On October 2nd, just as Major League Baseball's Division Series was kicking off, the main MLB Instagram and TikTok accounts posted a video hyping up the teams still in the running for the World Series. It featured clips of players from the Milwaukee Brewers, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, and more sliding into home plate, hitting homers, and celebrating hits - standard fare for a highlight reel. What really makes the montage, though, is that it's set to an Olivia Rodrigo song.

The song, "My Way," is an album track - not even a single - from Rodrigo's latest record. It's not exactly the soundtrack one might expect from an MLB-produc …

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“Sovereign citizens” think they can live beyond the reach of the state. Now the movement has influencers—and they’re selling all sorts of anarchist courses to expectant families.

Months after Elon Musk declared that the xAI model would outclass Christopher Nolan’s mythological epic, the bot itself admitted defeat.

The RealReal, a secondhand luxury fashion consignment retailer, said it's updating its bot defense system, effectively making it harder for AI agents to shop on its site.

The change comes days after The Verge reported that an AI agent could be used to take advantage of The RealReal's item reserve system. On the retailer's website, an item goes "on hold" and is unavailable for other customers to buy for 20 minutes once it's placed in a user's shopping cart. Using Meta's Muse, The Verge was able to instruct the AI agent to continuously re-add The RealReal listings in a shopping cart as soon as the 20-minute hold had expired, effectively block …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Among silver-screen romances, the Blake Lively-led odyssey across time, “The Age of Adaline,” isn’t exactly the most revered. Really, it’s barely even acknowledged, much to my campaign’s chagrin. The film is, however, one of my genre favorites for several reasons. First, it’s an old-fashioned love story with a fantastical twist: Lively’s character dies in a car crash but is revived when she’s struck by lightning, only to stop aging forever. Second, it marks a solid finale for a genre largely relegated to streaming, because for some odd reason, film executives don’t understand how powerful a collective romantic experience outside your living room can be. The guys making mid-to-high six-figure salaries aren’t connected with the average lovelorn, longing moviegoer — go figure!

But what I really love about “The Age of Adaline” is that it understands the heart. It’s a film that knows yearning doesn’t cease no matter how long we live, and that it’s all too easy to let fear complicate what should be easy. All this is wrapped up in one great line: “It’s not the same without growing old together. Without that, love is just heartbreak.” After it’s all said and done, isn’t this what guides our desires, the hope that we can find someone whose very presence can turn the innate tragedy of losing one another in death into something beautiful?

Married writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson have achieved something just as tender in their lovely new film, “Wicker,” a welcome return to the theatrical romance that, unlike many of its contemporaries, uses its gimmick to delightful effect. Based on Ursula Wills’ unpublished short story, “The Wicker Husband,” the film follows the headstrong but lonely Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman), an angler who catches and sells fish at her provincial town’s market, as she pushes against increasingly matrimonial norms. Everyone in town seems to be getting married off, with the women resigning themselves to the conventional duties of a loveless union. Tired of their cries of “spinster!” as she traipses through town with her catches, Fisherwoman asks the Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a spouse. She fancies it a joke to get the townspeople off her back, rubbing their traditions back in their faces. But part of her longs for a companion without fins and scales. 

Other organic materials should have to suffice. In a month, the Basket Weaver returns with a Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård), a man whose large, seductive frame and sinewy muscles are made entirely of, well, wicker. What’s more, the Wicker Husband is alive, something the Fisherwoman and townspeople all find strange, but not inherently terrifying. What really sparks curiosity is his natural, undemanding kindness, and the bond forming between him and his new bride — a far cry from the strained marriages that make up the quaint but judgmental village. 

Naturally, such an effortless romantic connection begets hard, wall-pounding, bed-destroying sex. In the grand tradition of supermarket romantasy novels, Fischer and Wilson are unafraid to go full-tilt erotic. They understand that part of the Harlequin romance genre’s appeal is its unabashed depiction of older women’s sexual desire. Those stories may occasionally adopt the fantastical and beastly into their narratives, but at their core, they focus on love in its most fundamental, gratifying forms. “Wicker” is no different, weaving a tale as sensual and honest as any classic love story, with such grace that it’s easy to forget the supernatural elements are there at all. The man might be made of wicker from head to head — if you catch my drift — but his love is intrinsically human.

Though, one would be forgiven for getting stuck on the question of sex. Wouldn’t it hurt? How is it possible? Can he . . . break? Fischer and Wilson do well to avoid getting trapped in the logistics. That’s the best part of the film’s fantasy aspects: Realism gives way to idealism, letting the story concentrate on its heart rather than its loins. Though the loins are admittedly impressive, too, marvelously detailed to make the design look disconcerting yet still quite sexy. But the film sneakily tucks its questions about romance between the gaps in Skarsgård’s impressive makeup and practical effects. Think of it like a cornucopia: all the rich, colorful stuff is hidden beneath the wicker.

As the relationship between the Wicker Husband and the Fisherwoman blossoms, so does the townspeople’s fervent envy, especially the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki), the Fisherwoman’s longtime acquaintance. Like the rest of the villagers, her jealousy stems from a seemingly harmonious yet ultimately unfulfilling relationship, providing just enough humor and stakes for “Wicker” to glide amiably. Occasionally, the film veers a bit too far off course in pursuit of laughs that are realistically only good for chuckles, leaving me to wonder how much more affecting the already moving story would be if it operated entirely with a straight face. 

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There’s an understandable temptation to let the fantasy buoy the film. But “Wicker” works best when it strips back, letting Colman and Skarsgård connect. Despite the latter’s ornate makeup, the pair’s chemistry is palpable and sincere. Skarsgård particularly makes a memorable impression in relatively few soft-spoken lines. Between this film and last year’s wonderful “Pillion,” he’s proven himself a daring performer, willing to approach love from its strangest, most complicated and genuine sides. While the material is lighter here, his work is no less touching, posing questions about differences within a relationship that go beyond the obvious, surface-level titular joke.

 

In its most poignant moments, Wilson and Fischer use the film’s unconventional setup to approach old questions with new flair. As the Fisherwoman and her Wicker Husband grow even closer, developing their own rhythm and a true, deep love, the possibility that something might affect their kinship becomes dreadful to imagine. Seeing someone pulled out of their shell by another person’s love is one of life’s most worthwhile joys, and also one of its most crushing sources of spite. And it’s not only the townspeople who bear this malice. Loneliness and jealousy have an ironic way of coming up when relationships are at their best. How defeating it can be to feel these things in the midst of true tenderness, especially in one’s first love, or when it’s been some time since they’ve been loved back. As the Fisherwoman admits after a transgression that threatens this happiness, “It’s easier to believe the bad than the good.”

“Wicker” might not spend all its time in those complex feelings, but it lingers within them long enough to cast a spell. And when it moves toward that big, life-defining, “Age of Adaline” quote moment, the film strikes resonance that lets it linger far longer than any movie whose central question is “what happens with the wicker penis?” should. “Wicker” wisely uses its silly conceit to its advantage, rather than letting it dominate the film’s central conversations. Here, love, sex and romance are woven into one sturdy new creation that reminds us fantasy can look exactly like reality, so long as we don’t overthink it.

The post “Wicker” is much more than its weird sex appeared first on Salon.com.

Copper prices are at record highs, but for TikTok creators, the real money may be in teaching others how to strip wire—and selling them the tools to do it.

ELLSWORTH, Kansas — David Rankin has never been one for putting up campaign lawn signs. As a lifelong Republican in a town of 3,000 — where Donald Trump has won by 50-point margins since 2016 — he’s never seen a reason to put a candidate’s name in his yard.

But recently, Rankin and his wife Dina did something new. Frustrated with their senators in Washington, DC, they went out to their front lawn and hammered in a sign in support of the Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Methodist megachurch pastor running for US Senate — and a Democrat.

As signs of a midterm blue wave rise around the country, perhaps no state has been more surprising to watch than Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years. A string of polls now show the incumbent GOP Sen. Roger Marshall locked in a tight race for survival, buffeted by low approval ratings, a string of personal controversies, poor campaigning, and Trump’s unpopularity over healthcare cuts, fuel costs, beef prices, and tariffs. 

Kansas is now a toss-up, attracting both national attention and last-minute cash investments from the national parties. Pundits have pointed to a range of reasons: the national backlash against the president; the unusual weakness of Marshall’s candidacy; the persistence of pocketbook issues for Kansas voters.

But there’s also something more interesting afoot, a difference that may have its own national repercussions. Hamilton’s campaign is a rare instance of a Democrat deliberately rallying people of faith, boldly proclaiming the Gospels, openly talking about Jesus Christ, and asking voters to find — and embrace — a profoundly Democratic message in the beliefs they profess every Sunday.

“Our faith is respectful…it reflects the ideas of justice and fairness, things that are just fundamental to the Bible,” Hamilton told me in early October. “Two thousand verses in the Bible talk about poverty and taking care of the poor. That’s not what you hear from Christian nationalists.”

That was part of the draw for the Rankins. They had known about Hamilton for a while. Friends had been to his church, and David — a retired choir director — told me that his own Presbyterian congregation had used Hamilton’s books and various sermon series as part of their Bible study. So when they found out Hamilton had decided to run earlier this year — as a Democrat, no less — they prepared themselves for the possibility that they might have to break with their political party this year.

“Things are not right right now. They’re not right in Washington and we have to do better,”  Rankin told me. “His faith is just going to make him better as he serves us.”

