Families of deployed sailors have pushed back, accusing Trump and Hegseth of dismissing what their loved ones have experienced aboard the ship.
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., a Marine Corps veteran, blamed the administration Sunday for what he called a “true lack of leadership.”
Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC’s “This Week” that morale aboard the Lincoln has improved since sailors learned they will finally be coming home.
The USS George Washington, the Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, is being pulled from the western Pacific and sent toward the Middle East to replace the Lincoln. The move will temporarily leave the western Pacific without a U.S. aircraft carrier even as China increases military activity in the region.
The Lincoln’s return date has not yet been announced.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., offered a blunt assessment Sunday of President Donald Trump‘s new childhood vaccine policy: It could mean more shots, more doctor’s visits, higher costs and more sick children.
“If it wasn’t so potentially tragic, you would break out laughing at a comment like that,” Cassidy, a physician and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
Cassidy was responding to Trump’s assertion that “nothing bad can happen” from his administration’s plan to overhaul the childhood vaccination schedule.
Cassidy also warned that requiring families to return repeatedly increases the chance children will miss doses, leaving them — and others — vulnerable to preventable illnesses.
“If you’re pro-life, you should be pro-vaccine,” Cassidy said.
The Louisiana Republican pointed to a recent case involving a pregnant woman who contracted a vaccine-preventable illness after exposure to an unvaccinated person and subsequently lost her pregnancy. Cassidy noted that immunity can decline during pregnancy, making community vaccination particularly important for protecting pregnant women.
“That is being pro-life,” he said.
In addition, Cassidy argued that the changes could turn two MMR shots into six individual injections — while requiring additional trips to the doctor’s office.
Trump has called for separating the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into individual shots and spacing out childhood vaccinations across additional medical visits, despite opposition from major medical organizations.
“Instead of mom or dad missing work twice,” Cassidy said, parents could have to “miss work or take vacation or personal leave six times.” More office visits would also increase costs for insurers and potentially premiums, he argued.
“This is working backwards on affordability,” Cassidy said.
The physician also warned that requiring families to return repeatedly increases the chance children will miss doses, leaving them vulnerable to preventable illnesses.
Trump has called the combined MMR vaccine potentially “lethal” and compared administering multiple vaccines to a “nuclear weapon.” Tapper reminded Cassidy that the senator previously called for someone to challenge “crazy stupid things” that undermine confidence in immunization and asked whether Trump’s statements qualified.
“Yeah, that’s a crazy stupid thing,” Cassidy replied.
Cassidy’s criticism carries additional political weight because he provided a crucial Republican vote to confirm Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic. Cassidy initially expressed concerns before supporting Kennedy after receiving assurances about vaccine policy, which he has since accused Kennedy of breaking.
Tapper pressed Cassidy on whether Kennedy’s history should have been warning enough.
Cassidy declined to revisit his vote, instead arguing that Trump’s policy will “decrease immunization rates” while being “less convenient and costing families more.”
Back in 2007, long before the MasterClass franchise was a thing, Jane Espenson, one of television’s most respected and imaginative writers, wrote an essay/tutorial for The New Republic that breaks down the embraceable genre formula she calls the Chosen One.
It’s a catchy idea that explains why figures like Peter Parker, Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter have a lasting hold on their fans in ways that other heroes don’t.
Although each occupies a distinctly separate universe, Espenson says they all fit the same pattern. “They’re living a life, sometimes a fine one, often a troubled one, but certainly one governed by ordinary rules, when suddenly the curtain is pulled back and a whole new world, or a new set of rules of this world, is revealed,” she said. “And what’s more — and this is the important part — in that new world, they are something special.”
Once I read that simple recipe, it changed the way I thought about every kind of genre fiction, including superhero tales like HBO’s “Lanterns.”
(Courtesy of HBO Max) Aaron Pierre in “Lanterns.”
The Green Lanterns don’t neatly fit into the Chosen One mold, you see. And that may explain why they seem to be less popular than other DC heroes.
I can imagine diehard Green Lantern fans firing up their rebuttals as they read this. After all, the very nature of how Green Lanterns obtain their superhuman abilities involves cosmically empowered rings choosing their wearers. Once the selected become official members of the Green Lantern Corps, they can wield their rings to create astronomical constructs. The top members of the Lantern Corps are only limited by their imagination.
But mainstream culture’s best-known Green Lanterns aren’t orphans or troubled. Hal Jordan and John Stewart are both military men. John is also an architect. They aren’t living drab or depressing lives when the Guardians of the Universe activate them — they’re faring pretty well, all things considered.
Hal and John also stand apart from other test pilots, Marines and field experts in ways that make them not merely suitable choices for superheroic duty but worthy of it. This, I think, is the difference between Espenson’s Chosen Ones and heroes like the Green Lantern. Hal, John and the rest must work to be worthy of their power.
Worthiness is a tougher bar to clear than being chosen for greatness. The Chosen Ones Espenson cites are part of a destiny ordained either by their bloodline or some greater lineage. What makes a Chosen One common in their society marks them as extraordinary once they cross the threshold into the fantastic.
And some heroes are Chosen at random. That radioactive spider that transformed Peter Parker into Spider-Man could have bitten the class moron just as easily. The tornado that transported Dorothy Gale from dusty Kansas to vibrant Oz might have swept up the village idiot instead.
The idea that anyone can suddenly be endowed with superhuman specialness simply by being in the right place at the right time is a little like daydreaming about winning the lottery. So it’s entirely understandable if most of us aren’t into the labor aspect of the Lanterns’ audition process.
(Courtesy of HBO Max) Kyle Chandler in “Lanterns.” Courtesy of HBO Max
If the box office is a fair, measurable indicator of how the public feels about these superhero archetypes, guess what? Espenson’s theory still holds: Chosen One stories still rule.
Meanwhile, the introduction of the Worthiest of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in “Captain America: The First Avenger” ranks #52 on a very long list.
About that. Two caveats, and they’re big ones, have to do with the quality of certain heroes’ movie introductions and America’s longstanding genuflection before elites.
Mainstream culture’s relatively lower esteem for the Green Lantern is absolutely related to cartoonish interpretations of his power in live-action depictions. Comic book versions of the Green Lantern toss around the power of the cosmos. When Lantern Corps members unite their rings’ powers, they can move planets. That has never been adequately portrayed in theatrical features.
In animated renditions streaming on HBO Max, the Green Lantern fares much better. Avid “Justice League” and “Justice League Unlimited” viewers recognize John Stewart as being held in equal esteem to the Big Three (i.e., Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman), especially in a crisis.
In the most recent “Superman” and 2011’s “Green Lantern” starring Ryan Reynolds, the way that Guy Gardner and Reynolds’ Hal Jordan toss around cartoonish CGI bubbles or massive green mallets falls short of conveying the Lantern Corps’ two-fisted punch of willpower and vision.
Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds in “Green Lantern”
Also, not all heroes neatly fit into the Chosen vs. Worthy popularity equation. Superman, Wonder Woman and Thor were born to greatness. America’s most-loved fictional titans, Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne, have bottomless wealth to fund their vigilante adventures, making them especially mesmerizing to an audience raised on rags-to-riches fables.
To a man and woman, they made themselves Earth’s protectors because they have the means and muscle to take on the job. And once Stark Industries and Wayne Enterprises bankroll their respective super-squads’ fortified headquarters, they attract the universe’s talent. By their nature, Earth’s Green Lanterns are a natural fit to serve the Justice League’s governing inner circle. They’re also the only leaders who answer to other bosses. (Boo.)
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But what some perceive as a negative makes the Green Lantern legend appealing to others, especially those driven to ascend through ambition and hard work.
HBO’s “Lanterns” is the first series to explore how that idea unfurls in a society that functions like our own — that is, one in which all things aren’t equal, and superheroes have a reputation for doing as much harm as good.
Maybe “Lanterns” can inspire us with its portrayal of worthiness. But it may take more than one good show to turn the tide of the Green Lantern’s reputation. Much as we respect that with great power comes great responsibility, it’s a lot dreamier to imagine what we could do with all that might if it were simply handed to us.
“Lanterns” premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 16 on HBO and HBO Max.
Last week, I wrote about the pasta that finally taught me how to shop at the farmers market. What I didn’t mention was that I ate the first quarter of my bowl standing up, at the bar top between my kitchen and the little alcove where our two-person table sits. I had simply stopped there. The cornbread crumbs were crisp, the chèvre was creamy, the squash had gone sweet and spicy and jammy after some time over low heat, and together they briefly became more interesting than wherever I had been headed.
I don’t want to overstate the revelation. I know what happens when you apply butter and patience to good vegetables. Still, that particular bit of alchemy never gets old to me. Especially when I realized that what was in the bowl had begun as a five-item farmers market haul, helped along by a few things I already had at home.
One excellent thing, I was reminded, is often enough.
The five recipes below all begin the same way: with one market find good enough to make me want to cook — sweet corn, ripe peaches, September carrots, a jar of hot giardiniera — and a wickedly simple form to build around it. Pasta. Baked rice. Simple syrup. A rolled pastry. Snack cake. Some of what you need may come from the market, especially at one with eggs, cheese, dairy or even pizza dough on offer; the rest can happily come from your pantry or the supermarket.
The market doesn’t have to provide dinner. Sometimes it just has to provide the idea.
