Beneath the shadows of indigo-streaked clouds, a young woman strolls through a fog-covered city, stopping at the base of a skyscraper. She looks up, eyes following every square inch of the structure until the point where it juts past the clouds and into the dark atmosphere above, beyond where she can see. She is the princess, and this is the castle she’ll be locked in, an indomitable beast of a citadel fittingly titled the Tower Hotel. 

“How hokey,” you might say, “a modern princess trapped in a luxury high-rise.” But really, everything in “Her Private Hell” is contrivance. Writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn — “NWR,” as he’s taken to branding himself — isn’t exactly known for his subtlety. His previous feature, 2016’s love-it-or-hate-it loony toon “The Neon Demon,” was a modeling industry semi-satire that featured beauties quite literally gobbling up their ingenue competition. It’s really no surprise that his first film in 10 years would arrive with its thematic commentary just as legible.

But that’s where the fun begins. Once the viewer understands where Refn is headed, they can submit themselves to his grotesque neon visions. His appeal as a filmmaker lies in his stylistic flair; the joy comes from watching him marry the aesthetically manicured with the ideologically bizarre. Whether it’s a union of love or force is another matter. NWR’s high concepts and their abrasive execution don’t always coalesce. But when they do, it’s like watching a magic trick play out before your eyes, leaving you so stunned you’re stammering, unable to utter even a single “How?”

“Her Private Hell” is Refn’s greatest trick yet: A beguiling fairy tale for a lost lamb named Elle (Sophie Thatcher). In this story, Elle is the archetypal royalty figure, thrust through a kaleidoscope of Refn’s signature bright pinks and blues and spit back into the tower where she passes her days, waiting for her savior to arrive. But as she greets her fate and rides the elevator to her penthouse prison, Elle strolls past Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a real-life Sleeping Beauty, napping on the lush chairs in the hallway outside. Elle and Hunter are due to shoot a movie together, which Elle’s father, the filmmaker Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), will produce. “The airline lost my luggage because of the Mist,” Hunter tells Elle. Ugh. Of course. The Mist seems to be screwing up everything these days.

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In the extraordinary abstraction that follows, Thatcher finds her ideal role as one of NWR’s stilted avatars, gussied up in couture and spouting riddles. Her energy rises and falls alongside the mysterious mist, which has engulfed the city and brought whispers of a mysterious ancient entity lurking in its haze. Thatcher performs as if this was the part she was born for, and it very well may be. 

Refn’s cold, theoretical violence and Thatcher’s knack for affected, high-glamor drama are a match made in DayGlo heaven. Her work is unlike anything I’ve seen this year, a ruthless and surprising turn from someone who’s struggled to find the right type of script for her unique style and physicality. If there is a God, somewhere amid all this mist, “Her Private Hell” will be Thatcher’s entrée to a new era of hyper-ostentatious, Elizabethan — Taylor, that is — cinematic elegance, a large void in the once-plentiful pool of subgenres that only she can fill.

Thatcher has been searching for her niche for a moment, but the delay hasn’t been for lack of trying. Since her breakthrough in Showtime’s “Yellowjackets” in 2021 — where she plays the troubled teenager Natalie, fighting for survival in the Canadian wilderness alongside her high school soccer teammates after their plane crash-lands — Thatcher’s had more than a few substantive roles. In 2024’s “Heretic,” she played a Mormon missionary lured into a violent theological maze by a wicked Hugh Grant. And in 2025’s “Companion,” Thatcher scored a decent turn as a sex robot with her programming on the fritz after she’s implicated in a murder plot. If those films sound preposterous, it’s because they are. “Heretic” was underbaked and half-thought, while “Companion” tried to create big laughs and bigger action from minuscule ideas. Thatcher, though, was far and away the best part of both films, bringing a striking depth to her thinly sketched characters. 