If Hamilton, and a handful of other candidates of faith in nearby Iowa and Texas, win, it could signal a shift in US politics — or at least a tremor in one of its most rock-solid certainties. One of the defining stories of the last century has been the realignment of religion, religious life, and religious voters on the political spectrum — and the complete shift of evangelicals toward the GOP. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Democrats could routinely count on majority support among white evangelical Protestants in congressional elections, and at least substantial support from them at the presidential level. But by the 1990s — with Americans becoming more evangelical and evangelicals becoming more Republican — the GOP had effectively locked in a permanent voting bloc, especially powerful in the heartland and the South.

Meanwhile the opposite has been true for the Democratic Party: Rapid liberalization and secularization has moved nonreligious and anti-religious voters toward the Democrats, while religious Democratic voters tend to come from smaller progressive churches. The shift has only accelerated in recent years, as Trump has consolidated evangelical voters, while white college-educated voters — who are largely secular — moved left. And when blue-state Democrats try to deploy faith-based messages, they get derided or dismissed as awkward, disingenuous, or off-brand. 

The result: In recent years, Democrats have mostly ceded religious voters, outreach, and messaging to Republicans. That has made it almost impossible for the party to compete in red and rural states, where white evangelical voters make up a substantial share of the electorate. In turn, Democrats have faced increasingly long odds to win those Senate seats, or expand the electoral map in presidential contests.

Whether he wins or loses in Kansas, Hamilton’s overperforming campaign poses a high-stakes question for Democrats nationally: Can a true moderate, a self-described radical centrist, and an openly religious person offer a road map for reclaiming Christianity and winning back religious voters? 

Maybe Hamilton does represent such a playbook. But to watch him on the trail, you find another fact that makes his path look much harder for other Democrats to walk.

It’s not just that Hamilton is a religious Democrat, or even that he’s mastered a message for religious swing voters hoping to reconcile their faith with a Democratic candidate. He’s also a deeply talented public speaker, well-connected community leader, and authoritative religious voice willing — unlike most pastors — to wade directly into electoral politics. He is, in other words, a unicorn.

He’s the leader of a very unique church — not just a politician “affiliated” with Christianity or training to join the clergy, but an established figure in an established institutional denomination that insulates him against attacks on his faith and character. (One of those came from no less than Vice President JD Vance, who attacked Hamilton in September as “dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”) The skills that come with leading a megachurch also lend themselves easily to campaigning — but might not be replicable for others, at least not to this extent. And Hamilton has managed to ease concerns from secular or nonreligious liberals, without compromising his centrist, at times heterodox, religious and political beliefs.

His campaign could change control of Congress. But beyond that, it also offers a new, possibly more effective, political language for Democrats in a post-Trump world.

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On a recent Thursday in Hutchinson, Kansas, Adam Hamilton found himself therapizing a crowd of several hundred. “Republicans for Hamilton” pins floated in the audience at this downtown theater in the middle of the state, as he diagnosed the problems in Washington that have bled into Kansas. Members of the US Senate, Hamilton said gently, had become like Dorothy’s traveling companions in The Wizard of Oz: They’d lost their minds, their hearts, and their courage.

Along the way, he said, they, and President Donald Trump, had torn apart the fabric of the community, turning neighbors into suspicious strangers. Heads nodded in agreement; those closest to me sighed and lowered their heads. Hamilton recounted something a mother once asked him: to be “somebody who’s going to help me not hate my neighbors with the red caps anymore.”

“And she wasn’t talking about Chiefs fans,” he quipped. Laughter broke the silence.

To see Hamilton in action feels like being thrown back to a forgotten era of politics: His tone is conciliatory. He’s eager to dispense with the “extremes.” He slips into preaching about “radical love,” and he’s comfortable quoting scripture and referencing Christian teachings when answering policy questions. Time permitting, he shakes hands and greets everyone in a room.

His public persona is built far less on his political experience — this is his first race — than on his three decades of experience leading a megachurch. In his own telling, tending to the middle has been a defining part of his life’s work.

His faith journey started in high school. Raised nominally Catholic, he embraced atheism as he watched his parents go through a divorce and after his grandmother died by suicide. After a late night of smoking weed with a friend, he heard a knock at the door: a Pentecostal missionary was inviting him to church. Though not necessarily sold on this movement, he did meet his wife LaVon at church — and they married a week after graduating.

Yet around this time, he says he felt a stirring to become a pastor. He enrolled at the evangelical Oral Roberts University to train as a preacher, but was thrown into despair, disillusionment, and doubt when his two best friends died in an accident. Seeking counsel and comfort from Pentecostal pastors and leaders, he was met with platitudes (“Everything happens for a reason”) and unanswered questions — and so began a journey that led him to John Wesley, the English theologian, and the movement he founded, Methodism.

“I carry my pocket testament with me everywhere,” Hamilton told me, pulling out his copy of the Gospels and the epistles of John, as he tends to do on the trail. “This is my defining story. This book and its story define how I understand what it means to be human and is at the center of my life.”

He was just 25 when he founded the Church of the Resurrection, commissioned by his bishops in the United Methodist Church to start a church “for thinking people.”

The point was to “use your intellect and not check your brain at the door,” he says on the stump. “And have a heart. Focus on both a spiritual life, but also on living out faith and justice in the world. These things go hand in hand.”

And so it came to pass that a congregation that started off meeting in the chapel of a funeral home in the 1990s grew into Kansas’s largest church, and the largest Methodist congregation in the country. The church now has nine locations across two states counting about 24,000 members between them, anchored by a spaceship-looking complex in Leawood, a Kansas City suburb.

Hamilton, and members of the church, are quick to point out the radical centrism of the church: It’s split roughly evenly between Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Hamilton himself is a former Republican. The Leawood location features both a 3,500-capacity sanctuary, with a full orchestra and 80-person choir for traditional services, a smaller space for modern, nondenominational-inspired worship, and a chapel.

And though the spotlight of the campaign has brought scrutiny, media visits, and broadsides from out of state, it’s also Hamilton’s experience in the church, combined with an unpopular and inexperienced GOP incumbent, that have made the race competitive. 

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The light pouring through the Swedish chapel’s windows in Lindsborg seemed to amplify the hundreds of singing voices. Hamilton, stumping at the front of the room, had broken out into song — “All Creatures of Our God and King” a hymn based on St. Francis of Assisi’s 800-year-old prayer — and the crowd at this Lutheran college quickly joined in.

“You just got to take the time to do that,” he said after the final alleluia.

Before the song, he had been speaking about the Christian roots of his campaign: the Biblical call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly, all for the sake of God’s creation. Oftentimes life, and especially politics, make it hard to see the beauty in nature, he was saying, and the complexity in everything.

Hamilton’s popularity in both his church and among Kansas voters owes a great deal to the fact that he’s a moderate. Coming from the coasts, that word, used around Hamilton, doesn’t quite mean what I expected. A “moderate” in American Democratic politics usually describes a longtime Democrat who carves out a middle lane on very specific issues — usually defense or reducing the deficit. But Hamilton has no trouble with complicated, unfixed, occasionally heterodox views, including on hot-button social issues.

Take a question a woman in the chapel asked him about abortion: What does he think about reproductive rights in a state like Kansas?

He’s spent the last two decades writing and talking about his evolving thoughts on abortion. He calls himself “pro-life with a heavy heart,” telling the woman that, as a pastor, he feels “personally moral tension when it comes to abortion.”

But he would be taking on a different role as a US senator, Hamilton said. Crisis pregnancies “lead me to have compassion, and say there needs to be legal and safe access to abortion,” he said. On this issue, politicians are usually pressured to take absolutist positions to satisfy their party’s base, but Hamilton sees his own view as representing what most Kansans actually want. People here have already voted multiple times to preserve abortion access, he said, and when an effort to undo abortion rights protections in the state constitution was on the ballot in 2022, it lost by nearly 20 points. He said he believed at the time that the legislature should not “be making that decision for women who are facing really difficult situations.”

This particular tension comes from his mother’s own experience: Worried she wouldn’t be able to support or raise a child at 17, her father, a TWA pilot, had encouraged her to travel to Switzerland for an abortion when she got pregnant. She considered it, but ultimately refused, leading to her being kicked out of her home and moving in with Hamilton’s 16-year-old father. Even today she tells Hamilton to remember her story — “I just can’t imagine how much poorer the world would be if I had gotten on that airplane and you had never been born.”

“There are things that are clearly black and white, but there’s a lot where there’s room; I may not ever get to where you are, but I can see where you’re coming from and I can respect you for that,” Hamilton said to me and other reporters after the chapel event. “People on the extremes on either end, they don’t want me telling the story about my mom. … But in the broad center, the folks who are on the left say, ‘You know what? That’s real. I know that you’re going to solidly make sure that there’s abortion rights.’ And on the right, people say, ‘I appreciate the fact that you understand the moral tension.’”

He applies a similar mindset to LGBTQ issues. His own church welcomes gay and lesbian people, even as he accepts that individual Methodist congregations can choose their own approach (he advocated for that middle ground while trying to prevent a schism between the mainstream UMC and a traditionalist and conservative offshoot that broke off in 2023).

