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.

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.

 

The post Here’s why we like some superheroes more than others 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.

The post “Talladega Nights” predicted America’s Sunbelt shift appeared first on Salon.com.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

I’m standing in the produce aisle of my neighborhood supermarket, between the fresh vegetables receiving their bi-hourly overhead mist and a long refrigerated wall of salad kits. Lately, the store has been running sales on the Taylor Farms ones. The discount tags have been placed, carefully it seems to me, directly over the Taylor Farms logo, giving the display the slightly furtive quality of merchandise that has recently acquired an unfortunate reputation.

Nobody appears especially eager to buy them.

Thankfully, I’m not there to buy one either.

Instead, I pull out my phone and open an app called Taylor Detector, which is exactly what it sounds like. Scan the barcode of a grocery item and the app tells you whether it has a documented connection to Taylor Farms — including connections that may not be obvious from the package.

There really is, apparently, an app for everything.

Taylor Detector was created by programmer Jonathan Goldner, whose other projects include Air Aware, which tracks air quality, pollen and environmental health risks, and Friday Night Lights, which reminds users when it is time to light Shabbat candles. His portfolio, taken together, suggests a particular interest in the invisible forces governing everyday life: particulates, sundown, industrial produce conglomerates.

I start scanning.

One salad kit: no.

Another: no.

For a moment, Taylor Detector is an exceptionally boring slot machine. Then I round the corner toward the bagged vegetables and point my phone at a package of Earthbound Farm broccoli florets.

The screen turns red.

CONFIRMED.

“Oh,” I think.

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This is how I learn that Earthbound Farm is owned by Taylor Farms, as is Eat Smart. The company also supplies private-label and store-brand packaged salad greens and kits for numerous major retailers from Whole Foods to Kroger to Aldi. 

That small revelation — broccoli in hand, phone glowing red — gets at the gap Goldner says he built the app to address. Shoppers trying to identify Taylor Farms products themselves have occasionally been advised to look for packaging codes beginning with “TF” or similar letters. But there is no standardized public key for deciphering them; codes vary among plants and products, and the absence of an obvious “TF” is no guarantee Taylor Farms wasn’t involved.

In his FAQ, Goldner puts the problem plainly: consumers shouldn’t have to be “decoding packaging on the fly.”

Which, when you think about it, is an extraordinary activity to have entered the modern grocery-shopping repertoire.

But there is a reason people are trying.

Taylor Farms has spent much of the summer at the center of a strange and confusing food-safety story. And this week brought another recall: The company pulled prepared foods, including salsa and guacamole sold under brands such as Trader Joe’s and Walmart’s Freshness Guaranteed, after receiving jalapeños connected to a multistate Salmonella outbreak.

We have entered a moment when the government tells Americans to scrutinize their food, corporations operate supply chains consumers can barely see, and states and Washington are fighting over who gets to regulate them — and someone has responded by building an app so I can stand in the produce aisle and scan my vegetables to determine who, exactly, is behind them.

That’s somewhat funny.

It is also an awfully revealing picture of where American trust in the food system is right now.

When Taylor Farms went to the White House

In July, FDA traceback and epidemiological evidence linked shredded iceberg lettuce produced by Taylor Farms to a major Cyclospora outbreak. Then came a confusing correction: A product sample the agency had initially described as positive was later determined to be a false positive. Taylor Farms used the revision to push back on the idea that its lettuce had been definitively identified as the source; federal officials, though, maintained that the broader epidemiological and traceback evidence still pointed there.

As if that were not enough to make the average salad eater develop a mild interest in supply-chain forensics, the story soon acquired a political subplot.

Taylor Farms and its CEO, Bruce Taylor, have donated millions to conservative and Republican-aligned political groups, including a $1 million contribution to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. in 2025. In July, as scrutiny of the outbreak intensified, company executives and lobbyists met privately with the White House. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, subsequently demanded answers about both the outbreak and the circumstances surrounding that meeting.

 

None of that establishes that political access changed the government’s response. But the optics are almost laboratory-designed to produce suspicion: A company tied to a sprawling foodborne-illness investigation, whose leadership has given substantial sums to the president’s political operation, gets an emergency audience at the White House while regulators and the company publicly disagree about what the evidence means.

This is also an administration that very much wants Americans thinking harder about their food.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who recently added cooking-show host to his duties at HHS, presiding over salmon cakes and homemade vinaigrette on “The Real Food Show” — has made distrust of the conventional American food system one of his signature themes. The show promises to teach Americans how to eat “real food,” presenting recognizable ingredients and home cooking as an antidote to a processed-food culture portrayed as artificial, addictive and imposed from above.

This week, Kennedy carried that project further, promising the federal government’s first official definition of ultra-processed food. Scientists do not currently agree on exactly what belongs in that category, a problem Kennedy summarized with characteristic bluntness: “If you can’t define a problem, you can’t solve it.”

Fair enough.

But the ideal MAHA consumer occupies a curious position. She should be discerning. She should read labels, mistrust mysterious additives, interrogate old nutritional orthodoxies and learn to distinguish “real” food from whatever came before it. She should, perhaps, even become a little suspicious.

Just not indiscriminately so.

Because once that skepticism travels backward through the supply chain — past the emulsifiers and dyes, toward corporate ownership, political donations, private meetings and the government agencies charged with keeping food safe — the questions become rather less tidy.

Discernment is encouraged. Distrust is curated.

When the recalls blur

Back in the produce aisle, the app has done exactly what it promised.

I now know that the broccoli florets in my hand have a documented connection to Taylor Farms.

What I do not know is whether that means I should put them back.

I have not received a recall alert for broccoli. There is no red banner telling me this particular bag is unsafe. And Taylor Farms is hardly the only name appearing in food-safety notices lately: Recent recalls have involved tomato bisque soup over possible Listeria contamination, a Chinese-style spice mix over possible Salmonella and blueberries over possible E. coli.

At a certain point, the alerts begin to blur together.

Taylor Detector can tell me who is behind the package. It cannot tell me what level of risk I should assign to that fact.

That part is still mine.

Which may be the strangest feature of this new age of food vigilance. Americans are being encouraged to become sharper, more suspicious consumers — to read more closely, question more aggressively and demand to know what is really in their food. But information arrives in fragments: a barcode result here, a recall notice there, a corrected FDA finding, a corporate statement, a congressional inquiry.

