It makes perfect sense that Emerald Fennell’s debut film, “Promising Young Woman,” is divisive. In fact, divisive isn’t quite the right word. Since its 2020 release, “Promising Young Woman” has become a lightning rod for heated conversation — quite a far cry from its initially warm reception, which led to five Oscar nominations and one win. 

Much of this radioactivity results from Fennell’s proclivity for pushing buttons (a habit I defended earlier this year). But in the case of “Promising Young Woman” — about Cassie (Carey Mulligan), a directionless 30-year-old who spends her free time pursuing cosmic justice for her late best friend Nina, whose death was the byproduct of a brutal sexual assault — the discourse is understandable. Fennell wanted to make audiences uncomfortable right out of the gate. And to create this air of discomfort, Fennell crafted a movie that darts from hopeful to despairingly bleak in the blink of an eye. 

Fennell’s acid-tongued rape-revenge film is caustic and cruel; a feel-bad film for, as Salon described it then, “the #MeToo times.” And though Cassie’s extracurricular pursuits echo that cultural reckoning, some distance reveals that “Promising Young Woman” is less about justice than protection. Revisiting the movie through this lens offers plenty of important wisdom that its detractors were quick to shrug off. But what’s tragic is that such a reappraisal has come at the cost of another woman’s safety.

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Over the past two weeks, Cornell University has faced a very public and very courageous rebellion, similar to the one Cassie attempts to mount in “Promising Young Woman.” The unrest is courtesy of four exemplary student journalists at the college’s newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, who published the names of seven male students named in a lawsuit against the university by an anonymous Jane Doe. The plaintiff alleges that, during a party at the school’s Chi Phi fraternity in 2024, she was coerced into taking drugs and gang raped by seven fraternity members. 

Shortly after, Jane Doe reported the incident to Cornell police, leading the school to assemble a sexual assault task force and conduct an internal investigation. Although students were alerted to the allegations, they never received the results of the school’s investigation. On September 16, nearly two years after the initial report, Jane Doe filed her suit against Cornell. The Cornell Daily Sun, having followed the case from the beginning, made the bold decision to publish all seven defendants’ names on the paper’s front page in an editorial titled, “Cornell Won’t, We Will.”

The editorial sparked immediate national attention, putting Cornell and Greek life — long the subject of intense scrutiny for its hypermasculine culture promoting sexual assault — in the public’s crosshairs. With discrepancies abound, a startling lack of clarity about Cornell’s systems (despite the school publishing a tail-between-its-legs FAQ), and the local district attorney revisiting the case, the rigor of Cornell’s Title IX investigation now looks shaky at best. In as little as two weeks, Jane Doe, The Cornell Daily Sun’s intrepid staff, and thousands of angry students and spectators around the country have turned their eyes toward Ithaca, New York, hoping this case might finally bring real change. 

This is what protecting each other looks like. Safeguarding isn’t only about what we do for one another before a tragedy, but how we respond in the days, weeks, months and years that follow.

It’s not entirely surprising, then, that “Promising Young Woman” has found its way back into the conversation surrounding what’s happening at Cornell. Some years before the film takes place, Cassie drops out of med school, consumed by remorse and, later, grief. Reminders of Nina and the assault linger around the campus’ every corner, exacerbated by the school’s dean (Connie Britton) choosing not to pursue an investigation into, or discipline for, Nina’s assault. The film isn’t only about justice; it’s about the people standing in its way. Faculty incompetence directly echoes the Cornell case. But, then again, so does Cassie’s greater endeavor. 

More than revenge, Cassie wants to embarrass potential assailants and jolt them, however briefly, out of their repugnant misogyny. She wants to scare them straight, in hopes that they won’t touch another woman without her consent ever again. Cassie understands this is probably futile, especially in the patriarchy’s grand scheme. But it’s something she can do not only for Nina, but for every other vulnerable woman.

Before we go further, though, I should be clear that I don’t disagree with the notion that comparing a real-life rape allegation to Fennell’s film is in poor taste. My intention here is not to say, “Hey, this unspeakable event unfolding in the headlines right now? It’s just like that movie!” My objective is to use the existing comparisons to reexamine “Promising Young Woman,” try to understand Fennell’s intentions, and look at the bleak truths her movie stares straight in the face. If you dislike or even detest this film, I don’t seek to negate your feelings. I only posit that it’s important to understand art — especially contentious art about pertinent crises — on a cellular level to learn what it, and our responses to it, can teach us.

 

Revisiting the film for the first time in six years this week, I was caught off guard. Reputation is a funny thing — how easily it can subconsciously skew one’s perception, even when we try our best to remain impartial. I remember finding “Promising Young Woman” to be contemplative. Yet the steady post-Oscar blowback and general friction surrounding Fennell made me certain I’d overrated it. But this isn’t exactly a film one jumps at the chance to rewatch just for their edification.

Though I’d say we’ve reached a point where that undertaking is worthwhile. “Promising Young Woman” is not a compare-and-contrast film, where overly didactic morality coaching encourages the viewer to say, “Ah, yes, now I understand rape culture.” Here, Fennell asserts that rape culture is our culture, that patriarchy and misogyny seep through the cracks of every single surface. Having come face to face with its most brutal consequences, Cassie’s rose-colored glasses have been removed, stomped on, ground to a pulp and had their remains burnt to ash. Even when life offers her a grain of solace or happiness, the morsel is already rotting from the inside out. The decay just hasn’t made itself known yet.

Between pretending to be wasted at bars to trick predators into taking her home, Cassie learns that one of Nina’s rapists, Al (Chris Lowell) — now a successful doctor — is getting married. Seeing Al prosper while Nina’s memory fades is enough to push Cassie into full vigilanteism, working her way through the parties complicit in Nina’s death. In her quest, Cassie discovers that there is cellphone video footage of Nina being assaulted, reluctantly handed over by her ex-classmate, Madison (Alison Brie). “I don’t know how we could’ve watched that, and all thought it was funny,” Madison admits. 

This aspect mirrors a frightening contemporary pattern reflected in the Cornell case, in which an alleged Snapchat thread from the Chi Phi house is presented as evidence. Social media has bolstered the narcissistic machismo already present among many men and ubiquitous in fraternity life. In a recent thread discussing her article on the “burnerverse” — a male social media subculture that seeks to exploit young women — Wired senior writer EJ Dickson explained the connection between social media and abuse. 

“Sexual assault has always been a thing; ‘boys will be boys’ has always been a thing,” Dickson writes. “What’s new is the main character syndrome. It’s the complete lack of respect for others in favor of building up a narrative around yourself as a ketamine-blowing, hard-partying Zyn bro that doesn’t give a f*ck about anyone but yourself.”

Take that dichotomy between the self-importance running like a virus through young men and the prudent actions taken by The Cornell Daily Sun staff. Egotism reigns in our modern world, and only those brave enough to stand up to it can impede its rule. Cassie’s methods may be unorthodox, but they’re driven by her ardent desire to remind people that someone is always watching. Her approach is to shame and reveal, but not always to get justice. As Fennell reminds us at the end of the film, justice — if it ever comes — often arrives too late, and at the expense of too many lives.

That ending, which I won’t spoil here, is where the film most often divides. It is certainly alienating and somber. But I’d argue that Fennell intends to galvanize thought and action, not outrage. No conventional idea of justice, be it carceral or social, can reverse the harm that’s already been done. Given the fact that these problems have only worsened in the six years since the film’s release, the conclusion is pragmatically bleak. Anything less would be a fallacy, a dream of a world that we don’t, and might never, live in.

But amid darkness, there is hope, too. The film’s great strength is in remarking on how much tertiary damage sexual assault does. It’s not only the survivors who are left to pick up the pieces, but the people who love and take care of them, too. The aftermath is anything but simple, and that “Promising Young Woman” is so vexing only proves there is no easy way to make sense of the senseless. The most we can offer is our voices, actions and constant vigilance; to refuse ignorance together and demand accountability as a community. That’s Fennell’s challenge: When something is hard, and when the pain is gratuitous, don’t turn the other cheek, don’t let the heart-wrenching horror slip away. Do something, anything. And then do more.

The post The Cornell case puts “Promising Young Woman” back in focus appeared first on Salon.com.

On Thursday afternoon in Dallas, in what looked like a farewell tour, the president of the United States told his Texas followers to “Hold your nose” and vote for Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, a man he also described as a “pain in the ass.”

Donald Trump then sped off in the presidential limo known as the Beast — at nearly 100 mph, according to pool reports — and headed for an event in Oklahoma. Republicans gazed in mock wild wonder, palms outstretched, claiming they have no idea why they’re staring at potentially historic losses in the midterm elections next month. 

Afterwards a MAGA supporter told me that Trump’s performance was just “presidential humor.” And fair enough. Donald Trump has spent a lifetime being, in effect, the Wednesday night open-mic comic at a backroom bar in some college town in Missouri. 

Neither capable of growth nor understanding, he’s that guy with just one punchline. He’s a one-trick pony: “Sir, she said. Sir.” He’s the most talentless man ever caught in the bright glare of the light he demanded from the world.

But he is persistent. That’s his superpower. The grift? Oh, that part he learned from experience. But he’s naturally persistent, and out of that grew the corruption, fearmongering and boundless anger — all driven by his superpower. He learned to be transactional. Every failure is fuel for the next fiasco.  

The first Trump administration was an accident, largely brought about by the split I witnessed firsthand between Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ supporters at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia during the last week of July 2016. What a shock: The Democrats destroyed their chances through infighting. Who knew?

Trump never thought he’d win that election. Some Republicans, who later fled the party, never accepted him as a legitimate heir to the GOP’s legacy when he did. Now, critics and fans alike have pointed out that there’s no doubt he’s the rightful heir to the Republican Party of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; more corrupt than Nixon, a happy practitioner of Reagan’s economics and more of a mean-spirited-wimp than Hunter S. Thompson ever thought Bush could be. 

Trump’s refusal to bust up monopolies while cutting staff to the National Park Service and selling off public lands has removed any illusions that he might be a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. His lack of military service takes him out of the realm of being a Dwight Eisenhower Republican. As for Abraham Lincoln, Trump has tried his best to divide a nation, not unite one. 

Since Trump never thought he’d win in 2016, he never really planned anything; he let the Republican establishment run things until he got comfortable sleeping in the big chair in the Oval Office and declaring each week “infrastructure week” while doing nothing about it. 

Then came COVID, and in 2021 Trump found himself out of power after, of course, refusing to concede the election and inciting a failed insurrection. That failure fueled his persistence and led to his 2024 re-election. The failure also fueled his anger. His subsequent 34 felony convictions in New York and the federal investigations into his actions became motives for Trump to seek and destroy all who tried to bring him to justice.

His persistent greed, anger and need for revenge empowered him during his first 100 days back in office in 2025, leading to sweeping, Nazi-esque changes sold to the public by discrediting or co-opting the media. 

Meanwhile, the former East Room of the White House looks like Dresden during postwar reconstruction; the Kennedy Center is starting to resemble a Greek ruin; the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is empty and broken, and for some reason that can only be understood under the influence of hallucinogens and Red Bull, he now wants to build a triumphal arch and stuff it with weapons.

We have no idea why we’re at war with Iran and no idea how to negotiate a peace. Trump’s latest attempt at that answer came in the Oval Office on Wednesday when he said, for what must be the fifth or sixth time, that he could just blow Iran up. 

At least 58 people have died after being remanded to ICE facilities. Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin shrugs that off and says nothing ICE does is controversial and he’s not running “Holiday Inns — these people broke the law.” His superpower seems to be life-ending, militant ignorance.

Then there’s Russia, Ukraine, China and a host of other scandals. Those include but aren’t limited to spending taxpayer money on political ads, the price of diesel fuel, the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, antisemitism, misogyny and the L.A. mayor’s race. 

While covering Trump is always a challenge, covering his minions is another story. Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who made his bones trying to kill the Affordable Care Act and challenging the results of the 2020 election, made a complete fool of himself this week in the Senate while attacking former special counsel Jack Smith. 

Schmitt’s superpower is apparently making an ass of himself in public. By misrepresenting nonsensical evidence, he accused Smith of perjury. When called out for his sophomoric display, he then went on right-wing media and lied some more.

Smith, who still reminds me of Coach Beard in “Ted Lasso,” explained that his prosecution wasn’t politically inspired. It was driven by facts. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties,” he said. “My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded,” Being driven by facts and principles is a pretty decent superpower and should describe most people, including reporters, lawyers, scientists, politicians and clerics. 

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” Smith said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

That conclusion shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone after all this time. Trump told me in the Brady Briefing Room, six weeks before the 2020 election, that “If you stop counting the votes” there wouldn’t need to be a peaceful transfer of power. He’d just stay on indefinitely.

Trump thus teaches us that persistence pays off even if the proposition is criminal and the facts aren’t in your favor. That’s why he currently commands the center ring of the circus.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, we have the aforementioned Sideshow Ken Paxton, one of the most loathsome individuals ever to climb out of the primordial ooze and declare himself a human being. This is a man so vile that even Trump hates him, and so do the Trump-happy Texas Republicans who have been known to embrace faith healers and hunt snakes in shorts and cowboy boots. They tried to rid themselves of Paxton, but he somehow slipped away.

Paxton’s superpower is his lack of spine and his greasy nature. That, combined with Trump’s (ahem) support, is the reason Paxton isn’t in prison. 

But time has its way with everyone. After more than a decade of deploying his superpower, Trump is noticeably faltering, even conceding from the Oval Office this week that his party may lose the midterms. The man who has traded on fear, corruption and grift for so long that he looks like a cartoon Tasmanian devil without the charm has now come to resemble Otis, the sleepy town drunk in “The Andy Griffith Show” (look it up, for heaven’s sake). 

Waiting in the wings is “Hillbilly Elegy” JD Vance, worming his way through the crowd. That’s his superpower: He’s a bearded human worm. If you don’t like him, you might place a bet on Marco “The Juggler” Rubio. His superpower is handling a variety of tasks without the loud explosive thud of total failure often seen from Trump, Vance and Pete Hegseth, who’s more like the the secretary of fashion than the “secretary of war.” That makes “Li’l Marco” a bright star in Trump’s dark firmament, even if it’s evident nobody likes him.  

Hegseth, on the other hand, is among the dimmest. His superpower seems to be the ability to cosplay a vain summer camp counselor in the Adirondacks from a bad Hallmark comedy.  

For the comic book fans out there, the Republicans are led by a Yellow Lantern with fading powers, delusional in his beliefs and actions, too fearful to change and faced with the overpowering realization that his time in power is quickly coming to an end. 

He even sent an email to supporters Thursday claiming “This could be my final four weeks as president.” Sure, it was another grift, as well as fatalistic and totally disingenuous. 

They may have to pry Trump out of the Oval Office with a crowbar and a handful of sedatives in 2029, if he lasts that long. But next month’s midterm elections, should they go as badly as Trump obviously fears, will mean the effective end of his presidency. What comes after that could be chaos. Don’t expect mature or professional behavior from a party that can’t tell the difference between an NBA game in Atlanta and a women’s college basketball game in Silver Spring. Just realize it’s the same party that wants to punish transgender Americans while rewarding the ultra-rich. 

