In the first episode of his hit HBO series, “The Rehearsal” — a show about evaluating the outcomes of hypothetical real-life situations — comedian Nathan Fielder admits, “I’ve been told my personality can make some people uncomfortable, so I have to work to offset that.” For Fielder, who is equal parts lovably strange and dryly hilarious, offsetting other people’s discomfort can be a sizable task. It’s not easy to go through life in a double consciousness, hyperaware that one’s behavior might offend or unease. “Humor is my go-to instinct,” Fielder says about trying to reassure others. “But every joke is a gamble.”

Consider, then, the overlap between Fielder and someone like Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the bogus blood-testing company Theranos, who was convicted of swindling hundreds of millions of dollars from investors with her purportedly revolutionary blood-analysis device. Even before her downfall, Holmes drew the media’s attention with her wide, unblinking eyes, bold red lip, deep voice and stilted speech — all of which became parody-ready upon her indictment. But all the more perplexing was Holmes’ reticence to admit guilt when caught with hands as red as her lipstick, talking herself in circles in pursuit of her truth. Her statements always seemed misaligned with the evidence, as if she were so convinced of her company’s virtue that she didn’t care about the eerie dissonance between her reality and the world’s. If Holmes was indeed playing a character she made up, as many people speculated, she was a skilled method actor. 

Sitting just inches apart around a San Diego beach rental’s dinner table in Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim’s magnificent new documentary, “You Can See Everything,” Fielder and Holmes look decidedly comfortable with one another. They share an ease and rapport neither has readily exhibited on camera before — certainly not around virtual strangers. But while they may not share many overt similarities, the strange duo align in their mutual slipperiness. 

Before them lie components of Theranos’ blood-analyzer, which Holmes hopes to turn into a new product after her 11-year prison sentence, set to start 34 days after filming begins. Trying to explain the device, and how her claims of its efficacy were misread by investors and the public, Holmes once again can’t translate her thoughts into words that make sense to Fielder. Instinctually, Fielder makes a joke. “Isn’t it funny that I hosted a show about business scams, and now you’re in trouble for a business scam?” Holmes remarks that she hadn’t thought about it until now, and the tension lifts as her frustration dissipates. Despite his well-intentioned wisecrack — or perhaps because of it — Holmes can relate to her new associate. Somehow, Fielder can see her.

But which version of her Fielder — and, by extension, the audience — sees, and which version is the truest, remains up for debate. The title “You Can See Everything,” taken from a text Holmes sent to Fielder during production, is an obvious red herring. This documentary is about a woman notorious for her deception. We, of course, can’t really see anything. 

And yet, it’s all on display. Fielder, Oppenheim, and the viewer share the task of putting those pieces together legibly, to tell Holmes’ story in a way that hasn’t already been done for her by the media, Hulu’s limited series “The Dropout,” and Holmes’ muddled observations. As the film plays out, its three-hour runtime gliding by in a flash, it becomes painfully clear that this is what Elizabeth Holmes has wanted all along: for someone to tell her story in a way she can’t — not because she doesn’t want to, but because she herself is unclear about what that story is. Breaking through Holmes’ tight circle of dubious companions, Fielder pulls at every thread he can, attempting to unravel a greater truth from life’s gnarled yarn. As he gains steady footing on the margin dividing observation and manipulation, aiming the camera at either side, Fielder uncovers something deeply, cosmically sad: Holmes can’t seem to tell the difference between the two.

That does not, however, mean she doesn’t want to try. Holmes is intent on letting the cameras see as much of her life as possible, not only to prove the innocence she’s maintained all along, but to show that she has nothing to hide. She understands that the world sees her a certain way, a way she doesn’t understand — or, in the case of the infamous photo of her holding a vial of blood between two fingers, outright refutes — but that people’s perception is entirely out of her control. Maybe emerging from hiding for the first time in seven years with a full-scale documentary team isn’t such a bad idea. Five weeks out from a decade in prison, what’s the worst they could uncover?