Jammy summer squash pasta with chèvre and cornbread crumbs
Yields
4 servings
Prep Time
15 minutes
Cook Time
1 hours 35minutes
This is the pasta that finally taught me how to shop at the farmers market: Start with a form, bring home one or two beautiful things and give them somewhere to land. Here, grated yellow summer squash and onion spend the better part of an hour over low heat, slowly becoming soft, sweet and jammy. Miso, honey and red-pepper flakes deepen the mixture; pasta water turns it glossy enough to tuck itself into the tubes and folds of a sturdy short pasta.
This is not a 30-minute dinner, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. Think of it instead as a very light weekend project, the kind you can tend occasionally while doing something else nearby. The toppings are market-flexible, too: Use whatever chèvre or goat cheese you find, whether it crumbles into little pillows or lands in soft clouds, and turn a leftover hunk of cornbread into crisp, salty crumbs.
Ingredients
2 medium yellow summer squash
1 medium onion, roughly chopped
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, olive oil or a combination
Kosher salt, to taste
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 tablespoon white miso paste
2 teaspoons honey
½ teaspoon red-pepper flakes, plus more to taste
1 pound short, sturdy pasta, such as rigatoni, shells or cavatappi
1 cup coarsely crumbled cornbread
Olive oil, for the skillet
Flaky salt, optional
About 4 ounces chèvre, or more to taste
½ cup loosely packed chopped fresh basil
Preparation
Prepare the vegetables: Grate the summer squash on the large holes of a box grater. Roughly chop the onion by hand, or pulse it briefly in a food processor until finely chopped but not puréed.
Start the sauce: In a large, wide skillet or Dutch oven, heat the butter, olive oil or combination of the two over low heat. Add the squash, onion and a pinch of kosher salt. Cook slowly, stirring occasionally, for 45 to 60 minutes. The vegetables should become deeply soft and jammy while retaining a little texture; you are not trying to cook them into a completely smooth paste. Taste occasionally and adjust the salt and pepper as needed.
Deepen the flavor: Once the vegetables are soft and jammy, stir in the garlic powder, miso, honey and red-pepper flakes. Continue cooking over low heat for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the seasonings have melded into the squash.
Make the cornbread crumbs: While the squash cooks, tear the cornbread into roughly pebble-size pieces by hand, or pulse it briefly in a food processor. Lightly coat the bottom of a skillet with olive oil and set it over medium heat. Add the cornbread and cook, stirring and turning occasionally, until crisp and golden. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate to drain and season with flaky salt while still warm, if desired.
Cook the pasta: Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil and cook the pasta until just shy of al dente. Before draining, reserve at least 1 cup of the pasta cooking water.
Build the sauce: Take the squash mixture off the heat for a moment. Add the drained pasta and a splash of reserved pasta water and toss to combine. Return the pan to low heat and continue adding pasta water, a splash at a time, stirring gently, until the squash loosens into a glossy sauce that works its way into the pasta’s tubes, ridges and folds.
Finish: Remove from the heat and stir in the chopped basil. Taste and adjust the salt, black pepper and red-pepper flakes as needed.
Serve: Divide among four bowls. Top each generously with chèvre — crumbled if firm, dolloped if soft and spreadable — and about ¼ cup of the crisp cornbread crumbs.
A jar of fruit syrup in the refrigerator is one of those small things that can make summer feel remarkably well-appointed. This version simmers ripe peaches with honey and whole black peppercorns until the fruit collapses and the syrup turns fragrant, floral and just a little prickly. I prefer mine on the less-sweet side, but both the honey and pepper are easy to adjust depending on your fruit and your taste.
Use it anywhere a little concentrated summer would be welcome: shaken into cocktails or mocktails, stirred into iced matcha or sparkling water, drizzled over gelato or spooned onto yogurt. Peaches are particularly lovely here, though I’ve made the same syrup with blackberries to equally good effect.
Ingredients
3 ripe peaches
1 cup water
½ to ¾ cup honey, depending on desired sweetness
1 to 2 tablespoons whole black peppercorns, depending on desired intensity
Preparation
Prepare the peaches: Peel the peaches, if desired, then remove the pits and roughly chop the fruit. Peeling produces a slightly cleaner finished syrup, but because the mixture will eventually be strained, leaving the skins on works perfectly well.
Simmer the syrup: Combine the peaches, water, honey and black peppercorns in a medium saucepan. Bring to a gentle simmer over medium heat, then reduce the heat as needed to maintain it.
Mash the fruit: Simmer for 15 to 20 minutes. As the peaches soften, periodically crush them against the side of the saucepan with the back of a wooden spoon or a potato masher to help release their juices. For a stronger peach and pepper flavor, let the mixture simmer toward the longer end of the range.
Strain: Set a fine-mesh strainer over a bowl or heatproof measuring cup and pour in the syrup. Press firmly on the peaches with the back of a spoon to extract as much liquid, color and flavor as possible. Discard the solids and peppercorns.
Cool and store: Let the syrup cool, then transfer it to a jar with a lid or a deli container. Refrigerate and use within about 1 week for the best flavor.
Hot giardiniera rolls
Yields
8-12 servings
Prep Time
20 minutes
Cook Time
25 minutes
Somewhere between a pizza roll and a savory breakfast pastry, these start with prepared pizza dough. Some of my better local farmers markets sell it in sweet little rounds, but you can also buy it from your local supermarket. Roll it out cinnamon-roll style, spread with cream cheese, Parmesan, herbs and hot giardiniera, then coil, slice and nestle the spirals together in a buttered skillet.
I like this recipe in particular because if the farmers market has otherwise failed you, there is a decent chance the pickle table has not. Even when the tomatoes are gone and the bread stall is picked clean, you can usually find some jar of something sharp, spicy and brined: giardiniera, hot peppers, spicy dills, pickled carrots.
Giardiniera is my first choice here — jars of it seem to appear at every Chicago market — but think of the filling as a template for whatever good, spicy pickled thing you bring home. Change the herbs accordingly: chives and parsley are excellent with giardiniera, while Mexican-style pickled carrots practically beg for cilantro and oregano.
Ingredients
1 pound prepared pizza dough, at room temperature
4 to 6 ounces cream cheese, softened
½ cup finely grated Parmesan
½ cup well-drained, chopped hot giardiniera
¼ cup chopped fresh herbs, preferably chives and parsley
2 tablespoons butter, divided
Preparation
Heat the oven: Heat to 375°F. Use 1 tablespoon butter to grease a baking dish or oven-safe skillet.
Make the filling: Pulse the cream cheese, Parmesan, giardiniera and herbs in a food processor until chunky and spreadable, not smooth.
Roll the dough: On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough into roughly a 12-by-16-inch rectangle, about the thickness of dough for cinnamon rolls.
Fill and roll: Spread the filling over the dough, leaving a small border. Starting at a long side, roll into a snug log.
Slice: Cut into 8 to 12 pieces; 8 makes generous breakfast-sized rolls, while 10 to 12 is better for sharing.
Arrange: Nestle cut-side up in the prepared pan. Melt the remaining tablespoon butter and brush over the tops.
Bake: Bake 20 to 25 minutes, until puffed and deeply golden. Serve warm.
Summer corn riso al forno
Yields
6-8 servings
Prep Time
20 minutes
Cook Time
50 minutes
Riso al forno — literally “rice from the oven” — is Italian baked rice, an adaptable format in which partially cooked rice finishes with sauce and cheese. This version leans hard into fresh corn, still in its cool green husks and already smelling sweet before you cut it from the cob.
Half the corn is blended with stock and cream into a velvety sauce; the rest stays whole for juicy texture. Parmesan or Pecorino keeps things more Italian, while cheddar nudges the dish toward American corn casserole. Crisp Mexican-style chorizo is optional, but I genuinely like this best when the corn gets to be extremely, unapologetically corn.
Ingredients
2½ cups Arborio or Carnaroli rice
Kosher salt
4 to 6 ears fresh corn, kernels cut from the cobs, divided
1 to 1½ cups chicken or vegetable stock
½ cup heavy cream
Freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon butter or olive oil, plus more for the baking dish
½ small onion, finely chopped
6 to 8 ounces Mexican-style chorizo, cooked until crisp and very well drained, optional
¾ cup grated Parmesan, Pecorino Romano or cheddar
Sliced scallions or chopped chives, for serving
Preparation
Heat the oven: Heat to 375°F. Butter or oil a 9-by-13-inch baking dish.
Parboil the rice: Cook the rice in generously salted boiling water for 8 minutes. Drain, rinse under cold water and transfer to the baking dish.
Make the corn sauce: Simmer half the corn with 1 cup stock for about 12 minutes, until tender, adding more stock if needed.
Blend: Remove from the heat, add the cream and season with salt and pepper. Blend until mostly smooth and pourable.
Cook the remaining corn: Heat the butter or oil in the same saucepan. Add the onion and remaining corn and cook over medium-low until the onion softens.
Combine: Fold the corn and onion, plus chorizo if using, into the corn sauce. Pour over the rice and stir gently to combine.
Bake: Top with cheese and bake, uncovered, for 30 to 35 minutes, until the rice is tender and the top lightly golden.
Finish: Rest at least 15 minutes, then scatter with scallions or chives.