The only question that matters is this; Does Trump have enough juice left in his Yellow Lantern ring for one last fearful victory? At his mini-convention in Dallas he told his followers to “cheat like hell.” At the same time Trump asked everyone to vote as if he were on the ballot; unfortunately for the Republicans, many will do just that. At this point, it’s almost as if Trump is campaigning for the Democrats. 

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Seems appropriate. Most of the Democrats are counting on winning by simply saying, “I’m not Trump.”

Folks, they’re not putting Vance out in the field for the Donald’s sake. He’s there for the same reason: Because he’s not Trump. Soon enough, JD could graduate from the sideshow to the center ring.

Should Trump and the Republicans suffer the historic midterm blowout everyone sees coming — barring armed confiscation of ballot boxes — the president will play the victim, a martyred hero who will claim the elections were rigged and blame Joe Biden, China, Canada, our NATO allies and Iran. If he somehow finds a miraculous recharge for his ring, he will use his superpower to foment further revenge and retribution. Every failure is fuel for the next fiasco.

I’ve been told that everyone has a superpower. If so, I’ll defer to what my father told me was mine: asking annoying questions. I still have a few for you, Mr. President.

The post Trump’s superpower is fading. Can he recharge before the midterms? appeared first on Salon.com.

Jane Doe, a former Cornell University student who has filed a civil lawsuit alleging gang rape at the hands of seven Chi Phi fraternity members, has struggled since she first reported the incident to the police in November 2024, a few weeks after night a frat party turned ugly. “Her life has been destroyed,” her attorney Thomas Giuffra told CNN’s Jake Tapper. Unlike most of the alleged assailants, Doe left college after what Giuffra has described as a “horrifying” semester in which she had to attend classes “where she saw these guys on a fairly regular basis.” 

She was not from “a wealthy family,” he said. “This was her dream and it was taken away from her at a young age in just a horrific fashion.”

But according to some on the right, Doe has not suffered enough for reporting her alleged assault to the police and then later suing the accused, the university and the fraternity. It’s not enough that she saw no charges filed, or that reportedly only two of the accused were expelled from campus. On top of her existing pain, therefore, many of the MAGA faithful are punishing her further by calling her a liar, implying she’s a slut and even threatening to out her, which would put her personal safety at risk. Whatever their intent, by doing this, they are sending a strong message to any victim of rape who might feel tempted to seek justice: Stay silent, or you’ll be next. 

In 2017, the #MeToo movement took the nation by storm. A veritable flood of women, and some men, spoke out about their own experiences with sexual abuse, leading to a slew of firings, lawsuits, arrests and social opprobrium of the accused, especially since so many accusers produced compelling evidence. Despite this, it was barely weeks before the backlash began, with countless articles about how #MeToo had gone “too far,” despite scant evidence that innocent men were getting entangled. That response swelled until it overcame #MeToo, which has largely faded into the background. 

 

The Cornell case shows, though, that far from going too far, the #MeToo movement didn’t go far enough. Much — if not most — of the time, alleged victims still face far more serious consequences than their accused assailants, and for many people and institutions, it still feels much easier to make the issue go away by suppressing accusations than dealing with these cases which are, admittedly, often complex. 

There is no doubt that the Cornell case is messy. By her own account, the victim was initially consenting, though perhaps not enthusiastically, to a threesome with two fraternity members. But the situation apparently took a turn when she took ketamine during the encounter and more fraternity members joined in, even communicating about “free p—y” on Snapchat. She describes hiding and swatting the new men away, but being too incapacitated to fight back.

“I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” she told police during a November 2024 interview. 

It took time for the alleged victim to get to the point where she was ready to file a report, which right-wing pundits have seized on as evidence that she was not really raped. The New York Times, using campus police documents and witness statements, laid out the timeline showing that she initially reacted with confusion and shame. While she didn’t call it “rape,” she was clearly unhappy about what had happened. Over the course of a few weeks, she came around to first texting one of the accused that “90% of what happened that night was not consensual,” and then filing a police report. 

“After rape, it’s common that victims don’t realize what happened was rape,” explained Anne DePrince, a psychology professor at the University of Denver and author of “Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence Against Women.” 

Victims “feel some shame about reporting it,” especially if they initially “liked the boy or they wanted to go to an event,” Sharon Gandarilla-Javier, an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me. She noted that it’s also common for someone to initially consent to one activity that then becomes “totally different than what they expected.” 

Journalists and feminist writers have been cautious in addressing this case, making it clear that the claims haven’t been tested in court and that New York’s rape laws may not be enough to secure an indictment, much less a conviction. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has reopened the case, arguing that this new lawsuit presents evidence he didn’t have when he initially made the decision to not charge the accused. New reporting also shows that Van Houten was given a condensed version of Doe’s report to Cornell police, one that omitted her use of the word “raped.” 

But on the right, there appears to be no similar care when lobbing unproven — and unevidenced — accusations that Doe is lying. 

“Her account has radically changed,” The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro said on Tuesday’s episode of his podcast, insisting “it turned out that the details of the police report did not amount to anything like rape.”

While he may be proven right if prosecutors can’t secure an indictment, this is not the same thing as saying that all Doe reported was “bad things happening with consent,” as Shapiro claimed. She herself said she was “raped,” and as many have pointed out, the very fact that she filed a police report is relevant. Calling the police suggests that a person believes they are reporting a crime. 

Matt Walsh, also of the Daily Wire, accused feminists of “rushing into the next Duke lacrosse/UVA-style hoax” and argued on X that the situation was nothing more than “a disgusting drug and alcohol fueled orgy,” where “the drunk men have just as valid a claim to being raped.” This, of course, ignores the fact that the alleged victim did not get on Snapchat to advertise “free p—y” to strangers, as well as her own testimony that she pushed them away and tried to hide.

The story “gets transformed from a night of regrets that the young woman is ashamed of into a night in which she’s a victim,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said on her podcast, where she also threatened to release the accuser’s name.

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Feminists and journalists are wise to use words like “alleged” and to be clear that the evidence has not been fully evaluated in a court of law, and it is true that there remains much about this case that is unknown. Still, there are the Snapchats and text messages, including one where the alleged victim uses the word “nonconsensual” and another where the accused wrote “I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night.” This alone makes it hard to believe the accusations are a “hoax,” as Walsh suggested, even if there are outstanding legal questions about whether a consensual encounter turned into something illegal. 

For people who insist on the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” many on the right have proven themselves quick to make claims about the alleged victim’s motives. It’s worth remembering that E. Jean Carroll won a defamation civil suit against Donald Trump after he accused her of lying when she claimed he sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. There is a demonstrable psychological and reputational toll on alleged victims when they face public accusations that they are lying, especially when they come from high-profile people who also insinuate that the victim is an immoral person because of their sexual history.

In this case, no one is required to have an opinion about the accuser’s character. They don’t know her history or her life or why she was even at the party, beyond her stated desire to have some fun. They could, like most decent people, consider the allegations and assume that, even if there is not a crime here, what is described should never happen to anyone. Shutting up is free.

But the past decade of Trumpism has largely been built on stirring up male anger at women’s growing equality. Paranoid and unsupported claims that women have immense power to ruin men with false accusations have been the bread-and-butter of a MAGA media industry designed to exploit men’s resentment for profit. Their audiences yearn to hear that Jane Doe is the real bad guy here, and so attacking her without a single shred of real evidence against her is an opportunity that many right-wing pundits can’t seem to pass up. 

Despite the hysterical claims of its critics, #MeToo was never about ruining the lives of innocent men. In a very real sense, the movement was about leveling the playing field, which is so dramatically tilted against victims that it makes justice nearly impossible to achieve. No one truly disputes the importance of due process to handle accusations of sexual violence. That’s why Jane Doe is going through the court system. It’s also why it’s good that, in light of new information, the district attorney is re-opening the case. 

But due process is endangered if victims can’t report allegations without facing  public abuse and threats of being falsely accused themselves that it becomes psychologically impossible to live their lives. As its name suggested, that was the whole point of #MeToo: to create enough solidarity between victims and allies to make it safe for victims to speak out without their lives being destroyed. If the right really believes in the value of due process, then they would let it play out, instead of dogpiling and harassing accusers so that future victims are too scared to report crimes. 

The post Cornell assault case shows #MeToo didn’t go far enough appeared first on Salon.com.

Few things are more difficult to get down in immutable ink than the history of professional wrestling.

Born on the carnival circuit, the pseudo-sport maintained a here today-gone tomorrow feeling until relatively recently. Promoters scraped out regional fiefdoms where transient performers would fight for a spell before jumping ship in search of better deals. Sometimes they took their name with them; other times they molded themselves to whatever gimmick their new promoter needed on the roster. It makes a mess of any timeline, and that’s before you get to the kayfabe — the illusion — of it all, the fact that all these real men and women are deadly serious about keeping up their fake characters. 

Grasping for concrete facts can leave you with two immutable bits of data: when a wrestler was born and when they died, with everything in between being a show on some level. Get enough of those dates together, and it’s hard not to notice a pattern: These sideshow athletes don’t live very long. 

Gorgeous George, one of the most famous faces of wrestling’s Golden Age, didn’t make it to his 50th birthday. “Macho Man” Randy Savage and his ex-wife/manager Miss Elizabeth both died before reaching Social Security eligibility. High-flying technical wrestler Eddie Guerrero died at 38. Windham Rotunda, who freaked out the WWE for years as a swamp-dwelling cultist named Bray Wyatt, passed away at the age of 36. And earlier this week, All Elite Wrestling star Pac died in the parking lot of an Illinois chain restaurant, just a day after his most recent match. HIs cause of death is still unknown. 

Born Benjamin Satterley in a blue-collar community in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, he first came to national attention stateside in the WWE, where he wrestled under the decidedly English name Neville. He took the cruiserweight title twice before jumping for AEW in 2018. His star rose exponentially as a regular heel for the young promotion. At the time of his passing, he was only 40 years old.

Playing a fake brute who’s willing to take a folding chair to the face to settle a disagreement is hell on a body. Learning how to fall and pretending you have superpowers can’t cancel out physics. If a 240-pound man turns you upside down and drives your head into a padded floor, you’re going to feel it the next day (and probably several days after). The wear and tear is cumulative, adding up over time like it does for all contact sports. Just take a boxer’s blown-out ears and a running back’s trick knee and expand it to account for the fact that, in wrestling, shots to the back of the skull are frequently necessary to move the story along. Recruiting almost exclusively among the huge and jacked — it’s easier to appear larger-than-life on camera if you’re real-world large — makes the list of heart conditions start to pile up. It’s all a recipe for a brief career, and a correspondingly short life.

The situation is exacerbated by wrestling’s employer-employee relationship. Staying true to its seasonal carny roots, almost all professional wrestlers are gig workers. The average star of WWE or AEW signs on as an independent contractor, meaning they are responsible for their own health insurance and are subject to being fired for nearly any cause. The situation has been even worse for wrestling’s women, who spent decades subject to the whims of Mary Lillian Ellison, better known as The Fabulous Moolah, a wrestler-promoter-extortionist who controlled virtually all of women’s wrestling, loaning out talent to regional promotions and taking cuts of stars’ pay.

Unlike the four major professional sports in the U.S., wrestlers have no pension and no retiree health benefits. If you wrestle for a living, you’re faced with significant pressure to perform for as long as you can, through as many injuries as you can. Unsurprisingly, the list of premature wrestler deaths is heavy on accidental painkiller overdoses and acute toxicity from mixing medications with alcohol. 

The central role of the promoter — and the lack of genuine athletic competition in matches — puts wrestlers and management on remarkably unequal footing. It’s hard to cause trouble for a boss who can simply write rabble-rousers out of the scripted action. Attempts to unionize the talent were mounted in the 1980s, first by hoo-rah heel Sgt. Slaughter, and then by wrestler-turned-governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura. The latter seemingly bought into some of the era’s storylines and ringside magic, believing that a rousing speech to the wrestlers in the locker room would convince them to strike. But he was ratted on by company star Hulk Hogan, and promoter Vince McMahon quickly summoned Ventura to let him know that any future outbursts of class consciousness would come with walking papers. 

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“Vince . . .  basically threatened to fire me if I ever brought it up again and read me the riot act,” Ventura explained on The Steve Austin Show. ”I then did WrestleMania 2 and immediately left and did ‘Predator’ and was a member of the Screen Actors Guild now, my union that I get retirement from now, healthcare from, all of that from.”

The situation only got worse as WWE muscled out nearly all regional promotions. McMahon’s anti-union behemoth spent decades as the only game in town for professional wrestlers who wanted the reach of a televised promotion. In recent years, AEW has pitched itself as an antidote to the WWE, but its roster is also almost entirely composed of independent contractors. Stars like CM Punk and Ray Fenix have complained loudly about the way the promotion handles wrestler health.

Pac is the second wrestler who performed in an AEW ring to have died just this month. Andy Williams, the former guitarist for metal-core act Every Time I Die who wrestled under the name “The Butcher,” died after collapsing during a match with an independent, regional promotion on Sept. 5 at 48. (His contact with AEW expired in April, after which he became a free agent.) Williams’ official cause of death is pending, awaiting final autopsy results.

Wrestling’s treatment of its employees is a bit too abstract to be listed on either man’s autopsy report. Coroners are in the business of endings, putting a neat period on decades of damage with phrases like “cardiac arrest.” Still, anyone who has followed wrestling for years can see the way it hobbles its heels and heroes alike. In a sport that heavily encourages everyone watching to follow the narrative, it’s hard not to notice a pattern.

The post AEW wrestler Pac’s death exposes pro wrestling’s labor problem appeared first on Salon.com.

Along with a few other TV critics, I have the dubious distinction of attending the last party at the late Hollywood producer Robert Evans‘ Woodland estate before its storied pool house burned down in 2003. There, I rubbed elbows with famous comedians and an assortment of UPN and WB starlets. But the guests I remember most clearly were a woman in her 40s, possibly, and her daughter, who was perhaps in her mid-20s. They were remarkable because they’d been surgically altered to look like twins. By that, I mean both women bore evidence of similar procedural enhancements, most noticeably lips plumped like party balloons and sharp cheekbones.

Plastic surgery is common in Hollywood, but this was something novel. This mother-daughter duo wasn’t in a show. They were there because they were part of Evans’ wealthy, powerful social circle. And they weren’t trying to maintain an existing aesthetic but to stand out with the best version of perfected artificiality money could buy.

That memory sat at the bottom of my mind’s darkest well until I watched Erin Lee Carr’s “The Swan: Behind the Mirror.” Indeed, I had blocked out most memories of that 2004 Fox reality train wreck until Carr’s documentary reached into my mind’s cobwebby attic and retrieved its cabinet of horrors.

For those who also blanked it out or were too young to clearly remember the details, “The Swan” recruited a bevy of normal-looking women convinced by magazine ads, the tabloid industry and other media that they were, in fact, ugly ducklings. “I wanted some big-a** cans,” one of Carr’s subjects said, explaining that was the age of Pamela Anderson and Maxim cover girls, women she wanted to be.