On the trail, Hamilton hews to the middle on other policy issues as well, raising concerns about the national debt, endorsing border security and ICE’s “original” purpose, letting local communities decide on AI data centers, and critiquing “far-left climate” activism. He’s running ads condemning socialism and the extremes of both sides. And he peppers his speeches with the phrase “independent-minded Democrat.”

In the same way, Hamilton is not afraid to evangelize. He’s both eager and willing to talk about his faith, to preach the Gospel, and to share his personal journey to God, while also reassuring liberal, nonreligious people, and Democrats broadly that he believes in the separation of church and state. He isn’t one of those Christians, he seems to suggest, but he is still uncompromisingly Christian.

“We’re not running to force our religion on other people, but we are running as people who say our Gospel calls us to something different,” he said. When comparing the core priorities of the GOP — fiscal responsibility, limited government, personal civil liberties, and a strong defense — with the core priorities of Democrats — social safety nets, education, the elderly, making sure that vulnerable people are cared for — the space to be a gospel-reading Democrat is quite obvious, he said. 

“Jesus never talked about civil liberties,” Hamilton said. “He never talked about fiscal responsibility, a strong defense or limited government. But he did talk about, ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.’ … Which of these two sounds more like Jesus in the Gospels?”

Which is where the lessons for other Democrats appear plainly. Hamilton thinks the party he joined earlier this year could learn a few things from his campaign, and those of other people of faith running as Democrats across the country.

“Sometimes they have inadvertently alienated religious voters who are just right of center who would easily have come on board if they felt like they were welcomed,” he said. “The Democratic Party would be far stronger and wiser if they were openly willing to say, ‘Of course we embrace people of faith and we need them.’”

And it’s that ability, to combine faith with moderation and openness, that is compelling to the voters across the political spectrum I talked with.

“I’m a Christian and I feel that in Christianity we feed the hungry, clothe the poor, all those things that I read in the New Testament. And I feel that he gets that,” Susan Combs, a 73-year-old registered Republican, told me. “This Christian nationalism that is going on is not really, to me personally, it’s not what Christianity is about.”

She and others pointed to Hamilton and Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, as examples of a kind of Christian political revival. Both of them, plus a handful of other Democrats running on openly faith-based messages, present case studies for strategists, scholars, and others who are watching the campaign for political lessons.

When Talarico and Hamilton use religious language, “it really stands out, even though it’s really more of a return to what we’ve seen in the past,” Dave Campbell, a religion and politics scholar at the University of Notre Dame, said. “The trick with religious language is that people from within a religious community, they pick up on the subtleties. Do they really speak the way I do? Do they really understand the world the way I do? And if you don’t really understand those nuances, your rhetoric can come off as not only inauthentic, but even offensive.”

The former Baptist pastor, religious researcher, and professor Ryan Burge noted that Democrats will likely not be able to pull many white evangelical Christians into their coalition. 

But his own examination of the data shows that there’s ample room for Democrats to grow their margins among white Catholics and mainline Protestant voters — those who belong to old non-evangelical institutional churches like the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Methodist churches.   

These voters will remain up for grabs in future elections — though outreach may only work in certain states that still have strong mainline traditions. “You can’t win in a place like Arizona — that’s not where your base is,” Burge said. But traditional denominations are still strong in the heartland and farm country. “A place like Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, even Missouri to some extent, Wisconsin — those are the kind of places I think that message would do well,” Burge said. “It wouldn’t do well nationwide, though.” 

Burge told me the key for Democrats to be competitive in religious spaces again will be to win over old mainliners “who used to be a Bill Clinton voter, even an early Obama voter, who got lost by the progressivism of the Democratic Party on social issues. That’s the kind of voter that you can win back, the 75-year-old Lutheran, Presbyterian.” 

The bigger question, Burge told me, is an uncomfortable one Democrats as a party must face: that the secular far left is loud, but not large. “A lot of those people [who are religiously unaffiliated] are actually open to the idea of religion,” he said. Even among those who don’t identify with any particular organized religion, atheists only make up less than one in five.

“A lot of [religiously unaffiliated people] do believe in something. Those people are not going to be turned off by some religious talk,” Burge said. “At some point you’ve got to say to the loud secular left, ‘Hey, we appreciate you and we want your votes, of course, but you’re going to vote for us anyway. We need the votes of Catholics and mainline Protestants and those kinds of people. They’re the ones we’re going for.”

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At a rally in the Kansas City suburbs in September, Vice President JD Vance unintentionally delivered an in-kind donation to Hamilton’s campaign. He leveled an attack liberal and mainline Protestant Christians have long fielded from the religious right: that Hamilton’s faith was just “left-wing radicalism dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”

“That is not Christianity,” Vance, a Catholic convert who grew up in evangelical, Pentecostal, and nondenominational faith traditions, said of Hamilton, also calling him “a guy who would insult your faith and spit on your religion to accrue donations to himself.”

By contrast, he described Marshall as “a proud Christian” with “real faith and real principles.” Marshall also attends a mainline Christian church. 

More than 100 Methodist clergy came to Hamilton’s defense in the wake of the broadside, urging Marshall, and Vance, to be more careful on the campaign. “When you attack Adam’s pastoral ministry, his home congregation, and our denomination as a whole, you sow seeds of division and dissent,” they wrote. “You tear at the fabric that is the body of Christ.” 

The pastor of Marshall’s old church called Hamilton “a middle-of-the-road pastor” who is “pretty good at loving his enemies.”

Trump himself recently called him “a Radical Left LUNATIC Dumocrat,” who is “is not one us [evangelicals].” 

But the personal attacks on his faith, and the defenses, may have only underscored one of Hamilton’s perceived advantages. In Kansas, at least, moral character has become one of the defining stories of the race. It’s no coincidence that Hamilton’s big break came in September, when a major New York Times investigation upended the race by reporting that Marshall — a former OB-GYN — had sued more than 700 former patients, some of them new mothers, for unpaid medical bills. Many were charged 18 percent interest, and 81 were arrested in debt-collection cases. Campaign ads interviewing doctors who said Marshall’s practices were unusual and Marshall’s former patients soon inundated Kansas airwaves. 

“It is ridiculous to suggest that Dr. Marshall ever arrested patients,” Abbi Enders, Marshall’s campaign press secretary, wrote in response to a question from Vox about the article. “The Kansas Bill of Rights states, ‘No person shall be imprisoned for debt,’ proving this to be a blatant lie.” Many of the arrests in the cases of Marshall’s former patients were due to missed court dates.

That story broke right before Hamilton trounced Marshall during a debate at the Kansas state fair. Videos of Marshall being drowned out by booing crowds spread quickly — while competing clips of Hamilton talking about being both liberal and conservative also went viral during this window. 

Hamilton’s favorability has become a prominent example of another shift in Trump-era American politics: the sense that Republicans are now losing the character war, nominating deeply flawed candidates who project strength and bluster at the expense of integrity, decency, and other qualities people trust. Across red states like Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas, Democrats have held an edge in polling when voters were asked which party’s candidate has better moral character.

In Kansas, more stories would soon drip out, contributing to the deteriorating public image of Marshall: reports that Marshall’s primary residence was in Florida, not Kansas; an unpaid cookie bill from a 2020 campaign event; allegations of inappropriate usage of officials funds or taxpayer money for campaign purposes.

The result: Hamilton leading the field of key toss-up Senate races with the highest net favorability ratings in a CNN average of polls from September and October.

Republicans have fired back, going after his religion and church. Vance and Marshall attacked his church’s participation in a Pride festival. Marshall campaign ads have criticized the church’s handling of decades-old child sexual abuse allegations against a former volunteer at a church camp, alleging that Hamilton “protected a pedophile.” Trump, at his rally in Wichita last week, delivered his own spin on these accusations, saying Hamilton “used church dollars to fund anti-religious transgender activity,” and “shielded a child sexual predator at his church.” 

Marshall has continued calling Hamilton a far-left, “woke megachurch CEO,” and went after his church again at a debate last week, asking if he was “leading from the middle when one in four churches left his denomination? Is that what you call leading from the middle when you split the Methodist church?”

“People know what I’ve stood for — they know I’m not some woke, far left, whatever,” Hamilton said in an interview. “And I feel at peace about it.” Still, “that’s 24,000 other people in my church that you’re attacking and you’re attacking every other mainline Christian across the state of Kansas as you’re doing that.”

When asked about this charge in an email, Marshall’s press secretary did not respond. 

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When Hamilton discusses religious liberty and the separation of church and state, he makes something clear: “I’m not running to be the chaplain of the Senate.”

Over the days that I followed him, he repeated this line, usually in response to liberal-leaning voters curious or skeptical about endorsing someone so vocally religious. 

“If anything, that might have been a negative,” Sally Gillihan, a Democrat, told me in Hutchinson. “I was really worried that that’s what he was relying on, that’s what he was going to go to bat for.” After hearing him talk about policy, religious freedom, and restoring normalcy, those fears went away.

Others, including Sam Buttram, a 2020 Marshall voter who works in the cattle industry, told me that Hamilton’s religiosity wasn’t a selling point for him, but that it’s “a lot of what makes him who he is,” which makes him trust his character. “I just wish more politicians were like him…independent-minded, wanting to do the right thing for the people instead of worried about staying in office or agreeing with some other politician.”

Ultimately, Hamilton’s unexpected campaign success so far might be due to the combination of all this — not only his faith, but the impression that many voters have that he is guided not by right or left but his own values, as evidenced by his heterodox views and moderate temperament. In his case, those values are informed by his faith, but for other Democrats in other red states, they might not need to be. 