Brown sugar-carrot snack cake
Yields
8 servings
Prep Time
25 minutes
Cook Time
50-60 minutes, plus cooling
September carrots can look almost too virtuous at the farmers market: sturdy bunches, feathery green tops, dirt in the creases. Here, they get cooked with butter, brown sugar, orange zest and salt until glossy and jammy, then folded into a simple sour cream cake scented generously with cardamom.
If you find candied citrus peel, toss some in; if not, use the zest of a full orange. Serve with lightly sweetened orange-zest whipped cream — homemade or straight from the spray can.
Ingredients
For the carrots
1 cup finely grated carrot
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons brown sugar
Zest of ½ orange if using candied citrus peel, or 1 whole orange if not
Pinch of kosher salt
Water, as needed
For the cake
3 large eggs
1 cup granulated sugar
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
1 cup sour cream
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1½ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cardamom
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup roughly chopped candied citrus peel, optional
For serving
Lightly sweetened whipped cream, preferably with orange zest, or canned whipped cream
Preparation
Prepare the pan: Heat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 9-inch round cake pan and line the bottom with parchment.
Cook the carrots: Cook the carrot, butter, brown sugar, zest and salt over medium-low heat for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft and jammy. Add water 1 tablespoon at a time if the pan gets dry. Cool until just warm.
Mix the wet ingredients: Whisk the eggs and sugar, then whisk in the melted butter, sour cream and vanilla.
Mix the dry ingredients: Whisk together the flour, baking powder, cardamom and salt.
Finish the batter: Fold the dry ingredients into the wet just until combined, then fold in the carrots and candied peel, if using.
Bake: Pour into the pan and bake 50 to 60 minutes, until golden and a tester comes out clean or with a few moist crumbs.
Cool: Rest in the pan at least 20 minutes before turning out. Serve warm or at room temperature with whipped cream.
This story originally appeared in The Bite, my weekly food newsletter for Salon. If you enjoyed it and would like more essays, recipes, technique explainers and interviews sent straight to your inbox,subscribe here.
Trump spent part of his weekend sharing a series of seemingly AI-generated images depicting himself alongside the nation’s first president, including one showing the pair writing with quill pens, another riding horses together and a short video in which Trump and Washington stroll through the still-unbuilt ballroom.
“Thank you, George, for some of your brilliant ideas on this great Military Complex/Ballroom!” Trump captioned the 10-second video.
Washington’s newfound role as Trump’s 18th-century architectural consultant comes as the president fights to continue construction on the $400 million White House project. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to intervene after a federal appeals court ruled that aboveground construction could not proceed without congressional approval.
The imaginary collaboration also contains a historical wrinkle: Washington never actually lived in the White House.
Washington selected the site for the President’s House and oversaw aspects of its planning and construction, but left office in 1797 and died in 1799. John Adams became the first president to live in the still-unfinished building when he moved in the following year.
Trump’s Washington posts arrive amid an increasingly public effort to shape his own presidential legacy. His administration is simultaneously fighting over the ballroom and efforts to place his name on the Kennedy Center, while Trump has repeatedly shared heroic and AI-generated depictions of himself online.
On Saturday, he added another image to the collection: a photograph of himself wearing a “Trump 2028” hat accompanied by the declaration, “WE ARE GOING TO WIN.”
The 22nd Amendment prohibits anyone from being elected president more than twice, something Trump acknowledged earlier this month when he conceded that the law on presidential term limits is “very strong.”
Washington, meanwhile, famously made relinquishing power part of his own legacy.
After commanding the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, Washington voluntarily surrendered his military commission to Congress rather than retaining control of the army. He later declined to seek a third presidential term, establishing the two-term tradition eventually written into the Constitution.
Washington’s legacy has hardly escaped historical scrutiny. He enslaved more than 100 people at Mount Vernon, and historians continue to grapple with the contradiction between the nation’s founding ideals and the human bondage practiced by its first president, among his strong mythology.
But Trump’s latest posts appear less interested in interrogating Washington than in imagining him as a collaborator — writing, riding and offering design tips to his 21st-century successor.
Whether Washington would have approved of Trump’s ballroom is impossible to know. In Trump’s AI-generated version of history, however, George has apparently already signed off.
As you may have noticed, many members of the American media and political classes are currently rending their garments in terror and despair at the perceived threat of “socialism.” It’s not at all clear what that word means in 2026, in this context or any other.
It only helps a little to observe that whatever “socialism” is supposed to refer to these days, it doesn’t have much to do with an economic or political system where the state or the working class control the means of production. I’m sure we could find people out there who advocate that. Hell, I might be among them, if it were a remotely realistic possibility. But none of those people are prominent in the current (and long overdue!) internal power struggle within the Democratic Party and the American left writ large.
Come to think of it, you know who really wants state control of the economy, if only in an incoherent, ass-backward, “Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” kind of way? Donald Trump, that’s who. For all his extended excoriations of Democrats as woke America-hating Marxist radical traitors, Trump has meddled more extensively and more directly in the economy than any Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It’s clearly going too far to call Trump a socialist, largely because profoundly corrupt autocratic or oligarchic regimes like his cannot easily be captured in ideological categories. He’s definitely not a democratic socialist (or a constitutional democrat of any other variety). But there’s no way around the fact that his fantastical DIY presidency has consigned conventional right-wing ideology about the sacredness of free-market capitalism to the proverbial dustbin. Let’s put it this way: Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu called himself a socialist; legendary Argentinian president Juan Perón did not. Trump belongs on the same historical shelf as those guys, if only as a wannabe.
Almost everything about Trump’s management of the economy during his second term, and pretty much everything else, has been disastrous. But even if we assume that the epic personal and institutional graft of his presidency will not survive his departure, he has created a haphazard regime that’s so deeply enmeshed in fossil fuels, Big Tech and AI, rare earths, pharmaceuticals, shipbuilding, semiconductors and the weapons industries that no one will be able to disentangle it anytime soon.
It’s going too far to call Trump a socialist. But his fantastical DIY presidency has consigned conventional right-wing ideology about the sacredness of free-market capitalism to the proverbial dustbin.
As Indiana University scholar Sarah Bauerle Danzman told Foreign Policy in 2025, it’s “jarring” to encounter “a Republican administration embracing state capitalism in a way we haven’t seen in a long time, while all the time decrying ‘socialism.’” According to more recent reporting in Forbes, the federal government now holds equity stakes in roughly 30 different companies across a range of industries. “What started with a ‘golden share‘ in U.S. Steel,” writes Keith Johnson of Foreign Policy, “has morphed into a government takeover of vast swathes of the economy,” best exemplified by capricious tariff policies that seem motivated by the president’s personal whims and grievances. As libertarian economist Tad DeHaven tells Johnson, since all this “is driven by one man’s personal desires, there is no plan and no strategy. It changes by the day.”
Fanatical Republicans from deep-red districts can keep staging government shutdowns and preaching the defeated gospels of Milton Friedman as much as they like. But it’s difficult to imagine any future GOP putting the genie all the way back in the bottle and entirely undoing this unexpected turn to oligarcho-socialism or state capitalism or, ahem, national socialism or whatever else it might be called. The Econ 101 term would be “dirigisme,” which was coined to describe the highly interventionist, quasi-socialist economy that rebuilt France after World War II and has more recently been applied to China, Singapore, South Korea and so on.
This raises the amusing possibility that the mainstream Democratic Party — always ready to turn itself into the punchline of historical irony — will once again end up holding the bag for a set of policies supported by their donor class and literally no one else. More than 70% of registered Democrats, according to a Fox News poll taken in March, say that capitalism is “not working very well or not working at all.” So naturally the party leadership seems prepared to go to the barricades to defend it.
To be entirely fair, in some cases the centrist moral panic over “socialism” seems to refer to rational or at least straightforward electoral concerns. Fairly or otherwise, mainstream Democrats convinced a tiny plurality of Wisconsin voters that gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong was too much of a humorless leftist to survive exposure to the mythical but coveted “median voter” in November. They may well have been correct; we don’t get to re-run the experiment and find out.
But in other instances, such as Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in New York in 2025 and a series of Democratic primary wins by progressive or socialist-aligned candidates in that city and across the country, the hysteria has more to do with generational and attitudinal change — yeah, I’m sorry, with a vibe shift — than with specific policy proposals or ideological labels.
On one level, it seems incredible that deep-dyed Democratic insiders like James Carville or former DNC chair Jaime Harrison are surprised that their party, which collectively decided to “resist” the second coming of Trump by doing absolutely nothing and steadfastly ignored the scale of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza for as long as possible, is seen as hopelessly weak by its own voters. Carville recently called for a “schism” (a delightfully old-fashioned word) within the Democratic Party, and Harrison has urged the so-called socialists to leave the Demo-normies alone and “focus on building the party you actually support.” That old saw about being careful what you wish for comes to mind.
Guys like James Carville and Jaime Harrison were raised on ancient fables of the ideological excesses of the 1960s and ‘70s, and no doubt still get misty-eyed over Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” of 1992.
On the other hand, there’s nothing especially mysterious about those attitudes. Those guys and others like them were raised on ancient fables of the ideological excesses of the 1960s and ‘70s, and no doubt still get a bit misty-eyed over Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” of 1992. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow!
Their version of the Democratic Party eagerly devoured the devil’s candy, in the form of unbreakable partnerships with Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and closed-door, $10,000 fundraising dinners in East Hampton and the Napa Valley. There’s no escape from that kind of political bargain on this side of the apocalypse.
