Writing something is a bit like polishing rocks. You start with an ugly hunk of something, a phrase or an idea you’ve tripped over. It rattles against the hard edges of your brain until it gets polished and smooth. Moving the rock through finer and finer grits is time-consuming, strenuous and not always rewarding. Sometimes, the lump becomes a slightly smaller and shinier lump, marginally less ugly than it was on the ground. But like exercise and tough conversations, the process is the point. You feel better for having gone through the ritual yourself.

Boy George didn’t get the memo. 

The former Culture Club frontman, whose voice adorned New Wave pop hits like “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” in the 1980s, had artificial intelligence spew out an unfortunate reggae song last week that turned out to be a statement of support for Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. “You say genocide, I say war,” the song, titled “We Will Dance Again,” starts, and the lyrics seem to revel in the ugliness of the ongoing violence in Gaza. The tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, the song claims, are “what the military’s for.” 

Obvious AI tells throughout this track make clear that Boy George hasn’t just gotten lazy, he’s also lost the quality of discernment. The song’s meter is odd, and its lines are overstuffed. There are no interesting choices, no glimpses of an artist’s vision. It’s a hollow provocation over a royalty-free riddim. 

Since Hamas militants attacked Israeli military installations and civilians on October 7, 2023, the ensuing war in Gaza has left more than 73,000 Palestinians dead. The United Nations has called Israel’s campaign a genocide. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing the Israeli prime minister of crimes against humanity. Attacks on Gaza continue despite a ceasefire deal. Against that backdrop, a song defending and celebrating the Israeli military is nasty work, no matter who made it. The fact that no one made it, that it’s the creation of a machine that hallucinates in exchange for electricity, only intensifies the sick, empty feeling the track leaves behind. 

The track’s release has been a disaster for George. He split acrimoniously from Tony Pontius, the long-time manager of his record label BGP, because of Pontius’ refusal to release the song. A planned role as King Herod in a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” was put on ice. Spotify pulled the track down for violating its restrictions around AI-generated music. Bandcamp followed soon thereafter. Boy George has dug in his heels in recent days, calling the platforms a “bunch of c**ts” as part of a steady stream of Instagram posts. His doggedness would be almost admirable, if “We Will Dance Again” wasn’t so lazy. 

In releasing the track, Boy George presumably wanted to turn heads, to make a statement. But he didn’t want to do any work. He didn’t want to record multiple vocal takes of lines he supposedly wrote and believes in. He didn’t want to arrange actual instruments to better emphasize his lyrics and pro-war stance. He didn’t want to mix the track carefully to refine his statement. He could have made something that shimmers, a piece of true pop that expresses repellent ideals. It wouldn’t have been the first. 

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Merle Haggard’s iconoclastic “Okie From Muskogee” is considered a country classic, even though the sentiment is about as far from mainstream American thought in 2026 as can be imagined. When even right-wing commentators are pushing microdosing as a path to self-betterment, his disparaging remarks about longhairs taking LSD come off as impossibly square. But you can hear the heart in Haggard’s leathery vocals, buoyed by the sweet harmonies of his backing band. Haggard waffled over the years on whether the anti-hippie hardliner anthem was a satire  of the crew cut set or a genuine tribute to his conservative father. Either way, Haggard sounds like he believes what he’s saying, regardless of whether that’s true, because of the time and effort he spent working out the song.

With 2013’s “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke and Pharrell set out to make a groovy single in the vein of Marvin Gaye. Though the song has been relegated to the dustbin following a widespread critical backlash and later allegations of sexual assault against Thicke by model and actress Emily Ratajowksi, who appeared in the song’s video, they were extremely successful. The song itself, creepiness aside, is a Swiss watch of a partystarter. Pharrell’s ad-libs and inserts interrupting the groove at perfect intervals to wake up the dancefloor. They arguably did too good a job recreating the shuffling, glass-clinking percussion of 1970s cocktail party classics, as they lost almost everything they’d made from the song in a subsequent — and successful — lawsuit from Gaye’s estate.  

“We Will Dance Again” does none of that. It warrants no qualifiers, no deeper thought, because Boy George clearly didn’t think too hard about it himself before spitting it out into the world. He asked a machine to build him a song to support what many consider to be an ongoing genocide. When it offered him half a song, he said, “Good enough” — without even bothering to run it through a few rounds of polishing. I regret to inform you that, in 2026, Boy George won’t even tumble for us.  

The post Sorry, Boy George. AI can’t even make bad art appeared first on Salon.com.

When Netflix announced the first-ever Chef’s Table Food Festival, bringing 70 internationally acclaimed chefs to Park City for four days of dinners, demonstrations and excursions, I felt something between excitement and apprehension.