Still, that might not make it any easier for Democrats trying to emulate the Hamilton playbook. 

Much of Hamilton’s success, Burge told me, is due to his unique position. “People don’t realize how good megachurch pastors are at stuff like [campaigning]. When you’re used to talking to 2,000, 3,000 people every weekend, you are a politician,” he said. “It’s a superpower though. … You’ve got to be a one in a million kind of person.”

Every day, Wikipedia biographies of living people are flagged for deletion because the subjects are not “notable” enough. How do these poor souls take the news?

Coyotec is bilingual, swears, and tells listeners how to defend themselves against ICE. Its popularity comes as more broadcasters are experimenting with artificial personalities.

Somewhere in the last two decades, the spoiler became a cottage industry. While some journalists twisted their movie and television coverage around major plot events, others tackled them head-on, writing “ending explained” and “twist revealed” articles for readers who wanted to skip to the point. But like every staple in modern life, spoiler anxiety didn’t turn ubiquitous overnight, even if it might seem that way. Capitalism’s slowly tightening grip bound us to spoiler culture. As the economy became increasingly unstable and demanded that moviegoers and television aficionados devote more time to their jobs, the average viewer naturally had less bandwidth for their cultural hobbies. Combine that bleak outcome with the advent of DVR and social media — where any event can be discussed in depth, immediately — and boom: Bye bye, watercooler.

Anyone vigilant about spoilers has adapted their own methods of avoiding them. But occasionally, there’s just no way to keep something a secret once it’s out in the world. Case in point: The second-act surprise in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary, “You Can See Everything.” Given the film’s unprecedented access to notorious Theranos scammer Elizabeth Holmes before her 11-year prison sentence, it was already going to be a talker. But it’s a credit to the directors’ ingenuity that Holmes is simply the film’s introductory selling point. In reality — something that is already under constant speculation in the movie — it’s everything that happens after Holmes surrenders, slightly less than halfway through the three-hour runtime, that reveals “You Can See Everything” as the contemplative, shape-shifting chimera it is. 

When the documentary premiered in semi-secret at this fall’s Telluride Film Festival, viewers were asked not to reveal certain aspects in their reviews and reactions. This was, of course, unfeasible. In 2026, one can’t bring Amanda Seyfried, star of “The Dropout,” into the process of a Fielder-led documentary, show it to the public and expect that Seyfried’s presence will stay under wraps.

But this is simply another way for Fielder to toy with the viewer’s perception, lifting questions about secrecy, deception and the nature of truth from the heart of the film and dispersing them into the ether, like a kid blowing on a dandelion to make a wish. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s any such thing as a spoiler for “You Can See Everything.” The movie’s narrative turns are so self-contained that you could know every beat of the film and still be flabbergasted by how it all unfolds. Knowing this documentary exists — that a slippery figure like Fielder is going toe-to-toe with the equally shifty Holmes — is its own “spoiler.” Assuming that would be the case, I sought out the film’s “twist” in an early review, wanting to confirm if my suspicions about Seyfried’s involvement were true.

It turns out that sitting on that knowledge for a month only aided in my experience with the movie. Knowing Seyfried will eventually show up lets the viewer watch without shock, processing every moment she’s on screen without the last-minute textual analysis that would otherwise accompany a surprise like this. This spoiler isn’t a spoiler at all. Seyfried’s presence sets fire to all the ideas the film juggles up until her introduction. Gazing into that fantastic blaze, every viewer will see something different, something new with each watch. Holmes might be the person on the poster, but “You Can See Everything” isn’t anything without Seyfried.

While the film would’ve been compelling if it were composed entirely of the 30-some days Fielder and Oppenheim spent with Holmes and her egomaniac partner, Billy Evans, in their San Diego beach rental, it would’ve only scraped the surface of Holmes’ psyche. In that relatively short time, we come to understand many things about Holmes and Evans. She is specious (perhaps unintentionally so) and charming, sitting atop a transparent partition that separates her from reality, trying unsuccessfully to reach the atmosphere below. He is governing and loathsome, with a knack for manipulation that merely foreshadows what audiences witness in the film’s second half. 

This dual character study alone would give viewers plenty to contemplate in light of what they already know or assume about Holmes — most importantly that her fraud is unquestionably a product of being a woman in a violent, dehumanizing world. But as soon as she surrenders into custody, the rumination would halt. It would be much easier for someone to project their version of the truth onto Holmes. At the end of the day, that hypothetical version of the film would make for a very special, feature-length episode of Fielder’s “The Rehearsal”; little more than a cultural curiosity, as opposed to the pool of lucid, viscous quicksand it is. But Fielder and Oppenheim wisely chose to wait it out, to see what they could uncover in time, even if it was nothing at all.

Two years later, enter Seyfried, who watches Fielder’s footage of Holmes watching Seyfried in “The Dropout” for the first time. Years removed from the project, her curiosity is clearly piqued. But what more is there to do besides lend additional color to the documentary? Fielder answers that question with his own questions, held over from the initial shoot. He wants to use Seyfried’s experience in playing a character to further investigate motive, reason, identity and truth. He wants to know more about why Holmes has chosen Evans, and what they both get from their relationship. But more than anything, he wants to understand Holmes as much as one person can possibly understand another — a patently impossible yet all-too-enticing undertaking.

As one of the finest, most challenging and surprising actors of her (or any) generation, Seyfried is game. An actor’s Faustian pact is that, by becoming someone else, they become more deeply acquainted with their true self and the nature of authenticity, a pursuit that can easily descend into rampant narcissism or crippling mental health crises. For Seyfried, who normally takes care to draw clear boundaries between her life and work — living on a farm and avoiding the usual trappings of celebrity — the task is ambitious and hazardous. And that risk is part of what makes “You Can See Everything” so gripping. By agreeing to whatever Fielder has in store, Seyfried willingly blurs the lines between art and reality. She’s engaging in a piece of phantasmagoric performance art with two raging megalomaniacs, suspecting humanity buried beneath their easygoing subterfuge. It’s both the opportunity of a lifetime and a descent into a pitch-black basement with nothing but the glow of her soul to light the way.

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Seyfried’s first order of business is to step back into the role of Holmes, recreating scenarios Fielder experienced with Holmes during production to explore the various, mercurial states of mind Holmes might’ve been in — or at least that’s what Fielder leads us to believe. Like “The Rehearsal,” the question of fact haunts these recreations. The lines he provides for Seyfried are not transcripts; they’re scripts. Seyfried and the audience must trust Fielder, while questioning that trust at every moment. Both are essential to scraping past the layers of artifice Holmes and Evans have built around themselves. Once faith hangs in the balance, Fielder can navigate the viewer and Seyfried through its opaque boundaries, taking all of us to Evans’ house for an uncomfortably intimate dinner. Here, Seyfried makes her first-ever contact with Holmes over a phone call from prison. After some time spent with Evans, her fear is as visible as her empathy for Holmes. She’s not quite sure what this means for any of them, much less herself.

Seyfried’s willingness not only to go to those uncomfortable places but to stay there is one of her great strengths as an actor. Plenty of performers will wax poetic about their methods, saying what they hope to achieve in their work — how hard they worked to identify with their character. But few convey those efforts as Seyfried can. Refusing to stop at investigating her characters alone, she’s interested in humanity as a whole, and where those roles fit into how our species operates. 

In the film’s final act, Fielder stages one last recreation, another scenario that may or may not have actually happened between him and Holmes during visiting hours at a Texas prison. Fielder shrewdly pairs the recreation with footage of Seyfried reading the script for the first time, intercutting between the two. There are no major revelations, yet the sequence is an edge-of-the-seat climax thanks entirely to Seyfried, wrestling with her work, her complicated feelings toward Holmes and her family, this project, womanhood, selfhood and identity’s fragility — all in real time.

 

Here, Seyfried’s participation poses new and obscenely complex questions about the intersection of fame and infamy. She wonders whether her performance as Holmes is instructive, destructive, or some form of both. What responsibility does she have for how Holmes is treated in prison, by the press, or by the public? None, she argues for a moment, until she peels away another layer. 

It’s critical to remember that Seyfried and Holmes are the only two women at the heart of this film. They are its entire feminine perspective. Both are mothers. Both are, to differing degrees, actors. And Seyfried — having seen the first half of the film before agreeing to participate in its latter portion; having spent time with Holmes’ repugnant partner — knows patriarchy is a key component of Holmes’ story, a tie that binds them. She might not have a responsibility to Holmes, but that doesn’t mean she can’t practice empathy toward her. 

Perhaps that’s a line other actors might not want to cross. But it’s another risk Seyfried is willing to take. A greater good is at stake beyond her own edification. What we learn is that it doesn’t particularly matter whether the interaction between Holmes and Fielder in the prison actually happened. After all this time spent pondering what’s real, Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes emphasizes something imagined: a world that is kinder and more considerate — a universe where we can get closer to one another by leading with compassion, regardless of whether that compassion is reciprocated. Neither you nor I, nor Fielder or Oppenheim or Evans, can see everything. It’s all obscured by layers upon layers of fact, fiction, perception and question. Only Seyfried can get close enough to make out the reality underneath it all, and truth concerns her little. What matters most to her is the only thing that allows any of us to see each other: trust.

The post Amanda Seyfried is the “You Can See Everything” wild card appeared first on Salon.com.