But one gets the sense that Thatcher’s worried about being pigeonholed. “Yellowjackets,” “Heretic” and “Companion” are all horror-thrillers. And Thatcher’s other film roles in 2023’s “The Boogeyman” and a bit part in the following year’s “MaXXXine” certainly don’t help Hollywood’s perception of her as a wannabe scream queen. The perennial problem with horror, even contemporary horror, is that it’s an extremely difficult genre to migrate from. But Thatcher’s talents extend past genre confines. She conjures a bewitching onscreen presence that many of her contemporaries could only dream of, pulling the viewer’s gaze with a single glare from her steely eyes or the quiver of her chin. The same grin can look menacing or jovial, depending on how Thatcher contorts the rest of her features. What’s more, there’s an ease to all of these things — a soft tenderness that counterbalances the frigidity — as if such intensity comes casually. And maybe it does.

With “Her Private Hell,” Thatcher has found an auteur who matches her refreshing self-assurance. Here, Refn lets it all go and indulges in his every artistic impulse, drenching a Brian De Palma-inspired deception in neon (and bringing in De Palma’s longtime collaborator, Pino Donaggio, for a resplendent score better than anything you’ve heard this decade). Thatcher isn’t so different from De Palma’s muses either. The naive exuberance of Nancy Allen, the innate sex appeal of Melanie Griffith and Michelle Pfeiffer, the informal immorality of Amy Irving; Thatcher has it all, rolled into one captivating package. When Elle and Hunter witness the brutal murder of a neighbor across the way — presumably by the mist’s fabled entity, The Leatherman — Refn completes the thread that ties his violent vapidity, where pretty girls do ugly things, to De Palma’s voyeuristic dreaminess. If you’re a fan of film and all the places it can take you, you can’t do much better than this. 

That is until Thatcher ratchets up the eerie tension tenfold while Refn builds his gorgeous fantasy around her. When Elle’s father unexpectedly departs, leaving her to finish shooting her movie in the care of her not-so-wicked stepmother, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), the pair’s psychosexual strain further complicates matters. Before Dominique married Elle’s father, the two were the best of friends. As strange as it is, their dynamic seems to alter everything around them, as if their mutual destiny were written in the stars — not that anyone can see the stars with all this mist, that is.

For a director who’s staked a name on films and television shows that are narratively impenetrable, “Her Private Hell” may feel like a big ask for some viewers. And I get that, I do. The movie sways almost imperceptibly between Elle’s quest for the truth and the haunting story of Private K (Charles Melton), a soldier who lost everything to the mist and its monstrous entity the last time it immersed the city. It can occasionally feel as if Refn is playing a game with you, softly whispering if you’re still there. But though some have complained about what they call “a total lack of plot,” I simply must object, and not just on behalf of Thatcher, whose work is worth seeking out even if you don’t jive with Refn’s aesthetic obsessions. 

There is so much to admire with “Her Private Hell” — too much for just one go-round. It’s not only gripping, but extremely intricate if you’re brave enough to get on its level. Two women witness the strange murder of a neighbor and begin to believe that something could be lurking in the mist that’s enveloped the Earth. When they start shooting a movie together, they begin to understand their connection to this ancient evil, and their place in a cyclical inferno wrought by absent parents and bad weather. They soon understand that to be heartbroken is to be damned to know the exquisite pain of being alive. This film is not merely glittering debris, as some have posited, nor is it style over substance; it’s a campfire story told by Thatcher’s unearthly orator.

As the night grows black and the last embers start to dull, “Her Private Hell” sends you off to bed wondering if it could all be true. Thatcher’s warbly voice hangs in the air; tales of the Leatherman and lost daughters spinning around your brain as you try to fall asleep. “None of this is real,” you tell yourself, turning off your brain for a good night’s rest. But just then, a piercing pink light appears outside, and a low, opaque mist begins to creep through the seams of your tent. As it turns out, the fantastical has much more grounding in reality than we ever want to imagine.

The post “Her Private Hell” belongs to Sophie Thatcher appeared first on Salon.com.

The tale of Donald Trump sneaking off Air Force One in a catering truck captured public attention for many reasons. It was a reminder that, for all his tough talk, the president harbors a sense of fear. Hiding away in a glorified ice chest would also have been a blow to the 80-year-old’s dignity. But the charade, which was first revealed by the Washington Post, also gave us insight, as political scientist Scott Lemieux wrote, “into who he considers his actual inner circle.”