“You Can See Everything” isn’t so much about big, jaw-dropping revelations as it is about the people behind them, and the assortment of personality and/or neurodevelopmental disorders fueling their actions. Holmes raves about her husband, San Diego hotel-chain heir William Evans, whose ego takes up most of the space in their beachside rental. When Fielder asks how he and Holmes met, Evans relays murky details of a 2017 party where the two spoke for an hour before he realized who Holmes was, even though he’d toured the former Theranos building the day before. 

Later, during a visit from Holmes’ parents, Fielder asks Holmes’ father, Christian, about her former lover and Theranos business partner, Sunny Balwani. Evans immediately interjects, trying to halt and redirect the conversation. Persisting, Fielder asks Christian to pinpoint a turning point in his daughter’s life. “That’s an easy one,” Christian says, confessing that the turning point came when Holmes was sexually assaulted at 19, a crossroads that Holmes admits had a hand in her dropping out of Stanford and starting Theranos.

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When Evans derails the conversation again, a new question pops up — an occurrence in this film as natural and frequent as breathing. Is Holmes’ husband trying to maneuver the situation because he cares for his wife, or because his behavioral patterns mirror those of Balwani and Holmes’ assailant? All three men directly impacted Holmes at vulnerable points in her life, and from the film’s outset, it’s clear Evans savors controlling the narrative, whether through Holmes’ life’s work or simply the way she whisks eggs for scrambling. What’s constantly baffling is how much affection Holmes has for her repugnant husband, no matter how much he twists stories or alienates the film crew. One could say the two share a talent for deception, but it always feels more complex and tricky than that, as if it would be too easy to say that Holmes and Evans get along because they’re both hucksters, skilled in fabrication. They both get something out of this relationship. Whether it’s love is anyone’s guess. 

What’s brutally, painfully clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that Holmes has not yet learned how to use her own voice. She knows how to speak, dictate orders and ideas. (And, obviously, how to fool powerful people.) But Holmes doesn’t grasp where her ideas end, and someone else’s influence begins. She personifies a complete lack of identity, so irrevocably tied to her inventions, physical or otherwise, that, compared to Fielder — whose work is marked by his own keen self-awareness — she looks like the diametrical opposite. Holmes is the tragedy to his comedy. Naturally, the two are intrinsically connected.

All of the questions about who’s running Holmes’ show take new, thorny form as the film blossoms in its latter half — the portion that, thanks to a surprise guest, makes the movie one of the most startling and memorable exercises in metafiction ever concocted. But the film’s most heartbreaking and pivotal scene comes in its first third, before Holmes surrenders for her prison sentence, when Fielder gathers her and Evans on the couch to show them Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s on First?” act. 

Fielder tells Holmes that he was reminded of the bit the day before, when Holmes tried to describe the science and intention of Theranos in front of its deconstructed prototype. Holmes has never seen the routine, and gives it a few chuckles. But when Fielder asks her to explain the joke — that “Who” is the name of the baseball player on first base, yet sounds like a question, confusing the two men — and why it’s funny, she can’t. As Fielder clarifies the punchline, Holmes breaks down in tears across from him, frustrated that she can’t understand.

In this moment, Fielder conjures a world of empathy for his subject, again posing questions about what gets lost between two people who believe they’re being perfectly clear, yet aren’t making sense to one another. Many things about Elizabeth Holmes aren’t certain. But what’s irrefutable is that she knows how lonely it is not to be able to communicate the world inside her head, and how painful it is not to understand others the same way. It’s no wonder that, when she meets someone who can bridge that gap, she wants to make a monument of it — be it a business, a marriage, a film or a profession of love.

Though the questions persist: Is this all part of Holmes’ master plan? Is she letting the cameras in to dupe us, to make us feel sorry for someone whose actions caused real harm? Maybe. Those seeking clear answers will leave with nothing more than new questions, but that’s the glorious part of “You Can See Everything.” In an era when documentaries are made for everything and nothing, it’s critical to remember that searching for reason in something as immense as the human condition is a fool’s errand. 

Fielder might be fascinated by motive and rationale, but he’s primarily interested in circumstance, and he understands Holmes’ circumstances perfectly. His film is a self-reflexive study of the inability to act as people expect — of masking and deception. How much of life is a performance? Can anyone truly be themselves when society’s bylaws not only dictate proper human behavior but also how successful anyone can be in something as complicated and unknowable as life itself? In seeking the truth, all one finds is more differences, more judgment. Sure, we can see everything. But whether we really should is another question entirely.