The broccoli remains broccoli.

I am simply standing in front of it with considerably more information than I had five minutes ago, and no corresponding increase in certainty. So I make the decision myself — and leave it behind.

Maybe I’ll have better luck at the farmers market.

The post We’re all amateur food safety inspectors now appeared first on Salon.com.

On most days in what many people still call the “United” States of America, our president sets the daily national news agenda with noxious blasts from his favorite media platform — the one, of course, that he owns and operates.

To put it another way, our president is making money selling us information we are due as members of what’s supposed to be an open democratic society. Reporting to us is in the job description. Donald Trump simply doesn’t care.

For Trump, this proposition is a win-win. Those who need or want to hear what he has to say keep him in business. Those who disapprove or try to ignore him have no effect. Trump has been impeached twice, is a convicted felon and publicly defends insider trading. You think he gives a squat about what you think? Honestly, he doesn’t care what he thinks. He only cares about the money.

I must confess that I long ago lost interest in what he was selling. Since it is a professional necessity for me to stay tuned in, I also must confess that I can only do so now by envisioning Trump as a failed standup comic, or a Hallmark movie watched while on bad hallucinogens and cheap speed — the kind we used to call a “greenie.” 

Trump may be the biggest greenie of all time. 

I find it difficult to stomach people who are only half as annoying as Trump. Who wants to watch the dozing Mad Hatter, doped up on stimulants, while his cursed kitchen demons poke and prod him through another “Weekend at Bernie’s” moment in the Oval Office? Sometimes I wonder what would happen if he didn’t wake up. Would he find a way to make money off that? 

If he could, he would, and Truth Social would be involved somehow. After all, that platform remains Trump’s trumpet for his “Darwin Mayflower” agenda of total world domination.  

On Wednesday, by way of this gateway to his shallow soul, the president told us that one of his “most trusted aides” was leaving the White House. Did Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offer their resignation?  After all, he’d left them holding the bag on Air Force One while he snuck away in a catering truck before being evacuated on a military jet from Turkey last month.

No. So far both Rubio and Bessent are still around. But we’ll see. Rubio didn’t look happy on Wednesday, as he stood  before a group of reporters and was asked about Trump using him as a human shield. He smiled weakly and quickly turned away. 

The person actually leaving, of course, is White House “pep secretary” Karoline Leavitt, who returned from paid maternity leave about a month ago and has only briefed the press corps twice since returning.

Did I miss anything?

Trump said on Truth Social that Leavitt is departing her role at the end of the month so she can spend more time with her children and family: “A decision I totally understand and respect!” 

That’s almost word for word the same explanation Sarah Sanders gave when she left Trump’s first administration. Trump’s response was also similar. Then, a few short breaths later, Sanders was running for, and winning, the Arkansas governor’s office once occupied by Bill Clinton.

Leavitt, with her cheerful brand of obfuscation, lies and propaganda, has the potential to go much further than Sanders did. In today’s politics, the bar is so low that the sky is unlimited for someone like her.

In fact, Leavitt may well become the gold standard for press secretaries  into the foreseeable future. In politics, success creates imitators. Leavitt, by never failing to placate, flatter and worship her boss, has displayed a singular and decisive pathway, although not a very original one, to political success. And she has a singular talent for it.

In Leavitt’s world, Trump is always right. He has won every election by a landslide, slayed the dragons, corraled the wild beasts and brought peace, tranquility and a great economy to his kingdom. Don’t worry about Jeffrey Epstein, the Iran war or anything else. All is well, except that  the Democrats are communists and ravenous beasts who probably eat their young. The price of eggs is down, and the price of gas will be, any day now

In reality, Leavitt is without a doubt the worst White House press secretary that I’ve ever had the displeasure of encountering since the day I first met Larry Speakes during the Reagan administration. Larry was polite and professional. I never had a problem getting access to ask a question. In this administration, reporters aren’t allowed access to the press secretary’s office. So much for transparency. 

Trump’s escape from Ankara was a huge embarrassment, exacerbated by a floundering and incompetent press secretary. When the Secret Service devised a plan to transport Bill Clinton from India to Pakistan in 2000, it was similar to the plan that Trump employed on July 8. But back then, press secretary Joe Lockhart got the Secret Service to change the plan. 

“Protecting the president is important, but there was a way we could protect the president without putting other lives at risk. We didn’t want to use the press and staffers as decoys,” Lockhart explained.

 

He worked with the Secret Service to develop a strategy whereby people who were present or watching on television could see that Clinton did not board the same plane as the staff and press. Three smaller military jets were nearby and was impossible to tell which plane Clinton had actually boarded. “That’s the difference between a public servant who serves the public and a monarch who believes the public serves him,” Lockhart said. “We didn’t lie, we included the press and we kept everyone safe. In Trump’s case it isn’t that they didn’t know the protocol. They didn’t care.”

In 2026 in Turkey, Trump ditched us and didn’t bother to tell us about a threat that could have gotten us all killed. Later, he said, “If I go, you go,” when apparently, he already went. Leavitt lacked the understanding, intelligence or inclination to manage the situation. Her value does not lie in critical thinking. The planning, and consideration employed by someone with Lockhart’s experience is simply beyond her capabilities, although the required empathy really shouldn’t be.

Trump lavished more effusive praise on Leavitt than anything he has recently said about Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel. Of course, they still fared better than Bessent and Rubio, who were offered up as a potential sacrifice on Air Force One.

Ironically, Bessent and Rubio are among the most experienced and professional of Trump’s closest advisers and top officials. Sure, that’s a low bar, but nothing Trump does encourages deep thought and professionalism. He favors those like Leavitt.

It’s all part of his “simple approach” to life, as exemplified in his so-called Patriot Games, conducted on Tuesday. Some compared this event to the fictional Hunger Games, but according to reporter John Bennett from CQ/Roll Call in a Tuesday pool report, it was “more like American Ninja Warrior.”

Trump, regarding the final competition with the air of a Caesar, praised the teenage competitors’ “deep love for the country,” and went on to say that, “love of … our great country has never been better.”

All I know is that this event, which was supposed to represent one male and female from every high school in the United States, looked suspiciously monochromatic. 