Left behind on the decoy plane were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and other administration officials and aides. The only people deemed worthy of saving from Iran’s reported threat were people whose full-time jobs are tending the president’s body and, more importantly, his ego: Natalie Harp, who writes Trump love letters, and whose main job is showing him flattering social media posts. Body man Walt Nauta. Dan Scavino, Trump’s former golf caddie. Oh yeah, and Pete Hegseth. 

The defense secretary’s inclusion on this list does not suggest he is an especially well-regarded or important person, especially when other prominent Cabinet members — not to mention White House reporters — were left vulnerable to the rumored assassination threat. On the contrary, his inclusion in Trump’s flock of flatterers is another sign that Hegseth’s main skill is fluffing up the narcissist-in-chief. It helps explain how Hegseth — unlike former Cabinet members such as former Attorney General Pam Bondi or former Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem, who recently lots their jobs — seems in no danger of losing his job, even as his manifest incompetence is a big part of the reason Trump is losing the war with Iran. He may be bad at running the military, but Hegseth is good at lying to (and attacking) the press and stroking his boss’s ego, which are the only skills that count in Trump’s White House. 

Recent news about the ongoing disaster aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln is another reminder of why Hegseth may indeed lead the highly competitive race to be the most hated man in Washington. Both Stars and Stripes and the Military Times reported that multiple service members had attempted to jump off the aircraft carrier, which has been deployed for over eight months without any real breaks. Sailors are reportedly “struggling with exhaustion and declining morale, including reports of suicidal thoughts,” explained Alison Bath of Stars and Stripes.

The details coming from family members offer a chilling illustration of how little regard Hegseth has for the actual well-being of service members, even as he releases videos implying they have low testosterone levels or berates them for being “fat” or “beardos.” Sailors have reported being fed “rotten” food or barely being fed at all, and desperate family members have been begging the Navy for relief. The wife of one sailor told MS NOW’s Priya Sidhar that the company is working 12-14 hour days and that her husband “said that he was exhausted working on the flight deck.” He also raised safety concerns with his superiors. “His prescription contact lenses had expired,” Sidhar reported, “and he told his chain of command that he couldn’t even see what he was doing, and he was worried about causing accidents.”

Hegseth, though, is shrugging off the concerns, telling reporters the issue is “completely misrepresented” and that the service members have “everything we can provide them at every single moment.”

Trump was even more callous and dishonest about the suffering of the sailors, saying that the deployment was “not nearly long enough,” even though, at over 260 days, it has set a record for the longest deployment. (On Friday, the acting Navy secretary announced the ship would be returning to the U.S. and replaced by the USS George Washington.)

Trump and Hegseth clearly share a disregard for the lives of the very service members they are asking to wage war on Iran. But the debacle also reveals how Hegseth’s twisted priorities appear to have endeared him to his boss, seemingly above every other sycophant surrounding the president. Beyond operating in the Northern Arabian Sea to aid in logistics and serve as a deterrent to Iran, it seems like the reason the USS Lincoln is being held in this Kafkaesque hell is to shore up the illusion — or perhaps even Trump’s delusion — that the war with the Islamic Republic will be over soon.  

The president, desperate to keep stock markets afloat and MAGA voters on the hook, has been playing a game for months where he announces a “deal” with Iran to end the war, usually timed to the market’s opening bell, buoying stock prices. But the news invariably turns out to not be true. The danger for Trump is that investors might finally wise up and stop falling for false promises. Swapping out a major aircraft carrier deployed in the Middle East, as the Pentagon is now planning to do, could blow the whole game up, as it is a tacit admission that the war is not ending in the next few days, as we’ve been told is happening for months. Sunday’s news, reported by the Wall Street Journal, that Iran is secretly planning to “escalate the war” will also not help matters.