The post “You Can See Everything” and the tragedy of Elizabeth Holmes appeared first on Salon.com.

At 16, I was entrusted with one of the most important pieces of technology at a suburban Chili’s: a wire rack full of restaurant pagers.

The restaurant occupied a sprawling shopping center alongside an Olive Garden, a Cabela’s and a Costco, making it something of a regional mecca for homecoming dinners, birthday parties and Little League victories. The air smelled perpetually of tortilla chips, and the soundtrack was an agreeable mixture of Matchbox Twenty and sizzling fajita platters.

I liked the job. I liked asking people what brought them in, hearing about their celebrations and making small talk while consulting my restaurant map and section list. On busy nights, I’d estimate the wait, scribble down a last name, party size and pager number in black pen, then hand over a pleasantly hefty plastic puck.

“You can wander as far as your car,” I’d explain.

“Ope! Was hoping to make a Costco run,” some dad would inevitably reply. I laughed every time. It was a very reliable joke.

Every five or 15 minutes, another pager returned to the host stand, blinking and vibrating in the hands of a customer whose table was finally ready. I particularly liked watching one go off. A group could be deep in conversation when the puck sprang to life, producing a brief, collective flicker of delight. Dinner!

They were not beautiful objects. One woman who came in weekly after church complained that hers was ugly and bulky, then set it on the red pleather waiting bench so that it would vibrate against the upholstery rather than any part of her body. Occasionally, someone stole one, apparently deciding that a restaurant pager belonged in the same category of souvenir as a pebbled Coke glass. Sometimes the rechargeable batteries flagged, and we’d pull a pager out of rotation.

There was a reason these contraptions belonged to the Chili’s end of the dining spectrum. You wouldn’t mistake one for fine-dining theater. But they had an appealingly limited set of ambitions. They buzzed, they blinked, and when the wait was over, we took them back. The technology stayed at the restaurant.

In retrospect, what a gift. 

I don’t remember exactly when the pagers mostly disappeared. There was no retirement ceremony, no last call for the little plastic puck. I began noticing their absence most acutely when restaurants reopened after the first wave of the pandemic. Minimizing shared surfaces made sense then. Why distribute and disinfect pagers when customers already had phones in their pockets? Digital waitlists predated COVID-19, of course, but for me, that was when the phone began to feel less like an option and more like a condition of dining out.

And it rarely stops at the host stand. Your phone tells you the table is ready. It may supply the menu via QR code, take your order and settle the bill. Hours later, another text arrives asking you to rate the experience.

At some point, the meal has ended, but the restaurant apparently hasn’t finished with you.

None of this is inherently awful. Some of it is useful. But every time I wake my phone to perform one of these little tasks, I’m also opening the door to everything else it contains: emails, notifications, messages I wasn’t planning to answer over lunch. What was supposed to simplify dinner can turn it into another administrative process requiring a charged device and a willingness to look at it.

Restaurants are hardly alone in this. I reach for my phone to ride public transit, pay for parking, produce concert tickets, check in at the doctor’s office and occasionally prove to one website that I am the person trying to sign into another. Each request arrives dressed as a convenience. Together, they have made the phone feel less like a personal possession and more like mandatory civic infrastructure.

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And mandatory infrastructure really ought to work.

For a while, I happily used the Ventra card on my phone to ride Chicago public transit. One less thing to carry! Then, for a miserable stretch, several Red Line stations I frequented seemed to stop recognizing it. One morning, I joined a small congregation of commuters attempting to convince the turnstiles that our phones were, in fact, perfectly legitimate fare payment.

“It worked yesterday!” one man exclaimed.

“The terminals are old! They weren’t meant for this,” a tired CTA employee explained, kindly ushering us through the stroller entrance as the next train rumbled toward the platform.

The backup plan wasn’t faring much better. Around the same time, the ticket machines were proving similarly unreliable about accepting credit cards. A little queue had formed at the station ATM, where commuters were withdrawing cash to buy physical transit cards so they could get on the train.