The reporting was colorless too. Here’s what passed as a pool report from the event: “’I knew what I wanted to do so I just did that,’ the kid from Utah told a camera afterward. It was aired on the screen here.” A reminder for those who didn’t know or had forgotten: The White House press pool is in place to report on the president, not write P.R. copy on a teenage athlete from Utah.

What was the president’s goal with this event? Who knows. Don’t look for his communication staff, or his press secretary, to provide useful information. On the other hand, if you want to insult the press, obfuscate the facts, ignore important questions and call the media people “fake news” and the “enemy of the people,” you want Karoline Leavitt. 

If you want facts, here’s one they’ll probably miss: The term “Patriot Games” may be a weak callback to an inferior Harrison Ford political thriller, but at root it is a reference to an Irish folk ballad about a teen going to war that satirizes and questions the political fervor of people like Trump. As I recently learned, Bob Dylan once considered recording it. 

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Some press secretaries have bucked their boss, understanding that their true audience isn’t the audience of one in the White House but hundreds of millions of people across the United States, and billions more around the world, whatever their political views. 

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen anything like that from a press secretary, but no one has mastered the dark art of hucksterism with Leavitt’s aplomb. She has been the cheering cherub of disinformation, the bright face and upbeat smile of divisiveness and the wholesome All-American grin of hate, death and destruction.

She fits in well with the phony Patriot Games,  the potentially disastrous escape from Turkey and the monotonous daily march into madness this administration represents. Trump will miss her, but the rest of us shouldn’t. 

If Leavitt is being honest about her reasons for leaving, which few people in the Trump administration ever are, then I wish her well. You only get one chance to raise your kids, and if more of us took that seriously, the world would be in far better shape.

But Leavitt rarely tells the truth, so we’ll probably soon find her anchoring a Fox News show or running for office in her home state of New Hampshire, where she lost a congressional race in 2022. One could certainly lead to the other.

After all, the sky is the limit for this new breed of press secretary, an unabashed public worshipper of the king who is more like a court jester than an information node; one who is wholly ignorant of the commitment, fortitude and intelligence the job requires, but entirely devoted to the art of covering their boss’s exposed rear end.

Welcome to the Brave New World. Join us at the Patriot Games.

The post The worst White House press secretary of all time appeared first on Salon.com.

In era when so much about the news is just plain depressing, what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is. The artificial intelligence-powered surveillance cameras, which are sold by Flock Safety as mere “license plate readers” to local governments, have spurred a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals. City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV. 

In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, “I’m not gonna waste your time; I’m kinda hungry. But one last thing: Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will.” He then walked off in triumph.

As with opposition to AI-fueling data centers, the revolt against Flock cameras is drawing support from across the political spectrum, uniting Republicans and Democrats in red and blue America. Their frustration isn’t just rooted in annoyance at having surprise speeding tickets show up in the mail. Flock cameras have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state. As Jill Lepore recently noted in Wired, it’s as if tech leaders read George Orwell’s “1984,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and other sci-fi classics “as instruction manuals” rather than “cautionary tales.” By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms. 

Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they’re being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy.

“Flock from the first has been quite deliberate in sequestering decision making processes — where these things are placed, what they gather and for whom — and the data gathered through them from the general public,” Adrian Daub told me. A comparative literature professor at Stanford University, his forthcoming book, “What Tech Calls Governing,” examines the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley. 

“The intersection with state actors is particularly worrisome,” Daub said. “Governments can outsource the dodgier aspects of data collection and use, while the private sector gets to disavow the obvious political implications of this kind of massive surveillance.”

According to an exhaustive 10-month analysis by Electronic Foundation Frontier, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in our digital age, local police were using the cameras to track protesters, such as those at No Kings rallies, who were then put in a national database to be used across all jurisdictions. Despite claims that the cameras only record license plates, the technology-focused outlet 404 Media found that the database is also being used to collect information on individual people whom cops can then search for using descriptions of clothing, race, gender and body type. In Johnson County, Texas, police officers fixated on a woman suspected of having an abortion, and used the database to track her movements in an effort to prove it — even though state law is supposed to exempt the patient from criminal prosecution. Police have been outed for using the cameras to stalk people for personal reasons, such as having a conflict — or even a sexual obsession — with them. 

Flock has claimed the company will reform its policies to address these issues, but history suggests it would be unwise to trust them. One former Flock employee, Jonathan Paz, has accused the company of lying about its intentions to gain government contracts, which are then abused by law enforcement to harm the public. Paz told 404 Media that company management had assured him they weren’t feeding information to agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a falsehood he passed on to city governments in his sales pitch. After finding out about a secret pilot program to help track down and detain immigrants, Paz left the company.

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Flock’s behavior represents a microcosm of a larger trend in tech that should alarm freedom-loving Americans, regardless of political affiliation. Silicon Valley enriched itself with promises that the cyber revolution would mean more freedom and democracy by enabling the flow of information and communication. But in recent years, there has been a dramatic about-face as the C-suite class has become increasingly authoritarian. Algorithms and AI are used to choke off people’s access to information and make intra-human communication more difficult. Journalism is faltering as an industry, even as social media and search engines are being programmed to dissuade users from reading or watching real news sources. Surveillance is starting to feel ubiquitous, between online bots tracking our every move to cameras everywhere, including the faces of other people wearing AI glasses. Billionaires like New York Knicks owner James L. Dolan reportedly use spying tech to harass people who criticize them. 

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a major donor to pro-Trump groups, observed at a recent meeting of financial analysts about the future of AI.

“There is a link between technology (whether it ‘works’ or not) and repressive state apparatuses,” Daub explained. For example, while Flock cameras expand the ability of the government to crack down on people, they also allow officials “to claim it’s not their fault when some poor sucker gets snared” unjustly by blaming poor technology. “It’s not an accident that their politics have tacked more openly to the right in recent years,” he said of the tech CEO class. 

This can all feel overwhelming at times, which is very much by design. Silicon Valley’s hype machine portrays an AI-controlled future as inevitable, even equating the technology to a god that will overpower us humans, rendering democracy a quaint artifact of the past. AI was swiftly embedded in innumberable computer programs, often not even allowing a user to opt out. The goal of this isn’t mysterious. Tech CEOs, mimicking the villains of sci-fi, are telling the public that resistance is futile. 