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This pattern suggests Hegseth is far more concerned about his boss’s fixation on stock prices and media coverage than he is about listening to the advice of admirals, who have been bearing the brunt of complaints from families of service members over the USS Lincoln. Even by the low standards of Trump appointees, Hegseth has shown an eagerness to back up the president’s every lie and delusion, not matter the cost. This dubious distinction is no doubt why, even as he is shepherding what may turn out to be Trump’s most notable entry in a long list of failures, Hegseth was included in the small club of people Trump opted to save from a possible attack on Air Force One. 

The secretary may be in Trump’s good graces, but in the real world, his reputation — which was never good to begin with, since he was comically unqualified for this job — is in the toilet. The American public loathes Hegseth. As CNN’s Harry Enten recently explained, at 22 points under water, Hegseth’s approval ratings are “the lowest of the low.” 

Hegseth is also widely loathed by fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill, even as they held their noses and voted for him to pacify Trump. As POLITICO reported, Hegseth has been “regularly trekking to the Hill in recent weeks and hobnobbing with lawmakers,” asking them to pass the largest defense spending bill in history. This request — asking Republicans to spend lavishly on weapons — should be as easy as talking Hegseth into another round of martinis at breakfast. But GOP members are worried about the midterms, and they don’t want to answer for the Iran war or the equally unpopular defense secretary. 

Hegseth is likely to stay, though, even as Trump posts on Truth Social that he’s “extremely happy with the job that Pete Hegseth is doing,” including “getting rid of DEI.” Sure, the secretary has mismanaged the military to the point that sailors are reportedly attempting suicide. But he has blocked the promotions of talented leaders who annoy MAGA by being women or Black, and that’s what really counts.

One sailor who reportedly jumped overboard is only 19 — practically still a kid. The terror and trauma Hegseth is inflicting him and his fellow service members in this losing war points to a man with no moral character at all. No wonder Trump loves him. 

The post Pete Hegseth is Trump’s favorite kind of failure appeared first on Salon.com.

In late July, according to the FBI, utility companies in at least seven states experienced cyberattacks from “malicious cyber actors” who remotely accessed water management systems, causing loss of pressure and flooding. As it turned out, there were more hazards. The agency warned in a recent alert that “untreated ground water [could] seep into pipes.” At least 30 municipal water facilities were hit in Minnesota alone. These cyberattacks were likely launched by Iranian agents as part of Donald Trump’s ongoing war with the Islamic Republic he started alongside Israel, and they could become part of a new normal as the conflict drags on. 

Now, in a memo released Wednesday, the White House is attempting to fight back against cybercrime by encouraging private companies to go after transnational criminal organizations “by incorporating the ingenuity of the private sector.” Details are vague, but a fact sheet hints at combatting “transnational cybercrime, fraud and other predatory schemes against American citizens,” such as ransomware attacks, phishing schemes and sextortion.

U.S. hacking laws prohibit individuals and companies from launching cyberattacks. According to TechCrunch, “the private sector can defend against incoming cyberattacks, but not launch of operate them,” a policy that spans several presidential administrations. 

This program is still in the very early stages, with more guidance coming in the next few months. But there’s no way this could possibly backfire, right? I’m kidding: Even under normal circumstances, giving private companies this much power is likely to incentivize inventing enemies to fight or drive unnecessary spending. That’s the military-industrial complex in a nutshell. 

You could say this program comes straight out of the Age of Sail, in which governments issued letters of marque and reprisal, licenses that authorized privateers to essentially practice legalized piracy, with private vessels attacking enemies of the state. Think of American shipping companies plundering British ships, which was common practice once upon a time. These letters haven’t been issued since the Civil War, but the parallel is obvious and creates shades of gray that could present major problems. Just look at Capt. William Kidd, who was hired by the British government to hunt pirates, but was later executed for being one.

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Trump’s cyberattack program, in all likelihood, will just be another way for his tech-bro allies, like Peter Thiel of Palantir, to siphon more money from the government while doing next to nothing to actually protect Americans or improve their quality of life. This is especially concerning in light of recent news that the Homeland Security Department spied on left-leaning Minnesotans who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Think these tools and tactics won’t be used domestically? That would certainly buck the trend of U.S. tech companies that regularly surveil Americans, be it Flock Safety, whose ubiquitous cameras are being used to stalk people getting abortions, or Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that hunts migrants.