The series changed the way I understood food. I wasn’t yet sure whether a festival built around it could preserve the reason why.

If you asked me to name the greatest piece of modern food media, I would hesitate. Without missing a beat, I would say Season 1 Episode 1 of “Chef’s Table.” 

And that answer has been the same for a decade. 

It’s not because I think Massimo Bottura is the greatest chef alive. It wasn’t only the breathtaking cinematography or the immediate fantasy of booking a flight to Modena and a table at Osteria Francescana. 

I’ve returned to it so many times because it permanently changed the way I think about food.

Yes, food media should make you hungry. But the very best examples also make you care about something greater than what’s on the plate. 

I was initially drawn in by Italy. Like so many Italian Americans, I grew up seeing pieces of my family’s history reflected in its food and had an insatiable desire to learn as much as I could about the country my grandparents grew up in. Watching Bottura reinterpret the flavors of Emilia-Romagna felt familiar, even comforting, but that’s not why the episode stayed with me. 

I still think about it and watch it over and over again because it beautifully articulates something I’ve always believed but struggle to find the words to explain.

“Chef’s Table” showed me that food could be a lens through which to understand culture, grief, resilience, identity, and community. It showed me that restaurants weren’t simply places to eat. They were living institutions capable of preserving history, supporting entire local communities, and bringing people together in moments of crisis.

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Looking back now, I can trace so much of my own career back to that realization.

For years, I’ve found myself gravitating towards stories about neighborhood restaurants, family businesses, local farmers, and food traditions — not because they’re quaint or nostalgic, but because they’re windows into something larger. These people have tangible passion and intoxicating energy for what they do. “Chef’s Table” helped open my eyes to the fact that that’s the story. Not the rare ingredients or celebrity guests, the pure, genuine joy for cooking and sharing that with others. 

One moment from Bottura’s episode has lingered most. 

After earthquakes struck Emilia-Romagna in 2012, warehouses collapsed around hundreds of thousands of wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano, threatening the livelihoods of the cheesemakers who depended on them. Bottura responded by creating a recipe for riso cacio e pepe and inviting people around the world to cook it with him. Nearly 40,000 participated, and all 360,000 damaged wheels were sold.

In Bottura’s hands, Parmigiano was never merely an ingredient. It represented years of labor, centuries of knowledge and an entire community’s economic survival.

One of Bottura’s most famous dishes from his three-star Michelin restaurant is the Five Ages of Parmigiano Reggiano, featuring the PDO product at five distinct aging points (24, 30, 36, 40, and 50 months). He manipulates the physical form of the ingredient to showcase different temperatures and textures: souffle, cream, biscuit, foam, and air. 

The dish isn’t about the cheese. It’s about tradition and craftsmanship and protecting your community. 

As Bottura says in the episode, “Cooking is an act of love.” 

It’s not a love expressed through expensive ingredients or elaborate techniques just for the sake of it. It’s expressed through responsibility — to your producers, neighbors, and the place you call home. 

Years after I first watched Bottura’s episode, I read Ruth Reichl’s “Why Food Writing Matters” and felt the shock of recognition. Food writing has been dismissed as frivolous or shallow — as if writing about restaurants somehow exists outside the realm of “real” journalism. Reichl had found the language for something I had understood only emotionally: food journalism belonged in the larger conversation about labor, politics, culture and power. Every person needs to eat, which means every person has a relationship with food that extends beyond the plate.

“Food touches everything we do. And that it is definitely a political issue,” she says, “Every election analyst has pointed to rising food costs as a major concern for voters. Yet despite the evolution of food writing over the last thirty years, consumers still have very little understanding of the forces that drive those costs.”

For the first time, I felt as though I had discovered the tradition I wanted to join.

A cohort of people who pursued and brought light to all genres of food stories. That feeling has become harder to find these days. 

In today’s media, there is simply so much food content competing for our attention. Social media has democratized food storytelling in remarkable ways, but it has also created an endless stream of restaurant rankings, viral menu hacks and “must-try” lists that reward speed over substance. 

Thankfully, there are still creators proving that audiences are hungry for something deeper. Nicholas Nuvan reminds me that thoughtful food storytelling hasn’t disappeared—it has simply adapted. His videos don’t stop at recommending where to eat. They introduce viewers to the people, histories and communities behind a dish, proving what the best food journalists have always known: people don’t just fall in love with dishes, they fall in love with stories.

When Reichl first took over the food section at the LA Times, she got a lot of pushback for covering international restaurants and including recipes for things like goat soup, sea slugs, and eel. She received dozens of letters lamenting the “good old days” of “American” recipes like cola-soaked pork chops, but she didn’t listen.