Meghan Markle told her estranged father he would never meet her children after learning of allegations of sexual abuse involving minors as Philippine authorities investigate claims that child sexual abuse material was found at his former home.

The Duchess of Sussex reportedly sent Thomas Markle Sr., 82, a final letter in December 2025, while he was hospitalized following a leg amputation. Sources close to Meghan told the BBC that she confronted her father about the allegations, told him authorities were aware of them and said she would never contact him again.

The revelation comes as Philippine Interior Minister Jonvic Remulla warned that evidence gathered so far raised the possibility of serious criminal wrongdoing. “Right now all signs point to a possible sex offender of the grossest kind,” Remulla told The Guardian, emphasizing that forensic examinations must be completed before investigators reach definitive conclusions.

Philippine police are examining materials reportedly discovered by Meghan’s half-brother, Thomas Markle Jr., while clearing out their father’s former home in Cebu. The materials allegedly included hundreds or thousands of images depicting child sexual abuse, along with electronic devices. Remulla said investigators expect forensic results within approximately a week.

Thomas Markle Sr. has emphatically denied the allegations, calling them “sick lies.” He told the Daily Mail that he had nothing to hide and welcomed forensic examination of the devices.

Meghan’s half-sister, Samantha Markle, has also defended their father, accusing their brother Thomas Jr. of fabricating the allegations for financial gain and claiming the computers had been outside their father’s possession for two years.

The investigation has also raised questions about British authorities’ handling of earlier warnings.

London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed Saturday that it received a letter in January 2019 containing allegations of offending outside the United Kingdom. Officers shared the letter with Meghan and Prince Harry’s office but did not forward the allegations to other law enforcement agencies. The department is reviewing its response and considering whether to refer itself to Britain’s police watchdog.

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Meghan, who has been estranged from her father since before her 2018 wedding, said Friday that she had kept him away from Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet to protect them. “I am deeply distressed,” she said, expressing concern for any children who may have been harmed.

The FBI has confirmed awareness of the allegations and offered assistance to Philippine authorities. No charges have been announced, and investigators have not publicly established that Markle Sr. possessed the alleged material.

The post Philippine police: Meghan Markle’s dad may be offender “of the grossest kind” appeared first on Salon.com.

BERLIN — As she was climbing the ranks of far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) a decade ago, Alice Weidel privately denounced one of her party’s most influential figures for using racist arguments and Nazi-era language, and sought to have him expelled.

Years later, she praised his leadership, said a bid to ban him from the party was “exaggerated” and that he was suitable for a federal cabinet position.

That striking reversal emerges from a massive leak of internal AfD communications, including emails in which Weidel condemned Björn Höcke, the party’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, and warned that extremists were driving away mainstream conservative voters.

The revelations come from more than 420,000 emails and roughly 48,000 documents released by hackers this week, providing a rare glimpse inside Germany’s largest far-right party. An anonymous spokesperson for the hackers told Die Zeit the attack was not “politically” motivated “in the sense that [they] support another party,” but that they published the allegedly stolen material to promote “transparency and public accountability.”

The AfD confirmed the breach, saying hackers had attacked a hosting provider in late September. It condemned the leak as “an attack on the German party system and therefore on democracy itself.”

WELT, which, like POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, examined emails from one of Weidel’s accounts between 2015 and 2017, when she was a relatively junior figure in the party’s leadership.

Asked by WELT to explain the contrast between her warnings at the time and her present position, Weidel declined to comment through a spokesperson.

A spokesperson for Höcke did not respond to a request for comment sent by POLITICO on Saturday.

‘Deeply problematic’

The messages seen by WELT show a politician deeply alarmed by the growing influence of Höcke, who championed an ethnically defined German nationalism drawing on ideas associated with the Nazi era.

In October 2015, Weidel warned colleagues that the party’s proximity to Pegida, an anti-Islam street movement, and the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (now known as The Homeland) was alienating the conservative voters it needed to attract.

“In the west we are losing the mainstream conservative electorate completely through our proximity to Pegida, and to the NPD in the east,” she wrote.

Weidel also strongly pushed back on a speech from Höcke that same year, where he contrasted a “life-affirming African expansionary type” with a “self-negating European placeholder type,”

“This is deeply problematic, because the reasoning here is racial. It is fundamentally wrong,” she wrote to the AfD’s federal executive board. “And please, spare me the usual ‘that’s-not-how-it-was-meant.’ I can’t hear it any more.”

In another message, she warned that extremists were deliberately blurring the boundary between the AfD and neo-Nazi politics, driving mainstream conservatives away “in horror.”

She also feared that Höcke’s rhetoric could bring the party under scrutiny by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, its domestic intelligence service monitoring threats to the constitutional order.

“Höcke’s statements alone, and the use of the term Volksgemeinschaft” — the Nazi-era concept of an ethnic national community — “are enough to land the AfD in that report,” she wrote, referring to the intelligence service’s annual assessment. “Some in our party seem in a hurry to drive the AfD, deliberately or not, into oblivion.”

In May 2025, the agency classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation”, citing, among other things, an exclusionary concept of the German nation. The classification, which grants authorities broader surveillance powers, was provisionally suspended by a court in Cologne last February.

‘Wake up, for once’

The leak also features emails about a speech Höcke gave in January 2017 to the AfD’s youth wing, attacking Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance.

Höcke described Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “memorial of shame,” criticized the country’s efforts to confront its Nazi past and demanded a “180-degree turn in the politics of memory.”

Weidel herself brought a motion to expel him from the AfD.

The motion, obtained by WELT, accused Höcke of using “vocabulary from Adolf Hitler” and endorsing the “Führerprinzip” — the Nazi doctrine of absolute leadership authority. It described him as displaying an “affinity in essence with National Socialism.”

In an internal message, Weidel urged colleagues to recognize the implications of Höcke’s language. “Wake up, for once,” she wrote, warning of the “explosive force of the double meanings” in his speech.

As Weidel prepared to seek the party’s nomination as lead candidate for the 2017 federal election, the leaked correspondence shows that she blocked the recording of her own motion against Höcke in the minutes of a party leadership meeting, arguing that further controversy would damage the party.

Höcke subsequently acknowledged that his speech had been a mistake and asked the leadership to withdraw the move against him.

Weidel publicly welcomed his letter as a “positive signal” and called for an end to the infighting.

Within weeks, she had secured her nomination as the AfD’s lead candidate. Asked whether she would campaign alongside Höcke, she replied: “Yes, of course. We are two parts of one party.”

Indeed, the emails suggest that Weidel’s private misgivings had not entirely disappeared. In May 2017, she condemned an AfD election poster featuring a pregnant woman and the slogan “‘New Germans?’ We’ll make our own” as “an NPD poster,” in a reference to the neo-Nazi party.

Today, Weidel no longer publicly criticizes Höcke. She has praised his leadership in Thuringia and even suggested him for a federal cabinet position.

“We get along very well and we got to know each other over the years,” she told BILD in a 2025 interview. When she was asked whether Höcke was suitable for a federal cabinet position, she simply replied: “Yes.”

When asked in February 2025 about the 2017 expulsion proceedings against him that were backed by Weidel, Höcke called it “old news.”

“We got to know each other and came to appreciate each other. Alice Weidel was the right lead candidate and did a top job,” Höcke told WELT at the time.

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, The Telegraph, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

Nothing about Shibuya HiFi is loud. From its unmarked front door to its low-lit lounge, the Seattle vinyl bar is a subtle, pensive ballad of a place. So much so, in fact, that on the Wednesday night that we visited for a sold-out event, the sparsely populated lounge area was nearly silent.

That is intentional, said general manager Jerry Stotler. Wednesday nights are closed to everyone but ticket holders. “These are what we call deep listening sessions,” he explained, “so when you walk in, there isn’t any music playing. We want to ensure a pristine listening environment when we’re in the hi-fi room.”

Seattle has many vinyl bars, but Shibuya, open since 2023, sets the local standard for premium listening experiences. Every inch of its intimate sanctum contains the story of the venue’s principal owners, Quentin Ertel and Brian Rauschenbach. It’s named for the Tokyo district known for its jazz kissa, cafés dating back to post-war Japan where visitors listen to vinyl on premium sound equipment. Rauschenbach’s parents met in such a place nearly six decades ago, Stotler said.

(Credit: Justin Kim)

Ertel, an interior designer, painstakingly curated the room. Cedar planks line the walls. Louis Poulsen chandeliers hang from the ceiling, along with several plush, crescent-shaped loveseats, acquired from Benaroya Hall when the concert hall underwent a redesign. A pair of deep seats covered in nubby upholstery sit close to this sacred space’s altar — a vinyl-stacked media console holding a vintage receiver and turntable, flanked by two ATC SCM50 loudspeakers. But one set of equipment reigns over everything: a pair of 1976 Klipschorns.

Shibuya’s schedule favors favorites such as D’Angelo’s “Voodoo,” Radiohead’s “Kid A,” or Charles Mingus’ self-titled opus. But on this Wednesday, the venue hosted a special listening session for Michael Kiwanuka’s fifth album, “Fudge,” a week before its Oct. 23 release.