The Flock uprising, though, is the stirrings of public understanding that none of this inevitable — and we have the right to fight back. The public has some leverage points. Despite their elaborate efforts at secrecy and unaccountability, Flock works through government contracts. Citizens can petition leaders to avoid or drop contracts, a tactic that has been working across the country. There are still transparency laws that apply to Flock databases, which is how 404 Media and other media outlets have discovered abuses of the technology. Activists have been building maps alerting people where the cameras are. 

The maps intersect with what has been the most controversial part of the Flock uprising: the vandalism. Although it appears the vandals aren’t organized in any meaningful way, they are being egged on by social media users who cheer from afar as people shoot, steal or otherwise disable the cameras. It’s understandable that the vandalism is the most compelling front of the rebellion, and not just because petty, victimless crime is a cheap thrill. Vandalizing the cameras is a sharp rebuttal to Silicon Valley talk about how technology will liberate us from the limitations of the physical world.

The reality is that bodies and physical space are still of paramount importance, which is why tracking and controlling people’s movement is a priority for tech-obsessed authoritarians. But while they’d like to pretend they are gods on an invisible mountain, bending us to their wills, the reality is that they need old-fashioned metal — copper and gold, even! — to get it done. Destroying a camera sends a strong and unmistakable message: They are finite, physical entities, just like us.

Like it or not, the vandalism sends an emboldening signal to the public that tech oligarchs are not omnipotent. If you toss a brick at their expensive cameras, they squawk. It’s crass and illegal, and yes, the cameras are insured and immediately get replaced. But the boost to human self-esteem and the reminder that our squishy bodies still matter more than all the data in the cloud? It’s hard to argue against it. 

There are still plenty of pitfalls. MAGA leaders like Tucker Carlson are clocking the anti-Flock movement and trying to hijack it. Using conspiracy theories, he and others can redirect attention away from real enemies — tech oligarchs and compliant politicians — and toward blaming phantasms like the “deep state,” falsely insinuating that the tech spies are left-wingers doing some poorly defined socialism. This has the twin benefits of ginning up outrage at innocent people, while also shielding the very right-wing forces that are actually the source of the problem. 

Still, it’s promising sign that people are rebelling against Flock cameras. Along with protests against data centers, it’s a sign that the public is desperate for a way to fight back against not just AI, but also the anti-democratic forces fueling this latest tech wave.

The post The Flock uprising is just the beginning appeared first on Salon.com.

For much of the 20th century, there were two relatively straightforward ways to win elections in the United States. Conservatives espoused their belief in traditional family values and getting out of the way of the wealthy. They defended the status quo against various liberation movements and labor coalitions, fighting to keep everything as it had always been in service of the people who most benefited from the old arrangement. With their natural orientation toward the past, conservatives would run on the good old days and attack anything that read as newfangled, trusting voters who thought similarly to show up at the polls in defense of American values. 

Liberals did the same, but in reverse. They fought for the rights of all people and defended the working class from the attempts of the wealthy to claw back hard-won protections. They pushed a larger, protective federal government that held back retrograde currents looking to lock people of color, women and other minorities into a permanent underclass. They ran on these values, trusting unions and activists to back them at the ballot box. 

But in the late 1980s, a new path to electoral victory emerged, blazed by people who pushed left-leaning politicians to erode labor victories and sell out loyal constituencies, creating a tacked-together centrist position that left almost everyone a little bit unhappy. This “Third Way” urged Democratic politicians to adopt the hands-off economic policies of their rivals while making welfare programs more punitive, all in the hopes of netting a few wishy-washy right-wingers come election time. For nearly four decades, this thinking has birthed a seemingly endless parade of candidates, political strategists and columnists pushing the idea that the ideologues are wrong. “Shut up,” they have said to anyone believing a better world is possible, “the adults are talking.”

Outside the masthead of The Atlantic, no one better represents this political tendency better than James Carville. The “Ragin’ Cajun” first rose to national prominence in 1991 by encouraging Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who had just announced his presidential bid, to point out to a strapped country that the economy wasn’t doing so hot. At the same time, Carville encouraged Democrats to carve up the welfare state that was buoying Americans taking the brunt of the economic downturn. Democrats had been locked out of the White House since 1980, and they were willing to try anything to win. These counterintuitive policy solutions were assumed to be smart, and Clinton’s victory in November 1992 proved it. Carville was a kingmaker, and his “please nobody” politics were the Democratic Party’s future. 

A congressional wash-out just two years later couldn’t knock the bloom off the Third Way rose among Washington’s Democratic consultant class. Carville’s reputation for colorful turns of phrase, and his tendency to stomp on any calls for the party to move left, made him a favorite of cable news programmers looking to make entertaining television. 

Now 81, Carville has remained a stock choice for cheap heat, even as his positions became more predictable, such as a recent slam on left-wing media personality Hasan Piker in which he called the streamer a “raving antisemite” due to Piker’s opposition to America’s support of Israel and his comment that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” As progressives and democratic socialists have notched recent wins across the country, Carville has been there to tell the activist wing of the Democratic Party to pipe down and tack toward Republican stances on issues like transgender rights and police reform. 

To Carville’s credit, he’s said that he would support Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who won Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate, because his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, is a “clown.” But that admission came just one month after democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier’s primary victory for a U.S. House seat in New York led Carville to call for the party to split from its progressive wing. 

“I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘s’ word: schism,” he said. “I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. We’re a big tent.’ There’s just some s**t I can’t be in the same tent with.”  

All this wouldn’t grate quite so much if it were coming from someone else, someone who could point to real, sustained political wins outside of a few choice Novembers. To borrow Carville’s folksy schtick, the Ragin’ Cajun was born on third base and has spent his whole life telling network anchors he hit a triple. Tagged by the Clinton campaign and a fascinated media as a strategic genius, his standard strategy of tacking toward the center has been taken as gospel by many in the Democratic Party ever since. In truth, Clinton was a neutron bomb of charisma running against an unpopular president in a bad economy. If you need proof that the tactic doesn’t work without a generational schmoozer as its face, just look at the presidential elections since Clinton term-limited out. 

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Extenuating circumstances in Florida provided useful cover for the Democrats’ 2000 loss in an election that never should have been close. John Kerry blew it against George W. Bush’s 40% approval rating. It took Barack Obama, another hall-of-fame charmer, to win back the White House in 2008. Then came 2016. 