A better solution might be to invest more in improved cybersecurity and critical infrastructure, like the power grids that risk being hacked. As they say, the best defense is a good offense. A digital bill of rights would be a major part of that by boosting privacy and protecting the level of data that corporations can siphon up about ordinary  people. An even simpler solution, come to think of it, would be not picking fights with other countries that are likely to fight back. Alas, that’s probably too obvious a strategy for our tech-illiterate president, and not enough of a slush fund for Silicon Valley. Maybe someday we’ll have leaders who understand the internet and the importance of avoiding perverse incentives. Until then, it’s a good idea to keep your system software updated and use a strong password.

The post The White House wants to encourage cyberattacks appeared first on Salon.com.

This story was originally reported by Jasmine Mithani of The 19th. Meet Jasmine and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Flock Safety claims over 5,000 law enforcement agencies use its license plate readers to help locate missing persons, catch thieves and identify suspicious vehicles. The company is most known for its camera network, which extracts data about cars from photographs and allows operators to search for vehicles by description or license plate number.

But there’s been another persistent, unsanctioned use: officers stalking women.

At least 50 law enforcement officers have been accused or charged with the misuse of Flock or similar tools, and over half of the incidents involve surveillance related to romantic partners, per a recent investigation by The Washington Post. The reports include officers of all genders, but many cases involve a uniformed man stalking a civilian woman — or the people close to her. Forty-six of the cases tallied by The Post involved Flock equipment.

Flock is under fire as stories roll out about how its surveillance network has been used to find a woman who self-managed an abortion, share data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and search for people based on race. The San Francisco Standard found at least 39 Flock contracts have been cancelled in 2026 so far, and community activists across the country continue to push for jurisdictions to ditch more.

But the problem is not only one company. Two law enforcement agencies in Colorado cut ties with Flock, only to shift contracts to Axon, another automatic license plate reader (APLR) vendor. The heart of the matter, advocates say, is this: New surveillance technologies are always appropriated to inflict intimate partner violence. Experts say systems like smart cameras and automated license plate readers are sold to the public as ways to increase safety, but there are few, if any, guardrails to prevent them from becoming tools of domestic violence. 

LOVEINT, short for “love intelligence,” entered the lexicon in 2013 when National Security Agency (NSA) officials admitted some employees misused intelligence networks to spy on romantic partners. The revelation came as the country grappled with whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks exposing the vast reach of the agency’s surveillance. Snowden also talked about how intimate images stumbled upon by young NSA analysts would travel through the workplace.

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Any technology that has the capacity for mass surveillance is inevitably used for gender violence, said Reem Suleiman, senior campaign director at Fight for the Future, a digital civil rights nonprofit. She helps organize an effort to “deflock” Lowe’s, one of the company’s largest commercial clients. 

“Even if you can find a use case or some utility for it, you cannot actually guardrail away some of these inherent harms,” she said. And those harms most often come at the cost of vulnerable groups like women, LGBTQ+ people and people of color.

At the same time, survivors of domestic violence or stalking use these surveillance products for their advertised purpose: to monitor their personal safety. Products like Ring, doorbells with always-on recording capabilities, are easier to set up than a closed-circuit security system, but how the data will be used by surveillance tech companies varies from brand to brand and is often unclear. There is a difference in levels of disclosure and control between a police officer having to ask someone individually for their private surveillance footage versus submitting a request to a corporation that isn’t obligated to give notice to its customers when it shares their data. 

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has spent years working with survivors of domestic violence. That led her to co-found the Coalition Against Stalkerware, an international working group tackling the problem of software tools frequently used to spy on unknowing romantic partners. 

Her efforts led the antivirus software Kaspersky to begin flagging the tools known as stalkerware as a privacy threat to its customers instead of labeling it as benign. But companies go under and relaunch with new advertising all the time. Galperin said she has seen how creators of stalkerware have resisted changing their product function in favor of rewriting ad copy to say their software is meant for parents, employees or “building trust in relationships.” 