Yes, this horrendous TV egg could only have hatched in a place like Hollywood, where mother-daughter spa days might also mean going under the knife.

When I say “The Swan” was one of the vilest shows ever made, that is coming from a person who has seen a quarter-century’s worth of terrible television. Lest you think my opinion is an outlier, here’s what my predecessor Heather Havrilesky had to say about it when it first aired:

The funny thing is, it doesn’t just make you depressed about plastic surgery and sad women and sleazy TV executives. It also makes you depressed about the war in Iraq, the frailty of the human ego, the undeniable soul-sucking lameness of our culture, and the impossibility of real beauty at a time when such confused animals roam the earth.

Somehow, despite each episode’s invasive gawking at each participant’s ghastly surgeries, the lasting legacy of “The Swan” and other shows – it didn’t exist in a vacuum – was not simply to normalize cosmetic surgery but to establish it as part of a system of social signifiers.

At the lowest consumer-friendly rung rest affordable fillers and Botox injections. At the top, in the realm of multimillionaires and billionaires, you will find the Hall of Mar-a-Lago faces. A library of radically changed visages, sliced and sculpted to fit the funhouse-mirror beauty standards set by a handful of influential men.

Dr. Randal Haworth was among the specialists creator Nely Galán recruited in 2003. Galán declined to be interviewed for Carr’s documentary, having been thoroughly raked over the coals once the public’s visceral disgust with “The Swan” got it canceled after its second season.  

But Haworth offered his view, which he may now regret. At first he opines that plastic surgery is surgical psychiatry before likening himself to an interior designer and then, in explaining his role in the series, saying, “My goal was, as a plumber, can I perform early hyperesthetic surgery on these people?”

Off-screen, Carr calls out the weirdness of a plastic surgeon describing himself that way. “You’re literally talking about toilets,” she says. “And women.”

“That was unintended,” he replies, only digging himself in deeper when he explains that, like plumbers or electricians, he was there to do a job.

So. The women in “The Swan” weren’t quite latrines, but the man who got intimate with their flesh and bone didn’t exactly see them as people either.

With “The Swan: Behind the Mirror,” Carr does a service to the participants this production tortured for ratings and to the modern TV audience by not only reminding us how exploitative it was but also establishing it as a benchmark for the beauty industry.

Of course, the first idea is likely to gain much more traction than the second, if the public’s shocked reaction to Netflix’s “Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model” is an indicator. “ANTM” and “The Swan” were contemporaries, after all. Before “The Swan” aired, ABC ran “Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People,” made memorable by ‘80s star Lorenzo Lamas, one of its judges, using a laser pointer to point out contestants’ flab and cellulite for viewers at home.

“Extreme Makeover” had also been airing since 2002, showing ordinary men and women undergoing plastic surgery, receiving style makeovers and adopting fitness routines. “The Swan” was not a singular occurrence, then, but part of an era hawking cosmetic improvement, whether surgical or noninvasive, as the key to succeeding at life.

The difference between the two shows resembles the divide between workaday vanity and Mar-a-Lago maximalist aesthetic uniformity. “Extreme Makeover” pitched each contestant’s journey as personal, ending with them showing their “new, improved” selves to their friends and family.

Producers on “The Swan” not only pressured participants to undergo a series of grueling procedures and painful recoveries (that Carr’s documentary reveals were insufficiently managed), but they also made them compete against each other in a pageant. Very much like an election, in other words, only one populated with women who were scalpel-sculpted, lifted, tanned and tucked to surgical specifications.

Or, in Haworth’s telling, maybe just one surgeon’s.

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To be clear, that difference does not make “Extreme Makeover” less morally reprehensible. The fact that it outlived “The Swan” by several years only enhanced its role in mainstreaming elective cosmetic surgery. More than two decades after these aired, we’ve swerved between an age of unattainable thinness being pushed as a cultural ideal and a time of healthy-at-any-size body positivity from which we’re slowly regressing. The first runs of these shows probably missed Gen Z. Not millennials, sadly. And yet, Sephora and other cosmetic retailers love that their obsession with anti-aging begins in their teens and 20s. These products are marketed to them as “skin-loving,” not as wrinkle creams.

As the recent, depressing discourse about the difference in Jasmine Guy’s appearance between when she starred in “A Different World” four decades ago and how she looks in the reboot rages on, we’re reminded that Americans still have a deeply ageist view of daring to grow old gracefully.

For the record, Guy is a physically fit woman in her 60s who has not undergone cosmetic surgery, whom many women would kill to look like. And if she had gotten all the lifts and tucks we expect of a TV star, we’d be criticizing her for that too.

But her appearance is her choice and doesn’t serve anyone but herself which, in these days of grotesque facial augmentation being associated with a dehumanizing strain of conservative politics, is downright refreshing.

Carr’s documentary closes by showcasing the sisterhood shared by the women who survived “The Swan” – women seduced by a sales pitch predicated on the assumption that cosmetic surgery would change their lives. Most of them found that wasn’t true.

But at least one participant in “The Swan” still believes in its promise. “It was empowering,” insists Haworth in “Behind the Mirror,” “because it shows you that beauty is power.” Reflected power, sure. But whose?

“The Swan: Behind the Mirror” is streaming on Hulu.

 

 

The post “The Swan” tested the waters for Mar-a-Lago face appeared first on Salon.com.

Before it became reality, the biggest fear around a second Donald Trump administration was an increased level of competence. The candidate and his team displayed shocking measures of discipline and consistent messaging throughout the 2024 race, with much of the credit going to campaign manager Susie Wiles, who became his White House chief of staff. As a result, some feared that the shambling jankiness of his first term would be replaced by an efficient, experienced administration that would carry out a ruthless, quasi-fascist platform with few hiccups. 

That hasn’t happened. Once in office, Trump replaced the GOP’s establishment scolds who curtailed his worst impulses in his first term with loyalists who were just as green as him. The result has been constant outrage over blatant graft and executive overreach, as Trump is unable to stop blabbing about his — possibly illegal — dealmaking and unconstitutional policy goals. But look to the Republican Party’s backbenchers: You’ll see what MAGA could do with a figurehead who can keep their trap shut. 

A loyal Trump acolyte, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has happily deployed bored-looking National Guard troops to New Orleans and the U.S.-Mexico border for little more reason than pleasing the president. He has successfully pushed a law to require the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and he rarely shies away from red meat conflicts with his state’s few Democratic strongholds. Little surprise, then, that Landry was hailed as MAGA’s next-generation hero by Rolling Stone in 2024.

But when the time comes to pass Republican policies he truly cares about, or to hand out contracts and favors to his preferred businesses, Landry goes eerily quiet. Unlike Trump’s premature crowing over his massive ballroom or countless would-be Iran ceasefires, the governor has a tendency to let his work speak for itself. 

When it was published, Landry’s profile in Rolling Stone made hay out of his ability to go dark. Lately, though, when he gets quiet, it’s out of legal necessity. His administration has proven remarkably open to signing non-disclosure agreements while working out public deals with megacorporations.

According to a report from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Landry administration has signed nearly 300 NDAs since he took office in 2024. The Gulf States Newsroom uncovered a further 100 NDAs between the governor’s office and its employees, restricting what they can share about their time on the job. Reporter Drew Hawkins, who spoke to employees of former Louisiana gubernatorial administrations, said the broad gag orders on public employees was unprecedented.

“[T]hey’ve never seen anything like this,” Hawkins told New Orleans television station WWL. “They don’t know about anybody else signing them. They never signed them, and then you know one of them reviewed it and went through it point by point and talked about just how wild this would be to enforce.”

The result of all these hush-hush agreements is most noticeable in recent headline deals with SpaceX and Meta. The former was given the OK to build a massive spaceport in coastal Louisiana in between two wildlife refuges. While the under-wraps deal was being worked out, Landry signed laws exempting aerospace operations from property taxes, nuisance liabilities and public records requests. The final deal, approved in a public meeting of a new development board announced just 24 hours before, granted SpaceX more than $24 billion in tax breaks to build a rocket-launching facility no locals had even heard about.

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A similarly tight-lipped dealmaking process led to Meta’s announcement of its largest data center to date in rural Northeast Louisiana. The project, dubbed Hyperion, will cover six square miles of Richland Parish. The tax breaks granted to Meta, again without public input, total more than $3 billion.

For his part, Landry kept quiet about the agreements until the last possible moment. But once the ink was dry, he was downright boastful about them. “I have no problem letting the people in the state of Louisiana decide whether what we put together was worth it,” he said, telling the Times-Picayune that he was motivated by pragmatism and a desire to drag his economically underperforming state into the future. “You don’t do these deals in the public,. At some point, you have to give the people elected to lead this state the opportunity to lead.”

Since Louisiana’s have a habit of ending up in prison, some level of backroom chicanery is to be expected in the Bayou State. At the moment, Landry’s NDA-heavy approach is largely a Louisiana phenomenon. But the ethically dubious practice of burying public-private deals under NDAs could be put to use elsewhere. 

Landry’s down-low dealmaking offers a blueprint for post-Trump Republicans looking to push through potentially unpopular agreements and policies, including those involving data centers and artificial intelligence. While the president may no longer be able to harness the support he enjoyed by virtue of being loud-mouthed himself, his followers can work quietly to carry on his project under a blanket of keep-quiet agreements — springing them on the public when the deals have already been made.

The post We’ll never know the art of Jeff Landry’s Meta, SpaceX deals appeared first on Salon.com.

It seems like a million years ago now, but there was a moment back in 2024, in the heat of that weird presidential campaign, when everyone was talking about the radical blueprint for Donald Trump’s restoration. Project 2025 was so extreme, in fact, that his campaign had Trump disavow it publicly. He usually said that he hadn’t read the plan and didn’t intend to, but at times he went further. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20, 2024, Trump said, “Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25 . . . They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right, and they come up — I don’t know what the hell it is, it’s Project 25 . . . and then they read some of the things, and they are extreme, seriously extreme.”

Trump probably wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t read it, but his advisers obviously believed he should keep his distance from the plan, which didn’t poll well, and when people found out what was in it, they were appalled. Project 2025 was a far-right manifesto, filled with the kind of pie-in-the-sky fantasies that denizens of conservative think-tanks had been churning out for decades in the hopes of influencing Republican administrations. 

One such organization, the Heritage Foundation, had been publishing “Mandate for Leadership,” its so-called policy guide, since 1981 and updating it as necessary. But Project 2025 was different from the group’s previous effort. This time, the Heritage Foundation had organized a formal transition operation, created training sessions, personnel lists and a day-one playbook for Trump to hit the ground running with a flurry of executive orders and personnel changes. 

This effort was largely guided by its co-author, Russell Vought, who served in the first Trump administration as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Having worked for years for the Republican Study Committee in the House, a group of far-right members dedicated to social conservatism, tax cuts and the destruction of the federal safety net, Vought was an experienced bureaucrat with a specific vision: to shrink the federal workforce and bring as much power under the direct auspices of the president as possible. As a self-described Christian nationalist, he also believed that the U.S. should espouse fundamentalist Christianity, and that the country has no obligation to engage in global initiatives that do not directly benefit its own people.

Vought was an active member of a group formed after the 2012 election called Groundswell, which included an eclectic group of influencers and activists such as Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and far-right political operative Steve Bannon, who had come to believe that Republicans needed to be much more radical in their methods and their goals. Seeing the federal workforce as nothing more than sinecures for dangerous liberals, Vought and his comrades planned mass firings under new rules such as Schedule F, which would reclassify thousands of federal workers as at-will employees, making them exempt from civil service protections. And if they could not be fired, he would make their lives so difficult that they would quit. As Vought famously explained:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

Vought believed that the way to secure a mandate for this agenda, even under Democratic presidents, was to cut the federal workforce so massively that the government would be unable to function beyond the most basic services. We will have to see just how well that works out for them in the future. But the destruction is already monumental.

In the months after Trump returned to the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wreaked havoc on the federal government. Thousands were fired and departments were shuttered, leaving chaos everywhere. That’s the tech-bro style. 

But Vought is a different breed. He is a patient and methodical destroyer. Vought believes that we are living in a “post-constitutional” time in which the “precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last 200 years” must be thrown off. And even while Trump’s presidency appears to be on the verge of collapsing from the weight of historically low poll numbers, Vought is quietly accomplishing his mission of comprehensive deregulation mostly under the radar. 

On Tuesday, the administration ended Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students, effectively allowing them to be bullied and discriminated against in America’s schools. But since this is a man who joyfully prescribes “trauma” as a political tactic, it’s not entirely surprising that his crusade would eventually reach schoolchildren.

Vought’s influence is also being felt on Capitol Hill. As the chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has made her role a centerpiece of her reelection campaign. For years, she has argued to Mainers that her value lies in the seniority and influence she yields. But Collins should think again: One of Vought’s primary strategies for securing the unitary executive is through confrontation with the legislative and judicial branches. That conflict is currently playing out in the courts. But under a supine GOP congressional majority that has been willing to cede the powers granted to them by the Constitution, he is winning — and making more moves. 

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According to the New York Times, an Oval Office meeting grew heated when Vought attempted to have the president rescind National Institutes of Health grants to universities that did not align with the MAGA agenda. Trump was on board with the idea, since it would have targeted Harvard University, an institution he sees as his enemy. After fierce pushback from members of both parties, the pair pulled back. But that reprieve could be temporary; conventional wisdom says they are likely to try again after the November midterms are over, when Vought’s new initiative to confront Congress begins in earnest.

Then, on Wednesday, Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., blocked a Democratic bill that would have stopped Vought’s recent pocket rescission of $810 million in domestic spending previously approved by Congress. (In a statement released days before the vote, Collins decried the move.) The money had been earmarked for programs focused on immigrants, refugees, civil rights, climate change and children. Johnson said the issue will likely have to be decided by the Supreme Court, which approved Vought’s rescissions in 2025 because they pertained to national security. These funds do not, but it won’t be surprising if the Court’s conservative majority, which has been largely sympathetic to the unitary executive theory, finds another reason to allow it.

If Vought and the administration were to win at the Supreme Court, Congress might as well just go part-time to approve presidential appointments, name post-offices and pass one big pile of money for the presidential monarch to spend as he pleases. Article I of the Constitution will be effectively dead.

Under Vought’s leadership, the damage to the federal government is already overwhelming, and it’s unclear if a Democratic congressional majority or administration will be able to fix it. But then, that’s part of the plan too. Trump’s presidency may be faltering, but Vought’s dream is being realized every single day.

The post Trump’s failure hides Project 2025 success appeared first on Salon.com.

Since moving to Italy from the U.S., I’ve noticed how much more spontaneous social interactions are here. It’s common for me to run into someone I know and have them invite me to coffee on the spot. Instead of receiving a text, I’m more likely to get a voice message or a phone call from someone I just met. But this is only true of the friends I’ve made here. When communicating with friends back home, I text them or send voice messages. But mostly, I do the dance of having to schedule a catch-up like it’s a work meeting. So when The Cut writer Kathleen Walsh published an essay recently about feeling like she should be able to cold call her friends, it resonated with me deeply. “In the past 20 years, a new social boundary seems to have calcified among people my age,” Walsh wrote. “It is no longer appropriate to pick up your phone and call your friend whenever you feel like it.”