Trump’s win should have forced reflection among Carville and his ilk, some admission that the project of the New Democrats had ended in obvious failure. Kamala Harris’s Liz Cheney-boosting, Glock-boasting campaign should have erected the tombstone on Third Way’s grave. Instead, Carville can still be counted on to punch left for the cameras while his ideological allies fill out the opinion pages of most major American newspapers. 

He defended Graham Platner, the former Maine Senate candidate who ended his campaign in disgrace following allegations of sexual misconduct, seemingly because of an innate need to be on the opposite side of every issue from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who recently told TMZ, “James Carville has an opinion on everything, and I pay attention to almost one out of 10.”

You don’t need to look at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s approval ratings to know the centrist wing of the Democratic Party is clearly out of gas. The energy of the party is now with progressives like El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez’s early wins proved that Democratic voters had an appetite for left-leaning solutions to the ongoing economic crises. Mamdani offered an amiable leftist alternative to “making the trains run on time,” flexing state power to make life easier and more affordable for average citizens. In his recent primary election, El-Sayed showed that centrists’ belief in playing nice with the opposition was played out. 

Recent progressive wins have shown that there’s no need to accept the framing of conservatives on issues like reeling in corporations and the war in Gaza. Allowing debate about the party’s supposed core beliefs on Republican terms is the sort of milquetoast politics that led us to where we are now: constantly fighting against whatever fantasy Carville’s counterparts on cable news have cooked up instead of talking about substantive issues. 

We don’t need any more of that.

The post Time for James Carville to sit down and shut up appeared first on Salon.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most notorious press conference Donald Trump ever held was the one in which he told a scientist in attendance to look into the possibility of using household disinfectant inside the human body to kill the Covid-19 virus. He had watched a demonstration of how the product worked on surfaces, you see, and he thought they hadn’t considered the possibility that humans could ingest it and achieve similar effects. That day, April 23, 2020, marked the last of Trump’s daily televised pandemic press briefings, and it may very well have been the last straw for many of those who voted against him just a few months later. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, Trump told the public that everyone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was astonished at how well he understood the science. He mused that he probably could have been a doctor. Despite the utter humiliation of that famous press conference, the president remains undeterred in that fantasy in his second term. 

In September, Trump announced that pregnant women should not take Tylenol during pregnancy, claiming without evidence the drug is linked to an increased risk of autism. On Monday he donned his imaginary white coat again to issue an executive order changing the U.S. government’s recommendation for the childhood vaccine schedule — because he is convinced that the vaccines cause autism.

Neither of those assertions is grounded in scientific fact, and both have negative ramifications for women and children if they are followed. The recommendations to break up the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines into individual doses because today they “look like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body,” as Trump stated, are plainly absurd. Any association between these vaccines and autism has been thoroughly debunked, and all the major medical and scientific associations immediately issued statements that they would not follow these recommendations.

Trump is aided in his crusade to personally cure autism by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his loyal health and human services secretary and anti-vaccine crusader, who dutifully stood by his side on Monday and parroted the same nonsense. The new recommendations will likely be followed by millions of MAHA moms who have fallen down the rabbit hole of misinformation and disinformation that Kennedy and Trump have been digging. But the pair are just the latest in the long line of hustlers, fraudsters and canny opportunists who have been working to undermine science in this country for more than a century. In fact, doing so is an all-American tradition.

Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business. While neither has openly colluded with the other, they have both furthered each other’s goals and ended up in a political alliance. One wouldn’t think these two disparate institutions would have much in common. But they share similar tactics: lying to their followers and customers for power and profit. And both have their reasons for rejecting science that interferes with their own interests.

Christianity and science have been in tension ever since the Catholic Church placed Galileo under house arrest for suggesting that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. But for the most part, the tension was at least somewhat manageable, and both carried on in their own spheres. In the early 20th century, however, a new Christian movement formed that took direct aim at science on the grounds it constituted a threat to the belief in the Bible’s inerrancy, and the modern war began. 

In the beginning, this new movement was largely financed by a pair of Los Angeles oil magnates. Milton and Lyman Stewart were religious zealots who were horrified by the encroachment of modernist ideas on society. The Stewarts published a book called “The Fundamentals,” giving the movement its name, and shipped copies all over North America at their own expense, literally spreading the fundamentalist gospel and influencing massive numbers of Americans to reject scientific knowledge wherever it conflicted with literal biblical interpretations. 

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Fast forward to the 1980s, and Christian fundamentalism had become a powerful political force as evangelical organizations like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family aligned directly with the Republican Party, wielding huge influence on right-wing politics. In doing so, they signed on with the most powerful GOP faction, Big Business. Using their influence with their followers, they managed to help convince millions to doubt any science that interferes with the interests of huge corporations, and reject regulations and taxation to mitigate the problems that came with their products. 

Once again, the fossil fuel industry led the way. Another pair of brothers, Charles and David Koch, zealous libertarians rather than fundamentalist Christians, ran a global conglomerate that dealt in energy and chemicals, and they were determined to stop the growing consensus that fossil fuels were warming the planet. Like the Stewarts before them, the Koch brothers financed a massive campaign to convince people that the science was wrong, and they brought a lot of their friends in the industries along with them. 

In the 2000s, a tsunami of money was released into the political system to block climate legislation, particularly during Barack Obama’s presidency. This has shown no signs of stopping, despite mounting evidence every day that the planet is under increasing stress and people are starting to suffer in vast numbers. The result of these efforts is obvious: Less than half of all Americans now believe climate change is caused by human activity. Only 21% of Republicans do.

Science denialism comes from many directions, and unfortunately we are in a period where it’s flourishing. There have always been hustlers and snake oil salesmen, but today the internet provides endless opportunities for people to “do their own research” and find whatever feels right to them, so conspiracy theories have become the lingua franca of our society. Delusional narcissists like Trump and Kennedy, occupying powerful positions and spreading nutty medical advice, are now just par for the course.

Some of the medical and scientific skepticism is a result of people feeling adrift in a rapidly changing world and drowning in competing information. But make no mistake: Powerful societal interests are also benefiting from all this, and it’s not by accident. They have spent a lot of time and a whole lot of money creating this environment of mistrust and suspicion, each for their own purposes but sharing the same goal, and it’s paid off handsomely.