We had arrived at the future, and it required a trip to the cash machine.

After a few weeks of this, I surrendered. I now carry a physical Ventra card, load $20 onto it when necessary and go about my business. It gets me through the turnstile without involving my phone. A modest pleasure, but one I’ve come to appreciate.

The trouble isn’t that every digital convenience is destined to malfunction. Plenty work exactly as advertised. It’s that we’ve become so accustomed to conducting ordinary life through our phones that we rarely stop to consider whether they’re necessary to the transaction in the first place.

Consider, for instance, a recent brunch in which absolutely nothing went wrong.

Recently, my husband and I went to a brunch spot I love in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood. The front-of-house staff always seem to be navigating the aftermath of a complicated breakup between two polycules, but the breakfast sandwich  is truly good enough to make the interpersonal intrigue part of the charm. I wanted to do very little beyond sit somewhere pleasant, eat something delicious and enjoy being newly married. There was a short wait. The host asked for my number; I provided it, then sat with my husband in two lobby chairs. We chatted. We waited. We did not move.

My phone buzzed. Our table was ready.

I looked up. The host stand was approximately two feet away.

The system had worked flawlessly. Somewhere, a piece of restaurant software had facilitated communication between two people who could reasonably have passed each other a saltshaker. The host hadn’t done anything wrong, and neither had I. But a moment that might once have involved someone looking up and saying, “You’re all set,” now required me to be reachable by a device I had no particular desire to consult.

I understand the alternative. A digital waitlist lets you wander around the neighborhood, browse the shops, maybe get a head start on another errand. Sometimes that’s a genuine gift. But I’m not convinced that being able to do two things at once means enjoying either one more. And sometimes I don’t want to wander. I want to be there, waiting for brunch, with the reassuring knowledge that the restaurant is handling the details.

That’s part of the pleasure of hospitality, isn’t it? For a little while, someone else tends to the logistics. You don’t need to manage every notification or keep every system running. You can just be a guest.

I don’t expect restaurant owners to read this and order a fresh shipment of vibrating pucks. If texts work best, fine. I’d simply like us to question whether requiring a phone is always an improvement, and remember that convenience isn’t much of a convenience when opting out stops being possible.

Maybe the pager never comes back. I can live with that. I’d just like to be able to let my phone die in my bag and still be called to breakfast.

Though I will say this for those ugly little pagers: At least you could hand one back.

The post I miss the restaurant pager appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump relished delivering two devastating words — “You’re fired” — in his role on the reality show “The Apprentice,” and years later, he repeated them incessantly on the campaign trail, much to the delight of his audiences. But the president has a dirty little secret: He does not like confrontation. In real life, he prefers to delegate the unpleasant task to an underling. 

This emerged as a pattern during his first term, when personnel churn was a constant. Trump often had his chiefs of staff — there were several — deliver the bad news, and sometimes he would even fire people on social media rather than confront in person. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, famously learned of his dismissal from his staff via a printed tweet after returning from a diplomatic trip to Africa. FBI Director James Comey saw the news of his firing on TV news reports. Once the person was gone, Trump often publicly insulted them, portraying them as “lowlifes,” “nutjobs” and worse, never seeming to realize the glaring contradiction — that a man with his alleged business savvy should have had better judgment than to hire such people in the first place. According to a Brookings analysis, the president had a 92% turnover rate among his “A team” during his first administration, the highest of any president in history.

Trump’s second term has been much more stable. Where before Trump had hired qualified people — aside from his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner — recommended by experienced Washington hands, this time around he has surrounded himself with nothing but the most loyal sycophants. As a result, there has been much less personnel drama. Still, there have been a few notable departures. 

The first was the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. After a bromance budded between the billionaire and Trump during the transition period, when Musk essentially moved into Mar-a-Lago, the president appointed him to head the Department of Government Efficiency and take a chainsaw to the federal government. Then there was a rupture in the relationship and Musk departed, although they seem to have mended fences. Since then, Trump has only fired a few people: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Centers for Disease Control Director Susan Monarez, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. (The latter three “resigned” under duress.) On Friday afternoon, after only a few days on the job and widespread criticism of her tenure, Trump dismissed White House press secretary Katie Zacharia.