In response to cases of law enforcement officers across the country improperly accessing Flock for personal reasons, the company rolled out a voluntary audit tool in April. It requires precincts to opt in, and only catches abuse after it happens. 

“We’re not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions,” Garrett Langley, CEO and co-founder of Flock, told The Post. “What we can do is make sure that they know if you use this tool, you will be held accountable.”

Lucy Qin, a postdoc at Georgetown University who researches privacy, pushed back against this framing: “Shorter-term fixes can band-aid the immediate problem but do not address a long-term pattern,” she said.

Galperin is similarly skeptical of any potential features that could meaningfully curb stalking: “It is not salvageable technology because of just the sheer scale of propensity to abuse.”

The abuse wasn’t necessarily unpredictable, either. Galperin pointed out that Flock is frequently used by police, a population generally shown to have above-average rates of domestic violence. Qin echoed that unauthorized use of surveillance data among law enforcement isn’t unprecedented.

Langley told a TED audience in April that the misuse of the company’s technology was “a trade-off I can make” compared to the number of investigations he said it assists with. 

But the scale of the stalking problem isn’t fully known, Galperin said: “This is not a matter of a few people engaging in aberrant behavior. These are just the people who have gotten caught, and who have gotten caught so blatantly that they have experienced consequences.”

And those consequences tend to be mild: Several incidents in the Washington Post piece resulted in probation for offenders who used Flock inappropriately. Among the NSA employees who were caught for LOVEINT, the ones who didn’t resign were temporarily suspended or had security clearances revoked. 

Getting to even that point can be difficult. Norma Buster is the chief of staff at C.A. Goldberg, a victim’s rights law firm focused on survivors of tech-enabled abuse. She handles intake for new clients, including those who are targeted by stalkers. 

She said the team evaluates every circumstance individually, but typically helps clients currently experiencing stalking to file for a protective order. In New York, where the firm is located, people are only eligible for those if they are being stalked by a partner or ex-partner. This is a huge limitation, as Flock has been used by officers to track not just exes but the new beaus with whom they have moved on. C.A. Goldberg advocated for the CREEP Act, which would allow for protective orders to be filed against anyone for harassment regardless of relationship status. The bill is currently awaiting the signature or veto of Gov. Kathy Hochul.

After Marci Bakely’s ex-boyfriend confessed to using Flock to track her whereabouts in 2024, The Washington Post reported a judge denied her petition for a protective order, saying she had no evidence to back up her allegations of stalking. 

Buster said there’s a digital literacy problem in the legal system; she saw this firsthand when she had difficulty finding a prosecutor to take up her own case involving image-based sexual abuse years ago. 

Ultimately, Buster said, it’s on tech companies to make sure their products are safe before they are released into the world. She doesn’t consider herself a tech expert, but over the years said she’s worked with thousands of survivors of tech-facilitated violence. “If I can foresee this, then I think an engineer who’s designing the product can foresee it too.”

The post Flock is just the latest example of using surveillance to stalk women appeared first on Salon.com.

Hayden Panettiere, the former child actor who became a household name as an indestructible cheerleader on “Heroes” before starring as a troubled country singer on “Nashville,” has died. She was 36.

Panettiere’s representative confirmed her death to ABC News on Sunday. A cause and other details surrounding her death were not immediately disclosed.

Born Aug. 21, 1989, in Palisades, New York, Panettiere began appearing in commercials before her first birthday. She went on to roles in “One Life to Live,” “Guiding Light,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Remember the Titans” and “Ice Princess.”

Her breakout role came in 2006 as Claire Bennet, a high school cheerleader with regenerative powers, on NBC’s “Heroes.” The character inspired the show’s signature slogan: “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”

Panettiere later starred opposite Connie Britton as ambitious country singer Juliette Barnes on the ABC and CMT drama “Nashville.” The six-season role showcased her acting and singing abilities and earned her two Golden Globe nominations.

Her other credits included “Bring It On: All or Nothing” and the “Scream” franchise. Her return as Kirby Reed in 2023’s “Scream VI” marked her first major screen role after a long acting hiatus.