They have always viewed left-wing opposition as childish and contemptible, but not far below the surface they have dreaded the day it rises up to bite them in the ass and destroy their glorious temples of political triangulation. That day has now come, and they are in danger of becoming the last advocates of a faith that both the right and left have abandoned. They can only hope that Donald Trump’s corruption and incompetence will save them from their own.
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from Andrew O’Hehir on our dazed and confused world
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: The man is lost. A desperate ploy to end a long-running war took more from him than he could bear. While working his way back home, he’s forced to outsmart a vicious beast at close quarters, and he takes up residence with a suitor. His offspring are made of lesser stuff than him, but our hero manages to earn redemption by flinging a stockcar around a tri-oval racetrack 180 times at 200 miles per hour.
Don’t worry, you didn’t miss a super-secret cut of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” that’s only projected on the side of Buc-ee’s locations nationwide. This deep-fried Ulysses is Will Ferrell in “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” which turns 20 years old this month. Part of Ferrell’s man-child trilogy with Adam McKay, the film follows a blowhard racecar driver as he works his way back to the winner’s circle following a dramatic and embarrassing wreck.
But Ricky Bobby’s return to glory was about more than the importance of humility and friendship. To anyone watching this free-wheeling gag showcase in theaters in 2006, it was obvious this high-speed hick was a stand-in for President George W. Bush. Now, 20 years on, it has a lot to teach us about life in Donald Trump’s America.
The film introduces us to Ricky Bobby’s family with a gross-out splat, implying the soon-to-be stock car racer was born in the back of a speeding Chevelle driven by his reprobate father. We jump ahead in time and see a grade-school-aged Ricky Bobby on Career Day, let down again by his dad’s absence. His father appears for the first time in over a decade and is quickly tossed out of Ricky Bobby’s school for inappropriate behavior, leaving his son with a bit of parting wisdom that may or may not have been the ramblings of an inebriated fool.
Ricky Bobby spends the rest of his life attempting to follow in his father’s tire tracks, working his way up to be in the big show but not a star. Dumb luck and a last-minute assist from his less charismatic, bumbling pseudo-sibling finally get him into the spotlight. He develops a reputation for aggression, seemingly fighting a war against everyone on the asphalt that spins out when he attempts to bully a cosmopolitan French driver into submission. His buffoonish bravado and frequent failures alienate everyone who is not completely in his camp. The movie ends with Ricky Bobby speeding in a car without sponsors, a massive “ME” splashed on the hood. For anyone who lived through eight years of Bush and saw Ferrell’s impression of him on “Saturday Night Live,” the real star’s identity is obvious.
“Talladega Nights” was reacting to its immediate surroundings, rubbing and racing against America’s political currents only three years after Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
“Talladega Nights” was reacting to its immediate surroundings, rubbing and racing against America’s political currents only three years after Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The film saw that the future was in the sprawling boomtowns of the Sunbelt, that making a movie about America in 2006 required taking a hard-left into Southern culture — and that there was no better avatar for the country’s anti-intellectual and anti-coastal skid than Bush-via-Ferrell.
Bush’s brand and accent were Texan, with the hat to match, but his roots are in the WASPy New England. His father followed the money south in the 1950s and stayed there, but George H.W. Bush never quite lost his boarding school bearing. The younger Bush was different, leaning into his sun-baked upbringing while keeping one boot firmly back East. When the time came to get an education, he skipped College Station for stints in New Haven and Cambridge. “Talladega Nights” pegs this missing link between America’s urban past and its exurban future from its opening seconds, putting a quote about “hot, nasty, badass speed” in the mouth of New York Swell Eleanor Roosevelt. The future was coming on fast, and it was dumb as a brick.
We’re now living in Ricky Bobby’s world. The culture and politics of the Sunbelt — sometimes called “America B” by people who spend too much time online — is now inescapable. From Stanley cups to dirty soda franchises, everything’s a little bit more SEC and a little less Ivy in 2026. Where Tumblr-ites dreamed of the cloistered quads and moody libraries of Princeton in the 2010s, TikTok-ers now obsess over the elaborate rituals of University of Alabama sororities.
This reality operates on zero-sum logic. Following his father’s maxim that “if you ain’t first, you’re last,” Ricky Bobby can’t imagine a win for anyone else as anything less than something stolen from him. If you’re at all up on the paranoid and protective stance of major right-wing media, this sounds awfully familiar. That pitch – they’re stealing from you – helped the nation elect Donald Trump in 2016, himself a late-in-life Sunbelter, and following his election loss four years later, it drove him to accuse Democrats of rigging the outcome in Joe Biden’s favor.
The film is littered with nods to the new normal. Ricky Bobby lives in a McMansion in some isolated North Carolina community. His sons are given tough names, lifted from a cut-rate Chuck Norris television show, in the same way conservatives today tend to name their sons after firearms manufacturers. Fast-food branding and half-hearted evangelicalism are a constant presence.
The film feels spooky in its prescience, but Ferrell and McKay were far from alone in noticing the culture was heading out of the cities. Mere months before Rickky Bobby ran around an infield in his underwear swatting at imagined flames, Bravo debuted the first season of their juggernaut “Real Housewives” series, which focused on the comings-and-goings of women living in palatial homes in master-planned communities outside Los Angeles.
The franchise fled further and further from coastal cultural centers, shifting from the “Real World” of New York City and Chicago to the air-conditioned enclaves of New Jersey and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. In 2026, no one questions a reality show set 20 minutes from Park City, Utah, or wonders why Netflix dating shows host their casting calls in exurban Charlotte. That this is a reflection of America is taken as a given, the same way “Love Is Blind” contestants don’t feel the need to mention their evangelical beliefs.
One hundred fifty years after Union Gen. William T. Sherman stormed from Atlanta to Savannah, the Savannah Bananas, an independent baseball team, took the greater United States by storm, capturing algorithms and filling stadiums with coordinated dance routines.
It’s odd to revisit “Talladega Nights” now. The Bushes and the Ricky Bobbys of the world have spent the interceding 20 years winning battle after battle in the political and cultural war. For those of us who actually do like crepes, though, there are some glimmers of hope.
For one, Donald Trump bringing the Sunbelt into the White House has been a disaster. A Democratic wave is expected in the coming midterms, one that may well carry on into 2028. For another, Formula 1 and soccer, sports frequently coded as elite and coastal, are experiencing booms of popularity across the country. Gen Z is pushing back against influencers, delighting in Obama-era signifiers like frozen yogurt and fighting off the “tradwife” trend.
While we’ve been racing on a closed loop for the last two decades, the cyclical nature of politics and culture will bring us back to the starting line faster than you might expect.
By now most of us have heard the acronym TACO, for Trump Always Chickens Out, but I was recently introduced to NACHO, which means Not a Chance Hormuz Opens. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about these cutesy insults — Donald Trump surely enjoys them, given his apparent enthusiasm for Mexican food — but appropriate or not, the labels seem accurate.
On Monday, Iran announced the strait will remain closed until Trump gives in to their demands, which include, according to the New York Times, “the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade and sanctions on Iran, the withdrawal of American forces from around the country, the payment of war reparations, the release of frozen Iranian assets, and the end of attacks on Iran’s allies in the region.”
Trump is so eager to claim victory in the war he started alongside Israel that he might even be willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, unnamed U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. The president has also made his own list of demands, not all of which are coherent, that includes compensation for the 18 U.S. service members killed since the war began. In a Truth Social post, he also demanded that “compensation should be paid to the families of the hundreds of thousands of innocent protestors that Iran has killed over the last 50 years, not to mention the 52,000 that have been killed in the last five months.”
Iran’s timetable of negotiations is reportedly designed to drag out past the midterms, with the expectation being Republicans will get clobbered in elections over high gas prices and the deeply unpopular war.
Let’s not pretend Trump truly cares about dead Iranian citizens, given how many have been killed by U.S. and Israeli bombs. But even if Trump were to agree to the Islamic Republic’s terms tomorrow, Tehran seems unlikely to serve up the victory he so badly craves. Iran’s timetable of negotiations is reportedly designed to drag out past the midterms, with the expectation being Republicans will get clobbered in elections over high gas prices and the deeply unpopular war. Such a loss could lead to Trump’s third impeachment — a very big if! — or at least hobble any further funding for the conflict.
But failing that, Tehran’s Plan C could already be coming clear: Just wait till Trump is gone. As reported by the International Business Times, Majid Shakeri, a senior adviser linked to Iran’s parliament, has urged the nation’s leaders to avoid both open war and a definitive agreement with Trump. The best strategy, he argues, is simply to wait until the end of Trump’s term, writing on X, “The path to victory in this war is neither just fighting nor just reaching an understanding. The path to victory is ‘managing the process of neither war nor peace, up to the point of victory.’”
Similarly, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi told PBS NewsHour on Tuesday that “One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition, so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost.”
While such a pathway is not Iran’s official policy, it nonetheless seems like a plausible outcome. But waiting until Jan. 20, 2029, when Trump’s second term will end — assuming he doesn’t die first, get impeached and removed from office, or try to break the Constitution badly enough to somehow serve a third term — could backfire. (That might mean an end to Iran’s problems, but it certainly wouldn’t be for Americans. A Tucker Carlson win in 2028 might sound like a joke now, but so did Trump in 2015.)