In February 2026, a YouGov survey found that 68% of surveyed Americans said text messaging had replaced at least some of the phone calls they used to make. More than one-third of those surveyed said text messaging had replaced most of their calls. While there isn’t any data to quantify its frequency, as Walsh pointed out, if a phone call does happen, it’s becoming increasingly more common to text before you call. But in a time when loneliness has been declared a public health crisis, Americans are saying fewer words to each other, and it’s trendy to be nostalgic for the ’90s – why isn’t the friendly cold call making a comeback? 

There are a few reasons. Despite all the public discourse around loneliness and the need to connect, the cold call violates some of the communication norms we’ve spent decades developing. Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communications at the University of Kansas, said one reason is simply that phone calls are sometimes disruptive to people’s lives. “There are lots of reasons people shouldn’t or normatively don’t take phone calls, and they’re totally valid,” he said. For example, when someone is at work or in a public setting. In fact, Hall added, when mobile phones first became more widespread, there was a backlash against taking private calls in public. Texting first, to arrange a phone call, is now seen as the more polite approach. 

Adding to the phone-calls-may-be-disruptive argument, Hall said in today’s digital-heavy world, people are constantly being bombarded by notifications on their phones. A friendly cold call could be viewed as yet another interruption, and a demanding one. Then there’s another reason at play: humans love to screen phone calls. From the invention of the answering machine to caller ID, Hall said people “really enjoy” having the ability to control when, and whether, they answer the phone. 

“I think that the politeness norm is actually a sign of good relational practice to say that I’m respecting the fact that there are lots of times not to take a call, and I’m also going to show this person some respect by doing so,” Hall said. “But when we use texting to replace important, meaningful conversations, or long catch-ups, because we do not want to put the effort of time into maintaining our relationships, that I think, is the big loss.”

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That doesn’t necessarily mean this new social norm of having to text before you call has serious consequences, or that phone calls are the only way to maintain friendships. Throughout history, every new form of communication has generated some type of anxiety. The rise of phone calls once led people to worry about in-person interactions. However, Hall says he believes phone calls are better than texting when it comes to connecting meaningfully with people. But is there something lost when they no longer feel spontaneous?

“Most of our communication is spontaneous,” Matt Abrahams, a professor and author of “Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot,” said. “And good things happen in spontaneous communication.” He used small talk as an example, which can lead to a deeper understanding, deeper trust, and connection for people. “I do believe we miss out on things when we’re not allowing ourselves to have some of these spontaneous interactions.”

But for many people, a cold call from a friend or family member has become synonymous with an emergency. “A ringing phone now reads as an emergency, and most of us have been conditioned to meet surprise with a small spike of alarm,” Christa Smith, a psychologist in Georgia, said. Smith agreed, a pre-arranged call is “courteous,” but it has also turned connection into an appointment. “And appointments get postponed.” 

“Spontaneity is how a relationship says ‘I thought of you for no reason,’” she said. 

Beyond experts in communication, the trend of having to text before you call is also divisive. Melanie Tornroth, a 45-year-old working mom, said she absolutely expects people to text before calling first. “Receiving cold calls from friends and family is now a huge pet peeve of mine,” she said. “The only person I will cold call is my mom because I know she prefers it and will always answer the phone.” When someone calls her out of the blue, it can feel intrusive and give her a lot of anxiety. “I have so much on my plate on a daily basis,” she said. “If a family member or friend calls, I feel pressure to answer, but I am rarely just sitting around doing nothing with time to chat.”

Conversely, Jackie Domanus, a 44-year-old mom of three in California, prefers spontaneous phone calls. In fact, she is known for cold calling her friends. “I just call,” she told me. “I’ve stopped sending or answering texts for the most part; I’m just over it,” she added. Domanus emphasized that she works alone and misses people and their voices, which could be part of her don’t-text-just-call stance. “Call me, or it’s not that important,” she said.

 

Mary Westheimer, a 71-year-old in Phoenix, Arizona, also prefers phone calls over texts.  “Please do not text me to ask if you can call me,” she said.

For people who are tired of having to schedule calls with their friends, Smith suggested agreeing with two or three of your closest people that a text before a call is never needed. “Some people are anecdotally growing tired of having to schedule calls with friends,” she said. 

Kissy Black, a 50-something in Nashville, was one of those people. She said she and her daughter got into a habit of texting to schedule a call, which “created some perceived hurdles to keeping in touch.” But recently, they instituted a “cold call rule” allowing them to call each other anytime, day or night, without texting first.

“Now, when one of us calls, we just say ‘cold call, cold call,’ which immediately makes us both laugh and kicks off our conversation,” Black said. “As a result, we are talking at least 300% more than we used to.”

As for me, any friends or family reading this can expect more cold calls. And if you can’t answer, no problem. I am personally team bring the friendly cold call back.

The post The quiet cost of scheduling every conversation appeared first on Salon.com.

It was a bit tense watching Jack Smith get grilled before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. During his testimony, the former special counsel defended himself against accusations of partisanship in his failed effort to prosecute President Donald Trump two years ago. The chaos of the current era has made the 2024 presidential campaign feel like it was a decade ago, but it’s important to recall that Smith secured indictments on Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the other on his alleged mishandling of government records, including the classified documents he had stored at Mar-a-Lago. Both cases fell apart as Trump was elected to a second term.

Now Republicans, including Trump, are pushing for Smith himself to be prosecuted. This wasn’t the first time he has been dragged before Congress so lawmakers could get the soundbites needed for Fox News hits. But to his credit, Smith doubled down and said he would prosecute the president all over again.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” Smith said during the hearing, adding, “If asked whether to prosecute a former president today, based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”

Republicans took the opportunity to lob insults and accusations at Smith for hours. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz accused him of bringing “the Department of Justice into disrepute,” while Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy was more graphic, telling Smith “You make me want to throw up in my mouth.”

Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri claimed Smith “will go down as a total dirtbag” and also attempted to corner the former special prosecutor into possible perjury, accusing him of attending an Atlanta Hawks game in 2024 as a pretext for meeting with Fani Willis, the local district attorney who prosecuted Trump in Georgia. But Schmitt — or some staffers who will soon be looking for employment — apparently confused the Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes — which are different teams, as it turns out. Smith had watched the Hawkeyes play in Maryland. (As a non-sports person, I confess I might have made the same mistake, except I check my facts.) Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., did Schmitt the favor of pointing out his error, quipping “Perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully.” 

This only seemed to further anger Schmitt, who is reportedly angling to be Vice President JD Vance’s running mate in 2028.

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The whole bit, including a poster board of Smith’s blown-up text messages, was amazingly lazy, even for this Congress. It seemed as if some aide suffering from conspiracy-brain didn’t bother to check the details, or maybe they asked ChatGPT for help. Still, getting the facts wrong probably won’t hurt Schmitt. He got in the abusive remarks that will earn him MAGA’s seal of approval.

Not surprisingly, Democrats also defended Smith. “The aspersions cast on Mr. Smith nonstop are petty, personal and political,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said. Cory Booker of New Jersey claimed “This is gaslighting of the American people,” telling Smith, “I am so sorry that they’re attempting to put investigators on trial while ignoring the extraordinary conduct that that they are duty bound to really investigate.”

Maybe this all seems like theatrics, more fodder for the cable news spectacle. But the stakes for Smith are real, and this charade could also carry severe consequences for Americans. Since the moment he returned to office, Trump has worked overtime to take down his enemies. That hasn’t been too successful yet — emphasis on yet — but this is about much more than potentially putting Smith behind bars. By playing the victim, the president benefits from controlling the narrative, and perhaps rewriting history, which becomes even more critical as we approach the midterms and he continues promoting the lie he won the 2020 election. So Smith continuing to give the president and his MAGA trolls the proverbial finger isn’t just satisfying — it’s necessary. 

I’m not a Smith fanboy, though I certainly admire him for serving as a specialist prosecutor investigating war crimes in the Kosovo War. It feels misguided to turn public figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci or Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., into heroes or thirst traps just for doing their jobs. Still, it’s worth noticing when someone in the hot seat does more than pay lip service to the idea of a just and accountable society, knowing that the consequences extend much further than their own personal freedom.

The post We all need Jack Smith’s defiance right now appeared first on Salon.com.

In “Primetime” — Lance Oppenheim’s psychological crime thriller about the rapid ascent and swift fall of the “Dateline NBC” segment “To Catch a Predator,” and its host, Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) — television is a complex ecosystem where hyperawareness is paramount to survival. To prosper in this broadcast biome, close surveillance is key. Attack too early and risk being mauled; retreat and risk going hungry, growing weaker and becoming the prey. 

Though a skilled hunter, even a reporter like Hansen can’t go up against an apex animal like ABC’s “Lost” when it comes to ratings and audience share. To assert dominance and secure his spot on the food chain, Hansen needs to observe the waters and hook a big fish. His cohort Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) — the founder of Perverted-Justice, the vigilante group in charge of luring the “Dateline” prey — believes he’s found just that in an internet chat room.

“This is big, the biggest,” Erck says. “A whale.” Oppenheim douses their conversation in blue, with the eerie artificial light of a computer illuminating both men from below. The effect erases the color from Pattinson’s eyes, fusing his iris and pupil into a black circle, like a shark that’s caught the scent of fresh blood. Emboldened by his animalistic observation, Hansen decides to weaponize Erck’s information and go in for the kill.

To anyone who’s spent even a modicum of time online in the last 20 years, this attack pattern looks familiar. In the World Wide Web’s wilderness, casual users, corporations and government intelligence alike collect data about everyone and everything, building digital footprints and algorithmic profiles that sit hidden just behind our newsfeeds. Gen Z and digital natives grew up in this extreme surveillance state, emboldened by controversial legislation like the Patriot Act and USA Freedom Act, which allowed unprecedented surveillance as a post-9/11 counter-terrorism measure. And while younger people have been raised in a vigilantly monitored world, that doesn’t make the lack of privacy any less disconcerting.

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Certainly, that’s why Gen Z has taken to “Primetime,” a film set in an era most of the generation is too young to remember firsthand, but one that has had a critical impact on their lives and well-being. In 2006, “To Catch a Predator” sat at the intersection of the surveillance state, militaristic nationalism motivated by the backdrop of the Iraq War, and digital culture proliferated by cellphones that were affordable and could accompany us anywhere. By the time Gen Z bled into Gen Alpha, all of these things morphed into one well-oiled machine, a self-regulating ouroboros. Though we may all be steeped in this reality, it’s unsurprising Gen Z would feel cheated out of a life where surveillance wasn’t constant — where they didn’t have to wonder whether a person on the train is scrolling on their phone or covertly taking a photo. 

Naturally, “Primetime” has become a point of fascination for zoomers, who made up 69% of the film’s opening weekend audience. While younger viewers adore Pattinson and the movie’s distributor, A24, alike, it’s the film’s subject matter that’s driving their conversations. “Primetime” traces a straight line from today back to the mid-aughts, clarifying the connection between pivotal historical events and their contemporary consequences. And though I didn’t find that the film actually said much about those events, it’s easy to see why so many people under 30 argue otherwise. Buzzy new films like “Primetime” rarely reflect the modern surveillance state’s inflection points as well as older media like “To Catch a Predator” can. But if Gen Z is really interested in retracing history’s steps to learn about surveillance culture, “Primetime” is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Whether or not that tip feels sharp depends largely on one’s relationship to our everyday insanity. Most zoomers likely grew up perceiving “To Catch a Predator” and Hansen through memes — chat logs removed from their disturbing context, or compilation videos of the show’s “funniest” moments. That perception in itself is upsetting, not only because it trivializes survivors’ experiences, but confirms just how much the show succeeded in turning criminal intent toward minors into entertainment. For those who already understood these inherent problems, “Primetime” doesn’t pose many new questions, which gives one the sickly feeling that the film is repeating some of Hansen and the show’s mistakes. For others, who are only beginning to understand “To Catch a Predator” as a planet that orbited the surveillance state’s blinding sun, Oppenheim’s film may be rife with new threads to pull. 

The film’s strongest narrative aspect in this regard is how accurately it reflects Perverted-Justice’s sting tactics, which made many “To Catch a Predator” cases unprosecutable or their evidence inadmissible by wading into entrapment. The team would hunt down potential predators in chat rooms and, in many instances, encourage prey to do things they were initially reticent to do or flat-out didn’t want to engage in. Occasionally, when the alleged predators would express their reluctance, the Perverted-Justice decoys would play mad or upset.

To build out a profile on their prey, the decoys would use chats to draw personal information out of their subjects. Furthermore, the on-camera interventions and arrests were largely faulty, too. Hansen wasn’t a cop; he never read anyone their rights. And the police lying in wait would greet the predator with unnecessary aggressive, martial force. The surveillance state is the primal wilderness, where anything goes, and “To Catch a Predator” employed the laws of the jungle: Identify, lure, attack, kill.

The methods are strangely akin to those employed in the concrete jungle, where badly behaved teens act with as much life-altering, brutal force as the characters in “Primetime.” If “To Catch a Predator” is the paradigm of reality television’s reflection of the surveillance state, the original “Gossip Girl” — which aired concurrently, however briefly, with Hansen’s show — is the prototype for the insidious ways surveillance is weaponized. That might sound like an offbeat comparison, but just because a teen soap is, well, a teen soap, doesn’t mean it has no cultural merit. 

“Gossip Girl” is an especially ideal time capsule for understanding how cellphones and all digital technology became useful tools for constant civilian monitoring. For anyone unfamiliar, the series follows a group of privileged teenagers living in New York’s Upper East Side, whose lives are chronicled by the anonymous titular blogger. Gossip Girl knows all of their desires and vices, their wins and their foibles. “She” walks among these spoiled brats, yes, but also relies on a steady stream of tips from readers. Photos, videos, intimate details; any hearsay is fair game, and Gossip Girl will go to the ends of the Earth to prove it— right up to the point where it’s revealed that Gossip Girl was actually not a “she” at all, but a male classmate.

This is all deliciously compelling on its own, but the series’ writers do a great job of emphasizing that these takedowns are products of the world we live in now. Gossip is currency, and anyone looking to climb the social ladder can use it to pay their way to the top — at the cost of their soul, of course. Characters blackmail one another left and right, sometimes with criminal intent. And while it’s entertaining to watch, the real marvel is how prescient the series is today.

 

“Gossip Girl” burst onto the scene in 2007 just as the cellphone was becoming the staple accessory for every teenager in America. The iPhone was four months old when the show premiered, and the series’ writers keenly understood the technology’s wicked possibilities. Surveillance was no longer a military or government tactic; it was for everyone with a wireless connection.

And while, like “To Catch a Predator,” one might argue that “Gossip Girl” encouraged this phenomenon by turning surveillance into entertainment, I’d say the show more often depicts its awful consequences. While the teenage characters already see the amateur espionage as part of their lives, the show’s adults are horrified by Gossip Girl and “her” web of tipsters. With age comes sagacity, and that transition sits parallel to the zoomers’ fervent response to “Primetime.” 