The post The gospel of science denial, from Galileo to RFK Jr. appeared first on Salon.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poor Helaena Targaryen never stood a chance. George R.R. Martin’s fantasy world of Westeros in “House of the Dragon” is a particularly cruel place to be sensitive, whether to the declining fortunes of a kingdom or the machinations of the spirit world. Notably hard and remarkably sexist, the people in power treat women who happen to be a little weird with twice-over disdain.

A seer whose talent only seemed to arise when she needed to share bad news, Helaena was an unwelcome presence in her feuding family. Having seen her worst predictions come to pass, she grabbed hold of the only future she was able to change: her own. In the season three finale that aired Sunday night, the pregnant Helaena leapt from her window, checking out of the war and leaving behind one final, unwelcome prophecy: an embroidered image of her half-sister and captor, Rhaenyra Targaryen, on the Iron Throne, surrounded by flame and crowned in blood. 

Even in death, though, no one was listening to Helaena. Her only sin was being right too early and too often — and the world never stopped hounding her for it. 

Though they’re remarkably different in terms of age, style and dragon-riding ability, Helaena reminded me of Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose uncouth objections to the Democratic Party’s neoliberalism and various Middle Eastern wars have earned him the lifelong label of Capitol Hill Crank.

The Vermont Independent’s vehement opposition to the Gulf wars made him an odd man out in Congress more than a full decade before it became fashionable — and politically expedient — to turn on expensive Middle East boondoggles. Now 84, Sanders has advocated for universal healthcare since the 1970s while watching Americans fall deeper into medical debt. In the late 1990s, he was a loud voice against the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act’s financial guardrails, and after banking adventurism nearly destroyed the global economy in the financial crisis of 2008, he managed to keep his told-you-sos muted. 

In boom and bust times alike, Sanders has been unshakeable on the idea that the U.S. is uniquely rigged against the lower classes, spoiling the party thrown by the winners of the go-go ‘90s and the Great Recession’s recovery. His Brooklyn honk has been a constant in the halls of Congress, sharing portents of doom and Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 

On Monday Sanders issued another unwelcome proclamation in a career full of them, sending a letter to the CEOs of the three largest artificial intelligence companies that called on them to pause the technology’s development. The letter follows news of several AI prototypes breaking the confines of their testing sandbox and accessing the internet. In the most shocking example, an agent made by OpenAI hacked into Hugging Face, a platform that AI programmers use to share datasets and models. The news prompted the company Anthropic to review its own tests; it discovered that models had found a way around their parameters to access the internet in three cases. Meta also shared that one of its own prototypes had done the same.

A breach of an AI-equivalent of GitHub was never going to bring about doomsday, but an AI agent that can ignore the bounds set by its creators and users has massive potential to cause widespread harm. Sanders certainly thinks so, in any case. He called on Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI, the big three of the industry, to stop work until they can get a better handle on the machines they’re creating. 

“Almost every day, there is a new story about how your companies are losing control of the AI technology you are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” he wrote. “Last month, the world found out OpenAI lost control of an AI model. The result? The model hacked into another company’s computers—a clear violation of federal law.”

AI models have been rolled out quickly and haphazardly across the wider internet. Though the major players haven’t yet found a way for this technology to make money and ensure its long-term survival, a cycle of hype, government contracts, and integration into software and search have made the models an inescapable part of digital life. AI has been spun up into all the surfaces the average internet user touches, and along the way it has warped academia and embedded itself with the U.S. military with reportedly disastrous results. 

The Maven Smart System, an AI-powered platform built for the Pentagon by the analytics firm Palantir, generated over 1,000 airstrike targets in the early hours of the Iran war. When the U.S. carried out a deadly strike on an all-girls school, legislators were quick to ask if the AI model was to blame. Fears of a bombing-run-capable Skynet striking children halfway around the globe spread, but the truth was a little more nuanced. Some of the U.S. intelligence fed to the system was outdated, not accounting for the presence of the school. Whipped up and given a sheen of analytic legitimacy by the Maven, military officials did not do their due diligence in the midst of hundreds of similar, simultaneous strikes. As The Guardian put it, “people failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal.”

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Even if AI models never got one iota more powerful than they are today, Sanders is still right to call for a pause. The damage companies like OpenAI can do to working Americans is very real. Layoffs will come from CEOs who buy AI’s spiel: that large-language models can replace humans in  the service sector, which accounts for nearly 70% of U.S. jobs. The data centers and infrastructure built to support these technological advances will strain our utilities. The tax breaks and incentives to attract these companies are a drain on state and local coffers. Weigh those cons against the things AI has reliably proven it can do – cheat on homework and write janky code – and it’s easy to understand Sanders’ urge to stand and yell “stop!”

It’s not only AI itself that concerns Sanders. In March, he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduced legislation calling for a moratorium on new data centers until critical safeguards are put into place. These massive sites, which are proliferating across the country, produce loud noise and pollution, rely on enormous amounts of water and electricity, tax power grids and inflate utility bills. Data centers are also proving massively unpopular, even among conservative voters in rural areas. The CEOs of companies that run these large-language models have often done end-runs around democratic controls, ingratiating themselves with Donald Trump and circumventing traditional pathways for their planned construction projects via backroom deals. They’ve managed all this even as their AI products have not proven they can reliably do any of the things OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg claim they can do. Merely mentioning the potential power of their models is enough to boost investment.

A nationwide movement opposing the continued construction of data centers offers some hope, with both Republicans and Democrats noticing the popular sentiment is largely anti-AI. But given the speed at which these data centers have been built, and the secretive lengths companies will go to avoid rowdy town halls full of angry crowds, even that groundswell of opposition is unlikely to put AI development on ice. 

The result is that Sanders’ warnings are likely to go just as unheeded as Helaena Targaryen’s. His threat of legislation will die, written off by other members of Congress as more grumping from a lifelong stick-in-the-mud. 

Don’t expect a similar dramatic exit from Sanders, though. He’s lived long enough to get used to the feeling of being unfortunately, awfully correct. 

The post Bernie Sanders’ AI warnings are being ignored in the Senate appeared first on Salon.com.