At any rate, the president’s war with Iran is clearly unsustainable in the long-term, and the U.S. may have to bow out sooner rather than later. Since attacking Iran, the U.S. has increasingly run low on weapons stockpiles. A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies details why this is happening; it’s not just the Iran war, but the entire spectrum of how the military operates, including the Pentagon’s budget process and how the U.S. has engaged in recent wars, including under the Biden administration. While I’m skeptical of such reports being used to further inflate the military-industrial complex — look no further than Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demands for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget — numbers are numbers, and you can’t bomb something with what you don’t have.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy announced Monday that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell by 6.1 million barrels to just under 300 million barrels last week. That’s the lowest the SPR has been since 1983. For this and numerous other reasons, such as the recent jobs report that shows how badly the economy is faring under Trumponomics, many folks are comparing the president to Jimmy Carter, who famously faced his own economic challenges and stalemate with Iran during the 1979-1980 hostage crisis. But really, this level of incompetence is in a league of its own.
There are other dumb acronyms for the Trump administration, continuing the taqueria theme, such as EMPANADA, for Everybody Makes Promises and Nobody Actually Delivers Anything, and TAMALES, for Trump Always Messes Around, Leaves Everybody Shafted. I have my own feelings about this era, steeped in euphemism, but whatever people decide to brand it, there’s no denying reality: As we should’ve learned with Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, you can’t just drop bombs on countries and expect them to do your bidding. Or as I might put it, SALSA: Someone Always Loses to Stupid Aggression. That someone is inevitably us.
President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements no longer cause the market gyrations that they did in 2025. But their sticker shock for American consumers is becoming increasingly clear – just as economic sentiment is souring ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections.
Covering nearly all U.S. imports, the advantage of these tariffs in the Trump administration’s view is that they’re more firmly based on existing U.S. trade law, beyond the reach of the Supreme Court’s review. And Trump has said he envisions enacting many more of these so-called trade law tariffs.
As a trade economist who has been following the tariff wars, I believe that the longer these import taxes are in place, the more the consumers will bear their burden. The 2025 “Liberation Day” tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down, as well as other levies Trump announced after the February ruling, turned out to be temporary. But the bulk of the new levies are designed to be permanent.
That means that for consumers, the total cost burden is likely to increase even if the tariff rates don’t change – because the new tariffs will be stacked on older ones.
The cost squeeze
On one level, Trump’s tariff fixation is a mystery. Tariffs continue to be unpopular, and it’s unclear why Trump would double down on them before midterm elections when his approval ratings, including on the economy, are so low.
But on another level, Trump’s embrace of tariffs can be understood as an instrument of personal power. He has long viewed them as tools for negotiating leverage, and he recently declared that U.S. tariffs “aren’t high enough.” The president also has deflected criticism of their impact on consumer prices by claiming erroneously that foreigners pay for them.
The simple fact is that U.S. tariff invoices issued by the Treasury Department are sent to the U.S. businesses that import the foreign products. These companies may try to absorb some of the cost to protect their market share and work through existing inventory. But eventually, the squeeze will compel them to pass most of that extra tax onto U.S. consumers – no matter which foreign countries are targeted.
And now that tariffs have had time to work through the economy, researchers have found an impact on prices. The Dallas Federal Reserve recently estimated that the Fed’s preferred inflation measure would have risen without tariffs at an annual rate of 2.3% in March, instead of its actual 3.2%. Meanwhile, an analysis by the Yale Budget Lab concluded that consumers are paying anywhere from half to the entire cost of the levies through higher prices, depending on the goods.
Tariffs upon tariffs
Trump based his July tariff announcements on three different legal justifications: a country’s unfair trade practices, like forced labor, which is known as Section 301; national security protection, or Section 232; and discrimination against U.S. imports, or Section 338. The last is a trade war tariff dating to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.
The new Section 301 tariff rates, which are global, currently range from 10% to 12.5%, but they could go up at the president’s discretion.
Section 301 has also opened the door to new country-specific tariffs targeted at Brazil, at 25%, while Section 338 was cited to slap an extra 50% import tax on certain Canadian goods. In addition, Trump has imposed levies ranging from 25% to 50% for specific products, covering steel, aluminum, automobiles, copper, timber, lumber and pharmaceuticals.
With so many tariffs in the mix, consumers will be even more squeezed because many of these taxes will be stacked on top of one another. For example, Section 301 tariffs will be applied on top of the older legacy tariffs that date back to World Trade Organization rules setting a baseline Most Favored Nation rate, as well as on top of each other.
So if a country ends up facing tariffs based on forced labor violations as well as excess capacity, each at 10%, on top of a uniform Most Favored Nation rate of 3%, the total rate on all products from that supplying country would be 23%. And this levy will be paid by U.S. consumers, not foreigners.
Pushback from the states
Trump is especially interested in Section 301, which is meant to remedy foreign trade practices that are discriminatory, unfair or unreasonable, and that burden U.S. commerce. It sets no limit on tariff rates and lets the president discriminate among exporting countries. Furthermore, federal courts have typically given the president broad discretion in implementing the statute.
Trump chose to use this measure to punish virtually all U.S. trading partners on grounds that they failed to prevent imports into their markets that were made with forced labor. His administration based the decision on its own investigation that determined the U.S. is the only country that prevents forced labor imports.
These tariffs were set at 12.5% for countries without any formal prohibition on forced labor imports, and 10% for all other countries with such a prohibition. These tariffs are similar in scope and impact to the earlier Liberation Day tariffs.
Twenty-five U.S. states then challenged these levies at the U.S. Court of International Trade, using similar reasoning as the Supreme Court when it struck down the emergency tariffs on grounds that they were an unconstitutional tax on U.S. consumers. Citing the affordability burden, the lawsuit claims that the Section 301 tariffs do the same thing. Nor did the administration offer any indication of how the tariffs were calculated and when, if ever, they would be removed.
The lawsuit further alleges that the new tariffs go far beyond the original purpose of Section 301, which is to open specific markets to U.S. exports through negotiated policy reforms, not to impose global tariffs with no clear goal in sight.
Whether this legal challenge will succeed depends in part on whether judges will continue to defer to the president on these particular levies, no matter how much they deviate from previous practice. And I believe Trump is counting on it.
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.
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.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has enough on his plate managing American foreign policy. Apparently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s sauerkraut won’t be joining it.
Rubio and his wife, Jeanette, offered a surprisingly candid glimpse into life inside the Trump administration during an appearance on “The Katie Miller Podcast,” covering everything from Cabinet members’ diets and pets to Pop-Tarts, UFOs and Rubio’s disastrous attempt at going keto.
Katie Miller is the wife of Deputy Chief of Staff and long-time Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller. Her podcast has become a behind-the-scenes look into Trump’s Cabinet members.
Asked whether he had embraced Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, Rubio said he supported it.
His wife immediately disagreed.
“He’s completely not,” Jeanette Rubio said, revealing her husband’s fondness for Pop-Tarts.
“The Pop-Tart is one of the great American innovations in history,” Rubio responded.
Rubio also singled out Kennedy’s commitment to a meat-and-sauerkraut-heavy diet, saying the health secretary travels with his own food.
“I’m not gonna travel the world with a cooler full of sauerkraut,” Rubio said.
Rubio has tried changing his eating habits. It apparently didn’t go well. He described attempting the keto diet as a “near-psychotic event” brought on by sugar withdrawal, joking that giving someone in his position that much irritability could have geopolitical consequences.
Then there is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth‘s cat.
The Hegseths and Rubios are neighbors, Rubio revealed, and Hegseth’s cat routinely visits the secretary of state’s porch. Rubio, who prefers dogs, described the animal as “arrogant.”
The cross-Cabinet pet diplomacy apparently goes both ways: The Rubios’ goldendoodle has wandered into the Hegseth home.
Rubio’s unusually loose interview ranged well beyond his colleagues. He professed a fondness for Tupac Shakur and electronic dance music, discussed UFO sightings around U.S. military installations and admitted his ideal fall Saturday involves spending hours watching college football.
He also recalled spending roughly 90 minutes aboard Air Force One worried that another passenger sleeping on a couch might actually be dead. Rather than wake the person, Rubio said he kept watching for signs of breathing until the passenger finally stirred.
The interview offered an unusually personal look at an official better known for managing an increasingly complicated portfolio of international crises and national security issues.
It also established at least one clear boundary in American diplomacy: Rubio may travel the world on behalf of the president, but he won’t be doing it with a cooler full of fermented cabbage.
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.
(Nicole Rivelli /Universal Pictures) Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner in “One Night Only”
“One Night Only” 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.
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.
(A24) Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton in “The Invite”
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?”
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.
(Magnolia Pictures) Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman in “I Want Your Sex”
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.
President Donald Trumplashed out Friday night at the preservation group challenging his White House ballroom project, calling its members “TREASONISTS” just hours after his administration asked the Supreme Court to let construction continue.
“These are the TREASONISTS that brought the suit against the Military Complex,” Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post targeting the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “They revealed Top Military Secrets!”
The administration filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court on Friday after a divided federal appeals court ruled that Trump lacked congressional authorization to continue aboveground construction on the $400 million, 90,000-square-foot project. The appeals court temporarily paused its ruling, giving the administration time to seek relief from the high court. Chief Justice John Roberts has asked the National Trust to respond by Tuesday.