The White House has insisted it’s entirely coincidental that all the firings have been women. But as the New York Times reported on Wednesday, “In many instances, the female officials who departed appeared to have failed some kind of loyalty test to Mr. Trump.” (You know how women are.) The departures of these women isn’t because none of the administration’s men have been implicated in misconduct or corrupt dealings. To the contrary: Some of Trump’s male officials and staffers are stunningly incompetent and dishonest, but their behavior has either been overlooked or rewarded with promotions and transfers. 

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So when reports surfaced that another high-profile female staffer may be on the chopping block, it would have come as no surprise — if it weren’t for the fact that the woman in question is the single most powerful female in the administration. 

Susie Wiles has earned the distinction of being Trump’s longest tenured chief of staff, and with good reason: She has managed to stay on the president’s good side by enabling him and never telling him what he doesn’t want to hear. She has admitted that herself, saying, “These seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.” 

One would certainly think that would guarantee her job security. But ahead of the monumental loss Republicans are expected to endure during the upcoming midterm elections, Trump is reportedly raging — and looking for a scapegoat. Apparently, it’s going to be Wiles. According to recent reports, the president has been calling around to friends to see what they think of his chief of staff — a common precursor to a Trump firing. According to POLITICO, plenty of people have their knives out for Wiles, with one person close to the White House saying, “She’s burned a lot of people.” 

This, though, is an occupational hazard for any Trump chief of staff. It’s also not unusual for turnover following a midterm election. But the GOP is facing what looks to be a massive loss, attributed to the president’s historically low approval ratings among the American people. Since Wiles, who guided Trump to his historic 2024 comeback, has also been tasked with doing the same in 2026 — along with her partners James Blair and Chris LaCivita — she is in the presidential crosshairs, even though there is little room to address Trump’s overwhelming unpopularity because he won’t listen to anyone. 

The big question now centers on Wiles’ replacement. POLITICO reported there are three likely candidates. One is Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a fierce Trump loyalist known most recently for spending as much time as possible with the president, feeding him memes and ideas on big white poster boards. Another is Kevin McCarthy, the former House Speaker who once told an aide to fill a jar with only the red Starburst candies for him to give to the president because he had noticed that Trump preferred them, earning him the presidential sobriquet “My Kevin.” Then there is Stephen Miller, the notorious senior adviser of everything.

The choice of Pulte or McCarthy would signal a continuation of current practices, albeit with less discipline and adult behavior in the White House, which may be inevitable no matter who wins the job. Pulte is dramatically unqualified, but since Trump once made him acting director of national intelligence, that distinction is obviously not an impediment.

McCarthy is one of the most incompetent and ignorant leaders in GOP history, but this is likely a plus, since Trump likes people who are just like him. If anyone expects that the president is looking for someone who is stronger than Wiles, the fact that McCarthy is being considered should lay those thoughts to rest.

The most frightening prospect is, of course, Miller, who is already serving as the shadow president and would, as chief of staff, essentially have the full power of the presidency at his fingertips. Trump is obsessed with his legacy projects and making as much money as possible, and the only other thing he cares about is vengeance on his enemies, a desire he shares in equal fervor with Miller. If Miller has the full power of chief of staff, we can assume that he will be ordering and approving the most authoritarian policies the United States has ever seen, and Trump may not even know it’s been done. That is clearly Miller’s mission, and given the power to enact such policies, he will not hesitate. 

Being far more ruthless and determined, Miller would no doubt run a tighter ship than Pulte or McCarthy. Trump, though, will still be in charge, and it’s easy to imagine that Miller’s actions would make him even more unpopular than he is now. That could make the legacy-concerned president uncomfortable as he confronts the possibility that he will leave office with a personal reputation far worse than Richard Nixon’s and a record of failure lower than Jimmy Carter’s.

It’s not too early to start blaming Miller for Trump’s unpopularity, and Democrats would be wise to start doing that publicly as soon as possible. If he becomes the chief of staff wielding power with fascist fervor, it may just be too late.

The post A blue wave could take out Susie Wiles appeared first on Salon.com.