The surveillance state perseveres by making itself invisible, an incontrovertible part of everyday life, especially for those who have grown up inside it. Sometimes, it’s much easier to see the boundary lines between the material and the intangible when someone or something points them out. “To Catch a Predator” and “Gossip Girl” are two sides of the same coin; the former an arm of dystopia, the latter a critic. “Primetime” may try to play both of these sides to its detriment. But what it lacks in searing critique of its subject matter, “Primetime” makes up for by showing viewers of all ages where older media and younger generations collide. Often, the best way to understand the world now is by revisiting its past, warts and all.

The post Why Gen Z sees itself in “Primetime” appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump has never been one for subtlety, so it follows that his taxpayer-funded “public service announcement” instructing Americans to love him would literally feature a gospel choir singing the words “Love Me.” Along with many of his closest allies, the president is a fan of pseudo-science, so perhaps he believes the repetition will have a hypnotic effect on viewers, reversing through pop psychology trickery the free-fall that has beset his approval ratings.

This is just one of three separate ads, totaling $1.5 million so far, that feel less like a sincere effort to persuade voters and more like an expensive effort by the White House to soothe the temperamental 80-year-old. Either way, what’s indisputable is that Trump is becoming increasingly frustrated that the chicanery he has used throughout his life no longer seems to be working.

The president has perhaps the most staggering track record of defrauding Americans of any hustler in the country’s 250-year history. His glib assertions of being the greatest genius who knows more than any other person about any subject under the sun have served him well for decades, and his 34 felony fraud convictions and civil fraud cases paint a picture of a man who always seems to find marks who will believe his transparent, self-aggrandizing lies.

Before he won the White House in 2016, “The Apprentice” managed to convince millions of viewers that a man who managed to lose nearly a billion dollars was some great businessman. Even when Trump argued that he, unlike medical experts, understood the salutary effects of household cleaners to treat Covid-19 patients, his followers stayed by his side, some of them putting their trust in MAGA quackery over science-based healthcare like vaccines. The cult of personality built around his persona of presidential greatness remains a puzzling swindle. 

But on Monday in the Oval Office, Trump did what he usually does these days when presented with a microphone: He whined at length at how he isn’t getting the love he believes he deserves. 

“Nobody talks about all the incredible things,” the president complained, saying America has “the best economy we’ve ever had.” He added, laughably, that people are “twice as wealthy” as they were as two years ago under the Biden administration. Then he repeated his false promise that, if Republicans win the November midterms, the government would issue a “dividend” check of $5,000 to every adult American. 

It may be easy to laugh at this stuff, but it’s worth taking a moment to remember that Trump has always been this way. Polls, however, suggest that Americans are finally waking up. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found his approval rating at a dismal 32% — hitting, in other words, the very bedrock of his MAGA base. Worse for him, only 13% of Americans, according to an analysis by G. Elliott Morris, are willing to tell a pollster they buy the president’s $5,000 check lie, showing that even people who claim to approve of him can’t be bothered to trust him any longer. 

People could be learning from experience. As Catherine Rampell of the Bulwark detailed, the $5,000 check promise is only the latest in a long list of false second-term promises that Americans would be receiving fat checks from the government. Her “partial list” includes these examples:

• $5,000 stimulus checks via a “DOGE dividend” (February 2025)
• $2,000 stimulus checks via a “rebate” or tariff “dividend” (July 2025, August 2025, November 2025, December 2025, February 2026)
• Checks of indeterminate value that would redirect money that would have been spent on Affordable Care Act subsidies (November 2025)
• $500 Obamacare “rebate” checks (September 2026)
• $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans win the midterms (yesterday) 

Thankfully, there now appears to be a limit to the number of times a fraudster can promise the check is in mail before even some MAGA voters start to wonder if they’re being had. Most clung to two big reasons to justify their vote in 2024: the president’s promises to lower prices and end foreign wars. Trump broke both in a dramatic fashion, starting a war with Iran and a trade war with, well, much of the world, both of which have escalated inflation, particularly of fuel prices. Even his most ardent followers are reminded of his lies every time they buy groceries or gas. Running ads that repeat his failed promises only serve to remind people of the broken trust. 

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Beyond bigger propaganda, Trump has no other ideas for how to change the situation. On top of the ads, last week the White House launched “Trump TV,” which was billed as an alternative to cable news but mostly runs pro-Trump content so poorly produced that it makes AI slop seem compelling. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye chronicled, the viewership started at a paltry 8,000 people and, by the next day, had faded to fewer than 1,000. It would have likely been even lower if it weren’t for journalists watching it to report on the emptiness of the enterprise. 

Perhaps the surest sign that these efforts are more about placating Trump than persuading voters is the his travel schedule. The president is avoiding visiting states with close congressional races, where he risks being shunned by Republican candidates trying to distance themselves from his unpopularity. Instead, he is mostly sticking to deep red states like Alabama and Oklahoma, where they can still scare up enough MAGA diehards to fill stadiums and, crucially, give Trump hours of reassurance that he’s still got fans. On Tuesday, he spoke at an event heralding our era as a “golden age” due to AI. As a political maneuver, his words were baffling, as most Americans deplore the economy and loathe AI. But being surrounded by billionaires while applauding himself with gold-related talk is Trump’s happy zone, and keeping the president there appears to be all that matters to his West Wing staff. 

For the worrywarts of the left, there remains plenty to be concerned about. Ahead of the midterms, Democrats are facing intense gerrymandering and voter suppression, which could blunt the wins currently projected by the polls. Even if the party were to take both the Senate and the House, Trump will still occupy the Oval Office for two more years. Armed with the criminal immunity granted him by the Supreme Court, he has no reason to stop blatantly flouting the law in a myriad of ways, ranging from his attacks on the Kennedy Center and prosecuting the Iran war without congressional approval to his own mysterious swelling wealth. 

Still, even though it’s almost certainly illegal, there is an upside to Trump using taxpayer money for ego-gratifying TV ads and propaganda. The more time he spends on his futile efforts to restore the glory days when only half of Americans opposed him, the less energy he has for the work of actually governing. Everything he’s done in that arena has been an unmitigated disaster. Keeping Trump distracted from making serious decisions is a good thing for us all.

The post Trump can’t trick Americans into loving him appeared first on Salon.com.

The Merikins are the descendants of formerly enslaved African Americans who fought alongside the British during the War of 1812. At the war’s end, the British granted these fighters and their families land in Trinidad and Tobago as part of their freedom.

The third verse of the “Star-Spangled Banner” served as a threat to African Americans who sought liberation — particularly those fighting against the United States like the Merikins — from Francis Scott Key, an unabashed racist whose racism influenced his professional legacy.

After years of playing it at sporting events out of choice or paid patriotism, Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for it:

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color . . . There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder,” Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview following his now-infamous kneel.

Following a lengthy and seemingly self-imposed silence, as others sought to narrate his protest and commitment to social justice, Kaepernick has reemerged in the public square on an impressive press run promoting his book, “The Perilous Fight,” to whoever will listen, including the platforms of Karen Hunter, Katie Couric, Van Lathan, Trevor Noah, and “The View.”

Kaepernick’s book discusses his life up to this point, from his childhood and adolescence to his current justice activities and life with his wife, Nessa Diab, and daughter. He takes time to explain the multifaceted origins of his activism, from the challenges of being a Black boy raised by white parents, to his experiences as a Black athlete in a space predicated on controlling Black bodies, to his awakening through literature by Black scholars and activists.

But like many Black people who were awakened by the murders of Black people by the police, Kaepernick was alarmed by the December 2015 murder of Mario Woods by San Francisco police. For refusing to drop his knife, Woods was shot twenty times by police. Police justified the killing, saying they feared for their safety, but the body camera footage said otherwise.

Kaepernick watched the Mario Woods video at his parents’ home, as his mother questioned Woods’ role in his murder. Upon reflecting on his attempt to explain to her the gravity of the situation and her lack of response, Kaepernick gained clarity:

“. . . the encounter helped bring even more clarity to the last twenty-eight years of my life, and why I was always frustrated and unsatisfied during my childhood when issues concerning race arose,” Kaepernick writes. “It was obvious my parents loved me as their son, but accepting their son was Black and dealing with that reality was not of much concern. Hell, I had white boys call me ni**er and try to tie me to a tree, yet I never told my parents. Even my mother told me I looked like a thug when I wore cornrows.”

Woods’ murder, followed by the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and the not-guilty judgment for the officer who murdered Freddie Gray, compelled Kaepernick into protest at the start of the 2016 NFL season. While Kaepernick’s protest garnered acknowledgment and some support, it also led to his banishment from the NFL and the hijacking and appropriation of his protest, along with critique and ridicule of perceived inaction. 

But Kaepernick pursued racial justice work: from the Know Your Rights Camps (KYRC) to the KYRC Autopsy Initiative, both founded with his wife and partner, radio personality Nessa Diab:

“I was hearing criticisms accusing me of just being an angry Black man without a plan. I wanted to buttress my protests on the field with action on the ground, to build an infrastructure that could start effective change where it might make a difference . . . I didn’t want to look back on this time and agonize that I should have and could have done more.”

Equally fascinating was his pulling back the curtain, so to speak, on the culture of football, particularly the NFL, where the expectation for players is to follow orders and “shut up and play.” He explained this by detailing various interactions with teammates, coaches, team executives, and even sports agents.

“Football breeds a culture of obedience. On the field, these guys were major alpha males — the biggest, baddest, most dominant dudes on the planet. But once they stepped off the field, they were just employees waiting for the boss to tell them what to do.”

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But the culture of the league also forced him to examine the implicit racism as early as his participation in the NFL Combine, asking himself, “Do all of those A’s over sixteen years of schooling plus the 3rd highest grade on the Wonderlic not mean anything? Is their stated concern over my intelligence genuine, or is there something . . . having to do with racist stereotypes?”

While all his experiences up to 2016 were instructive, they couldn’t buffer the shock and disgust of the backlash to his protest. While he did receive support, he couldn’t anticipate Nate Boyer’s attempts to profit from the protest and steal credit from Kaepernick teammate Eric Reid for the idea to kneel. Kaepernick couldn’t anticipate the Islamophobia and misogyny aimed at his wife. Nor could he anticipate the president of the United States calling him and his colleagues “sons of bit*hes.”

Who could possibly be prepared for any of that? Then again, maybe Kaepernick should have been.

His two near-death experiences made him fearless. Overcoming numerous challenges in his football career made him steadfast. Welcoming his wife into his life, and the growth that came with it, grounded him. His childhood experiences with whiteness shaped him. Therefore, when it was time to take a stand for Black people, he didn’t ask for permission, because he was already empowered to do so. And a Black athlete empowered to stand for Black people is an athlete who should expect to be persecuted, like Curt Flood, whom Kaepernick mentioned.

His protest didn’t make white people comfortable. There were no performative photo-ops with politicians or any ride-alongs with police. There was confrontation. I suspect he anticipated some of the whitelash. After all, Kaepernick didn’t appear shocked that his white family was embarrassed by his protest, with his mother calling it “disgraceful.” What he may not have anticipated was the extent of the cover Black players and notable Black folks gave the NFL.

 

I wonder if Kaepernick anticipated hearing a player tell him he needed “to go ask my owner if it’s okay to protest.” Did he anticipate Dr. Harry Edwards being co-opted by the 49ers, Ray Lewis by the Ravens, and the players’ coalition by team owners? Did he anticipate Michael Vick suggesting that he cut his hair to get a job in the NFL? Did he anticipate being sold out by Jay-Z for personal gain, followed by hit pieces and being dissed in a freestyle many years later?

The truth is that all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk, and if he wasn’t aware before the protest, he certainly is now. 

But Kaepernick doesn’t leave readers feeling that his work was in vain, or that he is without hope. He shares that his family, his wife and daughter, provide him with a newfound motivation to make justice a reality for Black people and all other people of color. He closed his book saying, with a Clarion call of sorts to his readers:

“Our children can’t develop to their full potential if they are constantly worried about what awaits them outside the doors of their home, or if they are on edge because of the fear of ICE agents invading their schoolyard or playground . . . What are we doing to our nation’s children when we are constantly undeserving their needs and sending them into schools that feel like war zones? They can never reach their peak in such circumstances. We must consider these factors when we think about how we are policing our communities and educational environments. We all want the same things for our children.”

But it begs the question that we all must answer: We all want the same things for our children, but do we all want the same things for each other? Colin Kaepernick has decided to move forward in hope. He’s asking us to do the same.

The post Colin Kaepernick knows what kneeling cost — and he’d do it again appeared first on Salon.com.

When prolific filmmaker Werner Herzog first met the Chaplin twins, Freda and Greta, the internet as we know it did not exist. If it had, it’s likely that the mystifying story of these sisters — who had a brief flash of fame in the ’80s when their neighbor sought a restraining order against them after a sexual dalliance with the two of them turned hostile — would have already run its course. According to reports, Freda and Greta not only looked and dressed alike, but spoke in unison, as if they shared a single brain. No doubt the TikTok amateur detectives would’ve momentarily shifted from true crime to the Chaplin twins, trying their damnedest to debunk what only the sisters could truly understand. One can’t possibly grasp the closeness two people share until they’ve experienced firsthand the joy and indescribable pain that come with the kind of enmeshment written in fate’s codex.

Though to his credit, Herzog tried his best. In his memoir, “Every Man for Himself and God Against All,” he describes tracking down the Chaplin twins with a newspaper photograph of the building they lived in. “You could have folded a picture of them, and the two halves would’ve matched,” Herzog writes. He watched them vacuum together, walking side by side with four hands on the machine at once until they got stuck between two chairs, sending them into a tizzy. Trying to open a can of sardines could’ve gravely injured them had the twins not gotten into a screaming match in the process. Ever the humanist, fascinated by ordinary people taking on otherwise herculean tasks to the point of obsession, Herzog resolved decades ago to make a film inspired by the sisters. He even had a title.

“Bucking Fastard,” Herzog’s long-gestating, extraordinary feature born from his time with the Chaplin twins, takes its name from an obscenity they shouted in court while on trial for the restraining order — a slip of the tongue allegedly uttered at the same time. History contends whether or not this really happened. But Herzog’s film makes it, and everything else, seem entirely possible. Screening at this year’s New York Film Festival, “Bucking Fastard” is a loaded cannon, currently waiting for a distributor to light the fuse to send Jean and Joan Holbrooke (Kate and Rooney Mara, respectively) soaring hand in hand into a world desperately in need of their peculiar wisdom. 

Playing versions of the Chaplins, the Holbrooke sisters share shades of classic Herzog characters while being quite unlike any of the eccentrics he’s brought to life before. Set in the present day, the sisters feel out of step with time, as if a glitch in the system spawned them here, letting them observe the world without understanding what it’s like to really live in it. As such, Jean and Joan are the only people who truly understand one another. But having a companion who sees everything the same way we do does not necessarily equate to love. Either sister’s sense of self is fundamentally rooted in the other. Their crippling codependence is alienating, as if there really were only one of them.

As Herzog moves the sisters between reality and film’s dreamy latter half, he plunges into the fizzy static that comprises their cosmic connection, examining their solitude as only he can. “Bucking Fastard” is a remarkable exploration of loneliness that only decades of tender rumination and appreciation could provide. For the wistful, lovelorn loner, it’s an imperative reminder that being attached at the hip can still be isolating, no matter how much two people think alike.