And isn’t that really what it’s all about? Reichl had the courage to dig deeper and show people a different side of food writing in a time when most people only read the food section for the ads. Not only were readers interested in what she had to say, she helped show people and restaurants of all cultures and styles that their food and their story matters just as much as any Michelin restaurant.  

That’s why I felt a genuine sense of cautious optimism when Netflix announced the Chef’s Table Food Festival. On paper, it’s easy to dismiss it as another celebrity chef event, many of which have become exercises in exclusivity — expensive tickets, buzzy names and Instagrammable bites. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it isn’t what made “Chef’s Table” resonate in the first place.

The series never asked us to admire chefs simply because they were famous. It asked us to understand them. To understand why they cooked, where they came from and what they were trying to preserve. Fame was a byproduct of that curiosity, not the goal.

“I see [the festival] as a celebration of why we come together to eat, why we go to restaurants,” “Chef’s Table” creator David Gelb told Bon Appetit, “That’s paramount and one of the most important things that makes us human. We come together around a hearth, we tell stories, and we eat.”

It wasn’t Bottura’s technical brilliance that changed me. It was his belief that food could be an act of service. That a restaurant could strengthen a community. That a wheel of Parmigiano could represent thousands of livelihoods. And that writing about those things wasn’t frivolous at all.

“Chef’s Table” didn’t convince me to become a food writer, but it convinced me that food could be the vehicle through which I wrote about everything else. 

If the festival can capture even a fraction of that spirit — if it asks us to understand not only famous chefs, but the farmers, artisans, workers and communities behind them — it will be more than another stop on the culinary calendar. It will be a reminder of what food media can offer when it chooses to nourish more than our appetites.

 

 

The post Why “Chef’s Table” still matters appeared first on Salon.com.

Perez Hilton always wanted to be famous. This is a statement of fact and not meant to make light of his self-harming incident broadcast via TikTok livestream on Tuesday—quite the opposite. Videos and images of Hilton, 48, covered in blood and cutting himself with a knife should be interpreted as a cry for help, not attention. A person can understand that much without seeing the footage.

But many who watched didn’t have a choice. Although Perez’s livestream proceeded for around 15 minutes before it was shut down, screenshots and clips rocketed across the internet, invading countless social media feeds. Some saw those disturbing images simply by picking up their mobile devices.

Fortunately, Hilton was transported from his Miami home to a hospital to receive medical attention, according to the local sheriff’s office. But such incidents have become increasingly commonplace to the point of numbing us.

While Wednesday morning Google search trends data showed that people were hunting for images of Hilton, I went to YouTube to see what he was up to in 2002. That year, he starred in a short film called “Dating Up,” which is not listed under his IMDb or Wikipedia filmographies.

He describes it in the video summary as “A short film about gay dating. In a world before Grindr!” It’s also a glimpse of the time before YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and before the man born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. launched PerezHilton.com in 2004 and quickly became one of the world’s most popular, controversial and despised gossip bloggers. 

I chose 2002 because that year’s most famous video captured the Feb. 1 execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Footage of his beheading circulated in the bowels of the internet for months, until the now-defunct Boston Phoenix published a link to it on its website, igniting furious debates about the morality and journalistic ethics of that decision.

Such discussions seem quaint in an age in which the video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was posted to social media moments after it happened, and a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed his killing of 51 worshippers at two mosques on Facebook.

An age, it bears adding, when X and Meta—Facebook and Instagram’s corporate owner—no longer emphasize stalwart moderation guardrails in the name of reducing “censorship” on their platforms.

The circumstances leading to Hilton’s distressing livestream and Pearl’s filmed execution are entirely dissimilar. But what brought the 2002 video to mind was that it marked the first time in modern history, at least that I can remember, that the public questioned what purpose watching something too horrible to fathom ultimately serves. Such discussions helped establish the difference between witnessing as a matter of civic responsibility and leering voyeurism.

Images of Sept. 11, 2001, were still fresh and traumatizing for millions who watched the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers collapse on live TV when Pearl was murdered.

But his death was an intimate injury to his loved ones first and foremost. Making it public, therefore, was viewed as a ghoulish act by many, including Salon’s former national correspondent Bruce Shapiro. “The idea that tossing the desires of Pearl’s family into the ashcan is ‘just what journalists do’ is only a cover for indiscriminate National Enquirer logic,” he said in a June 2002 column.

Months after that, the Phoenix’s media critic Dan Kennedy contended that it is our obligation to watch such difficult accounts in an essay for Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. “We turn away from such evil at our own peril,” Kennedy maintained.