In MAGA’s self-mythology, they are a family first movement that encourages Americans to have more babies. Over the past year, some of the coalition’s most prominent figures have touted a responsibility to pro-create. In December 2025, Lara Trump said on Fox News, “We’re going to be in a pickle if we don’t get more babies coming.” Three months later, in a speech at the 2026 March for Life, Vice President JD Vance congratulated himself for impregnating his wife Usha, saying he “practices what he preaches” when he calls for “more families and more babies.” Katie Miller, the podcaster and wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, used the same wording to announce her pregnancy on X in late 2025: “The White House practices what they preach about increasing the fertility rate.”

Even Donald Trump has gotten in on the act. At a Women’s History Month event in March 2025, he bizarrely referred to himself as the “fertilization president.” 

So when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram recently to announce she is freezing her eggs, surely MAGA was resoundingly grateful to her for carrying forward this pro-baby message, right? Not quite. As the 36-year-old New York Democrat was no doubt aware would happen, MAGA commentators lashed out at her for preserving her ability to have kids in the future. Christian right commentator Allie Beth Stuckey said she was “selfish.” Podcast host Matt Walsh called Ocasio-Cortez’s choice “backwards and ridiculous.” The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued that the congresswoman’s video was a “sad public performance/display of unnecessarily unwise decision making.”

In the MAGAsphere, it’s not enough for a woman to want motherhood. If she doesn’t give up her career and even her personal happiness in the process of making babies, it doesn’t count. Being pregnant isn’t enough. Conservatives also seem to require the “barefoot” and “in the kitchen” parts of the traditional job description.

In the case of Ocasio-Cortez — and many women like here — the problem is that she has ambitions for higher political office, hinting repeatedly that she’s considering a run for the Senate or even the presidency. For the right, babies aren’t an end in themselves; they are also a weapon to use in MAGA’s ongoing war on women’s equality. 

“She’s glamorizing the lie that women can have it all,” Stuckey said. “You can’t.” 

Hemingway agreed. “Ladies, get married to a good man as young as you’re able and have your babies,” she said. 

Blinded by their own sexism, none of these pundits considered the possibility that Ocasio-Cortez, a savvy politician who is skilled at social media, knew how MAGA would react to posts where she injected the medications on camera or answered people’s detailed questions about the process. She even hinted at this in her video. “Don’t be weird about this,” she said as she gave herself an injection. “Even though I know you all will be.”

The right’s reaction revealed what the White House has been trying to hide from swing voters all along: Their chatter about fertility rates was never about happy families or a prosperous nation. To the contrary, as evidenced by the draconian bans in red states, Republicans will gladly sacrifice happiness and prosperity for the goal of subjugating women. One White House official even told Axios that it’s “not helpful” and “isn’t really a winner” for conservative influencers to say the quiet part out loud.

Notably, none of these MAGA pundits have called Elon Musk “selfish” for having kids in his 50s. Or Vance, who is 42 with an infant at home. Or Trump, who was 59 when his youngest child, Barron, was born. The mandate to have kids young, even if it ruins your career or railroads you into an unhappy marriage, applies only to women.

Ocasio-Cortez flagged this in an Instagram story discussing why women might freeze eggs. “So much of this discussion around parenthood and fertility is focused on women, but it takes two to tango,” she said, going on to explain that often women want to get married and have kids, but “they haven’t found their person.” According to Puck News’ Leigh Ann Caldwell, who cited “a reputable Democratic source,” the congresswoman and her fiancé Riley Roberts called off their engagement “about 18 months ago.”

Regardless of her own relationship status, Ocasio-Cortez spoke a simple truth that is typically ignored by right-wing pundits: Women aren’t “delaying” marriage. The verb itself implies young women are turning down viable offers, but no evidence exists for such a claim. In fact, an increasing number of conservative women are starting to publicly complain about all this pressure to get married and have babies young, since they can’t magically conjure suitable men out of thin air. Last week, annoyance over this burbled up in far-right women’s circles on X. Despite being openly anti-feminist, these women were nonetheless complaining. “Many of us would have happily gotten married young . . . if we had the choice,” one wrote. Another said, “You can’t snap your fingers and get a spouse on demand, sadly.” 

Alex Clark, a popular podcast host in the Turning Point USA network, has also been struggling to tamp down her anger over this. In May, the 33-year-old published an ill-advised newsletter complaining that “[w]hores get married first” because, she felt, liberal women had an easier time attracting eligible men. The following month, at the TPUSA women’s conference, Clark was less overtly angry, but she still expressed frustration at her deceased mentor, Charlie Kirk, for telling young women to get married: “Right-wing men act like we’re supposed to just, I guess, live under an overpass and wait for our husband to fall from the sky.” 

Considering that young conservative men outnumber young conservative women, one would think it shouldn’t be so hard to find a Mr. Right who is also Mr. Right Wing. Recent high-profile stories about younger Republican politicians, though, offer a reminder of why the pickings can seem so slim.

In Texas, a 30-year-old Republican congressional candidate, Brandon Herrera, was recently exposed for posting a video in which he scolded mothers because “you let somebody [vulgar term for ejaculation] you” and calling a child a “c*m trophy.” When asked for comment by the Austin-American Statesman, his campaign replied with a picture of a whipped cream-covered pie, a reference to a term shaming women who have had sexual intercourse. 

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Even more high profile has been the divorce of Rep. Max Miller from Emily Moreno, the daughter of another prominent Ohio Republican, Sen. Bernie Moreno. Miller has been accused of breaking his two-year-old daughter’s collarbone, pointing a gun at his then-wife’s head and scalding her with hot water. The accusations are inextricable from his over-the-top public posturing as an alpha male, including an admission that despite being just 37, he has taken testosterone injections. 

In Florida, GOP Rep. Cory Mills, 46, is facing a tough primary due to allegations of violence and harassment against an ex-girlfriend.

Not every Republican man is as repulsive as these three. Democrats aren’t immune from bad men either, as recent scandals involving former California Rep. Eric Swalwell and former Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner have shown. The difference, though, is that Democrats made clear to both men they needed to step down once the evidence against them stacked up. Republican politicians, on the other hand, are rewarded for demonstrating abusive and misogynistic behavior, as evidenced by the robust support and fundraising given to Herrera, Miller and Mills by GOP leadership.