Stotler humbly acknowledged the venue’s good fortune to be included on the very short list of people and organizations invited to preview the record, a relatively recent development. Previous pre-release sessions have debuted work by the Beastie Boys’ Mike D and Thundercat.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. While waiting for the magic to start, we listened to the hi-hat riff of ice cubes click-clacking as Stotler worked a cocktail shaker. Once the listening room doors open, all drinks, distractions and shoes must be left at the door. “So enjoy a cocktail in advance of the session to relax and reset,” he calmly says, sliding one of his potions across the bar to a fellow patron. “Then we’ll go back and drop the needle.”

 

 

I’ve been curious about the recent rise of listening bars. Life has gotten faster, noisier and increasingly disconnected. Low-friction digital convenience has sapped life and music of their organic weight.

Places like Shibuya, then, are a natural fit for what Ertel describes as a renaissance of meaning, driven by vinyl’s resurgence. “There’s a search for new ways to be together, but also, I think, just new ways to be,” he said when I caught up with him by phone a few days later.  “We live in sort of this two-dimensional world of scrolling. Everything’s flat and fragmented and fractured. When you have something that has kind of a wholeness to it, that is also linked to something that most of us love so much, which is music, it makes sense that people want vinyl records again.”

Younger audiophiles revived the medium from the dead starting in 2008 for many reasons, the simplest being that digital downloads don’t include eye-popping cover art. By 2020, vinyl record sales revenue hit $596.2 million, surpassing CDs ($531.1 million) for the first time since 1986, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. In 2025, vinyl purchases in the U.S. alone reached $1.04 billion, the RIAA reported in March.

Listening bars, meanwhile, have popped up worldwide. Tracks & Tales, a site founded by British writer Rafi Mercer, reports finding bars, hi-fi cafés and sound-first venues across 171 countries and 6,465 cities. That doesn’t count traveling experiences like The Listening Room, created by Seattle DJ Joshua Fields.

Fields was inspired by listening to “Voodoo” at Shibuya and wishing that he could talk about it with the other attendees. (He credits Rauschenbach as a mentor.) A little later, a back injury forced him to slow down and think about what he’d do differently — a “divine download,” he called it during a recent phone chat, that transformed into a monthly series of phone-free listening sessions that have so far taken place in Portland and Seattle venues.

The rules of engagement are consistent. Soft, comfortable seating is a must. No phones for the duration, or talking, singing or other interruptions once the needle hits vinyl until the very last track finishes. Afterward, he sets aside time for quiet journaling and discussion.

“The music is really the medium that gets us to this opening up,” Fields told me, “because what I’m solving for is the lack of human connection, with all our technology and our robots, all our things.”

As such, his model is a little more relaxed than Shibuya’s. Participants are served food and drinks, with each event inspiring a signature cocktail. For a recent sit with “Purple Rain,” he direct-messaged its co-star, Apollonia Kotero, to let her know he was naming a drink after her.  “She responded, which blew my mind,” Fields said. “She told me, ‘Make sure it’s spicy.’”

So he made sure the bartender did.

(Credit: Meg Stacker)

Listening events remind us that music can be a full-bodied, meditative journey, however you do it. There’s a ritual to setting the turntable stylus, or needle, into a vinyl LP’s groove for the first time, hearing the soft, crackling prelude to an opening melody and listening to a body of work front to back with silent focus. We can create that feeling at home, setting up a dedicated space to be comfortably still and take in your favorite records, or an unfamiliar one, from start to finish.

Still, there’s real value in leaving home and finding a place to listen — not simply hear, but listen —alongside strangers who love the art and spirit of music as much as you do. At events like Fields’, you may even meet someone you otherwise wouldn’t. He teased that a Dec. 4 Listening Room event in Seattle for India Arie’s “Acoustic Soul” will feature a special guest.

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I look forward to inhaling “Fudge” many times on my stereo. But I’ll never be able to recreate the rush of hearing its blossoming piano and strings for the first time, sensing the soundwaves from those Klipschorn speakers penetrate my skin. It made me well up, which embarrassed me until I glanced around the room and noticed a few others dabbing their eyes, too.  

“In a true kissa or a well-kept basement bar, the first thing you feel is not volume; it’s presence,” Mercer writes. “The room seems to steady itself around a note. The air thickens. You sit differently. Your breath slows without negotiation.

“Good sound doesn’t overwhelm you,” Mercer adds. “It invites you. That’s the quiet truth at the heart of every listening bar: the room listens back.”

To search for a listening bar near you, click here.

 

 

The post The global rise of listening bars appeared first on Salon.com.

Life is a circle that we begin drawing at birth and complete at death. Surely, you’ve heard this analogy before. It’s just one of the many poeticisms used to make sense of this amorphous existence. But less talked about are all the full circles that exist inside life’s larger ring: the mini revolutions we collect throughout the years — things that not only make up a life, but make that life worth living. Comedian Maria Bamford’s new Netflix documentary, “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story,” is a shining ode to both the big picture and its small details, arguing that a life without detours and surprises is no life at all.

While it deals in cycles, Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley’s documentary is linear, tracing Bamford’s life from her early years growing up gifted and strange in Minnesota to her time performing idiosyncratic, character-filled stand-up, to a midlife informed by it all. And though its structure is conventional, its subject is anything but. Most comedians are — how do I put this gently — known to be some level of unwell. (Whether they understand that is another matter.) Bamford, on the other hand, has made a career out of being so deeply in touch with her mind and self that it would frighten the average neurotypical viewer if it weren’t so damn funny.

That fear is partially what “Paralyzed by Hope” seeks to scrutinize and change. Here, Bamford is as honest and casually hysterical as she’s always been, discussing mental illness with the candor such a stigmatized and distorted topic deserves. She’s unafraid to go deep and dark, naming feelings and investigating mistakes. It’s disarming and occasionally exhausting, but that’s the point: If such repetitive heaviness is difficult for the viewer, imagine how it is for the person experiencing it.

But at the risk of becoming trite, “Paralyzed by Hope” embraces the light that comes with radical honesty. For Bamford, comedy is a chance to close those mini-revolutions and understand the otherwise inconceivable by connecting with the audience. Her family and experiences are integral to her act and essential to strengthening those ties. Accepting that she’ll always be looking toward the end of life’s circle, she’s delighted to fill its contents in the meantime. As Bamford’s friend, comedian Gary Gulman, says toward the film’s end: “Those interactions are antidepressants, and she’s created so many of these little antidepressants.”

The post In her achingly honest documentary, Maria Bamford comes full-circle appeared first on Salon.com.

While we were swooning over “WandaVision” back in 2021, we couldn’t have known Marvel was softening us up for the AI revolution. Well, some of us probably suspected something was afoot since, like Agatha Harkness, it was right there all along. Algorithms were already predicting our tastes, needs and desires and serving us options before we asked for them. Virtual assistants steered our daily lives and still do. But Alexa and Siri don’t have faces, bodies or plausible imitations of human emotions or empathy — not on the level that Paul Bettany’s synthezoid Vision provided for a grieving Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen).

One five-year time jump later, “VisionQuest” drops in on the android’s story where “WandaVision” left off. The Vision who lived, laughed and loved beside Wanda was an illusion, a delusion, really, brought to life by witchcraft. This one is very real: a kind of Vision 2.0, rebuilt by the intelligence agency tasked with saving the New Jersey town Wanda took hostage to shore up her classic family sitcom simulation. It – OK, he –  has no direct connection to the life his predecessor shared with Wanda or the children they magicked into existence.

But Vision is slowly learning what it means to feel, which makes him the AI romantic companion of everyone’s dreams.

Honestly, that’s the show’s main appeal. Marvel and “VisionQuest” creator Terry Matalas seem to know it. Planting quippy chatter wherein Vision deduces that a young woman finds him more attractive than his sidekick Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) acknowledges Bettany’s rizz is shouldering the weight of this thing. But it also gives tacit permission to lust after the robot he’s playing. After all, the first Vision, or Wanda’s idea of him, tended to her every need and gave her everything she wanted, including children. He also blessed us with one of the most heartbreaking lines of this decade: “What is grief if not love persevering?” A beautiful notion. Also, it kinda made some people want to hit that.

(Photo by Dennys Ilic. © 2026 Marvel. All Rights Reserved.)

The new Vision returns to a lonely, disconnected world where AI companions are an increasing part of our lives, if not entirely normalized. Falling for a bespoke arrangement of code remains a novel concept for most people, but it’s also an accessible alternative to isolation.

Lacking sorcery or some other way to conjure up the ideal lover, we’re left with engineering. Reams of magazine profiles spotlight everyday people choosing to share their lives with an AI boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse. You may be acquainted with someone who does this without even knowing it, because it’s still viewed as strange or even alarming.

The “VisionQuest” hype is real, too. Although the ever-expanding Marvelverse collapsed under market saturation, Bettany’s romantasy hero is one of the few characters worth getting excited about. He was part of the TV show that started it all – a pretty great one at that – so his reappearance after years of diminishing returns has sparked excitement and hope in equal measure.

That also means that it doesn’t really matter that the “VisionQuest” narrative favors mechanical efficiency over emotional resonance now we’re four episodes in.

As with all Marvel series, “VisionQuest” hasn’t yet landed on its deeper meaning. It took two episodes to bring Tommy and Vision together, and this week’s third and fourth introduced T’Nia Miller’s Jocasta and her connection to the hero/villain synth we know and love.

And regardless of the metaphorical or philosophical cloak it may eventually wrap itself in, the show’s main function is to bridge one chapter of this franchise to the next. Remember, we’re less than two months out from the premiere of “Avengers: Doomsday.”