Somewhere in the middle, the rest of us wondered how absorbing such horror would change us, whether as individuals or as a society.

Twenty-four years ago, it was very easy to turn away from something you had to go digging for in the first place. YouTube would not exist until 2005. Instagram’s founding happened five years after that. TikTok turns 10 this year.

In the years between those companies’ founding and now, social media has given us plenty of opportunities to take up those debates again. But when such content is widely available, and we have so little choice as to whether we can avoid it, conversations about the ethics of it all seem like a luxury.

In exceptional cases, disseminating footage that’s hard to stomach serves a noble objective. Graphically violent video pouring out of 2011’s Arab Spring uprisings opened the world’s eyes to the deadly state violence people suffered under the repressive regimes of Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Arab nations.

In the United States, bystander videography has been bringing incidents of police brutality into American living rooms since at least 1991, when Los Angeles resident George Holliday captured cops viciously beating Rodney King on videotape. But the first cellphone equivalents to go viral were the 2009 videos of a police officer fatally shooting 22-year-old Oscar Grant III in the back at Fruitvale Station in Oakland.

And the list of people whose last living, breathing moments were captured on cellphone videos and shared with the world has only gotten longer. In 2014, the nation watched Eric Garner suffocate to death as a New York City police officer subdued him using a prohibited chokehold. In 2016, Diamond Reynolds filmed the moment that a police officer shot her boyfriend Philando Castile to death during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and posted it to Facebook Live.

In 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. And earlier this year, multiple bystanders recorded the shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, footage that contradicted Trump administration officials’ claims that Good was a “domestic terrorist” and Pretti was an “assassin.”

In all those incidents, bearing witness galvanized the public. The international furor over Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests and briefly mainstreamed the Movement for Black Lives. Videos of Good and Pretti’s killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents turned all eyes to Minnesota, leading to the ouster of Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security.

At the same time, our social media algorithms were not as loosely regulated a decade ago as they are now. Teams of human moderators once employed by all the major platforms have been gutted. Nobody should be shocked to know that the easiest place to find Hilton’s self-harm videos is X.  As for TikTok, a spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, the platform relies on automated moderation systems. They flagged Hilton’s alarming livestream within minutes, closed other live streams within 90 seconds and banned the account, the spokesperson said, but its removal was delayed by what was characterized as “a moderator error.” (TikTok previously banned Hilton in 2020 for violating its community guidelines. At the time, his account had 1.6 million followers and averaged 10 million views per week.)

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The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.

Knowing this, the fact that the top search terms on Wednesday morning indicated that people were looking for images of Hilton’s self-harm instead of contextualizing reporting is telling but, sadly, not surprising.

Lurid real-world footage of people harming others or themselves is being served directly to us whether we want to see it or not. What we might debate, as we did 24 years ago, is what that’s doing to us.

The post The end of looking away from violence on social media appeared first on Salon.com.

When Graham Platner ran for Senate, he came with an irresistible, dream candidate profile: a plainspoken veteran and man of the people who was ready to change careers from oyster farmer to politician. Platner, who turned 40 during the campaign, found immense support from other male Democrats close to his age who saw his campaign as the breath of fresh air the party needed to stay relevant. Even when his many skeletons came tumbling out of the closet — the Nazi tattoo, the Reddit posts, retweeting far-right podcaster Stew Peters and others — they only doubled down in their support. Each scandal was followed by another high-profile endorsement from a senator or influencer. Only when women accused him of rape and sexual assault did they finally drop their support, leading to his exit from the race in July.

The Platner fiasco revealed how a subset of male Democrats show symptoms of a midlife crisis. Typically, a man’s mid-life crisis occurs between his 40s and 50s when, having achieved a stable economic and sociopolitical status, a new generation emerges that threatens to replace him. He becomes depressed, irritable and restless. The cultural stereotype is that rather than accept this as a natural consequence of aging, he seeks to recapture his youth with rash impulsivity by purchasing an expensive red sports car, or having an affair with a younger woman, or changing careers on a dime without any idea of the scrutiny that comes with those who make such a shift — i.e., from oyster farmer to senator.

Politically, the midlife crisis expresses itself as an attraction to ideological extremes, represented by the trope of men growing more conservative with age. Sen. John Fetterman, once a darling of the progressive elite who embraced him as the leftier-than-thou alternative to center-left Rep. Conor Lamb in the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate primary, has become every Democrats’ face on the dartboard for embodying this exact stereotype. Fetterman’s conservative shift could have stemmed from how his staunch support of Israel amid rising sentiment toward Palestine within portions of the Democratic base pushed him further away from the party, leaving him susceptible to Republican overtures. But given that he had already displayed signs of an erratic and hostile personality before arriving in the Senate, his change feels of a piece with his past behavior. 