Herzog impresses this notion from the very beginning: A dream shared by Joan and Jean, in which the sisters stand in a corridor flanked by caged birds. “We could not be sure we saw the same birds,” they recall. “Only that there were cages on both sides.” The introduction sits right between poetic and blunt, and this same small, temporal crevice is where the Holbrooke sisters spend their time. Jean and Joan’s shared existence would otherwise make their days dull and predictable, but their bizarre circumstances let them see beyond their own purview and into someone else’s, even if only for a blip. They revel in the fascination they stir. Still, other people’s reactions to their similarity only remind the sisters of the bond they can’t break. Their gift is a curse. That’s the funny thing about love: No matter how perfect it is — no matter how much it seems like it’s written in the stars — there will always be the suspicion, somewhere in the back of your mind, that life might have something else to offer.

I’m at a point in my own life where much of my time is consumed by this very thought, facing forks in the road that feel more like cliffs. At 32, I like to feel fairly confident that, when it comes to relationships, I know the difference between love and comfort. But then something will happen that reminds me of life’s sheer unpredictability, and that matters of the heart are purely unknowable. After years of certainty, I’m no longer sure that true love is someone who knows you to the point of an echo. Is such sheer, universal familiarity the root of love — the kind of connection that everyone from Keats to Keaton wrote about — or does it trap you in one place, stunting your growth? How can anyone live like this, so doubtful about what is right and wrong? This is what leaps of faith are for, sure. But eventually, you reach an age where you put more emphasis on faith than the leap itself. If pleasant contentment is guaranteed if you just stay put, why take the risk?

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So much of Herzog’s career has been about weighing the hazards of happiness. Whether he’s challenging Fitzcarraldo (and himself) to lift a 320-ton steamship over a mountain, revealing the tragedy of Nosferatu’s immortality, or illuminating the perils of a life in nature, Herzog has dedicated his life’s work to pondering what we’ll do for our passions. In this way, “Bucking Fastard” feels like the culmination of it all. As the film progresses, Herzog intimately considers humanity’s relationship to the insurmountable. Could there be a place, somewhere in this vast Earth, where Joan and Jean don’t have to sacrifice their codependent sisterly bond to enjoy life’s pleasures?

As soon as they begin to wonder, the Holbrooke sisters — almost imperceptibly — begin to drift apart before snapping back in place. But maybe that’s progress. It could be enough. Perhaps this existence is more about riding the ebb and flow than it is mapping the course.

I’d be remiss not to heap praise on the sisters Mara, who bring something to the screen that I haven’t seen in quite some time. Their bond is, no surprise, electric. But it’s their palpable trust in one another that’s staggering. Always in the same frame, they exude a preternatural comfort that extends beyond familial ties and speaks to their shared life paths. Both Rooney and Kate are keenly aware of how petrifying it can be to be perceived, and how galvanizing it can be as well, and they bring both senses to their shared performance. It’s a sight to behold. For what “Bucking Fastard” lacks in Herzog’s early directorial style, it makes up for by focusing its lens on the magic happening in front of it. It’s like watching stars being sewn into the fabric of the universe.

 

Naturally, the Mara connection is the selling point here. But it’s also what grounds Herzog’s very airy, funny film. Every time the filmmaker’s typically unconventional ideas threaten to tilt the movie too far askew, the sisters bring “Bucking Fastard” back on the straight and narrow. (Well, as straight and narrow as a film about two horny, completely in-sync sisters can be.) They beautifully elucidate Herzog’s complex notions of loneliness, reminding us that the heart’s desire to cling to something familiar and safe can also be its undoing. Such closeness is inherently limiting, even when it’s ideal, too. “Bucking Fastard” relishes those contradictions, supposing that there might be some version of life where they can coexist in harmony. Herzog doesn’t have the answer to that question, and he doesn’t pretend to. He only knows that it’s enough to wonder.

“Bucking Fastard” screens from Wednesday, September 30, at the New York Film Festival. The film is currently seeking distribution.

The post In Werner Herzog’s “Bucking Fastard,” two can be as lonely as one appeared first on Salon.com.

Certain obvious questions arise from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington this past week, a spectacle that one observer has described as “diplotainment” rather than actual diplomacy. Exactly how much did Donald Trump abase himself in service to a temporary and transactional friendship with the dictatorial leader of a nation that is, at least by conventional standards, America’s principal strategic enemy? 

No one knows; I am tempted to surmise that Trump doesn’t know himself. The man who in sunnier times for his regime enjoyed calling himself “your favorite president” does not seem to be his own favorite president these days. Trump almost visibly glowed with delight when Xi praised the quality of service and attention to detail of his White House visit. “Everything is done to the highest order of perfection, and there is thought in every little detail,” the Chinese president said through a translator. “And it’s greatly appreciated.”

You could describe that as the meaningless courtesies of routine statecraft, but it also suggested a high-flying hotel guest offering his compliments to the concierge: The eggs this morning were entirely delicious. And the way your people turn down the sheets at night: exquisite!

If we could somehow remove ourselves from the anguish and destruction caused by Trump’s improvised policies (which resemble comic-book versions of Big Brother’s “Two Minutes Hate” from the film version of “1984”) and his aggressively stupid public persona, we might be able to perceive some pathos in his predicament. He cannot escape from a situation he believed he had created and felt he could control: He is the massively unpopular elected leader of a rapidly collapsing superpower, whose downward slide he promised to reverse but has only accelerated, perhaps to the point of terminal velocity.

Trump visibly and hungrily longs for things he cannot have: the alleged greatness of the mythological American past, rendered as white supremacist schlock inherited third hand from the more vigorous fascist movements of the last century; the enforced adulation and obligatory public spectacle of a totalitarian regime such as Xi’s China or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea; most of all, perhaps, his own youth as a brash Manhattan philanderer and unstoppable political renegade, when he didn’t fall asleep in public or stumble around awkwardly with an unexplained contraption under his clothing.

To consider such matters is not a distraction; it begins to point us toward the larger and more painful questions behind the Xi-Trump pseudo-summit. It surprised literally no one that the two leaders negotiated no new agreements on regulating A.I. (or “Super Intelligence,” in Trump’s self-parodying rebrand), the status of Taiwan, the sporadic trade war between the two nations or ending the war with Iran and restarting the global flow of Middle East oil. No mention was made of Trump’s vaporware claims last May that the Chinese had agreed to buy hundreds of Boeing aircraft and $10 billion worth of U.S. beef and soybeans, but Xi promised to send two pandas from China’s breeding facility to the Atlanta zoo. So much winning. It’s impossible to calculate.

In large part, the absolute nothingness of this summit reflects the fact that China is already winning across the board and Xi needed nothing from Trump beyond the legitimation provided by a diplotainment spectacle “to the highest order of perfection.” As China scholars Nicholas Bequelin and Yaqiu Wang write in a Foreign Policy analysis published before the summit, over the first 19 months of Trump’s second term, the geopolitical “balance of power has shifted in Beijing’s favor”:

China has weathered the trade war, narrowed the technology gap, tightened its leverage over critical supply chains, increased pressure on Taiwan, and deepened ties with Russia and much of the global south.

Contrary to more Sinophobic commentators, they argue that China’s ruthlessly pragmatic leadership is not interested in dominating the world, or at least not in the same way postwar America did. But it does have a long-term agenda, they write, which includes breaking the global dependence on U.S.-centric financial institutions, discrediting democracy and furthering a historical process Xi has described as “the rise of the East and the decline of the West.”

I don’t disagree with any of that, but the most important aspect of Bequelin and Wang’s analysis gets a little buried beneath a forest of impeccably organized policy details. Xi has no need to strike an overtly aggressive posture and can afford to cosplay friendship with Trump because “the West,” or at least its greatest military and economic power, is doing a terrific job of declining all on its own. To borrow the nostrum attributed to Napoleon, the Chinese president is smart enough not to interrupt an opponent while he’s making a mistake. 

It may take generations — if there are any future generations — to measure the scale of America’s self-inflicted damage, which goes well beyond material issues into the realm of psychology or perhaps spirit. (If it’s pretentious to use the Hegelian term Geist, it still fits.) It remains astonishing, not to mention upsetting and enraging, that in the face of a global climate crisis that has already caused millions of deaths and is obvious to nearly everyone on the planet, the U.S. has deliberately chosen to double down on fossil fuels while “China is consolidating its worldwide dominance in batteries, solar, and EVs,” as Bequelin and Wang write. 

Chinese solar panels and batteries, often offered at steeply discounted prices, are revolutionizing transit and energy issues in many poorer countries, beginning to break the expensive and damaging addiction to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the U.S. has largely abandoned or dismantled its foreign aid programs aimed at fostering economic development, public health and education, while doing its level best to destroy its own reputation as a multiracial secular republic rooted in the rule of law. Faced with America’s spectacular self-own (which didn’t start with Trump, to be clear), who can blame people in the Global South for beginning to suspect that the tradeoff between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” was never as straightforward as they were led to believe?

Despite the widespread anger and disillusionment of Trump’s second term — an encouraging trend, to be clear — it’s still too easy for Americans to duck the biggest and most glaring question of all: To paraphrase one of the greatest works of postmodern angst, how did we get here? It no longer feels remotely adequate (if it ever did) to suggest that angry, vicious people accidentally elected an angry, vicious president who is pursuing a self-destructive and nihilistic agenda, and that at some future date our national sanity and our “indispensable” role in world affairs will be reasserted. 

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We tried that, remember? It didn’t work. Perhaps, from some great historical remove, Joe Biden’s presidency will appear noble and tragic. But it was also doomed, trapped in a vision of the past every bit as delusional as the MAGA fantasy, and nearly as damaging. The Biden regime’s self-appointed mission of enforcing a “rules-based order” involved pretending that the world had not changed, that America was still widely beloved and admired, that our so-called republic had not bred and nurtured Donald Trump and that he did not embody its bottomless greed, its gleeful ignorance, its wounded and flatulent national pride.

And so we arrive at the final conundrum of the Trump-Xi summit, and our president’s stopped-clock tendency to stumble upon hard truths. In his inimitable ass-backward fashion, Trump has discerned that the “free world” has become a meaningless abstraction and liberal democracy is in a state of systemic failure. He is correct about that, at least to a point. But he can provide no answer beyond prostrating himself before dictators and building monuments to himself in imitation of their grandiosity. If China’s repressive techno-state makes a distinctly unappealing candidate to lead the world into the future, America can only offer competing versions of an imaginary past. Hey, at least we got those pandas. 

The post Trump rolls over for China’s panda gift appeared first on Salon.com.

How hard is it to enjoy your husband’s company? According to content made for Christian conservative women, the heaviest cross they may bear is learning to feel affection for their spouses — or at least fake it well enough to buy some peace at home. That’s what I learned perusing the growing field of influencers offering would-be tradwives advice on how to make MAGA marriages work. 

“Normalize liking your husband,” reads a T-shirt sold by Savanna Stone, a 21-year-old self-proclaimed marriage expert who has been selling content preaching marital submission with the backing of shady far-right funders. At first blush, that may seem like a trifling concept. But, as Stone makes clear in her video content, her definition of liking or even loving a husband is both laborious and ascetic to an extreme. 

“Submission isn’t earned, it is given through the covenant of marriage,” Stone argued in one video. If a husband makes bad decisions, she said, it’s his wife’s fault because she isn’t submitting enough to give him the “confidence” to “take on the masculine role.” At her speech at the 2026 Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Conference, Stone encouraged women to marry young, as she did at 18. If they don’t, the risk is that they will “build their own life,” which she defined as “the death of marriage” because “two separate lives do not easily merge.”

Stone attracts a lot of attention for her tender age and lavishly produced content. But she’s just one of a burgeoning group of Christian influencers, most of them fairly young, who hold themselves out as experts on marriage. Some dress in fashionable and sexy clothes, like Stone, while others favor prairie-style dresses. Some are podcasters or video hosts; others offer online courses with names like “Wife School” or “Wife Academy.” But the message remains the same: They’re all speaking to the deep disappointment and frustration that many Christian women apparently feel in their husbands. The solution, though, only ever seems to be that wives must suck it up and submit even more to their men. 

Recently, Alex Clark, the host of TPUSA’s “Culture Apothecary” podcast, married another Christian influencer after what appears to have been a whirlwind engagement of only a few months. (As recently as May, she was lamenting her lack of viable marital prospects.) In the run-up to her nuptials, Clark presented her own “wife school” series that made marriage sound so miserable that a reasonable viewer’s only conclusion was to avoid being a wife altogether. 

Her first guest, Tilly Dillehay, got right down to business by scolding women who are “picky” because they want something from a husband beyond just a man who is “active in his faith” and makes enough money to “support a family.” Dillehay held herself out as an example of a woman who failed; she said she had dated men who were “flippant,” which appears to be her code word for fun. Instead, while she was “not immediately attracted” to her husband and he was not attracted to her, Dillehay married him anyway because he is a “steady man,” “serious” and not prone like she is to “joke around.” 

If that sounds like a formula for a miserable sex life, well, Dillehay didn’t seem to be concerned. “God has commanded you to participate” in sex with your husband, she said. An added incentive is that it’s “a way that you protect each other from infidelity.” 

“Half of the time,” she said, “it’s only in getting started that you even start to be in the mood.” What happens the other half of the time, she didn’t say. 

“Remember that there are a lot of women out there whose husbands are at the bar tonight and they’re not coming home,” Dillehay said. “There are a lot of women whose husbands are not going to work today.” It should be “enough,” she added, to have a husband who works and goes to church. 

Dillehay’s view is especially chilling in light of a recent Netflix documentary “The Death of the Pastor’s Wife,” which chronicled the suicide of Mica Miller, who spent years of trying to please the ever-escalating sexual demands of her minister husband. This expectation doesn’t appear to be the exception. As Dillehay showed in her interview with Clark, the view of sex as a wife’s duty is deeply ingrained in conservative Christian culture.

Stone has drawn attention by saying consent isn’t part of marriage. “Because when you say, ‘I do,’ you are committing to a lifetime of sex,” she explained in an interview earlier this year. “‘You didn’t fold your laundry. I’m not going to have sex with you. You didn’t unload the dishwasher. I’m not going to have sex with you.'” In citing these scenarios, Stone mocked women who withdraw from husbands sexually, calling it “manipulation,” or even a “sin,” to feel this way. 

Feminists might argue it’s hard to get in the mood with someone who doesn’t respect you. That opinion, though, carries no weight in MAGA circles. Still, there’s clearly a lot of resentment among some Christian conservative women about husbands who don’t do chores. Trying to stifle anger over this may be the single most common topic in Christian marital advice content.

In her “wife school” series, Clark interviewed her new sister-in-law, Katie Voetberg, a prairie dress-clad podcast host and mother of six, about how to avoid being a “nagging wife” and a “constant dripping faucet.” Voetberg’s heartwarming advice? Abandon all hope of having a responsible husband. If your husband forgets to pay the electric bill, she said, don’t remind him or hold him accountable. Instead, “light a candle” and hope that he learns from the “embarrassment” of his failure. Presumably, wives in these relationships don’t control the money, or they could pay it themselves. In cases where women do have a little more power, Voetberg recommended simply doing every chore a husband can’t be bothered with.