The administration has increasingly characterized the ballroom not simply as an event space but as part of an integrated national security complex. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court the project is already 65% complete and argued that stopping construction would interfere with security improvements at the White House.
Trump reinforced that argument Friday night by posting — and then reposting — statements from senior officials defending the project.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine called it a “valid military requirement” necessary to protect the president and provide command-and-control capabilities. Trump also shared a statement attributed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio arguing that the project is necessary both for security and diplomacy, noting that the United States currently hosts major foreign dignitaries in temporary tents with “unsafe and unsanitary portable bathrooms.”
Trump’s fury comes amid another battle over his efforts to remake Washington’s landmarks.
On Thursday, the Trump-controlled Kennedy Center board again voted to put Trump’s name on the performing arts complex and approved plans to close most of the center for two years of renovations. A federal judge previously ruled that the board could not rename the Kennedy Center without congressional approval and blocked an earlier closure plan. The latest proposal would instead add “Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump” to the facade and name the surrounding grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
The new Kennedy Center plans must still be presented to the judge who blocked the earlier proposal.
If I see one more headline announcing that Gen Z has killed alcohol, I might just order another drink.
According to the internet, my generation doesn’t go to bars anymore. We don’t party. We don’t date. We’re all sitting at home sipping adaptogenic mushroom tonics, journaling our feelings and politely declining invitations to any event after 7 p.m. because we’d rather optimize our sleep scores than take a tequila shot.
There’s just one problem: I have absolutely no idea who these people are.
I was born in 2001, making me squarely Gen Z. My friends split bottles of wine over dinner. Our birthday party of choice is a bar crawl to our favorite hot spots. We can always be convinced to order another round of G&Ts with just a glance at each other. On any given Friday night, the restaurants around me are full of twenty-somethings lingering over drinks long after they’ve paid the check. Or getting in UberXLs to the night’s secondary location (i.e. the local dive bar). Even the sober Gen Zers I know still go out — they’ve just swapped negronis for mocktails.
So after reading what felt like the hundredth article declaring that my generation had abandoned alcohol, nightlife and socializing altogether, I started wondering whether I was missing something.
The statistics behind those stories are real: Younger adults are drinking less than previous generations did at the same age. But somewhere between “Gen Z drinks somewhat less” and “Gen Z is killing the bar industry,” something strange happened. A modest shift in consumer behavior hardened into a cultural stereotype. I wanted to understand what got lost in that translation.
I’m not questioning the data or trying to argue that the numbers are wrong. I’m questioning the story we’ve built around them. And if there’s one person who has spent more time thinking about that disconnect than almost anyone else, it’s Dave Infante.
The Kernel of Truth
Infante, who covers the beverage alcohol industry in his newsletter “Fingers,” has watched that distortion happen in real time. A few years ago, while reporting for VinePair, he interviewed roughly a dozen college students for a series on “the state of the modern keg party.” His findings weren’t especially dramatic.
Keg parties still existed. Students still drank. But packaged beverages — hard seltzers, canned cocktails and drinks like High Noon — were beginning to replace the giant communal keg that had become shorthand for college drinking culture.
At almost the exact same moment, another drinking trend exploded across the internet: BORGs, or “blackout rage gallons,” the customized gallon jugs of vodka, water, electrolytes and flavoring that briefly inspired a miniature moral panic in national media.
If you only followed the headlines, it was difficult to reconcile the two dominant narratives about Gen Z. Depending on the week, we were either frighteningly reckless or hopelessly boring.
Infante remembers watching that contradiction play out in real time.
“If anything,” he told me, “the story is maybe that youth were more interested in customizing the amount of alcohol they were drinking and the flavors they were drinking — or not drinking at all.”
Drinking differently is not the same thing as not drinking.
Infante has a phrase he likes to use when talking about stories like these.
“There’s usually a kernel of truth,” he said. Then that truth gets “wrenched through this…assembly line,” until what comes out on the other side barely resembles where it started.
That’s exactly what seems to have happened here. The original claim — that younger adults, on average, consume somewhat less alcohol than previous generations at the same age — is supported by plenty of evidence. But that’s not the story most people have absorbed.
Instead, we’ve somehow arrived at a version where Gen Z has collectively decided drinking isn’t fun anymore, bars are empty because nobody under 30 leaves the house and nightlife itself is quietly dying. Those are much bigger claims, and they’re far harder to prove.
Alcohol consumption statistics tell us how much alcohol people consume. They don’t tell us how often young adults see their friends. They don’t tell us whether restaurants are full, whether people are dating, whether house parties have disappeared or whether social life has migrated somewhere else entirely.
Every generation seems to inherit one cultural panic after another.
That pattern is something Corey Seemiller has spent years watching unfold.
Seemiller, a professor and one of the leading researchers of Gen Z, sees the pattern as generationally predictable. “Every generation gets blamed for everything,” she said.
When Baby Boomers were young, they were reckless. When millennials came along, they were entitled. Now Gen Z has become simultaneously too online, too anxious, too health-conscious, too antisocial and, apparently, too sober.
The labels shift depending on what’s happening in the broader culture.
Alcohol consumption statistics tell us how much alcohol people consume. They don’t tell us how often young adults see their friends. They don’t tell us whether restaurants are full, whether people are dating, whether house parties have disappeared or whether social life has migrated somewhere else entirely.
What doesn’t change is our impulse to explain complicated social and economic changes by assigning a personality to an entire generation.
Because the more Seemiller studies Gen Z, the more she finds a generation responding rationally to the world it inherited — not inventing entirely new values out of thin air.
Take socializing.
One of the most common assumptions underpinning the “Gen Z doesn’t drink” narrative is that young adults simply don’t want to go out anymore. Seemiller doesn’t buy that. Instead, she thinks we’re asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking whether Gen Z drinks less, she suggests: What does social life actually look like now?
“There are a lot of things that are going on all simultaneously,” she told me. Yes, the research consistently finds that Gen Z drinks less than previous generations. But that’s only one piece of a much bigger puzzle. “If they were to drink,” she said, “where are they drinking? Are they going to the grocery store and buying something and drinking at a gathering, or are they going to a bar?”
For decades, the bar occupied an almost uncontested position in American social life. It was where coworkers met after work, where first dates happened, where birthdays spilled into the early morning and where twenty-somethings figured out adulthood over cheap pitchers of beer. Going out and drinking were so tightly intertwined that they became almost interchangeable in the American imagination.
But Seemiller argues that’s no longer the landscape Gen Z inhabits.
Bars today aren’t simply competing with the bar down the street.
“They’re competing with boba tea houses,” she said. “They’re competing with coffee houses. They’re competing with thrift stores. They’re competing with a local park where you can just go sit down and talk to your friends.”
If you meet a friend for an overpriced matcha instead of an overpriced IPA, are you less social? If you spend three hours catching up over dinner instead of hopping between bars, are you participating less in nightlife? If you host friends at your apartment because no one wants to spend $90 before the Uber ride home, have you somehow opted out of social life altogether?
Or have the rituals simply changed?
Those questions kept resurfacing throughout my reporting, particularly when I stopped talking to experts and started talking to people my own age.
One of the first things I noticed was that almost nobody — drinkers or nondrinkers — recognized themselves in the version of Gen Z they’d been reading about.
Miranda Ferrante certainly didn’t.
Ferrante stopped drinking in July 2024 after alcohol began exacerbating her anxiety, stomach issues and sleep problems. The decision wasn’t part of some grand wellness movement. It wasn’t driven by social media. It was simply a realization that drinking no longer made her feel the way she wanted to feel.
But giving up alcohol didn’t mean giving up the rest of her life.
When I asked whether headlines about Gen Z “killing alcohol” felt accurate, she didn’t hesitate.
“No, sober does not mean ‘not fun,’” she said.
She still goes out with friends. She still celebrates birthdays at restaurants. She still orders drinks — just without alcohol. Her friends make a point of choosing places with thoughtful mocktail menus and are quick to point out alcohol-free options when they’re available.
“I think we are changing the definition of what socialization means,” she told me. “I don’t think drinking or not drinking alcohol should have any impact on the definition of socialization.”
We’ve spent years treating alcohol as a proxy for social connection. Drink less, socialize less. Order fewer beers, have fewer friends. But those equations only work if alcohol is still the primary reason people gather in the first place.
The more people I interviewed, the less convinced I became that it is.
Gabi Bradbury, who has been sober for three years, described much the same life: bars, concerts, festivals and nights out with friends, only without alcohol in her glass. “Why do we need to drink to have fun?” she asked.
Neither spoke like someone opting out of social life. If anything, both described becoming more intentional about it.
That word — intentional — came up so often during my interviews that I eventually started circling it in my notebook.
Intentional about drinking. Intentional about friendships. And then Dave Infante gave me a much more practical explanation.
Money.
The $20 Cocktail
“I think that’s a huge part of it,” Infante said when I asked how much economics has shaped the narrative around Gen Z and alcohol. “I don’t think that’s the whole piece… but I certainly think that’s a substantial piece of the puzzle.”
“We are very much squarely in the era of the $20 cocktail,” he said. “$10 beer. $18 glass of wine.”
Infante pointed me toward research by Rabobank senior beverage analyst Bourcard Nesin that complicates one of the most common assumptions about Gen Z drinking habits. Younger adults are spending roughly the same share of their income on alcohol as previous generations did — but in raw dollars, they’re spending dramatically less.