Panettiere spoke candidly about her experiences with addiction, an abusive relationship and postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter, Kaya, in 2014. Her younger brother, actor Jansen Panettiere, died unexpectedly at 28 in 2023.

In May, she released “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” a memoir about child stardom, motherhood, addiction and recovery. She also publicly came out as bisexual while promoting the book. She was also battling back from a severe lower back injury that left her almost paralyzed last year.

Panettiere is survived by her 11-year-old daughter and her parents, Lesley Vogel and Skip Panettiere. She died just five days before her 37th birthday.

The post “Heroes,” “Scream” and “Nashville” actor Hayden Panettiere dies at 36 appeared first on Salon.com.

Nicholas Brendon, the actor best known for playing Xander Harris on the late-90s cult classic tv show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” has died at age 54. His family announced he passed peacefully in his sleep on March 20, 2026. In recent years, Brendon was plagued with medical health issues. By 2023, he had a heart attack and was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect and cauda equina syndrome, the latter led to several spinal surgeries.

We are heartbroken to share the passing of our brother and son, Nicholas Brendon. He passed in his sleep of natural causes. pic.twitter.com/DqVQfVL8Xk

— Nicholas Brendon (@NicholasBrendon) March 21, 2026

Brendon’s portrayal of Xander — the everyman of the Sunnydale crew, who navigated a world of vampires and slayers armed only with wit, loyalty, and heart — earned him a devoted following and a lasting place in television history.

Costars quickly paid tribute on social media. Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy, wrote a heartfelt post invoking one of Xander’s comforting lines, a nod to the actor’s warmth both on and off screen. Alyson Hannigan, who portrayed Willow, shared: “My Sweet Nicky, thank you for years of laughter, love and Dodgers … I love you.” David Boreanaz, Buffy’s vampire love interest Angel, praised Brendon’s authenticity and spirit, emphasizing the depth of their personal friendship beyond the show.

Just last year, the “Buffy” cast and fans said goodbye to Michelle Tractenberg, Buffy’s younger sister “Dawn” to many fans.

Fans also expressed grief online, remembering Xander as the heart of the group, a character whose vulnerability and humor made him relatable in a world of supernatural extremes. Many reflected on Brendon’s candidness about his personal struggles, celebrating his humanity alongside his talent.

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Though Brendon faced challenges in his life and career, his work on Buffy remains a testament to his ability to connect with audiences through humor, loyalty, and emotional honesty. Xander Harris may have been the “normal” one in a cast of extraordinary characters, but Brendon’s performance ensured he was unforgettable — both to fans and to the colleagues who mourn his passing.

The post Nicholas Brendon, “Xander Harris” of “Buffy,” dies at 54 appeared first on Salon.com.

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.

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Relief, however, comes with a strategic cost.

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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.

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.

Looking at a BoxOfficeMojo.com ranking of all the Marvel feature films to date, the only solo act to appear twice in the “Avengers” dominated top five is Spider-Man, by way of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”

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.

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.

 

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President Donald Trump has apparently found a new adviser for his embattled White House ballroom: George Washington.

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.

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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.

The post Trump’s new ballroom adviser has been dead for 227 years appeared first on Salon.com.

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. 

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. 

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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.

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. 

 

The post Even MAGA loves socialism now appeared first on Salon.com.

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. 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.

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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.

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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.

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

Apparently, they live in “Venecky.”

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

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

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

It took a student just one day to notice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether artificial intelligence created the mangled pages remains unanswered.

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

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

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.

“You could end up bombing Paraguay,” Rubio joked.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

President Donald Trump lashed 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.

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Back at the White House, Trump insisted Friday that those standing in the way of his ballroom were abusing the legal system.

“It is this kind of gross and flagrant abuse of our Courts that is exactly why Americans are losing faith in our System of Justice,” Trump wrote.

The Supreme Court will now decide whether Trump can keep building while the larger fight over his authority to remake the White House continues.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

“It’s how romanticizing works,” she said.

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.

To test how much of that nostalgia reflected an actual historical difference, I called alcohol historian Scott Martin.

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.”

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.

 

 

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