“He hates going to the dentist” or the doctor, she explained, so “I just put it on my to-do list” to make his appointment. Even when a husband won’t do “the stereotypical husband duties,” like mowing the lawn or taking out the trash, she continued, the wife should handle it and say, “it’s never going to hit [the husband’s] radar.”

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Other influencers agree. Millicent Sedra, a rising Christian-right influencer who serves as pastor at Echo Church in Sydney, Australia, recently preached that wives should “[s]top complaining about having to help your husband when our God-given role is to do exactly that.” Another of her sermons centered on Proverbs 21:9, which reads, “Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a nagging wife.” 

Laura Zachary, the creator of “Wife Academy,” which is billed as “a program that allows women to rebuild their marriages from the inside out, explained in a video why all household chores should fall to wives: “Women were created for a man. So a woman without a man to take care of, she becomes very empty, very soulless, very bitter.” But Zachary’s logic is flawed: If scrubbing toilets and washing dishes while their husbands kicked back on the couch was, in fact, women’s natural inclination, then she wouldn’t be able to charge women thousands of dollars for courses that reportedly teach them how to love a life of submission.

Often, these lessons in denial are framed for Christian women as a rebuttal to feminists. As a marketing ploy, that’s smart, but it’s not entirely honest. Feminists aren’t listening to this content, and even if they were to stumble across it, they would simply move on. It is not sparking “debate.” 

The real audience for these messages are Christian women, a fact that is itself telling. That these classes exist in the first place shows that, despite being told it’s their “natural” role, Christian women do not actually enjoy submitting to their husbands. If women were eager to have sex in their conservative Christian marriages, they wouldn’t need to be told it’s their duty to have it, like it or not. Clearly, many Christian women resent domestic inequality, or else they wouldn’t have to be told to suck it up.

Why is there “wife school” but no apparent equivalent “husband school”? Men in this situation are perfectly fine; they are benefitting from a system set up to serve them at a woman’s expense. As long as that’s true, it’s inevitable that women will feel frustrated and resentful. “Wife school” can’t actually make women happier, since it reinforces the very male dominance that is causing their pain. But it sure can make men’s lives easier, if the teachers are successful at getting women to stop complaining and learn instead to serve their husband-masters in silence. 

The post Wife school can’t fix MAGA husbands appeared first on Salon.com.

Recently, I learned about a concept called atomic change. The term’s meaning depends on who’s employing it. One professional coach’s website describes it, in so many words, as making discrete adjustments to a business that, over time, lead to its significant transformation.

An engineering professor defines it as “a change applied to a class definition (i.e., its source code) such that a) it is minimal (cannot be decomposed into other atomic changes) and b) the program compiles and builds after the change.”

Then we tumble into the realm of inspirational gurus and thought leaders, where breathwork and manifesting meet motivational speak, popping with familiar verbal kernels like “sparking joy” and “habit formation.” It all reduces to the promise of small daily actions that, over time, build into the conquest of your wildest dreams.

Notice how similar the programming instructions are for computers, systems and people. Atomic change suggests that the soul, like the mind, can be reconfigured as gradually as we might update a laptop one key and chip at a time. That premise — that people can be gradually reconfigured — is one Oprah Winfrey discovered four decades ago when she launched the syndicated talk show that would change daytime TV, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” on Sept. 8, 1986.

Who and what we read is shaped in no small part by Winfrey. Somewhere in your house probably lurks a book, an accessory or an appliance you may not have bought if Winfrey hadn’t given it her seal of approval.

Even if that isn’t the case, the ramifications of two Oprah Winfrey endorsements touch every American: It’s unlikely the names of Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Phil McGraw would have floated into Donald Trump’s orbit otherwise. Since Winfrey anointed them as her go-to experts on wellness and behavioral health, Trump added them to his ineffectual celebrity governing cabinet. Dr. Oz leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Dr. Phil, America’s pro bono therapist, is now the celebrity face of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. In 2025, after previously embedding with Immigration and Customs Enforcement during raids in Chicago, his MeritTV crews were on the ground during ICE operations in Los Angeles. Merit Street Media, the television network he launched around MeritTV, later filed for bankruptcy protection.

This is what it means to spend 40 years being America’s original influencer.

 

 

Some may take issue with likening Oprah Winfrey to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. If this is the only way you view him, I suppose that’s fair. But remember that before Oppenheimer tossed us into the nuclear age, he pioneered modern theoretical physics in the United States. Some of his initial investigations contributed to our understanding of neutron stars and black holes.

We often associate him with the scriptural quote from the Bhagavad Gita that reads, “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” Not many recall his reported invocation of another work of Sanskrit poetry that reads, “In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame/The good deeds a man has done before defend him.”

A similar tension shadows how we reconcile what Winfrey means to American culture. 

Over the years, Winfrey gave us many nice things. She was the first daytime host to bring New Age, self-help philosophies to a massive audience under the rubric of “Change Your Life TV” while also making literacy fashionable via “Oprah’s Book Club” and promoting feel-good consumerism.

Through her encouragement, reading became a social, communal activity and positively relating to one another part of a purpose-driven existence. Along those lines, “Oprah” raised the profiles of many figures, including life-fixer Iyanla Vanzant and interior designer Nate Berkus, who reframed homekeeping as house pride. Even Winfrey’s movie career is largely comprised of roles that originated in books and ideas that spoke to her on a deep level, including her turns in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.”

But if it feels like “The Oprah Winfrey Show” remains a present force despite Winfrey ending her show 15 years ago, that is because it lives on through hundreds of self-made influencers.  Instagram and TikTok are awash in smiling people reminding their followers that they are worthy and loved; that they do not have to put up with abuse or maltreatment; and that they deserve to treat themselves to subscriptions of life-changing supplements, beauty products and meal kits of their choice. Link in bio!

A few, such as Jay Shetty and Alex Cooper, have amassed enough of an audience to build media companies around themselves and their brands – which are essentially one and the same. Of course, they are not billionaires like Oprah or celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow or Reese Witherspoon, who leveraged their pre-existing stardom into profitable imprimaturs in wellness and publishing.

 

But as Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil continue to embarrass themselves publicly, some wonder what responsibility Winfrey feels for making them famous. A recent interview with veteran critic Eric Deggans in Emmy magazine answered that question definitively.

“Everybody has their own path in life, and it has not one thing to do with me, and I don’t have one thing to do with them,” she said. On its own, that may read like spiritual bypassing. In the context of what she stated before that, however, it makes sense: Winfrey said McGraw helped her through a challenging time when, in 1998, she was accused of defaming the beef industry and sued by Texas ranchers. She found that Oz had a gift for explaining preventive medicine to ordinary people. 

“At the time, the reason and intention behind me giving them their breaks was I thought they had valuable information to share that had been meaningful to me,” she explained.

Thus, the conundrum of Winfrey’s terribly consequential influence. 

Long before Oz entered politics, for example, he’d been discredited for dispensing a vast array of scientifically unsound medical advice on “The Dr. Oz Show,” which Winfrey’s Harpo Productions co-produced. Nobody forced viewers to follow his unsound prescriptions.

The fact that many did makes one wonder how much sway Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil would have if our healthcare system didn’t relegate women to second-class status — and women of color even lower still — and placed behavioral and psychological wellness on par with other preventative care.

Let’s not discount America’s addiction to purchasing shortcuts for happiness either, which Winfrey also knows very well. Nine years ago, she included a Gratitude Jar on her annual Oprah’s Favorite Things list, which included nothing but 365 blank cards and vibes. It quickly sold out. That’s right: Oprah Winfrey persuaded her followers to buy a cylindrical glass container holding paper and air, for $45.

But I get it now. Winfrey was the first TV personality to invite a loyal audience primarily made up of harried women to put themselves and their care first. Over 25 years and 4,561 episodes, each of her small suggestions compounded into massive cultural shifts — significant transformation, from which there’s no going back.

 

 

 

The post How Oprah Winfrey became America’s cultural Oppenheimer appeared first on Salon.com.

The big story coming out of the 2024 election was how Donald Trump orchestrated a realignment of American politics, bringing demographic groups that had long eschewed the Republican Party into the tent. Latinos, Black voters and young people, mostly males, had voted for him and the GOP in larger numbers than anyone could remember, and it was seen in some quarters as a sign that the party was embarking on a thousand-year reign. Conventional wisdom held that Trump was something of a magical figure who had defied the odds, defeated the majority of the legal and political efforts to hold him accountable, and triumphantly returned to power. 

Many attributed the president’s success to a new political power on the block — the so-called manosphere, consisting of male podcasters with millions of followers who had enthusiastically endorsed Trump. Many pundits said that Kamala Harris lost the race because she didn’t try hard enough to appeal to these influencers, even though many are heavily misogynistic and wouldn’t have been open to her candidacy in any case. Their juvenile humor and oppositional defiance also happened, incidentally, to be perfectly matched to Trump’s sophomoric style. 

However, like transgressive boys everywhere, they have a short attention span; Trump has not turned out to be as fun as they thought he would be. Although anecdotal evidence suggests they have been less fervent followers of the president for several months now, The Wall Street Journal analyzed nearly 70,000 hours of podcasts to see if it was true. What they found was revealing: “Mentions of Trump’s name per hour on conservative podcasts have fallen nearly 70% from their peak in the run-up to the 2024 election.” Many are publicly unhappy with the economy and the war, both of which are seen as broken promises and could account for the decline in mentions, but the hosts are mostly spending their time trashing Democrats like James Talarico, the Texas state representative who is running for the Senate and may just win. (Significantly, the king of the manosphere, podcaster Joe Rogan, is actually a fan of Talarico.) 

There are some other big names in the podcasting world, like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who are now openly antagonistic toward Trump, mostly for opportunistic reasons. The pair are among the early crowd jostling for power within the post-Trump right-wing ecosystem. Kelly has railed against the Trump family’s alleged corruption, while Carlson appears to be positioning himself as a presidential candidate, with his iconoclastic takes on a number of issues and increasing talk of a third-party bid. He recently told NPR that Trump should be removed from office. 

But mainstream conservative media is still largely on board the Trump train, although Fox News’ firing of Maria Bartiromo for coordinating with the White House — hilarious as the network’s outrage is, considering the cozy relationships between the president and Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham — and its decision to stand against Trump in support of CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO has revealed a schism. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has also been pulling no punches throughout the second term. 

But what of the Republican establishment? Since Trump’s exultant victory in 2024, they have behaved as if he were ordained by God to be America’s reigning monarch, omnipotent and infallible. Republican governors have largely abdicated their own roles as one of the Constitution’s checks and balances, agreeing to give up their own sovereignty to serve his agenda, while the GOP majorities in Congress have proven to be nothing more than trained seals happily signing on to the president’s usurpation of their own power. 

But you can’t really blame them. Until quite recently, there was no shaking the hold Trump had on the GOP base. They were willing to believe that everything wrong in the country was the fault of former president Joe Biden, and that Trump was left with a massive disaster he had to clean up. The truth, of course, was the opposite. He actually inherited a recovering economy — dubbed “the envy of the world” in 2024 by The Economist — and newfound global respect. If Trump had done nothing and simply continued the policies that were already in place — and then taken credit for them, as he is wont to do — he would be in a different position today. But he surrounded himself with radicals and sycophants, and he believed his own hype. The results have been a disaster.

As Republicans prepare to face the voters in the November midterms, they are finding out that the “magical” Trump mystique was actually luck and hot air. Reality still exists, and it bites. Hard. 

As we head into the final month before the election, the polls appear very bad for Republicans. The House majority is almost certainly gone, and the Senate is increasingly in play, something that wasn’t seriously contemplated six months ago. The president’s approval ratings are in the low to mid-30s, and his ratings on the most important issues of the economy and the Iran war are even worse. Gasoline and diesel prices have turned the two big promises Trump made — to lower prices and keep the nation out of wars — into epic failures, and voters are livid. 

Suddenly, GOP candidates are running for the hills. Candidates in tight races in battleground and red states — including Mike Rogers, who is running for the Senate in Michigan against Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Rep. Ashley Hinson, who faces Josh Turek, a Democrat, in Iowa — are saying the Iran war must end. (As the New York Times pointed out, Hinson was among seven House Republicans who recently supported a resolution calling on the president to stop or seek congressional approval for military action in Iran.) Others are scrubbing or downplaying endorsements by or mentions of the presidents on their campaign websites. According to The Washington Post, Mike Beltran, the Republican nominee running against Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., touted on his website earlier this year how he had “stood with President Trump every step of the way.” That language has now vanished, along with photos of Trump and references to “America First.” At least seven other GOP congressional candidates, reported the Post, are doing the same. One Florida Republican. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, has even publicly condemned the president for elements of his radical deportation policy.

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Historically, this is common. Midterms are notoriously hard on the party in power, and presidents usually take the blame. Often, the approved strategy is for candidates to go ahead and distance themselves from the president, and try to win their races by portraying themselves as independent thinkers who will not rubber-stamp the unpopular majority’s agenda. Whether it’s Bush in 2006 or Obama in 2014, close midterm races almost always feature some version of that same sales pitch. The only exception in recent years I can think of is 1998, when the GOP’s threats to impeach President Bill Clinton over the findings of the Starr Report with regard to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky blew back on them, costing them seats and resulting in the resignation of the House Speaker Newt Gingrich in disgrace. 

But this time it is especially jarring considering the fealty Republicans have been required to show their leader — and have willingly given him — until now. That loyalty ended up not helping Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who lost his primary just a few months ago when Trump endorsed his opponent in retribution after Cornyn waited too long to endorse him in 2024. As the midterm campaign has unfolded, it’s belatedly become clear to many Republicans that standing with Trump may be riskier, even among the party’s base, than standing against him.

But they have a problem. The president won’t shut up. To the chagrin of most of his own party, he is insisting on making the midterms all about him. A narcissist to the core, Trump believes that the only way Republicans win in November is if he is out there bragging and blaming and lying as he always does, because that has been the secret sauce that brings out MAGA voters. He has even released a taxpayer-funded propaganda ad — which is illegal — touting his alleged accomplishments. 

No one should mistake the Republican retreat from Trump as a full-scale rebellion. Instead, it’s a tepid, last-minute attempt on the part of some desperate candidates to show independence, knowing they may lose anyway — and that the president will say it’s because they didn’t support him enough anyway. The Republican Senate had a chance to take a stand on one of the biggest issues in the campaign, and the one that’s causing the most pain for average voters: Iran. On Thursday they voted down a resolution to end the war. The tally was 50-49. When it comes to putting their votes where their mouths are, it’s clear they will default to Trump as always. Voters, though, are finally seeing through them.

The post Republican candidates are running for the hills appeared first on Salon.com.

Despite everything, I sometimes find it hard not to sympathize with Donald Trump. 

Like Trump, I also chose to make the site of a future climate catastrophe my permanent home. Like Trump, I live in a home more than a century old and spend each day disgusted with the handiwork of the previous inhabitants. Like Trump, I’m fighting a losing battle against decay.