If Gen Z is earning less while simultaneously facing higher housing costs, higher grocery bills and more expensive drinks, declining alcohol purchases start looking a lot less like a cultural rejection of drinking and a lot more like basic math.
“If you boil it down like that,” Infante said, “the intuitive idea that, ‘Oh, zoomers just don’t want to drink,’ becomes very hard to defend.”
I’m hard-pressed to think of a single friend who’s ever said, “I’m not going out because I don’t believe in alcohol anymore.” I can think of dozens who’ve said, “I can’t justify spending $75 tonight.”
Those are not the same conversation, and yet we keep treating them as if they are.
“Young adults respond rationally to inflation and stagnant wages” doesn’t inspire quite the same existential panic as “Gen Z killed nightlife,” but it’s probably closer to the truth.
Infante sees that framing play out even inside the alcohol industry. As part of his reporting, he regularly listens to corporate earnings calls and began noticing a pattern: When publicly traded alcohol companies missed sales targets, executives often reached for the same explanation.
“Guess who’s to blame?” he said. “It’s those darn kids.”
Blaming a mysterious generation that simply doesn’t like alcohol is a much easier story than confronting rising prices, changing consumer behavior or whether people still feel they’re getting enough value from a night out.
“There’s this very strange frame that happens,” Infante said, “whether it was millennials with the avocado toast, or it’s zoomers who are too into weed gummies to do alcohol.”
The implication is always the same: If only young people behaved differently, the industry would be fine.
“But ultimately,” he continued, “that is not a zoomer problem. That’s a beverage alcohol firm problem.”
Consumers don’t owe industries their loyalty. If restaurants, breweries or liquor companies want people to spend money, they have to convince them the experience is worth the cost.
Some bars, Infante noted, are already experimenting with lower-priced cocktails and expanded happy hours after discovering there may simply be a ceiling to what customers will pay for a drink.
But price is only part of what has changed.
“That is not a zoomer problem. That’s a beverage alcohol firm problem.”
Longtime drinks writers Caroline Pardilla and Esther Tseng, who both started covering bars in the early 2000s, remember a pre-COVID nightlife landscape with later hours, more clubs and fewer alternatives competing for young people’s time.
Pardilla remembers bar hopping as a routine weekend activity.
“It was just what our idea of fun was,” she said. “You’re just being social and it made you feel good and you kind of loosened up and everything.”
Tseng remembers going to coffee shops at 10 p.m. and blogging into the early hours of the morning.
“What coffee shop do you know is open that long anymore?” she asked.
It’s a small question that points toward a much larger shift. People talk about Gen Z as though young adults collectively decided to stop going out, when the physical infrastructure of going out has changed around them.
“There were a lot of clubs,” Tseng said. “Stuff used to be open a lot later. People drank a lot more back then, and especially leading up to the pandemic, the hours just kept getting cut shorter.”
Restaurants changed. Hospitality changed. Consumers changed. Even years later, many cities still haven’t fully returned to the schedules they kept before 2020.
If last call happens earlier, if restaurants close sooner and if people got used to gathering in smaller groups during lockdown, of course the texture of nightlife is going to look different than it did in 2018.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s disappearing. It may simply be evolving into something else.
The Gen Z Era
When people describe Gen Z as uninterested in going out, I wonder what exactly they’re looking at. Because I don’t see empty nightlife.
I see neighborhood wine bars packed over one bottle, sold-out tastings and cocktail bars where people wait an hour for a seat. The drink still matters, but increasingly it’s part of something larger: the room, the menu, the DJ, the conversation.
If previous generations often went to bars because that’s simply where people went, Gen Z seems more likely to ask a different question first.
Is this worth leaving the house for?
Infante sees that selectiveness reflected in the marketplace.
“The motive is a little different,” he told me. “Zoomer’s interest is less driven by conspicuous consumption than seeking out specific experiences.”
When older generations describe Gen Z as drinking less, they often seem to hear less interested. But those aren’t synonymous. If anything, many of the Gen Z drinkers I interviewed sounded intensely interested in food, wine, cocktails and hospitality. They just weren’t interested in drinking indiscriminately.
Part of the reason that distinction gets lost may be simple nostalgia.
Corey Seemiller told me every generation tends to romanticize the version of young adulthood it experienced while quietly forgetting the parts that weren’t so glamorous.
If you survived the reckless decisions, cheap beer and late nights and emerged with nothing worse than embarrassing stories, those stories become legends. The hangovers and genuinely bad decisions tend not to make the highlight reel.
Martin confirmed that alcohol really was more central to American social life.
“In terms of sociability, in terms of work cultures, it has been really central to sociability, particularly for men, and increasingly in the 20th century, I think, for women as well,” he said.
Drinking also functioned as a rite of passage, particularly as young adults reached legal drinking age.
But the social world surrounding that drinking was different, too.
“Our society has become much more of a surveillance society,” Martin said. Young people know that if photos or videos of a drunken night end up online, a future employer — or several million strangers — may eventually see them.
It’s one thing to wake up with a hangover. It’s another to wake up viral.
Add pandemic adolescence, expensive housing and stagnant wages, and different choices begin to look less mysterious than inevitable.
Martin described Gen Z as one of the first generations in recent memory to come of age facing markedly tighter economic circumstances.
“They’re just not going to do as well as their parents,” he said. Entry-level jobs pay relatively little, job security is tenuous and the math of going out matters. “If you’re going out and ordering those five drinks, some other bill is not getting paid, and that’s not sustainable.”
We often compare Gen Z’s present to older generations’ memories instead of their reality. That’s an impossible standard to meet.
“For younger people, they’re no longer living in the same kind of possibility that the older generations had,” Martin said. “I think they probably feel that the older generations just simply do not understand that, and perhaps they’re right, perhaps they don’t.”
In many ways, Seemiller told me, it’s more useful to think about the “Gen Z era” than Gen Z itself.
“Gen Z” implies something intrinsic about the people. “The Gen Z era” shifts the focus to the world surrounding them.
This is a generation that entered adulthood during a global pandemic after spending formative years online. We’re navigating historically expensive housing, student debt, inflation, stagnant entry-level wages and a social landscape with more entertainment options than previous generations had.
Spend ten minutes on TikTok and you’ll find creators dissecting natural wines, comparing probiotic sodas, reviewing coffee shops, ranking matcha cafés, explaining amaro, making elaborate cocktails and debating whether dirty martinis have finally replaced Aperol spritzes as the drink of the summer.
The curiosity is still there. It’s simply spread across a much wider landscape than alcohol alone.
When Pardilla was younger, drinking was simply folded into what being social looked like.
“Drinking was a sign of maturity, right?” she said. “That’s why a lot of college kids got wasted because you’re like, I’m able to drink now and you kind of go overboard.”
She thinks that idea has changed.
“I think [Gen Z] can be more selective and they have that opportunity to be more selective,” she said. “They’re more aware of the non-alcoholic options, so it’s not so much the getting wasted, but it’s more just having fun, not necessarily boozy fun. They’re just doing it for themselves.”
There have always been people who drank sparingly or didn’t drink at all. What’s changed, Pardilla said, is how visible and socially acceptable those choices have become.
Bars have responded. Many now treat their nonalcoholic menus not as an afterthought but as another place to show creativity.
“A lot of bars I’ve spoken to, they’re thinking very thoughtfully about how to create non-alcoholic cocktails that have a backbone,” Tseng said. “That have complex flavor profiles, that are not just juice and a splash of soda or a lime or something.”
“A lot of bars I’ve spoken to, they’re thinking very thoughtfully about how to create non-alcoholic cocktails that have a backbone. That have complex flavor profiles, that are not just juice and a splash of soda or a lime or something.”
I went down an Instagram rabbit hole looking at the work of Austin Hennelly at Kato, a Michelin-starred restaurant whose nonalcoholic drinks include things like a green strawberry daiquiri built with floral aperitif, wildflower honey, whey, oro blanco and lime.
Looking at it, I understood immediately why someone might happily pay cocktail prices for a drink without alcohol.
On the other hand, if your $16 “mocktail” is lemonade with soda and some mint leaves, we need to have a conversation.
Inside the beverage industry, Infante says one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the explosion of nonalcoholic drinks is that they’re replacing alcohol altogether.
“The biggest buyer of non-alcoholic beverages,” he said, “are people who are drinkers.”
In other words, the people ordering N/A beer, spirit-free cocktails and alcohol-free sparkling wine are often the exact same people ordering IPAs, martinis and Champagne on different occasions.
They’re not abandoning one category. They’re moving fluidly between them.
Infante likes using a word coined by journalist H.L. Mencken nearly a century ago: omnibibulousness.
It essentially means someone who will drink anything: beer, wine, cocktails, coffee, sparkling water, nonalcoholic beer. Whatever fits the moment.
The modern beverage landscape has never offered more options, and consumers are responding accordingly. That isn’t evidence of alcohol’s demise. It’s evidence of abundance.
Gen Z isn’t refusing to socialize. We’re choosing among more ways to do it than previous generations had available.
Sometimes we’re drinking less because cocktails cost $22. Sometimes we’re alternating between alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks, prioritizing food over booze, training for a marathon or simply staying home because rent is due next week.
The data tells us what changed. The reporting tells us why.
Those aren’t the decisions of a joyless generation. They’re the decisions of people living in 2026.