Translation: This Vision has a purpose beyond figuring out his role in this world, something he put off by hiding in a pub under the alias of Sherwood Ellis and posing as human. Since the establishment was owned by one of the sweetest ladies in the multiverse, who’s killed in a shootout orchestrated by a mercenary named Paladin (Todd Stashwick), her death prods Vision to do a little soul-searching.

(Photo courtesy of Marvel. © 2026 Marvel. All Rights Reserved.)

But wait — he has no soul, just wires, processors, fluid and whatnot, plus a set of AI personas guiding his interactions with the human world. Rather, most of them are. The original Vision also absorbed the persona of the genocidal superintelligence Ultron, played by James Spader here and in “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” That Vision kept Ultron’s code intact for reasons beyond sentimentality; he/it is effectively Vision’s father, created when Bruce Banner and Tony Stark merged the code of Tony’s noble assistant, J.A.R.V.I.S., with Ultron and the Mind Stone. It makes about as much sense as Tommy, a human, realizing he is somehow one of Vision’s sons due to a confluence of magic and circumstance. (The other, Billy, made his debut in “Agatha All Along.”)

All this is to say that the by-the-numbers circuitry of Tommy and Vision’s cross-country escapade, which thrusts them into a murder case involving a killer dubbed the Butcherbird (Miller), is merely a skin over the ones and zeros of artificial desire.

Take Spader’s role in this show, for example. His Ultron avatar sports the long beard of a fisherman shipwrecked by a hard life. But there are moms and grandmas watching who still blush at memories of Spader’s work in “Secretary.” (If you know, you know.)

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So, in the denouement of the fourth episode, when Vision lets Ultron take over his handsome, hella tight chassis to get out of a deadly situation, you can’t help but look at that twist with both horror and straight-up horniness. I mean, forget Reese’s cups – for some, Vision’s patrician looks and Ultron’s Spader-esque chill may be the two great kinks that go great together.  

Does this AI want to kill you, neg you or put you through a mattress? Answering “Why not all three?” is absolutely acceptable. In fact, it’s probably why many of us are invested in seeing this adventure through to its climax.

New episodes of “VisionQuest” drop Wednesday on Disney+.

 

 

The post VisionQuest is perfectly timed for the AI companion era appeared first on Salon.com.

The last time “Cold Little Heart” singer Michael Kiwanuka visited Seattle, I mistook the 7 o’clock start printed on my concert ticket for the doors-open time, only to arrive as he performed the “Big Little Lies” theme . . . and bid the audience goodnight. I sheepishly assured my husband that was OK; we’d catch his next tour.

Cut to a September 2026 interview with The Guardian, a month before his fifth album, “Fudge,” was due to come out: Kiwanuka revealed he’d suffered a hemorrhagic stroke in July 2025. He’s rehabilitating but still struggles to speak, in addition to other impairments he’d rather not make public. Suffice it to say, no one knows when Kiwanuka will tour again. His full, peaceful recovery comes first, of course. This news also reminded me to never take anything or anyone we cherish for granted.

Until we can applaud the performer’s return to the stage, attending a vinyl bar’s listening session for “Fudge” is about as close to that elating experience as a person can get for now. That’s what I did last week, driving across town to hear it a week before its release.

 

 

No recording can ever replace the feeling of hearing a singular talent like Kiwanuka live, although his music’s airy psychedelia stirs the soul whether it plays through headphones, tinny car speakers, or the most modest of home sound systems. But top-of-the-line audio equipment allows his work to truly soar.

Kiwanuka is a sonic artificer of the highest level, capturing lofty hope and languid melancholia in liquid waves that crash and surge around his voice. That comes through magnificently on “Fudge,” which was modestly engineered compared to 2024’s “Small Changes.” That was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Inflo and Danger Mouse, whereas this came together in a simple Southampton studio in the U.K. As such, a close-to-home comfort infuses “Fudge” with real tenderness without sacrificing any of Kiwanuka’s signature sonic luxuriance.

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Kiwanuka’s latest is a sun-soaked daydream of an album awash in afternoon light. It’s easy to get lost in its layers of strings, to chase a cello’s lusty glide past innocent piano notes. But it also has a purposeful solidity, announced by a snippet of an interview with jazz legend Chick Corea that leads into the nostalgic “Summer Clothes.”

“The simplest thing to forget is that what music is about, and any kind of art form is about, is creating the kind of things that you think are beautiful,” says Corea. With “Fudge,” Kiwanuka has certainly done that.
 

 

The post Michael Kiwanuka’s “Fudge” is a treat not to be missed appeared first on Salon.com.

Meta got hit this week with its biggest fine yet, the latest in a mounting pile of court-ordered payments.

Have you ever read “The Secret?”

The pseudoscientific self-help book by Rhonda Byrne rode a 2006 Oprah Winfrey endorsement to the tune of tens of millions of copies sold. It pushes the “law of attraction,” the idea that the universe is built on positive and negative energies, and that like sticks with like. In short, if you think regularly about the things you want and maintain a positive attitude, those things are more likely to come your way.

That’s the gist, anyway. Honestly, I never read it. But its ubiquity in the aughts, its reputation for being largely composed of quotations and the relative unoriginality of the premise — which adds a bit of woo-woo to the idea that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar — makes it feel like I have. Even if I was completely unaware of the New Thought movement, or if I’d never heard the name Norman Vincent Peale, I’d have some idea of what Byrne was on about. I’ve been a Jay-Z fan for most of my life.

The rapper has been manifesting his second act as a power player for nearly his entire career. Outside of some early, Das Efx-indebted features in the early ‘90s, Shawn Carter has been manifesting moguldom across his discography.

It’s right there on the cover of his 1996 debut “Reasonable Doubt.” The black-and-white photo and early computer-assisted graphic design look chintzy now, especially when held up to the art-directed and museum-curated sheen of his later work. But there’s no mistaking what Jay-Z is going for with his fedora, scarf and cigar. This kid from Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects is no street-level striver. He’s a boss.

It carries into track one, where a middleman is warning some lackey not to cross Carter. The first thing anyone hears about Jay-Z is in reverential tones, fit for a short-tempered kingpin. You get the sense that you might get to meet him someday, if you play your cards right. But for now, he’s out of your reach and your tax bracket. What follows is nearly an hour of opulent sh*t talk, laid over lush soul and jazz samples handpicked by producers with names like DJ Premier. It sounds slick and established. It sounds expensive. Most importantly, it sounds unhurried and in control. This was oligarch rap from the latest king of New York.

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In 1996, Jay-Z was far from the billionaire multihyphenate we know today. He was co-owner of Roc-A-Fella Records, but at that time the label was mostly a means to release his debut after being turned away by several majors. He kept putting out the idea that he was already a magnate to anyone with a Walkman, while still scrabbling behind the scenes.

Case in point: Two platinum records weren’t enough to convince the copyright holders of the musical “Annie” to clear a sample for Jay-Z’s third album. The multi-billionaire of 2026 might have flashed a wad of cash. ‘90s Jay Z (sans hyphen in several ways) wrote a letter.

“I made up this story about how when I was a seventh grader in Bed-Stuy, our teacher held an essay contest, and the three best papers won the writer a trip to the city to see ‘Annie,’” he told Grantland in 2014. “I wrote that from the moment the curtain came up I felt like I understood honey’s story. Of course, I’d never been to see ‘Annie’ on Broadway. But I had seen the movie on TV.”

That album went platinum six times over, but even in the heady pre-Napster era, that wasn’t private yacht money. You wouldn’t know that if you saw the “Big Pimpin’” video, though. Jay-Z kept up the facade of globe-trotting mogul through several more albums, and that fantasy inched closer to reality with each release. He launched a clothing brand. He opened a nightclub. He was still talent, though, calling for the suits to “pay us like you owe us” on his hit “Izzo.” More than a decade later, Jay-Z would make good on the idea that “money talks so talk more bucks” when he launched a streaming service that paid higher royalty rates than its competitors.

On mic, he started referring to himself as the “best rapper alive.” Knowing that hall-of-famers go out with a bit of ceremony and their jersey in the rafters, he announced a short-lived retirement with “The Black Album.” Briefly free from a grueling release schedule, he bought a stake in the NBA’s Nets and pushed them to move to Brooklyn. He became the CEO of Def Jam Records. His mogul dreams made real, Jay returned to rapping with the flair and distant remove of a bored emperor. He was a moneymaker first and foremost, not a businessman but a business, man. He’d spoken it into existence 16 bars at a time.

In that context, it’s not at all surprising that Jay-Z may have hand-selected himself to headline next year’s Super Bowl halftime show. Puck broke the news that Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment conglomerate, had tagged the rapper for the championship game. Roc has produced the halftime show for the NFL since 2019, and Jay-Z is currently touring to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his debut album. It would be a natural fit, even without the hitmaker’s behind-the-scenes ties. He’s already a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer. He just wrapped up the release of an eight-part docuseries with producer/guru Rick Rubin on HBO Max.

 

Pressed on the leaks, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell took on the tone of intelligence services, refusing to confirm or deny the news.

“I am not aware of a leak,” Goodell said in a news conference earlier this week. “I’ve been in the committee meetings. So, I’m not sure it’s a leak. We haven’t announced anything. Until we do, we won’t make any comment on that.”