I can’t get too mad when Trump smoothes out the columns of the White House or paves over the Rose Garden when I look at my closet shelves shoved through  drywall or my mirrors held in place with blue-tack putty. When I see the sloppily applied makeup on his hands or the AI edits that transform his doughy octogenarian body into a superhero physique, I try not to think about the cobwebs of spliced knob-and-tube wiring in my attic that became outmoded around the time of Thomas Edison’s death.    

Trump’s poll numbers are in free fall, presaging a brutal midterm election that might make him a premature lame duck. The Big Lie of 2020 has gone stale. His promise to keep America out of new wars has fallen apart in the dumbest and most expensive way imaginable. His foundation is cracking, with at least some longtime MAGA boosters turning on him. His public rambling and late-night Truth Social screeds suggest there may be termites in the rafters. Overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work he’d have to do to actually set things right, Trump has opted for a fresh coat of paint.

The president launched Trump TV on YouTube earlier this week, and once again I can see the logic. The 24-hour propaganda stream allows him to crow about his accomplishments while avoiding the pesky questions that even sympathetic news networks have started tossing at him lately. At a moment when former supporters are visibly backing away from Trump’s moldy message and trying to seal themselves off from the toxic reputational effects of his second term, Trump is creating a safe space for his lead-poisoned die-hards. It’s almost an act of love, or about as close as someone as self-obsessed as the president can get. 

There’s no tension on Trump TV and precious little in the way of explanation. The streaming channel acts as a firehose of Trump news, meant to be met with unquestioning applause from the most devoted members of Trump’s shrinking and increasingly elderly  base. It’s an endless stream of nothing, meant to fill time more than entertain, like the brainrotted AI slop that pollutes TikTok streams, except many leagues less interesting. The lack of conflict that might have been created on a conventional news channel renders his impromptu network interminably boring. 

As the Bulwark puts it,  the channel has “no purpose.”

“It’s simply Trump’s staff trying to fix a problem Trump created — all in an ad hoc way but while trying to give the misimpression that there’s a plan.” the outlet’s Brendan Hartnett wrote. “It’s political ephemera — the sort of content that arguably isn’t even meant to be watched the first time, let alone replayed later.”

Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye agrees, calling  the self-evident desperation “excruciating”:

When a clown’s only trick is shouting into a live microphone, the absolute worst thing that can happen is for the cameras to simply turn off. It’s clear by this week’s spectacle that Trump cannot survive the possibility that America has finally changed the channel.

Away from his glorified YouTube playlist, a pro-Trump ad aired recently on Fox News, pushing back hard against the nonexistent danger of communism in America. Proudly displaying the probably-illegal fact that it was paid for the U.S. government, the commercial uses a visual language deeply familiar to denizens of the online right. A pulsing mix of photos of Trump looking maximally presidential flies past as slogans flash across the screen. UFC president Dana White crows about Trump’s toughness over phrases like “DEFEND LAW AND ORDER” and “AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY.”

It’s the stuff of AI conserva-slop and gooner Discord channels. It’s unclear whether the TikTok-y style will land with the older, couch-bound Fox News audience, but the purpose is easy to discern. Like Trump TV, it’s meant to boost confidence in the president among an ever-diminishing group of supporters, to create belief in an alternate reality where the White House isn’t falling down around him. 

Let’s be clear that the rot didn’t start with Trump. He was ushered into office by a pre-existing coalition of racists, the tax-cut-seeking wealthy and millions of Americans who got left behind in the unequal recovery from the Great Financial Crisis.  If the whole experiment hadn’t been decaying in the first place, it never would have embraced a bigoted, silver-spoon game show host. Again, I can sympathize. If my own house weren’t in a state where examining anything too closely costs $200, if there weren’t cracks in the porcelain and popcorn shedding from the ceiling, I’d never have been able to buy it. 

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Like Trump, I’m no expert at the job I’ve been handed. I meet each new crisis with little more than a desire to muddle through, to patch it up well enough that I can forget about it. In that light, it’s easy to forgive Trump TV its shoddiness and his advertisements for their questionable legality. The right way to fix the holes in the floor is kind of abstract, while the screws and plates in my utility closet are right there. Trump can’t fix the core problems of an increasingly unequal America or stop the slide of the country’s global esteem. So, why not slather on another coat of bull and hope no one notices?  

Trump’s term will end soon. He will visibly grow older – pretty fast, I suspect — and then he’ll die. Trumpism just has to hold on until he can sell it off to some other sucker. 

The post Trump TV’s intentional brainrot appeared first on Salon.com.

In the mid-2000s, “Dateline NBC” correspondent Chris Hansen became a national sensation for his hidden-camera sting show, “To Catch a Predator.” Shortly after, he became a meme. 

Given the nature of “To Catch a Predator” — where Hansen applied his stern, lilting newscaster intonation to horrific online chat logs between grown men and what they assumed were teenagers — this blur between revulsion and comedy was practically inevitable. Hansen, along with the entire “To Catch a Predator” production, had a way of making the off-putting internet shorthand that men used in these archaic web chats to describe their sexual proclivities seem comical. As repulsive as the correspondence was, chat typos and ludicrous fetishes often made the predators look like bumbling fools, desensitizing viewers to their alleged crimes and downplaying the severity of their actions. As a form of ritual humiliation for its subjects, who were subsequently arrested and detained after being interrogated by Hansen in Tuscan décor kitchens around America, the show gave viewers the thumbs-up to turn its investigations into online fodder. Who were they hurting by making a joke out of those trying to hurt others?

Lance Oppenheim’s new film “Primetime,” in which Robert Pattinson assumes Hansen’s enigmatic role, reveals the answer — sort of. Pattinson portrays Hansen as a caricature of himself, accentuating the journalist’s unmistakable vocal cadence to remove any distance between “To Catch a Predator” and the man behind the show. The effect is something like uncanny sketch comedy, dredging laughs from Hansen’s stilted expressions and intense demeanor, regardless of a scene’s emotional gravity. 

When the film’s second trailer dropped, Pattinson’s delivery of the notable Hansen-ism, “You see how this looks, right?” instantly became a reaction video itself; a meme of a meme of a meme. Soon after, the film’s distributor, A24, posted a production photo of Pattinson styled to look like Hansen’s headshot, the source of innumerable jokes during the aughts when memes were just two blocks of text in Impact font. At a pop-up event, A24 sold “Primetime” merch featuring another Hansen quote: “What would’ve happened if I wasn’t here?” For a film ostensibly about how “To Catch a Predator” self-destructed by catering to people tuning in for laughs and entertainment, it’s disconcerting that the movie’s marketing would play into the exact culture it’s commenting on.

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But perhaps that’s the point. “Primetime” presents itself as a story about Hansen’s callous quest for ratings and notoriety at the expense of his tact, but the portrait is unfinished. Not even “Predators” — the 2025 documentary on this very subject that not only beat “Primetime” to the punch but has far more to say about Hansen’s effect on culture — can complete the image. We, the audience, are the final piece of the puzzle, the culpable players who not only ate up the original “To Catch a Predator,” but all the media and memes that spun off it. 

Now, “Primetime” (and its marketing) exposes itself as a continuation of that culpability, turning “To Catch a Predator” back into a spectacle for the viewer to gawk at, spoon-feeding them shallow bromides between handfuls of popcorn. The film poses no questions about Hansen’s ethics that haven’t already been asked, making the entire affair feel guilty of the same sensationalism as Hansen’s original show. “Primetime” isn’t a film so much as it is a final exam testing what we’ve learned over the last 20 years. The answer? Not much.

Set in late 2006, “Primetime” takes place in the shadow of Saddam Hussein’s collapsing regime, a context the film repeatedly emphasizes by reminding the audience that Hansen — though darting between Florida condos and Jersey Shore houses — is first and foremost a telejournalist. He senses the world changing in real time and doesn’t want to get left behind, lest his reporting and notoriety succumb to oblivion. With “To Catch a Predator” already a hit, NBC execs decide to move the show to a primetime slot to capitalize on its success. All Hansen has to do is deliver the high-impact predators: prominent pedophiles who can prove the show has a reach beyond the creeps who linger too long outside schoolyards. To do it, Hansen forges forward with all the ardent conviction of an American soldier, clinging to the belief that his definition of good is the greater good, too.

This is where “To Catch a Predator” divides. Some view the show as a public service; others see it as an illegitimate operation that lures creeps into a sting, allowing audiences to see the moment subjects realize their lives as they knew them are essentially over. On “To Catch a Predator,” there is no differentiation between the levels of danger the men pose; no mercy for those who understand they’re sick and desperately plead for rehabilitation. The show makes the final judgment call, with Hansen serving as executioner. 

This total lack of regulation begets unchecked power. And it’s this scarcity of restrictions that contributed to the suicide of Bill Conradt, a former Texas district attorney who shot himself in November 2006 when police and NBC cameras forcibly entered his home. Eager to catch his biggest fish yet and keep the show highly rated, Hansen made the fatal mistake of pursuing the predator, rather than trapping him. Hence the film’s clunky equivalence of Hansen’s dogged chase to that of the American army.

These cultural comparisons would and should be interesting, if not for screenwriter Ajon Singh’s frustratingly shallow screenplay and Oppenheim’s stylish yet one-note direction. Whenever “Primetime” comes close to a deeper truth, the film backs off entirely, deferring to Pattinson to deliver the intended magnitude. And though his impersonation is spot-on, even a stellar character actor like Pattinson can’t voice his way out of platitudinous dialogue. “There used to be a pillory in every civilized town,” Pattinson’s Hansen remarks about the state of justice. “Now there’s a television with me on it.” Oh, brother.

But though “Primetime” fails to be a deservedly introspective analysis of its subject matter, it does tee up fair questions about its own existence. At one point, Hansen tells a “Predator” decoy, Dan (Skyler Gisondo), about a reporting trip to India, where he observed villages searching for a string of missing children. With no leads, the residents turned on each other to enact justice by their own hands. Hansen uses this as a metaphor for the “To Catch a Predator” conceit. But it’s a far better analogy for how viewers rallied behind the show, making Hansen and his questionable methods a sensation that could be replicated after their mutual cancellation.

 

Discussing his India trip, the “Primetime” version of Hansen remembers an alleged witness to the kidnappings, who describes the perpetrator as a monstrous ancient evil lurking in the dark. Hansen believes that by targeting predators, he is helping rid the world of such an entity. Later in the film, Oppenheim depicts a brief glimpse of said figure, lurking in the bushes outside of Conradt’s home in the wake of his suicide. The image is at once hokey and compelling, suggesting in unwieldy terms that the monster Hansen has been chasing is like a Hydra: cut off its head, and it’ll regenerate with two more. 

Peering back at Hansen from the shrubbery, the film seems to suggest that we — the audience to this specious display of white-knighting nobility — are monsters who can act just as heinous as the criminals. After all, the public drove up the “To Catch a Predator” ratings; they turned Hansen into both a hero and a joke. Perhaps we’re just as responsible for trivializing the show’s subject matter as the show itself, and the fact that anyone is eager to see this movie points to the unfortunate truth that we haven’t learned from our actions in the last two decades.

And while that is true to some degree, the curious viewer can’t shoulder the blame for the film’s shortcomings. All the memes and merch exist on the movie’s fringes. If the movie had more to offer than frivolous musings about the fame machine and its sickly products — complex ideas that warrant real digging instead of ironically superficial investigation akin to Hansen’s — it might successfully catch us in its trap. But unlike the show it’s scrutinizing, “Primetime” lets its prey walk free.

The post “Primetime” isn’t Chris Hansen’s story — it’s ours appeared first on Salon.com.

It’s time to vote in one of the most consequential elections of the year, one only slightly less important than the November midterms. Of course I’m talking about Fat Bear Week, the annual event in which people elect — well, yes, the fattest bear. The candidates are bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, who are currently busy devouring as many calories as possible to fatten up for winter hibernation. Voting officially opened Sept. 22, continuing a tradition started in 2014 to select which bears are the best and most fat using a March Madness-style bracket. You can learn more and vote here, plus read some delightful bios on the bears in the running or peruse its hall of champions.

Something like a million people vote in this event every year, according to the daytime news segment that I caught at the dentist the other afternoon while getting a tooth cleaning. Do I need to fact-check that? Sometimes information just comes at you when you have your mouth wide open and people are prodding their fingers around inside. (It remains a mystery, however, why my dentist has a TV on in every room.)

My point is, everyone is talking about Fat Bear Week, and I encourage it. Growing up, I was one of those reflexively contrarian teenagers who hated anything popular and found value in almost anything obscure, independent or weird. These days I’m much less anti-mainstream, especially when it’s something that brings us closer to our true human nature, which is reflected to some degree in the seasonal behaviors of other species. I, too, will fatten up this winter, whether I want to or not. 

I wish Fat Bear Week could be every week. Some people are trying. There’s now a Fat Marmot Week, a similar event inaugurated this year. But I must add that a family of marmots devastated my garden in April and destroyed my precious stargazer lilies (I am not joking about this; it was brutal and saddening), so I’m having a hard time jumping on that bandwagon. But I’ll try! Go fat marmots, go! Plump yourself on the spoils of would-be gardeners. I was a big fan when succulents became a dumb little trend, because at least that was boosting an interest in plants rather than mass-produced ugly dolls from China or something. I can’t stand all this plastic trash we elevate above the natural world. Maybe I have retained my anti-establishment roots after all. 

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This would be the point in the essay where I introduce some sad facts about falling grizzly population levels or remind everyone that climate change is going to make it harder for bears to exist or something. I definitely need to fact-check that, but I don’t want to. Even coming across news this week that a mining project is being fast-tracked at Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, which neighbors Katmai National Park and could impact bear populations, is not what I need to hear right now. Sometimes we all need some joy in life, such as contemplating the fattest bears without all the other gloomy stuff in the world. I do find plenty of things to be grateful for and optimistic about, even if it doesn’t always come through in my published writing. While I don’t want to ignore all the very important chaos — facts that barely register on the news cycle, like how we keep breaching the planetary boundaries necessary for the flourishing of life — I try not to wallow in it either. That’s what Fat Bear Week means to me, and I think we could all use more stuff like it. Ping me when there’s a Sleekest Dolphin Week, Plumpest Mushroom Monday or the Most Insane Octopus of the Month. Give me the “American Idol” version of meadowlark songs.

I am always humbled and delighted whenever the internet explodes over some recently indexed cat species or a shiny new NASA artifact, like the first images of a black hole or the recent trip around the moon, maybe because the collective awe inspired by stuff like that reminds me that people do feel connected to something larger and more mysterious, whether it’s little red dots in the early universe or bears munching on berries in Alaska. From there, maybe people will take more responsibility for the home we share. There’s not much I can do about grizzly bear populations — which are indeed at greater risk under the Trump administration — but I can show my solidarity; I can vote, not just in fun online elections but in the real, super serious one coming up. And I can dream of — no, demand — a better world for all species. Oh, and by the way, I’m rooting for unnamed bear 909. Read her bio. She’s been through a lot of grief, and I admire her resilience. 

The post Fat Bear Week should be every week appeared first on Salon.com.