Every summer, conservative television hosts and influencers suddenly discover women’s professional basketball, which they insist they don’t care about, and then they spend weeks explaining why it’s one of society’s greatest ills. This year, just like last, their attempts to turn the WNBA into a proxy war for cultural grievances is failing because it’s not really about the league.
It is a content farm built using Caitlin Clark, her Indiana Fever teammate Sophie Cunningham and a nonexistent transgender player controversy to conceal old grievances about race and gender. But despite the attempts to sully the WNBA brand, the league is thriving — and the whole spectacle is now backfiring in ways even the people profiting from it can no longer hide.
The right has attacked the WNBA since at least Brittney Griner’s 2022 imprisonment in Russia. In 2025, the Onion ran a spoof headline imagining the State Department designating the league a terrorist organization. It was funny because it wasn’t that far off from how conservative media actually treats the WNBA until football arrives to distract them.
Fox built out what it called a “hard contact timeline” for Clark, who is white in a league where 70% of the players are Black. This helped lay the groundwork for MAGA media’s narrative: that the WNBA is being handed a gift by a white star, and it is responding with ingratitude.
For three seasons, Clark has been the perfect vessel for this project. The former Iowa superstar entered the WNBA as the all-time leading scorer in women’s Division I basketball, and she arrived in Indianapolis with a massive audience already attached to her. That made her an irresistible figure for a right-wing media ecosystem constantly searching for a new culture war protagonist. Fox built out what it called a “hard contact timeline” for Clark, who is white in a league where 70% of the players are Black. This helped lay the groundwork for MAGA media’s narrative: that the WNBA is being handed a gift by a white star, and it is responding with ingratitude.
This year they have taken that myth further than ever, and Media Matters for America put a number on exactly how far. Since June 25, when Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas, who is Black, picked up a flagrant foul on Clark, Fox News has aired at least 206 segments and devoted more than 13 and a half hours of programming to the WNBA, sprawled across “The Five,” “The Ingraham Angle,” “Hannity” and “Gutfeld!” More than eight of those hours, according to the analysis, have gone specifically to relitigating the issue of trans athletes in a league that has none.
This inconvenient reality has turned the right-wing media circus into an absurd performance art piece. Pundits have resorted to inventing entirely fictional scenarios to keep their audiences angry. Outkick founder Clay Travis offered to bankroll a completely fake expansion team in Nashville just to stock it with a 100% transgender roster. Cunningham’s comments in an interview with ESPN opposing trans inclusion in women’s sports gave this machinery another opening. Fox’s coverage pivoted from hard fouls to trans panic, Clark got dragged into a fight she has spent three years trying to avoid and Cunningham’s follower count exploded. Former NBA players like Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White are now engaged in publicity stunts declaring themselves eligible for future drafts under the cynical guise of identifying as women.
The wall-to-wall outrage manufactured by Fox News and its allies has even appeared to tire the network’s host Jesse Watters, who is no stranger to being aggrieved by so-called wokeness. “This is week three of ‘The Five’ covering the WNBA,” he recently complained, “and I have to say, I’m done.”
The on-the-ground consequences have not been abstract. When the Fever traveled to play Seattle Storm, two teenage fans wore shirts referencing XX and XY chromosomes and carried a sign thanking Cunningham for “speaking up for girls.” Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton confronted them, allegedly cursing at the girls and calling them “insane,” conduct serious enough that the league fined and suspended her for five home games, an extraordinarily rare disciplinary step against a team owner. The Storm apologized. Cunningham called Keaton’s behavior “truly embarrassing” while also attempting to distance herself from her previous anti-trans comments, stressing that trans women, trans men and everyone else are welcome “at her table.” Fox News Digital and Outkick turned the two teenagers into viral martyrs, while British novelist and anti-trans activist J.K. Rowling pronounced them “heroines” to her tens of millions of social media followers. Independent activist Jennifer Sey, whose XX-XY Athletics brand produced the shirts, and Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer who has built a podcast career on her anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy and a fifth-place tie in a college championship, both showed up courtside for the Fever’s next game against the Minnesota Lynx.
Beneath the surface of the fabricated trans panic lies an even uglier dynamic driven by racial resentment and the commodification of Clark and Cunningham. Right-wing media outlets have tried desperately to cast Clark as a conservative culture war martyr, claiming she is the helpless victim of a mass conspiracy and anti-white racism orchestrated by her peers. President Donald Trump weighed in on Thomas’ foul on Clark, saying the Fever guard was “treated rather rough.” Newsmax host Greg Kelly said the league should have “the cops” show up and start making arrests over the common basketball foul. Eleven House Republicans led by Texas Rep. August Pfluger wrote to Commissioner Cathy Engelbert speculating that rough play against Clark “may be racially motivated” and threatening federal investigation. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, presiding over a state with no WNBA franchise, threatened to prosecute players for assault. On Fox News, the Federalist’s Brianna Lyman argued that “the bigger problem in the WNBA right now is anti-white racism,” while a recent Washington Examiner op-ed argued that “The WNBA has a black entitlement problem.”
Clark herself has repeatedly said she doesn’t want to be used this way, that harassment of any kind isn’t acceptable and that she stands with her Black colleagues in the league. It hasn’t mattered. Conservative commentators have attacked her from the other direction for refusing to take their side on trans athletes. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called her “the biggest coward in the history of sports.”
This is a classic MAGA media pattern: Elevate a woman as a brave truth-teller only until she exercises independent judgment. Fox News even tried to flip the whole thing on the left, writing in its Outkick vertical, “Now, they all want [Clark] to shut up and dribble.” The aggressive pushback against Black stars like Angel Reese and DiJonai Carrington, meanwhile, demonstrates that the conservative media apparatus views the surging popularity of women’s basketball primarily through a racialized lens.
And yet the plan is not working — at least not in the way its architects intended. Rather than capitulating to the relentless pressure from right-wing pundits and political actors, the broader WNBA community has mounted a fierce and inspiring defense of its players and values. The league issued strong statements making it abundantly clear that its players will not be used as political pawns for reactionary internet trolls. Fans have shown up waving Trans Pride flags. Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wore a shirt reading “Trans kids belong” on an ESPN broadcast and told reporters plainly that “there is a faction of people in our country that are making this a massive issue.” Fans of the opposing Golden State Valkyries cheered Carrington’s return to Chase Center after the outrage over her Aug. 8 flagrant foul against Cunningham.
Meanwhile, the business the right claims to be so worried about keeps expanding, regardless of how loudly Fox tries to poison it. The league signed an 11-year media rights agreement — worth roughly $2 billion — with Disney, Amazon and NBC that took effect in 2025. Viewership was up 23% that season and ticket sales increased by 26%, and the new collective bargaining agreement ratified this spring raised the team salary cap from roughly $1.5 to $7 million, the largest single jump in the history of American professional sports labor, with players now guaranteed a real share of league revenue for the first time.
None of this happened because Fox News decided to help. It happened because millions of people, including plenty who have never watched a minute of Fox in their lives, decided the games were worth watching on their own terms.
It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.
The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.
Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.
Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.
“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.
“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”
Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.
He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.
It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.
But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.
According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.
The administration plowed forward anyway.
HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.
Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.
Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)
In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.
“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”
A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”
Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.
There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countlessstudies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).
The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.
Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.
“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”
Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.
Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.
Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.
Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.
To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.
Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”
“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser
Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.)
Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.
“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”
In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.
The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.
Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebookpostsandreposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)
For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”
Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)
Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)
The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.
The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.
The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.
In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.
By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)
The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”
Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy
As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.
Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.
The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.
Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.
From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.
In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.
Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.
But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.
“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”
Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager
Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.
In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”
Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.
“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”
Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.
Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.
The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”
In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”
A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”
Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.
Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.
“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”
Collapsing Claims
By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.
About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.
Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.
Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.
Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.
The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.
Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.
Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.
Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.
“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”
Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted
Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)
“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”
In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.
Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.
In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.
The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.
In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”
As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.
Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.
In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.
“Far-Reaching Consequences”
Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.
Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.
In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.
Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”
Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”
“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.
“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon
In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.
Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.
“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”
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.
Nearly two years ago, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in New York City. A massive manhunt followed, resulting in the arrest of Luigi Mangione, who quickly became a sort of folk hero for people fed up with the state of healthcare in the U.S., even if they may not support the use of violence in fixing or protesting the system.
On Friday, Mangione pleaded guilty to federal stalking charges in Thompson’s death.
“I shot Mr. Thompson and he died,” he told the court. “I knew what I was doing was illegal.”
Mangione also explained his motive: his back injury and experience with the U.S. healthcare system as a patient drove him to kill Thompson, although he was not specifically a customer of UnitedHealthcare. However, the company has a large reputation for denying claims to customers, especially compared to other insurers.
Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s on Dec. 9, 2024, and police said they found a 3D-printed gun and a 3D-printed silencer in his backpack, as well as a notebook describing grievances with the healthcare industry, such as “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”
Mangione is to be sentenced at a separate hearing on Dec. 18, which will be determined at the full discretion of the judge. At the state level, Mangione still faces murder charges and the possibility of life in prison, though his defense is expected to argue that both cases cover the same alleged conduct, which is essentially double jeopardy.
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.
Kyle Chandler in “Lanterns.”
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.
Where “Watchmen” indicted America’s addiction to white supremacy, “Lanterns” skeptically spotlights the durability of our meritocracy myth.
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.
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.
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