It’s incredibly hard to square the pious claims that young women should marry a “good” Christian man young and start having babies with a Republican culture that is so welcoming, even encouraging, of such vile men. Women aren’t respected in MAGA. Despite the Christian right’s false claims, mothers aren’t venerated either. Instead, ugly, sexually demeaning language about mothers and children is normalized. Abuse is also tacitly accepted, and women are shamed if they speak out. As with the attacks on Ocasio-Cortez, all this talk about family and motherhood is a paper-thin disguise for hate, and for putting women under the boot. 

The timing of Ocasio-Cortez’s egg-freezing announcement dangles a once-unimaginable prospect: that we could have a pregnant president of the United States. If she, as many assume, is putting off pregnancy until after a presidential run, then such a scenario is at least a possibility.

Republicans can complain, but most Americans understand that a pregnant woman is more capable of doing a high-level job than a man in his 80s, especially one in such seemingly poor health as Donald Trump. A pregnant President Ocasio-Cortez would also further reveal their hypocrisy. After all, these are the people who, not so long ago, were holding up a pregnant press secretary, second lady and whatever it is that Katie Miller does as role models. Surely, a pregnant president would send that pro-baby message they say they crave even more loudly. 

The post AOC exposes MAGA’s motherhood hypocrisy appeared first on Salon.com.

As the western United States is gripped by record-shattering wildfires, some unscrupulous people aren’t just contemplating what it will be like for future generations living in our new normal of erratic weather patterns, or wondering whether climate change is making this situation worse. They’re thinking about how much money they can make. 

Prediction market apps like Kalshi and Polymarket allow people to bet on pretty much anything, whether it’s some boring sports thing, election results or perhaps even war crimes. You can even bet on the outcome of clinical drug trials and whether cancer drugs will be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which experts criticize as undermining the integrity of medication research. The father of a seventh-grader living with cancer recently raised the issue of “whether researchers in a trial could be motivated by prediction market profits,” something so heinous it is difficult to contemplate.

While the makers of these apps insist they are “future exchanges,” not digital gambling parlors, regulators in places like Singapore, France, Belgium and elsewhere aren’t convinced and have banned the platforms altogether. There are several mechanisms inherent to prediction market apps that make them a little different than putting it all on red. They involve binary contracts that resolve based on whether certain events happen or not, using some complex math to factor in a probability of an outcome. Critics are increasingly looking into the consequences of making almost everything wagerable.

On Aug. 3, Democratic senators from six states sent a letter to the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the independent government arm that regulates Polymarket and Kalshi, warning that the apps are allowing bets to be placed on wildfires, which could incentivize arson. They highlight previous examples of bets placed on the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, which razed large areas of Los Angeles County, killing 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures. 

“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” the letter’s authors, who include Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., wrote. “There’s also the heightened risk — according to state and local fire officials — that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful.”

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For example, someone might bet on how big a fire might get or how many buildings it might destroy. I wanted to know what unexpected stuff I could find on the apps, so I downloaded Polymarket and Kalshi, seemingly the two most popular platforms or at least the ones I’m tired of seeing ads of the most. Both were littered with sports events, which I scrolled past, but also had sections for elections, politics, tech and a lot more. Polymarket seemed to have fewer and more bland options for betting, with the most shocking queries I could find being things like who will get kicked out of Trump admin next or if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be arrested by year’s end.

After giving over way too much private data to Kalshi, I was able to browse entire categories dedicated to natural disasters and climate change, such as if 2026 will be the hottest year ever or if the U.S. will ever meet its climate goals. I also found weird things like how many Atlantic hurricanes this year or if California will be hit by a magnitude 8 earthquake, which goes without saying but would be extremely bad. For context, the recent Colombia and Venezuela earthquakes were both magnitude 7.4 and 7.5 respectively. All of these things are likely to kill countless people if they happen, but climate change is already widely treated like an abstract future problem, rather than our disastrous present, so maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.

Both apps allowed wagers on the number of “explosive diarrhea” cyclosporiasis and measles cases this year, with both outbreaks shattering records. I could not find anything related to fires, presumably such content being recently removed, as there have been plenty of cited examples of bets on fires in the past, such as how many acres or locations the Palisades fires would reach.

So many of the scenarios on these apps present classic examples of a perverse incentive, in which the structure of a system encourages undesirable results. The classic example is of dubious historical accuracy, but originates from the British occupation of India. Weary of venomous snake bites, British authorities put a bounty on dead cobras — but this only incentivized locals to breed more of the snakes, in order to collect even more reward money. If you allow people to earn cash from dead snakes, you risk getting a lot more living snakes in the process.

Are we already seeing this with wildfires? It’s hard to say, but it’s true that arson is, strangely, a common catalyst for wildfires. One man was arrested outside of Spokane a few days ago, admitting to starting the Old Trails Fire, which burned entire neighborhoods to a crisp. Police say that Aaron Farinacci admitted to having set two dozen other blazes since 2025.

The conditions that make these blazes so out-of-control are thanks to climate change, which is causing hotter and drier conditions. According to a 2021 study supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the increase in fire weather in the western U.S. is primarily due to climate change. (Still, trying to explain that level of nuance to a climate denier is like teaching rocks to play Risk.)

What these apps do best is lay bare the ways in which our entire economy is structured like a betting app strung together by incentive perverts. It’s why the market rewards the most amoral and destructive behavior, from hedge funds that short the market and destroy company value to vulture capitalists who gut businesses like Toys “R” Us or Radio Shack, and then escape on their golden corporate parachutes. Even when such behavior results in a recession, the government is likely to bail big corporations out, while any form of assistance for the working class is branded as “socialism.” In fact, the entire stock market could be best described as a casino that incentivizes absurd growth like the historic tech bubble provoked by the spread of artificial intelligence.

Mainstream economists may want you to believe all this is driven by Darwinian forces that follow some natural law, simplified as “the cost of doing business,” or even by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. But that’s pretty unscientific.

Money itself is just a construct, one with rules dreamt up by humans. We don’t have to live in a world where people profit from tragedy, be it wildfires or a child with cancer, housing foreclosures or weapons manufacturing. I’m willing to bet we can actually achieve such a utopian outcome, even if it takes another century. The alternative is to continue draining everything of value as it goes up in smoke. 

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

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

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

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

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