However, in today’s political climate, Fetterman’s rightward drift makes him something of an outlier, as the Democratic midlife crisis now expresses itself as a shift toward the far-left, even if it means compromising one’s previous positions and alienating the audience that brought them to prominence. 

The most public examples of this are the “Pod Save America” hosts Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer — a.k.a. the “Pod Bros” — who first jumped on this bandwagon in November 2024 when they interviewed far-left streamer Hasan Piker on their podcast. Bringing on Piker — who, by coincidence, is the same age the Pod Bros were when they founded their parent company, Crooked Media — got people talking about them again, even if the talk was that the podcast had jumped the ideological shark by hosting someone who has been accused of caping for communists and terrorists. 

Since his first “Pod Save America” appearance, Piker has traveled to China and Cuba to defend their regimes, and he recently deployed Vladimir Putin-like language when he called the Soviet Union’s collapse “a catastrophe” at a Yale political union meeting in April. But the Pod Bros have interviewed him multiple times, even inviting him to Crooked Con, their Washington, D.C., convention, in November 2025, where he appeared on a panel alongside MS NOW’s Symone Sanders-Townsend and Fox News’ Jessica Tarlov. 

Given their embrace of Piker, it’s no surprise the Pod Bros were also among the most ardent backers of Platner, defending him like an expensive red sports car. When the news broke about his Nazi tattoo, they invited him on the show to explain himself. Ben Rhodes, the former Obama aide and host of the Crooked Media podcast “Pod Save the World,” even penned a lengthy New York Times op-ed on Platner’s rise, lauding him as a voice of the anti-war movement. In the wake of the rape allegations, Favreau issued an apology for his defense of Platner; Rhodes, as of this writing, has not. (Rhodes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Other elected officials within this age bracket have dunked their big toes in populist waters despite being elected as moderates in red states, such as Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, or as so-called center-left “Normie Democrats” in blue states, such as Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. Both men have been mentioned as contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination, but absent a campaign announcement, their leftward shifts are the equivalent of focus group testing on a national scale. Granted, neither Gallego nor Murphy have alienated their constituencies with these ideas, but it’s a far cry from their personas when they were first elected.  

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Since arriving in the Senate in 2025, Gallego has gone on the lash against big corporations and monopolies. In a speech for the American Economic Liberties Project, a left-wing think tank, in September 2025, Gallego said “anything that empowers the consumer, the everyday person, is going to be a very popular message . . . It can win in any cycle, in almost any state, or environment.” He has continued this crusade, recently endorsing a $20 minimum wage and speaking out against the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

Murphy, who entered the Senate only a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, made a name for himself as one of the body’s most outspoken gun control advocates. But in a May 2025 interview with “The Atlantic,” he seemed a bit sheepish over this, arguing that by emphasizing social issues over economic ones, Democrats risk losing voters who might be more receptive to economic messaging. “I own part of that responsibility,” he said. 

In addition to being spoken of as a potential 2028 contender, speculation is rampant that Murphy is positioning himself to lead the Democratic caucus after the midterms. Once known as a bipartisan negotiator, he has pivoted to a harder line, telling the Connecticut Mirror in November 2025, “I just don’t think that’s the job right now . . . I think I would be committing sort of political malpractice if I was operating this year like I’ve operated in the past.”

The psychological phenomenon of the midlife crisis masquerading as populism does not occur in a vacuum. Social media has exacerbated it, with algorithms making it easier to gain popularity by taking extreme viewpoints, as Piker has, than to represent the center-left, as the “Pod Save America” crew did for years. Moving toward extremes also has the potential to produce rewards. For pundits and influencers, that could mean boosting their voices and incomes. For politicians, it means the chance to swell their campaign coffers — even though he isn’t up for reelection until 2030, Murphy’s campaign PAC, Friends of Chris Murphy, had $11.5 million cash on hand as of June 30 — and, better yet, position themselves for future elections, regardless of whether the shift is sincere.

However, the less sincere that shift is, the greater the fallout when it turns out to be for naught. Watching Graham Platner’s campaign implode was like watching that expensive red sports car get totaled. You felt bad for anyone who got harmed. But if you’re honest, you also loved watching the guy dumb enough to buy it fume over the futility of his impulses. But the harder you laugh, the more you have a responsibility to not do what he did. Otherwise you could wind up behind the wheel.

The post The Democratic male’s midlife crisis appeared first on Salon.com.