If it turns out to be true, it’s just the latest example of Jay-Z putting what he wants out into the universe and getting it back. He turned down an offer to perform at the halftime show over a decade ago, telling The New York Times that he did not appreciate the way the league negotiated. Per Jay-Z, the NFL’s offer hung on bringing along Kanye West and Rihanna, who were two-thirds of his 2009 hit “Run This Town.”

“Of course I would have,” Jay-Z said in 2020, “but I said, ‘No, you get me.’ That is not how you go about it, telling someone that they’re going to do the halftime show contingent on who they bring. I said forget it. It was a principle thing.”

Jay-Z got the last laugh. After the 2019 halftime show landed with a thud, he was brought on to produce the event and has helmed it since. Rhonda Byrne told readers that “your thoughts become things.” Jay-Z told us that he would always pick himself. Who does he know fresher than Hov? Riddle him that.

The post Of course Jay-Z picked himself for the Super Bowl appeared first on Salon.com.

Upward, a newly relaunched Christian app, is pitching trad values to a generation that barely even dates.

When my book “Occult America,” a history of supernatural religions in the U.S., appeared in 2009, I was surprised to receive an admiring phone call from a conservative documentarian and financier. He professed deep interest in the book’s themes, and encouraged me in my next work, “One Simple Idea,” an exploration of positive-mind metaphysics in American life. His name was Stephen K. Bannon.

Although the media have characterized Bannon as the Disraeli of the dark side following his rise to power in the Trump administration, I knew him, and still do, as a deeply read and erudite observer of the American religious scene, with a keen appetite for mystical thought.

Ronald Reagan, a hero of his, was not dissimilar. As I’ve written in the Washington Post and elsewhere, Reagan, from the start of his political career in the 1950s up through the first term of his presidency, adopted phrasing and ideas from the writings of a Los Angeles-based occult scholar named Manly P. Hall (1901-1990), whose 1928 encyclopedia arcana “The Secret Teachings of All Ages” is among the most influential underground books in American culture.

President Trump himself has admiringly recalled his lessons in the mystic art of “positive thinking” from the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, the Trump family’s longtime pastor, who popularized metaphysical mind-power themes in his 1952 mega-seller “The Power of Positive Thinking.”

What in the cosmos is going on? New Age and alternative spirituality are supposed to be the domain of patchouli-scented aisles of health food stores and bookshops that sell candles and pendulums, right? Well, not exactly.

There is a long-standing intersection between mysticism and conservatism in America. This marriage extends back to the late 19th century when globetrotting occultist and Russian noblewoman Madame H.P. Blavatsky depicted America as the catalyst for a revolution in human potential in her 1888 opus “The Secret Doctrine.” “It is in America that the transformation will take place,” Blavatsky wrote, “and has already silently commenced.”

Generations of occult writers echoed Blavatsky’s theme of America as a Holy Grail among nations, possessed of a “secret destiny,” as Manly P. Hall put it, and thus married esoteric spirituality to patriotic ideals. This partnership has flourished out of view of most mainstream observers—and significantly impacted American culture, including the look of our currency.

In 1935, then-Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, a former Republican and mystical seeker who went on to become Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice president, approached FDR with a novel idea: mint a coin with the mysterious reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States—the eye-and-pyramid surrounded by the Latin maxim “God Smiles on Our New Order of the Ages.” Both men were Freemasons with a taste for portentous imagery—and were on the lookout for epic, unifying symbols for the recovering nation. (Wallace had spoken of the need for a “New Deal of the Ages.”) Roosevelt was so taken with the 1782 image, with its Masonic undertones and message that worldly achievement is incomplete without higher ethics, that he personally supervised its installation on the back of the dollar bill, making a previously arcane insignia into an indelible symbol of the republic.

President George H.W. Bush brought new attention — and unintended infamy — to the concept of a “New World Order.” In his Sept. 11, 1990, speech to a joint session of Congress, Bush sought to celebrate the possibilities of international trade and cooperation that could follow a swift victory in the first Gulf War: “Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge … An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony.” Little was he aware that his use of the term would inspire a generation of conspiracy theorists to notions of a hidden, sinister global plan.

Conservative metaphysics extend beyond geopolitics. One of Richard Nixon’s confidants — in addition to the Rev. Peale, whose church he also attended—was insurance magnate W. Clement Stone, a right-wing activist, benefactor of the famous ESP lab at Duke University, and collaborator to Napoleon Hill, author of the mind-metaphysics classic “Think and Grow Rich.”

Most liberals and centrists find these kinds of associations jarring and a bit creepy. Thoughtful people are suspicious of mixing Rasputin-like intrigue with American politics. And with good reason. As Vice President Dan Quayle once put it—and he was specifically referring to Rasputin — “people that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.” (It should be noted, however, that the “mad monk” soberly cautioned the tsar against getting entangled in World War I.)

Critics fear that a sense of spiritual preordainment can produce reckless or dangerous policy choices. Yet such episodes in American history have traditionally had less to do with religious impulses than the kinds of hubris that once drove “the best and the brightest” into Vietnam, or moved senators from both parties to support President George W. Bush’s tragic rush into Iraq, based on the cynical calculus that a quick and tidy war would net a political victory.

Rather than fomenting secrecy or subterfuge, America’s embrace of esotericism is often characterized by a chin-out earnestness, something that many observers and conspiracy-mongers miss. “You can call it mysticism if you want to,” Reagan told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, “but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” In announcing his candidacy in 1979, Reagan declared: “To me our country is a living, breathing presence, unimpressed by what others say is impossible . . . and that man is capable of improving his circumstances beyond what we are told is fact.” Reagan often returned to such themes, echoing Hall’s 1944 book “The Secret Destiny of America.”

This rhetoric may sound flighty, but that, too, is part of our heritage. Historically, I prefer the cadences of offbeat idealism to the rampant ugliness of our current president’s Twitter insults, or the low-octane, visionless speechmaking that burdened Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Conservative presidencies have not cornered the market on the otherworldly. During the 2016 campaign, I was surprised that no one revisited an episode from Bill Clinton’s first term, when then first lady Hillary Clinton was accused of holding “séances” in the White House—a term misapplied to her visioning sessions with New Age teacher Jean Houston, a pioneer of the human-potential movement. Houston, whom I’ve published, didn’t quite know how to explain to reporters that when she guided the first lady in dialogues with her political hero Eleanor Roosevelt, they were not summoning spirits but rather conducting creativity and value-defining exercises. President Clinton was cool toward these tête-à-têtes. Houston told me that the president once sat in on one of their sessions. When the guru told him he was an “undeveloped shaman,” he stood up and left the room.

Bill Clinton took a similarly dim view of parapsychology. During a period of post-Cold War cost cutting in 1995, he eliminated the CIA’s budget for its psychic-spying program. Jimmy Carter, by contrast, admired the “remote viewing” operation. The year of Clinton’s cuts, Carter told a group of Emory University students that during his presidency, clairvoyant spies helped identify the coordinates of a crashed Soviet spy plane in Central Africa, netting a significant intelligence gain.

Off-the-grid practices should come as no surprise to students of politics. People in power always import values, customs and attitudes from their backgrounds—sometimes the religious conservatism of a Mike Pence and other times the Southern Californian vibes of a Ron and Nancy Reagan, with their enthusiasm for astrology, psychics and UFOs (Reagan reported sightings as both an actor and governor). Reagan alone was at ease swapping stories with New Age neighbors at Hollywood pool parties, while simultaneously maintaining a sincere, and mutual, affection for evangelicals. He was the model American religionist.

Even conservative evangelicals today borrow from American mysticism. When Pat Robertson speaks of the “Law of Reciprocity” (did you miss that in Scripture?) he is reprocessing the “Law of Attraction,” a concept popularized by the book and movie “The Secret,” but rooted in an American mystical tradition extending back to 1854, when a spirit medium named Andrew Jackson Davis coined the term.

Davis’ career illuminates how historically deep these entanglements go. Called the “Poughkeepsie Seer” for his Hudson Valley, New York, hometown, Davis was naturally controversial—with one prominent defender, who attested that his channeled trances were an authentic telegraph to the spirit world. The medium’s advocate was a Rev. George Bush, a first cousin, four times removed, to the Bush presidential family. The Rev. Bush caused a stir in 1845 by leaving the Presbyterian Church to become a minister in the Church of the New Jerusalem, an ecclesiastical body based on the ideas of Swedish mystic-scientist Emanuel Swedenborg. Bush wrote admiringly of Davis, and attended his séances (a term Davis also coined in its occult sense) along with a dubious journalist named Edgar Allan Poe.

Today, cable television producers and radio hosts often urge me to postulate some kind of occult “pact” between the Bushes and the dark side (cue up Skull and Bones). But such things are fantasy. The truth is, Americans have always been, well, a little strange. As a historian, I feel affection for that aspect of American life. Shadowy figures have long hung around the fringes of power in many nations; but rarely have they done so with the ingenuousness and transparency of those I’ve been considering.

If there is a central principle in American life, one valued across our political spectrum, it is a belief in the protection of the individual search for meaning. The presence and persistence of esoteric and unusual religious ideas in our political culture, including in its most conservative quarters, serves as evidence that that core principle is still working. In the U.S. military, religiously observant service members and veterans can now choose among more than 65 “emblems of belief,” including pentagrams, druidic symbols and every variety of mystical insignia. We are truly one nation under many gods — a fact that unites us across our fractured political divide.

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